Written by Katrina Trinko

This isn’t OK.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to hear any of the cases on same-sex marriage means, as my colleague Ryan T. Anderson writes, that “lower court rulings that struck down state marriage laws now will go into effect, forcing the redefinition of marriage in [Indiana, Wisconsin, Virginia, Oklahoma and Utah] and potentially in other states in the 4th, 7th, and 10th circuits.”

That shouldn’t be acceptable—regardless of your position on same-sex marriage.

Voters in 31 states voted to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Liberal California voted for that in 2008, and so did red Texas in 2005. From 1998 to 2012—not say, from 1870 to 1890, or some other long-gone time period—34 states voted on defining marriage as being between a man and a woman—and only three voted against it.

And now the will of the people is being struck down by judge after judge.

If you think same-sex marriage should be legal, put it on the ballot. Ask the people of your state to decide in a vote.

Pundits have been pointing out that polls show Americans’ views on same-sex marriage have changed in recent years. “The Supreme Court confirms what we already knew: The fight over gay marriage is over,” tweeted the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, including a chart that shows higher support for than opposition to same-sex marriage.

But those polls are irrelevant. If people want to change a law they now consider to be wrong, they should do it at the ballot box, not at the courthouse. Unless, of course, the law is in clear violation of the text of the U.S. Constitution. But no one seriously thinks that when we ratified the 14th Amendment, we were voting to redefine marriage.

Americans deserve the right to choose the laws governing marriage. Everyone who values the will of the people, no matter what they think on the issue of same-sex marriage, should be decrying how it’s judges, not Americans, getting to decide this important issue.

This article was originally posted at The Daily Signal blog.

Let’s give President Barack Obama his due. Last week he announced his “It’s On Us” campaign to end sexual assault of women on college campuses. All decent people agree that the sexual assault of women is a cultural evil that we must continually work to expose and end.

While the cause of raising awareness in the hope of ending violence against women on campus is noble and critically important, Obama’s motives may be less noble and more self-serving. Cynical minds suspect this may be part of his get-out-the women-to-polling places campaign.

If that isn’t his motive, then why the deafening silence on the sexual assault of men in the military. GQ Magazine has a September article that is excruciatingly painful to read. Men tell their stories of brutal sexual assaults during their military service and the devastating life-altering aftermath.

They also share their frustration with the worse than inadequate response by the military bureaucracy, which is set-up to address sexual assaults on women but not men. The military is not adequately addressing this problem. Congress is not adequately addressing it. And President Obama certainly is not adequately addressing it, even as he addresses the sexual assault of women on campus.

Here are some stories of the stories profiled in the GQ article on an issue to which Obama could and should increase awareness (WARNING: graphic details):

• Kole Welsh, Army, 2002-07: I had actually let the assault go, because I didn’t want it to interfere with my career. I wanted to be an officer, and I just said, ‘Bad experience, won’t let that happen again.’ But there was some residual damage. A month and a half later, I was brought into a room with about nine officers and told, “You’ve tested positive [for HIV].” I was removed from the military and signed out within a day. It was a complete shock.

• Heath Phillips,Navy, 1988-89: The two main guys—their nickname was the Twin Towers. They held themselves like they were God and untouchable. They were both six feet five or above, 250 pounds. I weighed maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. As soon as the Twin Towers came near you, you instantly wanted to pee yourself.  The main attacks were at night. When you’re being dragged out of your bunk literally by your ear, you can’t fight, because they’re doing these funky things with your fingers, twisting them, and they’re ripping your mouth open, and then they got another guy that has his fingers in your nose or in your eyes to make you open your mouth. That’s what always used to bother me: I’m screaming, yelling, fighting, and nobody is even moving their curtains to look.  I went AWOL; I couldn’t take it no more. I tried hanging myself. I was living in the streets, and I got arrested shoplifting, and they sent me to the brig. Then I got sent back to the same berthing area, where they started terrorizing me again. The final straw was, I was taking a shower and these guys beat me up and raped me with a toilet brush. Medical told me I probably had a hemorrhoid. I went AWOL again, then turned myself in a couple of days later. Finally my executive officer came back [proposing] I take an other-than-honorable discharge.

• Steve Stovey: As a man, I can’t perform the way I used to. I just feel damaged. All I remember, along with the pain, is the slapping sound of being raped. I try to make love to my wife, but I can’t—I’m triggered. I’m traumatized by that sound.

• Matthew Owen, Army, 1976-80: One night I was getting ready to go into my room in the barracks when a blanket was put over my head. I heard five different male voices, which I recognized, because I had heard these voices when they harassed me every day. They beat me down onto the floor and forced my legs open. Then they took the end of a broomstick and forced it into me again and again. Each time it felt like my insides were coming out. The blood was a blessing, because it seemed to lubricate the broomstick.

And here are some deeply troubling facts from the GQ article:

• More than half of the victims of sexual assault in the military are men.
• Every day 38 men are sexually assaulted in the military.
• When a man enlists in the military, his risk of being sexually assaulted increases ten-fold.
• In sheer numbers, more men experience Military Sexual Trauma (MST) than women. Almost 14,000 men were sexually assaulted in 2012 alone.
• Sexual assault on men results in a particularly toxic form of PTSD

Men are even less likely to report sexual assault than women (which points to the inherent differences between men and women). The reasons range include shame, fear of physical retaliation, professional ruin, and social stigma.”

Here are some excerpts from Obama’s speech that launched his campaign to raise awareness of campus sexual assault:

When they finally make it onto campus, only to be assaulted, that’s not just a nightmare for them and their families; it’s not just an affront to everything they’ve worked so hard to achieve—it is an affront to our basic humanity.  It insults our most basic values as individuals and families, and as a nation.  We are a nation that values liberty and equality and justice.

…

For anybody whose once-normal, everyday life was suddenly shattered by an act of sexual violence, the trauma, the terror can shadow you long after one horrible attack.  It lingers when you don’t know where to go or who to turn to….It’s a haunting presence when the very people entrusted with your welfare fail to protect you.

…

We still don’t condemn sexual assault as loudly as we should.  We make excuses.  We look the other way.

…

It is on all of us to reject the quiet tolerance of sexual assault and to refuse to accept what’s unacceptable.”

Perhaps Obama could speak these words to and about the young men who volunteer to serve America at great personal risk and sacrifice and who, like college co-eds, deserve to be protected from the shattering violence of sexual assaults.

While the government is cleaning up the Veterans Affairs mess, they should be cleaning up this mess, and Obama should be leading the effort even if it doesn’t garner Democrats a single vote.

Western society is currently experiencing what can only be described as a moral revolution. Our society’s moral code and collective ethical evaluation on a particular issue has undergone not small adjustments but a complete reversal. That which was once condemned is now celebrated, and the refusal to celebrate is now condemned.

What makes the current moral and sexual revolution so different from previous moral revolutions is that it is taking place at an utterly unprecedented velocity. Previous generations experienced moral revolutions over decades, even centuries. This current revolution is happening at warp speed.

As the church responds to this revolution, we must remember that current debates on sexuality present to the church a crisis that is irreducibly and inescapably theological. This crisis is tantamount to the type of theological crisis that Gnosticism presented to the early church or that Pelagianism presented to the church in the time of Augustine. In other words, the crisis of sexuality challenges the church’s understanding of the gospel, sin, salvation, and sanctification. Advocates of the new sexuality demand a complete rewriting of Scripture’s metanarrative, a complete reordering of theology, and a fundamental change to how we think about the church’s ministry.

Why the Concordance Method Fails

Proof-texting is the first reflex of conservative Protestants seeking a strategy of theological retrieval and restatement. This hermeneutical reflex comes naturally to evangelical Christians because we believe the Bible to be the inerrant and infallible word of God. We understand that, as B.B. Warfield said, “When Scripture speaks, God speaks.” I should make clear that this reflex is not entirely wrong, but it’s not entirely right either. It’s not entirely wrong because certain Scriptures (that is, “proof texts”) speak to specific issues in a direct and identifiable way.

There are, however, obvious limitations to this type of theological method—what I like to call the “concordance reflex.” What happens when you are wrestling with a theological issue for which no corresponding word appears in the concordance? Many of the most important theological issues cannot be reduced to merely finding relevant words and their corresponding verses in a concordance. Try looking up “transgender” in your concordance. How about “lesbian”? Or “in vitro fertilization”? They’re certainly not in the back of my Bible.

It’s not that Scripture is insufficient. The problem is not a failure of Scripture but a failure of our approach to Scripture. The concordance approach to theology produces a flat Bible without context, covenant, or master-narrative—three hermeneutical foundations that are essential to understand Scripture rightly.

Needed:  A Biblical Theology of the Body

Biblical theology is absolutely indispensable for the church to craft an appropriate response to the current sexual crisis. The church must learn to read Scripture according to its context, embedded in its master-narrative, and progressively revealed along covenantal lines. We must learn to interpret each theological issue through Scripture’s metanarrative of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. Specifically, evangelicals need a theology of the body that is anchored in the Bible’s own unfolding drama of redemption.

Movement One — Creation

Genesis 1:26–28 indicates that God made man—unlike the rest of creation—in his own image. This passage also demonstrates that God’s purpose for humanity was an embodied existence. Genesis 2:7 highlights this point as well. God makes man out of the dust and then breathes into him the breath of life. This indicates that we were a body before we were a person. The body, as it turns out, is not incidental to our personhood. Adam and Eve are given the commission to multiply and subdue the earth. Their bodies allow them, by God’s creation and his sovereign plan, to fulfill that task of image-bearing.

The Genesis narrative also suggests that the body comes with needs. Adam would be hungry, so God gave him the fruit of the garden. These needs are an expression embedded within the created order that Adam is finite, dependent, and derived.

