Dan Savage is a sex-advice columnist and a leading gay activist. He is probably best known for spearheading the “It Gets Better Project”—a YouTube campaign encouraging gay teenagers that being gay gets better after high school. He has received a great deal of favorable press from mainstream media outlets, even though his work as a gay activist includes a fair amount of morally dubious activities. Mark Oppenheimer recently profiled Savage in a lengthy piece for The New York Times Magazine. Oppenheimer’s article focuses on Dan Savage’s prescription for healthy marriages—non-monogamy. Savage argues not only that gay marriage should be legal but also that monogamy should be discarded as a marital…
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How To Disagree Agreeably
Here are Tim Keller, Michael Horton and Matt Chandler telling us how it’s done. One piece of advice is particularly helpful. They highlight the importance of limiting criticism to positions actually held by your opponent. Don’t confuse your opponent’s view with what you see to be the necessary entailments of his view. For example, you may think that consistent Arminianism leads to open theism, but it is uncharitable and unfair to describe all Arminians as open theists. (HT: Justin Taylor)
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Gay Marriage and the Slippery Slope
Gay marriage supporters tend to have little tolerance for slippery slope arguments that compare gay marriage to other illegal relationships like incest and polygamy. I know that I have seen impatience with that kind of argument on this blog numerous times, and I have seen it countless times elsewhere as well. Despite protestations to the contrary, the slippery slope is a reality in today’s New York Times.
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Albert Mohler on Homosexuality in WSJ
Albert Mohler has an opinion piece in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal about the moral revolution we have been witnessing concerning homosexuality. Speaking of evangelicals, he writes, We cannot accept the seductive arguments that the liberal churches so readily adopt. The fact that same-sex marriage is a now a legal reality in several states means that we must further stipulate that we are bound by scripture to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman—and nothing else.
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Brief Response to Darrell Bock
Darrell Bock has weighed-in on the discussion about the 2011 NIV. In general, he thinks the negative responses to the new translation are unwarranted. There are several remarks he makes that I think are worth responding to. Readers need to read Bock’s post for themselves, but I will try to summarize his concerns here and respond to each briefly.
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John Piper on NY Gay Marriage Decision
Today at DesiringGod.org, John Piper offers some sobering remarks about gay marriage in general and about the NY law in particular: On June 24 the New York legislature approved a Marriage Equality Act. This makes New York the sixth state where so-called homosexual marriages will be institutionalized: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, (and the District of Columbia).
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President Obama on Gay Marriage
Chuck Todd asked President Obama about gay marriage in today’s press conference (starts at 5:45 above). Among other things, the President said that the legalization of gay marriage in New York was a “good thing” and that “we are moving in a direction of greater equality.” Laura Meckler pressed him on the issue later in the news conference (at 4:20), and he then stopped short of endorsing gay marriage saying, “I’m not going to make news on that today.”
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Vern Poythress on the New NIV
We have been discussing the new of edition of the New International Version of the Bible this week, and I have another resource or two to throw your way. The first is a most helpful review by Vern Poythress which appears in the most recent issue of The Westminster Theological Journal. This review is very well done, and I hope it gets a wide-reading. Here’s the full bibliographic info and a link to a PDF of the article as it appears in WTJ:
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Current Issue of JBMW Available Online
The current issue of The Journal for Biblical Manhood & Womanhood is now available online for free download from CBMW.org. There are many excellent articles in this issue, and contributors include Josh Harris, Stephen Nichols, Albert Mohler, and Rebecca Jones. Of course my review of gender language in the 2011 NIV is included as well. Here’s the full table of contents:
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Robert George on NY Gay Marriage
Robert George had a big hand in the paper I posted earlier this week from The Witherspoon Institute, and he has some pointed words today about the gay marriage decision in New York. You need to read the whole thing, but I thought his remarks about the worldviews of the two most significant political players in New York (Cuomo and Bloomberg) were spot-on. He writes: