Written by Tom Gilson

Quick quiz: According to statements published by the U.S. government, where was the shot fired that was “heard round the world”? Lexington and Concord, you say?

Good answer — but you’re only halfway there. There was another “shot heard round the world,” says the National Park Service. That one was in June 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, where two nights of rioting “led to the development of the modern LGBT civil rights movement.”

The Gay-Rights “Shot Heard Round the World”

You read that right. The U.S. government has co-opted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s deeply symbolic phrase to make the birth of the gay rights movement symbolically equal to the birth of our own country. To fill in the rest of the quotation:

The riots inspired LGBT people throughout the country to organize and within two years of Stonewall, LGBT rights groups had been started in nearly every major city in the U.S. Stonewall was, as historian Lillian Faderman wrote, “the shot heard round the world … crucial because it sounded the rally for the movement.”

There’s history at Stonewall, to be sure. And its reach was indeed global. The month of June is now designated “Pride Month,” and almost 150 gay pride festivals are scheduled in cities around the world.

But what does this mean for true freedom?

The Depth of Our National Confusion

It’s worth noting that Lillian Faderman’s full quote read, “to many homosexuals, male and female alike, the Stonewall Rebellion was the shot heard round the world” (emphasis added).

I give her credit for identifying the group who might have seen it that way. The Park Service’s version leaves that out, making it a statement for us all.

I shudder to think of how celebrations in 2017 would have turned out if Stonewall had happened a week later that year, on July 4. As far as I can tell, the White House has never been lit up in red, white, and blue. We’ve all got images seared on our brains, though, of it lit up in the six rainbow colors of the gay rights movement.

This isn’t just happening on some obscure web page, in other words. The gay rights movement has become America’s new freedom movement. It perfectly depicts the depth of our national confusion.

Freedom Based in the Image of God

For there is “freedom,” and there is freedom.

There is the freedom for which our forefathers fought at Lexington, Concord and beyond. It was a view of liberty rooted in a biblical understanding of what it means to be human.

They knew that humans are made in the image of God. We’re not just today’s snapshot in some ever-changing course of evolution. Instead human nature is a stable, enduring, real. We have a moral nature based in God’s own character. We have a well-designed sexual nature, based in God’s plan for us as individuals, couples and families who build communities and cultures together. We have a destiny based on how we relate to God in Christ and to each other in accordance with God’s design for us.

Argue all you want about whether America was founded as a Christian nation, there’s no denying that our founders’ view of human nature that was deeply influenced by the Bible’s view of humanity. Even Thomas Jefferson, who was no Christian, knew at our inalienable rights come from our Creator. Not government, not courts, not even (later on) our Constitution.

Our founders fought for freedom from political tyranny that kept them from determining their own course. Their fight was never for the “freedom” to do whatever anyone chose, though. Quite the opposite. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Freedom was not merely the ability to do as one wanted; it was the ability to do as one ought.

Or Freedom Based in Making Ourselves Our Own Creators

With all thought of a Creator cast aside, “freedom” now means being able to create ourselves after our own wills.

That’s the freedom for which the shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. Stonewall’s freedom has almost nothing to do with that. With all thought of a Creator cast aside, “freedom” now means being able to create ourselves after our own wills. Not satisfied with your sex? Create yourself all over again! Not content with the morality that’s held the Western world together – in spite of various wars and injustices – for centuries? Call it off! Re-make marriage while you’re at it!

And why not? The view now is that nothing about us is fixed. We’re evolving, so we can make ourselves whatever we decide to be. The same goes for human purpose and moral standards: There’s nothing there but what’s evolved over the eons, but we can alter that, too, as we will.

Our Choice: Celebrating Freedom or Free Fall

I can’t think of anything else that so clearly shows the depth of our national confusion.

We claim this as a new-found freedom. But we’re like the kite that yearned to fly high and away, free of the string it thought was holding it down. Freedom? No. Free fall.

Yet this is the freedom our own Park Service symbolically equates with Lexington and Concord. The patriotism of red, white and blue is being displaced by the spectrum of the gay rainbow.

America was never perfect. It took us way too long to recognize that human rights belong to everyone. Still we got there in law and (to an obviously lesser, yet still helpful, degree) in practice. The shots fired at Lexington and Concord led ultimately to our country becoming the world’s greatest champion for true freedom. The shot fired at Stonewall is leading us in another direction altogether.

