Over the weekend, I was made aware of the Facebook comments of two of Illinois’ elected lawmakers in response to my article on the impending marriage redefinition vote in which I examined the appeals to emotion that are relentlessly exploited by the Left to divert attention from the intellectual shallowness and inconsistency of the Left’s poor arguments.

These Facebook responses illustrate both the dishonesty and lack of maturity that also inform the movement to normalize homosexuality and pervert the legal definition of marriage.

The first was a comment from the bill’s chief sponsor State Representative Greg Harris (D-Chicago) who either completely misunderstood one of the central points of my article or, more likely, intentionally misrepresented what I actually said.

Harris wrote that I believe:

Family values don’t include church going, homemaking, raising children, doing chores together or helping your spouse go through cancer if you happen to be a lesbian.

What I actually argued is that caring for children, managing finances, attending church, doing chores, and caring for one another during an illness does not mean the adults engaged in those activities are married. Note, I never claimed that those activities are unrelated to family life or family values. I said the presence of those activities does not mean that those engaged in them are in a marital union. I said that the presence of those activities does not mean that marriage is wholly unrelated to sexual complementarity. My point was clear that marriage is not constituted solely by those activities.

It is neither honest nor helpful to misrepresent an opponent’s argument. The public deserves more from the elected employees whose salaries they pay.

Moving from the dishonesty of politicians to the lack of maturity of politicians, we can look to the Facebook post of lesbian State Representative Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago) who wrote this about me:

This is the same woman who described me [Cassidy] as a ‘perfervid promoter of all things homosexual.’ She [Higgins] definitely got a word of the day calendar for Christmas last year.

The response of this public servant who is pushing to radically change the legal definition of society’s bedrock social institution—a change that will diminish religious freedom; undermine the inherent right of children to be raised by a mother and father, preferably their own; inevitably lead to the legalization of plural unions—is to mock the fact that I know words that she apparently does not.

What Harris, Cassidy, Alderman Deb Mell, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Governor Patrick Quinn should do is respond to the questions about marriage that IFI has posed: What is marriage? Why is the government involved? If marriage is constituted solely by intense loving feelings, why should it be limited to two people? What is the origin and reason for the requirement that only two people may marry? If marriage is constituted solely by love with no inherent connection to reproductive potential, why shouldn’t close blood relatives or platonic friends be permitted to “marry”? Do children have an inherent right to be raised by a mother and father—preferably their own biological mothers and fathers?

Mockery, dishonesty, appeals to emotion, and a relentless refusal to respond to these central questions about marriage do not reflect well on our public servants and do not well serve the public.

We need to fight for marriage with intelligence, honesty, seriousness, tenacity, courage, conviction, and prayer.

 Please, click HERE to to support our work in the public square.

Politicians and pundits are making mincemeat of marriage, faith, and religious liberty.

Rumors are circulating that Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) and homosexual activist, State Representative Greg Harris (D-Chicago) may call for a vote on the marriage redefinition bill (SB 10) next week. Because their ideological accomplices in the political and punditry spheres are promoting this effort with fervor and tenacity, it’s essential that Illinoisans understand the specious nature of the arguments that animate them. The Chicago Tribune once again provides a cornucopia of lousy — that is to say, false and destructive — ideas about marriage, ideas which, unfortunately, extend beyond the narrow boundaries of the Tribune and the narrow minds of newly installed Chicago Alderman Deb Mell, Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, and Governor Pat Quinn.

Lesbian activist Deb Mell’s recent Tribune commentary isn’t actually a rational argument for the redefinition of marriage. Rather, it’s an extended piece of demagoguery that embodies and conceals a troubling set of assumptions and an absurd conclusion. And it’s the only thing Mell’s got, so she repeats it ad nauseum.

To summarize her “argument”: She and her partner have been together for nine years, they own a home together, they do household chores together, they are raising a child together, they assume extended familial roles together, they attend a church that rejects orthodoxy together, they care for one another during illness, and they manage their finances together. Therefore, marriage has no inherent connection to sexual complementarity.

