While government municipalities, school districts and other entities advance a political agenda through co-ed bathrooms and dressing rooms, parents concerned about the safety and privacy of their kids are fighting back by boycotting a national retail chain.

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In an astonishing act of hubris, abrogation of local control over education, and obsequiousness to Barack Obama, Obama-handmaiden Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has filed a “friend of the court” brief” (i.e., an amicus curiae brief) begging for Illinois to be subject to Obama’s illegal command that public schools allow boys in girls’ restrooms and locker rooms and vice versa.

Following the “guidance” from Obama’s Department of Education via the Office for Civil Rights to integrate sexually all restrooms and locker rooms in government schools, eleven states led by Texas filed a lawsuit in late May requesting that an injunction be issued to stop the implementation of Obama’s “guidance.” This lawsuit includes a 1975 quote from current U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who said that “‘[s]eparate places to disrobe, sleep, perform personal bodily functions are permitted, in some situations required, by regard for individual privacy.’”

Then leftist attorneys general stepped in on behalf of not only their own states but all 50 states to insist on having the federal government rob citizens in every state of their right to decide if they want their local schools to have coed, sex-integrated restrooms and showers for children and teens.

The brief Madigan signed describes concerns of those states opposed to Obama’s diktat as “speculative and inaccurate claims of harm,” adding that “respecting the civil rights of transgender individuals will cause Plaintiffs no harm. Their allegations of safety risks are unsupported hyperbole.”

The sex of humans cannot change. Boys who wish they were girls remain unalterably boys no matter what chemical, surgical, or sartorial changes they make. And boys have no “civil right” to invade the private spaces of girls.

The suggestion by Madigan et al. that claims of harm are “speculative and inaccurate” requires a definition of “harm.” If “harm” is defined solely as physical assault, the risk is low and posed primarily by boys pretending to be girls. But certainly when boys have easy access to girls’ private facilities the risk is not nil.

Under the Obama diktat, all that’s required for a boy to use girls’ private facilities is his claim to be “transgender.” No parental confirmation needed. No medical diagnosis required. No treatment of any kind required. All that’s required is for a boy to claim that he is “trans” or “bi-gendered” or “gender-fluid,” which I guess means he can float fluidly between those binarily fixed facilities until such time as leftists complete their revolution to destroy all public recognition and accommodation of sex differences. On that day, all restrooms, locker rooms, shelters, and hospital rooms will be coed—and not just for those who reject their sex.

Moreover, not even a “medical” diagnosis of “gender dysphoria,” surgical mutilation, and cross-sex hormone doping can turn a boy into a girl or vice versa. And none of these alchemical protocols justify allowing objectively male or female students into opposite-sex facilities.

But harm is not limited merely to physical assault. Included in the concept of “harm” is the violation of modesty and privacy that takes place when unrelated persons of the opposite sex intrude into restrooms and locker rooms. It is likely that Orthodox Jews, Muslims, theologically orthodox Christians, and even some secularists would find these experiences harmful. For those who know that biological sex per se has profound meaning and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy, seeing unrelated persons of the opposite sex partially or fully unclothed as well as being seen partially or fully unclothed by unrelated persons of the opposite sex constitutes harm.

Though it’s incomprehensible to morally deadened leftists, many—perhaps most—men and women prefer not to urinate or defecate in stalls with unrelated persons of the opposite sex doing the same in the stall next to them. These feelings of modesty derived from sex differences are the very reason we have separate restrooms in the first place. What possible difference should it make to girls if the boy in the stall next to them wishes he were a girl or not? Being forced to do their business with unrelated persons of the opposite sex in the neighboring stall also constitutes harm.

Madigan et al. are justifiably concerned about the safety of cross-dressing boys using sex-appropriate restrooms. Now that parents and administrators allow boys to wear lipstick, dresses, and Victoria Secret lingerie with their penises taped down to school, they have put these boys at risk in boys’ locker rooms and restrooms. But the solution to the problem leftist created must not include allowing these boys into girls’ restrooms or locker rooms, or to room with girls on overnight school-sponsored functions as Obama’s diktat requires.

The only reasonable accommodation of such tragically disordered thinking (or egregious rebellion) is single-occupancy facilities. If boys who wish they were girls have the purported right to use facilities with only girls, then surely girls have that right.

The federal government—largely controlled by liberals—has been gobbling up vast swaths of American cultural life, including the education of our children. In so doing, leftists are imposing their subjective and arguable assumptions about, among other things, sexuality on other people’s children as well as violating the 10th Amendment which makes clear that public education is the purview of states—not the federal government:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Liberals make the specious argument that federal intrusion with regard to sex-integrated restrooms and locker rooms is warranted just as it was warranted with regard to racial integration of schools. But that comparison is based on the absurd comparison of the behaviorally neutral condition of race to the disordered subjective desire to be the opposite sex accompanied by futile behavioral choices in the service of pretending to be the opposite sex. For an analogy to be sound, there must be points of correspondence between the analogues. What precisely are the points of correspondence between race and sex-rejection?

In order to impose his radical sexual revolution on our nation’s children, Obama—master violator of the Constitution and the separation of powers—is attempting to unilaterally and illegally change the definition of the word “sex” in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include the rhetorical contrivance “gender identity” (i.e., subjective feelings about one’s sex). And apparatchik Lisa Madigan is helping.

Parents, notify your school administrators and your children’s teachers that under no circumstances may your child or teen use restrooms or locker rooms with persons of the opposite sex, and under no circumstance is your child or teen to be required to use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to any student, staff, or faculty member.

Attention on the poop deck. It seems our “first gay president” intends to “milk,” with pride, his fetish for all things “LGBT” in the closing months (mercifully) of his catastrophic presidency. USNI News (U.S. Naval Institute) reports that the Obama Navy presumes to ram, without consent, the most reprehensible aspects of the extremist homosexual political agenda down the throats of a divided American public.

“The Navy is set to name a ship after the gay rights icon and San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, according to a congressional notification obtained by USNI News.

