The most significant thing about the new, anti-gay "Manhattan Declaration" is not that scores of Christians are against gay rights. It's that, recognizing they're on the wrong side of history, they tie themselves in knots insisting they're not anti-gay. And in doing so, they reveal the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of their obsessive persecution of gay people.
The Declaration, released last week and signed by over 150 Christian leaders and social conservatives, identifies abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty as the three most important issues facing modern Christians, and pleads with both believers and non-believers to stand up against the first two and in defense of the third.
Christians, says the Declaration's preamble, were the ones who rescued abandoned babies in trash heaps in ancient Rome, tended to the sick during the plagues, ended slavery in the West, uplifted the poor, created the conditions for democracy, and ushered in women's suffrage. Their bizarre self-righteousness in claiming the mantle of all the great things that have happened in history makes you wonder if these modern moral crusaders have a pathological need to feel that they are good people, which is usually the first sign that they have reason to worry they are not. (Sure enough, one of the three drafters of the document is Nixon's former special counsel, Chuck Colson, convicted of obstructing justice surrounding the Watergate scandal.)
Claiming the rather quaint authority not only of Holy Scripture but of "natural human reason" and "the very nature of the human person," the signatories proclaim themselves vigilantes called to protect "marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society."
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Christians, says the Declaration's preamble, were the ones who rescued abandoned babies in trash heaps in ancient Rome, tended to the sick during the plagues, ended slavery in the West, uplifted the poor, created the conditions for democracy, and ushered in women's suffrage. Their bizarre self-righteousness in claiming the mantle of all the great things that have happened in history makes you wonder if these modern moral crusaders have a pathological need to feel that they are good people, which is usually the first sign that they have reason to worry they are not. (Sure enough, one of the three drafters of the document is Nixon's former special counsel, Chuck Colson, convicted of obstructing justice surrounding the Watergate scandal.)
Claiming the rather quaint authority not only of Holy Scripture but of "natural human reason" and "the very nature of the human person," the signatories proclaim themselves vigilantes called to protect "marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society."
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