For the Bible Tells Me So
First Run Features 97mins, TBA

A documentary by
Daniel Karslake

Here we go with another propaganda film. These things are rather all the same. You demonize the other side, use half-baked, if not fully fraudulent reasoning to prove your point, and then you show how angelic and wonderful your side is. That is the “plot” of this film in its entirety.

The film attacks the religious right for being hypocritical for attacking homosexuality as “sinful.” In order to prove that his is so, they lie about what the Bible says, rather, they say that it's authors either didn't mean it, or that it's all bullshit anyway, so who cares?

We'll just discuss this particular point because the rest of the film doesn't mean all that much. Dick Gephardt loves his lesbian daughter? Even AFTER she came out? Awwwwwwwww….that's nice, but who cares? Then there's a snarky cartoon, which proves nothing [So the American Psychiatric Association backed down because Gay and Lesbian liberation groups threatened all sorts of action if they didn't change their definition of homosexuality, that ain't science!]
It's one sided and MEAN. But then this is propaganda and they do that sort of thing.

No, it's the drastic and fraudulent “reinterpretation” of the Bible that is most offensive. There are, according to the filmmakers, SIX anti-gay passages in the Bible, and the film discusses three of them, one cursorily, and the other two in slightly more detail: The Sodom and Gomorrah story, where an angry mob tried to rape and kill some angels visiting Lot's house, thereby causing God to destroy them, and the Holiness code in Leviticus, which does in fact clearly condemn homosexuality.

It's the part about the “holiness code” which is really galling. On the one hand, whether or not to keep kosher is a choice as much as anything else, You don't believe the Bible has any legal or moral governance of your life, fine, or you wish to eat bacon cheeseburgers on Passover, that's your business, especially if you're not Jewish. You can say it's not relevant to your lifestyle, you can say it's all bullshit, you can say all sorts of things. But you cannot say that the writers were kidding or didn't mean what they were writing, and that's what the filmmakers do.

Saying, “we're not kosher, so the writers of the Bible weren't either” isn't a theological argument. It's an insult to those millions of Orthodox and Conservative Jews who take stuff like mixing kinds of cloth very, very seriously. The tortured, twisted, logic which the filmmakers use to show that the Bible is PRO Gay is insane.

You can accept the Bible or not. Either way is fine. But using fraud to basically say that Black is White is not kosher. I'm sorry, but there it is. The film is preaching to the choir, and if you're not in it, don't bother as it won't convince you anyway.

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