“The July 14, 2016 notification, signed by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, indicated he intended to name a planned Military Sealift Command fleet oiler USNS Harvey Milk (T-AO-206).”

An “oiler.” You can’t make this stuff up.

It remains unclear whether the USNS Harvey Milk will come equipped with sonar/radar or Grindr, be modeled after a Disney “cruise” liner and adorned with the American flag, or the rainbow colors of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Why Disney?

What would you call a 33-year-old man who both had, and axiomatically acted upon, a deviant sexual appetite for underage, drug-addicted, runaway boys?

No, not Jerry Sandusky, but good guess.

What would you call a man of whom, as regards sexual preference, his own close friend and biographer confessed, “Harvey always had a penchant for young waifs with substance abuse problems”?

In a 2013 interview with OneNewsNow.com, I called this man “demonstrably, categorically an evil man based on his [statutory] rape of teenage boys.”

But you can call him Harvey Milk.

Harvey Milk’s only claim to fame is that he was the first openly homosexual candidate to be elected to public office (San Francisco city commissioner). His chief cause was to do away with the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. In 1978 Milk was murdered over a non-related political dispute by fellow Democrat Dan White.

And a “progressive” martyr was born.

Merriam Webster defines “pederast” as “one who practices anal intercourse especially with a boy.” It defines “statutory rape” as “the crime of having sex with someone who is younger than an age that is specified by law.”

Harvey Milk was both a pederast and, by extension, a statutory rapist. One of Milk’s victims was a 16-year-old runaway from Maryland named Jack Galen McKinley. Motivated by an apparent quid pro quo of prurience, Milk plucked McKinley from the streets.

Randy Shilts was a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and close friend to Harvey Milk. Though Shilts died of AIDS in 1994, he remains, even today, one of the most beloved journalists in the “LGBT” community.

Shilts was also Harvey Milk’s biographer. In his glowing book “The Mayor of Castro Street,” he wrote of Milk’s “relationship” with the McKinley boy: “… Sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure. … At 33, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him.”

In a sane world, of course, the only direction his “new lover” should have pulled him was toward San Quentin. But, alas, today’s America is anything but sane.

Don’t miss Matt Barber’s new book, “Hating Jesus: The American Left’s War on Christianity”!

Whereas McKinley, a disturbed runaway boy, desperately sought a “father figure” to provide empathy, compassion, wisdom and direction, he instead found Harvey Milk: a promiscuous sexual predator who found, in McKinley, an opportunity to satisfy a perverse lust for underage flesh.

Years later, McKinley committed suicide.

Another teen who crossed paths with Harvey Milk was Christian convert and former homosexual Gerard Dols. In a 2008 radio interview with Concerned Women for America, Dols shared of how – as a physically disabled teen – the “very nice” Harvey Milk had encouraged him in 1977 to run away from his Minnesota home and come to San Francisco.

According to Dols, Milk told him, “Don’t tell your parents,” and later sent him a letter with instructions. Thankfully, the letter was intercepted by Dols’ parents, who then filed a complaint with the Minnesota attorney general’s office.

The incident was swept under the rug.

Milk was also reputed to offer room and board in his San Francisco flat to young sailors in exchange for sodomy. His history of child sexual abuse was (and is) no secret to Obama or the homosexual community.

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council penned a detailed expose on Milk in 2009. “He continued to engage in homosexual conduct while serving in the U. S. Navy,” wrote Sprigg. “Shilts reports that Milk, who had his own apartment off base, would pick up hitchhiking sailors by offering them a bed to sleep in. ‘The guests often would not know that Milk’s apartment had only one bed until they walked in the door.’

“Milk later exploited his time in the Navy during his political career – by lying about it, claiming falsely that he had received a dishonorable discharge for his homosexuality. Milk ‘knew the story would make good copy,’ according to Shilts. ‘Maybe people will read it, feel sorry for me and then vote for me,’ Milk told one campaign manager.

“The information Shilts provides about Milk’s sexual partners is revealing about the nature of male homosexual life in America,” concluded Sprigg. “Milk’s first long-term lover, Joe, had his ‘introduction to gay life’ when he performed sex acts upon men in a movie theatre for money – at age 9. Milk’s next lover, Craig, had been arrested after having sex with a 40-year-old man – when Craig was 14. He met Milk when he was 17. ‘[I]t would be to such boyish-looking men in their late teens and early 20s that Milk would be attracted for the rest of his life,’ Shilts reports. Another lover, Jack, moved in with Milk when he was 16 and Milk was 33. Jack attempted suicide several times, and once when he physically attacked Milk, ‘Harvey literally tied him up and threw him in a closet,’” reports Shilts.

So what does a man like Harvey Milk get for his crimes and predatory predilections? While most sexual predators get time in prison and a dishonorable mention on the registry of sex offenders, Harvey Milk got his own California state holiday (“Harvey Milk Day”), official U.S. postage stamp, a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom and, now, is honored with a U.S. Naval ship in his own name.

God bless America?

This shameful “honor” bestowed upon a child molester is a slap in the face of every man and woman who ever served, fought or died for this great nation in decline. If you’re as disgusted by it as I am, please contact your congressional representative and demand they torpedo this predatory ship of fools.

Some, perhaps many, within the Republican Party have of late been fawning over allegedly conservative activist Milo Yiannopoulis. For those who remain blessedly unaware of him, he is the foulmouthed, British, homosexual Breitbart News technology editor who was recently unjustifiably banned for life from Twitter following a Twitter twaddle battle with the foulmouthed actress Leslie Jones, who is a Saturday Night Live cast member and one of the stars of  the Ghostbusters remake.

To better understand who Yiannopoulis is, conservatives should watch this short video of Yiannopoulis speaking at a recent party of homosexual Republicans:

**Caution: Vulgar Language**

Perhaps Yiannopoulis had no control over the troubling photos of adolescent-looking hairless, shirtless boys adorning the walls behind him at this party, but he did have control over his continual sexual asides to men off-camera, which expose precisely why he should be rejected as any kind of hero for conservatism.

