Several months ago, Paivi Räsänen, a Finnish lawmaker, physician, mother of five, and wife of a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland was investigated by the police for her posting on Twitter and Facebook of Romans 1: 24-27 with these accompanying words:

How can the church’s doctrinal foundation, the Bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of pride?

Her comment was prompted by the decision of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland to “become an official partner of the 2019 LGBT Pride events,” which Räsänen rightly believes conflicts with biblical truth about homosexuality.

On November 4, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Finland issued a press release that said:

According to the Prosecutor General, there is reason to believe that because of the defamation of homosexuals by the violation of their human dignity, Ms Räsänen is guilty of incitement to hatred against a group. Therefore, there will be a preliminary investigation in this matter. The preliminary investigation will be carried out by the Helsinki Police Department.

On that day, the police interrogated Räsänen for four hours about a pamphlet titled “Male and Female He Created Them” she had written in 2004 that potentially violates Section 10 of the Criminal Code that states the following:

A person who makes available to the public or otherwise spreads among the public or keeps available for the public information, an expression of opinion or another message where a certain group is threatened, defamed or insulted on the basis of its race, skin colour, birth status, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or disability or a comparable basis, shall be sentenced for ethnic agitation to a fine or to imprisonment for at most two years.

There are several problems with this law. First, the term “sexual orientation” should never be included in anti-discrimination policies or laws or in “hate crimes” laws. Unlike skin color, birth status, or nation of origin, which, because they are objective, immutable conditions that involve no volitional acts, are morally neutral conditions, “sexual orientation” is constituted by subjective feelings and volitional acts that are legitimate objects of moral assessment. Humans have every right to discriminate between right and wrong conduct—and that includes sexual conduct.

Second, if the definition of “sex” can be revised to include a condition that is not sex and, in fact, is wholly non-material (i.e., “gender identity,” or feelings), then surely “sexual orientation” will expand as well, likely to include other conditions constituted by subjective feelings and deviant sexual acts like paraphilias. The American Psychological Association’s Consensual Non-Monogamy Task Force already has a petition that includes a request to include “consensual non-monogamy as a protected class.”  For those who aren’t up to date on euphemisms for sexual deviance, “consensual non-monogamy” (aka “polyamory”) is, in plain English, open adultery or sexual infidelity gussied up (or covered up) with psychological mumbo-jumbo.

Third, this law effectively bans parts of the Old and New Testaments. It censors public speech—including what pastors and priests may preach. And if “progressives” get their druthers, it’s coming to America via the Equality Act, which is on the tiptop of the legislative list of regressive lawmakers.

Here’s the irony. A law that treats the expression of biblical truth about volitional homosexual acts as a defamatory insult is itself a defamatory insult to theologically orthodox Christians for whom the Word of God is central to their identity.

Everyone’s beliefs about morality or religion necessarily imply that someone else’s beliefs are wrong and likely destructive. If the religious beliefs of theologically orthodox Christianity are true (which they are), then those of Islam are false and undermine human flourishing. If Islam is true (which it’s not), then the deeply held beliefs of Christians, Jews, and atheists are false and undermine human flourishing.

Moreover, if theologically orthodox Christian beliefs about homosexuality are true, and those who don’t repent of homosexuality will be eternally separated from God, then is it defamatory and insulting to express those beliefs? Would expressing them be an act of hatred or of love? Do we want the government deciding which moral or religious convictions are true? On what basis could such a decision be made?

When we are dealing with disputed issues related to ultimate meaning, epistemology, ontology, teleology, morality/ethics, the role of government, etc., people will feel uncomfortable. The moral or ethical legitimacy of speech cannot be determined by the subjective feelings of hearers because every moral claim means that someone’s feelings could be hurt.

If we want to be free to try to ascertain truth, to answer life’s big questions, then we must be willing to endure uncomfortable feelings. Do we want to wrestle freely with these thorny questions in the public square and academia or not:

• Why are we here? What is the chief end of man?

• Are the claims of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or atheism true or false?

• Are these worldviews forces for good, evil, both, or neither?

• What determines whether volitional acts are moral or immoral? In other words, how do we know that a specific act is right or wrong?

• Is morality wholly subjective and relative or does objective moral truth exist?

• What constitutes harm?

• What is the purpose of government?

• What are the limits of government?

• What’s the best form of government to ensure maximum freedom and yet maintain order?

• Does marriage have a nature, or do societies create it out of whole cloth?

