The Hypocrisy of Dan Savage

Last week while speaking at the National High School Journalist Conference in Seattle, Dan Savage hurled insults at students who left the room because they were offended by his remarks concerning the Bible and its position with regard to homosexuality. The irony is that he made his comments at a conference that was themed around an anti-bullying message. He even implicated himself as a bully when he said, “It’s funny that someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-a*** some people react when we push back.”

Forget the irony for minute. Savage makes the claim about the Bible that pro-homosexual activists have been making for years, that since the Bible got its views of slavery wrong then there is a one-hundred percent chance that its views on human sexuality are wrong as well. He basically levies the accusation that bullying towards homosexuals takes place because the Bible calls it an immoral act and that Christians justify their bullying from a biblical worldview.

Savage makes many assumptions in his argument. First and foremost he seems to assume that Christians who operate from a biblical worldview are the primary source of homosexual bullying. He assumes that Christians simply ignore other types of sexual behavior that the Bible speaks against. He also assumes that people who attack homosexuals are true Christians. Because he does not understand biblical Christianity, Savage creates what he thinks is a Christian for the explicit purpose of arguing against Christianity. In philosophy, that is called a straw-man. My response to Savage is that his own worldview, secular humanism, logically concludes that homosexuality is unnatural, and that we do not need to create straw-men secular humanists to make our case.

Darwinian evolution teaches that animals evolve in such a way as to maintain survivability in their respective environments. We have many different species of animals that came from a particular genetic descent because they evolved through chance mutations in order to fit their environment. Darwin also argued that species that did not evolve became extinct. Darwin assumed that the species that were the most fit survived. For Darwin life was all about survivability and the perpetuation of the species.

Evolution is to humanists what the Bible is to Christians—the underlying foundation to their worldview. The problem with humanists like Savage is that they fail to see that there is no place for homosexuality in their own worldview. Biologically, there is no way for a population that is entirely homosexual to perpetuate itself. The only way that homosexuality can exist is if it does so in a heterosexual society. According to Darwinian evolution, homosexuality should cease to exist because it biologically, genetically cannot survive on its own. It would have to evolve to heterosexuality in order to do so.

Christians can argue against homosexuality from multiple worldviews. Humanists like Savage can only argue for homosexuality by attacking the worldviews of others. In order to justify homosexuality, they have to step outside of their own worldview and admit that there is such thing as morality and then they have to convince people that humans are capable of defining their own morality, hence the attacks on the Bible and Bible-believing Christians.

Nobody develops their worldview in isolation. Every thinker is influenced by other thinkers. Because we are thinking beings, we choose the influences that form our worldview. Christians that operate from a biblical worldview have chosen to let the Bible stand as their authority. Others, such as Savage have chosen other forms of influence in the development of their worldview. Here is the difference: Savage’s worldview allows him to hurl insults at people that he would call bullies. A biblical worldview mandates that we love those who are trapped in the sinful lifestyle of homosexuality. So, who are the real hypocrites?