A recent episode of Dr. Albert Mohler’s “The Briefing” highlighted a study, published in the scientific journal “Global Epidemiology” on the effect of marriage on the physical and emotional health of a group of female nurses. The study, authored by two researchers from Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, revealed results that a) confirm what most believers already know about marriage and b) contradict (and would likely enrage) feminists and the many progressive forces now arrayed against a traditional understanding of sex, gender, and family.

The text of the study, which is titled “Marital transitions during earlier adulthood and subsequent health and well-being in mid- to late-life among female nurses: An
outcome-wide analysis” begins by quoting anthropologist Joseph Henrich as saying, “Marriage represents the keystone institution for most…societies, and may be the most primeval of human institutions.” For Bible-believing Christians, this is the most obvious of statements, as marriage is the FIRST social construct we find in Genesis, formed before the Fall of man (and therefore “good” in the eyes of God)!

Over millennia, we can see how local communities, societies, and even nations have been built on the institution of marriage. Families are, quite literally, communities in miniature. Not only does marriage call us to care for another person as we care for ourselves, but when that union includes the rearing of children, it is the place where future adults are formed as they learn the many facets of social responsibility and engagement.

In the study, controlling for other factors, the researchers compared the health of married, divorced, and never married women. In a related Wall Street Journal article, they gave this summary of the results:

“Our findings were striking. The women who got married in the initial time frame, including those who subsequently divorced, had a 35% lower risk of death for any reason over the follow-up period than those who did not marry in that period. Compared to those who didn’t marry, the married women also had lower risk of cardiovascular disease, less depression and loneliness, were happier and more optimistic, and had a greater sense of purpose and hope.”

In other words, marriage is objectively good for the physical and emotional health of women. Incredible!

In a previous life, I studied biology/pre-medicine and went on to complete a master’s degree in bioethics. I remember going into my college studies feeling that there was a tension between science and belief in Jesus. Though I never doubted my faith, I had learned to view many scientific theories as a threat to Biblical belief. Imagine my surprise when, over and over, I saw God’s design reflected in, rather than contradicted by scientific study. From psychology to biology, from physiology to mathematics, God’s intelligent design was on display.

There are those within the scientific community who, sadly, increasingly shirk the basic scientific method in favor of bending research subjects, observations, and results to fit their pet agendas. This is not science but rather a sophisticated way to lie. In recent years, we have increasingly seen this approach to promoting a disordered understanding of sexuality, marriage, and gender. These so-called researchers are motivated not by an unbiased search for the truth, but by their feelings.

That is what makes this study from Harvard so surprising and refreshing to see. It shouldn’t be a shock to learn that real subjects prove what those with an orthodox belief in God and His Word already know, but here we are. We don’t know the researchers’ faith or lack thereof, but that’s as it should be in this context. Regardless of their backgrounds, this study appears to hold up to expectations of academic rigor.

In light of our society’s shift away from valuing and prioritizing marriage, the study’s authors seek to sound the alarm, saying, “In view of marriage’s profound effects on our sample’s health and well-being, it is unsettling to consider its rapid displacement from American life.” They continue, “Our findings, added to an already extensive literature showing the value of marriage, ought to serve as a wake-up call for a society in significant denial about this crucial element of flourishing.”

As Dr. Mohler pointed out in his podcast, the results of this study should make Christians smile, because we already know this! Through academic work like this, even those who doubt the goodness of marriage—if they’re honest—must acknowledge that it is a societal good. I am thankful that all truth is God’s truth! What a beautiful witness to the world that this reflection of Christ and his Bride can be proven to positively impact those who enter into it.

My husband and I have been married for over six years, and in that time, we’ve been blessed with two kids. I personally experience the value of and benefit from my marriage every day. I see how it’s changed me by calling me to radical self-sacrifice, breaking down my selfishness and pride, softening my heart, and providing a stable place for my children to learn their identity in our family (and in Christ), what healthy adulthood looks like, and God’s good design for us.

I will be the first to admit I don’t function in marriage perfectly. I fail, I stumble, and I often have to seek forgiveness. But my husband and I have always acknowledged and returned to the truth that the beauty of marriage is not in fleeting emotion, but in the day-by-day, minute-by-minute choosing of one another. It’s by this commitment and hard work—and all the other associated goods, scientifically-proven and otherwise—that we proclaim to the world that marriage is, in and of itself, a good!

I, for one, appreciate the bravery of these researchers and their commitment to following the evidence. As Dr. Mohler closed the podcast segment on this topic, he commented, “They didn’t tell us what we didn’t as Christians already know, but it’s fascinating to know that they know this and have the courage to say the truth out loud.”

In the last decade or so the concept of “human flourishing” has been co-opted by a progressive lobby that can no more define “human” than it can words like “sex,” “woman,” or “family.” This study is a reminder that as believers in the One who defines them all, we can and should take back the conversation about human flourishing with joy and confidence. God’s design is still good, and science proves it.

On Monday, December 5, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, another case that pits the purported rights of same-sex couples to force Christian business-owners to create products (or provide services) that express messages related to same-sex “weddings” in violation of the Christian business-owners’ First Amendment rights.

The Court case is a challenge filed by Coloradan Lorie Smith, a wedding website designer who, in expanding her business, understandably wants to include a statement clarifying that she does not create websites for same-sex weddings. But Colorado’s boneheaded pro-religious discrimination, pro-censorship law “that bars businesses that are open to the public from discriminating against gay people or announcing their intent to do so” mandates both what Smith must do and may not say.

Smith has made clear the intent of her work:

As a Christian artist, I want to create freely and create messages that glorify and honor God. And for me, this means designing for weddings and telling the story of a couple through God’s lens of marriage. But the state of Colorado is forcing me to celebrate messages about marriages that are inconsistent with my faith. There’s a lot of misconceptions about my case and what it is that I’m asking for. I love everyone and my faith has taught me to love everyone, and I have worked with those who identify as LGBT. There are just certain messages that I cannot promote because of my faith.

While Smith originally challenged the Colorado law based on its violation of both speech and religious protections, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken it up only on free speech grounds. The threat posed to religious liberty, however, is at least as grave.

This case follows on the judicial heels of cases in which those who choose to place their homoerotic desires at the center of their identities have sued bed and breakfast inns, videographers, florists, cake bakers, and calligraphers. The plaintiffs in those cases like to pretend they are the Rosa Parks of the sexual revolution—the oppressed victims of irrational hatred based on a condition equivalent to skin color.

Anyone with an ounce of rationality should be able to see that this whole “LGBTQIAP+” political movement is based on a big fat, slimy lie—a lie not unlike a Guinea worm that works from deep inside the body politic, worming its way painfully through the muscles and sinews of its host. The only difference is the Guinea worm rarely leaves permanent damage.

For the millionth time, there are no points of correspondence between skin color per se and homoeroticism per se.

Skin color is an objective, 100 percent heritable, in all cases immutable, environmentally unaffected condition with no behavioral implications—and, therefore, morally neutral.

In contrast, homoeroticism is a subjective condition, with little to no genetic involvement, shaped in many cases by one’s environment, and constituted centrally by volitional acts that are appropriate objects of moral assessment. Making judgments about the morality of homoerotic acts and relationships is as legitimate as making judgments about any other erotic acts and relationships constituted by such acts.

Saying homoerotic acts and relationships are immoral no more constitutes hatred of “gay” persons who believe differently and act in accordance with their beliefs than does saying polyamory and plural unions are immoral constitute hatred of polyamorists.

Refusing to make floral arrangements, bake cakes, or create websites for weddings of two men is no more unjust or hateful than refusing to make floral arrangements, bake cakes, or create websites for weddings of five polyamorists, three brothers, or a man and his horse.

And refusing to create products or provide services for “weddings” of two men or two women is in no way akin to refusing to allow blacks to sit at a lunch counter. Only fools and deceivers would claim it is.

