How Religion Can Help (and Hurt) Our Understanding of Marriage and Family (HuffingtonPost) 
Things seem pretty solid here at home after the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the constitutionality of Defense of Marriage Act cases. So it seems that our straight marriage has survived the unspecified threats gay marriage poses to it. I still don't get what these threats are, exactly, nor do I understand how it is that an institution said to be the bedrock of everything civilization holds dear can at the same time be so utterly fragile as to stand in need of a vigorous defense. Now it seems that the whole thing may be on its way to the footnotes of American constitutional history without my ever having figured it out. Not even the Republicans, for whom this issue seemed so central not that long ago, seem to want to fight about about it any more, except for Mike Huckabee. Of course, he's a pastor, so what do you expect?
But wait a minute -- I'm a pastor. This reminds me of what has irked me about DOMA -- and about the whole moral conversation in general -- ever since it appeared: People think there's only one kind of Christian. People think there's only one kind of religious moral vision. People outside faith communities imagine a conservative social consensus within them that isn't there, and people within them often think there should be one, even though there isn't. The old inside joke about Jews -- two Jews, three opinions -- is true of all faith communities. We share a certain moral and cultural inheritance, and our spiritual assignment is to puzzle over it. Often we agree among ourselves about its meaning and application in the world and sometimes we don't. That's the way assemblies of human beings and faith communities are nothing if not human.
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Complete article at Huffington Post : http://huff.to/hTwtvo
