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.

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This past Sunday night’s Grammy awards was a tragic freak show that demonstrated the entertainment industry’s arrogance, ignorance of marriage, and disregard for children. It was a gawdy spitball hurled in the all-seeing eye of a holy God.

The spectacle was bookended by a soft-core porn performance by the not-single lady Beyoncé who twerked and jerked her half-revealed derriere in a series of “dance” moves that simulated sex and stimulated sexual appetite, while the crowd cheered in puerile excitement.

Beyoncé was later joined by her husband Jay-Z who seems to revel in the lustings of strangers for his wife. What kind of man gets pleasure from his wife’s flaunting of her sexuality and from the certain knowledge that men desire to do things to his wife because of her arousing dress and actions? Is it money that motivates his eager embrace of his wife’s immodesty, or pride that he has access to her body when all other leering men do not? If it’s money, how is he different from a pimp?

Beyoncé’s performance reinforced the cultural deceit that modesty and the notion that conjugal love is private are archaic puritanical irrelevancies. Beyoncé has abused her power as a beloved role model for young girls to teach them terrible lessons about sexuality and marriage. Her performance raises many questions:

• What motivates a young, married mother to flaunt her partially-exposed sexual anatomy to the world and simulate sex movements?
• Deep down is this what she truly wants to do?
• Deep down does she really want her husband to delight in the objectification and commodification of her body for the prurient pleasures of other men?
• Would Jay-Z and Beyoncé want their daughter to one day perform like her mother for the pleasures of men? What would they think about an 18-year-old Blue Ivy recreating her mother’s performance but in a seedy club for the eyes of less expensively attired and botoxed men and women? 
• Is Beyoncé comfortable with her father watching her performance?
• What kind of mixed message does this performance send to children? Parents and pediatricians tell children that parts of their bodies are “private parts” that only parents and doctors should look at or touch. We convey that message to them from the earliest prepubescent ages. So, what happens after sexual maturity? Do those “private parts” suddenly become public parts?  
• Is modesty in dress the same as prudery, or is it a virtue to be cultivated?

Beyoncé’s vulgar anti-woman, anti-marriage performance foreshadowed the climactic setpiece of the evening: Queen Latifah, long-rumored to be a lesbian, officiated at the “weddings” of 33 couples, many of whom were same-sex couples, while accompanied by the preachy, feckless song “Same Love” by Macklemore and the song “Open Your Heart” by the Dorian Gray-esque Madonna. It was a sorry, sick, non-serious ceremony that looked like something from the garish dystopian world of the Hunger Games, replete with a cheering sycophantic audience, faux-stained glass windows, a faux-choir, a homosexual faux-pastorette, and “Madonna” with her faux-face. It was a non-wedding festooned with all the indulgent gimcrackery of Satan’s most alluring playground: Hollywood.  

Here’s an excerpt from theologian and pastor Doug Wilson’s must-read blog post about the meretricious Grammy extravaganza—I mean “wedding”:

[T]hose Christians still besotted by our contemporary sintertainment standards are not going to reflect on how compromised they all are until next year, when the Grammys will have John the Baptist’s head brought out on a platter. And even then, there will be no little debate about it, because some of our more illustrious cultural thinkers will no doubt point out that John’s somewhat direct method of approaching Herod left something to be desired. It was not — let us be frank — an invitation to mutually constructive dialog. It ended badly, to be sure, and John did have such promising gifts and so it grieves us to say that, at least in part, he brought it upon himself.

A homosexual East Coast journalist called me last week, angry about my open letter to Notre Dame University president Father Jenkins. He is angry at just about everything orthodox Christians say about homosexuality, including the assertion that the legalization of same-sex “marriage” will destroy marriage. He believes that “progressives” are not destroying marriage but, rather, expanding it.

I explained that many “progressives” believe—as conservatives do—that marriage has a nature. We just disagree on the features that constitute that nature. Conservatives believe marriage is constituted by romantic/erotic feelings, “binariness” (i.e., marriage is composed of two people), and sexual complementarity. The Left believes that marriage is constituted by romantic/erotic feelings and “binariness.” The journalist agreed with this definition of marriage.

I suggested that if someone were to propose “expanding” the legal definition of marriage to include platonic friends in as large a group as these friends desire, “progressives” who believe that romantic/erotic feelings and binariness are essential constituent features of marriage would likely respond that this redefinition is not an expansion but the destruction of marriage. One cannot jettison inherent features from an institution without changing it so fundamentally that it is, in reality, destroyed.

Conservatives argue that sexual complementarity is as fundamental to marriage as romantic-erotic feelings and “binariness.” Jettisoning the essential constituent feature of sexual complementarity represents the destruction of marriage. Self-righteous Grammy “sintertainers” just hammered another nail in the cultural coffin of marriage.

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.