Feedback archive → Feedback 2005, 2009

The disingenuous and anti-Christian nature of ‘gay rights’ rhetoric

18 February 2005; reposted 18 April 2009

I think it is truly disgraceful what you publish on this website. I Know for a fact that homosexuals can not help their sexual preferences. Do you think that they would choose to be persecuted and excluded from society if they had a choice? Most of your “proof” comes from a book written thousands of years ago when people did not necessarily understand what scientists have now discovered about gay people. I’m not saying that I don’t believe the Bible, I just think that everything in it should be taken with a grain of salt. I would not be so quick to blindly believe, word for word, in a book that contradicts itself in many places. I believe that when Jesus and various other people condemned homosexuality, they were condeming the type of activity found in places like Ancient Rome, when the rich male citizens would sometimes have “little boy companions.” That, I find disgraceful, but I think that doesn’t mean we should not allow innocent people to enjoy their full rights as human beings. It is our duty as good Christians to love our neighbors and spread peace throughout the world. We cannot do this if we continue to be predjudiced against about 5% of God’s people.

E.B.
USA

I think it is truly disgraceful what you publish on this website.

That’s an interesting revelation about your personal psychology, but what matters is what the Bible says and what can be logically deduced from it. In any case, a number of people have appreciated that my response to a homosexual was not at all harsh towards him as a person, while firmly against his sin—see right.

You may have heard rumors in certain sectors of the media that the Creation Museum will have an exhibit blaming homosexuals for AIDS. This has not the slightest basis in fact, and there is nothing like that on our website. Indeed, we have affirmed that AIDS has a mechanistic cause, the HIV—see Has AIDS evolved? Certainly, if people obeyed God’s laws restricting sex to within heterosexual monogamy, the vast majority of AIDS cases in the West would not have occurred. However, we would also regard it as a medical and compassionate duty to help sufferers, just as for smokers with lung cancer, for example. Indeed, some CMI supporters are involved in cutting-edge research trying to combat HIV.

I know for a fact that homosexuals can not help their sexual preferences.

How do you know such things? Several points come to mind:

• There is a huge irony here—how come gender differences are ‘choices’ although the biology is clearly different, while ‘orientation’ is hardwired despite biological sameness? To explain: feminists have for years declared it an abominable heresy that ‘gender’ differences are innate. Instead, they have asserted that the differences are rather the result of choices and conditioning. This is despite the obvious biological differences even down to brain wiring (and note we are not claiming female inferiority—we leave that to Darwin and his fellow evolutionary pioneers because it contradicts the Bible!). Yet now, many homosexual activists claim that ‘sexual orientation’ is innate (‘can’t be helped’), despite the lack of biological difference (discounting the ‘gay gene’ nonsense expounded by a self-serving homosexual geneticist).
• All the same, some homosexual activists strongly oppose the idea that it can’t be helped, on the grounds that it still imputes aberrance to homosexual behavior; ‘if we weren’t born this way, we wouldn’t want to be like this.’ This was explained on the website (which you should have checked as per our feedback rules).
• A ‘preference’ doesn’t determine behavior. Some people with a ‘preference’ for the opposite sex are still forbidden to have sexual intercourse with just any such person—they are restricted to their spouses. Since ‘gay marriage’ is an oxymoron, it follows that those with homosexual ‘preferences’ are forbidden from having sexual intercourse with those of the same sex, just as the Bible says (see explanation in my reply to an objector to a homosexuality article).
• Jesus told us that lust is adultery in the heart, and in general that sinful acts are generated by sinful thoughts. So heterosexuals must resist such thoughts towards other people’s wives—after all, not all heterosexual acts are right either, as explained in the previous point. So surely, since all homosexual acts are wrong, it is wrong to have homosexual lusts too. The Bible says a few things about the need to resist all sinful desires, and the good news that Jesus is the answer:
• Galatians 5:24 ‘Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.’
• Titus 2:12 ‘It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age,’
• 1 Peter 2:11 ‘Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.’
• This would explain why Ex-gays exist—they show that people can make a conscious choice to escape the homosexual deathstyle, especially with Christ’s help. Even Dr Robert Spitzer, once the great hero of the homosexual movement for persuading the American Psychiatric Association to remove ‘homosexuality’ as a ‘disorder’, has now become a pariah for saying, “(S)ome people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that.”

Do you think that they would choose to be persecuted and excluded from society if they had a choice?

How precious can you get? Homosexuals are now a politically protected victim group, about which it is verboten to say anything negative. And certain homonazis want Christians punished if they quote from the Bible against homosexual behavior. Indeed, 63-year-old Pastor Åke Green was jailed in Sweden for just that, because they have such a sodomofascist law restricting Christian freedom. Never mind that he offered the biblical encouragement that ‘[e]verybody can be set free and delivered.’ Moreover, he concluded his sermon with:

We cannot condemn these people — Jesus never did that either. He showed everyone He met deep respect for the person they were (…) Jesus never belittled anyone.

Fortunately his conviction was overturned on appeal, to the ire of the Gay-stapo, by a higher court because it was such an egregious violation of Sweden’s free speech laws.

Further evidence that homosexuals have special protection comes from media double standards. E.g. the vile murder of the 21-year-old homosexual Matthew Shepard by young thugs he had propositioned was front page news as an alleged anti-gay ‘hate crime’, and blamed on conservative Christians (although the thugs weren’t in the least bit motivated by conservative Christian concerns, especially as the latter almost always preached love towards the sinner). And of course, this was used as an excuse to push for ‘hate crime’ legislation. (as opposed to ‘love crimes’, no doubt), although existing laws were sufficient to sentence the murderers to life. (Actually, six years after the murder, the media finally researched the case properly and found that Shepard’s killers were motivated by money and drugs, while the savagery was fueled by methamphetamine abuse not anti-gay hate.)

Yet there was a virtual media blackout on the vile rape and murder of the teenage boy Jesse Dirkhising by a homosexual couple. Even the homosexual columnist Andrew Sullivan admitted (New Republic Online, 2 April 2001):

What we are seeing, I fear, is a logical consequence of the culture that hate-crimes rhetoric promotes. Some deaths—if they affect a politically protected class—are worth more than others. Other deaths, those that do not fit a politically correct profile, are left to oblivion. The leading gay rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign—which has raised oodles of cash exploiting the horror of Shepard’s murder—has said nothing whatsoever about the Dirkhising case.

And consider the crime of Nicholas Gutierrez, a 19-year-old homosexual, who bashed the devoutly Catholic 51-year-old wife and mother-of-four Mary Stachowicz to death after she questioned his lifestyle and explained Christian forgiveness. Once again, there was a virtual media blackout, and of course no push for laws to protect Christians from hate crimes—some liberals even justified or, even worse, applauded the murder (see also Matthew Shepard vs. Mary Stachowicz: Why Did AP Hype One Murder Victim and Ignore the Other? The ugly truth is too much for most in the media to admit: they would have cared a lot more about Mary Stachowicz if she were ‘gay’ and if her murderer, Nick Gutierrez, were not.

The former CBS journalist Bernard Goldberg pointed out in his book Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite yet another example of the liberal protection of the gay agenda. This is the way they describe certain wayward Catholic priests (a tiny minority) as ‘pedophile priests’. However, they would be far better described as ‘gay priests’, since their usual targets were adolescent boys rather than little girls.

The probability of violence occurring in a gay couple is mathematically double the probability of that in a heterosexual couple … we believe as many as 650,000 gay men may be victims of domestic violence each year in the United States.

Also, the Leader Messenger (South Australia), 4 June 1997, p. 1, gave figures indicating that a massive 28 out of 168 reports of domestic violence involved homosexual couples, while only around 1 in 1,000 of all couples were homosexual.

