I was hoping not to wade into the gutter with the critics of Douglas Wilson, who in IFI’s view is one of the most important truth-tellers on the corrupt American scene. But the calumny hurled at Wilson is so manifestly unjust that we cannot remain on the curb any longer.

For those who don’t know Douglas Wilson, he is a faithful, wise Christian, a theologian, and pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho with the increasingly rare gift for foreseeing where intellectual trends are leading both the church and the culture and for fearlessly warning against these trends. He is a brilliant writer with a gift for incisive metaphor and biting satire, which he has employed to critique, among other things, toxic feminism, toxic un-masculinity, unbiblical egalitarianism, the failure of churches to apply biblical church discipline, and “pomosexuality” (i.e., post-modern sexuality, including “trans”-cultism).

Wilson is semi-regularly attacked in an unholy effort to destroy him by false allegations, innuendo, lies of omission, and idiotic out-of-context memes. All of these tactics are aided and abetted by the poor reading skills of Americans, a stubborn refusal to do the hard work of closely and objectively examining sensationalistic allegations, and a faux-Victorian sensibility that sends some to the fainting couch following an encounter with toasty rhetoric (as opposed to church lady-approved milquetoasty rhetoric).

The most recent attack comes by way of that purveyor of wisdom and virtue: Vice Magazine—or as Wilson aptly calls it Vile Magazine. In an article titled, “Inside the Church That Preaches ‘Women Need to Be Led by a Firm Hand,’” feminist and opponent of theological orthodoxy, Sarah Stankorb, admits to interviewing only “12 former and current church members and Logos students.” Logos schools is the K-12 school founded by Christ Church.

For some perspective, Christ Church currently has 900 members. Logos school has 562 current students and 583 alumni. And the college affiliated with Christ Church, New Saint Andrews, currently has 196 undergraduate students and 40 graduate students, and has issued over 500 Bachelor of Arts degrees. Anyone could find a dozen disgruntled complainants from among well over 2,000 to gripe about any institution, pastor, or teacher.

Stankorb refers to the “communal ecosystem” in Moscow, Idaho composed of “the K-12 Logos School; a publishing house, Canon Press; an unaccredited pastoral ministry program, Greyfriars Hall; and a private college, New Saint Andrews.” Take note of the adjective/pejorative “unaccredited,” intended to tacitly discredit the pastoral ministry program. Leftists are all googly-eyed about “accreditation.”

I guess this makes Moscow, Idaho similar to the communal ecosystem found in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago where Stankorb would find the pre-K-12 University of Chicago Lab Schools; a publishing house, the University of Chicago Press; the accredited University of Chicago Divinity School; and a private university, the University of Chicago.

Maybe, just maybe, Christians want the freedom and ability to do some of the things leftists, who control public K-12 schools, most colleges and universities, and publishing companies, enjoy.

Stankorb tells the story of a woman called “Jean” who details her abusive marriage, implicating unnamed leaders of Trinity Reformed—a Christ Church plant—as facilitators of her abuse, none of whom were Doug Wilson.

“Jean,” whose real name is not used, alleges that since she divorced her husband and left Christ Church, her car has been vandalized multiple times and she’s been called “whore, b*tch, and c*nt,” online. None of the miscreants have been named. And neither Stankorb nor “Jean” provided any evidence that Doug Wilson or Christ Church leaders or parishioners were involved in any of these offensive acts.

The pseudonymous “Jean” also told Stankorb that an unnamed man in Christ Church “told her a man is allowed to rape his wife.” Again, not Wilson, and the article did not say that “Jean” shared this comment with Wilson who has made it clear that he abhors marital rape as does every other decent man.

Stankorb brings up two of Wilson-haters’ favorite stories, and she does what all Wilson-haters do: She gives astonishingly short shrift to very complicated stories several of whose central characters have lied (not Wilson) and subsequently admitted to lying (not Wilson). Stankorb likely assumed that very few readers would take the time necessary to research the stories in depth.

The Bible commands Christians to “judge with righteous judgment,” so here is a link to information provided by Wilson on these two controversies for those interested in seeing evidence before forming judgments.

And here’s a link to information provided by Wilson on other controversies ginned up by secular leftists and Christians who hate complementarianism and piquant rhetoric.

I must acknowledge that Stankorb is a skillful writer, and by “skillful,” I mean cunning. She writes in such a way as to be able to claim she was truthful, while tainting Wilson’s character through innuendo and critical omissions.

Stankorb, whose previous articles expose her personal animus toward theological orthodoxy, goes on to criticize Wilson indirectly by criticizing his father, the liberal townies’ feelings about Christ Church’s land purchases, Christ Church’s disciplinary policies and theological positions, and Logos School’s dress code and biblical beliefs on the nature and roles of men and women.

Another of the Wilson critics cited by Stankorb is Sarah Bader who identifies herself as a “cult fighting” “atheist” and “humanist.” As evidence of just how dishonest Bader is, she posted this quote on her Twitter feed implying it was about Wilson:

Let me be clear, strange grown men cannot go around bending near-pubescent girls over desks to spank them then be surprised when somebody brings up the obvious sexual element.

That quote was not written by Bader, and it was not about Wilson. It was written by another woman Stankorb cited, Kamilla Niska, on her Facebook page on September 29, 2021 at 8:12 a.m. And it wasn’t written about Wilson but about a former Logos teacher and current superintendent Matthew Whitling, whom Niska alleges spanked her to get his sexual jollies.

Those who aren’t members of the “Believe All Women,” club would need more than this allegation to condemn Whitling. Moreover, there is no allegation from Niska that Wilson had any knowledge of the alleged spankings.

One of Wilson’s essays that popped the eyes and twisted the knickers of some Christians was a rip-snorting critique of the morally repellent, heretical Lutheran “pastor” Nadia Bolz-Weber, the tatted up supporter of “ethically sourced” porn and  other forms of sexual deviance about whom I have written.

Three years ago, in a condescending effort to mock sexual purity by mocking “purity rings,” Bolz-Weber asked her disciples to send their rings to her, after which she melted them and had them sculpted into a statuette of a vagina, which she ceremoniously presented to feminist icon Gloria Steinem.

In analyzing this act, Wilson used the word that best describes the shockingly evil, obscene rebellion against God’s creation and moral order to which Christians have become desensitized:

Bolz-Weber most certainly does understand symbolism, and she also understands—just as well—the utter inability of conservative critics to read or understand what she is saying by that symbolism. Here we have two feminist women, created by God to be the image and glory of man, and in high rebellion against that glory one of them makes a symbolic idol out of purity rings, in order to celebrate impurity. …

So let me tell you what this symbolism really means. This is what they are saying. They are shamelessly declaring to the world that they are just a couple of c*nts.

Wilson was decidedly not calling any women “c*nts.” He was saying that’s what Bolz-Weber and Gloria Steinem are, in effect, calling themselves by their actions. To bowdlerize their work by prettifying the description would be to allow Christians to continue in their blithe indifference and inadequate responses to the gangrenous rot that now engulfs America’s children.

Some Wilson critics argue that using the “c” word in any context constitutes a violation of the biblical command that Christians are to be “above reproach.” But on what basis are they claiming his use of the “c” word in this context is a reproachable sin? Because they don’t like his use of it in this context or in any context?

I suspect some of these critics would find it a reproachable sin if Wilson called women fat or lazy cows as the prophet Amos does. I suspect some of these critics would find it a reproachable sin if Wilson were to talk about the unfaithful as whores who lust after lovers with genitals like donkeys whose “emissions” are like those of stallions as Ezekiel does. I suspect some of these critics would object to Wilson comparing—in contemporary language—the unfaithful to women who melt down gold and silver to sculpt into a male object with which to have sex as Ezekiel does.

Some of Wilson’s critics cherry-pick Scripture to condemn Wilson but ignore the part about exposing the unfruitful works of darkness. Do they agree with C.S. Lewis that Christians “must be trained to feel … disgust and hatred at those things which really are … disgusting and hateful”? (emphasis added)

Are those pastors who refuse to boldly condemn homoerotic acts and relationships, same-sex “marriage,” fornication, and cross-dressing guilty of reproachable sin? Are those pastors who refuse to boldly condemn public schools that introduce homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation to children guilty of reproachable sin? Are those pastors who say and do nothing while children in their congregations are “educated” in institutions that teach them that evil is good guilty of reproachable sin? Are pastors who use incorrect or socially constructed pronouns that embody lies guilty of reproachable sin?

A lesser but likely problem attendant to all this judgy-judging is that once Christians make repeated public indictments of a fellow Christian, pride can begin to creep in, providing an incentive to maintain their position even in the face of countervailing evidence. In fact, pride incentivizes tightly squeezing closed their eyes, plugging their ears, and stopping up the access and passage to remorse.

As the saying goes, this isn’t Wilson’s first rousing rodeo. He has been attacked before by both the evangelical right (of which I am a part) and the secular left. Some of the rage against him is now spilling over onto Illinois Family Institute. We are accused of inviting him to speak and promoting his work.

“Guilty” as charged.

We have invited him to speak, and we promote his work because we believe he is one of the truly good guys in the cultural war between light and dark. And we have examined the allegations against him and found them false.

We have looked at the biblical consonance of his words, the soundness of his prognostications, the wisdom of his advice, and both sides of the allegations against him and believe he is more than worthy of support.

We at IFI are accustomed to attacks, generated ultimately by the father of lies whose goal is to marginalize and destroy truth-tellers. Satan delights in destroying the ability of Christians to expose the unfruitful works of darkness and preach the whole gospel, including the culturally inconvenient bits.

