We saw it coming. This week's cover story,written by Lisa Miller, our religion editor, lays out the religious case for gay marriage. As Jon Meacham says in his weekly Editor's Letter, "The reaction to this cover is not difficult to predict. Religious conservatives will say that the liberal media are once again seeking to impose their values (or their "agenda,"a favorite term to describe the views of those who disagree with you) on a God-fearing nation. Let the letters and e-mails come."

And come they did, in a flood. Throughout the week, I'll be featuring conversations with people on various sides of this debate, some thorough reader analysis of the issues at stake (keep commenting and e-mailing!) and perhaps some guest viewpoints to complement our cover,which is ultimately supportive of gay marriage.

To start, Politico reached out to conservative Christians, including Richard Land, who heads the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Liberty Commission. "It doesn't surprise me," he told Politico of our piece. "Newsweek has been so far in the tank on the homosexual issue for so long, they need scuba gear and breathing apparatus. I don't think [the piece] is going to change the minds of anyone who takes biblical teachings seriously."" href="<http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/shared-blogs/ajc/politicalinsider/entries/2008/12/08/newsweek_and_the_religious_cas.html>"> The Atlanta Journal Constitution's political blog linked to the Politico piece and pointed out the comments made by Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition. "I see it as an attempt to caricature and reduce to a cartoon the social conservative belief in the efficacy of a traditional marriage, and try to reduce it to some formulaic, scriptural literalism," he said. "There's more of a practical, sociological foundation for why we seek to affirm marriage as an institution than I think is generally understood by those who want to legalize same-sex marriage." And Tim Graham, the Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center, accuses NEWSWEEK of saying, essentially: "Religious conservatives are troglodytes on the wrong side of history."

Over at the blog of the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, they refer to the NEWSWEEK piece as a "dire mess." In turn, they point to the lengthy rebuttal that was written by Mollie Hemingway on getreligion.org (which, it's worth noting, has this tag line: "the media... just doesn't get religion"). In her lengthy piece , Hemingway argues that NEWSWEEK'S biblical analysis is off-base. "If you are going to pretend that opposition to same-sex marriage is based Sola Scriptura, could we at least get our Scripture right?" she asks before introducing herself into the piece:

Meanwhile, on the National Review's blog, Mark Hemingway says that Miller "can't even get through the first paragraph of her story without evincing an understanding of Christianity and its basic texts that is grossly oversimplified and distorted, filtered through an almost exclusively liberal political lens." And, on his personal blog, Albert Mohler, the ninth president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues in a lengthy response for the reproductive reasoning behind marriage: "At the center of this extended family stands the institution of marriage as the most basic human model of covenantal love and commitment, " he writes. "And this notion of marriage, deeply rooted in its procreative purpose, is unambiguously heterosexual."

Not according to everyone. On the Web site for America, the National Catholic Weekly, a blog post lauds Miller for quoting biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, who says that the religious argument for gay marriage "is not generally made with reference to particular texts, but with the general conviction that the Bible is bent toward inclusiveness." In doing so, America encourages any readers who want to comment to "remember the dictates of charity."

And the leading gay news blogs, not surprisingly, were also supportive. On Towleroad, a gay news aggregator, an image of the cover is featured as the top story with this excerpt from the story: "...First,while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, as the examples above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage-theirs or anyone else's -to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes."

On AfterElton, a blog owned by the gay television network Logo, Brian Juergens writes, "Much like the excellent documentary "For the Bible Tells Me So," the Newsweek piece takes a hard look at exactly what the Bible says about marriage, homosexuality, and the place where the two meet. Not surprisingly, the fundamental text is not as anti-gay as many Prop 8 supporters would like us to think it is." And to round things out, the blog Queerty had this to say about our piece: "One of the most useful side-effects of the passage of Prop. 8 in California is that people are asking, "So why won't we let the gays get married again?" and anti-marriage advocates, unable to win their case in the civic square have retreated to religion, pulling out the "Because the Bible tells me so" defense. Not true, says Newsweek's Lisa Miller inthis morning's cover story." The authors of the Queerty post close out by saying that, if history is any indicator, Miller's sure to get lots of angry responses.

Queerty is right. On the American Family Association's Web site, they have started a petition urging members and like-minded readers to e-mail NEWSWEEK's CEO. So far, his office reports that they have received 15,000 such e-mails.

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