The LGBT crowd will be celebrating their “pride” this month. That’s their choice. Our own Park Service seems to be saying everyone else is obliged to join them. I can’t think of anything else that so clearly shows the depth of our national confusion.

(I owe some of my reflections on this to a conversation this week with John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview.)

This article was originally posted at Stream.org

Written by Eric Holmberg

On Friday, June 24, President Barack Obama designated a new national monument at the site of the Stonewall uprising in New York City “to honor the broad movement for LGBT equality”. This was just the latest in a series of speeches and actions on the part of his administration to define down–if not obliterate–any notions of sexual deviance. Worse, to now even memorialize and celebrate it.

Friday’s pronouncement came laden with historical revisionism and stolen valor.

I would encourage the reader to take a few minutes to watch the “your-tax-dollars-in-action” White House video commemorating the uprising. The video was released and promoted through the internet on the 24th and was broadcast on the billboards in Times Square on the eve of the NYC Pride Parade.

And now watch, as they say, the “rest of the story“– the true story.

June 24th is not the first time Obama has melded the normalization and celebration of homosexual couplings into the noble movements for women’s suffrage and civil rights for blacks and other ethnic minorities. I’ve lost track of the number of times he’s trotted out the alliterative triad, “From Seneca Falls, to Selma to Stonewall.” Nor is it the first time he has cherry-picked, embellished and even rewritten history in order to push his progressive agenda.

Another example bears examining.

When Obama  spoke at the site of a true historic landmark–the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama–on the 50th anniversary of the pivotal civil rights march, he rightly observed the suffering the praying, non-violent demonstrators endured at the hands of the police.

“We gather here to celebrate them. We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching towards justice. They did as Scripture instructed:  “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.” ”

But towards the end of the speech, Obama had the audacity to smuggle the so-called right for one man to have sex with another into the same ring of honor, integrity and sacrifice.

“We’re the firefighters who rushed into those buildings on 9/11, the volunteers who signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We’re the gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge.”

This blather, this twisted nugget of unhistorical agitprop, is stunning. And so is the complete pass the comment received from the mainstream press.

When did anyone marching for the right to engage in homosex or use an opposite-sex bathroom get set upon by anyone, much less the police? I’ve covered a number of gay rights parades and protests and all I’ve ever seen are police protecting the demonstrators, sometimes looking the other way while marchers dress and cavort in a manner that would get anyone doing the same things in a different context arrested.

When was any blood shed during these marches, unless it was spilled by the S&M contingency that is invariably present at these parades in major cities? And when exactly did the blood run in the streets of San Francisco and New York like it did during the Selma march?

And how much praying, preaching and seeking to obey the words of Scripture attends these celebrations of hedonism and a “do what thou wilt” sexuality?

Seriously?

And what do you think, the firefighters of 9/11? Soldiers who have risked their lives in Afghanistan? How do you feel about having your sacrifices compared to a phalanx of proverts marching through city streets, throwing condoms and packets of lube out to cheering throngs?

And my black brothers and sisters, how do you feel about having your immutable, genetically determined and morally neutral “race” [ii]—who you are, in other words–conflated with the mutable [iii], genetically non-determinative as well as immoral [iv]actions of others: in other words, what they do [v]?

We’re well on our way to the day when God may set up His own monument in America. It will likely be a grave stone planted in the heart of our nation’s capital. And on it I can imagine His own triad: “Ichabod, Psalm 2:1-6, and Romans 1:18ff.

Not as slick and alliterative as Obama’s. But infinitely more true.

Wake up America.

[ii] Bugs me to use the term because there really is only one race–the human one. But you get what I mean
[iii] There isn’t time to develop this here. Suffice it to say, now that they have won the day and the pressure is off to promote the lie that people are born 100% gay, can’t change and can’t have a loving, meaningful and sexually satisfying heterosexual relationship, even staunch LGBTQ activists are more and more acknowledging that sexual attraction is “fluid”–subject to change.
[iv] This would be according to the vast majority of people and religions throughout human history.
[v] Some will disagree with my nomenclature. But through the lens of a Biblical worldview, a person sexually attracted to members of their own gender is not guilty/has not sinned–is in this sense not a homosexual–until they commit a homosexual act.