Most of your “proof” comes from a book written thousands of years ago when people did not necessarily understand what scientists have now discovered about gay people.

All Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16), and it is absurd to think that God knew less about sexuality than certain self-serving scientists today.

I’m not saying that I don’t believe the Bible,

Yes you are, by logical implication. You clearly do not believe its many claims of divine inspiration, including by Jesus Himself, who said ‘Scripture cannot be broken’ (John 10:35) and many other things affirming biblical inerrancy.

I just think that everything in it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Then that must logically apply to the passages you invoke in support of your liberal views.

I would not be so quick to blindly believe, word for word,

Please find out what we really teach about biblical hermeneutics rather than knocking down this straw man of hyperliteralism. We actually should take the Bible as the original authors intended, so we read poetry as poetry, history as history, laws as laws, etc. See Should Genesis be taken literally? and Refuting Compromise ch. 1.

… in a book that contradicts itself in many places.

So why don’t you name even one of these places? But before wasting our time again, please check our page, Bible ‘contradictions’ and ‘errors’.

I believe that when Jesus and various other people condemned homosexuality, they were condeming the type of activity found in places like Ancient Rome, when the rich male citizens would sometimes have “little boy companions.’

Once again, this has already been refuted on our website, by showing that the condemnation did not use such words, but general terms forbidding any homosexual intercourse. In any case, this is disingenuous on your part to attempt this amateurish eisegesis, since you don’t believe the Bible anyway. In any case, the homo-sex wasn't condemned because it was part of paganism; rather, it was evidence for the depravity of paganism.

That, I find disgraceful,

On what grounds? Since when is right and wrong decided by your personal preferences? Pedophiles might accuse you of ‘pedophobia’. After all, there are the likes of philosopher Peter Singer who sees nothing wrong in infanticide or bestiality, yet the academic establishment rewarded these morally perverted views with a personal chair at Princeton.

… but I think that doesn’t mean we should not allow innocent people to enjoy their full rights as human beings.

Who is stopping them? ‘Gays’ have the same right of marriage as secular people—a ‘gay’ man has exactly the same right to marry a woman as a straight man does, and vice versa!

[Update September 2006: Judge James Johnson, in a concurring judgment in a Washington State Supreme Court case (Andersen v. King County), pointed out:

Marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and every Washington citizen has a constitutional right to enter into such marriage subject only to limited regulation under the police power (for example, restricting underage or close family marriage).

This case was a state appeal against trial court activism, where gay activists had tried to impose ‘gay marriage’ by judicial fiat. This case reversed the trial court decisions and upheld the state definition of marriage.

However, in Massachusetts, the State Supreme Court had previously invented a ‘constitutional right’ to gay marriage. However, to liberals, ‘constitutional right’ doesn’t mean ‘a right found in the constitution’, but ‘something we want but the electorate won’t support, so we need the courts to impose it on them (for their own good, of course)’. But Johnson J., in the introductory paragraph to the case above, pointed out:

This is a difficult case only if a court disregards the text and history of the state and federal constitutions and laws in order to write new laws for our State’s citizens. Courts are not granted such powers under our constitutional system. Our oath requires us to uphold the constitution and laws, not rewrite them.

He went on to denounce the Massachusetts liberal activism as ‘one notorious exception’, and continued, ‘To declare [Washington’s Defense of Marriage Act] unconstitutional would declare marriage as Washington citizens have always known it, unconstitutional.’

Ironically, in Massachusetts, fewer than half the gay couples have bothered to marry, which makes one wonder about the motives of the gay marriage putsch, i.e. to support something gays want, or to undermine traditional marriage. Also, the first gay couple to marry under this test case has now divorced. This illustrates a point from Johnson J. in the Washington case:

Direct comparisons between opposite-sex homes and same-sex homes further support the former as a better environment for children. For example, studies show an average shorter term commitment and more sexual partners for same-sex couples.]