Anyone who understands that properly ordered sexuality, marriage, and the needs and rights of children are issues as vital to the flourishing of America as a good economy, lower tax rates, secure borders, and military strength should reject the anti-hero Yiannopoulis. He will not attract people committed to all the positions requisite to strengthen this country. He will bring in homosexuals and those who support their cultural agenda. He will bring in people who will corrupt the GOP from within.

Those within the GOP who understandably seek a bigger tent should stop fawning over the indecent Yiannopoulis simply because he holds some conservative positions and attacks liberals and liberalism. A person who delights in sodomy cannot possibly strengthen a party committed to conservatism. Republicans need to stop being so desperate for the cool kids to like them. The enemy of our enemy is sometimes our enemy.

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In the June, 2016, issue of Travel and Leisure magazine, Hilton Worldwide shocked readers by placing a full-page ad that featured two men in bed together. Click here to see the ad.

Travel and Leisure isn’t a gay-specific magazine sent directly to homosexual’s homes. It’s a widely distributed mainstream publication that can be found in many public places such as doctors’ or auto repair waiting rooms.

If Hilton had advertised two men playing tennis, cards, or having lunch, that would have been reasonable. However, Hilton chose to make a cultural and social statement by purposely marketing the promotion of homosexuality to a large segment of the population who finds the idea of two men sleeping together unnatural and offensive.

So far, Hilton is defending its decision to promote homosexuality in the magazine and will likely take it further with other forms of mainstream media. Hilton said, “Hilton Worldwide is a global company of diverse cultures serving diverse guests…We are proud to depict and reflect our guest diversity in our advertising…”

Take Action

Sign the American Family Association’s petition to Hilton Worldwide, urging them to market responsibly by advertising in a more family friendly manner when marketing through mainstream media.

This article originally published by the American Family Association.

When Target announced its transgender-friendly restroom and fitting room policy in April, the American Family Association (AFA) almost immediately called for a boycott. (You can sign the petition here.) What alarmed us in particular was Target’s eagerness to allow grown men into dressing rooms that historically had been reserved for the exclusive use of the fairer sex.

While Target emphasized that its policy was just about transgenders, we immediately saw citizen videos in which grown men who were making no pretense to be women asked Target personnel if they were free to use whatever restroom or dressing room they chose, and they were enthusiastically told that of course they could.

This represented – and still does today since Target has not changed course – a dangerous loophole. Target is allowing any male to use a women’s dressing room if he simply self-identifies as a female, and even if he doesn’t. He is not required to show any evidence of his femaleness, whether with a driver’s license, a note from his doctor, or even his attire. His word is his bond. If he says he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body, Target will simply take his word for it, regardless of how obviously ridiculous the claim may be.

This is exceedingly irresponsible, as it exposes our wives, daughters, and granddaughters to invasion of privacy at a minimum and to sexual assault at the worst. Video voyeurism, we predicted, would increase, for the simple reason that any man can go into any dressing room or restroom he wishes without being challenged or even questioned by Target employees. Once he’s in, he’s in, and if he does something indecent while he’s in there, too bad. Thanks to Target, it’ll be too late for the victim. He might even wind up getting arrested, but the damage will have already been done.

At the time, we were told ad nauseam that we had nothing to fear from those who claim to be transgendered because no transgenders had ever abused their privileged access to little girls’ rooms. Well, that ruse has now been blown to bits.

Here is a case in point, which perfectly illustrates why the Target boycott must continue until Target management gets its collective mind right. In my home state of Idaho, police arrested a 46-year-old man who claims to be a transgender woman. His crime? Filming an 18-year girl as she tried on swimwear in a Target dressing room. His legal name is Sean Smith, even though he claims to be going by the name Shauna Smith. He used an iPhone to film the victim from an adjacent booth, simply by sticking the phone over the top of the divider.

Smith was attired in a dress and a blonde wig, either as an expression of his own sexual confusion or as a clumsy disguise to avert suspicion. But his mugshot makes it clear that he’s a male regardless of what he thinks he is.

During questioning by Bonneville County detectives, Smith admitted that he has done this thing repeatedly in the past. One investigator wrote, “[Smith] eventually admitted to me that she [sic] had made videos in the past of women undressing. The defendant told (the detective) that she [sic] makes these videos for the ‘same reason men go online to look at pornography.’”

We’re not told why he picked a Target store, but unchallenged and unquestioned access to intimate settings would have made it irresistibly tempting. Misguided corporate leadership has turned Target into a virtual chain of do-it-yourself porn sets and peep shows for would-be video voyeurs and pedophiles.

Target will soon be releasing its second quarter financial statement, and the news will not be good. Shareholders have every reason to be restive about management risking their investment on a doomed-to-fail social experiment.

Perhaps shareholders can get the attention of Target’s CEO, since, at this point, he seems impervious to the voices of alarmed American families who are taking their shopping dollars to friendlier climes.

Bottom line: Target either needs to get a new dressing room policy or a new CEO. And the sooner the better.

This article was originally posted at AFA’s blog.

Written by Richard Wiley

Freedom of conscience is at risk, and the attack upon it has officially enveloped the field of medicine.

Remember the 11,588,500 word bill passed by Congress in 2010, accompanied by the hopeful promise of easy-access healthcare? The bill that continues to cause the closure of small businesses and price hikes in the insurance market? That’s right, the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) strikes again. Pointing back to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is now using Obamacare to target the right to liberty of conscience.

Reminiscent of the rainbow colors projected on the White House after Obergefell v. Hodges, the HHS is doing everything it can to solidify its celebration and special treatment for those struggling with their sexuality. Pursuant to a final rule to become effective July 18th entitled “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities,” every medical practice treating any patient who participates in HHS administered or funded health programs or in the health insurance marketplaces will be required to comply with Obamacare’s new “nondiscrimination protections”.