This article was originally posted at TheApologeticsGroup.com

No, the title of this piece is not referring to President Barack Obama’s “say what?” comparison of individual action to muskets and militia:

For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. 

Yes, it should trouble Americans of every political stripe to hear that Obama apparently views individualism and bootstrap independence as outmoded, ineffectual means of “meeting the demands of today’s world,” but the analogy to which the title refers is Obama’s audacious (as in demonstating a lack of respect) and fallacious comparison of homosexuality to race and sex:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

“Seneca Falls” refers to the historic women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. “Selma” refers to the signal event of the civil rights movement when blacks attempted to march to the capitol of Alabama to protest voter registration abuses and state-sanctioned violence against blacks.

And then there’s Stonewall…

The Stonewall Riots are considered by many to mark the beginning of the “gay liberation” movement. The Stonewall Inn was a mafia-owned bar in New York City patronized primarily by homosexuals and cross-dressers and which was regularly raided by police. Over the course of several nights in the summer of 1969, homosexuals rioted in protest of one such police raid.

It is wearying to have to address the comparison of homosexuality to sex or race yet again. But like the emperor’s non-existent clothes, Obama and his court continue to trot it out in public, knowing that the masses still deceive themselves into finding it utterly bedazzling.

Race and sex are 100 percent heritable conditions that are in all cases immutable and have no relation to volitional acts that are legitimate objects of moral assessment.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, is not 100 percent heritable, is not in all cases immutable, and is constituted by volitional acts that are legitimate objects of moral assessment.  A more sound analogy would compare homosexuality to polyamory or pedophilia (or for those who put finer distinctions on the condition currently being renamed “minor-attracted persons,” there is pedophilia, hebephilia, and ephebophilia).

Obama goes on to say that “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.” (Translated, this means that “same-sex marriage” should be legalized.) Such foolishness from our president should be embarrassing, but we seemed to be losing our capacity to recognize foolishness or be embarrassed.

First, those who choose to place their same-sex attraction at the center of their identity are “treated like anyone else under the law.” They are perfectly free to participate in the sexually complementary institution of marriage. They choose not to. They are not asking to be treated equally. They are demanding to be treated specially. They want the unilateral right to jettison the central defining feature of marriage (i.e., sexual complementarity)—something, by the way, that polygamists, polyamorists, “minor-attracted persons,” and sibling-lovers are not permitted to do.

Second, does our president actually believe the idea he clunkily articulated in his speech, that “surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well”? Does he believe the love polygamists “commit” to their wives “must be equal as well”? Does he believe the love a high school teacher commits to his student “must be equal as well”? Does he believe the love five polyamorists of assorted genders “commit” to one another “must be equal” as well? Does he believe the love a brother and sister “commit” to each other “must be equal as well”?

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.

Obama audaciously exploits the legacy and faith of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. by linking King’s righteous battle for the civil rights of black Americans to the unrighteous battle to normalize homosexuality and legalize homosexual faux-marriage. While arrogating for his ignoble purposes the name of Martin Luther King, Obama conveniently omits the fact that King said, “How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.”

While Obama claims to be a follower of Christ (a fact that doesn’t seem to upset the Left nearly as much as George Bush’s Christianity did), he flouts the teachings of Christ. It’s unclear whether Obama’s heretical views of marriage reflect Jeremiah Wright’s teaching, Obama’s spiritual and intellectual laziness, or his political opportunism. What is clear is that his views are destructive.

But while both the Old and New Testaments affirm marriage as a sexually complementary institution, defending marriage as such need not derive from religious belief. Even atheists and agnostics are able to recognize and defend marriage as a sexually complementary institution, which explains why in France recently, there were atheists (as well as homosexuals) joining people of faith to defend the traditional and true understanding of marriage. 

Some will claim in high dudgeon that criticisms of Obama demonstrate a lack of respect for the Office of President. Americans, however, have no ethical obligation to refrain from criticizing ideas that are ignorant, offensive, and destructive—even if those ideas are expressed by the president. In fact, the office Obama occupies provides him with an exceptional degree of influence that requires the pernicious ideas he promotes to be challenged. And the de facto destruction of marriage—which is the idea he was promoting in his inaugural speech—is, indeed, pernicious.