Wait, what?

For ordinary people, it would have been an “OOPS!” moment, but the USA’s religious radicals and leaders of the anti-gay industry aren’t ordinary people. Clearly.

At a recent gathering organised by the SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group, the “Family” “Research” Council, speaker after speaker belched all sorts of inane nonsense, and among those was a “young earth” anti-evolutionist, Australian-born Ken Ham, who was preaching against marriage equality (video above). And therein lay his doom.

He said claimed that Jesus preached that “the doctrine of marriage is built upon the history in Genesis.” Then he goes in for what he considers a rhetorical coup de grâce:

“You have generations of pastors and Christian leaders in this nation and Christian academics telling our congressmen and our president that Genesis is not literal history, then marriage can be whatever you want to make it to be. And that’s what’s happening.”

Ah, Genesis, the very model of modern marriage! It’s what we should emulate and hold to be sacrosanct, right? Well…

Writing on Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla takes a look at what’s actually in Genesis: “Outside of Adam and Eve, and Noah and his wife, just about every major patriarch engaged in either polygamy or some form of incest, and often both.”

He goes on to provide some highlights:

According to Genesis 16, Abraham slept with and married his wife Sarah's slave because Sarah was unable to bear children. On top of that, according to Genesis 20, Sarah was also Abraham's half-sister and he later took at least one more wife.

Abraham's son Issac was married to Rebekah, who, according to Genesis 24, was the daughter of the son of Abraham’s brother, which would make Rebekah the daughter of Issac's cousin, or Issac's first cousin, once removed.

Rebekah then gave birth to Esau and Jacob. According to Genesis 26, Esau married two Hittite women and then later took a third wife while Jacob married the daughters of his mother's brother, his first cousins, named Leah and Rachel. Rachel was unable to bear children and so gave Jacob her servant to sleep with and take as a wife, to which Leah responded by likewise giving Jacob her servant for a wife.

Go, traditional marriage!!

Mantyla also cites the aftermath of the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah—the story above all others that radical right religionists love to try and use to attack gay people. Aside from the fact that they get the story completely wrong every time because they misrepresent what the “sin” of the cities was supposed to have been, they always omit the rest of the story: The Hebrew god kills everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah, ultimately saving only Lot and his two daughters. Later, the daughters got their father drunk and had sex with him so they would become pregnant—and they did. Yeah, that’s a story the fundies always forget to tell. Funny, that.

The point of all this is that the Religious Right keeps going on and on and on about “Biblical Marriage” as the only “real” marriage. They say everything but “one man, one woman” is “counterfeit” because it’s not based on “god’s law” as set out in their bible, and that marriage equality will inevitably lead to incest and polygamy. The trouble for them is that incest and polygamy WERE marriage for most of the folks in Genesis—which is what “the doctrine of marriage is built upon”?

Oops.