Yes, folks, that’s what passes for an argument in the alternate universe called “progressivism.” No attempt to define marriage. No attempt to justify why marriage is restricted to two people. No attempt to explain why platonic friends, siblings, or polyamorists — all of whom can do all the things listed above — should not have their unions legally recognized as marriages. No attempt to justify the deliberate denial of children’s inherent right to be raised by both a mother and father, preferably their own biological mother and father. No attempt to explain what the government interest is in inherently non-reproductive types of relationships.

While Mell replaces sound logic with appeals to emotion, Eric Zorn replaces it with ad hominem arguments and condescending dismissals, starting with calling business owners who make distinctions between right and wrong actions “intolerant.” To business owners like the Christian photographers who have been fined $6,637 for declining to photograph a lesbian commitment ceremony, Zorn offers these tolerant and compassionate responses: “Tough,” “Please,” “Yawn,” and “Then don’t open a business.”

Zorn believes that anyone who makes moral judgments with which he disagrees is intolerant. One wonders, would Zorn similarly malign a photographer who refused to photograph a commitment ceremony between a father and his 30 year-old consenting daughter? And let’s complicate the question by hypothesizing this refusal comes during a time when laws prohibiting incestuous acts between consenting adults have been repealed. After all, the government has no business in our bedrooms.

Out of either ignorance or dishonesty, Zorn fails to address the fact that the photographers did not decline to photograph homosexuals. They declined to photograph a homosexual ceremony. They were not discriminating against people. They were making legitimate ethical distinctions among types of activities—an inconvenient truth for “progressives.”

Zorn seems to believe that the ultimate arbiter of all matters moral is THE LAW. Yes, laws like the Illinois Human Rights Act, which was created by Left-leaning Illinois politicians in cahoots with homosexual activists, are the ultimate arbiters of moral truth. Regarding religious liberty, Zorn says:

“You want to open a business that serves the public? Then you can’t practice discrimination on the basis of…religion…sexual orientation and so on….The law [the IL Human Rights Act] doesn’t care what you think about customers in these protected categories.”

Zorn doesn’t seem to see his inconsistent application of both a principle and a law. He uses the law that prohibits discrimination based on “sexual orientation” and religion to compel business owners to engage in an activity that violates their religious beliefs.

Further, “sexual orientation” is merely a dishonest term concocted to disguise the fact that a condition constituted by subjective sexual desires and volitional sexual acts has no similarity to other protected categories. Zorn with unequivocal eagerness subordinates religious liberty to the newly minted sexual “rights” of homosexuals. Methinks there’s some rollicking grave-rolling roiling the cemeteries of our Founding Fathers.

Zorn harrumphs that the religious protections in the proposed marriage revision bill that protect the right of churches to refuse to solemnize homosexual “weddings” are all the protections conservative people of faith deserve. This exposes Zorn’s ignorance of what it means to be a Christian and what the First Amendment was intended to protect. The totality of the life of a Christian is informed by his or her faith. There is no distinction between the sacred and the secular spheres for true followers of Christ, a point Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently expressed in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Governor Quinn, who claims to be a Roman Catholic, reveals, like Zorn, a troubling measure of theological ignorance. Quinn defends his defiance of the teachings of the Catholic Church on marriage by stating that he is acting in accordance with his “conscience.” Zorn and Quinn share a strange and stunted view of faith, doctrine, and religious liberty. Zorn wants to keep religion out of the public square. Quinn wants to keep it out of the public square and his conscience.

IFI is extending an urgent plea to our readers to take a few moments to express your opposition to SB 10, the bill that will permit the government to recognize non-marital unions as marriages, will harm children, and will further undermine religious liberty. It’s not just homosexual activists in Illinois who are watching this vote. Homosexual activists and their ideological allies throughout the country are watching Illinois. So too are conservatives in other states in which marriage is now or soon will be under attack. Defeat of this bill will offer hope to them.

Take ACTION: Send an email or a fax to your state representative.  Encourage your him/her to uphold marriage, family and religious freedom in Illinois by voting against SB 10.  Then take a moment to call the Capitol switchboard at (217) 782-2000 and ask your state representative to vote NO to SB 10.