According to HHS, unlawful “discrimination” based on “sex” is not limited to choosing to operate on a female instead of a male simply because she’s a female and he’s a male; the new definition includes refusing to provide sex-reassignment surgery because you disagree with it as a matter of medical or moral judgment. The rule thus mandates that medical institutions provide sex reassignment surgeries to patients regardless of the religious interests of the institution or physician. Possible penalties for violating the rule include civil suits, fines, and criminal investigations.

It doesn’t stop with transgender conundrums, however; the new rule also includes those requesting abortions to the list of protected classes. Although the HHS declares that the rule (section 1557) does not replace the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act or other provisions pertaining to religion, it fails to articulate any means of seeking relief under religious exemptions and is silent as to which provisions would be lifted and which would be stayed, should any relief be requested. The rule simply states, “[i]nsofar as the application of any requirement under this part would violate applicable Federal statutory protections for religious freedom and conscience, such application shall not be required.” No other mention of religious exemption is provided, leaving further procedural steps in limbo to be determined on a case-by-case basis with no uniform application.

Regulations will typically lay out a section detailing which providers are exempt under which circumstances because not doing so produces nebulous interpretations of the law. The practice is more than a courtesy, and omitting such a provision is a telling action indeed.

In addition to breaking down the freedom of conscience and religion, the rule erodes doctors’ professional judgment regarding which procedures are necessary, effective, and plausible for their patients. It’s another case of micromanagement that will have additional economic and moral ramifications for the medical field.

In the end, it’s clear that the rule is a ruse. While the federal government brandishes the colorful flag of the downtrodden class of sexual revolutionaries in its hand, it tramples on the ashes of truth, proudly proclaiming its fidelity to the cause of the deceived. Ironically and tragically, the very thing that can cause healing, that can provide some long overdue stability to struggling families, is the very thing the government continues to deride: the truth.

This article was originally posted at the FamilyFoundation.org blog.

Written by Doug Mainwaring

When Christian rock star Trey Pearson announced he was coming out of the closet and separating from his wife and their two children after seven and a half years of marriage, he said that his wife had been his “biggest supporter” and that “she just hugged me and cried and said how proud of me she was.”

If this account is exactly true, it is troubling. Think about the degree of social decay required—especially within Christianity—for a Christian wife to be so conditioned by popular culture that she immediately congratulates her husband for abandoning her and their children, rather than reaching out for help to preserve their marriage and family. A man who walks away from a marriage because of same-sex attraction is no different from a man who abdicates his role as husband and father for sex with other women. We shouldn’t view Trey Pearson’s actions as heroically true-to-self, but as simply selfish.

I should know. I walked away from my marriage nearly twenty years ago because of my same-sex attraction. I made a stunning error in judgment. Thankfully, our marriage has been very happily restored for more than five years now. Along the way, I learned that marriage is more than just a tradition or a religious or social construct. Monogamous, complementary, conjugal marriage is a pearl of great price worth investing one’s entire life in, a pursuit that surpasses all its imitators and impostors.

Many Same-Sex-Attracted People Are Drawn to Complementarity and the Solemnity of Marriage

Popular culture now espouses the notion that heteronormativity is harmful to those with same-sex attraction. But many who experience same-sex attraction would disagree. In seeking conjugal, complementary marriage rather than anti-conjugal, anti-complementary relationships, we seek nothing more than to fit in with the entire universe, to be part of the wonderful ecosystem of humanity and all of nature. Non-conjugal, non-complementary sexual relationships are a synthetic lifestyle, at odds with nature and the entire cosmos. Not only do we seek marriage in the only true sense of the word, we are dedicated to its solemnity and the sanctity of our marriage vows.

One man recently told me:

Over the years, I have had passing thoughts of giving up my family and marriage for a same-sex relationship or partner, but decided that in no way is it worth destroying my family and marriage for that. There is enough unhappiness in this world without me adding to it. Life isn’t all about me; I have created a family and children and I have a responsibility to them that I could never forsake. So over time, even when feeling same-sex attraction, I have chosen not to dwell on it and to remain faithful to my marriage and family. I draw immense satisfaction from that.

I don’t think of myself according to my sexuality or sexual desires, but rather as a man, husband, and father. I’ve formed many relationships that support that self-understanding and I’m content with it. I suspect that there are many married men like me with these same-sex attractions but who choose to remain faithful to our first commitment to wife and family. It’s no big deal to. Really. In fact, it’s the greatest of honors and privileges.

Like many of the married same-sex attracted people who have spoken to me over the years, this man wants to remain anonymous, because he wants to protect the happiness and security of his marriage. He would never do anything to undermine or jeopardize his family. He is one of the many unsung heroes whom the world will never know. I wish many more would step forward publicly, but I certainly understand why they choose not to.

Last year I contributed an essay to a book, Living the Truth in Love: Pastoral Approaches to Same-Sex Attraction. Here’s what a few of the married same-sex attracted men I spoke with had to say:

Kory Koontz:

I am 52 years old, a father to five awesome kids, and have been happily married to my wife, Colleen, for 20 years. I am an actor, writer, marathon runner, and I have SSA [same-sex attraction].

I may not have chosen to have SSA but I certainly can choose to deal with it according to the dictates of my own conscious [sic], mind, and faith. I stand as a voice to an alternative choice: that a man with SSA can be fulfilled emotionally, physically, and sexually in a traditional relationship and marriage, as the provider of the family and the patriarch of the home.

Jeff Bennion:

In my twenties I would have thought it was impossible that I could ever marry a woman, and even less possible that I would be happy and fulfilled in every way in that marriage. Eleven years and counting now, and I am happier than ever. That includes sexually, relationally, and emotionally.

I don’t blame people who doubt me—if I hadn’t experienced it myself, I would find it dubious myself, it’s so counter to the dominant cultural narrative out there. People like me have always been around, but we seldom have any reason to speak up. I choose to do so now not out of any desire to help myself, but to advocate for those who are in the position I was in in my twenties and early thirties, and even more, for the children whom I believe deserve (if at all possible) to be raised by their biological parents if at all possible.

