Gay Marriage - A response to Lisa Miller's Article in Newsweek

Lisa Miller, in the recent December 15 newsweek, authored the cover article (which can be found here, http://www.newsweek.com/id/172653/page/1). Which is an attack against Conservative opposition to gay marriage on the grounds that scripture supports the practice.
Miller makes numerous scriptural errors in her article, first of all she seems to believe that the Old Testament example of marriage is summed up in the patriarchs and the kings. She cites Christ's celibacy as a reason that we should make no attempt to follow biblical examples of marriage, and claims that the Apostle Paul was also celibate. One has to wonder where exactly she has been getting her information.
First let me say that there are many bad examples of marriage in scripture, the Bible is a book that offers a wonderful transparency in the lives of its characters. We see not only their good points but also their bad ones. However, one has to wonder at her assumption that this honesty is (1) a bad thing or (2) an argument to ignore scriptural standards. The characters of scripture often do not follow the laws that God lays down, they also pay the consequences for ignoring said laws.
I do want to speak further on the Apostle Paul, first of all Miller's claim that the apostle was celibate shows a glaring lack of knowledge of Hebrew culture. Paul was a Pharisee, in fact he himself claims to have been among the greatest of the pharisees (as in best not necessarily most powerful). However, if this is the case he MUST have been married at one time. One could not be a pharisee and be unwed. Discerning readers of scripture will note that Paul's wife must have either died, or left him. Miller's claims about Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 7 also show a startling lack of knowledge about scripture and the history of the first century. 1 Corinthians 7 encompasses the ENTIRE biblical warning against marriage...this is the only passage where marriage in general is preached against and Paul himself has many good things to say about marriage in other books.
Paul's letter to Corinth was written, as far as we can tell, during a time of great persecution by the Roman government. Paul's warning against marriage was written with the understanding that if the Corinthian Christians did marry it was very likely that one spouse would die within years, possibly even months or days, of the marriage. Paul's warning against marriage is not that marriage is a bad thing but that marriage, for the Corinthian's at that time, was more likely to result in misery than in joy.
Miller also, erroneously, informs us that the only New Testament passage to preach against homosexual behavior is Romans 1:21-32 and that homosexual behavior between women is never mentioned in scripture. However homosexual behavior is also condemned in 1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy, and Jude and the passage in Romans 1 contains mentions of both male and female homosexual behavior.
All this is to say that Miller's attack against the opposition to homosexual marriage is not based in fact.
However, how should Christians deal with homosexual marriage and the calls for equal rights for homosexuals.
One of the key arguments for the gay rights movement is that homosexuality is genetically based. However, we will assume for a moment an evolutionary stance (though I am not a Darwinian Evolutionist, I am in fact a creationist). If we assume the validity of Darwin's theory of natural selection then the idea that homosexuality is genetically based should seem impossible. Homosexual couples can not naturally reproduce and pass on the genetic code hypothetically necessary to create more homosexuals. This leaves us with two options (1) Either homosexuality is not genetically based or (2) homosexuality is a genetic flaw which has been artificially kept in the human genome by means of selective breeding. We will again assume the former as the later is ethically, politically, and socially too problematic to tackle. This would place the argument for equality made by the gay rights movement on the same level as religious equality, not the level of racial equality on which they commonly attempt to place it.
In this position we, as Christians who are acting with love, must admit that those who chose a different lifestyle than our own do still deserve the same LEGAL rights as we enjoy. However marriage is not a wholly legal issue. It is a religious issue as well, and this I think is key to the argument against homosexual marriage. If the gay rights movement wants to provide a legal equality to homosexuals then they should be fighting for civil unions, not marriage. The fact that the issue here is homosexual marriage and not legal homosexual unions which provide the same legal benefits as legal heterosexual unions makes the issue one of competing religions and not one of CIVIL or LEGAL rights.