Dan Savage - Standing Up to the Bible

Here in America, we loves our cognitive dissonance. If you ever watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report, you know that these are two industries based primarily on pointing out, with great humor and wit, how often we contradict ourselves on a daily basis.

One of those areas in which we collectively seem to be somewhere off in self-contradictory la-la land is the widespread belief that our moral values come from scripture, but as Dan Savage explains in the short video below, that can't be right.

Why not? Because we are perfectly comfortable ignoring, or even outright rejecting, various biblical injunctions. We don't execute women who lose their virginity pre-maritally, we don't stone to death children who disrespect their parents, we are not trying to pass constitutional amendments banning the consumption of shrimp and lobster, we think slavery is morally wrong, and we certainly do not condone holocaust or the annihilation of entire nations. And since we are happy to reject these scriptural injunctions (and they're there, look it up), then, wherever else they come from, our moral values do NOT come from the Bible (or pick your favorite holy book).

But if that's the case, then we can't justify our condemnation of homosexuality (or anything else, for that matter) simply on the basis that there is some biblical injunction against it. What we need is REASONS that justify such a view, and that requires that we do the work necessary to achieve such conclusions instead of simply assuming their truth from the outset.

Did you also get a sense that the walk-out may have been pre-emptively planned?