Film shows another side of the Bible

Last Thursday, the Davidson College Gay-Straight Alliance screened “For The Bible Tells Me So,” Dan Karslake’s provocative documentary film. The documentary was a conglomeration of touching accounts from devoutly religious families across America and the desire to reconcile the disparities between the Christian views toward homosexuality.
The film centers on families coping with these challenges and investigates the different ways in which they have overcome these difficulties. For these families, homosexuality has brought a greater and deeper understanding of Biblical scripture and has led them to read the Bible more thoroughly to seek true understanding.
One particularly hard-hitting scene emphasizes the context of the Bible. Here, one of the priests interviewed elucidates the fact that Leviticus 18:22 states that he who lies with another man is an abomination, and the same is true of he who eats shrimp or pork, or he who wears wool and linen together. Contextual errors such as these force millions of GBLT individuals to hide their true selves from society.
The families face a broad range of challenges, but their struggle has caused them to become activists. They want to stop those who use Biblical scripture as a means of condemning homosexuality.
The film also exhibits more tragic and, regrettably, more common approaches that some families use to deal with homosexual family members. For example, some parents condemn their children’s sexual identity and enforce therapy sessions to “repair” thier “defect”.
In even worse cases, as in the one expressed in the documentary, a mother dismissed her daughter and claims she would always hate and never accept her homosexual nature. The daughter eventually hanged herself. Her death calls to light the fact that GBLT individuals are much more likely to commit suicide than heterosexuals.
To help her deal with her own guilt, the mother became an activist for the GBLT community, and now helps raise awareness about the mistruths that are preached. She now attempts to explain the Bible’s true feelings towards sexuality.
At the end of the screening, Reverend Rob Spach, Davidson College Chaplain, shared his thoughts. He reflected that the many people featured in the film seemed to be driven by hate of the “other.”
Only through eliminating this hate, Spach explained, can people develop a sense of community. Reverend Spach expressed that it should not to be hate that drives someone, shapes a community or lies the foundation of a belief, but that it should be love, and only love, that performs this task.  

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