NPR Gives Focus on the Family's Jim Daly a Pass

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http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/danielschultz/6970/npr_gives_focus_on_the_family_s_jim_daly_a_pass/


March 25, 2013 5:25pm
by DANIEL SCHULTZ

What is with NPR these days? They’re famously held to be a bastion of liberal reporting, but you wouldn’t know it by listening to their weekend morning shows. Last week, I caught Scott Simon helping advance the discredited theory of liberal decline. This week Sunday host Rachel Martin lets Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly go unchallenged.

Daly was on the show to talk about how Focus is facing up to the tide of marriage equality, ahead of this week’s expected Supreme Court ruling on the subject. He did everything he could to project an aw-shucks, kinder and gentler face to Focus, acknowledging the complexity of society and human sexuality, allowing as how gays and lesbians could be Christians and “perfectly good” people, positing homosexuality as a sin like any other. He even interjected a note of humility into the proceedings: “I’m not the author of scripture, obviously,” he told Martin. “I’m just trying to read them and live by them even though I fail.”


And fail he does, slickly conflating two things scripture has to say about marriage, and ignoring a couple of others. Accordingly to Daly, covenant love can only take place in the context of opposite-sex commitment:

We think it’s pretty clear that God’s design for human sexuality is a male and a female committed to one another in marriage, for life. It’s interesting, because Jesus talks about that in Matthew and Mark in the gospels where he restates the Genesis commitment, which is “a man shall leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one.” He doesn’t say anything about same-gendered people getting together.

Now, I and others might interpret that Genesis passage (2:24) as emphasizing the covenant aspect of marriage, an issue that goes beyond the particularities of gender. Everybody should be faithful to their partners, in other words, whether it’s a same-sex or heterosexual relationship.

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