While some Christians may not like Wilson’s writing style, many others do. Both the content and style inspire and embolden them. What those who detest his style believe is not merely that Wilson should not write the way he does but that no Christian should. I’ve been told that no Christian should ever use “sarcasm” or “call names”–not even when discussing evil and those who promote it. Those Christians probably hate Juvenal and Jonathan Swift too.

For your edification and enjoyment, here are some YouTube videos of Pastor Doug Wilson at IFI events:

Should Christians Send Their Children to Public School?

Should Christians Use Transgender Pronouns?

What is a Christian Worldview?

How is Transgenderism Unbiblical?

‘Trans’ Identification & Creational Norms

Pastor Doug Wilson – Sanity as Insurrection

An Interview with Pastor Doug Wilson (2015)

Pastor Doug Wilson’s Keynote Remarks at the 2015 IFI Annual Banquet

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/The-Smearing-of-Doug-Wilson.mp3

IFI was honored to have theologian, pastor, and courageous truth-teller Doug Wilson speak at our September banquet, after which he continued his critique of culture in an interview with Pastor Derek Buikema of the Orland Park Christian Reformed Church. Pastor Wilson addressed the cultural issues to which Christians must respond: abortion and “same-sex mirage.” Take a break from the holiday hubbub to savor and be both educated and challenged by words that more pastors and priests should be speaking.

We have two video versions for your consideration.  Our short “highlights” video is six minutes long and can be viewed HERE.

The full video interview can be viewed HERE.  So sit back and enjoy twenty-two minutes of instructive and uplifting conversation with Pastor Wilson. And if you enjoy it, please consider sharing it with your friends.

On July 23, 2020, conservative University of North Carolina professor, Townhall writer, and Christian, Mike Adams, was driven to suicide by the vile and relentless bullying of devotees of diversity and teachers of tolerance who fancy themselves “progressive.” They were aided and abetted by spineless Christians who failed to come alongside a brother in Christ because of his “sins” of violating leftist language rules.

Leftists and some Christians were especially peeved by a metaphor Adams employed to criticize oppressive pandemic commandments issued by North Carolina’s Democrat governor Roy Cooper.

On May 29th, Adams tweeted, “This evening I ate pizza and drank beer with six guys at a six seat table top. I almost felt like a free man who was not living in the slave state of North Carolina. Massa Cooper, let my people go.”

Which of the following metaphors is more offensive: Comparing a political leader who oppresses citizens with unjust orders to a slave master or comparing those with wealth who ignore the starvation of the poor to cannibals?

Is one acceptable speech and the other unacceptable? Are both acceptable? Neither?

Of course, the cannibal metaphor was employed by Jonathan Swift in his satirical essay “A Modest Proposal,” which we teach in public schools.

When Reverend Jesse Jackson referred to President Trump as a slave master and knee-takers as slaves, I can’t recall anyone on the left or right batting their exquisitely sensitive eyes. Are only blacks allowed to use slave metaphors, or does it depend wholly on whose ox is being gored with condemnation that determines whether metaphors should send adults to the fainting couch?

While their sanctimonious and empty proclamations of fealty to inclusivity, love, equality, tolerance, subjectivism, autonomy, freedom, and diversity echo systemically throughout American institutions, Leftists reveal their inky underbellies rotted with hypocrisy and depravity when they screech hater and hurl death wishes at those who dare to disagree with Big Brother, Critical Race Theory, or their anarchical sexuality ideology.

But it’s not just leftists, secularists, and atheists who faux-tie their own panties in a twist about bold language from conservatives. Even conservatives get the heebie-jeebies if Christians use bold language.

In a mostly moving tribute to his “close friend” Mike Adams, political pundit David French made sure to include that, although protected by the First Amendment, some of Adams’ writing was “acerbic,” “intemperate,” “insensitive,” “excessively provocative,” and “outright infuriating.” French further said, he “cringed at some,” of Adams’ comments and that “my friend could frustrate me. He could say things I disagreed with. He could say things that outraged me. He could be wrong.”

With “close friends” like French to write a tribute, who needs enemies.

New Testament professor and friend of Mike Adams, Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, wrote about Adams’ sadness at the socially distancing of David French:

[W]hen [Mike] reached out to David by phone for help in his hour of greatest crisis in June 2020, he viewed David’s brush-off as due to the negative change in David in the Trump era. While he couldn’t be entirely surprised by David’s failure to help, there’s no question that it was a body blow to his gut. He twice initiated mention of David to me in mid-June and on July 1. I didn’t bring David French up as a topic of conversation. Mike did, unsolicited from me. …

Mike felt that David had abandoned him precisely because he didn’t share David’s NeverTrump stance and because of David’s heightened desire to distance himself from Mike’s tweets in order to preserve his (David’s) reputation with people on the Left. …

I would never say that David French single-handedly killed Mike Adams. … David was simply the most painful among many acts of silence and detachment toward Mike by Christian “elites” and “friends” at his end. The primary blame belongs with the vicious Left.

Every Christian on the frontlines of the culture war has experienced the voluntary social distancing of brothers and sisters in Christ who don’t want to be tainted by friendship with cultural lepers. We all know the experience of having friends or colleagues either secretly whisper their thanks for our work, or avoid us entirely, or turn against us. There’s no skin in the game for many Christians when the game gets rough. Instead of marching into battle accoutered with the armor of God, they scuttle into their safe havens accoutered with protective platitudes acceptable to God’s enemies.

Oddly, I’ve seen very little criticism of Andrew Klavan—another Christian who uses satire brilliantly and effectively to mock stupid and evil ideas that deserve mockery. For example, assuming the voice of a presumptuous Hollywood celebrity, Klavan recently wrote,

I take responsibility for being a fatuous, virtue-signaling, useless, celebrity knucklehead. Which is a much better life than yours by the way. For which I take complete responsibility… and then run away before you realize I haven’t done a damn thing for you and your life still sucks.

Before reading Klavan’s satires, all those legions of PC Christians holed up in their bunkers hoping no unbelieving colleague learns they disapprove of homosexuality better stock up on smelling salts.

Not quite a year ago, I wrote an article about the superintendent of a large Illinois high school district who sexually integrated all locker rooms in the five-school district—a decision so wicked that all Christians should have felt enraged.

He was aided and abetted by wealthy Hollywood Matrix director “Lana” Wachowski—a man who pretends to be a woman—homosexuals from outside the district, and a school board member with a vile sexuality podcast for children. In strong language, I wrote about this evil action and the vipers who promoted it.

In response, I received an email from a conservative Christian who identified herself as the “dean of rhetoric” in a “Christian co-school.” She chastised my “language and tone,” saying that she found them “disturbing.” She criticized the “vitriol and loaded language … name calling and hyperbole” and “uncharitable language,” saying it “would never be tolerated” in her rhetoric classes, that she was “disappointed to read” such language, and that she found my “writing style offensive.”

So, a Christian is teaching children that the use of biblical language and tone are sinful even when describing egregious sin.

I asked if she had ever sent an email with as much passion and strong language as the one she sent to me to any of the many political leaders, public school teachers, administrators, or heretical “Christian” leaders who promote sexual deviance to children. No response.

“Progressives” use the phrase “my truth” a lot—a phrase that Boston College philosophy professor Dr. Peter Kreeft describes as both oxymoronic and moronic. Much of what “progressives” affirm as “their truth,” seems to be sexual desires that originate in their dark bellies—or what in The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis calls the seat of mere animal appetites.

Lewis argues that to protect against domination by our imperious appetites, human emotions must be properly trained:

Without the aid of trained emotions, the intellect is powerless against the animal organism…. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.

Do tell, Christian brothers and sisters who favor warm milquetoasty language at all times, how do we train human animals of all sizes to feel disgust and hatred of those things which really are disgusting and hateful while using only warm milquetoasty language?

Lewis continues, describing what education should do:

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. … Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

Yes, there are things—desires, ideas, images, words, and acts—for which we should properly feel hatred. The prophet Amos said, “Hate evil, and love good.” In Romans, Paul teaches us “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” For love to be genuine or true, we must abhor what is evil.

Children must be taught to feel love for the good and feel hatred for that which is evil, which is wholly different from hating people. True love requires first knowing what is true and good. Affirming in and to people that which God detests is not love; affirming in and to people that which God detests is detestable.

“Progressives” understand that the emotions must be trained, which is why they use the arts—especially our myth-making machine, Hollywood, and government schools to shape the hearts of America’s children. Tragically, since “progressives” don’t know truth, they’re training America’s children to love evil and hate good.

In our public schools, interactions with friends, and Facebook posts, we have at our disposal many tools for training emotions, among which are rhetorical tools. The Bible warns that the tongue “is a restless evil, full of deadly poison,” and that “Kind words are like honey—sweet to the soul and healthy for the body.” But such verses do not and cannot possibly mean Christians must never use strong language or sarcasm. We know that because the Bible includes numerous examples of the use of strong language and mockery.

Amos called women fat “cows” and warned that God would take them away by harpoons or fishhooks. Imagine how today’s evanjellyfishes would feel if a Christian were to use that biblical language.

Paul wrote this to Titus: “As one of their own prophets has said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’ This testimony is true.” In other words, Paul called Cretans liars, evil beasts, and lazy gluttons.

Jesus said,

“You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! … You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.”

“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?”

