Douglas Whaley

In the battle over gay marriage (which I’m pleased to say is going very well, and, as I’ve predicted in Related Posts below, is highly likely to be over by the end of June 2015 when the Supreme Court next addresses the issue), there have been a spate of recent letters to The Columbus Dispatch explaining that the bible condemns homosexuality and calls for marriage to be celebrated solely between one man and one woman.   This post addresses those assertions. 1.   Is Homosexuality Condemned by the Bible? Alas, yes it is.   There have been valiant attempts through the years to take each of the biblical passages doing this and explain them away, but in my opinion they fail to convince any objective reader, even one who has read these explanations carefully.   The most famous text-by-text discussion of how the biblical passages can be supposedly read not to make homosexuality sinful is the well-known book by John Boswell “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality” (1980).

    The answer is to elect more Democrats to Congress.   The Republicans have made it all but impossible to ever get rid of your student loans, particularly not in bankruptcy proceedings.   If you file for bankruptcy protection from your creditors, no matter how disastrous your financial situation is, you will emerge from the bankruptcy still owing every penny of student debt you incurred, and that debt will follow you to your grave.   It wasn’t always so.   I’m a law professor at The Ohio State University, and I’ll be teaching the course on bankruptcy there this coming fall semester.   Prior versions of the federal Bankruptcy Code allowed student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy where it was clear that there was no way the former student was going to be able to pay them off.   But in 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress pushed through major changes in the Bankruptcy Code, most of which were designed to screw consumers and reward banks.   Deceptively named “ T