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Dan Savage

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Two blogs, two different reactions on Dan Savage

It’s amazing how audience dictates the comment section of a blog and how each handle discourse. I posted my Dan Savage blog post on this blog and on my Times Union blog.  Interestingly, I posted my blog post on Facebook. On Facebook, the conversation was civil, exchanged differing views, offer opposing ideas, and generally mild. On this blog, there were no comments about the post.

On my Times Union blog, it was a different story with over 55 comments. Most of the posts were critical of the fact that I spoke out against Dan Savage. Most of the commenters thinking revolved around the fact that Savage represented a community who has been unfairly oppressed by religious conservatives. Thus, my critique of Savage’s comments about the Bible being ‘bullshit’ and how he misunderstood slavery in the Bible were not apropos. Despite the fact that I deplored gay-bashing and Bible beating any group, it seems that many commenters believed Savage’s comments were just and called for. Many of the blog comments were attacks against Christianity in general, how religion is narrow-minded, and even some personally attacked me.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield (author, radio and TV talk show host), led a Q&A for the Washington Post, commented on Dan Savage. The Rabbi wrote “You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism” and offers some important insight when he commented on a reader’s question/statement on the Dan Savage story:

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bullying

Anti-bullying advocate: ‘Ignore the bullsh*t in the Bible’

Anti-bullying advocate Dan Savage recently told a gathering of 1,800 high school students to “ignore the bullshit in the Bible”. Savage is a columnist and a speaker for the gay community. Savage’s comments came at a conference for students and his forum was about responding to cyber-bullying.

His speech in context was as follows:

People often point out that they can’t help it. They can’t help with the anti-gay bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans, that being gay is wrong. We can learn to ignore the bullshit about gay people in the Bible the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waived Bibles over their heads during the civil war and justified it.

As you see in the video, students who are presumably Christian, walk out in protest of Dan Savage’s comments.

Savage continued:

If the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong, slavery, what are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? 100 percent.

After his rant, Dan Savage welcomed the departed students to come back:

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