Paul said this about sinners,

There is none who does good, no, not one.”
“Their throat is an open tomb;
With their tongues they have practiced deceit”;
“The poison of asps is under their lips”

In Revelation, those who are not saved are called “dogs.”

Peter describes false teachers—of which we have many in the church today—as “irrational animals … born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant. … They are blots and blemishes. … Accursed children!”

Paul calls the Galatians, “foolish Galatians.”

John the Baptist called the multitudes a “brood of vipers.”

If the dean of rhetoric of the Christian co-school thinks calling a top school leader who sexually integrates the locker rooms of 12,000 minor children “depraved” undermines our witness—as she claimed I did—then logically she must think John the Baptist undermined his witness by calling the multitudes a brood of vipers.

Theologian and pastor Doug Wilson makes clear that the Bible does not mandate the kind of saccharine language that corrupts evangelicalism or prohibit bold, bracing, condemnatory language from which many evangelicals flee:

Evangelical Christians are very sweet people and there’s an upside to that. … But they’re so sweet they can’t be friends with diabetics. And what happens is, if you respond to the prevailing ungodliness with a response that’s tart, or serrated, or pungent, or satiric, you will have more than a few Christians taking you aside saying, “Hey brother, you probably don’t want to talk to them that way. … Would Jesus have responded that way?” And when you reply, “Well, yes, he would have. And here’s how he did it in Matthew 23 where he disassembles the Pharisees.”

[Evangelical Christians] don’t have a category for that. They’re so used to having Christlikeness defined by their ecclesiastical culture instead of having Christlikeness defined by the Bible, it is astonishing for many Christians to discover that this kind of verbal polemical engagement is preeminently biblical. It’s a very common biblical way of expressing righteousness. … If you take the smarmy, sweetie, nice discourse that many Christians think is supposed to be the norm and drive it into the Bible, you can’t find examples of that anywhere.

American philosopher and Catholic, Dr. Edward Feser, shares Wilson’s disdain for the unbiblical and unhelpful contemporary perversion of the Christian obligation to love our neighbors:

Niceness. Well, it has its place. But the Christ who angrily overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, who taught a moral code more austere than that of the Pharisees, and who threatened unrepentant sinners with the fiery furnace, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, was not exactly “nice.”

Feser finds fault with the unbiblical notion that “even a great many churchmen seem to have bought into,” which is that “inoffensive ‘niceness’ is somehow the essence of the true Christian, or at least of any Christian worthy of the liberal’s respect.” He argues that in,

innumerable vapid sermons one hears about God’s love and acceptance and forgiveness, but never about divine judgment or the moral teachings to which modern people are most resistant—and which, precisely for that reason, they most need to hear expounded and defended.

Feser argues against church “teachings on sexual morality” that are delivered “half-apologetically, in vague and soft language, and in a manner hedged with endless qualifications”:

Such “niceness” is in no way a part of Christian morality. It is a distortion of the virtues of meekness (which is simply moderation in anger—as opposed to too much or too little anger), and friendliness (which is a matter of exhibiting the right degree of affability necessary for decent social order—as opposed to too little affability or too much).

Maybe, just maybe, if every theologically orthodox Christian spoke in biblical tones and language about the perversity and corruption that confront our children every day in their TV shows, picture books, and government schools, and defile our society there would be less of it, and maybe, just maybe Mike Adams would still be alive.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/How-May-Christians-Speak.mp3

Please consider a gift to the Illinois Family Institute. As always, your gift to IFI is tax-deductible and greatly appreciated!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

The 2019 Illinois Family Institute Worldview Conference on “Trans” Ideology concluded with a Q&A session moderated by IFI’s cultural affairs writer, Laurie Higgins. During this final session, speakers Dr. Michelle Cretella, Denise Shick, Walt Heyer, and Pastor Doug Wilson field questions from conference attendees.

Higgins begins by addressing the endgame of LGBTQ activists regarding transgenderism, the effect of the transgender agenda on privacy and culture, and the smoke and mirror tactics of the American Academy of Pediatrics in regard to transgender protocols. Topics and questions covered by our speakers include gender confusion and regret; transitioning/detransitioning; calls to lower the age of consent; Planned Parenthood’s evolving business model; an effective Christian approach to government schools; the biology of sex determination; and loving, biblical responses to transgender family members and friends.

IFI depends on the support of concerned-citizens like you. Donate now

-and, please-

Illinois Family Institute is urging our readers to watch and share this critically important conversation between Pastor Doug Wilson and Pastor Derek Buikema on the science-denying, anti-Christian “trans”-ideology. Doug Wilson is the pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho; theologian; prolific author; and blogger extraordinaire. Derek Buikema is the lead pastor at Orland Park Christian Reformed Church in Orland Park, Illinois who has master’s degrees from Wheaton College, Westminster Seminary, and Calvin Seminary.

Their discussion includes the issues of Christian worldview, church discipline, the biblical view of a welcoming church, and the increasing persecution of the church in America.

Both pastors are theologically orthodox, wise, winsome, courageous, and whipsmart—a combination of characteristics increasingly rare among Christians—including Christian leaders.

As the “trans”-ideology takes root in the toxic soil of American anti-culture, we desperately need Pastor Wilson’s insights and example. We’re rapidly heading to a cultural place in which all public recognition and valuation of sex differences will be eradicated. There will remain no sex-segregated spaces or activities. Our children and grandchildren will be taught that they are ignorant, hateful bigots if they refuse to share restrooms, locker rooms, dorm rooms, or semi-private hospital rooms with persons of the opposite sex.

There will remain no single-sex high schools or colleges, no women’s athletics, no sex-segregated prisons or shelters. Women will no longer be able to count on mammograms being administered by women. Small mom and pop businesses—including businesses that cater to children—will not be free to refuse to hire cross-dressing men. Child welfare agencies will place children in the care of adults who pretend to be the sex they are not and never can be. Christians who refuse to use incorrect pronouns when referring to those who seek to pass as the opposite sex will lose their jobs and be fined or jailed.

Parents, watch and discuss this with your middle school and older children. IFI subscribers, share this with your friends and church leaders—or better yet, invite them over to watch and discuss it together. You will be edified, enlightened, emboldened, and inspired.

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

The U.S. House of Representatives just passed the disastrous and dishonestly titled Equality Act that if passed into law will not merely gut First Amendment protections but effectively ban Christianity and any other religions that teach that homoerotic acts and cross-sex impersonation are immoral.

This proposal (H.R. 5) passed Friday afternoon by a vote of 236 to 173 (with 23 not voting). The Illinois Congressional delegation voted along party lines. Congressman Darrin LaHood (R-Peoria) was absent but has told us that he was a “no” vote.

Here are the 8 traitorous U.S. House Republicans who voted with the Democrats in favor of the faux-equality act: Reps. Susan Brooks (Ind.), Mario Diaz-Balart (Fla.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) Will Hurd (Texas), John Katko (N.Y.), Tom Reed (N.Y.), Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) and Greg Walden (Ore.).

They sold their souls and our religious liberty, assembly rights, and speech rights for a mess of pottage in the form of their re-election bids. Either self-serving desire to preserve their position was their motivation, or they have no understanding of either equality or the differences between conditions like race and sex and conditions like homoeroticism and opposite-sex impersonation.

The National Review exposes how radical and dangerous the Equality Act is:

Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has been a longtime supporter of same-sex marriage…. Laycock has also been a longtime supporter of enacting a federal gay-rights non-discrimination law, but he doesn’t support the Equality Act, a bill just approved by the House of Representatives that would add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, because it would “crush” conscientious objectors.

“It goes very far to stamp out religious exemptions,” Laycock tells National Review in an email. “It regulates religious non-profits. And then it says that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does not apply to any claim under the Equality Act. This would be the first time Congress has limited the reach of RFRA. This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests. It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side….” Laycock says that religious schools would probably be viewed as “public accommodations” under the Equality Act even if they refuse all federal funding.”

If passed and signed into law, the Equality Act would require that federal law recognize disordered subjective feelings and deviant behaviors as protected characteristics. Federal law would absurdly recognize homoeroticism and cross-sex masquerading as conditions that must be treated like race and biological sex, which are objective, 100 percent heritable conditions that are in all cases immutable, and carry no behavioral implications.

Once the law is enjoined to protect two groups based on their subjective, internal sexual feelings and volitional sexual behaviors, we open a Pandora’s Box of evils that will inevitably result in conflicts between the spanking new legal rights of those who embrace sexual deviance as “identity” and 1. the First Amendment rights of those who reject sexual deviance, 2. the moral right of businesses to require restrooms, locker rooms, and showers to correspond to biological sex, 3. the right of businesses to fire or refuse to hire a person who chooses to masquerade as the opposite sex, and 4. the right of public schools to fire or to refuse to hire a person who chooses to impersonate the opposite sex.

Thomas Donnelly–aka “Giselle”

There is nothing intrinsically unjust about treating people differently based on their volitional choices. There is nothing unjust about treating biological women as different from biological men who impersonate women. And it is manifestly just and proper for an organization or business to fire people like Thomas Donnelly (see photo), a defense and national security Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and BDSM aficionado who now masquerades as a woman named “Giselle.”

Just as the legal prohibition of discrimination based on homoerotic feelings and acts conflicts with the legal prohibition of religious discrimination, so will the legal prohibition of discrimination based on feelings about maleness and femaleness and acts related to those feelings set in motion conflicts with prohibitions of religious and sex discrimination. It is morally and intellectually untenable that subjective feelings and volitional acts supersede both biological sex and religion as a protected class.