• If marriage is wholly a cultural creation with no intrinsic nature, why limit it to two people, or unrelated people, or conceive of it as a romantic/erotic union?

• Do children have an intrinsic right to be raised whenever possible by their biological parents or is biological connection wholly irrelevant and meaningless?

• Does biological sex have any meaning, or is it as meaningless as eye color?

• If it has meaning, does that meaning entail any rights?

• When in conflict, should subjective feelings about maleness or femaleness supersede biological sex?

• Do some people have a right to force others to speak words to or about them or to participate in celebrations that violate their deeply held beliefs? If so, what is the origin of that right?

• Does the refusal to speak words to or about others or to participate in celebrations constitute hatred of others, or is it possible that such choices reflect love for them?

Answers to many of those questions will likely be experienced by half of society as defamatory insults, but it is impossible, unhealthy, illiberal, and dangerous to try to create a society in which no one feels uncomfortable. If we try to create such a society, it will be the powerful who will decide whose views must be silenced. The feelings of the silenced will not matter, and they will have no rights.

We see this happening right before our eyes as the irrational, science-denying “trans” cult accrues sufficient cultural power to silence speech, threaten religious liberty, and undermine the freedom to associate, all while defaming and insulting people based on their religion. #irony

For research on a book he is writing, author Rod Dreher just spent a week in Russia interviewing Christian dissidents who suffered grievously under the Communist regime. Dreher explained to former dissident Alexander Ogorodnikov his book’s thesis:

[E]migres from the USSR and Soviet-bloc countries are sensing the coming of a soft totalitarianism in the West, and to both fight it and prepare for it if it comes anyway, I’m seeking out the advice of Christians who endured the hard totalitarianism of Communist rule. They endured an Orwellian ordeal, while we in the West are today, and in the near future, facing a dystopia that has more in common with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”

Ogorodnikov who, because of his Christian faith, had been thrown into a mental institution and then “jailed and tortured in the gulag for about a decade” responded,

I’m already shocked by the totalitarianism that already exists in the West, within social opinion…. Someone makes some kind of announcement that’s not up to progressive social standards, and immediately there’s a quarantine zone around them. It gets to the point just in order to be understood you have to constantly simplify, in order not to hurt or offend anyone.

Dreher’s response to Ogorodnikov should be the response of every Christian in the America:

That was the first thing he said to me, and it brought me to the edge of my chair. When a man who has suffered what Sasha Ogorodnikov has suffered under totalitarianism tells you that he sees signs of a new version of it emerging in the West, you had better pay attention.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/LGBTyranny-Spreading-in-Purportedly-Free-Countries.mp3

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You’ve probably heard homosexual activists and “trans”-cultists mock the idea that Christians in First World countries are or ever will be persecuted. Well, here’s a news item direct from the expanding “That is NOT persecution” file: Catholic clinical psychologist Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Sr.’s books on reparative therapy for those who experience unwanted same-sex attraction are now banned from Amazon.

Since deliberately deceitful homo-activists relentlessly conflate “aversion” therapies, which can include the administration of pain, and reparative therapies, it’s important to clarify that Nicolosi’s counseling practice and underlying theories never included “aversion” therapy treatments, nor were they coercive. His treatment protocol was “talk therapy” intended to help clients better understand the environmental factors that may have contributed to the development of same-sex attraction in the hope of reducing such feelings. Nicolosi, who died in 2017, promised no particular outcome, engaged in no “aversion” therapies, and counseled no one who opposed counseling.

Whether one accepts or rejects his theories about the possible effects of childhood trauma on the development of same-sex attraction is irrelevant to an assessment of the ethical implications of and danger posed by Amazon’s de facto censorship. Many would argue that “born gay” or “born-‘trans’” theories are both devoid of conclusive proof and are destructive, and yet Amazon doesn’t ban the sale of books that promulgate those doctrinaire theories.

This remarkable political feat of getting e-commerce colossus Amazon to ban the sale of a book was achieved by British homosexual Rojo Alan who doesn’t like Nicolosi’s theories and set out on a campaign to undermine liberty by making it far more difficult for people around the world to access ideas Alan doesn’t like. He joined a petition drive, contacted Amazon, and through Reddit and Twitter encouraged people who hadn’t read Nicolosi’s books to leave bad reviews.