Here’s one way to know that that these cases have nothing to do with discrimination or hatred of persons and everything to do with the religious bigotry and discrimination of people who seek compulsory approval of their deviant sexual desires: Virtually every one of the Christians sued by homoeroticists, including Christian florist Barronelle Stutzman and cake baker Jack Phillips, happily made products for and served homoeroticist customers.

Theologically orthodox Christians do, indeed, sell their wares and services to homoeroticists. They simply will not use their gifts, time, and labor in the service of an event that violates their deeply held religious convictions, mocks marriage, and offends God.

Ignorant of both the meaning of the First Amendment as well as the nature and role of Christianity in the lives of Christ-followers, many non-Christians harbor (at least) two fallacious ideas. First, they believe Christians should exercise their religion only within the confines of their church building. And related, they believe the First Amendment protects only what takes place in church buildings.

Leftists want no protections for the exercise of religion outside the confines of church on Sunday. But here’s the cultural rub: For Christians, the exercise of their religion encompasses the totality of their lives, including their work.

Just as skin color, homoeroticism, and religious exercise have natures, so too does marriage. Marriage is something. It has a nature that does not change based on the legislative whims or prurient desires of humans. The law can no more change the nature of marriage than it can change the nature of horses by redefining them.

Until very recently, sexual differentiation has been central to any definition of marriage throughout history and cultures. In fact, jettisoning sexual differentiation is far more radical a change than would be jettisoning criteria regarding blood kinship, number of partners, or age of partners.

Of course, those changes are coming because—ya know—”love is love.” All that polyamorists, sibling-lovers, and hebephiles need to do now is organize, pressure the American Psychological Association to designate their erotic predilections “sexual orientations,” and abracadabra, their unions will be covered by anti-discrimination law and legalized.

When that day comes, will Christians who refuse to provide goods and services for sibling weddings, poly weddings, and hebephile-teen weddings be hauled before courts for discriminating based on “sexual orientation”? Will they be accused of bigotry and hatred?

The ceremony solemnizing an erotic relationship between two men or two women is not a wedding. Such a relationship is by nature and design non-reproductive, so it is neither sexual nor uniting. Since the central constituent feature of a true wedding is the sexual differentiation of partners, a ceremony recognizing and solemnizing a non-sexual, non-uniting relationship is not a wedding. It is the antithesis. It is an anti-wedding. And it harms all involved.

Leftists are trying to force Christian photographers, florists, bakers, calligraphers, and wedding website designers not only to create and sell products that violate their religion but also to create products that they have never before created: Anti-wedding cakes, anti-wedding floral arrangements, and anti-wedding websites.

Looking over a list of Christian conferences coming up in 2023 I ran across one that states it is for: “LGBTQ+ Christians who have committed to celibacy as a personal call in their spiritual journeys.”

Here are some of the bios of the speakers:

“(Speaker A) identifies as cis/gay/queer and is the mom of a grown son from a 25-year mixed-orientation marriage.”

“(Speaker B, He/Him) is passionate about the intersection of faith, sexuality, and… facilitates conversations among Christian sexual and gender minorities.”

“(Rev. Speaker C, she/her) is…an outspoken advocate for youth ministry and social justice, (she/her) has worked as a youth leader, Children, Youth and Family Pastor, (has used) theatrical and improvisational elements in services but also to respond to God as a worship light and (has been)…a drag king, and occasional amateur DJ.”

“(Speaker D) was raised in a Christian home that was heavily involved in addiction recovery ministries. While leading in a large evangelical campus fellowship her first two years of college, (she) had a crisis of faith and ultimately joined a new group specifically created for Queer people of faith on campus. Attending (this same conference) in 2019 was a huge turning point for her, where she felt able to fully embrace her identity. She has gone through a long period of deconstructing her faith and continues to ponder the liberating potential of faith. She frames Jesus as her earliest example of what a revolutionary can look like.”

It goes on.

Where the Battle Fiercely Rages

This issue reminds me of the following quote:

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity.  Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace to him, if he flinches at that one point.” — A follower of Martin Luther, 2 April 1526, quoted in Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family (New York, 1865), page 321.

The front-line of the battle in Evangelicalism today is that of sexual ethics: Marriage, divorce, remarriage, fornication, adultery, pornography, abortion, same-sex attraction, “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “gender fluidity,” “non-binary,” “non-conforming,” transgender, and of course, the entire alphabet soup of titles and “preferred gender pronouns.”

In 2014, the liberal Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) published an article promoting the acceptance of “gay” as a category for Christians but offering the suggestion of celibacy for those who are not “married.” The United Methodist Church (UMC) also led with this path.

Christian colleges and university are also impacted by this movement. For instance, Calvin University (a school in Grand Rapids, MI that is connected to the Dutch Reformed tradition) has (in 2022) denounced premarital sex and defined marriage as between a man and a woman, however it still allows a support group for LGBTQ students on campus. In the 2020-21 academic year, the school allowed a bisexual student to be elected as student body president.

Matthew Vines, a self-identified “gay” man, and a Presbyterian authored the popular book God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships. Vines promotes celibacy outside of marriage but believes “gay Christians” have a theological case for same-sex marriage.

He has helped to shift the nature of the dialogue on this issue among Evangelicals. He says, “It’s a subtle but significant shift. (People are now) saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with being gay in and of itself,’ and that is a big change.”

Moving the Goalpost

It is believed by many activists that the way to normalize all LGBTQIA+ issues is to take the path of least resistance with Evangelicals. If you claim to be celibate or “non-practicing,” then everyone drops their guard and chills out. Pragmatically, their theory seems to work. This approach has been repeatedly attempted in the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination, who so far has withstood the acceptance of those into positions of leadership who self-identify as “gay Christian,” “homosexual Christian,” or even “same-sex attracted Christian.” Even some Southern Baptists are moving in this direction. Some of their top seminary faculty have spoken at conferences that affirm the acceptance of “identity” as long as the individuals are non-practicing.

The Law of Identity

Many LGBTQIA+ advocates claim Jesus never taught on the matter, and they infer from this that He must have approved of such ideas. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Jesus said, regarding sexuality:

“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So, they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matt. 19:4-6, ESV).

The first law of formal logic is “The Law of Identity.” This very basic law asserts that “whatever a thing is, it is.” This kind of thesis also presents a “Classical Negation.” If something is true, the opposite is false (the Law of Non-Contradiction), and truth cannot in this sense be both true AND false (the Law of the Excluded Middle). So, when Jesus says there are two sexual categories of humans (male and female) in the original creation, He is describing a Universal Elimination all other possibilities.

A New Identity

One of the churches the Apostle Paul founded in the middle of the first century had many of the same sexual problems that exist in America today. Rather than teaching them to see themselves as “Christian swindlers” “Christian adulterers,” or such, Paul emphasized their rebirth and new identity in Christ.

“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:9-11, ESV, emphasis added).

Paul encouraged them to identify their past sins and struggles but to look forward, not back. You will never overcome a sin or habit that you believe you ARE. If something defines your very existence, you will never move past it because it controls you. You may be a male or female who struggles with same-sex attraction (or illicit heterosexual attraction), but rather than defining yourself by a temptation, you should not only abstain from sin, but pursue righteousness instead.

“We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Rom. 6:6).

This issue of identity is not just a side issue. It is the dam that holds back the floodgates of immorality in the Church. If you ARE something other than God says He made you to be, that makes Him out to be a liar. That makes humans, not God, the arbiters and definers of sexuality. The original argument in the garden from that serpent was, “Hath God REALLY said?” That is the enemy’s same approach today. God did not make anyone “gay” or “transgender.” He made them male and female. Sin has made them all these other things by which they self-identify. The solution is the same one the Church has been preaching for 2,000 years: The gospel of Jesus Christ that forgives sin and changes sinners.

Marriage is a gift from God. But marriage is in a sad state in America today, and we all suffer because of it.

I read recently about the movie star Joan Crawford who was legendary in her promiscuity. As her rival Bette Davis once reportedly sneered about her, “She slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie.”