Pastor and theologian Doug Wilson makes clear the totalizing and totalitarian impulses and goals of LGB and T activists (a schism among whom is growing):

[T]he sexual revolutionaries are not interested in anything shy of total and complete victory.

And that is what the faux-equality act is about: total and complete victory over theologically orthodox Christians, which necessarily means eradicating their freedom to speak freely, assemble/associate, and exercise their religion.

Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, Professor of Theology at Houston Baptist University, provides a troubling list of effects that will ensue from the passage of the pernicious Equality Act—which speaking in the strident voice of cultural regressives, Dr. Gagnon facetiously calls the “Get the Homophobic and Transphobic Bigots Act.” According to Dr. Gagnon, the faux-equality act will mandate:

1.) Nationwide “LGBTQ” indoctrination in school curricula and in workplaces, where you and your children will regularly learn and relearn that anyone who is not a cheerleader for all things “gay” and “transgender” is a hateful, ignorant, and indecent bigot who has no place in society (note that Christian teachers in public schools will be forced not only to listen to such presentations but also to make them for students).

2.) State social services to take your children away from you if you oppose your child’s “right” to transition to a person of the other sex or enter homosexual sexual relationships.

3.) Affirmative-action hiring of people who identify as “transgender” and “gay” throughout industry and academia.

4.) Speech that embraces the faux gender identity of “transgenders” under penalty of fines and imprisonment.

5.) “Transgender female” (i.e., male) access to female restrooms, showers, locker rooms, dressing rooms, shelters, dormitories, and sports.

6.) Use of all commercial talents (photographers, artists, bakers, wedding planners, printers, etc.), including forced speech (lettering, messages) to promote transgenderism and homosexual intercourse, under pain of fines and imprisonment.

7.) The firing of white-collar employees who express any religious or secular views deemed “hateful” by “LGBTQ” radicals, even if that view is expressed outside the workplace, say (for example) in social media.

8.) Loss of federal financial aid, science grants, and ultimately accreditation for Christian colleges and universities that maintain “discriminatory” policies toward LGBTQ behavior and relationships, whatever short-term, bait-and-switch exemption is offered to get the bill passed.

9.) Doctors and Catholic hospitals to perform “sex-change” operations on children and to treat all “trans” patients not as their real biological sex but as the sex that they pretend to be.

10.) Law enforcement agencies, courts, and medical research studies to categorize “trans-persons” by their pretend sex.

11.) Censorship, with punitive penalties imposed if at all possible, on all speech and publications that make homosexual and transgender persons “feel unsafe” (essentially all speech critical of homosexual intercourse and transgenderism).

Just slapping the word “equality” onto legislation does not transform it magically into something good or make it about equality. The Equality Act—like the ERA—is not about equality. The Equality Act—like the ERA–serves the tyrannical interests of the “LGBTQQAP” community. And both will be used to deny the rights of women and Christians.

You have been amply warned. Now, do something.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to our U.S. Senators to urge him/her to oppose the federal Equality Act (H.R. 5) which seeks to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections for an individual’s perceived sex, “sexual orientation,” or “gender identity.” If you know the name of your local official, you can also call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask the operator to connect you with his/her office to leave a message.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/HR5.mp3

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

This warning delivered by the prophet Hosea is true not only regarding knowledge of God’s existence, nature, and redemptive purposes but also regarding knowledge of the world in which we live and move and have our being. Right now, the bodies of children are being destroyed by lack of knowledge about human sexuality, and Christians who should know better largely say and do nothing. The foundation for right action is knowledge, which far too many Christians lack regarding the stunning “trans” revolution—a revolution the likes of which the modern world has never seen and too few understand.

The Illinois Family Institute hopes to play a small role in remedying the serious problem of lack of knowledge through our upcoming Worldview Conference on the “trans” ideology.

We are rapidly moving to a cultural place in which all public recognition of the reality and meaning of sexual differentiation will not be merely eradicated but outlawed. If any of the following surprises or troubles you, you need to attend the Worldview Conference:

• Countless children will be chemically sterilized and surgically mutilated.

• Many more children will fall victim to the phenomenon of “social contagion.” Emotionally, psychologically, socially, intellectually, morally, and spiritually vulnerable and malleable children will be provided a distorted lens through which they will misinterpret confusing, uncomfortable, and/or distressing thoughts and feelings.

• All previously sex-segregated spaces or activities will become by law sexually integrated. No more single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, showers, shelters, jails or prisons, semi-private hospital rooms, nursing home rooms, dorm rooms, athletics, clubs, or travel tours. If state and federal laws prohibit discrimination based on sex and on “gender identity,” there remains no legal way to maintain sex-segregated spaces. If men who identify as “trans” are permitted in women’s spaces, then “cisgender” men must be allowed in as well because discrimination based on “gender identity” is impermissible.

• The safety of girls and women will be jeopardized by the presence of men who claim to “identify’’ as women in women’s private spaces.

• First Amendment speech, association, and religious exercise protections will erode.

• Language rules will be instituted that will prohibit the use of some words and mandate the use of others. Failure to submit will result in fines or jail time.

• Public schools, where many parents due to financial stresses resulting from death, divorce, desertion, or disabilities must place their children, will teach explicitly through curricula and implicitly through bathroom, locker room, and athletic policies and practices, that in order to be compassionate and inclusive, children must share private spaces with opposite-sex peers. This in turn teaches that biological sex has no meaning relative to feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy when engaged in intimate activities.

• Public decency laws will be repealed. For example, society will be forced to treat women who pretend to be men and have obtained falsified birth certificates and driver’s licenses that identify them as men but choose not to have mastectomies as if they are men. Since men are permitted to be topless at public beaches, pools, and parks, so too will women who pretend to be men.

• Social media monopolies, rapidly becoming the primary means of conducting business and communicating information and ideas, will ban anyone who uses language or expresses ideas that “trans” ideologues oppose.

• Biological, adoptive, and foster parents who reject the science-denying “trans” ideology and, as a result, refuse to allow their confused children to socially, chemically, or surgically “transition” will face loss of custody or the inability to adopt or foster.

• People—including children—will be taught that those who care about the biological sex/anatomy of their romantic partners are “transphobic.” Dissenters will be bullied.

Big Brother will continue to be enjoined to oppress dissenters, and resistance will be futile.

What Christians urgently need is knowledge and a willingness to suffer—also known as courage. In the fervent hope of serving both needs, the Worldview Conference in just a few weeks will host four leaders on the national stage who have both knowledge of the “trans” ideology and the willingness to say and do what far too many Christians shamefully refuse to say and do.

The conference will include two Q & A sessions following presentations by the following speakers:

• Michelle Cretella: Pediatrician and Executive Director of the American College of Pediatricians

• Walt Heyer: Former “transgender,” author, and contributor to Public Discourse

• Denise Shick: Daughter of cross-sex-identified man, and Founder & Director of Help 4 Families

• Doug Wilson: Senior Fellow of Theology at New St. Andrews College, pastor, author, and homeschooling father

Please come, learn, and be challenged to do more to protect the hearts, minds, bodies, and rights of our children and grandchildren. If we are willing to endure minor persecution now, perhaps our grandchildren won’t be forced to endure worse in the years to come.

“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.  But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” (2 Tim. 3:12-15)

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Worldview-Recording-3.mp3

The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Click here for more information.

The legal recognition of homoerotic unions as marriages goes by many names. Professor Anthony Esolen calls it “pseudogamy,” and Pastor Doug Wilson calls it “same-sex mirage.” Whatever you call it, don’t call it marriage because it ain’t.

Before same-sex faux-marriage was inflicted on the nation by five black-robed miscreants, cultural regressives insisted the legal recognition of intrinsically non-marital unions as marriages would affect no one, no way, no how. Everyone with an ounce of commonsense and a dollop of intelligence knew that was yet another lie. Once society formally ceases to recognize that marriage is something by jettisoning the central, most enduring constituent feature of marriage, it ceases to be anything. Or rather, it becomes an amorphous malleable blob that can be squished into any meaningless semi-form spiritualists, libertines, and narcissists can create.

And so, we now have “self-marriages.” Oprah, goddess and CEO of the self-love cult, must be in—er, well, somewhere warm and cozy.

For those who have been too busy serving the needs of others to have read about self-marriage, it is the newest anti-marriage fad. It entails all the trappings of a wedding without the central ingredient that gives marriage its salt, light, and beauty: a sexually complementary couple. Self-marriage is an oxymoronic, moronic ontological cipher.

Self-weddings include all the accouterments of real weddings: invitations, wedding attire, rings, vows, bouquets, floral arrangements, food, and celebrations—that is self-celebrations. I can only guess what happens on the wedding night.

Rather than committing oneself sacrificially to another who is “other,” celebrants commit themselves to idolatrous self-service and self-celebration. Whereas true marriage has both personal and public meaning, self-marriage has neither.

Erika Anderson is a 2^nd-time bride. This time ‘round, she married herself. Cosmopolitan Magazine describes Anderson’s special day:

On the rooftop of her Brooklyn apartment building this past spring, Erika Anderson put on a vintage-style white wedding dress, stood before a circle of her closest friends, and committed herself — to herself.

“I choose you today,” she said. Later she tossed the bouquet to friends and downed two shots of whiskey, one for herself and one for herself. She had planned the event for weeks, sending invitations, finding the perfect dress, writing her vows, buying rosé and fresh baguettes and fruit tarts from a French bakery. For the decor: an array of shot glasses emblazoned with the words “You and Me.” In each one, a red rose.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” she’d noted on the wedding invitations. “I had cold feet for 35 years. But then I decided it was time to settle down. To get myself a whole damn apartment. To celebrate birthday #36 by wearing an engagement ring and saying: YES TO ME. I even made a registry, because this is America.”