 Please help your Illinois Family Institute remain strong in this fight.  
Please, click HERE to contribute what you can today.

Thank you.

Benjamin Franklin famously quipped, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Franklin evidently failed to envisage today’s postmodern left. For the conservative, there exists at least one other certainty, and it is this: The degree to which “progressives” attack you corresponds precisely to the degree with which you challenge any among their assorted, distorted and sordid sacred cows.

What would you call a 33-year-old man who both had and axiomatically acted upon a deviant sexual appetite for underage, drug-addicted, runaway boys? (No, not Jerry Sandusky.)

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

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

But you can call him Harvey Milk.

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

And a “progressive” martyr was born.

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

Harvey Milk was both a pederast and, by extension, a statutory rapist. After I publicly addressed this objective reality in the above-mentioned interview, the liberal blogosphere reacted in, shall we say, an informatively defensive manner.

A Huffington Post headline screamed: “Harvey Milk Was An ‘Evil Man’ Who Raped Teenage Boys, Unworthy of Postage Stamp: Matt Barber.”

The always-amusing Right Wing Watch blog breathlessly posted my comments with the header: “Barber: ‘Harvey Milk Was Demonstrably, Categorically an Evil Man.’”

And so on.

Here’s what’s especially telling about their reaction. Not one of the dozen-or-more publications that reported on my comments even challenged their veracity. Not one attempted to refute or deny that Harvey Milk was, in fact, a pederast and a sexual predator.

That’s because they can’t.

One of Milk’s victims was a 16-year-old runaway from Maryland named Jack Galen McKinley. As previously mentioned, Milk had a soft spot in his, um, heart for teenage runaways. Motivated by an apparent quid pro quo of prurience, Milk plucked McKinley from the street.

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

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

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

Randy Thomasson, child advocate and founder of SaveCalifornia.com, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on Harvey Milk. Of the Shilts biography, Thomasson notes, “Explaining Milk’s many flings and affairs with teenagers and young men, Randy Shilts writes how Milk told one ‘lover’ why it was OK for him to also have multiple relationships simultaneously: ‘As homosexuals, we can’t depend on the heterosexual model. … We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don’t have to follow it. We should be developing our own lifestyle. There’s no reason why you can’t love more than one person at a time.’”

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

Years later McKinley committed suicide.

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

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

The incident was evidently swept under the rug.

So what does a man like Harvey Milk get for his apparent crimes? While most sexual predators get time in prison and a dishonorable mention on the registry of sex offenders, Harvey Milk got his own California state holiday (“Harvey Milk Day”) and, more recently, his own commemorative postage stamp, awarded by the Obama administration’s USPS.

God bless America?

As troubling as the postage stamp may be, to me – the father of a soon-to-be-teenage boy – the specter of having a “Harvey Milk Day” forced upon millions of California children, parents and educators is even more troubling. Especially in light of Milk’s own sordid history with minors.

Even so, and quite obviously, not everyone agrees. Some have said that my reality-based assessment of Harvey Milk is “uncivil.” Our historical revisionist friends on the left tend to get a bit snooty when you publicly deconstruct one of their meticulously fabricated mythical martyrs.

I find that odd.

To me, even the mere notion of elevating, to hero status, a man who statutorily raped teenage boys, is what’s uncivil.

Lawmakers who support the legal recognition of same-sex unions as “marriages” should be embarrassed by the intellectual vacuity of the arguments they and homosexual activists use to defend this radical redefinition of marriage. And the sycophantic media, in the tank for all things homosexual, that facilitate the use of irrational arguments to destroy marriage should be equally embarrassed. But unfortunately, it takes integrity and a commitment to logic to feel embarrassed by these intellectual and ethical lapses.

Before any lawmaker votes in favor of eliminating sexual complementarity from the legal definition of marriage, they should read the article “Same-Sex Marriage Makes Liberal Judges Irrational” by Matthew Franck. The irrational non-arguments that irrational ideologue-judges use are the same irrational non-arguments that lawmakers and homosexual activists use (though judges are often more skillful at elaborate, convoluted sophistry than are our lawmakers and activists).