Here’s an excerpt from Rojo Alan’s jubilant July 2 Facebook post:

Our hard work finally fucking paid off!! We got the homophobic books pulled from Amazon!!! Thank you all for the help!!!!

On the 31st of May, I made a post on Facebook, asking all of you to help me in getting a number of homophobic books pulled from Wordery and Amazon.

The main book in question was one called, ‘A parents guide to preventing homosexuality’ by Joseph Nicolosi.

I asked for people to go to each website and leave a bad review and also contact the providers if possible.

After I had messaged Wordery, they took down the said book from their website within 24 hours.

However, Amazon did not as they said these books didn’t go against their rules. I wasn’t willing to let this be. So since then, I had been working on getting these books pulled. I contacted Amazon regularly to speak to them about the books, about how unethical they are.

For the most part, it felt I wasn’t getting anywhere. They would say to me “we will pass it onto the relevant team to look into.” and that was it. I was constantly checking Amazon to see if the books were still there, and they were.

It was frustrating. So I make a plan of attack. I realised me saying to them “these books are bad” wasn’t getting anywhere. So I started by posting on other social media websites, like Reddit and twitter – to get people to leave negative reives [sic] on these books. Someone on Reddit also pointed me to a petition that was created to have these books removed.

It took a couple of weeks but the rating on Amazon dropped from a 4 star to a 2 star. I was finally getting somewhere.

I then started to look deeper into things. I looked into the “rules of publishing” on Amazon, to see what sort of things they allow and don’t allow. Once I wrapped my head around that I started to look into the laws of conversion therapy. The legal side of things.

Once I gathered everything I went back to Amazon and I threw all the information I had at them in several conversations….

My last conversation with Amazon was 6 days ago on the 26th June.

As of today ALL THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BOOKS BY JOSEPH NICOLOSI, HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THE UK AND US AMAZON STORE!!!

…

This is such a huge fucking step in the right direction. Getting such a huge retailer to remove something like this.

Note Rojo Alan’s use of the term “homophobic.” The term means irrational fear or hatred of homosexuals, but that’s not what homo-activists mean when they use it. Even those who were counseled by Nicolosi and reject his theories have not accused him of being hateful. What Alan means by “homophobic” is ideas that dissent from the dogmatic theories and moral assumptions of the homosexuality-affirming community.

Apparently, the politically biased Amazon owned by the bigoted Jeff Bezos was only too happy to comply with a book-banning request—a decision rationalized by an appeal to Amazon’s elastic principles.

Amazon does, indeed, prohibit materials that are

libelous, defamatory, harassing, threatening, or inflammatory. For example, don’t…express hatred or intolerance for people on the basis of… gender or gender identity, religion, [or] sexual orientation.

But moral and ontological assumptions with which homosexual activists disagree do not constitute either hatred of or intolerance for persons. If they did, however, then any book that espouses Leftist moral and ontological assumptions about homosexuality should be banned as well because they conflict with theologically orthodox religious beliefs and, therefore, violate Amazon’s prohibition of materials that “express hatred or intolerance for people on the basis of religion.”

Rod Dreher, senior editor of the American Conservative, writes that Amazon still carries Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler, Communism with the Mask Off and Bolshevism in Theory and Practice by Joseph Goebbels, multiple books by pro-Stalin apologist Grover Furr, and a “highly influential text by the Islamist radical Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, which calls on Muslims to wage relentless global jihad against non-Muslims and insufficiently radical Muslims, until the entire world is under radical Islamic rule.”

So many contradictions, so little time.

I guess Rojo Alan (and Amazon) missed these Amazon rules:

As a bookseller, we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable. 

and:

Don’t attempt to drown out other people’s opinions, including by posting from multiple accounts or coordinating with others.

By ignoring the drop from four stars to two stars in a two-week period of a book published years ago, Amazon also ignored its own product review guidelines that prohibit

[P]osting content… on behalf of anyone else.

How long will it be before Amazon bans the sale of other books that espouse ideas homo-activists and “trans”-cultists hate? And at what point will Leftists be forced to admit that Christians are, indeed, being persecuted?

• When a federal law is passed requiring all citizens to use incorrect pronouns when referring to men and women who masquerade as the opposite sex?

• When Christian colleges lose their accreditation for refusing to pretend that biological males are women?

• When all private spaces are sexually integrated, including all restrooms, locker rooms, dorm rooms, nursing home rooms, semi-private hospital rooms, jails and prisons, and women’s shelters?

