Last Hate Mail I'm Answering On The Fate of Ideas:Moses

Oh, dear, I thought I'd answered that last night.   Haven't you gotten the clue yet that when Marilynne Robinson writes an essay like this one that she would have thought of the strife between right-wing Christians and LGBT people such as myself?   She makes this point in the last two paragraphs of the essay:

If one were to argue that the attack on Moses is and always has been an attack on the very idea of ethical obligations, one could adduce by way of evidence, first, the fact that where Moses has been rejected, virtue has been of the kind Jesus described as tithing mint and cumin – a devoting of much attention to minor things.  When the Bible was finally unleashed on Europe, it set off revolutions.

A second, graver point might be made, too.  Every one of these books [those which slammed Moses and the Scriptures that deal with the Law] displaces ethical responsibility away from Christian or modern civilization and onto the Old Testament.  It is useful, it is even rational, to excuse oneself and one's own from ethical responsibility by any means at all, let alone by means that reinforce this worst prejudice?  And in fact would not justice to Moses restore to this mysteriously religious society something urgently needed, a sense of the absolute biblical imperative to respectful generosity toward the poor and the stranger?   When Jesus describes Judgment, the famous separation of the sheep from the goats,  he does not mention religious affiliation or sexual orientation or family values.  He says,  “I was hungry, and ye fed me not”  (Matthew 25:42)*.  Whether he was a rabbi, a prophet, or the Second Person of the Trinity, the ethic he invokes comes straight from Moses.

*  Here's the complete passage Matthew 25:31-46.  No where in the Gospels does Jesus condemn anyone for sexual transgressions that I'm aware of.