Adam and who?

BY GAVIN WARD

I am sure many of us have heard that saying before from various more conservative-minded people and, of course, the religious.

In case you haven’t, it goes like this: -˜God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’.

The first time I heard this conveniently poetic saying was at a school assembly at high school. It was the Friday before Mardi Gras and one of the senior teachers got up on stage and informed us that, since it was Mardi Gras weekend, we should remember that God created… etc, etc.

I’m not sure what reaction was expected, but there was certainly lots of sniggering, as would befit a hall full of 700 teenage boys.

I really do think this statement is popular not so much because of its rhyming, but because people who don’t understand the great complexities and wide spectrum of human sexuality find it very convenient to compact all of it into a short sentence, without giving thought to the reality. It’s just not very intelligent if you think about it. It’s the equivalent of saying God created white Europeans to rule the world. This was believed once, but since this is 2009, not 1609, most people have moved on from this way of thinking.

The same goes for sexuality. Saying you are against homosexuality just because, in the Christian creation story in Genesis, God created a man and a woman is a bit short-sighted. It leaves out thousands of years of human development and experience, and the fact that creation needed to be this way so there could be children.

-˜Try and practice as they might, two men have yet to produce a child by natural means.’ The people who spout this phrase would do well to also remember that Adam and Eve weren’t exactly model examples either; it took them just three chapters to mess it all up.

God does a lot of creating. There are over six billion people on this planet and everyone is unique. So to those who say God created Adam and Eve, I say God also created lots of Adams and Steves, and loves every single one of them.