• When all previously all-women activities are forced to include men?

• When parents who oppose the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of their children lose custody to Big Brother?

• When it becomes illegal for pastors and priests to preach the whole counsel of God, including those parts of Scripture that homo-activists and “trans”-cultists don’t like?

• When Amazon bans the Bible?

All of these actions will constitute persecution of Christians because all violate theologically orthodox Christian beliefs regarding sexuality and God’s created order.

The persecution of Christians is on our doorstep. Christians need to be prepared, and it’s incumbent upon church leaders to prepare them.

“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,
while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”
(1 Timothy 3:12-13)

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Bigot-Bezos-and-Amazon-Ban-Book.mp3

IFI Fall Banquet with Franklin Graham!
We are excited to announce that at this year’s IFI banquet, our keynote speaker will be none other than Rev. Franklin Graham, President & CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Christian evangelist & missionary. This year’s event will be at the Tinley Park Convention Center on Nov. 1st.

Learn more HERE.

Macy’s was once a symbol of wholesome American fun with its Thanksgiving Parades and visits with Santa Claus, immortalized years ago in the classic movie Miracle on 34^th Street. But this month the department store chain is busy promoting the debauchery associated with “LGBT pride” and pushing the new all-American tradition of encouraging children to interact with perverted drag queens.

Macy’s has been promoting “LGBT” activism for a while, undeterred by periodic protests from pro-family groups. This is the 10^th year for the chain’s annual “Pride + Joy” campaign and its June festivities for “Pride Month” are now on a scale similar to that of patriotic and holiday celebrations. With flags of its own, the “LGBT” movement has rapidly gained ground in the mainstream, thanks in no small part to the growing number of corporate and civic allies eager to outdo each other in the race to see who can be the most ingratiating toward the queer lobby. Apparently not wanting to be left behind by Target or any other store, Macy’s created a full calendar of special events for this month.

On Saturday, June 22, the flagship store in New York City in Herald Square will host a Drag Queen Story Hour. “Bring the whole family for a reading circle and sing along with the queens at this feel-good event!” reads the calendar posting. Macy’s on State Street in downtown Chicago will hold a “Pride” celebration this coming Saturday, June 15, to “celebrate family, friends and community” and offer “treats, performances by drag queens and more!”

Macy’s stores in Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, Minnesota, and Columbus, Ohio, are also holding “Pride” events this month. The chain is participating in “Pride” parades and festivals across the county and selling “Pride”-themed merchandise at more than 150 stores and online at macys.com. The New York City location earlier this month had a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new “Pride” shop within the department store. Macy’s boasts that the Manhattan store is “beaming with Pride as it lights up the night in rainbow colors every evening in June.”

This past November, “LGBT” activists celebrated when the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade featured a same-sex kiss between two actresses participating in the parade. Not everyone saw it as a sign of progress. “Macy’s has sexualized and lesbianized Thanksgiving in its iconic kids’ parade,” wrote conservative writer Rod Dreher.

Other once family-friendly companies are also stepping up efforts to push the “LGBT” agenda, including Disney, which held its first “Pride” parade at its theme park in Paris on June 1. In writing about the parade, the “LGBT” publication Out Magazine called Mickey and Minnie Mouse allies and described them sporting “brand new Pride looks, riding by in a car covered in rainbows.” For years, Disney has held unofficial gay events at its theme parks.

As “Pride” events have grown in size and begun touting themselves as family-friendly—making them even more vile—Christians have become more befuddled about how to react. It should be obvious to Christians that they shouldn’t join in the festivities, but some need reminders like that found in Dr. Michael Brown‘s recent piece, “Why I Do Not Celebrate Gay Pride.”

Even worse, some supposedly conservative Christians publicly endorse attending “Pride” events. In evangelical Protestant and Catholic circles, there’s a growing “gay but celibate” movement that encourages Christians with homosexual attractions to openly and unashamedly identify as gay and which allows for keeping one foot in the gay world so long as one does not act on same-sex desires. Last year, lesbian Catholic writer and Revoice conference speaker Eve Tushnet wrote in Patheos:

I was at the Pride parade this weekend. I have all kinds of issues with contemporary Pride celebrations but here is the thing: I know Christians, believers seeking to live obediently, who feel freed at Pride in a way they never feel in church. In so many of our churches, gay people’s shame is treated as a proof of their orthodoxy or personal holiness… I don’t feel especially liberated by Pride, but that is because I was never imprisoned in the ways that my friends have been. I’m always aware of the ways in which my faith makes me an outsider there. But my friends, who share my faith in spite of much greater suffering at the hands of Christians, feel liberated at Pride because it is a place where being gay does not separate you from others, but connects you to them. Being in a space where everyone is gay and just rejoicing in our community, flinging beads (I do love the beads), being gay in a million different ways, makes you see that being gay can mean community instead of silence, solidarity instead of judgment, beauty instead of barrenness, welcome instead of suspicion, and joy instead of despair.