Joseph Allen Stith:

I don’t remember ever being attracted to someone of the opposite sex since my earliest memories. As a boy, I kept my feelings to myself knowing I would not be accepted if anyone knew how I felt. I joined the United States Marine Corps to learn how to be a man and learn masculine characteristics I lacked. After 6 years of service, I fell in love with the only woman I have ever been attracted to and we were married. We’ve had the privilege of seeing our children grow to maturity in a loving home as husband and wife. My greatest happiness in life has come from the privilege and responsibility of raising my family in a way I have chosen according to my beliefs. Grandchildren now visit our home and our family remains close more than thirty years since our marriage.

Had I followed my own desires and impulses toward other men, my life would be very different today. . . . My children have been told many times by their friends from single parent homes, just how fortunate they are to have both a Mom and a Dad even with our reversed non-traditional roles (I do the cooking and I hate sports—totally opposite of my dear wife, and it’s ok).

And there are others. Many others.

Dale Larsen, now father of four and grandfather of nine, recognized his attractions at an early age. After nine years of marriage, and during a period of stress, his attractions “skyrocketed.” A gay relative “convinced me that I needed to be who I was—that that’s who I am and I needed to live my life that way.” She arranged for him to go on a date with another man, and Dale recalls:

I looked over and I saw a couple, his brother and sister-in-law, and their little kids and they had the same aged kids I had and the same two boys and a girl. And all of a sudden in my mind, I saw my own family sitting there and the words that came into my mind were, ‘If you continue down this path, and you can, you will lose them.’ I made a decision that that was it—I was coming back home. I wanted a family so bad. I wanted my wife.

I loved my wife.

Blaine Hickman: “my feelings don’t . . . define me. I’m not what I feel; I’m what I do.”

Bill Seger: “We can choose our destiny. We can choose the direction we want. It’s not easy . . . but the blessings are enormous.”

The Power and Beauty of Marriage

In the spring of 2015, I originated an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court that came to be known as “Same-Sex Attracted Men and Their Wives.” It was submitted in Obergefell v. Hodges in support of allowing states to maintain the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. Twelve same-sex attracted men, married to women, contributed to this effort. Our goal was to let the justices know our stories, which have been regularly suppressed. We are not supposed to exist. Our existence—and the thriving of our families—threaten to undermine the narrative that same-sex marriage is the only route to happiness for the same-sex attracted.

Here is the conclusion of our brief, which sums up the message we wanted the justices to hear:

Striking down man-woman marriage laws on the basis of constitutional discrimination would thus send a message to the same-sex attracted that there is only one choice for them, that man-woman marriage is unattainable, that they are acting against their nature for desiring it, and that pursuing it will be dangerous for them, their spouses, and their children.

But the opposite is true. The man-woman definition of marriage is not an insult; it is an ensign, beckoning to anyone—regardless of sexual orientation—that the union of a man and a woman is of unique significance in light of its procreative power and complementary capacity.

The man-woman definition of marriage—conjugal, complementary marriage—is an ensign not because it is just a good idea, or the best among many. It is a bright ensign because it is the truth, undeniably displayed in nature and in each of our physical beings. We are made male and female, as complements to each other. And when male and female come together, they unite as one flesh. When two males or two females attempt to join together sexually, they remain two males or two females. To base marriage solely on romantic or sexual interests requires averting our minds from easily discernible truth.

Our stories are not based on “reparative therapy,” so-called attempts to “pray away the gay,” or other efforts to change sexual orientation. Rather, we fully accept the reality of our same-sex attractions and fully affirm our individual self-worth, just as we are. We also attest that our attractions do not dictate our relationships. While we may not have a choice about our attractions, we do have a choice about our relationships. And rather than choose the now culturally acceptable and popularly celebrated same-sex relationship, we instead have chosen marriage. The real thing.

Here’s what the proponents of same-sex marriage and the many who have passively accepted its arrival may never be able to comprehend: sex within marriage—and marriage itself—is about generously giving of ourselves, not taking what our eyes and minds covet. I would rather live freely according to reason, in harmony with the universe, than as a prisoner living according to the dictates of nothing more than hormone-triggered impulses.

Same-sex marriage is not the only option for gays and lesbians who seek personal fulfillment and familial happiness. No matter what the Supreme Court may say, marriage to a member of the opposite sex is not some kind of meaningless impossibility for the same-sex attracted. It’s the fulfillment of our deepest longings.

Article originally published at ThePublicDiscourse.com.

**Caution: Parental Guidance Suggested**

What the tragic events of last week did not need was the distraction posed by one of the organizers of the Dallas protest, Dr. Jeff Hood, the 32-year-old bearded, bespectacled white man who is effective at one thing: self-promotion. While Selma had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an eloquent, dignified, and committed follower of Christ, Dallas had Dr. Hood, a narcissist committed to self-aggrandizement, sexual deviance, and syncretism.

After the shocking shootings of Dallas police officers, Hood—an admirer of Jeremiah Wright—could be found all over the airwaves, including on The Kelly File with Megyn Kelly.

Hood, a father of five young children, offers this description of himself on his website:

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Baptist pastor, theologian and activist living and working in Texas. A graduate of Auburn University, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, University of Alabama and Creighton University, Dr. Hood also concluded a Doctorate of Ministry in Queer Theology at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. Dr. Hood was ordained at a church within the Southern Baptist Convention in 2006 and received standing in the United Church of Christ in 2015.

The author of ten books (The Queer: An Interaction with The Gospel of John, The Queering of an American Evangelical, The Sociopathic Jesus, The Year of the Queer, Jesus on Death Row, Frances, Last Words from Texas: Meditations from the Execution Chamber, The Rearing of an American Evangelical, The Courage to Be Queer and The Basilica of the Swinging D*cks)…In 2013, Dr. Hood was awarded PFLAG Fort Worth’s Equality Award for Activism….With deep soul and a belief that God is “calling us to something queerer,” Dr. Hood is a radical mystic and prophetic voice to a closed society.

