Hi Miss Muppet.

You asked "Many Christians these days talk about equality in male/female marriage. Does that mean that same-sex relationships simply follow that same pattern?"

I would say yes. There should be equality in any relationship, straight or same sex. In saying that each person might be happy to preform certain duties, that some may state are a certain gender role. Eg, cooking is the women's job. I know plenty of men who are happy to cook. In a same sex there might be someone who is happy to do the cooking but not the mowing. Different for everyone and it is whatever works and makes each relationship happy.

Great you are mulling things over 🙂 Hope you are well.

Quote from miss.muppet on March 24, 2014, 8:38 pm

I spent most of my young adult life submitting to the elders & believing that was what God had for me to do, in faith. I'm.just a bit confused in my head how to let those things go & believe something new.

I don't know if this helps, but I've struggled long and hard with this…in the end my opinion is that rigid gender roles in Christian teaching are but one of many things that may well change over time. Not too long ago, slavery was justified with Bible verses; nowadays liberal Christians can also find biblical justification for the equality of all peoples.

There are some that teach that the word of God is forever unchanging. I take some comfort in Ecclesiastes 3 – there is a time for all things. So female submissiveness / male dominance cannot be the most appropriate practice 100% of the time.

As further justification of this, when you move away from the religious perspective entirely, you'll find that broadly speaking, political conservatism is more popular in times of national war and unrest, and political progressiveness in times of peace and prosperity. It would be unacceptable for a LGBTIQ activist to demand a million-dollar investment in a Mardi Gras parade when bombs are about to fall from the sky in WWII, just as it would be ridiculous to demand that every housing block be built with a nuclear fallout shelter today.

I read this thread awhile ago and was uplifted by the sincerity of people trying to find their truth. I offer this science snippet as food for thought. An American entomologist was studying spiders behaviour, in particular one of the many species where the females dine on the males after mating. She noticed some odd behaviour with some of the males.

Some males would be very choosy about the females they approached. They would wait until another male had been consumed by a female before approaching the female and depositing his sperm. THe researcher thought this may be an example of "thinking". Obviously for survival. Anyhow , if true, it just shows how weird and diversified this wondrous world is, created and evolved by God.

From a science point of view, we are only here because of the limitless variation sex brings to our species. Sadly many Christians dislike science as much as they dislike Christians