Department stores bedecking “LGBT” depravity with rainbows and glitter and selling it to kids as well as adults deserve to feel the heat of righteous anger. But when Christians get this confused and compromised, they’re a lot less likely to send the right message.

IFI Banquet Speaker Announced!
We are excited to announce that at this year’s IFI banquet, our keynote speaker will be none other than Rev. Franklin Graham, President & CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Christian evangelist & missionary. This year’s event will be at the Tinley Park Convention Center on Nov. 1st.

Learn more HERE.

Written by Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon 

In a blog post titled “‘Fairness For All’: Smart Politics, Or A Sellout?” (Dec. 13), Rod Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative,  reports a defense of the recent decision by the boards of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to support “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” “federal antidiscrimination law in exchange for religious liberty guarantees written into the same law.” The defense was made by “a prominent conservative Evangelical political strategist who works at both the national and state levels” and whom Dreher calls “Smith.” Rod himself professes to be unsure about the whole subject; an uncertainty that appears to be fueled by his usual belief that voting Republican changes nothing.

The substance of the defense is essentially born of naïve utilitarianism, overlaid with a veneer of high rhetoric about standing up for the “rights” of LGBTQ persons. In effect: We are losing the battle over human sexuality in the culture so, while we still can, let’s cut a deal with proponents of all things “gay” and “transgender” that gives us something in return. They will (allegedly) recognize our good will and then become favorably disposed to protect our “religious liberties” in both the short- and long-term.

The problem with the argument is that it amounts to a policy of appeasement with sexual extremists who advocate (from our perspective) a grossly immoral sexual policy and have never exhibited a “we’ll stop here approach” before. It is an appeasement that requires us to sacrifice our basic principles to get some statutory assurance that can easily be retracted by legislative vote after a full-court indoctrination surge, predicated on the new law, overwhelms remaining resistance. In addition, it is an appeasement that provides only the narrowest of exemptions for religious institutions while throwing under the bus the vast majority of Christians who work and live outside those institutions.

It requires us to sign our own persecution warrant by conceding on a federal level that homosexual practice, “gay marriage,” and sexual mutilation surgery are (as Houghton College President Shirley Mullen, who sits on the boards of both evangelical organizations argued in a position paper) “basic human rights.” Elevating these high acts of sexual immorality to the status of “human rights” in turn slanders reasoned moral arguments against such acts as virulent prejudice akin to racist views.

It gives jurists and legislators the ammunition they need to dismiss any remaining Evangelical resistance to a program of coerced indoctrination and enforcement as inconsistent residual bigotry rather than an instance of rational moral conviction. As Lydia McGrew has pointed out,

[T]his could sabotage any attempt to get an even clearer baker/florist, etc., religious liberty ruling from the Supreme Court in a subsequent case…. A *federal* law enshrining “public accommodations’ non-discrimination rules for sexual orientation could be just what would influence someone like Kavanaugh and possibly others to reverse course rather than going more clearly in the direction of the Masterpiece [Cake] ruling.

Once Evangelical “elites” support special “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” legislation they have conceded (whether they know it or not) that a man having sex with another man and a man subjecting himself to voluntary castration and adopting a female persona are honorable life decisions deserving full government promotion and support.

When the Czechs were compelled to give up the Sudetenland in the Munich Agreement of 1938 in exchange for a contractual assurance of German respect for their sovereignty, they gave up the most defensible and defended part of the country, relying solely on the “good will” of someone who had shown absolutely no previous interest in respecting territorial boundaries. LGBTQ advocates won’t be rounding us up in concentration camps to be gassed, to be sure. Yet they will continue to press for the elimination of every last vestige of “homophobia” and “transphobia” in society by every and any legislative and judicial means. By their own rhetoric they will still regard as hateful ignorant bigots on the level of the Klu Klux Klan, all the more given new federal “anti-discrimination” legislation from which we now seek immoral exemption.