Just two months ago, the Dallas Observer profiled Hood:

Hood says he’s anointed “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” “Jesus wasn’t a Christian” is one of his sayings. He thinks “Jesus has a vagina,” [and] “Jesus is queer” is one [of his sayings] that spurred hundreds of rebukes from Christians across Facebook, calling him a “false prophet,” a “charlatan,” and “nothing more than a left-wing activist.” Some of his former congregation put him in the ranks of scandalous TV evangelists like Jim Bakker.

…

He also suffers from bipolar disorder, which sometimes means hallucinations and bouts of paranoia.

After leaving the Southern Baptist denomination and purportedly seeking treatment for his mental illness, Hood started a church for homosexuals in a Denton, Texas homosexual bar that lasted a year. Former church members’ descriptions of Hood some remarkably like descriptions of cult leaders:

“After working within the church for several months as an ‘elder,’ it became apparent that a lot of the leader’s misogynistic white male privilege kept showing, regardless of how much he would hide it under a thin veil of faux hipster economic struggling.”…When various issues or statements regarding upsetting comments that could be perceived as misogynistic or offensive were brought to the leader’s attention, they were usually met with a defensive, self-pitying martyrdom which was served to give him immunity from any and all criticism.”

Another wrote, “No criticism of the pastor was allowed. If someone challenged his behavior, he told lies about them to the congregation. If someone brought up problematic elements of the church, they were immediately silenced. It wasn’t until I spoke with other people who had left that we began to realize the amount of lies that we had been told about [one another]. I left the church because I experienced firsthand the pastor’s lies, manipulation and lack of boundaries.

For a time, Hood was involved with the largest homosexual church in America, Cathedral of Hope United Church of Christ (UCC) in Dallas, but like so many of his endeavors, this relationship was short-lived. After Hood was arrested and briefly jailed in Ferguson, Missouri, where, according to Hood, he was one of the protest leaders, Hood hurled epithets at his former church leaders at the Cathedral of Hope, complaining that “ those chicken sh*t a**holes…didn’t even announce that I had been arrested at church.”

Hood and his wife Emily support their five children under five (including two sets of twins) by “being creative, she as an artist and he as a writer, but they also receive help from friends and Hood’s 88-year-old grandfather, who still doesn’t quite understand his grandson’s ministry.”

On his blog, a picture of a deeply troubled  man and heretic emerges.

Hood expresses his appreciation for the “public witness” of Reverend Charles Moore who lit himself on fire to express “his frustration with the United Methodist Church’s position on human sexuality, opposition to the death penalty, disdain for racism (especially in his hometown of Grand Saline) and his deep anger at Southern Methodist University’s decision to house the George W. Bush Presidential Center.”

Hood asserts that  “Jesus sinned. Jesus was a racist y’all.” He finds everything “[f]rom the historical personhood of Adam and Eve to ideas of substitutionary atonement to a literal hell to the impending return of Jesus” to be “really problematic doctrines.”

And here is how he concluded one of his sermons:

Love your neighbor…put down your gun.

Love your neighbor…open your borders.

Love your neighbor…embrace the revolutionary spirit of our age.

Love your neighbor…be queer.

Last December, Hood posted an obscene novella he’s penned, a perverse, poorly written tale that, like John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress, has a main character  named “Christian” whose story begins with a sojourn in jail. Reading The Basilica of Swinging D*cks offers a glimpse into Hood’s spiritually darkened mind. The rambling story is replete with references to homoerotic sex and masturbation. The first-person narrator Christian describes even the church building in sacrilegious terms: “At the top of the Cathedral, we placed a phallic steeple shooting up to heaven with a cross coming out of the domed tip.”

With the first black president fomenting social and political division, with public school teachers indoctrinating children with an imbalanced picture of American history, and with rebellious syncretists preaching heresies in our churches, it’s no wonder that racial tensions are escalating. Hood, a mentally ill, narcissistic heretic deserves neither pulpits nor press conferences.

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Written by Carl R. Trueman

Last week, Chad Vegas, a good friend of mine and the Reformed Baptist pastor in Bakersfield, California emailed me as follows:

As you know, CA has mandated this [school transgender policy] for the whole state. I have served on the largest high school board in CA, and the nation, for 12 years. I basically lead that board. Our board voted to adopt the new law into policy. I voted against it. I was breaking the law for doing so. I could be personally sued and our attorney tells me the board insurance won’t cover me because I am breaking the law and I am a bigot. Anyway, I announced I would not seek reelection. The community came unhinged when I announced that. I remain the most popularly elected official in the history of our school board. Thousands of parents filled our board room in protest of the law. Thousands are pleading with me to reconsider and keep fighting. My elders are still considering what to have me do…. [T]he board and administration, and even some leaders in the liberal teacher’s union, are asking me to reconsider.

On Thursday, he announced that he would not seek re-election in a letter to his congregation.

There you have it: A popular, longstanding, and effective member of a school board has had to stand down—not because he does not enjoy the confidence of the community, but simply because he does not accept the latest demands that every knee must bow to whatever the political taste of the moment has decided is non-negotiable.

It reminded me of my review of John Inazu’s new book on confident pluralism and his response. Essentially, I argued that confident pluralism depended upon a balance of cultural and political power. As that balance no longer existed, pluralism was effectively dead. John responded that I was too pessimistic and that my own tone in my review was not entirely conducive to promoting pluralism.

Well, the fate of Chad Vegas in Bakersfield is a great example of precisely my point. He is a popular member of the schoolboard, perhaps the most popular. Even his liberal opponents acknowledge that and want him to stay. But he cannot. He has already broken the law by voting his conscience. He could be sued for that. And how many of those who want him to stay would be willing to stand shoulder to shoulder during a long, exhausting and punitively expensive legal action?