Further, Adam would have a need for companionship, so God gave him a wife, Eve. Both Adam and Eve were to fulfill the mandate to multiply and fill the earth with God’s image-bearers by a proper use of the bodily reproductive ability with which they were created. Coupled with this is the bodily pleasure each would experience as the two became one flesh—that is, one body.

The Genesis narrative also demonstrates that gender is part of the goodness of God’s creation. Gender is not merely a sociological construct forced upon human beings who otherwise could negotiate any number of permutations.

But Genesis teaches us that gender is created by God for our good and his glory. Gender is intended for human flourishing and is assigned by the Creator’s determination—just as he determined when, where, and that we should exist.

In sum, God created his image as an embodied person. As embodied, we are given the gift and stewardship of sexuality from God himself. We are constructed in a way that testifies to God’s purposes in this.

Genesis also frames this entire discussion in a covenantal perspective. Human reproduction is not merely in order to propagate the race. Instead, reproduction highlights the fact that Adam and Eve were to multiply in order to fill the earth with the glory of God as reflected by his image bearers.

Movement Two — The Fall

The fall, the second movement in redemptive history, corrupts God’s good gift of the body. The entrance of sin brings mortality to the body. In terms of sexuality, the Fall subverts God’s good plans for sexual complementarity. Eve’s desire is to rule over her husband (Gen. 3:16). Adam’s leadership will be harsh (3:17-19). Eve will experience pain in childbearing (3:16).

The narratives that follow demonstrate the development of aberrant sexual practices, from polygamy to rape, which Scripture addresses with remarkable candor. These Genesis accounts are followed by the giving of the Law which is intended to curb aberrant sexual behavior. It regulates sexuality and expressions of gender and makes clear pronouncements on sexual morals, cross-dressing, marriage, divorce, and host of other bodily and sexual matters.

The Old Testament also connects sexual sin to idolatry. Orgiastic worship, temple prostitution, and other horrible distortions of God’s good gift of the body are all seen as part and parcel of idolatrous worship. The same connection is made by Paul in Romans 1. Having “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles” (Rom 1:22), and having “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25), men and women exchange their natural relations with one another (Rom 1:26-27).

Movement Three — Redemption

With regard to redemption, we must note that one of the most important aspects of our redemption is that it came by way of a Savior with a body. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14; cf. Phil. 2:5-11). Human redemption is accomplished by the Son of God incarnate—who remains incarnate eternally.

Paul indicates that this salvation includes not merely our souls but also our bodies. Romans 6:12 speaks of sin that reigns in our “mortal bodies”—which implies the hope of future bodily redemption. Romans 8:23 indicates part of our eschatological hope is the “redemption of our bodies.” Even now, in our life of sanctification we are commanded to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to God in worship (Rom. 12:2). Further, Paul describes the redeemed body as a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19) and clearly we must understand sanctification as having effects upon the body.

Sexual ethics in the New Testament, as in the Old Testament, regulate our expressions of gender and sexuality.Porneia, sexual immorality of any kind, is categorically condemned by Jesus and the apostles. Likewise, Paul clearly indicates to the church at Corinth that sexual sin—sins committed in the body (1 Cor. 6:18)—are what bring the church and the gospel into disrepute because they proclaim to a watching world that the gospel has been to no effect (1 Cor. 5-6).

Movement Four — New Creation

Finally, we reach the fourth and final act of the drama of redemption—new creation. In 1 Corinthians 15:42-57, Paul directs us not only to the resurrection of our own bodies in the new creation but to the fact that Christ’s bodily resurrection is the promise and power for that future hope. Our resurrection will be the experience of eternal glory in the body. This body will be a transformed, consummated continuation of our present embodied existence in the same way that Jesus’ body is the same body he had on earth, yet utterly glorified.

The new creation will not simply be a reset of the garden. It will be better than Eden. As Calvin noted, in the new creation we will know God not only as Creator but as Redeemer—and that redemption includes our bodies. We will reign with Christ in bodily form, as he also is the embodied and reigning cosmic Lord.

In terms of our sexuality, while gender will remain in the new creation, sexual activity will not. It is not that sex is nullified in the resurrection; rather, it is fulfilled. The eschatological marriage supper of the Lamb, to which marriage and sexuality point, will finally arrive. No longer will there be any need to fill the earth with image-bearers as was the case in Genesis 1. Instead, the earth will be filled with knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

Biblical Theology Is Indispensable 

The sexuality crisis has demonstrated the failure of theological method on the part of many pastors. The “concordance reflex” simply cannot accomplish the type of rigorous theological thinking needed in pulpits today. Pastors and churches must learn the indispensability of biblical theology and must practice reading Scripture according to its own internal logic—the logic of a story that moves from creation to new creation. The hermeneutical task before us is great, but it is also indispensable for faithful evangelical engagement with the culture.

This article was originally posted at the AlbertMohler.com blog.

By Peter Sprigg

The fact that some people change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual (some spontaneously as a developmental change, some through religious counseling, and some through professional therapy) is a big problem for the homosexual movement. It seriously undermines the myth that people are “born gay and can’t change” This myth is essential to making the public believe that disapproval of (or even failure to actively affirm and celebrate) men choosing to have sex with men and women choosing to have sex with women is exactly as loathsome as “discrimination” based on race.

The organized ex-gay movement is small and poorly-funded, but it poses such an existential threat to pro-homosexual mythology that homosexual activists have mounted a furious assault upon it. The principal form this assault has taken is the introduction of laws that would ban any and all “sexual orientation change efforts” (or “SOCE”) with minors by licensed mental health providers. This idea was pioneered in California where they originally wanted a ban across the board regardless of age. However, it was concluded that this shocking violation of a long-time ethical principle of client autonomy might be too much to take, so the ban was limited to minors on the grounds of “protecting” children. Such laws have been adopted already in California and New Jersey, but similar bills died in more than a dozen other states over the last year or so.

As noted, “protection of minors” has been a key selling point in the legislatures that have considered these bills, and the threatened loss of licensing has been the legal stick employed. However, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a wealthy, left-wing, anti-Christian political advocacy group that was linked to domestic terrorism in federal court, has executed a pincer movement in New Jersey by suing SOCE providers, including unlicensed counselors who work with adults, charging “fraud” under that state’s consumer protection laws.

Most “sexual reorientation therapy” today consists of “talk therapy” — a client simply talking with a counselor about his or her feelings, experiences, relationships with parents and peers, etc. Some therapists add other positive techniques that have been validated in a variety of contexts — not just SOCE.

However, to generate opposition to SOCE, its opponents have reached back decades to techniques some therapists once used called “aversion therapy” — attempting to associate homosexual feelings with some sort of negative stimuli. No one has been able to identify a single therapist actually practicing today who uses “aversive” techniques in SOCE — but that hasn’t stopped homosexual activists from pretending that they do.

In a hearing before the New Jersey legislature, one witness in support of the ban was a young person who is a male-to-female transgender and goes by the name Brielle Goldani. Christopher Doyle is ex-gay, a therapist himself, and a founder of the ex-gay advocacy group Voice of the Voiceless. He was also present at the March 18, 2013 hearing, and described Goldani’s testimony in a piece for WorldNetDaily the following week:

QUOTE

“Twice a week I was hooked up to electrodes on my hands,” she said. “I, a child, was shocked repeatedly by people who had my parent’s permission to torture me.” Goldani, now 29, claims that she had no rights when her parents sent her away as a male teenager. She claims that the torture occurred at conversion camp called True Directions. “This is nothing more than legalized child abuse,” claimed Goldani at the hearing.

Having attended and testified at the hearing myself, I was shocked and horrified to hear about such abuse… . So I tracked down Goldani and talked to her on the phone to find out more information.

Goldani claims that an Assemblies of God Church in Columbus, Ohio, ran the True Directions conversion therapy camp:

“There were 12 boys, and 12 girls. The first Sunday I was there, I was forced to sit in their church service, which was nothing but hate speech. Then, on Monday, the heavier therapy began. We were forced to masturbate to heterosexual images and soft-core pornography, such as Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. Twice a week, my hands were hooked up to electrodes for two hours at a time while we were shown positive images such as a nuclear family, a female with children, a male construction worker and a female receptionist. I was also subjected to forced IV injections twice a week for two hours each while being made to watch negative images of what they didn’t approve of. … The injections made me vomit uncontrollably. Every Friday and Saturday evening, we were forced to go on ‘flirting dates’ where a camp counselor coached us on how to talk to the opposite sex romantically. … We were also given uniforms to wear, black pants and white shirts for boys, black skirts and white blouses for girls.”

END QUOTE

Doyle wrote in his article, “As a former homosexual and practitioner of Sexual Orientation Change Effort (SOCE) therapy, I had never heard of such inhumane treatment, except from anti-ex-gay activists who often claim thatSOCE employs such barbaric methods.” So he did further research to see if he could verify any of Goldani’s account.

The Assemblies of God in Ohio denied that any such camp existed, or that they had ever participated in such activities. The state government of Ohio could find no record that a camp named “True Directions” had ever existed there. Goldani claimed that her family’s church in New Jersey had paid for him to go to the camp for a month and a half, but the pastor of the church scoffed at the idea that they would ever have done such a thing.

Doyle did find one reference to a “gay conversion camp” called “True Directions,” though. It was part of the plot of a fictional 1999 movie called But I’m a Cheerleader, which starred drag queen RuPaul. It would be hard to conclude anything other than that Goldani took the plot of this far-fetched movie, and tried to pass it off as her own life story.