Evangelicals who think otherwise are foolish in the extreme, giving our enemies the club with which to beat us and then taking them at their word that (for the moment) they won’t beat us with it. Then why give them the club in the first place?

According to Smith, “pluralism is about accommodating deep difference” and that requires Evangelicals to “accommodate sexual minorities” and to acknowledge the latter’s “rights.” It is evident already in Smith’s own language that he has given up the store. He has appropriated language of “minorities” and “rights” previously associated with the cause for African American civil rights and applied it to the “LGBTQ” agenda. By definition, then, any resistance to that agenda is “heterosexist” and “cis-sexist.”

Race is about an intrinsically benign, non-behavioral, and immutable facet of human existence. Don’t confuse rhetoric rightly used to support the cause of racial justice with rhetoric that promotes desires (however innate) to do things at fundamental odds with one’s biological design. Contrary to what Smith claims, it is not part of the “common good” to provide special rights for such behavior that will invariably lead to severe state indoctrination and attenuation of both freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion (whatever exemptions we are briefly granted in the law by LGBTQ powers for our detestable prejudices). Smith says that “gay people have a right to be wrong.” They already have that right. What they want is the right to compel others to do things that violate conscience.

Pluralism has its limits. Would Smith apply the same argument to Evangelical hostility against polyamory and adult-consensual incest (these too involve “sexual minorities” and questions about “rights”)? In a pluralist society must we eventually accommodate these “deep differences” too once there is a societal push for such acceptance? How could he possibly argue otherwise given the fact that moral logic predicates opposition to such behavior on a male-female prerequisite for sexual relations and the integrity of a biologically based sexuality, an opposition now surrendered in the public sphere?

Homosexual practice and transgenderism are not “run of the mill” sexual offenses. They are extreme sexual offenses that attack the very foundation of all sexual ethics. The CCCU and NAE want us to promote legislation that honors and protects such behavior and provides the legal reasoning for coercing acceptance in the whole population.

Smith even admits that LGBT activists believe that

Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 dealt a powerful blow to their hopes…. Now they have Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and Justice Ginsburg aged and frail. LGBT strategists believe that the likelihood of litigating their way to preferred policy outcomes is low under this Court.

Then Smith argues that, despite this perspective, our cause is hopeless because Trump and a Republican-led Congress haven’t done everything in two years. He completely ignores the fact that we haven’t lost federal ground in the sexuality wars and are on the road to strengthening materially our position vis-à-vis the Court without having to surrender our moral convictions in the public sector.

Smith assures us,

I don’t think they’re doing it as a bad-faith stalling tactic.

How ridiculous. Every political example points in the direction that LGBTQ activists will continue their inexorable pursuit of stamping out homophobic and transphobic prejudice (so-called) by all means necessary. These Evangelical appeasers have the “innocent as doves” demeanor down but not the “wise as serpents” part. California moved from outlawing sexual orientation “change therapy” on the part of licensed clinicians for minors to five or six years later making a concerted effort to outlaw it for adults on the part of pastors where an exchange of funds is involved. LGBTQ politicians will push their agenda to the bitter end.

Once we abandon the moral conviction that homosexual and transgender immorality are not “human rights” requiring state promotion, we have no basis for opposing our further persecution. Bigots (in the thinking of LGBTQ activists) are not entitled to exemptions in the long run for a bigotry that harasses “sexual minorities” and induces suicide attempts. LGBTQ activists won’t think us to be any less bigoted because of our surrender. They will simply view us as conviction-less and unprincipled bigots who deserve what is coming to them.

Most galling of all is that Smith even cites the Golden Rule to justify his position:

In Smith’s view, in a pluralistic society like America 2018, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ is a good rule for religious liberty advocates and gay rights supporters alike.

Jesus didn’t formulate the Golden Rule to provide special legal protections for, and promotion of, immoral behavior. He formulated it to encourage us to act in the best interest of others rather than to engage in vengeful behavior as a response to wrongs committed against one’s self. Since no true Evangelical can possibly believe that self-dishonoring homosexual behavior and attempted erasure of one’s biological sex are positive goods in the best interests of the practitioners, no Evangelical can support the kind of legislation that the CCCU and NAE are now endorsing.

With this kind of reasoning on the part of Smith, it is little wonder that he wants to remain anonymous.

