Product Description

Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Seattle Interntional Film Festival, Dan Karslake's provocative, entertaining documentary brilliantly reconciles homosexuality and Biblical scripture, and in the process reveals that Church-sanctioned anti-gay bias is based solely upon a significant (and often malicious) misinterpretation of the Bible. As the film notes, most Christians live their lives today without feeling obliged to kil anyone who works on the Sabbath or eats shrimp.
Through the experience of five very normal, very Christian , very American families - including those of former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson - we discover how insightful people of faith handle the realization of having a gay child. With commentary by such respected voices as Bishop Desmond Tutu, Harvard's Peter Gomes, Orthodox Rabbi Steve Greenberg and Reverend Jimmy Creech, For The Bible Tells Me So offers healing, clarity and understanding to anyone caught in the crosshairs of scripture and sexual identity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1125 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-02-19
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 99 minutes

Amazon.com
For the Bible Tells Me So is a compassionate and insightful documentary about the contemporary face of an old conflict between Christian fundamentalists and gay and lesbian people. The film looks deep into the hearts of several families--a few of them quite famous--that have struggled with making sense of having a homosexual son or daughter in the fold. At the same time, For the Bible Tells Me So is a deconstruction of thin arguments that the Bible actually condemns homosexuality in a few passages and through the story of Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction. A number of clerics and scholars explain the cultural and historical context for Old Testament quotes routinely referenced as arguments against homosexuality, and point out translation confusion about the real meaning of the Sodom story. Unquestionably, the most compelling part of the film is its focus on various families, including that of former U.S. presidential candidate Dick Gephardt, who has a lesbian daughter for whose safety he worries. Also among the interviewees is Gene Robinson, a gay man who became bishop of New Hampshire's Episcopal church in 2004, and his parents, as well as a gay teen whose folks joined him on the front line in protest of their church's negative stance on gays. Not every story is affirmative: there are tragedies within these tales, too, as well as an indictment of so-called cures that supposedly banish the gay drive from homosexual men and women. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

Says it all.
This documentary deals with the insane idea that you can take the Bible literally from beginning to end. It also shows how the Bible has been used to support all kinds of prejudice by selectively picking out passages and ignoring others. The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. Funny how lopsided these admonishments have become. This is a great tool to help gay people deal with religious fanatics in their lives.

For the Bible Tells Me So
This is one of the best movies I have ever seen regarding Gay and Lesbian people. This should be mandatory for all schools and for all families, regardless of whether or not they "think" they have a family member who is gay.

powerful stories, predictable story line
Don't watch this documentary film if you expect anything like a balanced treatment of homosexuality and Christianity. It's aggressively polemical, it incorporates all the worst examples of Christian hate and extremism, it omits any treatment of gay extremists like you might see in San Francisco's Gay Pride Parade, and in several instances it presents "experts" without identifying them as aggressively pro-gay (eg, Peter Gomes of Harvard). But there's a good reason to watch this film, nevertheless, because it presents the personal stories of five families, without exception all of which are deeply Christian, and how they dealt with the news that their kids are gay. Two of the families are famous-- Chrissy Gephardt is the daughter of two-time presidential candidate and Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt, and Gene Robinson became the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. Jake comes from the suburbs of Minneapolis, Tonia is an African-American who grew up on a dirt road in North Carolina before going to Yale, and then Anna was from Arkansas. These families run the Christian gamut -- United Church of Christ, African-American, Lutheran, Catholic, and fundamentalist, and they respond to their child's coming out in different ways. It's a shame that the film makers resorted to predictable polemic instead of trusting the power of these deeply moving stories.