The latest debate over the issue occurred on June 27 at a committee hearing on a bill similar to the California and New Jersey measures that has been introduced in the District of Columbia. You can read my account of the hearing on the Family Research Council Blog, and my testimony on the FRC website.

One of the witnesses at that hearing who testified in support of the proposed ban was Dr. Gregory Jones, who introduced himself as a “gay identified” licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in “Affirmative LGBTQMental Health.”

In his testimony, Jones included this quote from a recent article on the SOCE bans that appeared on Timemagazine’s website on June 23, 2014:

QUOTE

“Sam Brinton says that his father first tried physical abuse to rid his young son of homosexual feelings. When that didn’t work, Brinton’s parents turned to something called reparative therapy. Some of the memories are hazy more than 10 years later, but Brinton does remember the tactics the counselor used. There was talk therapy, about how God disapproved, and there was aversion therapy, during which pictures of men touching men would be accompanied by the application of heat or ice. “It was pretty much mental torture,” Brinton says. “To this day, I still have light pain when I shake hands with another male.”

END QUOTE

I had seen the Time article — and it, in turn rang a bell. The name of Sam Brinton had first come to my attention the week before that, when a piece appeared in Politico that was authored by John Paulk. In the 1990’s and early 2000’s, John and his wife Anne were former homosexuals who worked for Focus on the Family promoting the ex-gay message. In 2003, they fled the spotlight to move to Oregon, where John opened a catering business.

John Paulk has now renounced his ex-gay advocacy and, apparently, returned to homosexuality. (Anne Paulk, his now-estranged wife remains active in the ex-gay movement.)

A sidebar article accompanied John Paulk’s piece in Politico: “Gay-Conversion Therapy: How It Works (Or Doesn’t),” By Elizabeth F. Ralph.

It included this:

QUOTE

Electroconvulsive Therapy

One former patient described his course of electroconvulsive therapy, in use today, as “The Month of Hell.” The treatment, he told the Huffington Post, “consisted of tiny needles being stuck into my fingers and then pictures of explicit acts between men would be shown and I’d be electrocuted.”

END QUOTE

This refers to Samuel Brinton, a Kansas State student whose story was reported almost three years ago in theHuffington Post:

QUOTE [emphasis added]

“I grew up as the son of Southern Baptist missionaries and without knowing what the word “gay” was (we just called them abominations) I asked my father why I was feeling attracted to my best friend, Dale. I don’t remember the second punch but I do remember waking up in the emergency room for the third time asking the doctors not to send me back and telling them that I had not fallen down the stairs again. When “punching the gay out” didn’t work we moved to conversion therapy. Being told I had AIDS and was going to die if the government found me was only the beginning. I would be strapped down with blocks of ice or heating pads placed on my hands while pictures of men holding hands were shown. The conversion ended when I told my parents I was straight to stop the electrocution by needles in my fingers while gay sex acts where shown to me. When I would later come back out to them for a second time I was told never to walk back in that house if I wanted to walk out alive.

“I tell you the story of my conversion therapy not for dramatic effect but to explain why I do what I do. I cannot let another child go through that torture because their parents think this is the only way to have a normal child.

END QUOTE

Brinton received an award from “Campus Pride,” the college LGBT group, for sharing his horror story of therapy. This report was so shocking that even some pro-“gay” media tried to verify this report — and couldn’t.

Even Wayne Besen, the most rabid “anti-ex-gay” activist, refused to use his story because it remains unverified. Here’s the full statement Besen posted in the comments section of the Queerty article which questioned Brinton’s story.

QUOTE [emphasis added]

Wayne Besen

Samuel came forward and told a story presumably in an effort to help others. There are groups like mine who would be thrilled to use his example to demonstrate the harm caused by “ex-gay” therapy. We live for real life examples like this.

However, until he provides more information to verify his experience, he makes it impossible for us to use him as an example. Indeed, it would be grossly irresponsible for us to do so.

If a group like mine puts out or promotes a story that turns out to be exaggerated or fake, the religious right would rake us through the coals and by extension the entire LGBT community. This would cast an ominous shadow on all of the legitimate ex-ex-gay testimonies that have helped so many people come out of the closet.

So, for the sake of the movement he is trying to help — it is critical that Sam reveal exactly who the therapist was that tortured him. He could do this publicly or privately, but we need more information before we can use his narrative.

We very much hope he will provide enough information so we can help people by sharing his compelling story.

Sincerely,

Wayne Besen

Truth Wins Out

Oct 11, 2011 at 8:51 pm

END QUOTE

Here is part of Brinton’s reply to Besen:

QUOTE

I was indirectly in contact with Wayne and although I know he wants me to send the information of the therapist that is simply not an option. Counselor after counselor has seen me revert to near suicidal tendencies when I try to dig deep into the memories of that time and I simply don’t have his name. I can picture him clear as day in my nightmares but his name is not there. The movement can’t use me I guess.

I have no problem with people not believing my story. It is not for me to try to prove. I don’t want to be the poster-child of the anti-conversion therapy movement since graduate school at MIT is plenty tough as it is.

. . .

Oct 14, 2011 at 2:11 am

END QUOTE

Brinton’s memory does not seem to have gotten any better since 2011, since Time reports “Some of the memories are hazy more than 10 years later.” And he seems to have dropped the claim that he was electrocuted as part of his therapy (or perhaps even Time thought that strained credulity). Yet what even Wayne Besen said would be “grossly irresponsible” (using Brinton as an example), Time is perfectly willing to do, thus making Brinton exactly what he coyly claimed he didn’t want to be — “the poster-child of the anti-conversion therapy movement.”

 Originally Posted at the Family Research Counsel Blog

Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has been doing a great job at National Review Online debunking Judge Richard Posner’s opinion striking down the Indiana and Wisconsin marriage laws for a panel of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on September 4 (see here, here, here, and here).

I will note here just one thing that jumped out at me in both the oral arguments and the opinion. Judge Posner makes the following argument (pp. 22-23 of the opinion):

Consider now the emotional comfort that having married parents is likely to provide to children adopted by same-sex couples. Suppose such a child comes home from school one day and reports to his parents that all his classmates have a mom and a dad, while he has two moms (or two dads, as the case may be). Children, being natural conformists, tend to be upset upon discovering that they’re not in step with their peers. If a child’s same-sex parents are married, however, the parents can tell the child truthfully that an adult is permitted to marry a person of the opposite sex, or if the adult prefers as some do a person of his or her own sex, but that either way the parents are married and therefore the child can feel secure in being the child of a married couple. Conversely, imagine the parents having to tell their child that same-sex couples can’t marry, and so the child is not the child of a married couple, unlike his classmates.

Judge Posner’s set-up of this hypothetical situation sounds like a demonstration of how same-sex “marriage” couldharm children raised by same-sex couples:

Suppose such a child comes home from school one day and reports to his parents that all his classmates have a mom and a dad, while he has two moms (or two dads, as the case may be). Children, being natural conformists, tend to be upset upon discovering that they’re not in step with their peers.

Perhaps it is a function of his long judicial career, but Judge Posner seems to think that it is entirely the law which will determine whether such a child experiences “comfort” or distress from such a situation. If the law says that the two women or two men raising the child cannot be “married,” the child will experience distress. But if the law says that the two women or two men raising the child are “married,” then they will experience “emotional comfort,” presumably from the knowledge that their family is just like that of their friends.

Except, even in Judge Posner’s own framing of the situation, it is not the absence of a marriage certificate that makes the children feel different from his peers. It is that “all his classmates have a mom and a dad, while he has two moms (or two dads, as the case may be).” If the child’s “two moms” or “two dads” are permitted to “marry” — well, “all his classmates” will still have “a mom and a dad,” while the child in question will still be “not in step with [his] peers” because he will still not have a mom and a dad!

Judge Posner is naïve in the extreme if he thinks that such a child would care more about whether his caregivers have a certificate from the government than about whether his family includes something as fundamental on a human level as a mother and a father.

This article was originally posted at FRCblog.com.

In this cultural moment in which half of Americans work in large corporations and the Internet disseminates information in the blink of a blinkered eye, and in light of the absolutist demands of homosexual activists for either ideological conformity or silence, what are the employment and First Amendment implications for theologically orthodox Christians?

The First Amendment guarantees the right of Americans to speak freely. This right was guaranteed in order to protect political speech without which Americans effectively lose their right to govern themselves.

Americans on both sides of the political aisle correctly assert that the right to speak freely does not guarantee the right to be free of consequences—which sounds reasonable enough.

It sounds reasonable until one notices how it’s working out in the sullied hands of homosexual activists and their ideological accomplices. The possibility that public speech on a controversial topic may result in unpleasant consequences is transmogrifying into the possibility that those who  express conservative views of homosexuality, “gender,” and marriage will have difficulty finding a job in America. “Progressives” are demanding submission to their subjective moral and political assumptions about homoeroticism and gender confusion or risk the loss of employment.

Large corporations infected by homosexual activism

Mozilla founder and CEO Brendan Eich lost his job following the revelation that he donated a pittance to the effort to protect true marriage in California. The amount of money is irrelevant. Even if he had donated $10 million to the campaign to stop the perversion of real marriage into faux-marriage, he should have been able to keep his job.

I can’t remember conservative groups pursuing a strategy that seeks to “influence” political opinion on controversial topics by targeting citizens’ employment. Did conservative groups ever demand the firing of someone who in his free time or with his own money expressed support for the redefinition of marriage?

Did defenders of life argue that CEO’s of large corporations who donate to “pro-choice”/anti-life causes be fired? And let’s remember that donating to such causes means advocating the right of one human to murder another human being.

