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FOR THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO
Produced & Directed by Daniel Karslake.
Director of Photography Kevin Bond, et al.
Edited by Nancy Kennedy.
Music by Scott Anderson & Mark Suozzo.
Released by First Run Features.
Country of Origin: USA. 97 min. Not Rated.

This frank, emotionally draining, and tightly-structured documentary opens with Anita Bryant declaiming against the supposed sin of homosexuality, followed by a procession of ranting rhetoric of middle-American preachers. Director Daniel Karslake depicts these conservatives as a gallery of grotesques, shown mostly through grainy second-hand film of their overheated sermons.

Then the camera turns to an elderly couple with strong Kentucky accents describing their bible-based upbringing and their son’s conventional piety. With a sudden lurch, one realizes that these are the Robinsons, parents of Gene Robinson, bishop of New Hampshire and the first man in an openly gay relationship to become an Episcopal bishop.

This film is mostly about those families, conventionally or even conservatively religious, coming to terms with a gay or lesbian child, a recognition which brings fear, distress, incomprehension, and the overturning of what had been assumed or unquestioned. The spine of this efficiently told film consists of the stories of a handful of them, from Minnesota Lutherans to black and white Southern folk, as well as Dick and Jane Gephardt. We move with each, in turn, through the process of discovery, adjustment, reconciliation, and, in most cases, active, loving solidarity.

A second strand of the movie methodically dismantles the alleged biblical basis for homophobia, through interviews with a series of distinguished Biblical scholars and church leaders, including Peter Gomes of Harvard and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. No Biblical text and no biblical writer even envisaged, let alone legislated about, the faithful monogamous adult relationships of modern gay and lesbians.

A final, less emphatic theme exposes the claims to “cure” or “repair” homosexual orientation. The film deals briefly with this aspect: no reputable science supports such practices, and the psychological damage they can inflict is horrendous. One of the film’s subjects, Mary Lou Wallner, was a former follower of family-values guru James Dobson. Wallner broke with her daughter, Anna, after she came out as a lesbian; Anna killed herself before she and her mother could be reconciled.

So devastating is the film’s exposure of the dire effects of religiously motivated homophobia that one almost wonders (if only momentarily) whether full justice has been done, at least, among the more moderate conservatives (represented here only by the president of Fuller Theological Seminary). Euan Cameron, Academic Dean and Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation Church History, Union Theological Seminary
October 5, 2007