One progressive does the right thing: Dan Savage was wrong to call the Bible Bullshit

As the fallout grows over homosexual writer Dan Savage, who recently called the Bible �bullshit�, one progressive writer, Jay Michaelson, shows the kind of integrity Dan Savage sorely lacks.  

The Daily Beast reports when gay-rights activist Dan Savage lashed out against the Bible�s �bullshit,� Jay Michaelson attacked him for it�and took some heat from progressives. Doubling down, Michaelson says his critics have lost their moral compass.

There�s no one way to be religious. You�d think that progressives would appreciate this, since it�s conservatives who usually preach dogma, and progressives who are meant to counsel pluralism. But in the recent debate about Dan Savage�s statement that �we can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people,� some progressives seem to have lost their moral compass.

For example, in Slate today, Amanda Marcotte�who once referred to the Immaculate Conception as God filling Mary �with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit��called me a �concerned troll� who has �poor reading comprehension.� Why? Because I dared to argue that not all of us have to be religious the same way, and that the Bible is not as clear as its dogmatic proponents and opponents seem to think it is.

First, a disclosure. I have spent ten years as a queer activist, am one month away from getting my Ph.D. in religion, and wrote a book on sexual diversity and religion, God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality. Since Marcotte apparently didn�t bother to Google me, I thought I�d provide this information now

My argument in the original piece was that when gay-rights advocates like Savage call parts of the Bible �bullshit,� they play into the hands of homophobes who claim that the God of the Bible hates gays. Of course it�s fine for progressive Christians and Jews to pick and choose which Biblical verses they like, and it�s fine for atheists to call the whole book a crock of Santorum. But as LGBT activists, we have a responsibility to be more responsible�especially to those who do not accept such liberal premises.

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