Then Illinoisans should demand that these public servants publicly respond to the following questions raised by Franck:

• What is marriage?
• Is marriage now simply an affective/sentimental/romantic/sexual relationship of two persons who wish to share their lives together?
• If marriage is now simply an affective/sentimental/romantic/sexual relationship—wholly unrelated to reproductive potential—of two persons who wish to share their lives together, then what limiting principle demands that it be sexual, and not affective in other non-sexual ways?
• Why should marriage be exclusive, with a requirement of fidelity to one’s spouse?
• Why should marriage be permanent?
• Why should the dissolution of marriage be governed by any standards other than the will of the parties? After all, we don’t govern the dissolution of other types of loving, non-reproductive types of relationships by any standards other than the will of the parties.
• Why should marriage—which in the new definition is wholly unrelated to reproductive potential—be limited to two persons, or that it rule out the union of close blood-family members?

We citizens are lazy, irresponsible fools if we don’t demand these questions be publicly answered. We should be in the faces—winsomely, of course—of our elected representatives relentlessly asking these questions and refusing to let them bob and weave rhetorically as my representative Scott Drury (D-Highwood) did in a frustrating conversation during which he refused to explain why marriage should be limited to two people.

Legislators who purport to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage are unworthy of office if they don’t ask these questions during what are laughingly referred to as floor “debates” in Springfield.

Journalists should be relieved of their duties if they don’t badger lawmakers with these questions just as they badger marriage traditionalists with hard questions.

And any lawmaker who votes for the disastrous same-sex pseudo-marriage bill (SB10) should be booted from office, winsomely, of course.

Click HERE to make a tax-deductible donation to the Illinois Family Institute.

Click HERE for information about the Oct. 23rd Defend Marriage Lobby Day.

The second Defend Marriage Lobby Day of the year is less than two weeks away on Wednesday, October 23rd in Springfield.

Whether you’re able to come or not, we need you to contact your state legislator today.  If you are able to join us in Springfield, please let your legislators know that you’re coming and look forward to speaking with them about protecting marriage in Illinois.  If you’re unable to come, please send your legislator a message to protect marriage by clicking HERE.  Tell them that you wish you could attend and ask them to protect marriage. 

Your attendance could very well lead to the defeat of same-sex “marriage” this year.  Our adversaries have only six days this fall to accomplish their radical goals: October 22-24 and November 5-7.  We are holding our Defend Marriage Lobby Day on the second day of the veto session.

While it would not be prudent to publicize all of the information about the vote count on SB 10, I can say that I am encouraged.  A large turnout on October 23rd will make a huge difference and could derail the opposition’s efforts.  (Find a bus ride HERE).

Your efforts are already making a difference.  Stephanie Trussell of WLS radio interviewed me on Sunday afternoon.  Stephanie saw a bumper sticker on a supporter’s car and googled “Defend Marriage Lobby Day.”  This led to the phone call, and an opportunity to get the word out to tens of thousands of listeners.  Then yesterday afternoon, Joe Walsh from WIND radio had me on his program to help us get the word out.  

Thank you for your faithfulness and courage in standing for the truth. Keep getting the message out!

I am so excited to see how our grassroots efforts are making a difference.  You made it possible for us to sell out the IFI Fall Banquet that we held recently with Dr. Benjamin Carson.  Over 1,100 Illinoisans turned out to show their support for Christian values.  This event reminded me that, despite what media pundits want us to believe, protecting life, family, and freedom is a value shared by many, many citizens.

The Illinois Review published a comprehensive news story on the event.  They wrote:

Dr. Carson subtly compared what is happening in the White House to the teachings of Chicago native, Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals published in 1971 served as impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change.  Never mentioned by name, but implied, was how the President had been schooled in Alinsky’s rules as a community activist in Chicago.  Prevalent among Alinsky’s rules being applied by the White House through its actions and policies: 1) if you push a negative hard enough it will gain traction and become a positive and 2) driving a wedge between people or groups of people will create class warfare and with it division and unrest.

