Is religious opposition to same-sex marriage collapsing?

“Throughout history, religion has sanctioned and fueled the persecution of homosexuality. That dynamic may be drawing to an end. Polls, clerics, and denominations are shifting. Theology is adapting. Resistance to same-sex marriage is dwindling, and there’s no end in sight.”

So writes William Saletan of Slate, in an article on the recent Faith Angle Forum, an event hosted annually by the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.It includes this snippet:

The conference’s second session dwelled on sin. The speakers, Cornelius Plantinga of Calvin College and Ross Douthat of the New York Times, discussed what we should feel bad about. Homosexuality wasn’t on the list. Plantinga, a former president of Calvin Theological Seminary, noted that some people’s views were changing.* “It used to be that people thought of homosexual acts as sinful,” he said. “Now they think of criticism of homosexual acts as sinful.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of Saletan’s piece deals with a question that Michael Gerson, who former Bush speech writer and member of a breakaway Anglican church, asked the two speakers about the ways in which the “belief” that people may have a “strong genetic predisposition” to homosexuality” is changing even conservative Christian’s views on this subject.

If Gerson and his compatriots in the breakaway Anglican movement are swerving from their uncritical embrace of the anti-gay bigotry of Peter Akinola, which I wrote about in this May 2008 piece, that is good news. But what would be better is if they could get their leaders, like Archbishop Bob Duncan, to come out against Uganda’s hideous anti-gay law.