Apparently, in the miserable and difficult childhood of Lucille LeSouer (who later adopted the name Joan Crawford), there was a wound from the absence of her father, according to Shaun Considine’s book, Bette and Joan, which became the basis for the mini-series, The Feud.

Considine quotes someone else about Crawford’s childhood: “Being abandoned so often traumatized Joan…She spent the rest of her life looking for a father—in husbands, lovers, studio executives, and directors.” To this Considine adds, “When she found the ideal candidate, Joan felt safe, secure, validated. In time she expected them to leave, to reject her. When they didn’t, she grew suspicious, then resentful, and found ways to make them depart.” So sad.

So far from God’s design, which is one man, one woman for life. His prohibitions against sex outside of marriage are for our good.

A fascinating article in a recent Wall Street Journal (February 5-6, 2022), highlighted the findings of a study based on the marriages and many divorces among 50,000 women in the National Survey of Family Growth.

One can infer from the article’s headline that it’s best to avoid cohabitating before marriage: “Too Risky to Wed in Your 20s? Not If You Avoid Cohabiting First: Research shows that marrying young without ever having lived together with a partner makes for some of the lowest divorce rates.”

Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone, the article’s authors, observe, “The idea that cohabitation is risky is surprising, given that a majority of young adults believe that living together is a good way to pretest the quality of your partners and your partnership.” But couples who live together before they wed “are less likely to be happily married and more likely to land in divorce court.”

Through the years, similar studies have found the same results: to prepare best for marriage, save sex for marriage. Even in the archives of the UCLA, they cite a 1990s study from the Family Research Center in Washington, D.C., which says:  “Other findings indicate that saving sex for marriage reduces the risk of divorce, and monogamous married couples are the most sexually satisfied Americans.” If you’re unfaithful before marriage, why should you be faithful after getting married?

In previous generations, cohabitation was viewed as more of a scandal. Of course, not all marriages were good by any means.

My dad used to tell a story where he and mom were playing bridge one day against another couple. The woman kept yelling and berating her partner at every turn.

Finally, dad asked her, “Are you two married?”

And she snapped, “Of course we are! Do you think I’d live in sin with an idiot like that?”— pointing to her henpecked husband. When I shared this anecdote with a friend, he thought that that story might discourage someone from considering marriage instead of cohabitation. Well, without proper preparation, bad marriages happen. (Sadly, sometimes even with preparation.)

I thank God that I have 42 years of empirical evidence that I married a saint. After all, my fantastic wife has put up with me for more than four decades. Thankfully, we spent more time preparing for the marriage than we did for the wedding.

I write this on Valentine’s Day 2022—when we celebrate love and romance. Christian author Bill Federer notes that the best historical evidence is that Valentine’s Day customs go back to a third century Christian leader, who fell afoul of the Roman Empire and was martyred on February 14, 269.

The reason for St. Valentine’s martyrdom was not only his rejection of Roman idolatry but also because he defied the emperor, who forbade men in the Roman army to marry. Writes Federer: “Roman Emperor Claudius II needed more soldiers to fight the invading Goths. He believed that men fought better if they were not married, so he banned traditional marriage in the military.”

But some of these soldiers wanted to be married, and Valentine secretly performed weddings for them. When the Roman leaders found out about this, he was arrested and sentenced to death. The jailer, who had a sick daughter, asked his prisoner, the holy man, to pray for his child. She got better, and the saint wrote her a short, encouraging note, signing it from “your Valentine.”

Jesus said, “I have come that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” That includes our relationships.

God’s design for marriage is for our good, and it helps spare people a lot of unnecessary unhappiness.

This article was originally published by JerryNewcombe.com.

Written by Patience Griswold

A recent Gallup survey found that just 29 percent of Americans believe it is very important for a couple who has children together to be married, down from 49 percent in 2006. The survey also found that only 38 percent of Americans said that it is very important for a couple that plans to stay together for the rest of their lives to be married — a disparity that indicates a shift in how Americans think about marriage and family, with fewer Americans seeing the two as going hand in hand.

Several commentators have pointed out that while marriage rates have been dropping for some time, and our culture increasingly minimizes the importance of marriage in forming stable families, Gallup’s research shows a significant and alarming decline in support for marriage among groups that have traditionally been pro-marriage and family, including conservatives, Americans over the age of 55, and people who attend church weekly. While 67 percent of weekly church attendees said that it is very important for a couple who plans to stay together for the rest of their lives to be married, only 45 percent of weekly church attendees said that it is very important for a couple who has children together to be married. Even in the church, a shrinking number of people recognize how important it is for couples who have children together to be married.

Another subgroup that surprisingly did not place a higher value on parents being married was respondents with children under the age of 18. Gallup reports,

Parents of minor children (30 percent) are not significantly more likely than nonparents (27 percent) to view marriage as critical. Those who are currently married (33 percent) are slightly more likely than those who are not married (25 percent) to say it is important, though the current eight-percentage-point gap between these two groups has narrowed from 16 points in 2006.

Cohabitation is not the same as marriage, and the difference is clear when looking at the data for how children fare when raised by cohabiting versus married parents. Additionally, two out of every three unmarried couples who have children together split up by the time their child is 12 years old, meaning that children cohabitating couples are more likely to face the very real loss of fatherlessness or motherlessness than not.

Children do best when they are raised by their married mom and dad because no mother can fill the role of a father, and no father can fill the role of a mother. Children who are raised by their married parents are less likely to experience poverty, less likely to be incarcerated, and more likely to graduate from college, and mere financial support does not fill the void left by an absent parent.

Family stability matters for children, and cohabitation undermines that. Even when cohabiting couples choose to marry, marriages that begin with cohabitation are more likely to end in divorce. Unfortunately, over half of America’s young adults believe that the opposite is true, saying that living together before marriage increases the likelihood of a successful marriage.

Currently, only half of the children in the U.S. are raised by their married mother and father. This is a real loss that comes with significant harm to children, adults, and entire communities. Marriage and family are the bedrock of society and we need to be investing in building strong marriages and families and pursuing policies that encourage the formation of strong families, rather than penalizing them. Coming alongside children and families affected by family breakdown is also vital — children who have experienced family breakdown but are raised in communities with strong families fare better than children who experience family breakdown and are not surrounded by families with stable marriages at their core.

Despite popular opinion, it is very important that couples who have children together be married, and the church needs to lead the way in recognizing this fact by encouraging and strengthening marriages and families. Marriage and family are designed to go hand in hand, and everyone benefits when both are valued.

This article was originally published by the Minnesota Family Council.

As I have long argued, the greatest threat posed to our First Amendment assembly, speech, and religious free exercise protections comes from the homosexual community and the “trans” cult. Already state laws and judicial decisions have been eroding those protections, and last Thursday, the most dangerous threat yet emerged in Congress when U.S. Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) re-introduced the deceitfully titled “Equality Act,” which explicitly neuters religious protections when religious beliefs conflict with disordered sexual desires.

The Equality Act (H.R. 5) would add “sexual orientation” (i.e., homosexuality) and “gender identity” (i.e., cross-sex impersonation) to the current list of bases on which discrimination is prohibited in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Doing so is a means of abrogating 1. the right of free people to express moral judgments about volitional acts, 2. the right of people of faith to exercise their religion freely with regard to beliefs on sexuality, and 3. the right to recognize the scientific reality of sex differences in those places where sex differences matter most.

When leftists say that the Equality Act will protect “LGBTQ” persons from discrimination, they mean the Equality Act will prohibit conservative people from making decisions in accordance with their beliefs—including religious beliefs—about marriage, volitional sexual acts, and cross-sex impersonation. In other words, if the Equality Act passes, a new protected class based on or constituted by disordered subjective sexual feelings will be created and our first freedom will be abrogated.

The Equality Act, which has 223 co-sponsors—all Democrats—is supposed to be voted on this week after which it will move to the U.S. Senate. President Biden is urging Congress to pass it with all due haste, so he—the self-identifying Catholic—can sign into law the bill that will undermine religious protections for Catholics and Protestants.

