For The Bible Tells Me So is very much aware of the larger political fights for LGBTQA rights in the era in which it was made but it's primarily concentrated on smaller-scale depictions of fighting for equality and LGBRQA visibility in one's own heavily religious family. The documentary chronicles interviews with a number of members of the LGBTQA community, who discuss in length their struggles to accept their own sexuality while growing up in a household that preached that all facets of the LGBTQA community were sins, while also engaging in interviews with parents of these individuals and how they reacted to their child coming out of the closet.
Some of the parents learn to accept their child and who they are over time, while other parents are far less accepting of their offspring's sexual orientation.These interview segments are paced across the entire movie so as to allow the greater span of time that these LGBTQA individuals spent in the closet struggling with their own identity have a greater impact. Interspliced within these parent/child interviews are discussions with high-ranking officials in the world of theological studies that challenge passages of The Bible that anti-LGBTQA individuals take out of context to support their own bigotry.
Unde the direction of filmmaker Daniel G. Karslake, For The Bible Tells Me So goes directly to the front lines of what people primarily use to excuse their own hatred for the LGBTQA community, that of ardent supporters of Christianity or Catholicism utilizing their scripture to excuse themselves marginalizing an already struggling portion of the population. What's it like to know for years on end that you're really gay, bisexual, transgender, etc. and feel like you can't embrace that side of yourself because the very people you call family are so vehemently against the LGBTQA community? It's a horrific internal struggle that the interview portions of For The Bible Tells Me So shed a thoroughly introspective light on.
As said above, the interview segments are paced in a way that allows the full length of time these people trapped in the closet spent grappling with themselves to really have an impact, particularly in the case of interviews with Gene Robinson, whose interviews chronicle him going from being a young guy trying to keep his homosexuality a secret (to the point that he got married to and had two kids with a woman) to becoming the first openly gay Priest in an Episcopalian Church in history. It's a wonderful tale, a personification of that pro-LGBTQA movement axiom "It Gets Better" and it's a story the movie tells oh so well. Of course, there are many in this community for whom the struggles go on and on and For The Bible Tells Me So does not ignore that as it interviews a woman whose refusal to accept her daughter's homosexuality led to her daughter committing suicide just before she turned 30 years of age.
That woman has since become a staunch advocate for the LGBTQA community but the scenes showing her imparting this story of the guilt she has over the loss of her daughter is heartbreaking to watch. Such interview portions of the movie, as well as establishing shots that serve as connective tissue in between these segments of the film, are filmed in a more down-to-Earth way with these more conventional cameras that suggest a level of intimacy that fits the more small-scale nature of the production. That adherence to an endearingly homegrown aesthetic makes a brief animated segment, narrated by the legendary Don LaFontaine, an oddly out-of-place sequence of the film, especially since it makes use of overt comedy that doesn't fit at all with the motion picture it inhabits, but that's an anomaly in terms of quality when it comes to the otherwise engrossing documentary For The Bible Tells Me So, which is all about helping and loving your fellow man, two qualities Jesus Christ himself was very fond of.
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