Gay okay: conservatives have become strangely tolerant of homosexual activity. They should not be afraid to defy the Zeitgeist

National Review, Sept 1, 1998 by David Klinghoffer

But it is incorrect to read Leviticus as you would a newspaper, where every phrase means exactly what it seems to mean at first glance. Ancient or modern, no society ever was organized on the basis of a literal reading of Scripture. Christians and Jews have always recognized that the Bible is cryptic. Understanding it requires traditions of interpretation passed down through millennia. In his book The Theme Is Freedom, M. Stanton Evans traces the genealogy of one such tradition from medieval Europe, to post-Reformation England, to Revolutionary America.

The old traditions take their values from the Bible, not their jurisprudence. That is, you can voice strong disapproval of a sin without wishing to see its practitioners molested in any way. The Bible presents men bedding each other down as a sin fully equal in gravity to any other, indeed as a capital offense. Yet the American Biblical tradition never thirsted to root out and punish discreet homosexual activity.

In recent decades, lots of Americans have rejected the hierarchy of sins that would have been obvious to our ancestors. Whether Bible believers or not, conservatives must in the future worry about this fact more than we do now and denounce it wherever possible. And it would strengthen our case to bring the Bible into the debate.

To believers, of course, the Bible's relevance on the subject is obvious. One of the main themes of Scripture is that God judges not only individuals but nations, and that He does so based less on what the nation does in private than on what it sanctions in public. As Deuteronomy expresses the idea, "The hidden [sins] are for the Lord [to deal with], but the revealed [sins] are for us and our children forever." For confirmation on that point you could ask the Canaanites, who according to an old tradition recognized same-sex marriage. Or rather, you could ask them if they weren't extinct, having been "disgorged" from Canaan three thousand years ago for endorsing exactly the sort of practices (Leviticus 18:24 - 29) that Michael McCurry urges us to endorse lest we be thought of as "backward."

But NR's editorial asserts that non-believers will find the whole subject of what the Bible says irrelevant. Not true. The case for learning from the Bible can be made to them as follows.

LET'S say you regard that book as the elevating but hardly divine work of certain antique Middle Eastern creative writers. Well, that dead poets' society of the desert provided the moral framework in which American democracy grew. In The Weekly Standard, praising a Library of Congress exhibit about the role of faith in the Founding, Matthew Spalding notes that in revolutionary-era political writing not only was the Bible by far the most cited literary work, but references to Deuteronomy alone outnumbered those to John Locke by almost 2 to 1.

As the Founders agreed, a free republic needs a virtuous citizenry; and this particular Republic long ago hitched itself to a particular literature of virtue. Stan Evans makes a strong case that the Anglo-American habit of distrusting big government originates in the Bible, which persistently warns against the usurpations of mortal rulers. Nations that have sought to detach themselves altogether from the Biblical tradition (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia) have subsided into terror and authoritarianism.