The Equality Act makes clear the sweeping nature of the cultural changes leftists seek to impose via federal legislation.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer … people commonly experience discrimination in securing access to public accommodations—including … senior centers … health care facilities, shelters …  youth service providers including adoption and foster care providers. … Forms of discrimination include the exclusion and denial of entry, unequal or unfair treatment. … (with respect to gender identity) an individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.

If this legislation passes, no senior center, health care facility, shelter, or adoption agency that partners with the federal government or receives federal money will be permitted to treat biological men who pretend to be women as men.

Shelters, senior centers, and hospitals with sex-segregated restrooms, showers, or sleeping quarters will be forced to sexually integrate those private spaces.

Catholic hospitals will be forced to perform surgical mutilations on men and women who seek to pass as the sex they are not.

Christian adoption and foster care providers will be forced to place infants, children, and teens in the homes of homosexuals and cross-sex impersonators.

Teachers in government schools will be forced to facilitate delusional “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices. Administrators, faculty, and staff will be required by law to use incorrect pronouns, which constitutes bearing false witness. And locker room supervisors will be forced to oversee students of the opposite sex undressing.

The Equality Act poses some as of yet unacknowledged ideological and pragmatic problems for Democrats. For example, on the same day Cicilline reintroduced the Equality Act, U.S. Representative Grace Meng (D-NY) reintroduced her bill that seeks to protect girls and women in refugee camp bathrooms. Meng explained,

Refugee camps should be safe havens for those who have been forced to flee their countries and that includes secure facilities for restrooms. … But unfortunately, many bathrooms in refugee camps do not provide appropriate safety protections. Many refugee camps lack adequate access to such facilities and often times the restrooms are mixed-sex, public, and without locks. … These conditions create a lack of privacy and dignity and make women and girls afraid to use the restrooms, fearing that they may be assaulted and subjected to violence while using the bathroom. These types of conditions are unacceptable. Nobody should have their safety jeopardized in order care for their most basic hygiene needs. My bill would finally combat this problem. (emphasis added)

David Cicilline is a co-sponsor of Meng’s bill, which means that Cicilline is the co-sponsor of a bill that prohibits mixed-sex bathrooms in federal refugee camps and the sponsor of a bill that mandates mixed-sex bathrooms in all federally funded facilities.

Oh, what tangled webs …

The Equality Act also includes the following:

A single instance of discrimination may have more than one basis. For example, discrimination against a married same-sex couple could be based on the sex stereotype that marriage should only be between heterosexual couples, the sexual orientation of the two individuals in the couple, or both.

Leftists define the belief that marriage is the union of two people of opposite sexes as a discriminatory “sex stereotype,” and they want to legally prohibit every American from acting in accordance with that belief. Of course, the leftist opinion that the cross-cultural and historical understanding of marriage is a discriminatory sex stereotype is neither an objective fact nor true. It is an ideological assumption.

As an end run around the First Amendment’s religious protection, the anti-constitutional, anti-liberty, anti-Christian, perversity-supremacy law—misnamed the Equality Act—states,

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 … shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.

Anticipating appeals to equality for people of faith, who are currently protected by both the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, the tyrants behind the Religious Bigotry Act Equality Act made sure that people of faith lose.

As I wrote two years ago,

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 sexual feelings and volitional sexual behaviors, we open a Pandora’s Box of evils that will inevitably result in conflicts between the 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.

If the Equality Act passes, all it will take for other groups to have their sexual peccadillos deemed “sexual orientations,” is to organize and wait for the culture to do its dirty work.

Academia will jump aboard first, squawking in newly invented jargon and intellectual-ese about identity, authenticity, equity, tolerance, diversity, bigotry, hatred, and phobias.

Then the “arts,” will join in writing plays, novels, Hollywood scripts, and heartstring-pulling songs affirming all sorts of perverse sexual fetishes as authentic “identities.”

Next our polluted and politicized professional mental health and medical communities will manufacture “social science” studies to show how much happier polyamorists are when they are free to live in poly-pods without shaming judgments; and that brothers in love should be permitted to marry (after all, love is love); and that adults who identify as babies should be free to wear onesies to work in order to be their authentic selves, after which all of society will be  forced to ask our friends, neighbors, co-workers, and students what their preferred age is.

Christians will be legally prohibited from acting on their moral judgments about sexual perversion, and dissenters will be “othered,” cancelled, and shamed. Soon Christian-shaming will be the only shaming permitted in this brave new world where shame is unmoored from morality.

Americans are a tolerant and patient people, but their capacity for tolerating unjust oppression and suppression of their most fundamental rights is not unlimited. I suspect Pelosi, Schumer et al. realize that. I suspect they know that the radical anti-American, anti-liberty, anti-Constitution, anti-Christianity, Big Brother-esque agenda they have planned for Americans in the next four years may spark a rebellion. Hence the razor-topped wall surrounding the “people’s” house.

But, razor-topped barbed wire cannot keep standing a house divided against itself.

Take ACTION: (UPDATED) Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative our U.S. Senators to urge him/her them 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/2021/02/audioThe-Equality-Act-Will-Lay-Waste-to-This-Already-Divided-House_01.mp3

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Do you remember the popular advertising slogan, “When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen”? While good financial advice can boost your net worth, solid theology, biblical scholarship, and consistent application of the Word of God are infinitely more profitable. With that in mind, you will definitely want to listen closely as you view this timely and informative conversation featuring Dr. Robert Gagnon and Pastor Derek Buikema.

Beginning “in the beginning,” Dr. Gagnon presents an overview of what the Bible says about marriage by explaining the importance of the specific words that are used in the account of God’s creation of man and woman in Genesis 1 and 2. Dr. Gagnon also discusses complimentary otherness, human sexual ethics, and Jesus’ authoritative voice on the topic of divorce and remarriage.

As the conversation continues, Dr. Gagnon and Pastor Buikema address the scriptural prohibition against homosexuality, impurity offenses, the danger of compromise, tolerance, and acceptance within the church concerning matters of morality, and the proper motivation for discipline.

If you hesitate or struggle to confidently articulate or promote a biblical worldview regarding homosexuality, same-sex “marriage,” polyamory, and other perversions, I encourage you to watch this video – and share it with friends and family.

Dr. Robert Gagnon is a professor of New Testament theology at Houston Baptist University and the author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics.

Pastor Derek Buikema is the lead pastor at Orland Park Christian Reformed Church.

Nine years ago, my wife and I were married.

Nine years. It’s a long time. Except that it’s also not so very long.

Long or short, nine years is definitely enough time to experience some of life’s ups and downs together as a couple.

If you’ve ever seen the 1965 Disney move That Darn Cat (starring one of my all-time favorite actors, Dean Jones, as an FBI agent tasked with tailing a roguish cat in an attempt to locate the ruthless bank robbers and their hostage), you may remember the scene in which Patti Randall (Hayley Mills) is talking with her boyfriend, Canoe, after returning home from yet another date spent watching a surfing movie. “Couldn’t we just once,” she asks, “see a nice quiet movie where boy meets girl, they have problems which aren’t too weird, they fall in love and live happily ever after?”

Falling in love and having problems which aren’t too weird—and, of course, living happily ever after—is probably the ambition most of us have in our single days when we envision meeting “the one.”

Real life, of course, isn’t always so simple. We do have problems, and some of them end up falling outside that category of “not too weird” (or hard, or long-lasting, or whatever other adjective you choose to insert).

I’m not talking about marriage problems here. I’m talking about life problems.

Now, I don’t know what sort of challenges you’ve experienced during your married life. Maybe the life problems my wife and I have experienced aren’t as big, serious, or weird as yours. That’s entirely possible. Or maybe they’re more so. The point is, at one level or another, we all have struggles we weren’t thinking about on the happy day we said “I do.”

I didn’t expect the family business I’d built my career around to begin a long, painful decline just a short time after my wife and I tied the knot.

I didn’t expect to be forced into an unexpected and unwanted career change when said family business finally shut down.

I didn’t expect my new business to take so long to get off the ground.

