Giles Fraser's Thinking Aloud podcast: the church should abandon its opposition to gay marriage

"Why do you have so many children?" I asked. Perhaps it was a rude question. But I didn't get how in so poor a place as Gaza it made sense to have a dozen kids. "It's political," the man said – going on to explain that Yasser Arafat had told to them that their victory was to be found in "the Palestinian womb". I was shocked. But in a place whose very existence is threatened, having children is all about national survival.

I had never really understood all those anti-gay passages in the Bible before this short conversation in the back streets of Khan Yunis. But then I got it. Why do the Hebrew scriptures go on so much about eunuchs and barren women and homosexuals? Precisely because they do not make children. And this feels essential to any community that has a fragile foothold on the planet. Thus Abraham promised his people that they would end up being as numerous as the stars of the heavens. Those who do not contribute to this effort are seen almost as traitors.

One of the interesting things about the Bible is how, on the subject of eunuchs at least, it fundamentally changes its mind. In Deuteronomy, eunuchs are explicitly banned from the congregation of God. But this prohibition is later explicitly overturned in Isaiah chapter 56.

"To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters."

In other words, doing what is right is more important than bearing children. Obvious to us. But in the context, this was radical stuff. And thus the Bible changes its mind. And it does so in the direction of greater inclusion. The current pressure for gay people to participate fully within the walls of the church – as priests and bishops, as gay married couples – is the extension of this same logic. Inclusion is the ever-widening gyre of the Biblical narrative. What a pity the church of today still cannot find it within itself to be as bold as the prophet Isaiah.