Sex columnist Savage on Bible, marital infidelity and his 'get it' moment

SEATTLE -- Seattleite Dan Savage is arguably the most popular sex and relationship advice columnist in America.  He’s outspoken on just about every topic, but he’s always entertaining and thought-provoking.

In his new book, “American Savage”, he writes about a number of social and relationship issues.

Here are some extended excerpts from the interview with Q13 FOX News:

On marital infidelity:

“There are circumstances over the multi-decade course of a truly long-term relationship, and in that time sex becomes less and less important.  It becomes more of a partnership, parents, family, property, community, status, really all these things are also a part of marriage.  And, you know, if one person is completely done with sex and the other person is not done with sex, what do advise people to do in that circumstance?  Divorce?  Traumatize the children?  Perhaps leave one partner in the lurch if that partner is dependent economically, or for health insurance on the other.  I look at that and I say, you know, do what you need to do to stay married and stay sane.  And maybe that involves cheating, but as the lesser of two evils. Divorce is an evil. Cheating is an evil. There are circumstances which cheating is the lesser evil.”

On being called “sex-centric”:

“I’m not sex-centric.  I look at a marriage, and I see a loving bond, a commitment, a shared history.  I see children, I see property.  I see two families that were blended together, all of their relatives now identifying with each other also as family.  I look at that and I say, all of that should outweigh an infidelity.  All of that should be given more weight than one accidental evening in a hotel on a business trip.  It’s the people who say that this explodes all of this who put too much emphasis on sex.  They’re overvaluing sex.  I’m undervaluing sex.  I’m saying sex is less important than everything else a marriage is about.”

On his anti-Bible comments:

The heat in the reaction to my comments about the Bible exist in direct proportion to how I’ve nailed it.  You have these people waving the Old Testament in our faces, the clobber passages from Leviticus that gay people should be put to death.  Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve is an Old Testament reference.  And yet there is all this other stuff in the Old Testament that they ignore.  All these other things that are also abominations.  A girl who is not a virgin on her wedding night should be dragged to her father’s doorstep and stoned to death.  Why don’t we hear about that?  How come the clobber passages in Old Testament about gay people are still in force, but all the clobber passages in the Old Testament about heterosexual conduct are no longer operative?  And when you say that to people who are literally citing Leviticus and screaming it in your face, it makes them very upset when you call them on it.  And when they say the Bible is the inerrant word of God and then you say, well, slavery, the Bible got slavery wrong.  The easiest moral question humanity has ever faced, as Sam Harris writes in letter to a Christian nation, the Bible got it wrong.  They got something as obvious and as easy as slavery wrong.  What are the odds that it got human sexuality wrong?  About a thousand percent I’d say.”

On whether he ever had an “IT GETS BETTER” inspiration:

“I was in line in a movie theater when I was, I don’t know, 11 or 12 years old, already very self-conscious about how different I was, but not having a name for it, not really understanding it.  And there were two men in front of us, 1976, Logan’s Run, Water Tower Place (Chicago), that’s how much I remember it.  Two men ahead of us in line who were holding hands, two young gay men.  And I saw them and my mother pulled me toward her, not my other siblings, just me, and looked at my father and said, Those men are weird.  And looked at them and went, oh that’s it, they’re weird like I’m weird, I get it.  And they looked happy, and I thought, I’ll be OK, because look at them….It stuck with my all of my life.  Makes me cry when I think about it.  The bravery of those guys, you know, to be openly gay guys in Water Tower place in the north side of Chicago in 1976, holding hands at the movies, that was risky and that sent a message that like hit me when I was 12.  It didn’t make me gay, I was already gay.  But it made me realize that I would grow up and I would find love and that was a possibility for me.”