I didn’t expect the mental health challenges that roiled our lives for so many months and which still flare up now and then in unwanted ways.

I didn’t expect parenting four little ones to be as hard as it is. (All you fellow parents can give a knowing chuckle here.)

In short, our lives together have had challenges we didn’t anticipate, problems we didn’t envision, and bumps in the road we didn’t want. From a financial standpoint, we’re certainly not where we expected to be nearly a decade after marriage. We’ve had to raid our meager retirement savings to cover living expenses. We’re still living in our “starter home” with the small yard rather than enjoying a larger house with more space for the kids outside—and what’s more, I have no idea when that will change.

All of those things (and more) are true. And it’s also true that some of those difficulties wouldn’t have been an issue (or at least not as serious) if I were a single man.

But you know what? Despite that, there’s no way I’d want to go back.

Because despite the problems that wouldn’t be problems if I were single, married life is good. God Himself said it’s not good for man to be alone, and I agree. We’re made for companionship. We’re made to share life with a partner who walks beside us through all the ups and downs, no matter what.

And that, by God’s grace (and the goodness and patience of my wife), is what I’ve enjoyed these last nine years.

I have no idea what the next nine years will hold. I could speculate, but I’m not sure my predictions would be any more accurate now than the ones my wife and I made before we were married.

But whatever happens (or doesn’t), here’s what I know I want: with God’s help, I want both of us to still be in love with each other. I want us to be closer to each other and to God than ever before. And I want to be walking beside each other through whatever God allows in our paths.

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Why Christians must engage the culture on sexual ethics or be responsible for our civilization’s demise

As a Christian pastor, I am seeing a dangerous trend among American Christians: There seems to be a philosophical and theological framework developing in reaction to a culture that is becoming increasingly hostile to a Christian worldview. In many cultural spaces, the Christian worldview is considered laughable and openly despised. The response of a large segment of evangelicals is to privatize faith and talk publicly only about issues that don’t ruffle cultural feathers.

This is most profoundly seen in the cultural conversations on sexuality. Every evangelical is ready to talk about clean water in Africa, but you will find very few who want to talk about the necessity of Christian sexual ethics as a cultural standard. The reason is crystal clear. Christian sexual ethics are despised in secular society. They are viewed as hateful and repressive. Younger evangelicals see the writing on the wall and want nothing to do with this—as they view it—embarrassing part of their faith. They might very well be traditional in their sexual ethics, but they have talked themselves into believing that no one else needs to know these biblical truths. Sadly, they couldn’t say why Christian sexual ethics are good for the culture anyway.

A new trend among evangelicals is a posture of apology: “we are so sorry that the Bible says this is not a good idea.” Then, they have “listening conversations,” in which they listen to how damaging these cultural ethics have been. Then, they apologize again. Through silence or apology, a large segment of Christians have removed themselves from the public square on the conversations of sex, desire and gender. They want to be relevant. Staying quiet on sex and gender seems to keep us acceptable to the powerful cancel culture.

What happens when the Christian worldview on sexuality loses its defenders in the public square? What happens when a society removes its long-held prohibitions on sexual activity outside of the traditional marital covenant—one man, one woman for life? What happens when marginal sexual impulses of a society aren’t just tolerated but celebrated as a societal good? What happens when morality itself shifts so that gay marriage, gender fluidity and surgical “gender” interventions are held as high examples of society’s wisdom? What happens when what has been considered wrong in Western culture for millennia are now examples of a person’s ultimate expressions of courage and “authenticity”?

This is the world in which we find ourselves. The legal right to marry someone of the same sex is now viewed as a constitutional right. The era of “gender fluidity” is here. Children can now get medicine and surgery to repress and conceal their embodied sexual development and become what their fallen hearts desire, whatever that might be.

Catastrophically, this is not all that this new sexual freedom wants. The goal of the new sexual-freedom culture is not just freedom to do what an individual desires but also to force everyone to celebrate every sexual expression. With fascist-like devotion, they are taking aim at our children.

In Illinois, a new law has been passed that requires the inclusion of LGBT “contributions” to United States history. But this is not about historical contributions; it is about ideological indoctrination. In Joy Pullman’s Federalist article on the new law, Brian Johnson, an LGBTQ advocate, reveals that they are using this law to teach our children to accept the lifestyles of the LGBTQ community as a positive good:

“Imagine a generation of Illinois students having learned the positive contributions of LGBTQ people to U.S., Illinois, world history. … I think it’s only going to have a positive effect on our society’s view of LGBTQ people.”

The angels weep as we sacrifice our children through silence to the new god of tolerance.

Christian silence brings a great human cost. By remaining silent, we are handing our culture a death sentence. This sounds alarmist but if what follows is true, then the alarm must be rung.

Harvard sociologist J.D. Unwin’s seminal work Sex and Culture makes the danger to our country and culture clear. Unwin, a secularist, performed a sociological survey of 80 societies, looking at their sexual ethics and the state of the culture. His work shows a direct link to the flourishing of a society and the sexual ethics they embrace.

There are four stages of civilization that have repeated themselves throughout human history. The first stage is “zoistic.” Zoistic societies “have no … political organization; usually their ‘chiefs’ are social elders or magicians,” and they are “sexually free.” These are primitive societies that cannot provide care to their inhabitants.

The second stage is “manistic.” Manistic cultures embrace “ancestral worship.” The dead are worshipped, placated or served. Manistic societies “compelled an irregular or occasional [sexual abstinence].” Such societies do little to harness this power for the good of its members.

The third society is termed “deistic.” Deistic societies erect temples to respond to the powers of the universe. Successful deistic cultures are “energetic.” Unwin shows how sexual restraint and this social energy are tied together, writing that “members of all the deistic societies demanded the tokens of virginity as proof that a girl was virgo intacta when she was married.” Such a society prescribed “pre-nuptial chastity” to restrain sexual energy. To the degree that the sexual energies were restrained, the society was proportionally energetic:

[T]he accomplishments of extremely energetic societies are territorial expansion, conquest, colonization and the foundation of a widely flung commerce.” Sexual restraint, chastity, and marriage cause a society to flourish.

The fourth stage is termed “rationalistic.” Rationalistic cultures develop the arts and sciences and have intellectual advancements, and are also best positioned to care for all segments of society. In short, a rationalistic society is the kind of society where humans can truly flourish.

Western society is at the rationalistic stage, the apex of societal development. Yet according to Unwin, we are in a precarious place. Unwin’s demonstrates that when sexuality is properly constrained, the energies of that restrained sexuality is [sic] used for the good of society. But when a culture begins to expand “sexual freedom. … the society will begin to display less energy” and display “human entropy.” Such entropy is a decline into disorder. If left unchecked, the society will decline and be overtaken by others.

Surely, we have much to defend and protect. Arguably, Western civilization is the greatest society that has existed in human history. Built upon the foundation of the Hebrew tradition and the teachings of Jesus, the great fruit of Western civilization is representative democracy. No other modern government has done more good for human flourishing than the one we are a part of today. It is built upon the blood, sweat and tears of nameless citizens, saints and soldiers through the ages. The common good of our fellow humans around the world is dependent upon its survival and its ideas taking hold.

But it is time to sound the alarm. We are in danger of an extinction-level event, societally speaking. The house is on fire. We have expanded our sexual freedoms. We are losing all sexual restraint and the future is clear: a declining society that very well might be swallowed up by powers that can no longer be held at bay. If your neighbor’s house is on fire and they are asleep, you do not stop yelling to wake them up even if it annoys the whole block. Better to be annoyingly loud than watch your neighbors burn.

How might we be annoyingly loud on sexual ethics in a culture that is on fire? First, we need to remember what it means to be human. In Genesis 1:26-28, we see important ideas about humans that have been foundational to modern Western society. The first important idea that the Bible has given Western society is that every man and woman bears the image of God. Notice that biological sex is foundational to image-bearing and not an expression of personal choice. Our sex is what we are, not what we choose or how we feel. We can’t allow this pillar of civilization to be thrown out because a few post-modern intellectuals have decided biological sex doesn’t matter. It matters. and we must say so. Society’s future is at stake.