Anderson was married before but divorced when she was 30 because she and her husband “grew apart” after college. I wonder what will happen if she and herself have a similarly tenuous commitment to their marriage vows.

For those brides and their beloveds who can’t manage together to plan their wedding, there are websites to help. One such website is Self-Marriage Ceremonies where self-lovers can sign up to receive premarital counseling in the form of pre-recorded inspirational messages, questionnaires, and vow-writing guidance all for a mere $200.

For those who need additional guidance, Self-Marriage Ceremonies’ founder Dominique Youkhehpaz is available for private sessions at the discounted rate of $50 per 2-hour session (usually $75).

Youkhehpaz started her business in 2011 during Burning Man, an annual event that bills itself as dedicated to “community, art self-expression, and self-reliance.” I think they forgot “self-love.”

Burning Man’s motto is “a culture of possibility. A network of dreamers and doers.” Someone should tell dreamer Youkhehpaz that it’s actually not possible to marry oneself.

It’s fitting that Self-Marriage Ceremonies got its start at Burning Man. While Burning Man was the brainchild of Larry Evans and was initially held in San Francisco, it was moved to its current location in in Black Rock Desert in Nevada by John Law, who conceived of it as “Dadaist temporary autonomous zone.” Dadaism was a post WWI rebellious, irreverent art movement that rejected aesthetically pleasing imagery, convention, logic, and reason. Instead, Dadaist artists valued “nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest.”

Though the self-marriage movement is utterly nonsensical and irrational, a visit to the I Married Me website would make Dadaists and Jack Handy cringe. Here are some of the deep thoughts Marcel Duchamp and Jack Handy would find:

• You Should Totally Marry Yourself
• Choose Love
• Hell Yeah I’m Awesome
• To Honor Myself Is To Understand And Acknowledge That I Am Worthy
• You Are A Reason to Celebrate

Self-lovers can get the entire self-wedding kit and caboodle for the amazing bargain-basement price of $230! Imagine that. All it costs to celebrate your solemn commitment to and celebration of yourself is 230 smackers. Forget those starving children in Sudan. You’ll be contributing so much more to the world if you spend $230 (plus the cost of the actual ceremony and reception) if you marry yourself.

Dada artist Francis Picabia offered this description of Dadaism: “DADA…smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing.”

The same could be said of self-marriage.

While these non-marriages are intended to exalt the self, in reality engaging in such empty, nonsensical  rituals that mock true marriage reflect the irrational and self-abasing nature of our anti-culture.

IFI Text Alerts!

For up-to-the minute news, action alerts, coming events and more you can now sign up for IFI Text Alerts!

Stay in the loop with IFI by texting “IFI” to 555888 to be enrolled right away.

Click HERE to donate

Three years ago, sensing that his pastor at an Evangelical Covenant Church in a Chicago suburb was moving away from theological orthodoxy on homoerotic activity, same-sex relationships, and marriage,  a regular attendee initiated a conversation with his pastor that this past April culminated in the pastor’s  troubling—though not surprising—admission that he no longer affirms either biblical orthodoxy or the Covenant Church’s position on these critical issues.

Yet more troubling still, this pastor—let’s call him Rev. X—revealed that those in authority over him were aware of his rejection of theological orthodoxy as well as the denomination’s position on these matters but were doing nothing. In other words, no church discipline.

Moreover, Rev. X has not yet revealed his abandonment of orthodoxy to his congregation.

Instead last month Rev. X embarked on a quest to lead his flock away from Scripture while claiming he merely seeks to make the church a “welcoming” place for those who identify as homosexual and to make the church a place in which “diverse” theological views are represented.

Rev. X’s transformation from orthodoxy to heresy and his unholy efforts to lead his congregation astray offer important lessons for Christians of every theological stripe because efforts to normalize homosexuality (and gender dysphoria) in and through the church will eventually sully every church’s sanctuary.

Here are just a few thoughts generated by the abandonment of orthodoxy by Rev. X and increasing numbers of church leaders on matters related to homoeroticism:

1.)  Revisionist pastors and theologians claim their goal is to make the church “welcoming” and “inclusive,” but as “progressives” so often do, they use language to dissemble. Rev. X’s church has always been a welcoming and inclusive church if by welcoming and inclusive one means welcoming and including sinners. All sinners are welcome and included at this church and always have been. Rev. X is not really seeking to ensure that those whose besetting sin is homoerotic activity are welcomed and included at his church. Rather, he no longer believes homoerotic activity is sin. He seeks to make those who place their unchosen homoerotic attraction at the center of their identity feel welcome and included by telling them that homoerotic activity is not sinful. Rev. X wants his church to welcome homosexuals by telling them there is no need to repent of homoerotic activity because it is not now nor ever has been sinful. Apparently, in Rev. X’s view, scholars throughout the first two thousand years of church history (and continuing to the present) made one huge exegetical blunder. It took Leftist scholars immersed in a culture polluted by the sexual revolution to discover that God has never disapproved of homoerotic activity.

2.)  “Progressives” toss around the word “love” a lot without a close examination of what true love is. They rightly assert that Christians should be Christ-like, but the portrait they paint of Christ is in reality a self-portrait. They begin with a faint outline of the biblical Jesus and fill in the details with their own desires. The Jesus “progressives” worship is a Jesus separate from his holiness. It’s a fictional Jesus whose love does not demand that our old selves die.

True love of one human for another, like Christ’s love for man, entails desiring that which is objectively good for others, and, therefore, Christ-like love requires knowing first what is true. We learn about truth from Scripture. Deeming good that which the Old Testament moral code condemns as wicked is wicked. Affirming that which the apostle Paul teaches will result in eternal damnation is the antithesis of love. We cannot be more Christ-like by condoning and affirming sin as righteousness.

3.)  Rev. X believes that the “theology of welcome commanded by Christ” is “to reach out in love to all people, beginning with the love of Jesus, trusting it will do its work among those who come to him by faith.” But Christ’s love is not separate from his expectation that those who come to him must repent. And repentance from sin is hampered when shepherds call sin righteousness.

4.)  It was only during the latter half of the latter half of the 20^th Century that any theologian arrived at the conclusion that Scripture does not condemn homoerotic activity. Both a plain reading of Scripture and deep, careful exegesis reveal that God condemns all homoerotic activity—not just temple prostitution or other exploitative activity. It is only tortured exegesis prompted first by human desire that leads to the conclusion that neither the Old nor New Testaments mean what they clearly say.

5.)  Marriage is a picture of Christ and his bride, the church. To argue that marriage can be composed of two people of the same sex necessarily means there is no difference in function or role between Christ and his church, which is surely heresy.

6.)  Those who embrace heresy repeatedly claim that the church should be a place where diverse theological positions are permitted. But is this an absolute claim? Are there any issues on which Scripture plainly speaks and which do not permit diverse interpretations? If not, what constitutes heresy? Historically, diversity has been tolerated on issues on which Scripture is unclear. Scripture is clear on the ontology of marriage and the immorality of homoerotic activity.

7.)  It is not possible for a church to embrace both the belief that homoerotic activity, same-sex relationships, and same-sex “marriage” are pleasing to God and the belief that they are abhorrent to God. That kind of contradiction cannot be sustained. Those who reject two millennia of teaching on homoeroticism and marriage are embracing heresy. Those who affirm heresy are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

8.)  Every year heretical theologians in many denominations (e.g., North Park Seminary professor Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom) are working like the devil to lead leaders astray who then lead their flocks astray. Any denominational or nondenominational church leader who decides to embrace heresy in the service of the “theology of welcome” should be encouraged to welcome Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, arguably the world’s foremost scholar on the topic of the Bible and homosexuality, to discuss and debate the topic—you know, in the service of diversity and inclusivity.

In November, Rev. X initiated a discussion  series on “LGBTQ” inclusion led by himself and another heretic and chief author of a petition that Rev. X and 114 other Evangelical Covenant Church leaders signed in January of 2015 urging the Evangelical Covenant Church to allow churches to reject theological orthodoxy on matters related to homosexuality. Since Rev. X includes the “T” for “transgender” in his discussion series, some intrepid adherent to orthodoxy should ask Rev. X if inclusivity demands that men who pretend to be women be permitted to use the women’s facilities at his church.  Should men who pretend to be women be permitted to teach children’s Sunday School classes? And should they be permitted to be camp counselors for girls?

Those who confront heretical church leaders like Rev. X will be accused of undermining unity and promoting schism. During those painful moments of division and strife, they should remember that unity never trumps truth.

Theologian and pastor Doug Wilson provides some clarity about the issues of heresy, schism, and the critical importance of church discipline:

Scripture teaches us to attack divisiveness with discipline. We don’t answer division with unity; we answer division with discipline. Divisiveness and heresy need to be addressed in local congregations every bit as much as adultery and embezzlement do. And when we separate from a schismatic, we are not being schismatic. We are not doing the same thing he is doing….

[T]here is another kind of future unity that we are supposed to grow up into (Eph. 4:13), when we finally arrive at the perfect man, in the unity of the faith. When we have arrived there, it will have been because we have rejected various winds of doctrine, the sleight of mind, and the cunning craftiness of false teachers (Eph. 4:14). In other words, in order to grow up into the truth, we have to reject the liars. And we do so while speaking the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). Identifying and rejecting the liars, the divisive, the sectarians, and the schismatics is therefore the path to catholicity. It is not part of the harvest—it is removing rocks from the fields during the plowing and planting.