This cultural moment has been taking shape for some time. A few years ago my oldest son was running track for an Ivy League school. One of the team came out as a lesbian and it was decided that all athletes should wear a rainbow armband in support. My son did not want to comply but also did not wish to cause unnecessary offense to his friends and so he called me and asked what argument he should make against the idea. I told him to say that, as one of America’s greatest virtues was its freedom, he should tell his teammates that he absolutely respected their right to wear the armband in solidarity with their friend. They were free to do so and he rejoiced to live in a nation where they could do so. But by the same token, they should respect his right not to wear the armband in accordance with his personal religious convictions. That’s a good argument, I said, and I told him he should make it modestly and politely and then simply not wear the band without drawing any great attention to his act. But I also advised him that it would not be greeted with approval because the issue was not really about the freedom to be tolerant and diverse, whatever the rhetoric. It was about the intolerant political demand that all should be the same. Sure enough, he was decried as a bigot and homophobe.

Thus it is in modern America. To repeat myself: Confident pluralism assumes either a balance of power or a basic common decency between the various sides in any of the cultural debates. The balance and the decency no longer exist. Nor does it matter that there might be a democratic majority supporting the dissenter in whatever public-square conflict occurs. Power is not a function of numbers any more, if it ever was. It is a function of organization and of having one’s hands on the levers of cultural and legal power. Expect no quarter in the conflicts that are already upon us, however many of your neighbors may initially express sympathy with you.

The long Gramscian march of the activist bien pensants through the institutions is reaching its conclusion. It really is. And it is time to face that fact and abandon the myth that the world is run by people who respect difference and diversity, and that all we need to do is behave decently in order to win their respect and earn their favor. They do not think that way. They will never think that way. And they will crush those who do. By any means necessary.

Carl R. Trueman is Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary.

This article was originally posted at FirstThings.com

The kind of draconian restrictions of speech and religious rights that corrupt Canadian governance are  arriving bit by corroded bit on America’s church steps sooner than many expected and in, of all places,  Iowa. Make no mistake though, this is coming to every state.

Iowa, like many other states, has a law banning discrimination based on, among other conditions, “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” in places of public accommodation. To be clear, the rhetorical contrivance “sexual orientation” really means “subjective homoerotic attraction and volitional homoerotic acts,”* and the rhetorical contrivance “gender identity” really means “the subjective desire to be the opposite sex or no sex,” both of which are ontological impossibilities.

Iowa also has a Civil Rights Commission that has issued “guidance” on how the state law and corresponding city codes affect churches. It states that the anti-discrimination law—including its provisions regarding homoerotic feelings and sex-rejection—does, in fact, apply to churches. Fortunately, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the Fort Des Moines Church of Christ to prevent the civil rights commission and Iowa attorney general “from forcing Fort Des Moines to use its facility in a way that violates its religious beliefs about human sexuality.”

Here are some of the tricksy ways the Iowa Civil Rights Commission seeks to violate the civil rights of Christians.

Place of public accommodation

The Iowa law banning discrimination based on “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” applies to  places of public accommodation, from which historically churches have been exempt. But inventive (or cunning) Iowa public servants have found a way around that pesky obstacle to their absolutist cultural ambitions. The commissioners write that if any place that is “distinctly private by its nature….offers some services, facilities, or goods to the general public, it will be treated as a public accommodation for those services,” and, of course, church services are open and offered to the general public. By that very act of opening church services to all, churches—in the opinion of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission—become subject to Iowa’s anti-discrimination law and vulnerable to lawsuits for non-compliance.

Churches and their “bona fide religious purposes”

The commission explains that “Iowa law provides that these protections do not apply to religious institutions with respect to any religion-based qualifications when such qualifications are related to a bona fide religious purpose. Where qualifications are not related to a bona fide religious purpose, churches are still subject to the law’s provisions.”

Many Christians will be scratching their heads at those statements in that virtually everything that takes place within churches has a bona fide religious purpose or, more precisely, is informed by religious belief. Since neither the law nor the commission’s interpretation of the law defines a “bona fide religious purpose,” I will take a stab at the definition: To the commission, a “bona fide religious purpose” is a religious purpose so narrow in its scope and application that no secularist can hear or see it.

For those still baffled by the commission’s gaseous emanations, the commission provides two specific examples of church activities that because of their public nature are unrelated to a “bona fide religious purpose” and, therefore, “subject to the law’s provisions”: “a child care facility operated at a church or a church service open to the public.”

Bodily sex and physical privacy

The commission warns that churches that offer services open to the public must allow sex-rejecting men and women to use opposite-sex restrooms or risk lawsuits. According to the commission, the law and city codes require that “ndividuals [be] permitted to access… [restrooms, locker rooms, and living facilities] in accordance with their gender identity, rather than their assigned sex at birth, without being… questioned.”

ADF charges that the commission is  engaging in viewpoint discrimination: “The Act and City Code permit churches and others to distribute and disseminate religious statements that support or condone policies permitting access to restrooms and showers based on one’s gender identity, but punish religious statements that support or condone access to restrooms and showers based solely on one’s biological sex.”

Big Brother is stomping across the Iowa cornfields belching that church restrooms should no longer correspond to objective, immutable biological sex, but henceforth should correspond to the strange, subjective feelings of those who believe sex per se has no intrinsic meaning. Such a moral claim, however, is based on prior assumptions about the meaning of sex, modesty, and privacy—assumptions that contradict Scripture.

Harassment

According to the commission, “illegal harassment” could include “repeated remarks of a demeaning nature…demeaning…stories…and intentional use of names and pronouns inconsistent with a person’s presented gender.” Would the story of Sodom and Gomorrah be a demeaning story? Could a pastor’s exposition of Leviticus 18:22 or 20: 13, or Romans 1: 26-27, or 1 Corinthians 6:9 be construed as “remarks of a demeaning nature”? If a pastor uses the man formerly known as Bruce Jenner as an illustration in a sermon and refers to him by the grammatically correct male pronoun because Jenner remains to this day male, could the pastor be fined or jailed?