Second, the Genesis text teaches that each person is of immeasurable value. This value should be tended to, defended and cultivated. In Western culture, this means constraining sex to marriage because it is in a committed relationship that one man and one woman can honor and serve the image of God in one another. From this, the sexual ethics of Judaism and Christianity find their foundation. Sexual boundaries protect the beauty of God’s image in humanity. According to Unwin, this boundary enables society to flourish. Without it, there will be hell to pay.

The third biblical idea is this: “be fruitful and multiply.” In Christian theology, this is referred to as the creation mandate. If the image of God in humanity is where each person finds his or her identity and worth, then the creation mandate gives the purpose of human sexuality. In Western society, the family is the foundation. The human family is to be a womb of love, creation and protection. In the love of a father and a mother, a child matures in the stability of a life-long commitment. This purpose gives an aim for sex. Pleasure alone provides no restraint. Procreation and restrained pleasure in marriage enables society to flourish.

It is these ideas that have formed the basis of human advancement and human flourishing since the age of the enlightenment in Western society. It is the highest level of hubris to think we are above this pattern of sexual restraint and social energy. We ignore Unwin at our peril.

It is the task of those who believe this is true and care about the future of human good to articulate and speak out for the good of the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. It’s time to be annoyingly loud. In every area of life—with family, friends, colleagues, church, and in the public square and politics—we must be apologists for the common good. Make no mistake: those who believe in the new sexual ethic and destructive “gender” theories are not going to stay quiet. They are loud. If left unchallenged, a Christian worldview will be relegated to the trash dump of history. And if Unwin is right—and the research is sadly compelling—this new age of sexual freedom will propel our culture into destruction.

I have heard so many Christians speak ill of Western civilization or claim it doesn’t matter that Christians defend it. This demonstrates that they have no idea what comes next if we remain silent. According to Unwin, a culture that moves into our stage of sexual permissiveness has one generation to restore essential sexual restraints before the culture begins to diminish.

There is still time, but Christians cannot stay quiet. We know what is good and right. The house is on fire, and the occupants are sound asleep. If we love our neighbors, then we must engage. Gentleness and meekness have their place, but this moment demands something more. It demands courage to be annoyingly loud. It demands that we not be silenced by the crowds. It demands a willingness to be persecuted. We should do this because human flourishing is at stake. So, wake up, dear Christians. There is a fire to extinguish.

IFI is hosting our annual Worldview Conference on March 7th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year’s conference is titled “Thinking Biblically About Our Corrosive Culture” and features Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Rob Gagnon. For more information, please click HERE for a flyer or click the button below to register for the conference.

It’s always nice to be able to point to the polls when they support your position. But polling, when done accurately, does nothing more than tell you what other people think. And just because you have the majority on your side doesn’t mean you are right. In fact, when it comes to morality, the majority is often at odds with the Bible, which sets the standard of morality for practicing Christians.

But this should come as no surprise.

After all, Jesus famously said, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13–14).

As the related saying goes, the road to destruction is broad.

Ironically, a Gallup article from June, 2018 indicated that, “Forty-nine percent of Americans say the state of moral values in the U.S. is ‘poor’ — the highest percentage in Gallup’s trend on this measure since its inception in 2002. Meanwhile, 37 percent of U.S. adults say moral values are ‘only fair,’ and 14 percent say they are ‘excellent’ or ‘good.’”

So, almost half of the country thinks that the moral values of the country are “poor,” leading to an obvious question: Are we right about our morals being wrong? If so, then why are so many of us immoral?

Gallup reported in May of this year that, “A majority of Americans (63 percent) continue to say same-sex “marriage” should be legal, on par with the 64 percent to 67 percent Gallup has recorded since 2017.”

As recently as 1996, however, only 27 percent of Americans believed same-sex “marriage” should be legal.

As for same-sex relationships in general (outside of marriage), Gallup reports that in 1987, 57 percent of Americans said that consenting, adult relationships between gays or lesbians should not be legal while only 32 percent said they should be legal. By 2019, those numbers had more than flipped, with only 26 percent saying those relationships should not be illegal and 73 percent saying they should.

The Gallup chart is quite graphic, with the numbers crisscrossing somewhat through 2004 and then becoming an ever-widening gap from roughly 2005.

Are these numbers significant? Absolutely.

Do they point to major social shifts? Obviously, they do.

Are they great news for LGBT activists? Without a doubt.

Do they prove anything when it comes to determining what is moral? No, they do not.

During the time period from 2003 to 2017, support for polygamy in America rose from 7 percent to 17 percent, an even more dramatic shift from a statistical point of view. And it’s up to 18 percent in 2019.

Gallup noted that this “may simply be the result of the broader leftward shift on moral issues Americans have exhibited in recent years. Or, as conservative columnist Ross Douthat notes in his New York Times blog, ‘Polygamy is bobbing forward in social liberalism’s wake …’ To Douthat and other social conservatives, warming attitudes toward polygamy is a logical consequence of changing social norms — that values underpinning social liberalism offer ‘no compelling grounds for limiting the number of people who might wish to marry.’”

Gallup also observed that, “It is certainly true that moral perceptions have significantly, fundamentally changed on a number of social issues or behaviors since 2001 — most notably, gay/lesbian relations, having a baby outside of wedlock, sex between unmarried men and women, and divorce.”

Interestingly, Gallup also noted that there were social reasons that help to explain some of this larger leftward shift (including the rise in divorce and changes in laws; another obvious reason is that people have friends and family members who identify as gay or lesbian).

In contrast, “there is little reason to believe that Americans are more likely to know or be polygamists now than at any other time in the past. But there is one way Americans may feel more familiar with or sympathetic to polygamy: television.”

Marital challenges and changes are not often on the minds of the young or newlywed.  However, five or ten years into a marriage and the dreams of a honeymooning couple can fade pretty quickly as the pressures of family life, work, or finances bear down on day to day living.  Compounding this are cultural messages that run counter to family, fidelity, and marriage.  This occurring alongside a high level of divorce, can make the idea of a happy lasting marriage going into a couple’s senior years seem difficult or unlikely.

Some studies have found that marital happiness does decline over time.   However, a new study by sociologist Paul Amato challenges the notion that couples that stay married are headed for an unhappy time in their golden years.  The study titled, “Changes in Spousal Relationships Over the Marital Life Course,” is the first to compare the relationship trajectories of spouses who stayed married to the those who eventually divorced.  It is also one of a few to follow couples for decades, which means it included a substantial number of couples in long-term marriages.

They found that marital quality actually improves over the years for couples who don’t split up. Specifically, although marital happiness declined slightly in the early years of marriage, it improved after about 20 years for most longtime married couples, while discord improved continuously over time. Shared activities—like recreation, eating dinner, or visiting friends together—also improved after about 20 years. The study points out “about half of all marriages last a lifetime, and the long-term outlook for most of these marriages is upbeat, with happiness and interaction remaining high and discord declining.”

The Institute for Family Studies conducted an interview with Dr. Paul Amato about his study that you can read and learn more about his findings HERE.

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

“I also think… that it is a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.”
~ lesbian activist Masha Gessen

Let’s try a little thought experiment. Let’s imagine that now, after legally recognizing intrinsically non-marital same-sex unions as “marriages,” we notice that there remains a unique type of relationship that is identified by the following features: it is composed of two people of major age who are not closely related by blood, are of opposite sexes, and engage in the only kind of sexual act that is naturally procreative. We decide that as language-users there must be a term to identify this particular, commonplace, and cross-cultural type of relationship. Let’s call it “huwelijk.”

In this thought experiment in which the term “marriage” would denote the union of two people of the same sex and “huwelijk” would denote the union of two people of opposite sexes—both of which provide the same legal protections, benefits, and obligations—does anyone believe that homosexuals would accept such a distinction?

