The nation’s first “gay”-affirming middle school has just been approved right here in the Midwest. On Dec. 16, 2008, the Milwaukee Board of Education approved a “gay-friendly” school for 11, 12, 13 and 14-year-olds.

According to U.S. News and World Report, “At a meeting two weeks ago, a subcommittee of Milwaukee’s Board of Education unanimously approved the Alliance School’s proposal to serve sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. The proposal gained unanimous approval from the full board by default when the item was not pulled for further discussion or a vote at last night’s meeting. . . . Marty Lexmond, the director of school innovation for Milwaukee Public Schools, said the need for a gay-friendly middle school is even greater today because adolescents are publicly identifying their sexuality as early as middle school.”

Yet more public money will now be used to affirm theories about the nature and morality of homosexuality that are controversial, unproven, flawed, and harmful, first, to very young, sexually confused adolescents and, second, to society.

Homosexual desire and conduct are not immutable, intrinsic human attributes. And volitional homosexual conduct is not moral conduct. The beliefs that homosexuality is intrinsic, immutable, and moral are unproven, hypothetical, and dangerous philosophical theories that public school administrators have no business affirming and no business using public money to affirm.

And taxpayers, parents, civic leaders, and church leaders have no business remaining silent in the face of this educational malpractice and misuse of public money.

This new school is the cancerous fruit of ignorance, silence, and cowardice. If churches do not assume the responsibility to teach their congregations how to understand the specious secular arguments effectively used to normalize homosexuality, we will continue to lose ground to the pro-homosexual forces that are hugely influential in public schools.

I have said this before, but it bears repeating: When public schools violate their own ethical and pedagogical obligations to intellectual inquiry and when public money is used to promote ideas that hurt children psychologically, physically, intellectually, and spiritually, all of us are called to respond. Do not accept the lie being promulgated by activists in public schools: Facilitating children and teens in their psychological and moral disorders is not a sign of compassion, but rather a supremely unloving, unconscionable act for which we will be held ultimately accountable.

Adolescents who struggle with same-sex attraction deserve our love, our compassion-and truth. It is a worthy and important goal to rid society and schools of bullying, name-calling, and ridicule. But we must not pursue this critical goal by illegitimate means. We must not attempt to eliminate cruelty by affirming that which is physically harmful and soul-destroying.

Where were Milwaukee church leaders during discussions on this misbegotten proposal? If public school administrators, teachers, and school board members were to propose a school that affirms unproven, arguable, destructive theories on other sexual behaviors, like pornography use, adult consensual incest or polyamory, would pastors remain similarly detached? Would they remain comfortably ensconced within their sanctuaries while the children under their watch were being fed destructive lies? If not, then why do they respond so differently-or rather so indifferently-when their children are fed destructive lies in public schools. What is taking place in virtually all public schools is a scandal and moral outrage of such astonishing proportions that I’m dumbfounded by the silence of the church.

I reiterate here something I wrote earlier this year:

At different times in history, the enemy chooses different scriptural truths to attack with ferocity, and the church must respond accordingly. During the middle part of the 20th Century, Martin Luther King Jr., following in the footsteps of his namesake, confessed Christ boldly as the church faced, not an assault on sexuality, but an assault on the inherent dignity and equality of all men. But the truths he spoke in “Letter From Birmingham Jail” resonate today as we face yet another assault on truth:

I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. . . . too many . . . have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows. . . . I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? . . .

I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, non-biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

In deep disappointment, I have wept over the laxity of the church. . . . I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide, and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

I have no illusions; this work is difficult. But God is on His throne and calls us to carry His Cross: “That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10).

Does the American church today delight in weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and difficulties? I would argue that on the topic of homosexuality, except for a distinguished few, the answer is no: neither church leaders nor their followers delight in suffering for Christ. They flee from it with all due haste.