Homosexuality-affirming activists believe that opposing the legal recognition of same-sex unions as marriages warrants firing because they presume such opposition is motivated by hatred. Protectors of life believe that preborn babies have an inherent right to live that is not lost simply because they are not fully developed, or because they suffer from physical abnormalities, or because they’re not wanted by their mothers. Conservatives believe that those who support legalized abortion are supporting murder, and yet they don’t demand that supporters of abortion be fired from their jobs. Perhaps in the twisted world of homo-activism, presumed hatred is worse than actual murder.

About half of Americans are employed by large corporations. According to an article in the Washington Post, “Over the past two decades….companies with more than 500 workers employed about 45 percent of the workforce yet contributed 65 percent of the jobs created since 1990.”

The New York Times writes this:

[I]f you define “small” as fewer than 500 people (as the federal government does, basically), you still find that half the work force is employed by large businesses. It’s even more stunning when it comes to payrolls: 57 percent of total compensation is paid out by companies of 500 or more employees, with most of that coming from the largest, those with at least 10,000 employees. And new research by the Treasury Department finds that small businesses—defined as those with income between $10,000 and $10 million, or about 99 percent of all businesses—account for just 17 percent of business income, and only 23 percent of them pay any wages at all.

Now that large corporations like Target, Apple, Nike, Facebook, eBay, Alcoa, Intel, and Morgan Stanley are taking formal, public positions in support of redefining marriage and are treating homoerotic desire (and gender confusion) as equivalent to behaviorally neutral conditions like race in their anti-discrimination policy, how long will it be before employment practices will take into account public statements in support of true marriage (or restroom usage policies that recognize biological differences)? These companies are not merely creating ad campaigns geared toward the purchasing practices of homosexuals; they’re filing amicus briefs in courts to influence judicial decisions.

Will corporate policies on sexual deviance affect First Amendment rights?

In the near future if an employee of Target or Apple (or a public high school) were to sign a petition or donate to a political campaign or organization that supports the view that marriage is a sexually complementary union, will her job be jeopardized? If she writes a letter to her local press expressing her view that marriage is inherently sexually complementary (or that public restrooms should correspond to objective biological sex), will she risk her employment? If someone forwards her letter to the busy beavers at Change.org who then start a petition urging Target to purge their organization of such a wicked letter-writer who surely must be motivated by animus that will make all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender-fluid patrons of Target  feel “unsafe,” will she be fired? (If “LGBT” people must be spared from ever feeling unsafe—by which they really mean uncomfortable—how do speech protections even work? And shouldn’t orthodox Christians whose biblical beliefs are central to their identity be similarly protected from hearing ideas that make them feel uncomfortable unsafe?)

Interracial marriage ≠ same-sex pseudo-marriage

The Left argues that businesses have no more obligation to hire or retain an employee who publicly opposes the legalization of same-sex “marriage” than they do to hire or retain an employee who opposes interracial marriage. There are two problems with this argument:

First, those who opposed interracial marriage did not argue that such unions were not marriages. They argued that such marriages were not proper. And their opposition to interracial marriage was motivated by false ideas about racial superiority and by actual hatred. While it is appropriate to make moral distinctions among volitional behaviors (e.g., homoerotic activity vs. heterosexual activity), it is inappropriate to posit some people as ontologically superior to others or to hate people.

Supporters of true marriage are making a wholly different argument—one which has nothing to do with hatred. They’re making the argument that marriage has a nature central to which is sexual difference. They’re arguing that a union of two people of the same sex is in reality not a marriage—even if the law permits it. They’re arguing that the law can no more make a non-marital same-sex union into a marriage than it can make a wholly human African American into 3/5 a person.

Most “progressives” argue that marriage is essentially and immutably binary. Conservatives argue that sexual difference is as central to marriage as the number of partners. In fact, conservatives argue that the twoness of marriage makes sense only because there are two sexes. While arguing that marriage is inherently binary,  most “progressives” fail to offer any justification for the immutable, essential magical number two.

Since the central (and most enduring, cross-cultural) constituent feature of marriage is sexual complementarity, prohibitions of interracial marriage were wrong because they prevented actual marriages from being legally recognized. Anti-miscegenation laws arbitrarily prevented the societal good of uniting men and women in true marriages.

Laws that prevent the unions of two people of the same-sex from being recognized as marriages affirm the true belief that marriage has a nature that humans don’t create but, rather, recognize and regulate. Laws that prevent two people of the same-sex from “marrying” recognize that sexual differentiation is even more integral to marriage than is blood kinship or numbers of partners. Homoerotic unions exist; they’re simply not marital unions.

The second problem with the comparison of opposition to same-sex faux-marriage to opposition to interracial marriage is that its analogical foundation is flawed. Homosexuality per se bears no points of correspondence with race (or skin color) per se.

Race per se has no subjective constitutive features (e.g., feelings), no behavioral implications, and no relevance to the public purpose of marriage that justifies government involvement. In contrast, homosexuality per se is constituted by subjective feelings and behaviors which are legitimate objects of moral assessment and which are relevant to the only purpose that justifies government involvement in marriage: children.

Though not all marriages result in children, all children have parents. Children have an inherent desire to be connected with their biological parents, and they have needs that are best fulfilled by being raised whenever possible by their biological mothers and fathers. If humans did not procreate sexually (in other words, if all the erotic activities of humans were inherently sterile), there would exist no such thing as civil marriage. If humans procreated asexually, the idea of civil marriage would no more have developed than the absurd idea of government recognition of bff’s.

Counter-insurgency needed

Post-modernism, the sexual revolution, and a television-dominated culture created the wormy subsoil into which two other cultural phenomena have taken root and grown into a felicitous political environment for homo-activism. With large corporations dominating employment in America and the Internet disseminating information, disinformation, and demagoguery with lightning speed, homosexual activists are able to advance their doctrinaire and dogmatic ideology while undermining both religious liberty and speech rights. This is a stealth insurgent assault on the First Amendment, and it’s being opposed by a feeble, emasculated counter-insurgency effort.

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Target has filed legal briefs in two court cases intended to win marriage rights for homosexuals and lesbians. The cases are being weighed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh District.

“It is our belief that everyone should be treated equally under the law, and that includes rights we believe individuals should have related to marriage,” Target Executive Vice President of Human Resources Jodee Kozlak wrote on the company’s blog.

While other companies are choosing to remain neutral in the culture war, Target is going all out to support homosexual marriage.

This is a company whose leaders make a mockery of marriage. They make a mockery of God’s Word – and every Christian in this nation  should let Target know it is out of step with the majority of Americans who support natural marriage.

Are you going to give Target your money, knowing they’ll use it to undermine your deeply held beliefs?

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to tell Target Corporation that their decision to take sides in the culture wars has cost them your patronage.

You can also call them at Call (612) 304-6073.  Urge  them to withdraw their support for homosexual marriage and stop undermining long-held American values that marriage is only between one man and one woman.

This article was originally posted at the American Family Association website.

On Tuesday August 27, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals judge, Richard Posner, grilled attorneys from Wisconsin and Indiana who were defending true marriage. Posner’s noxious bias dripped unnoticed by Slate writer, homosexual Mark Joseph Stern, who sycophantically described Posner as possessed of an “unapologetic bias toward reality and logic.” Riiight…

While “progressives” took pleasure in the judicial demeanor of Posner, describing his “withering bench slaps” and “string of brutal retorts” as “exhilarating, satisfying, hilarious, and fun”  “schadenfreude,” law professor Josh Blackman described Posner as a “bully from the bench.”

Perhaps Stern and Posner should spend some time thinking about the logical outworkings of these “progressive” propositions upon which the legal redefinition of marriage depend:

• Marriage has no inherent connection to “gender” (aka biological sex).

• Marriage has no inherent connection to procreative potential.

• Marriage is solely constituted by love.

Those, I believe, fairly summarize the assumptions or propositions that animate the political Left. So, what are the logical implications of these non-objective assumptions?

Well, if marriage has no inherent connection to either biological sex or reproductive potential, how do “progressives”—most of whom defend marriage as inherently binary—defend their prohibition of plural unions? Where do they derive their notion that marriage is the union of two people? Conservatives have a rational explanation for the number two, an explanation which, by the way, derives from reality. There are two sexes. The sexual union of one member of each sex is the type of union that naturally produces children who have needs and rights that the government has a vested interest in protecting. The government has no interest in ascertaining fertility or in compelling procreation (and certainly no interest in affirming love). Rather, the government has an interest in recognizing, regulating, and promoting the type of relationship that naturally produces children.

What accounts for progressives’ interest in limiting marriage to two people? They certainly can’t appeal to “tradition” since they, like Judge Posner, hold tradition in contempt. And they can’t appeal to the needs and rights of children because they have argued that marriage has no inherent connection to children (which makes it passing strange that Posner spent so much time discussing the needs and rights of children).

And what about the logical implications of the Left’s proposition that marriage is solely constituted by love? Aren’t three, four, or five people capable of loving one another?

Let’s take a closer look at the infamous exchange  between the interrupting interlocutor Posner and Timothy Samuelson, the Wisconsin assistant attorney general tasked with defending marriage:

Posner: What concrete factual arguments do you have against homosexual marriage?

Samuelson: Well, we have, the Burkean argument, that it’s reasonable and rational to proceed slowly.

Posner: That’s the tradition argument. It’s feeble! Look, they could have trotted out Edmund Burke in the Loving case. What’s the difference? [Note: Loving v. Virginia was a 1967 decision striking down bans on interracial marriage]… There was a tradition of not allowing black and whites, and, actually, other interracial couples from marrying. It was a tradition. It got swept aside. Why is this tradition better?

Samuelson: The tradition is based on experience. And it’s the tradition of western culture.