I suspect that homosexuals would not accept such a linguistic distinction. They would not accept it even if they enjoyed all the practical benefits society historically accorded to sexually complementary couples and even if their unions were legally recognized as marriages.

Homosexuals would not tolerate such a legal distinction because their tyrannical quest for universal approval of homoerotic relationships cannot be achieved unless they obliterate all distinctions—including linguistic distinctions—between homosexual unions and heterosexual unions. Homosexuals—whose unions are naturally sterile—would not tolerate any term that signifies the naturally procreative union between one man and one woman.

In the novel 1984, George Orwell named the process in which homosexuals (as well as the “trans” cult) regularly engage: Newspeak. Here is how Orwell explained Newspeak:

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of IngSoc, or English Socialism….

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever….

[T]he special function of certain Newspeak words… was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them….

[W]ords which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. (emphasis added)

Homosexuals and their allies seek to redefine words in the service of their ideology and would surely oppose any word that would signal a distinction between heterosexual unions and homosexual unions. A new term that pointed to the reality that homosexual and heterosexual unions are not identical would carry the risk that positive connotations would accrete to the term “huwelijk.”

It’s remarkable that so many are willing to destroy the institution of marriage without ever giving much reasoned thought to whether marriage has a nature (i.e., an ontology) or to what public purposes it serves. G.K. Chesterton warned against this kind of blind willingness to destroy an institution (and the jettisoning of the central feature of marriage—sexual complementarity—does, indeed, constitute the destruction of the institution of marriage):

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution.

In the desperate quest to rationalize their redefinition of marriage, homosexuals asserted that the marriage of any particular homosexual couple will have no effect on the marriage of any particular heterosexual couple. But that’s a silly non-argument. If Bob and Jim were to marry, their marriage would not affect mine. But if Bob were to marry his brother, it wouldn’t affect my marriage either. If Bob were to marry five women or five people of assorted sexes, it wouldn’t affect my marriage. If Bob were to marry five children of assorted sexes, it wouldn’t affect my marriage. Does the absence of effect on my marriage in these cases provide justification for legalizing incestuous, polygamous, polyamorous, or “intergenerational” marriages?

Eventually the redefinition of marriage will affect children, public education, the public’s conception of marriage, the public’s investment in marriage, and the future health of America. Severing marriage from both biological sex and reproductive potential renders marriage irrelevant as a public institution.

The most salient aspects of marriage as an institution sanctioned by the government are not subjective feelings of affection and sexual attraction. The government has no vested interest in the private subjective feelings of marriage partners. That’s why even arranged marriages are legal.

The government has a vested interest in the public good. What serves the public good is the welfare of future generations. And what best serves future generations is providing for the needs and protecting the rights of children, which includes their right to be raised by a mother and father, preferably their own biological parents.

If marriage were solely a private institution concerned only with emotional attachments and sexual desire, as homosexuals claim it is, then there would be no reason for the government to be involved. There would be no more justification for government regulation of marriage than there is for government regulation of platonic friendships. And there would be no legitimate reason to prohibit incestuous marriages or plural marriages.

If the claim of homosexuals that marriage has no intrinsic, necessary, and rational connection to the biological sex of partners or to reproductive potential are true, then there remains no rational basis for the belief that marriage has anything to do with romantic or erotic feelings.

Why is marriage any longer conceived of as a romantic and erotic union? If marriage is severed from biological sex and from reproductive potential and if love is love, then why can’t a loving platonic relationship between three BFF’s be recognized as a marriage? Why can’t the platonic relationship between a 40-year-old soccer coach and his 13-year-old soccer star be deemed a marriage? If “progressives” can jettison the single most enduring and cross-cultural feature of marriage—sexual differentiation—then on what basis can they conceptually retain any other feature, including the notion that marriage is a romantic/erotic union? While eroticism may be important to intimate partners, of what relevance is naturally sterile erotic activity to the government’s interest in marriage as now construed?

When Leftists assert that “love is love,” they really mean that the moral status of erotic activity between two men or two women is no different from the moral status of sexual activity between a man and a woman. If the claim that “love is love,” is true, then there is no rational basis for thinking that there exist types of relationships in which eroticism has no legitimate place. If that’s the case, then why isn’t it morally permissible for all types of relationships to include erotic activity? If all loving relationships are identical (i.e., “love is love”), then why can’t all loving relationships include erotic activity? And if love is love, and marriage has no intrinsic nature, then it’s anything. And if it’s anything, it’s nothing.

If, however, there are different forms of love, some of which ought not include erotic activity, how do Leftists determine when love ought not be eroticized?

Marriage is in tatters, but Leftists want those tatters torched. Next up from “progressive” pyros: “eliminating the binary”—of marriage. Polyamorists are on the move. “Progressives” just love the smell of napalm all day long.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Torching-Marriage.mp3

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Marriage is not worth it for men. It’s not worth the practical and financial sacrifices, the lost romantic opportunities, or the “lack of freedom.” All in all, a spouse is a ball and chain—of little benefit to any man interested in pursuing happiness and well being.

Considering both the latest survey data and the continuing decline in the marriage rate, it’s fair to say that this viewpoint is becoming more entrenched in our society, particularly among younger men. 

But, despite its prevalence, the ball and chain view of marriage is simply not supported by the research. Indeed, the benefits of marriage for men are substantial by every conceivable measure, including more money, a better sex life, and significantly better physical and mental health. Yet, many men remain ignorant of these benefits, a view seemingly promoted by popular culture.

These are the opening paragraphs of a great briefing paper from the Institute for Family Studies which dispels many of the myths about marriage that are rampant in our culture.  While being a good husband is hard work, the paper points out that the benefits of marriage are numerous for both men and women, and even more so for children.

Natural marriage also has numerous societal and economic benefits. For example:

• Married men earn 10-40% more than comparable single men;
• Marriage increases the earning power of men;
• Married men are less likely to be fired from a job;
• The typical married man in his 50’s has three times the financial assets of his unmarried peer.

Since romance is the topic of the day on this Valentine’s holiday, it is also interesting to note that married men have better sexual relationships than their peers, including unmarried cohabiting, males.   According to the National Health and Social Life Survey, 51% of married men reported that they were “extremely” satisfied with their sex lives compared to only 39% of cohabiting men and 36 percent of single men.

Marriage also has health benefits for men. Research find that men who get married and stay married live almost 10 years longer than their unmarried peers. Married men and women appear to manage health better and adopt healthier lifestyles than their unmarried peers.

Lastly, married men tend to be happier than their cohabiting or unmarried peers. Married men tend to have better mental health outcomes and less depression than their peers.  To read or print out this report click this link: https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/ifs-researchbrief-menmarriage-083117.pdf

This article was originally published by AFA of Indiana.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter
the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will
of my Father who is in heaven.”  ~Matt. 7:31

Two influential bloggers who “identify” as Christians have rejected biblical orthodoxy in order to affirm homoeroticism as holy. Jen Hatmaker and Glennon Doyle Melton have chosen to reject two thousand years of church history to embrace heretical views of homoerotic activity and marriage.

Jen Hatmaker and her husband Brandon assure their followers that they studied the Bible closely using established hermeneutical principles; “engaged in hours of conversations with theologians, bishops, pastors, authors, and church leaders”; engaged in “a ton of prayer”; kept “a journal full of notes”; and even “researched the claims behind the Kinsey Scale” before they concluded that the Bible actually affirms the views that the Hatmakers were embracing before they embarked on their deep Scriptural studies.

The Hatmakers concluded that those theological views that emerged in the latter half of the latter half of the 20^th Century—views impelled not first by close study of Scripture but by the cultural movement to normalize homoeroticism—are correct. Like liberal theologians, the Hatmakers have concluded that only abusive homoerotic relationships are condemned by Scripture:

Every verse in the Bible that is used to condemn a “homosexual” act is written in the context of rape, prostitution, idolatry, pederasty, military dominance, an affair, or adultery. It was always a destructive act. It was always a sin committed against a person. And each type of sexual interaction listed was an abuse of God’s gift of sex and completely against His dream for marriage to be a lifelong commitment of two individuals increasingly and completely giving themselves to one another as Christ did for the church. But not one of these scriptures was written in the context of marriage or civil union (which simply did not exist at this time).