Rev. X is not really advocating for tolerance, inclusivity, or diversity. He is sowing the seeds of heresy in his church and denomination. He is incrementally leading his flock astray. If he believes homoerotic activity and same-sex unions can be holy and pleasing to God, it makes no rational or moral sense for him to long tolerate the belief that homoerotic unions are intrinsically and profoundly wicked. It is  morally incumbent upon any church leaders who believe committed same-sex unions please God to denounce the belief that God condemns homoerotic activity and unions.

What Rev. X is now teaching will harm in incalculable ways the temporal and eternal lives of those whom he seeks to welcome by calling sin holy. His teaching will harm children and families. And his teaching will harm the Christian witness. Rev. X stands with those shining artificial light on the broad road that leads to destruction. In pursuit of a worldly understanding of “inclusion,” Rev. X and his accomplices are leading Christians to eternal exclusion from God’s glorious presence.

Join IFI at our Feb. 18th Worldview Conference

We are excited about our third annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Frank Turek on Sat., Feb. 18, 2017 in Barrington. Dr. Turek is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture:

Click HERE to learn more or to register!

The controversy over locker room policy for gender-confused students in Township High School District 211 here in Illinois has erupted nationally. The Office for Civil Rights, a division of the intrusive Department of Education, has decided that the district violates federal legislation by not allowing a gender-dysphoric high school boy unrestricted access to all areas of the girls’ locker room. Since the highly politicized Office for Civil Rights is publicly lying pretending that District 211 in Illinois is violating Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, it might be helpful to read the relevant parts of Title IX:

[T]itle IX of the Education Amendments of 1972…is designed to eliminate (with certain exceptions) discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program….A recipient [of federal funds] may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex, but such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex.

In 2014, unelected employees with no legislative authority in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) unilaterally proclaimed that the term “sex” in Title IX includes “gender identity” and “gender expression.” They sent their astonishingly arrogant proclamation—referred to as “Dear Colleague” letter—to all public schools.

Even though the OCR is lying through its rainbow-tinted teeth, let’s conduct a thought experiment, which is another way of saying let’s explore the logical outworking of another flaky and destructive Leftist assumption.

Since “LBTQQIAP” activists are nothing if not dogged in their pursuit of unfettered sexual anarchy, and since far too many conservatives, especially political leaders, are largely ill-informed cowards, let’s imagine that Lefties win the day and are permitted to determine what the meaning of “sex” is. “Sex” in our thought experiment now means objective biological sex, and “gender identity,” and “gender expression.”

In a disturbing segment on the FOX News show The Kelly File last night, host Megyn Kelly interviewed Dr. Daniel Cates, superintendent of District 211. In her interview Kelly stated that District 211 has not only set up a private changing area in the locker room for the gender-dysphoric boy but also agreed to allow his friends—that is to say, girls—to change with him. This decision, along with allowing the boy to use the girls’ restrooms, necessarily means that the district no longer has an absolute prohibition against boys and girls sharing restrooms or changing areas. If, as the superintendent said in a recent statement, “boys and girls are in separate locker rooms for a reason” related to anatomical differences, why allow this boy in the girls’ locker room or restrooms at all? And why allow girls to voluntarily change with him?

Moreover, if objectively male students are permitted to use girls’ restrooms and enter girls’ locker rooms, and if girls may voluntarily choose to change clothes with an objectively male student, why is such mixing of sexes permitted only for those students who wish they were the opposite sex? Wouldn’t allowing only gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms constitute discrimination based on “gender identity”?

Presto change-o, the Left will effectively efface another essential boundary. In the twinkling of a winking eye, all boys will be able to use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms, and vice versa. The ancient heresy of Gnosticism that devalues physical embodiment and the pagan worldview of “oneism” that seeks to merge opposing binaries rear their ugly heads again, obliterating any cultural recognition of the meaning of sexual differentiation. As theologian and pastor Doug Wilson said in a recent (and soon to be released) IFI interview, “All idolatries have contradictions built into them.”

Let me be clear: The logical and inevitable conclusion of these restroom/locker room policies, which are embedded with non-factual assumptions about the nature of physical embodiment, is to eradicate all distinctions in language, law, and social institutions between male and female.

Chew on that for a moment, then gather those dust-collecting spines from the attic, and do something courageous with the doggedness of the Left.

Partner with Illinois Family Institute as we continue to stand
on the front lines for marriage, family, life and liberty.

In the macabre, perverse universe in which Planned Parenthood doctors and administrators live and move and have their baby-devouring being, euphemistic language is essential. Melissa Farrell, Director of Research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast refers to her contribution to “the organization” as “diversification of revenue stream.” The “revenue stream” is composed of either small intact human beings or the parts that remain once a baby—er, I mean, a male or female “product of conception”—has been exterminated and disemboweled or torn limb from limb.

**Warning — video contains disturbing content**

Farrell casually shares something that sounds remarkably like an admission of violating both moral and federal law:

We’ve had studies in which the company…has a specific need for a certain portion of the products of conception. And we bake that into our contract and our protocol….so we deviate from our standard to do that….[W]e can get creative about when and where and under what conditions can we interject something that is specific to the tissue procurement needs….[S]ome of our doctors in the past have projects, and they’re collecting the specimens, so they do it in a way that they get the best specimens, so I know it can happen…. [I]f we alter our process and are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, then we can make it part of the budget.

Farrell later expresses her “happiness” at the prospect of connecting the undercover buyers of murdered babies with researchers who are seeking “everything” from 120 babies between 14-22 weeks gestational age.

The next time you hear someone argue that societies morally evolve, just show them these videos from the Center for Medical Progress and remind them that as of August 2015, America has allowed the legal slaughter of 58 million babies, nearly 7 million by Planned Parenthood alone.

When the fake buyers are taken into the clinic’s pathology lab to see the quality of the “specimens,” they are greeted with guffawing from a staffer who jovially explains that they had had “a really long day and they’re all mixed together in a bag.” Just to be clear, it was bloodied, severed body parts from multiple desecrated babies that were all mixed together in a bag like garbage.

From a freezer, this same staff member brings out a 20-week-old “twin,” aborted just that morning and “almost frozen.”

Next we see a staff member sorting through the lungs, trachea, intestines, limbs, and scapula of an 18-week-old “product of conception” in a baking dish—an apt metaphor for the barbarous consumption of human babies by economic cannibals.

Conservatives who subordinate all other political issues to the protection of babies in the womb are often chastised by arrogant political operatives and lawmakers as foolish, naive bumpkins or obstructionists for being “single-issue voters.” Of course, that criticism is never hurled at those who place jobs or foreign policy at the tippy top of the issues that shape their electoral decisions.

Every human who claims to value equality, justice, and compassion should unselfconsciously place the protection of tiny, vulnerable, dependent persons in the womb at the top of their list of political issues.

As many IFI readers know, a federal judge in San Francisco has issued a temporary restraining order to prevent the release of any secretly taped videos that include footage of StemExpress—one of the ghoulish fetal tissue procurement companies that buys baby body parts from Planned Parenthood and sells them to researchers. Pastor Doug Wilson doubts that the video would have been suppressed “if it were a secret video of caddies at Augusta bullying a fellow caddy for being gay.”

The judge, William H. Orrick III, was nominated by President Barack Obama to the federal court in January 2013. According to Wikipedia, Orrick “raised at least $200,000 for Barack Obama and donated $30,800 to committees supporting him.”

This, my friends, is why it is imperative that conservatives support only those congressional and presidential candidates who boldly, articulately, and unashamedly defend the right of preborn babies to be protected from slaughter.  Pay no attention to the fake wizards behind the curtain, pulling levers and promoting lies.

Download a Planned Parenthood Fact Sheet or a Church Bulletin Insert.

National Day of Protest against Planned Parenthood
Saturday, August 22, 9:00 to 11:00 A.M.
Planned Parenthood, 3051 E New York St, Aurora (map)
Lead by the Pro-Life Action League

Professor Anthony Esolen is one of America’s cultural treasures. He writes about moral decline in America with insight, boldness, and eloquence—no timid, hesitant, evasive speech from Professor Esolen. Many people—though not nearly enough—know Professor Esolen through his writing for LifeSiteNews, and Touchstone and Crisis Magazines.

IFI has the distinct honor and privilege of hosting Professor Esolen along with Pastor Douglas Wilson at our upcoming very special banquet, which takes place in just 4 1/2 short months on September 18, 2015.

Those like me who read everything they can by Professor Esolen will welcome this opportunity hear him in person, and those who are unfamiliar with his work must come to be introduced to this remarkable cultural warrior.

To whet your appetite for bold, impassioned truth-telling, here is a recent piece Professor Esolen wrote on the pernicious lies with which leftist sexual revolutionaries have poisoned America:

Fools or Liars?

The latest apologists for the Sexual Revolution – that great swamp of sewage backup, human misery, family breakdown, squalid entertainment, and lawyers – have been saying that the most radical anthropological breach ever known to man, the detachment of marriage from childbirth and the plain facts of nature, will have no effect (none at all, not to worry) on marriage and childbirth and family and community life.

To which I reply, “Haven’t you said that before?” About what exactly have the sexual revolutionaries been right? Which of their non-predictions has been confirmed?