Posner: What experience! It’s based on hate, isn’t it?

Samuelson: No, not at all, your honor.

Posner: You don’t think there’s a history of rather savage discrimination against homosexuals?

What is most notable but least discussed—at least by “progressives”—is how Posner twisted the argument. Samuelson appealed to tradition in defending marriage as inherently sexually complementary. Posner countered by citing bans on interracial marriage as examples of when tradition was wrong. Then Samuelson argued that tradition (i.e., the traditional view of marriage as sexually complementary) is based on experience, and Posner, either due to a failure in close listening or to being deafened by his own bias, declaimed, “What experience! It’s based on hate isn’t it?” Samuelson, referring to the traditional view of marriage as sexually complementary, disagreed with Posner regarding this tradition being based on hate. Posner responded with the non sequitur: “You don’t think there’s a history of rather savage discrimination against homosexuals?” Posner’s question was utterly irrelevant, since Samuelson clearly was not referring to the “tradition” of banning interracial marriage.

Was Posner suggesting that tradition is absolutely and always devoid of value and at odds with truth? Are our current traditions devoid of value and at odds with truth? Does the fecklessness of some traditions invalidate all traditions? Shouldn’t we discriminate between good and bad traditions? Shouldn’t we allow for the possibility that some traditions have value in the same way that some legal precedents have value despite the fact that others are informed by ignorance, irrationality, and even hatred?

The good news is the best arguments in favor of retaining sexual complementarity in the legal definition of marriage have little to do with tradition and everything to do with logic and reality. Unfortunately, these arguments were not well-articulated by the two attorneys defending marriage, which is a problem all too common among many conservative attorneys, politicians, and pundits.

Since Posner suggested that bans on interracial marriage are analogous to so-called bans on same-sex “marriage,” a further discussion of the weakness of his analogy would have been helpful. Such a discussion would lead to the larger question that too few in society—including Posner—discuss, which is, “What is marriage?”

Posner, who Stern reveres for his grounding in logic and reality, asked this demagogic question of Samuelson:

Think back to when you were six. Suppose you’ve been adopted by same-sex parents. You come home one day from school, and you say, “You know, all the other kids in my class, they have a mom and a dad. I just have two dads (or two moms), and you know, what’s that about?” And suppose the parents say, “Well, you know, in our society an adult can marry a person of the opposite sex or a person of the same sex. But you know it’s marriage in both cases. So, your classmates, their parents are married. Your parents are married.”

….Now contrast that with a situation where the parents say to the child, “Well, you know, we’re your parents, but we’re not allowed to get married.” Which do you think is better for the psychological health and welfare of this child: to have a married same-sex couple or an unmarried?

What is remarkable is the absence of logic in Posner’s languid, intellectually vacant question, which is nothing more than an appeal to emotion.

Without a single argument or a definition of health and welfare (or their corollary, “harm”), Posner implies that the harm done to this child rests with marriage laws rather than the adults who have adopted this child, intentionally denying him or her a mother or a father.

Posner’s hypothetical scenario ignored the more essential and prior harm done to children acquired by homosexuals. Here’s a question for Posner: Which would be better psychologically for a child, to be raised by a mother and father or to be denied either a mother or father?

Posner was suggesting that marriage must be redefined by jettisoning the most fundamental feature of marriage (i.e., sexual complementarity) so that young children don’t feel bad about the volitional choices the adults raising them have made. The answer to the problem of children being denied a mother and father, however, is not to create a legal fiction that treats marriage as if it has no connection to sexual complementarity.

Further, Posner’s astonishing “argument,” if consistently applied, would preclude the expression of all moral propositions that make children “feel bad,” including any moral propositions codified in law.

The issue that Posner leaps over is that marriage actually has a nature that society merely recognizes. Society does not create marriage out of whole cloth. Most “progressives” even acknowledge that truth every time they assert that marriage is composed of two people. They believe that one of the inherent and immutable constituent features of marriage is its binariness.

Conservatives agree with “progressives” that marriage has a nature. We simply disagree on what that nature entails. Conservatives argue that sexual complementarity is the central constituent feature of marriage without which a relationship is not a marriage. In fact, it is the twoness of the sexes that accounts for the twoness of marriage in both reality and the law.

Posner goes on to say that “Indiana provides, and the federal government is carried along with it, very substantial and tangible benefits to a married couple. Now, don’t the children of a married couple, whether same-sex or opposite sex, don’t they benefit? The married parents are better off. They have all sorts of benefits….Doesn’t that make the kids better off?”

Here’s where Posner’s reductive argument fails: First, though children may benefit financially, they are harmed in other ways. Second, the financial benefits that would redound to the children of “married” same-sex couples no more justify the jettisoning of sexual complementarity from the legal definition of marriage than would the financial benefits that would redound to children being raised by siblings or polyamorists justify the jettisoning of the criterion regarding blood kinship or numbers of partners from the legal definition of marriage.

From his high and mighty perch, Posner was able to pose questions without ever having to answer any. Here are slightly altered forms of the questions that Posner asked of the two attorneys defending marriage and over which his fans slaver. Perhaps Posner could publicly share his responses:

1. There’s been a tradition of banning plural marriages and marriages between siblings. Those bans are based on hate, aren’t they? You don’t think there’s a history of rather savage discrimination against polyamorists, polygamists, and siblings who love each other?

2. Isn’t allowing plural marriages or incestuous marriages better for the psychological health and welfare of children being raised by polygamists, polyamorists, or close blood relatives (whether homosexual or heterosexual)?

3. Why do you prefer adoption by couples to adoption by groups of more than two? Why do you prefer adoption by people not closely related by blood to homosexual siblings who love each other? Why punish children whose parents happen to be polyamorists or close blood relatives? Why do you want children being raised by polyamorists to be worse off, because they don’t have the financial and psychological benefits of having married parents?

4. Isn’t it much better for kids to be adopted? If you allow plural marriage, you’re going to have more adopters, right? You should be wanting to enlist people as adopters.

5. Who is being helped by bans on plural unions? How is society helped by plural union bans? No one is trying to force polyamorists into binary marriage. So, what is the harm of allowing these people to marry those they love? Does it hurt binary marriage?

I will add this question: Why should marriage be limited to people in relationships characterized by romantic/erotic love as opposed to platonic love or no love at all? How would society be harmed if two adult brothers in a platonic relationship were to “marry”? If these two brothers were to adopt children, how would their children be harmed if they were to be able to marry? How would society be harmed?

Posner’s words oozed arrogance and ignorance. Just another drop of arsenic into the water that America drinks like Kool-Aid.

 Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet
With Eric Metaxas on Sept. 19th!

Early Bird Specials Expire on August 18th!

Holy Family Parish in Inverness, Illinois has been at the center of yet another controversy spawned by the unholy effort to impose a “progressive” sexuality ideology on the entirety of society, including churches. Holy Family recently fired its choir director, Colin Collette, following his Facebook announcement of his intention to “marry” his same-sex partner, William Nifong, a Chicago high school teacher.

Following his firing, a church meeting drew a large and impassioned crowd. What, you may ask, inflamed the passions of hundreds of parishioners? Was it the unholy union of a church leader, a union which violates both Scripture and Catholic doctrine?

Was it the indefensible acquiescence of church leaders to the serious and unashamed embrace of sin by Collette who says that church leaders knew he was homosexual and that he was in a same-sex relationship: “‘This has not been a secret,’ said Collette, who held the job at Holy Family for 17 years. ‘My partner has read for the church at Mass.…We have been living together for five years.’”

No. What inflamed the passions of many parishioners was the removal of Collette for his unapologetic embrace of sexual perversion—a sin that the God these parishioners claim to serve detests. Yes, even while loving his creation, God detests much of what we do, and some of the things we do, he detests more than others.

Chicago Tribune reporter Lisa Black quoted a Holy Family church cantor who resigned from his choir  position in protest, arguing that other “prominent ‘sinners’ in Christian history” had “retained high-ranking positions and questioning why a gay couple’s marriage is any different.”

Well, I’ll take a stab at that question.

First, the neglect of biblical discipline on one occasion does not justify neglect of biblical discipline on others.

Second, there is a difference between people who sin and repent and those who embrace sin while calling it non-sin.

The church is necessarily composed of sinners because that’s the only kind of human that exists. But failing to live perfect lives is wholly different from embracing, affirming, and celebrating sin as central to one’s identity—which is what Collette is doing. Church member Bob Garbacz said that “‘[Collette’s] just a pillar of that community. For the church to say you can’t be here because of this rule is ludicrous to us.’”

Of course, the belief that marriage is inherently a union between one man and one woman is not just a “rule.” It’s a reality established by God, affirmed by his son, and taught in his Word.

From all accounts, Collette seems to be a lovely man with many good qualities. But the presence of admirable qualities does not mitigate the offense of embracing and affirming sin. Nor do his admirable qualities render him automatically suitable for a leadership position.

This letter which appeared in the Chicago Tribune epitomizes the truly foolish thinking that has infected the minds of many contemporary Christians:

I am a member of Holy Family Parish in Inverness; I serve humbly in a ministerial and voluntary role. The unfairness and brutality of this recent decision to fire our choir director rests squarely at the doorstep of the Catholic hierarchy.

Hundreds of years ago, the Catholic hierarchy condemned the scientific community for speaking the truth; men were imprisoned and forced to recant truths about astronomy. Too many years later, for its errors the Catholic hierarchy apologized to Galileo’s descendants.

Today, with the issue of gay marriage, the Catholic hierarchy claims to know more, once again, than the scientific community–medical doctors and psychologists who speak the truth about human sexuality. And I believe one day, soon I pray, the Catholic hierarchy–for its ignorance and arrogance–will apologize.