Let that sink in for a moment: The government is intruding into sacred space to force Christians to lie in violation of their religious convictions. Astonishing. The government has passed a law that bans “demeaning remarks” and compels lying thus violating First Amendment speech and religious protections. The left has long sought to scrub the public square of religion, but now the poisonous tentacles of “progressivism” are slinking into even our sanctuaries.

Churches may be exempt from Iowa’s anti-discrimination law when it comes to hiring a pastor—which means churches may discriminate based on a candidate’s embrace of a homosexual or “trans” identity—but if, in a church service open to the public, pastors preach sermons based on theologically orthodox beliefs about homosexuality or if churches require that restroom-usage corresponds to objective sex, churches risk lawsuits. Leftists will no longer allow religious purposes to remain unmolested by anti-biblical, Caesarist policies even within church buildings unless those buildings are hermetically sealed off from the public.

It appears that states are careening down the greased up slope at the bottom of which they’ll find Dystopia watched over by the gimlet eyes of debauched Big Brother.

*No one is discriminated against based on their heterosexuality because objectively all humans are heterosexual. Their bodies are designed for hetero-sex and they reproduce heterosexually. The term “sexual orientation” in law actually refers only to subjective homoerotic feelings and volitional homoerotic acts, which means the legal door is open to add other conditions constituted by subjective feelings and volitional acts to anti-discrimination laws and policies.

By Michael W. Chapman 

Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.

Dr. McHugh, the author of six books and at least 125 peer-reviewed medical articles, made his remarks in a recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal, where he explained that transgender surgery is not the solution for people who suffer a “disorder of ‘assumption’” – the notion that their maleness or femaleness is different than what nature assigned to them biologically.

He also reported on a new study showing that the suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people. Dr. McHugh further noted studies from Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of children who had expressed transgender feelings but for whom, over time, 70%-80% “spontaneously lost those feelings.”

While the Obama administration, Hollywood, and major media such as Time magazine promote transgenderism as normal, said Dr. McHugh, these “policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.”

“This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken – it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”

The transgendered person’s disorder, said Dr. McHugh, is in the person’s “assumption” that they are different than the physical reality of their body, their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature. It is a disorder similar to a “dangerously thin” person suffering anorexia who looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight,” said McHugh.

This assumption, that one’s gender is only in the mind regardless of anatomical reality, has led some transgendered people to push for social acceptance and affirmation of their own subjective “personal truth,” said Dr. McHugh. As a result, some states – California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts – have passed laws barring psychiatrists, “even with parental permission, from striving to restore natural gender feelings to a transgender minor,” he said.

The pro-transgender advocates do not want to know, said McHugh, that studies show between 70% and 80% of children who express transgender feelings “spontaneously lose those feelings” over time. Also, for those who had sexual reassignment surgery, most said they were “satisfied” with the operation “but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery.”

“And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a ‘satisfied’ but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs,” said Dr. McHugh.

The former Johns Hopkins chief of psychiatry also warned against enabling or encouraging certain subgroups of the transgendered, such as young people “susceptible to suggestion from ‘everything is normal’ sex education,” and the schools’ “diversity counselors” who, like “cult leaders,” may “encourage these young people to distance themselves from their families and offer advice on rebutting arguments against having transgender surgery.”

Dr. McHugh also reported that there are “misguided doctors” who, working with very young children who seem to imitate the opposite sex, will administer “puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous – even though the drugs stunt the children’s growth and risk causing sterility.”

Such action comes “close to child abuse,” said Dr. McHugh, given that close to 80% of those kids will “abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated ….”

“’Sex change’ is biologically impossible,” said McHugh. “People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”

This article originally posted on cnsnews.com.

Summer is the season during which countless parents take their children to visit our magnificent national parks. And this is a special year for our National Park Service in that August 25 marks the 100^th anniversary of the day President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill that officially recognized the National Park Service.

During this centennial year, President Barack Obama has decided that what the world needs now is a national park dedicated to sexual deviance. In his unbiblical belief that homoeroticism is something to be publicly celebrated, on June 24 President Obama proclaimed that the 1969 Stonewall riot that took place outside a seedy homosexual bar in NYC and which officially marks the start of the social and political revolution to normalize sexual deviance should be commemorated:

“I’m designating the Stonewall National Monument as the newest addition to America’s National Park System….I believe our national parks should reflect the full story of our country, the richness and diversity and uniquely American spirit that has always defined us.”

This proclamation follows as expectedly as dark night follows day from a president who has defaced the White House in the garish and misappropriated colors of the rainbow to honor the destruction of marriage by the five Supreme Court justices. About this defacement, Obama was pleased to say “how good the White House looked in rainbow colors.”

The rainbow, the symbol of God’s promise never to destroy the world for our iniquities, is now the appropriated symbol of the celebration of iniquity. The rainbow has been purloined by the perverse to represent the wholesale rejection of God’s order for maleness, femaleness, sex, and marriage. And our president, who claims to be a follower of Christ, not merely shares in the celebration of wickedness but uses the office established by God-fearing men to promote it.

Does Obama know something St. Paul did not, because while Obama celebrates faux-marriage, the creation of intentionally motherless and fatherless children, and riots in support of body- and soul-destroying sexual acts, St. Paul warns of the eternal consequences of homoeroticism:

“The men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:27).

“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” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

Was Obama’s unseemly act a proclamation of social and political liberation from unjust oppression, or was it the ordination of a gnostic/neopagan monument to the unyoking of sex from truth?

“For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God?
Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man,
I would not be a servant of Christ”
(Galatians 1:10)

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

A conservative leader is weighing in on the “bathroom wars.” Dr. Alan Carlson says making restrooms and locker rooms multi-gender is just a piece of the broader LGBTQ agenda. The founder of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society says Christians should target that agenda with their votes, legal action and by pulling their children out of government schools.

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