You Know You Keep Doing The Same Thing And Expecting A Different Result, You know what they say about people who do that, don't you? - Hate Mail

Little children says Holy Mother
Sooth and comfort one another,

Draw the chords of union stronger,
Wind and bind them around each other,
Make them feel your love and blessing.

Shaker Spiritual

I AM NOT A THEOLOGIAN.  At least no more than anyone who thinks about these things for themselves and who tries to come to an understanding of what Scripture and previous believers have said about these things, to reconcile those, where possible, with their own experience as understood through a rigorous application of moral conscience is a theologian.  Maybe everyone who reads scripture (or theology) and thinks about it seriously is a theologian for themselves.

I have no more intention of coming up with a universal theology of sexual relations and marriage than I do of making commenting on Sodom and Gomorrah a major theme of my political blog.  

It is rather ironic that in thinking of your objection to my commentary on Genesis 2, on the fable of the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam and what God said was his motive in doing that, I am more convinced that it supports marriage equality even more strongly than I had thought last week.  It is certainly presented in the fable as an afterthought, the other creation of human beings in Genesis 1 presents the first human beings as created at the same time.  But since it was brought up, again, as a proof-text that marriage equality is forbidden, I'll point out more about it to refute you haters.

1. As I said, in that second and quite different account of the creation of human beings, Adam would seem to have been around alone of his kind for a period of time.  God creates Eve only because "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper corresponding to him."  God, God's-self says that aloneness, loneliness, a solitary life for a human being, singleness, is not a good thing.  According to anyone who wants to use that story as you want to, that observation of a bad state, arising to an evil that God feels God must end, even before the possibility of sex and sexual morality, loneliness is identified as an evil.  AND THAT IS GIVEN AS HIS SOLE MOTIVE IN CREATING EVE, NOT THE INVENTION OF HETEROSEXUALITY.   Yet the traditional anti-LGBTQ+ line of moralizing (for others) on that requires us to live in just the state of evil that Genesis says is in need of God's intervention.  

2. There is no mention of sex anywhere and not even by implication until after the expulsion from the Garden, due to the disobedience of God's command about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I think the observation that thrills many a 6-year-old when they first hear the story, that they were "naked but unashamed" is a strong implication that they had no sexuality.  The theological insertion at 2:24 about marriage is later commentary because no such statement is attributed to God in the story, that doesn't come up until the two dopes got tempted and did what God forbade them to do.  It's when they've eaten the fruit and they seem to have, thus, gained a sense of shame about their genitals.  It's interesting that they would seem to be the only two who they would be ashamed to see each other's nakedness,  maybe that means heterosexuality started with the first sin.  But that's not my point, my pint is that all of that  comes well after God made the second person to end the loneliness of the first person. God doesn't mention procreation except in 3:16 as part of his curses on Eve during the expulsion and no mention of a child is mentioned until the birth of Cain.  

It's interesting that the first time Eve is called Adam's wife is at 3:20 and it's Adam who calls Eve "life giver" because she became the mother of all humans, he said that, not God.  That would seem to have been a human designation, Eve as a procreator, not one from God.  Or, at least if you're going to read the story carefully and not in the superficial way you do.

I would wonder at the implications of that, since you want to draw inferences from it not contained in the text.  I wonder how Adam, before the creation of Eve could have really had a gender identity of his own. He had no other human being to relate to sexually, there were animals but it's not even clear that the animals had sexuality or reproduced in The Garden.  I wonder if he had any way to imagine another human being to relate sexually to. Given what I pointed out above, that even after her creation there doesn't seem to have been sex between them - the text doesn't mention it, it's adding to Scripture to assert there was, something you accused me of doing - the creation of Eve doesn't seem to have anything to do with sex and everything to do with companionship and helpfulness.  

As an aside, God created a second human being to be HELPFUL not "useful."  That's a distinction I'm pretty touchy about, I don't think people should be thought of in terms of utility to someone else but in terms of helpfulness.

3. As I said, I don't have any intention of trying to make up a theology of marriage, but if you're going to use that story as  rigid template for valid marriages, then the first reason for marriage in Scripture is to alive loneliness, to provide companionship and love to those who marry.  Sex is a secondary consideration and bearing children, which comes a chapter and a catastrophe after that, might be put third in order of reasons to marry, which, as a sacrament, is a decision of the two People who marry, not a friggin' church or priest or minister or the damned state to decide.  Two Gay Men or Lesbians could always have a valid, loving, faithful a  marriage, by their choice and commitment, though those were bound to be precarious in a hateful society as other kinds of forbidden, valid marriages, those between races, religious groups, rich and poor perhaps the rarest of those.  

Marriage equality isn't about that, the state has no power to bless a marriage,  it's whether or not the state is going to treat those marriages equally in terms of respecting the relationship as a family in the same way it does the most sordid and frivolous and unloving, unsupportive, unequal straight marriages concluded before a mail-order ordination cleric in some drive-through wedding chapel in Las Vegas or some mass-prearranged marriage between couples who never met each other before some CIA created messiah marries them by the scores,elsewhere.  

In the early days after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalized same-sex marriages in Massachusetts (and thereby, if the friggin' Constitution had any integrity, those marriages were valid in all states, then) I said my preference would be for the state to stop being involved in the marriage business altogether and to shift all of the rights and privileges that the law gave to even the most sordid of straight "marriages" to those who entered legally into a civil-union.  I said at that time that I preferred that any two consenting adults be allowed to enter into a civil-union, not on the basis of them having sex with each other but with the stated requirement that they form a household to care for each other and any children that resulted from the union or those who were brought into it.  I noted in many a blog brawl over that that the commonest such civil unions in France seemed to be between widowed or divorced mothers and their adult daughters, without any sex happening at all. I would imagine many couples of various description might enter into such government recognized civil unions, without any intention of having sex or those who intended to have sex.

It is deeply ironic that as I was writing this that Shaker spiritual came into my head, ironic because the Shakers were and the two left are still a celibate order.  They are devoted to that even into their likely imminent extinction.  I have always admired the integrity of the Shakers in maintaining their determination to not have sex, though I disagree with the theology they use to explain that.  I don't believe sex, while fraught with the possibility of evil uses and consequences, is inevitably evil or even, as Paul presents it, a lesser state than celibacy.  I don't question the Shakers' or Paul's conclusion from their experience that they were called to celibacy, I respect their conclusions about that for themselves, I deny anyone has the right to decide that for anyone else who may come to a different conclusion based on their own experience and moral consciousness of their own lives.  It was very interesting to me to have it come into my head as I thought about that story in Genesis because it seems to validate my conclusion that even before sex, marriage is for the purpose of securing the experience of intense human love and the blessing of that loving relationship, something which is beyond state or church but is an integral aspect of being a human being in relation to The Creator who created us needing such relationships with other human beings and who blesses such relationships as within God's Creation.  

I would make a very important distinction between such civil unions and marriages because I think marriage is a sacramental relationship which should only exist as an equal, committed, loving, and faithful covenant, so many "marriages" as blessed by church and state, are obscene parodies of real marriages.   

I don't think the state has any business at all in the matter and the most any church can do is to recognize that such a sacramental relationship exists, no priest, no minister, etc. creates a marriage.  I have read that for about the first thousand years of Christianity, there was no regular rite for matrimony and the whole business of the church "blessing" a marriage is spotty and unsettled.   Marriage without clergy was considered as valid as any back then. 

But the government, not taking such a radical course puts itself in a place that it has no place of being in, of giving what, when given unequally, are privileges to even the most sordid and unholy straight coupling so it is an absolute right for same-sex couples who marry to demand the same things be given to us.