Religions must change with the times

I READ WITH great interest the July 22 religion commentary "Rifts caused by gay issues won't go away soon." I am sorry that our Christian and Jewish friends are having such a hard time realizing that acceptance and love are required to heal the millennial wounds left by their insistence on the prescriptive value of every passage in their Bible. In fact there are many rules and regulations that they have modified over the ages.

Did not Jesus declare, according to Mark (2:27), "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath?" Have not the Jews, who claim the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) for their own abandoned slavery, polygamy, concubinage?

In every age religions have adapted or died. The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations of North America has long since ordained active homosexual ministers and performed ceremonies of holy union, in our eyes the equivalent of marriage. There are no barriers to full membership in our welcoming congregations.

We applaud the action of Vermont in legalizing such relationships. It is long since the time for the religious underpinnings of homophobia, leading to the violence we have witnessed, to be removed.

Morton Nadler , Blacksburg
Roanoke Times Letter to the Editor: Monday, August 07, 2000

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