Robert A. J. Gagnon is Professor of New Testament Theology at Houston Baptist University. He has a B.A. degree from Dartmouth College, an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. His main fields of interest are Pauline theology and sexual issues in the Bible. He is a member both of the Society of Biblical Literature and of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas [Society of New Testament Studies]. He is the author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001; 520 pgs.); co-author (with Dan O. Via) of Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003; 125 pgs.); and, as a service to the church, provides a large amount of free material on his website dealing with Scripture and homosexuality.

You’ve heard the old saying that starts, “Hell hath no fury”? It pretty well describes today’s transgender activists.

If you want to see how far down the slope civic discourse has slid in the land of free speech and “tolerance,” I give you an article in The Atlantic by Jesse Singhal [sic] entitled, “When Children Say They’re Trans.”

Rather than the unabashed cheerleading you might expect in a secular, progressive magazine, the article is surprisingly balanced. And that’s just the problem for transgender activists.

Said one on Twitter: “This guy’s one-man crusade against trans people has gone on for years. It really doesn’t make sense. Sad that the Atlantic gave him a cover story to spread his pseudoscience and bigotry.”

Said another: “This article can and will cause real, tangible harm to the trans community and trans youth.”

And finally this: “[Bleep] off with this transphobia. And on pride month too. This article and cover are an absolute disgrace. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Three and a half years ago in an article titled “Frightening The Horses,” writer and editor Rod Dreher opens giving a fellow writer kudos. “Ben Domenech calls it,” Dreher notes, and then excerpts him:

I think they have really been arguing against the rise of something which has a much larger impact than just a small number of homosexuals getting married — they have instead been arguing against the modern concept of sexual identity. And this is a much tougher task, considering how ingrained this concept has become in our lives.

During the sexual revolution, we crossed a line from sex being something you do to defining who you are. When it enters into that territory, we move beyond the possibility of having a society in which sex acts were tolerated, in the Mrs. Patrick Campbell sense — “I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses” — and one where it is insufficient to be anything but a cheerleader for sexual persuasion of all manner and type, because to be any less so is to hate the person themselves. Sex stopped being an aspect of a person, and became their lodestar — in much the same way religion is for others.

After commenting on that, Dreher goes back to Domenech again:

So the real issue here is not about gay marriage at all, but the sexual revolution’s consequences, witnessed in the shift toward prioritization of sexual identity, and the concurrent rise of the nones and the decline of the traditional family. The real reason Obama’s freedom to worship limitation can take hold is that we are now a country where the average person prioritizes sex far more than religion.

. . .

In a nation where fewer people truly practice religion, fewer people external to those communities will see any practical reason to protect the liberty of those who do.

I highly recommend Rod Dreher’s entire article, where he weaves together several more excerpts from others, including the late Justice Antinon Scalia. Ben Domenech’s article The Future of Religious Liberty is also worth your time. Their point — that opening the door to mandated acceptance of everyone’s choice of identity has serious negative consequences.

Let’s turn to our next identity. A few years ago the Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins wrote an article titled, “Whole: A New Documentary on a Troubling Disorder.” Here is the opening:

The new documentary Whole, which recently premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, explores the troubling topic of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). This disorder, which I have mentioned in several articles, used to be called apotemnophilia.

Those who suffer from BIID identify with amputees and seek to have their bodies align with their psychological identity. That is to say, they seek to have healthy limbs amputated. Many of those who suffer from BIID (known colloquially as “amputee wannabes”) recount feeling these desires from a very young age. Some have accomplished their goal through self-mutilation, and at least two have been facilitated in their quest by a doctor in Scotland.

Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page (emphasis added):

Body integrity identity disorder (BIID, also referred to as amputee identity disorder) is a psychological disorder wherein sufferers feel they would be happier living as an amputee…

BIID is typically accompanied by the desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs to achieve that end. BIID can be associated with apotemnophilia, sexual arousal based on the image of one’s self as an amputee.

So, next on our list of basic and important questions: How will society respond to “After the Ball” type efforts to normalize BIID, remove it from the DSM’s (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) list of mental disorders, and demonize those who disapprove of it?

It is their identity, after all, and you shouldn’t be a bigot.

Up next: Transgenderism.

Written by Joe Rigney

Senior editor of The American Conservative, Rod Dreher, opposes Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis’ act of civil disobedience. As most adults know—with the possible exception of those interviewed on Watters’ World—Kim Davis is refusing to issue marriage licenses with her signature to couples whose unions are inherently non-marital. After being denied even the teeny tiniest religious accommodation, Davis was thrown in the brig, which is a penalty that liberal government officials who have engaged in far more egregious acts of civil disobedience have not suffered.