In any case, this is another example of disingenuity from gay activists: when they first pushed for ‘rights’, it was ‘what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom is no one else’s business’. But now they demand public approval for these very things! And if approval for this behavior is a ‘right’, then it logically follows that Christians no longer have the freedom of opinion to disapprove. Therefore so-called ‘tolerance’ becomes a tyranny of intolerance.

It is our duty as good Christians to love our neighbors and spread peace throughout the world.

Where do you get this idea of Christian duty from? Surely not from the biblical records of Christ’s actual statements? But if the Bible can’t be trusted where you disagree with it, then on what grounds do you use it when you agree with it (or rather, distort it to support your liberal mores)? Actually, Jesus told his followers to teach obedience in everything He commanded, which includes his statements about marriage between one man and one woman, and against lust.

We cannot do this if we continue to be predjudiced against about 5% of God’s people.

E.B.
USA

Where do you get this figure from? Sounds as suspect as the oft-quoted 10% from that gall wasp specialist with pedophile researchers, Kinsey, as explained elsewhere.

Another deceitful argument is comparing laws against same-sex marriage with the repugnant laws against ‘inter-racial’ marriage. But male-female differences are foundational and instituted from creation; racial differences are incidental and post-Babel (see Racism Questions and Answers). Even Blind Freddie's deaf guide dog can discern why male-only and female-only restrooms are reasonable, while white-only ones are repugnant.

Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D.
Brisbane, Australia

Profoundly different website

Dear …:

Before I became a Christian about four years ago, my biggest stumbling block was believing that I could still be a rational, thinking human being and believe in a God who could perform miracles. But after reading a book on the subject, I was convinced that, although I didn’t have all the answers, I still wanted Christ in my life.

Naturally, after I was born again, I was still very much concerned with my questions, and so I went looking for answers. I came across the Reasons to Believe website, and I thought that I had found what I was looking for. However, as I read more and more, I was left with the sense that they had constructed an overly elaborate worldview that is never sure of itself, for it is open to change the minute any new fossil is found. It seemed far too complicated and weak, and the Genesis account, which seems to be straight-forward and demanding of a literal exegesis, was ripped apart, and a whole bunch of excuses made about why something could not mean what it said because of some ‘scientific discovery’, etc.

When my friend showed me your website, I knew I had found something profoundly different. Until that point, I was not aware of the enormous difference that a literal belief in Genesis makes, but now I understand that if one doesn’t take Genesis seriously, then why take the Bible seriously at all? Near my house, there is a United church that has posted on its signboard out front ‘We take the Bible seriously, not literally.’ I think this church speaks for many others who would not be so bold.

All this to say, thank you for your wonderful ministry based on the timeless and unchanging word of God. You have equipped me to defend what I know to be true in a way that makes sense.

Thanks again.
Kevin
Canada

Ed. Note: see the book below.

Related articles

• Response to ‘gay marriage’ article objections
• Handling the barrage of homosexual half-truths: Resisting strategies that try to make us compromise God’s Word
• Creationism and the Problem of Homosexual Behaviour (overview)
• Newsweek’s Gay Apparel: Lisa Miller’s Travesty of Exegesis
• CMI answers philosophy/religion professor on biblical exegesis

Further reading

• Homosexuality: What are the biblical and scientific issues?
• Christian Apologetics Questions and Answers

Recommended Resources

Refuting Compromise

by Jonathan Sarfati

With his usual brilliant clarity, Jonathan Sarfati, author of the best-selling Refuting Evolution (Vols. 1 and 2) has produced a comprehensive and resounding refutation of the position of ‘progressive creationist’ Hugh Ross, whose views are causing massive confusion about science and the Bible. The most powerful and scientific defence of a straightforward view of Genesis creation ever written.

The ‘new atheists’ claim that Christianity doesn’t have answers to evolution. This site begs to differ with over 7,000 fully searchable articles—many of them science-based. Keep refuting the skeptics.