They told us that liberalization of the divorce laws – the no-fault divorce that libertarians so heedlessly pushed – would have no effect, none at all, not to worry, upon the frequency of divorce. The new laws would only make divorce less painful to the couple, and consequently less painful to the children. For there are such things as “good” divorces.

By a miracle of sympathy and maturity beyond their years, children would be happy to find their parents happy. In fact, they could never be happy otherwise. No one troubled to ask how their parents could possibly be happy in the teeth of their children’s sorrow. Well, the revolutionaries were wrong about that. Or they were lying; one or the other.

They told us that “everybody was doing it,” with “it” growing gradually more immoral and unnatural, basing their assertions upon research conducted by that pedophile and fraud, Alfred Kinsey. Therefore, they said, to smile upon fornication was not to change anything, except to relieve everybody from reproach, and allow them to do open and honestly what they had been doing dishonestly and in secret.

In one generation the relations between the sexes were utterly transformed, so that girls (and boys too) who wanted to practice the ordinary virtue of prudence, and even the more difficult virtue of chastity, were “immiserated,” left out, lonely. In the old days, a boy’s heart might leap if the girl gave him a kiss. Now he can hardly feign a bit of affection unless she brings him to climax. Well, the revolutionaries were wrong about that too. Or they were lying.

They told us that pornography was an innocent pastime for a minority of people interested in it. It had nothing to do with violence. It would not coarsen the culture. You would be able to keep children away from it. No effect, none at all, not to worry. Need I comment on this one? They were wrong, or they were lying.

They told us that the Pill would result in fewer children being conceived out of wedlock, and that liberalizing the abortion laws would have no effect, none at all, not to worry, upon the number of women seeking them. Pope Paul in Humanae vitae predicted otherwise. Now forty percent of children in America are born out of wedlock, most of them to grow up without a stable home. And by the testimony of the Supreme Court itself, abortion has become so intimate a part of a woman’s life, as the failsafe against the misfortune of making a child when you do the child-making thing, that it cannot possibly be scaled back now. Again, the revolutionaries were wrong, or they were lying.

I should say they were lying again, because the evidence they brought before the courts had always been a mass of fabrications.

They told us that little children introduced to sex by sweet and gentle older people would suffer no great harm by it, unless parents overreacted. They had for a while to forget that they ever said it, but now that the Catholic Church has cleaned house, they are forgetting that they forgot it, and are starting to sing the same old tune: no harm, none at all, not to worry. They were and are wrong, or they were and are lying.

They told us that the ERA, which was never ratified but which has been litigated into law anyway, would not result in such absurdities as women being sent into combat, the end of single-sex public colleges, unisex bathrooms, and the normalization of homosexuality. No effect, none at all, not to worry. They were wrong about that, or they were lying.

What have they gotten right? Have the relations between men and women ever been more suspicious, more fraught with anger and shame? according to their own testimony, our colleges are swarming jungles of assault and rape. That was not so before the revolutionaries did their work.

They said that abortion would not lead to euthanasia. Now they are glad that it has led to euthanasia, and they say that euthanasia, doctor-assisted snuffing, will not lead to killing elderly people without their consent. Actually, it has led to killing elderly people without their consent. Elderly people are subjected to slow and purportedly painless suffocation every day, in every hospital in the country. No effect, none at all, not to worry.

We were told that extending the notion (not the reality, which is impossible, but the pretense) of marriage to same-sex couples will have no effect, none at all, on anything else in the land. It will have no effect on what children are taught in school. It will have no effect on the number of young people experimenting in the unnatural. It will have no effect on religious liberty. It will have no effect on freedom of speech.

It could not possibly have any effect on such things, because, we were told, the behavior in question was perfectly natural, engaged in by perfectly healthy people. It was not an unnatural moral and psychological disorder, impossible to render natural, which could only be shored up by coercion. No effect, none at all, not to worry. And by the way, agree or be destroyed.

When have they ever been right in their predictions? Why should we trust them now?

The IFI Banquet is a rare opportunity to hear Professor Esolen, who is coming from Providence, Rhode Island and Pastor Wilson, who is coming from Moscow, Idaho. Please come and bring your family, friends, church leaders, and neighbors to hear these two brave, brilliant, inspiring men of God who through their uncompromising commitment to transcendent, eternal, unchanging truths will inspire us all to do more and better.

Click HERE for a banquet flyer.

Event Details:

Illinois Family Institute
Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet

Friday, September 18 , 2015
The Stonegate Banquet & Conference Center
2401 W. Higgins Road
Hoffman Estates, Illinois  60169

Written by Doug Wilson

In 1992, Pat Buchanan put the phrase “culture war” on the map with his speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Since that time, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge, but — we should be careful to note — it is all the same river.

One of the things you may have noticed lately is that various Christians of various stripes have been trying to put distance between themselves and this culture war. They are “tired” of it. It just seems to go on and on, and what’s the point? Instead of all this, the Church should be focusing its energies on things like furrowed brow concern over climate change — something that will garner applause instead of sneers.

When it comes to the culture wars, I would like to begin by making a distinction between those who are tired from being on the right side, and those who are tired of being on the right side. The former have been faithfully doing their part in these culture wars, which means worshiping God, bringing up kids, providing them with a Christian education, volunteering at the crisis pregnancy center, voting faithfully, composing music, painting beautifully, and so on. If you want a naval war, you have to build ships, and if you want a culture war, you have to build a culture. And whether it is Rome or any other city, it is not done in a day.

But they are doing all this in a fallen world, and some of their fellow “culture warriors” are fools and others are hypocrites, and some of the generals are lunkheads. Some think that everything will be settled if they write shrill and counterproductive blog posts, and it turns out that’s not true. And suppose the staff member responsible for abstinence lectures at the crisis pregnancy center is getting it on with her boyfriend. Okay, that’s a problem. My father-in-law served with honor and distinction in the Pacific theater, and was wounded at Guadalcanal, and yet simply being on the right side did not make it all a matter of Simple Valor. He told me that one time he was up at the headquarters on that embattled island, and one of our generals was trying to function up there while flat out plastered. Couldn’t hit the ground with his hat.

Paul tells us that in a great house there are many different kinds of vessels (2 Tim. 2:20), and the same thing is true of a great army. There are many faithful Christians who have served in just the ways God calls us to serve in times like these. They are tired from serving in the culture wars, tired from betrayals, tired from mismanagement, tired from apparent lack of success, and the only thing they need is a word of encouragement.

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” (1 Cor. 15:58).

“For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister” (Heb. 6:10).

But there is the other category, the people who are tired of being on the right side. They are tired of the scorn they receive from the other team, and they have a deep hunger to somehow get in with the cool kids. And because there is absolutely no way to get in with the cool kids so long as you remain in any way in clear opposition to the sexual revolution, they have begun the process of dialing everything way back. What they are doing is looking for the first clear opportunity to go over to the other side. So the word that is necessary to deploy here is not encouragement, but rather repentance. The problem here is not that they object to our opposition to everything going to metaphorical hell in a metaphorical handbasket, but rather that they are acting in such a way that shows they want to go to the actual Hell.

People in this category chide and rebuke the conservative church for having misplaced priorities. Why so combative? Why the polemics? Why the constant us/them construal of everything?

Well, the last I checked, we are still dismembering little children by the million, and doing so in the name of James Madison. And last I checked, quisling black “leaders” were going along with a genocidal targeting of the black future, and all to white hipster golf applause. And God set forth Sodom and Gomorrah as an example to every generation of the vengeance of eternal fire (Jude 7), so that we all might have something to consider before giving way to our lusts. And yet we still live in a time when the secular state, in one of its many paroxysms of tolerance, is demanding that we all give our formal approval of detestable acts. And we also live in a time when the social justice gimmie gimmie graspers have a poorer understanding of property rights than a dog with a chew toy does. I could go on for a long time, for there are many examples.

So to those who are “tired of” all the culture war rhetoric, I have one last point to make.

If North America were one vast pagan empire, and the apostle Paul just arrived here, what would he do first? I quite grant that he would not start by circulating petitions against the gladiatorial games. He would start with the foundations, which would be planting churches, establishing worship around the empire, and teaching Christians to live like Christians in their families and congregations. We are going to judge angels, so let’s start by learning self-government. If the meek will inherit the earth, you don’t start with the inheriting part — you start by learning meekness, which can only be learned through the gospel. So that’s where he would start.

But if one day we got to the point where there were tens of thousands of churches, and millions of Christians, and the gladiatorial games were still going on merrily, and new stadiums were being built every year, then the only possible conclusion would be that the churches in question were diseased.

“Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Matt. 5:13).

This article was originally posted at DougWils.com.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the law that would have protected the right of people of faith to refuse to be part of homosexual faux-weddings. In so doing, she helped chisel out another chink in the constitutional wall that protects the free exercise of religion. Apparently, she does not possess the spine to withstand pressure from corporations and feckless politicians like John McCain and Mitt Romney who urged her to veto the bill.

Pastor and theologian Doug Wilson has this  to say about the Arizona debacle:

When [the Holy Spirit] is manifest, when the wind stirs, the church has the mojo. When it is not, then the GOP, and Romney, and the NFL, all feel safe in saying that Arizona should much rather provoke the evangelicals than provoke the gayboys.

Christians aren’t refusing to “serve gays and lesbians” as the media reports. Some Christians are refusing to use their labors in the service of a ceremony that God detests—as they should. These same Christians who don’t want to use their labors in the service of a ceremony that mocks marriage will serve and have served those who identify as homosexual. These faithful followers of Christ will sell baked goods and flowers to any particular individual including those who identify as homosexual. They won’t, however, use their gifts and labors in the service of a ceremony that mocks marriage and displeases the God they serve. This critical distinction is an inconvenient truth for “progressives.”