Our challenge as Catholics will be to forgive them.

—Bill Leece, Schaumburg

So many errors, so little time:

1. The proximate cause of the decision to fire the choir director rests at the doorstep of the Catholic hierarchy. The ultimate cause is the ultimate law-giver: God. Scripture teaches with unequivocal clarity that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Both the Old and New Testaments teach that homoerotic activity is profoundly sinful and abhorrent to God. The New Testament teaches that those who engage in homoerotic activity—among other sins—will not see the kingdom of God. The New Testament teaches that church leaders must live godly lives and that church members who are involved in serious sin for which they refuse to repent must be disciplined. Church discipline involves not just removal from church leadership but also when necessary expulsion from fellowship.

2. Church discipline for the unrepentant embrace of serious sin is painful and difficult, but it is neither unfair nor brutal. Failure to engage in proper, biblically-prescribed church discipline constitutes disobedience and puts at risk the eternal lives of those who embrace and affirm sin. Such dereliction of one of the most difficult ecclesiastical duties is unfair and brutal.

3. Comparing the actions of the Catholic Church on matters related to hard science to the actions of the contemporary church on matters related to sexual morality and marriage is foolish. The Bible was never intended to be a science textbook and does not address matters related to the facts of astronomy. In contrast, the Bible has much to say about both sexual morality and marriage. I wonder if Mr. Leece challenges other biblical teachings on sexual morality.

Further, neither medical doctors nor psychologists have anything substantive to contribute as medical doctors and psychologists on the morality of homoerotic activity or the nature of marriage. Those issues stand far outside the purview of their expertise. From medical doctors, we can learn about the pathology of anal sex and the natural and inherent sterility of same-sex unions. But the professional education of doctors and psychologists no more prepares them for determining the morality of particular sexual activities or the ontology of marriage than does the training of architects or chefs.

All Christians—and especially church leaders—who proclaim and promote as righteousness that which God abhors will one day beg for forgiveness, but not from their fellow Christians.

By Alastair Roberts

The sociologist Mark Regnerus recently published a piece for the Witherington Institute’s Public Discourse, suggesting that support for same-sex marriage in some Christian circles correlates to broader shifts in morality surrounding sexuality and relations. Survey respondents were asked to declare their level of agreement with seven statements relating to the issues of pornography, cohabitation, no-strings-attached sex, the duty of staying in a marriage, extramarital sex, polyamorous relationships, and abortion. The results illustrated pronounced fault lines between those committed to historic Christian stances on sexual morality and supporters of same-sex marriage.

As conservative Christians, we often see such data and reach for one or both of two related narratives: the narrative of the rejection of morality and the narrative of the slippery slope. I’m convinced both approaches typically oversimplify matters and obscure the reality.

Within the narrative of the rejection of morality, those who abandon an orthodox Christian stance on sexual morality cast off all external restraint and moral norms and are subject only to the dictates of their own sinful nature. As the stars of the moral constellations are extinguished in their heavens, they navigate the pitch guided by the unprincipled light of their individual wills, doing only what is right in their own eyes. Should it surprise us that such persons are widely supportive of abortion and cohabitation?

For the slippery slope narrative, there is an inherent instability to error and, given time, the rejection of biblical truth in one area will lead to its rejection in a host of others. This narrative is employed by those who argue that support for same-sex marriage will eventually lead to support for polygamy, incest, paedophilia, and bestiality. Even if biblical morality isn’t abandoned wholesale, it will be gradually eroded. Those advocating a slippery slope narrative often present empirical evidence illustrating the steady abandonment of Christian truth among those who took a precipitous first step.

Elements of Truth

Both of these narratives contain elements of truth. In many of the moral shifts we are witnessing, the individual will holds privileged status, empowered to reject various higher authorities or bend them to its inclination. We also often witness the (d)evolution of moral commitments over time, seeing how pulling one thread can lead to a larger moral fabric unravelling.

Yet there are problems too. The rejection-of-morality narrative doesn’t do justice to the fact that most who abandon orthodox Christian morality don’t do so for a willful moral anarchy. Advocates of the slippery slope narrative often presume rather than demonstrate that the rejection of position A will eventually lead to support for position B. Relatively little evidence is forthcoming to substantiate claims that support for same-sex marriage will lead to support for things such as bestiality or paedophilia. In fact, opposition to certain sinful acts, especially those of coercive abuse, may even be intensified.

The elements of truth in both narratives can be retained and considerably strengthened when we appreciate that the shift we’re witnessing is not the abandonment of all morality but a shift to a new moral system, one with its roots firmly within the philosophical tradition of liberalism. This new moral system is loosely coherent, and its underlying principles will work like yeast through the dough of our moral vision. Rather than advocating mere amorality, it forcefully presses moral claims against Christian sexual and relational ethics: for this moral system, Christian morality isn’t just wrong, it is immoral.

Until we understand this new morality on its own terms, we’ll be unable to offer effective responses to it.

Five Core Principles

The following are some of the core principles of the new sexual and relational morality:

First, sexual acts don’t have intrinsic meanings or purposes. They don’t relate to a deeper natural order, which we must honor and not violate. Their meaning is merely constructed, by society and the persons engaging in them. Sexual relations between a man and a woman need not involve the natural significance of making them “one flesh,” with all that entails. “Meaningless” sex is a genuine possibility.

Second, our sexuality is a subjective sense and intrinsic to our self-identity. Provided no harm is caused to others, we have a duty of care for ourselves to realize and express our desired sexual identities, even when this may involve measures such as sexual reassignment surgery. As members of a society, we also have a duty to ensure the sexual identities of our neighbors are affirmed and supported. Opposition to nonmarital sexual relations, or the expectation a person should remain in a marriage for the rest of their life (even though it may be sexually unfulfilling), are two Christian positions in tension with this principle of sexual morality.

Third, sexual agents are autonomous, rights-bearing individuals. Sexual relations are therefore mutually enhancing arrangements. Appropriate relations presuppose the partners are equal in their agency and there are no significant imbalances of power between them. For those who have developed this principle, traditional forms of marriage can cause discomfort. Such forms of marriage have typically recognized the existence of some degree of inequality of power between husband and wife (e.g., physically, economically, socially), harnessing male powers for loving and responsible service rather than presenting men and women as autonomous individuals facing each other with equal bargaining power. They have also placed limits on individuals’ and couples’ sexual choices, expecting lifelong exclusivity and commitment even against their private desires. Much of this restraint has been for the sake of children, who by the nature of their existence confound liberal concepts of the person and social relations.

Fourth, freely given consent is the watchword for sexual relations. Where a relationship between given parties is consensual, few if any reasonable objections can be raised against it. When advocates of traditional Christian ethics oppose consensual same-sex relations, for instance, they violate this strongly held moral principle and threaten both the rights and identities of other sexual agents.

Fifth, beyond the prevention of harm, sexual relations should be freed from social policing and constraint, from norms and from stigmas. While marriage may grant public recognition and affirmation to a couple, each couple should be freed to practice marriage as they choose, and no couple should be expected to get married. But Christianity has always sanctioned certain sexual relations and condemned others, treating sexual relations as matters of public and communal concern and thereby falling afoul of this principle too.

Instinctive Appeal

It’s imperative we appreciate the instinctive appeal of these moral principles to most persons within our society. These principles spring out of the liberal tradition and its definition of personhood, a tradition that has decisively shaped our politics, our economics, and our society’s ethics more broadly. As the assumptions grounding these sexual ethics are so pervasive in our society, and even in much conservative Christianity, we often lack the resources to present a principled challenge to them. The “thou shalt not” of biblical authority is erected as little more than a last-ditch resistance, a dam against the encroachment of principles we have no means of neutralizing, as we have imbibed them so fully. The Scriptures, however, have a far more compelling and substantial alternative vision to offer us, one that could inoculate us against this ersatz morality.

At the outset I questioned the typical narratives offered to explain such shifts—the narrative of the rejection of morality and the narrative of the slippery slope. I suggested that a careful account of the new morality would provide us with a far more illuminating framework. We are now in a position to see how it does so.

In response to the narrative of the rejection of morality, we have seen the replacement of Christian morality by an alternative form. The absolute moral anarchism this narrative envisages doesn’t materialize. However, we do see an elevation of the individual will over against the natural order and divine and social norms, rendering individual self-realization a more central moral end. The narrative of the slippery slope typically lacks a sufficient account of why the rejection of the historic Christian position on same-sex relations will often be accompanied by the rejection of specific further positions, while leaving others intact. When we appreciate that the shift is occurring through the gradual outworking of these principles of a new moral system, the logic will become clearer, as will the positions under threat. For instance, the principles of this moral system will generally produce strong moral opposition to paedophilia, which is seen to involve harm, significant imbalance of power, and the lack of capacity for informed consent. In contrast, the principles offer little resistance to consensual polyamorous relationships.

Armed with a firmer grasp of this new morality, we will be better able both to interpret and also to predict its movements.

Originally posted at The Gospel Coalition

Target has missed its mark once again. Last week the company took a shot at marriage and families by signing an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in opposition to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Target joined other mega companies such as Starbucks, Google, Microsoft, CBS, Time Warner and Nike in support of same-sex “marriage.”

Executive Vice President and Human Resources Chief, Jodee Kozlak, gave the company’s position in a public letter.

It is our belief that everyone should be treated equally under the law, and that includes rights we believe individuals should have related to marriage.