In his post, Dreher predicts this parade of hypothetical horribles will result from Kim Davis’ action:

1.) Gay marriage will still be the law of the land.

2.) A huge number of secular and/or liberal people in this country will be far less disposed to listen to anybody talk about religious liberty, and will be more willing to regard all religious liberty claims as Kim Davis-like special pleading.

3.) A non-trivial number of conservatives will lose patience with and sympathy for religious conservatives, because whatever they think about same-sex marriage, they will see this as fundamentally a law-and-order issue.

4.)A huge number of conservative Christians will become ever more alienated from America and angry at the government. This will hasten their exodus from the public square, and the fraying of the social fabric.

Well, Dreher is not arguing that horrible #1 will be a result of her action. Rather, he’s suggesting that since “gay marriage” will still be the law of the land, Davis’ act of civil disobedience is an exercise in futility.

Ending “gay marriage,” however, is not her goal. Clearly she, like many Americans, desires that “gay marriage” not be legal, but that isn’t her goal. Her goal in refusing to issue marriage licenses to those in non-marital unions is simply to have her name removed so that there is not even an appearance of complicity in the absurd and offensive act of recognizing same-sex unions as marriages. It remains to be seen whether she will succeed in achieving that goal.

But with regard to Dreher’s somewhat irrelevant point on the inefficacy of one act of civil disobedience: Did anyone think that Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus would in one fell swoop change Jim Crow laws (and no, I’m not equating the injustice Kim Davis faces with the injustice Rosa Parks faced)? Does the failure of one act of civil disobedience to change laws undermine its value?

I agree with Dreher that following Kim Davis’ action, we will see horrible #2 and #3, because those already exist. Nice bit of rhetorical tricksiness on Dreher’s part to attribute existing cultural phenomena to Kim Davis’ act of civil disobedience. Does anyone think that most secularists and/or liberals are currently disposed to listen to conservative Christians talk about religious liberty when it comes to things sexually deviant? Does anyone think that non-religious conservatives (I assume that’s who Dreher is referring to in that he contrasts “conservatives” with “religious conservatives”) currently have patience with and sympathy for religious conservatives?

With regard to horrible #4: Perhaps a huge number of conservative Christians will become ever more alienated from America and angry at the government, but blaming that on Kim Davis is a bit like heaping blame on the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Kim Davis’ civil disobedience has alerted conservative Christians to the reality that the cultural air we breathe is noxious. Her action has exposed the alienating actions and hostility of those in and out of government who are hell-bent on subordinating First Amendment protections to the pagan sexual revolution that, like the “corpse flower,” is coming into full fetid bloom.

While we’re speculating about the effects of Kim Davis’ civil disobedience, I would like to posit my parade of hypothetical lovelies—or would it be terrifics?

Anyway, here they are:

1.) Her action may spur conservatives of all stripes to read and think more deeply about the separation of church and state, a concept that secularists and/or liberals have successfully perverted almost beyond recognition, persuading people of faith that it is constitutionally impermissible for religious belief to inform political decisions.

2.) Her action may increase the number of people concerned about the usurpation of the rights of citizens to govern themselves.

3.) Her action may motivate citizens to think about the principles that justify civil disobedience.

4.) Her action may lead Christians to think more deeply about what should be rendered unto Caesar and what price they’re willing to pay for holding fast to truth.

5.) Her action may help illuminate the erosion of First Amendment rights that jackbooted “LGBTQQIAP” activists are seeking in their quest to limit the exercise of religion to hearts, homes, and pews

Such a parade of terrifics would be a lovely antidote to both pessimistic parades of horribles and rainbow shame parades.

Dreher concludes his article by claiming that Kim Davis is the political Right’s Michael Brown (the Ferguson, Missouri thug who became a dubious martyr and embarrassment for the political Left). Here’s Dreher’s conclusion: “Kim Davis is the Michael Brown of the Religious Right. Don’t underestimate the political potency of that. You watch, this is not going to end well for religious liberty in America.”

Things are, indeed, shaky for religious liberty–for orthodox Christians–in America, but not because of Kim Davis. Things are shaky because of “LGBTQQIAP” activists, their ideological allies, and the complacency and cowardice of the church.

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