The Left persists in exploiting the stupid and dishonest comparison of homosexuality to race (or skin color) because it works. And it works in part because conservatives are too cowardly or lazy to challenge it every time a “progressive” trots it out, which is daily.

Skin color is 100% heritable, in all cases immutable, not constituted by subjective feelings, and carries no behavioral implications amenable to moral assessment.

Homosexuality, in contrast, is not 100 percent heritable, is in some cases mutable (or fluid as queer theorists describe it), and constituted centrally by subjective feelings and volitional sexual acts that are legitimate objects of moral assessment.

So, if the Left wants to construct a sound analogy, they need to find a suitable analogue like perhaps polyamory or consensual adult incest. Will the government at the behest of sexual transgressives one day require Christian bakers and florists to use their labors in the service of polyamorous or incestuous ceremonies, which are arguably less perverse than homosexual “weddings”?

Christians need to strengthen their rubbery spines and find their lost chests, which is difficult to do with the church’s anemic preaching. Doug Wilson paints a dark picture of what much of contemporary preaching portends:

When men preach boldly—as when they declare that sin is bad and Jesus is good—it is easy to represent them as having a go-to-hell dismissiveness about them. But it is actually the opposite. Those ministers who crawl on hands and knees in order to obtain the respect of the world—an odd way of proceeding, I should think—are those whose mealy-pulpitoons amount to a wish that the world would continue on its way to Hell, not warned, not rebuked, not hindered in any way. And those who try to stand across the way are accused of having engineered the way in the first place, and of harboring a not-so-secret wish that all non-Christians would tumble headlong into the Abyss.

If our preachers manage to hoist themselves off their hands and knees, here are some anchoring (and bracing) thoughts from Wilson to help them preach boldly:

As conservative Christians, we are accustomed to discuss homosexual issues in the light of Romans 1. There Paul tells us that our gay pride parades are the result of refusing to honor God as God, and refusing to give Him thanks. Nothing is plainer to exegetes—who are not selling out, or who don’t have a gun to their head—than the fact that an apostle of Jesus Christ taught us that for a man to burn with lust for another man was unnatural, and that for a woman to burn with lust for another woman was even more unnatural. But that is not the point I would like to make, although the point I need to make assumes this. We need to go on to see that this chapter teaches us something else quite important about our current controversies.

The wrath of God is described in this chapter, and it is described as God giving people over to their desires. The mercy of God is found in the restraints He places on us, and His wrath is revealed from heaven whenever He lets us run headlong, which is what is happening to us now. This wrath is described this same way again a couple verses later. God gave them up to dishonorable passions. It is repeated a third time just a moment later. God gave them up to a debased mind. When God lets go, that is His wrath. As Lewis says somewhere, Heaven is when we say to God “thy will be done.” Hell is when He says that to us.

So what consequences follow when He lets go? What does this wrath look like when it is visited on a culture?

The next point is often missed. This progression amounts to the wrath of God being revealed against us because we are being delivered up to the tender mercies of the wicked, which are cruel. Notice Paul’s description of what these people are like outside the bedroom. Right after his observations on men burning in lust for men, and women for women, he gives us an additional character description.

“And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful . . .” .

Now who do you want to put in charge of the new civility? Who do you want as an arbiter of true sensitivity in speech? Who should run the training seminars for all the big corporations on what “hate” is? Who should set the boundaries for acceptable public discourse? Who should be the appointed gatekeepers on what constitutes tolerant speech? For any Christian who has read Romans 1 rightly, not these people.

They don’t know what tolerance is. They don’t know how to spell it. They hate the very idea of it. They have taken the biblical doctrine of tolerance and have filed it into a shiv, so that they might smite us all under the fifth rib, as Joab did to people. This should not be surprising to us. Someone who finds the anus of another the object of his desire is not someone that I would trust to determine whether or not this sentence is a hate crime. They are liars and filled with all malice. They are backbiters, overflowing with malignity. They are implacable.

So if you want to form a brigade of tolerance cops, that is bad enough, but then, when you want to staff the whole brigade with these people, the entire spectacle turns into how the right panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights would look if Bosch had just taken three hits of acid just before painting it. The way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. The only thing that their lawlessness can really do well is breed more lawlessness . So I know! Let’s put them in charge of civility in public discourse.

This is the wrath of God upon us, and the wrath of God delivers us over to more than just our demented lusts. It delivers us over to the ministrations and judicial processes of those who refuse to tolerate any rebuke of their lusts, whether the rebuke is express or implied.

Click HERE to support the work and ministry of Illinois Family Institute.

Yesterday’s article on the Grammy’s generated a lot of impassioned responses, including a shocking email that can be read here. **Caution: This is the most depraved, blasphemous, and hateful email IFI has ever received (which is saying a lot), so you’ve been forewarned.

The reason for publishing it is to remind Christians of what evil lurks behind the façade and rhetoric of decency, compassion, love, equality, and tolerance created by politically savvy “progressives.” I’m not suggesting that all “progressives” think as the lost soul who emailed me thinks. I am suggesting that the hate that animates him is not dissimilar from the hate that animates Fred Phelps—a truth that the mainstream press rarely discusses.

IFI is not seeking to sensationalize the evil expressed in this email but rather to illuminate how truly evil the homosexuality-affirming movement is. Those who don’t visit homosexual websites and blogs don’t fully realize that the movement to normalize homosexuality is at its core anti-Christian and unloving.  

In the ubiquitous cultural efforts (including of even orthodox churches) to emphasize “relationship,” “dialogue,” and “conversation” (all, by the way, good things), it’s easy to forget the magnitude of the evil that inheres this movement. Just as it’s difficult to fully grasp the evil of the pro-abortion movement without at least occasionally seeing photos of aborted babies, one cannot fully grasp the homosexuality-affirming movement’s enormity (i.e., the degree and seriousness of its depravity) without occasionally hearing what they say in their own words. 

Of course, not all homosexuals or their ideological allies would say the things that were said to me in this email just as not all conservatives would say the things Fred Phelps says. But obscenity, profanity, blasphemy, sexual perversion, and hate are common in the homosexual community. 

Conservatives have a troubling willingness to insulate themselves from this reality. Just telling them that many on the Left say ugly, obscene, blasphemous things is insufficient to rouse them from their moral slumber. Unfortunately, often only a close encounter with this kind of corruption can overcome the apathy, lethargy, or fear that paralyzes them. 

But God is good, and IFI received far more positive responses than negative. I will close with this eloquent response from Dr. Daniel Boland who sent me this edifying (and amusing) message about marriage, which refutes those cultural critics who are absurdly arguing that Beyoncé and Jay-Z have made a valuable contribution to the reputation of marriage by making it look “fun”: 

Your article on Beyoncé and that Jay-Z person was excellent and much to the point; I hope they read it.

Not surprisingly, the few commentators I have read on this issue entirely miss the point, as did those who produced and applauded the tawdry, hollow spectacle.

I would also add (in my usually timid and tremulous manner) that the commentators who write of such matters as “marriage” so often define it as some sort of dreadful servitude by which people are enchained to an uphill wheel of drudgery and wretchedness. They see marriage as a condition redeemed only by the prospect of occasional periods of enthusiastic rutting unleashed by such events as Beyoncé and Mr. Beyoncé occasion: namely, those moments when women wear sexually absurd and revealing clothes, and men (most appropriately clad in a tux which, one is led to believe, is somehow suited to the stimulation and resurrection of affection and other related concerns) clutch at their women with exhibitionistic abandon.

Rarely do cultural critics—such as this one—have the common sense, the emotional maturity, the personal experience of, or the intellectual discernment to realize or ponder the fact that a stable and dignified marriage has little to do over the years with such sickly-fantasized sexual performances.

One customarily grants showbiz people a degree of leeway and the benefit of idiosyncratic renderings which imaginative artists must have. In this present instance, however (as in so many cases these days), the messages of modern “art” not only invade and distort social and political reality, they assault our deepest traditions, offend our intelligence and seek to re-define the boundaries of cherished moral and cultural reality. Art has become a socio-political weapon for the dismantling of our culture’s finest ideals. Our society is made worse by this reckless, invasive interweaving.

Anyone with a modicum of honesty realizes that a true and lasting marriage (as does life itself) rests not on sickly superficial, crotch-centered fixations but on the deeply demanding discovery and decades-long exercise of a multiplicity of virtues involving self-restraint and mutual sacrifice. The first and most essential of these costly virtues is personal humility which begins not with one’s wardrobe or the trappings of seduction but by recognizing and admitting one’s own weaknesses.

A marriage which is superficially defined by the deceptive, fleeting allure of sex is a marriage suited to moral midgets who habitually distort and eschew—rather than celebrate and elevate—reality. Thus, those stunted critics who celebrate Beyoncé and Her Mate for somehow ennobling the modern notion of “marriage-as-sexual-side-show” deserve no credit. Indeed, they reinforce the escalating shallowness of our culture and exhibit astonishing ignorance about the nature of marriage and, for that matter, the realities of human nature itself.

Click HERE to support Illinois Family Institute (IFI). Contributions to IFI are tax-deductible and support our educational efforts.

Click HERE to support Illinois Family Action (IFA). Contributions to IFA are not tax-deductible but give us the most flexibility in engaging critical legislative and political issues.