In the News

Last month, a petition was filed with the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that made same-sex marriage legal at the national level. The person bringing the petition is Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk who claimed that processing same-sex marriage licenses went against her religious convictions. Back in June, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to make overturning Obergefell v. Hodges a denominational priority. 

While the attack on marriage rights is somewhat separate from the attempts to deny the existence of trans and non-binary people, it is all tied together. The effort to prohibit same sex marriage really only makes sense in the context of a binary understanding of gender. You have to be able to label someone “male” or “female” so that you know who they are and are not allowed to marry. (If you are a little fuzzy on the distinctions and terminology around sex, gender, and orientation, check out the Flying Gender Unicorn.)

In the Word

Before we dig into the nitty-gritty of Genesis 2, I want to make a brief comment about the imperative in the Gospels for protecting opposite-sex marriage: there is none. And regardless of one’s particular beliefs about same-sex marriage, to prioritize the overturning of marriage rights–to make overturning Obergefell the focus of your religious action– is to follow the leadership of worldly powers and not the leadership of Jesus. (See Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.)

In my previous post I looked at gender diversity through the lens of the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:4a. I now invite you to turn your attention to the creation story in Genesis 2:4b-24. This is the story of Adam and Eve (kind of, but those names aren’t used in this chapter), a text frequently used to support both the subjugation of women and the insistence on opposite-sex marriages. At its heart, though, this second biblical account of creation is not about God setting up rigid rules, but about God’s deep and intimate love for God’s creatures. In the Genesis 1 story, the Divine One seems to speak humans into being, but in Genesis 2:7, God forms the first human “from the dust of the ground and breathe[s] into [their] nostrils the breath of life.” There is a physical connection between creator and creature here that is akin to childbirth. 

Once the human is created, divine love propels God to seek what is good for them. While the refrain in Genesis 1 is “and God saw that it was good,” here God says that “It is not good that the human should be alone.” Genesis 2 expresses the deep human need for companionship and community, and shows that God cares deeply for us and works within creation to fulfill that need. 

We should note that the term translated in Genesis 2:7 as man and in Genesis 1:26 as humankind (at least in the NRSV) is adam. This term is used in both creation stories only as a general noun; Adam isn’t given as the name of the first male human until Genesis 4:2. (The first female is named Eve in Genesis 3:20.) In verse 22, the female–isha–is created from the rib of the human. And then finally, in the poetry of verse 23, the term ish is first used to explicitly designate male. 

It skews the intention and flow of this second creation narrative to read the first human as male and the creation of the second human as some sort of mandate for heterosexuality and a narrow understanding of gender as binary. The divine revelation of the Genesis 2 creation story is not about who gets to marry who. The divine revelation here is that we, as humans, are created for community and relationship with each other. It is not good for us to be alone.