The Hatmakers evidently assume that the only reason Jesus defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman was that homoerotic “marriage” did not exist. They evidently believe that Jesus’ understanding of marriage as a sexually differentiated union was limited by his culture. In their view, Jesus’ understanding of marriage was a product of his limited knowledge.  The Hatmakers presume that if same-sex “marriage” had existed, surely Jesus would have defined marriage in the Bible as a union of any two people with their sexes being utterly irrelevant.

But if the sex of marriage partners is irrelevant, then what is the reason for limiting marriage to two people? Can’t three people love each other?

And since the Bible teaches that marriage is a picture of Christ—the bridegroom—and his church—the bride, are the Hatmakers saying there is no distinction in role or function between Christ and the church?

When asked if she would attend a friend’s “marriage” to a person of the same sex, Jen Hatmaker said, “I would attend that wedding with gladness, and I would drink champagne. I want the very best for my gay friends. I want love and happiness and faithfulness and commitment and community.”

Every Christian desires love, happiness, and faithfulness for their loved ones. But knowing what love is requires knowing first what is true. And no Christian should desire that an unholy relationship endure. Permanence does not mitigate the moral offense of homoerotic relationships. Commitment can no more transform an intrinsically immoral homoerotic relationship into a moral one than it could transform an intrinsically immoral incestuous relationship into a moral relationship.

Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, arguably the foremost authority on the Bible and homosexuality, has critiqued the late 20^th Century revisionist position that only exploitative, abusive homoerotic activity is condemned in Scripture. In his book The Bible and Homosexual Practice, Dr. Gagnon refutes the Hatmaker’s claim that the only homosexual acts condemned in Scripture are condemned were abusive or exploitative:

The prohibitions in Lev. 18:22 and 20:13 are unqualified: any man who lies with another male in the manner men lie with women (i.e., engaging in sexual intercourse) has committed an abomination. There are no exceptions. One finds no specifications regarding age of either participant. Neither is there any mention of the exploitative character of the relationship. If homosexual relationships were wrong primarily because they were exploitative, why would Lev. 20:13 specify a death penalty for both participants, the exploited as well as the exploiter?

The Hatmakers were motivated to critically reexamine what Scripture teaches about homosexuality by seeing “so much pain among the LGBTQ community: Suicidal teenagers. Divided families. Split churches. So. Much. Pain.” Let’s pray the Hatmakers don’t notice the pain of “zoophiles,” adulterers, and sibling-lovers. Let’s also pray that the Hatmakers do notice that church splits are largely caused by biblical revisionists like them and that the pain that results is felt not just by homosexuals but by the theologically orthodox as well.

While Jen Hatmaker until recently embraced theologically orthodox views, self-indulgent “Christian” blogger Glennon Doyle Melton has long made her unorthodox theological views known on her blog Momastery.

Melton, a recently divorced mother of three known for such faux-pearls of wisdom as “Life is brutal. But it’s also beautiful. Brutiful, I call it,” announced on Sunday night that she is “deeply, finally, FINE. Fine through my bones and soul and mind and just every fiber of me.”

And what is the cause of this deep, final bone and fiber-penetrating fineness? Could it be a renewed relationship with Jesus Christ? Nope. It’s her newfound homoerotic relationship with lesbian soccer star Abby Wambach.

For those who are unfamiliar, Melton, who has 645,000 Facebook followers, is a professional confessor in the mold of self-indulgent professional confessor Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. Interestingly, Gilbert left her second husband for a homoerotic relationship with her best friend.

Oprah-esque/Gilbert-y Doyle rationalizes her self-indulgent, relativistic worldview to her children—a worldview manifestly non-Christian—arguing that through her selfishness she is a brave, empowering, feminist role model:

Now we are entering a new time which calls for a different type of leadership. And now it is my job as a leader not to concern myself too deeply about what you think and feel about me- about the way I live my life. That is what I want to model now, because that is what I want for YOU: I want you to grow so comfortable in your own being, your own skin, your own knowing – that you become more interested in your own joy and freedom and integrity than in what others think about you. That you remember that you only live once, that this is not a dress rehearsal and so you must BE who you are. I want you to refuse to betray yourself. Not just for you. For ALL OF US. Because what the world needs — in order to grow, in order to relax, in order to find peace, in order to become brave—is to watch one woman at a time live her truth without asking for permission or offering explanation.

When it comes to homoerotic activity, there is no such thing as “her truth.” There is only objective, eternal transcendent truth. And the betrayal revealed by Melton, who claims to be a Christian, is her betrayal of her commitment to Christ and rebellion against the will of the Father.

Those who care about Melton’s children and the temporal and eternal lives of both Melton and Wambach should pray that they will be called to Christ like Rosaria Butterfield who was deeply entrenched in a life defined by homosexuality and recently wrote this:

I was not converted out of homosexuality. I was converted out of unbelief. I didn’t swap out a lifestyle. I died to a life I loved.

The worldly view of “identity” stands diametrically opposed to a biblical view of identity. As I wrote in an earlier article, “progressives” always in thrall to subjective feelings have redefined “identity” to render it immune from moral judgment:

Homosexual activists began transforming the concept of “identity.” They sought to recast identity as something intrinsically inviolable, immutable, and good. They sought to refashion identity in such a way as to make it culturally taboo to make judgments about any constituent feature of identity. They re-imagined identity in such a way as to move homoeroticism from the category of phenomena about which humans can legitimately make moral distinctions to one about which society is forbidden to make judgments.

Identity in its former incarnation was merely a way of saying that a thing is itself. Identity when applied to individual persons simply denoted the aggregate of phenomena constituting, associated with, affirmed, or experienced by individuals. Identity was “the set of behavioral and personal characteristics by which an individual is recognizable as a member of a group.”

Identity was not conceived as some intrinsically moral thing, because identity could refer to either objective, non-behavioral, morally neutral conditions (e.g., skin color) or to subjective feelings, beliefs, and volitional acts that could be good or bad, right or wrong. Prior to the new and subversive conceptualization of identity, there existed no absolute cultural prohibition of judging the divers elements that constitute identity.

By conflating all the phenomena that can constitute identity, “progressives” demanded that society should no more make judgments about feelings and volitional acts than they should about skin color.

In contrast, Christians should find their identity in Christ which means we must die to ourselves. Butterfield writes about the meaning and challenge of being a new person in Christ:

Conversion to Christ made me face the question squarely: did my lesbianism reflect who I am (which is what I believed in 1999), or did my lesbianism distort who I am through the fall of Adam? I learned through conversion that when something feels right and good and real and necessary—but stands against God’s Word—this reveals the particular way Adam’s sin marks my life. Our sin natures deceive us. Sin’s deception isn’t just “out there”; it’s also deep in the caverns of our hearts.

How I feel does not tell me who I am. Only God can tell me who I am, because he made me and takes care of me. He tells me that we are all born as male and female image bearers with souls that will last forever and gendered bodies that will either suffer eternally in hell or be glorified in the New Jerusalem. Genesis 1:27 tells me that there are ethical consequences and boundaries to being born male and female.

While the world tells us that our identity is found and secured by yielding to our emotions, Christ tells us that our identity is found in obedience to him through which our feelings will be redeemed from their fallen distorted state.

These women, Hatmaker and Melton, influence people—particularly women. These two attractive women use flowery rhetoric to describe pseudo-love. It is pseudo-love in that it is severed from truth. By promoting sexual deviance as holy, Hatmaker and Melton are wolves in adorable sheep costumes.

Warn your loved ones about them and their false teachings, and please have conversations with your children about the differences between fallen man’s view of identity and Christ’s.

Listen to this article HERE.

Save the Date!  Feb. 18th Worldview Conference

We are very excited about our third annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Frank Turek on Saturday, February 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!

Click HERE for a flyer.