The absurdity of the argument, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

Got this question in as a comment to the video that my wife Catherine and I made for  The NALT Christians Project :

John and Cat,

Great answer to some of the more fundamental Christian arguments. I do have a question on how to answer the most basic statement made by anti-gay Christians; the one that God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, so that they can procreate. That is the one area that I’m troubled with. I agree that the Bible doesn’t have an all-condemning statement against homosexuality, and I’m so sick of these Christians pushing young teens, who are just coming to terms with their sexuality, to the brink of suicide, if not to actually accomplish the task. There is still way too much bullying being done today against our LGBT brothers and sisters and I want to help stop it. But, I need to be armed with all of the come backs to the Christian arguments against homosexuality. Can you help?

So we’re talking here about these words from  (the King James Version of) Genesis 1:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness …

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female he created them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, …

So. First of all, where does it say here that the total number of people created by God was two? It doesn’t. If this were a story of God creating the entire human race in one moment, it would read perfectly well just as it is. It fact, it makes more sense if read that way—especially given how common it is in today’s Bibles for that “man” to be translated “mankind.”

Mankind isn’t two people. It’s lots of people. We have zero reason to think that God here isn’t saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth” (emphasis mine) to all kinds of people. Where in the text does it indicate that he’s only talking to two straight people?

And even if he were only talking to two straight people, where does it say that the only kind of men and women God would ever create would be straight? At most it says that the first couple God made were straight. And that makes enough sense, doesn’t it? God needed a straight couple to get the ol’ human population going. He was needin’ the breedin’!

And clearly, Adam and Eve fit that bill.

And now we’re all here! Yayeth!

So even if you accept the idea that God is here addressing no one but two lone straight people, it’s absurd to read the text as a negation of the possibility that one day God would create gay people, same as he did straight. Especially given the beyond-obvious truth that God did create gay people.

I think it’s safe to say that the fact that gay people exist means that God always knew that part of his/her divine plan was to gift the world with people of all kinds of sexual orientations and identifications. I vote that’s what “in our image, after our likeness” means.

Variety, people. It’s all about blessed, sacrosanct variety.

What dangerous foolishness it is to believe that in his wisdom God would never create and bring into our lives people who are at once so similar and so different from us that their very existence forces us to either broaden or contract our own personal, working definition of what it means to be a loving, compassionate, caring, trusting, reasonable human being.

I think we’re all being tested, all the time. And I think the single question we’re all constantly being tested on is, “How well—how deeply, how thoroughly, how constantly—do you love?”

Here’s hoping we all deserve an A.