Religious people have to reconcile themselves to ignore what the Bible says about gay people—the same way they ignore what the Bible says about polyester, lobster, figs, and women.

Question: Will the religious right and gay rights advocates ever come to terms?

Dan Savage:  Yes, the religious right and the gay rights movement will eventually come to the same terms, will come to terms.  The same terms that religious people have had to come to around gender equality, racial equality. 

We ignore the bullshit in the Bible about race, about slavery.  We ignore the bullshit in the Bible about women.  We ignore the bullshit in the Bible about women should be killed on their wedding nights if they’re not virgins, that parents have a right to murder their disobedient children.  There is all sorts of crazy bullshit in the Bible that we just ignore, that religious people ignore—and we’re going to have to get there for homosexuality. 

If we can ignore what the Bible says about slavery... the Bible got slavery wrong, something as easy and obvious as slavery as Sam Harris wrote in "Letter to a Christian Nation."  If the Bible got slavery wrong, it’s wrong for somebody to own another human being, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount couldn’t spare a sub-clause to say don’t own people.  If the Bible got slavery wrong, something as easy and obvious, a moral outrage the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? Pretty high. And what religious people have to reconcile themselves to is dropping it, dropping, ignoring what the Bible says about gay people the way they ignore what the Bible says about polyester and lobster and figs and shrimp and women.

Recorded on October 18, 2010
Interviewed by Max Miller