Without getting into the specifics of a court case, this brief evaluates the issues created by states that both prohibit same-sex marriage and also refuse to recognize marriages that were conducted legally in other states. This position is particularly challenging for a large organization that operates nationally, such as Target. At Target, we have long offered comprehensive, competitive benefits to our LGBT team members and their families, often above what is legally required. We continue to do so today because we believe doing so is right for our team and for our business. But current laws — in places like Wisconsin and Indiana that are addressed in this brief – make it difficult to attract and retain talent. These disparate laws also create confusing and complicated benefits challenges across multiple states.

We believe that everyone – all of our team members and our guests – deserve to be treated equally. And at Target we are proud to support the LGBT community.

And there you have it. Do you want your hard hard-earned money to advance destructive liberal ideology? As more and more people, companies, celebrities, teachers and lawmakers draw a clear line in the sand, it’s our children and future generations that are being impacted. Many schools and teachers have already adopted homosexual-affirming curricula unbeknown to many parents. And many children, still in the process of developing their values, are being indoctrinated into an anti-Christian worldview.

Target also funds the Chicago Foundation for Women, an organization that strongly supports and lobbies for abortion protection and advancement.

TAKE ACTION: Contact Target to express your disappointment with their latest decision. Click here to send a message to Target (scroll down to see the full form) or call their customer service (800) 591-3869 and corporate offices (612)304-6073.

For those who want to send a stronger message by cutting up your charge card, send it with a note to: Target Corporate Headquarters, Attn: Chairman and CEO Brian Cornell: 1000 Nicolett Mall, Minneapolis, MN 55403.

There are times when you have to read something two, three, maybe even four times to make sure it’s actually serious and not a joke—and even then you’re not certain. Such was the case with Christin Scarlett Milloy’s recent article for Slate, breathlessly titled “Don’t Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn.”

Don’t let the doctor do what?

Here’s how Milloy describes it:

“It’s called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It’s a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring’s genitals.”

Yes, she’s saying—she’s actually, seriously saying—that a doctor who tells you the sex of your baby could be doing the baby irreparable harm, by not taking into consideration that in later years, that child might not wantto belong to that sex.

In fact, Milloy suggests that infant gender assignment, that practice that takes place after every birth, is playing “Russian roulette with your baby’s life.”

Why am I taking this kookiness seriously, even enough to mention it? Because I think we need to recognize what got this culture to the point of such absurdity—and where we might go from here.

For years now we’ve been hearing ever louder arguments that we need to free children and everyone else from the tyranny of gender, with all the practical implications that argument has—laws that say that boys can use girls’ bathrooms if they identify as girls, for instance. Or parents who trot out their five-year-old daughter and announce that she’s decided to be a boy.

There’s a reason, as my friend Karen Swallow Prior points out in a recent article at Think Christian, that “Facebook offers 56 gender options for user profiles.” No kidding.

Prior goes on, “While [Milloy’s] article is clearly intended to be shocking, its argument has, in fact, been a long time coming. Theories about the ‘constructedness’ (as opposed to givenness) of human sexuality … have been trickling down from the ivory tower for decades.”

And not just trickling down from the ivory tower. How about trickling down from the highest court in the land? Chuck Colson often said that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v Casey was a watershed cultural moment. “At the heart of liberty,” Kennedy wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

As Chuck always said, “Worldview matters.” Ideas have consequences. What Chuck rightly called “Justice Kennedy’s absurd statement” sums up the spirit of our age.

And Milloy’s article is simply taking all this to its logical conclusion.

And even people who get Milloy’s logic are appalled with that conclusion. Like the commenter who wrote: “I totally think it’s wrong and weird to push a child to like ‘boy things’ or ‘girl things,’ and I’d genuinely try to be open and accepting if my children turned out to be transgendered. That being said . . . this article is bonkers, right? [It’s] not just me?”

To that commenter and the others who expressed similar sentiments, I would say: It is bonkers, and no, it’s not just you. But you may have helped us reach this point, whether you meant to or not.

Maybe, in the long run, we’ll all have cause to thank Christin Scarlett Milloy for ripping away the blinders and making people face facts. Maybe, unwittingly, she’s brought us to the tipping point we so desperately need to reach.

Great resources for further reading:

Don’t Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn
Christin Scarlett Milloy | Slate | June 26, 2014

It’s a (tbd)!
Karen Swallow Prior | Think Christian | July 2, 2014

Bathroom Wars: Potty Politics
Chuck Colson | BreakPoint.org | June 6, 2008

An Experimental Casualty
John Stonestreet | ThePointRadio.org | June 16, 2014

‘I am Ryland — the story of a male-identifying little girl . . .’
Lindsay Leigh Bentley| blog | June 30, 2014

Gender Matters
Chuck Colson | BreakPoint.org |June 21, 2011

The Image of God and Gender
Dr. Glenn Sunshine | The Colson Center | June 16, 2010

This article was originally posted at the BreakPoint.org website.

According to a 2011 Gallup poll, Americans thought that 25 percent of the population was gay (meaning one out of every four people), while those aged 18-29 put the figure at closer to 30 percent (meaning almost one in every three people). The reality is that less than 2 percent of the population is gay (meaning fewer than one in 50 people), and many gay leaders know this is true.

People of America, you have been duped.

For many years, we were told that “one in every 10 Americans” was gay, a figure based on the massively flawed 1948 study of Alfred Kinsey. (Kinsey actually relied on data from male prisoners to come up with his statistics.)

Even though gay activists knew the figure was inflated, they used it as a convenient lie, since, as two leading gay strategists noted in the late 1980s, “there is strength in numbers.” (For details, go here.) As expressed by a gay leader a few days ago, “The truth is, numbers matter, and political influence matters.”

In other words, if Americans realized that less than 2 percent of the population was gay rather 10 percent (let alone 25 percent), they would have a very different view of “gay rights.”

To be sure, it is wrong to bully or oppress or mistreat anyone based on gender or ethnicity or romantic attractions, so that is not the question. And whether gays are 1 percent of the population or 90 percent, they should not be mistreated.

But you don’t overhaul the legal system to the point of attacking freedoms of speech, conscience, and religion based on the sexual and romantic desires of a tiny percentage of the population, nor do you engage in a massive social experiment, like redefining marriage, because of a statistically tiny group of people.

Back in 2003, in their official brief in the landmark Lawrence v. Texas U.S. Supreme Court decision, a major coalition of 31 gay and pro-gay organizations used the figures of 2.8 percent of the male population and 1.4 percent of the female population as identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

This means that these activist organizations were fully aware that the 10 percent figure was completely bogus and yet they never protested when that figure was used to advance their cause. Why expose such a useful lie?

In 2011, UCLA law school’s Williams Institute released a study done by Dr. Gary J. Gates, who serves as the Williams Distinguished Scholar at the Charles R. Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy. His official bio also states that, “Dr. Gates co-authored The Gay and Lesbian Atlas and is a recognized expert on the geography and demography of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender  population. … Many national and international media outlets regularly feature his work.”

According to Dr. Gates, just 1.7 percent of the population identifies as gay, with about the same figure identifying as bisexual.

Contrast this with an informal poll I conducted while speaking at a Christian youth conference last month, asking these committed young people what percentage of the population was gay. (Some of these kids were home schooled and most seemed less aware of the more notorious cable TV shows, so they were less worldly wise than your average young people.) The first teen answered, “Thirty percent.” The second said, “Forty percent.”

Where in the world did they get such ridiculous figures? You can thank the media for that, by which I mean the sitcoms, dramas and movies along with the major news outlets. (For an enlightening Pew Research survey, go here.)

But this is where things get very interesting. For years gay activists worked to get a sexual-orientation question on the CDC’s National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a document of major importance in both government policy and public perception.

That question was included in the 2013 survey, and the results, released last month, made for shocking story lines: “1.6 percent of adults self-identify as gay or lesbian, and 0.7 percent consider themselves bisexual.”

These figures approximated the ones used by conservative leaders for years, because of which we were mocked as liars and vilified as haters. Now the government confirmed what we knew to be true.

Gay and lesbian leaders weren’t happy with the results, with Dr. Scout, director of the nonprofit CenterLink’s Network of LGBT Health Equity, stating, “If we really are 2 percent vs. 4 percent, it means people are going to say, ‘OK, I’m only going to care half as much.'”

How about changing that to, “If we really are 2 percent vs. 25 percent, people are going to say, ‘OK, I’m only going to care one-twelfth as much.'” And take note: Dr. Scout only claimed that 4 percent were gay.

Bisexual leaders were concerned as well, with Ellyn Ruthstrom, president of the Bisexual Resource Center in Boston, opining, “For such a respected survey as the NHIS to produce such a small number is a blow.”

“It’s just going to make it harder for us when we’re going out and talking to people about the bisexual population,” she said. “We have a real hard time already with people not taking the bisexual identity seriously.”

But it gets more interesting still. An article in the Washington Post entitled, “Gay rights groups dispute federal survey’s estimate of population,” notes that the 2013 National Adult Tobacco Survey came up with results that “more resembled what gay-rights groups had expected. It found that 3.5 percent of Americans considered themselves gay, lesbian or bisexual, with 1.9 percent labeling themselves gay or lesbian, and 1.6 percent identifying as bisexual.”

This means that gay-rights groups knew full well that, rather than being one in 10, their numbers were closer to one in 50, with fewer than one in 60 identifying as bisexual.

The truth is that America has been lied to and duped, and gay activists have been complicit in the deception, if not actively leading the way in the ruse. With the new survey out, it’s time to expose the lies.

The reality is that fewer than one in 50 Americans identify themselves as gay, out of which only a minority wants to be “married.”

How foolish, then, to redefine marriage, restrict freedoms of conscience, speech, and religion, and engage in a massive social experiment based on such a tiny percentage of the population.

We won’t be duped again.

This article was originally posted on the ChristianPost.com website.

