Stakeholders

Anti

     Focus on the People is an anti-gay website. It provides information from a Christians views of why/how gay marriage is bad. Most of the time people do not accept homosexuals because they are strong followers of god.

"It was a big shock when my dad came out to me. I started crying. I didn't say anything. I tried to brush it away, but I knew what it meant. I knew it wasn't something approved of … that God didn't approve of it. I wanted it to all go away. I love my dad, no doubt; however, I get worried that the same thing that happened to my mom might also happen to me." -- Taylor, age 18

     Taylor is a strong believer of god. She says "God didn't approve of it" which therefore means she is against homosexuals in general. Religion has a major impact on the outlook people have towards how life is supposed  to be lived; especially towards homosexuals and their marriage. If some Christians don't accept homosexuals because the bible tells them that that's not the natural way of living, then they also abide by the stated definition of the bible of how marriage is the union man and a woman. A story provided by the website, Focus on the People, called "My Spouse Struggles with Homosexuality" is about a man and a woman who both strongly follow the bible; they fell in love and got married. When a few years passed and they had a 7 year old child, the woman became concerned with her husband because she had been receiving "signs from god" stating that her husband is a homosexual; when he was seen at a gay bar, the signs she was receiving had become true. Just as stated before, religious values have a strong impact on the way homosexuals are viewed. By initially looking at the title, "My Spouse Struggles with Homosexuality," creates the assumption that either a man or a woman is a religious follower and figured out they're homosexual; therefore leads them to think that there's something wrong with them and the way to fix it is by becoming heterosexually married. However, within the near future the man or woman's homosexuality is revealed because that's how they wanted to initially live their life.


Click on the bold and highlighted "My Spouse Struggles with Homosexuality" for a link to the page

Pro

     Even though the outlook of the bible tells Christians gay marriage is frowned, an interview by Andy Eddins to Bishop Robinson suggests that one can't take the text written within the bible literally. Robinson says that "Even if you are only trying to deal with the words as they are written, even your choice of which words you are going to deal with—which passages—requires interpretation." This means that your interpretation of the bible can not be taken literally.  Within the verse of Luke of the bible, it states that “If you want to be a follower of mine, you must give up all of your possessions.” Nobody abides by this recommendation of the bible. When people read the bible, they do "selective reading" meaning they only intake certain information. The Bishop creates a comparison between baseball and the bible demonstrating that unless one knows the game of baseball, one can only assume what "out in left field" really means. He says that the Old Testament section of the bible  was created by cultures that wanted to get rid of the Jews; " Much of what we read in the Old Testament is about this struggle with those cultures. We now know a lot more about those struggles and the culture, and therefore, in some sense, we know the game of baseball they were playing. We have a context in which to sort through those words." 

     "Once we know what was meant by the author and what was heard by the people for whom it was written, we can ask the question, “Is this eternally binding or something culturally determined that applies only for that time?” There are steps involved to determining how things within the bible should be interpreted; without this process, one would have no way of knowing because one would be taking two sides of the argument; what was said in the past, doesn't always apply to the future. "Some of the other things that we read in scripture have to be taken in context, and we have to say, maybe then but not now." 

Click on the bold and highlighted "Bishop Robinson" for a link to the interview page