This is a must-see short video clip to help everyone understand how the debate about same-sex “marriage” is not about equality or discrimination. Ryan T. Anderson is from the Heritage Foundation. Please forward to your email database and networks and share below on social media.

Ryan T. Anderson will be the keynote speaker at the September 24th banquet for Catholic Citizens of Illinois.  The event will be held in Oak Brook, Illinois.  Click HERE for more information.

The first-ever major U.S. Government survey to present “nationally representative data on sexual orientation” finds that only 1.6 percent of Americans identify as “gay” or “lesbian,” while .7 percent identify as “bisexual.” This is about considerably less than the much-ballyhooed, decades-old LGBT claim that 10 percent of society is “gay.”

Almost 98 percent of the 35,557 survey respondents identified themselves as “straight” or “not gay,” according to the survey by the federal National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). It also found significant health and behavior disparities between heterosexuals and self-described gays, lesbians and bisexuals. For example, the latter were much more likely to be heavy drinkers than straights.

So much for ‘10 percent’

The 2.3 percent gay-lesbian-bisexual figure is far below the “10 percent gay” number that has been advanced for decades by homosexual activists and their allies—dating back to the discredited sex research of Alfred Kinsey, who vastly over-sampled sexual adventurers and deviants (including criminals). The “10 Percent” ploy suggested homosexuality was far more common—and hence “normal”–than it actually was. Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, homosexual authors of the influential 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in 90s (and relying on Kinsey’s fraudulent estimates), demonstrate how the myth was used for PR purposes:

If we must…pick a specific percentage for propaganda purposes, we may as well stick with the solidly conservative figure suggested by Kinsey decades ago: taking men and women together, at least 10% of the populace has demonstrated its homosexual proclivities so extensively that the proportion may reasonably be called ‘gay.’….

Straights do not appreciate that, with at least one-tenth of the public extensively involved in it, the practice of homosexuality may be a more commonplace activity in America than, say, bowling (6%), jogging (7%), golfing (5%), hunting (6%), reading drugstore romance novels (9%), or ballroom dancing (2%) on a regular basis. (Ballroom dancing—not that’s abnormal.)…

You should grasp clearly why America’s persistent underestimation of the number of homosexuals in its citizenry and core institutions is so dangerous to the cause of civil rights….Literally, the more the better. As Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin explain dryly in their classic study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male

“To those who believe, as children do, that conformance should be universal, any departure from the rule becomes immorality. The immorality seems particularly gross to an individual who is unaware of the frequency with which exceptions to the supposed rule actually occur.”

Thus, when it comes to fighting the charge that homosexuality is statistically abnormal hence immoral, there is strength in numbers. [pp. 16-17, emphasis theirs]

Here I call it a myth, but the defiance with which homosexual activists like Kirk and Madsen so aggressively promulgated their “10 percent gay” factoid suggests that it could more aptly be called a lie, perhaps a useful political lie—which is to say, propaganda. (Another LGBT activist distortion is the oft-repeated claim that homosexuals, and now transgenders, are “born that way” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.)

For example, Kevin Jennings, the founder of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, and a former Obama Department of Education appointee, titled one of his books, “One Teacher in Ten” (see graphic above)—which is far more compelling, from a “gay” activist perspective, than “One Teacher in 45.”

Of course, it didn’t help the cause of accuracy that “mainstream” media organs like the Washington Post routinely repeated the bogus 10-percent figure in their homosexuality-related articles, as if it were fact. Conservative efforts to correct the powerful “10 percent” myth often fell on deaf media ears.

To this day, some LGBT activists and straight, liberal allies maintain that “10 percent” of the population of the United States, or any society for that matter, is “gay” or bisexual/transgender. Given the new NHIS data, which confirms previous surveys that put the “gay” population at 1-3 percent, and no higher than 5 percent, this claim is as tendentious as it is absurd.

[To read about two other studies confirming low population percentages for homosexuals, see this report on a 2011 Williams Institute survey that found that 1.7 percent of the U.S. adult population is “gay or lesbian”; also see this account by Paul Cameron’s group, Family Research Institute, of an older study by the liberal Alan Guttmacher Institute, which “interviewed over 3,300 men throughout the country in 1991, [and]] found that only 2.3 percent of those interviewed admit to a same-sex experience in the last ten years; only 1.1 percent say they have been exclusively gay.”]

NHIS: the Gold Standard of population data

The National Center for Health Statistics is a branch of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the thoroughly-tested methods used for its ongoing “National Health Interview Survey” (NHIS) make it a trusted source of population data. [I will discuss those methods and the challenges of gathering survey information about homosexuality in Part Two of this AFTAH report.] This survey, based on 2013 interviews, was the first NHIS to report on “sexual orientation’ data; it states:

NHIS is an annual multipurpose health survey conducted continuously throughout the year and serves as a primary source of health data on the civilian noninstitutionalized population of the United States. Data are collected by trained interviewers with the U.S. Census Bureau using computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), a data collection method in which an interviewer meets with respondents face-to-face to ask questions and enter the answers into a laptop computer. When necessary, interviewers may complete missing portions of the interview over the telephone.

The NHIS report containing questions about homosexuality and bisexuality–but not transgenderism and transsexuality–is the result of a hard-fought political victory achieved years ago by “gay” activists to include homosexuality-related questions in federal surveys.

Having won that victory, LGBT activists now might not want to face the results. Some are already complaining that the NCHS survey is inaccurate—falling back on their usual claim that many homosexuals and bisexuals go uncounted because they are afraid to reveal their sexual status to interviewers. [See the comments at the bottom of this Huffington Post article and see this essay on the pro-LGBT site Bilerico.] However, in a culture that increasingly celebrates homosexual, bisexual and transgender identities and behavior, such reasoning pulls less and less weight.

Dispelling the propaganda

Testifying to the enormous amount of pro-homosexual propaganda and LGBT-sympathetic media-messaging in the culture, Gallup shockingly revealed that the average American in 2011 speculated that 25 percent of society was “gay or lesbian,” and 35 percent thought that more than 25 percent of Americans were homosexual. The popular myth of a massive homosexual population evidently had been growing for years—perhaps taking off in the Clinton-era “gay 90s.” Even back in 2002, a quarter of those polled in a similar Gallup survey said they thought “more than 25 percent” of the population was homosexual; the average American man in 2002 believed that 21.4 percent of society was “gay” and the average woman that 22 percent of society was homosexual—more than 10 times the actual numbers.

It is fair to surmise—at least with regard to the prevalence of homosexuality—that the notion of widespread “gayness” in the culture is largely a media creation. Surely the fact that homosexuality is much more common in big cities, which dominate the media and pop culture, contributes greatly to the false perceptions. Also, the ridiculously high estimates of homosexual population in the public’s mind testify to the effectiveness of the emotionally manipulative “gay” strategy of “coming out” (as an open and proud homosexual) to as many people as possible.

LGBT activists have long understood that visibility equals power, and with the help of a progressively more sycophantic and gay-compliant media, they created a popular perception that, it turns out, is not even close to reality. Perhaps the new NCHS survey will add to the seriousness to the numbers conversation and the media’s treatment of it.

Still a lot of homosexuals

Even as it deflates a longstanding “gay” myth, the 2.3 percent NHIS figure itself is hardly comforting to those, like this writer, who believe that homosexual practice is a sin and/or a destructive aberration (i.e., a sexual perversion). The 2014 U.S. population of 317,297,938 translates into an estimated 5,076,939 “gays and lesbians,” and 2,221,086 bisexuals—for a total “non-straight” U.S. population of 7,297,853. That’s larger than the populations of Los Angeles and Chicago combined.

It is almost hard to imagine that as recently as the late 1940s, homosexual behavior was so taboo, and open homosexuality so rare, that pioneering “gay” activist Harry Hay could count on both hands the number of fellow “out” American activists who were willing to join him as open, pro-homosexual organizers. (See The Trouble with Harry Hay, by Stuart Timmons.)

A problem with semantics

In Part Two of this AFTAH report, I will examine some of the difficulties and discoveries of government researchers in surveying the public on homosexuality. For example, English-speaking respondents understand the words “straight” and “gay,” but those terms are alien to many Hispanics, who use “heterosexual” and “homosexual.”

The following excerpt from a related 2011 report by NCHS researchers Kristen Miller and J. Michael Ryan is a good synopsis of why “sexual identity”—rather than “sexual orientation”—became the focus of federal surveys. Miller’s and Ryan’s work helped create the sexual-identity-related questions in the first-ever NHIS report dealing with homosexuality. They write [emphasis added]:

It is important to note that although individuals may conceptualize their identity within a framework of who they have sex with or who they are attracted to, behavior and attraction in and of themselves do not constitute identity. It is the meaning—specifically the interpretations that the individuals assign those behaviors and experience—that defines how they ultimately conceptualize their identity.

Measuring sexual identity on a survey questionnaire, however, presents unique challenges. Sexual identity is a complex concept that is rooted in social and political contexts and can change over an individual’s life…While the concept of ‘sexual identity’ holds a particularly distinct and salient meaning for those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, many non-minority [Editor’s note: read: straight] respondents do not hold salient sexual identities. Instead, these respondents (who for all intents and purposes would be categorized as being heterosexual), often dis-identify from a gay identity, possessing what is referred to as a ‘not-me’ identity…Rather than identifying as heterosexual, these respondents typically identify as ‘not gay’ or ‘normal.’ [Miller and Ryan, “Design, Development and Testing of the NHIS Sexual Identity Question,” NCHS, October 2011]

Translation: the overwhelming majority of Americans see themselves as normal, while a tiny minority sort out their aberrant sex- and gender “identities,” which can change over time.