The push for same-sex “marriage” is meant to divide people, and it is, of course, a negative.  Secular progressives know that if they push this negative hard enough it will eventually appear to be a positive.  They hate the God of Christianity and the Bible.

We must resist this scheme.  As Christians, it is our duty.  For the sake of our children and grandchildren, let’s make sure marriage revisionists go no further in advancing their effort to pervert the legal definition of marriage.  

You can help right now by contacting your legislator:

Take ACTION:  Send an email or fax to your state representative today.  Ask him/her to stand firmly and courageously against SB 10, and warn him/her not to be persuaded by the emotionally manipulative and intellectually hollow rhetoric of the homosexual lobby.

Critical and inconvenient truths about homosexuality, marriage, and children manage to leak out in unexpected places. If you’re not reading carefully, you may not even notice them.

Here are several brief quotes from Tuesday’s Chicago Tribune article on “gestational surrogacy” that unintentionally expose some of those inconvenient truths:

• “The number of reported babies born live in the U.S. as a result of gestational surrogacy has more than doubled in seven years.”
• “Many people with fertility problems are choosing gestational surrogacy over adoption, taking the opportunity to pass their DNA on to their child.”
• “The fact that we can have our own biological children, we had to take advantage of that.”
• Nancy Block, founder of The Center for Egg Options, stated that when “she started the agency 13 years ago there were only a handful” of homosexual couples seeking children. Now 25% of her clients are “in a same-sex relationship.”
• “More people are aware and accepting of same-sex couples wanting a family.”

Inconvenient truths exposed:

1. The single most important point in this article is one to which most people would respond, “Duh.” It’s that humans want “to pass their DNA on to their child.” The article shared the physical, emotional, and financial hardships a young couple has endured in their effort to have their own biological child. But this inadvertently reveals something else. It reveals something critical about the rights of children.
   
   If adults are willing to endure enormous hardship and heartbreak to procreate and raise children who are biologically connected to them, what does this say about the corollary rights of children? Don’t children possess an equal right or perhaps even greater right to be raised by both the mother and father whose DNA brought them into existence? Do the desires of men and women in naturally sterile, voluntary homosexual unions to have families supersede the rights of children to be raised by their biological mothers and fathers? These are not airy, angel/pin-dancing questions. How we answer these questions will have real consequences for real children.

2. “Progressives” often smugly ask the question, “How would the legalization of same-sex ‘marriage’ affect your marriage?” It’s a feckless but strategically effective question. As countless conservatives have replied, the legalization of same-sex ‘marriage’ will not affect any existing particular marriage. But neither would the legalization of polyamorous unions or incestuous unions affect any particular existing marriage. What will be affected, however, is the public understanding of what marriage is as well as issues related to sexual monogamy, adoption, children’s rights, parents’ rights, religious liberty, and public education.
   
   The dramatic increase in homosexuals seeking babies has obviously occurred  prior to the legal recognition of same-sex unions as “marriage.” But the social approval that will follow in the wake of this radical change in the legal definition of marriage will further increase the already indefensible practice of creating intentionally motherless and fathers babies for sale to homosexuals. And it is this social approval that homosexuals most desire. It’s not hospital visitation rights, which Obama mandated in an executive order immediately after his first-term election. And it’s not state or federal benefits that they most covet. What homosexuals most covet are public affirmation of homosexuality and the eradication of any social or legal distinction between sexually complementary and homosexual unions.

3. “Progressives” suggest that the desire of same-sex couples to have a family is sufficient justification for their acquisition of children. Are those “progressives” willing to apply that principle consistently? Are they willing to say that the intense desire of three homosexual men in a polyamorous union justifies their acquisition of children? Are they willing to say that the intense desire of adult siblings who want a family without risking genetic defects justifies their acquisition of children? If not, why not? The Left proclaims that all that matters in romantic relationships is love and that the government has no business poking its gigantic proboscis into bedrooms. So, why not allow any person or numbers of persons who are “in love” to acquire children?
   
   Inquiring minds are still waiting to hear from “progressive” tub-thumpers for same-sex “marriage”—perhaps Deb Mell, Greg Harris, Pat Quinn, Ed Sullivan or Ron Sandack—why marriage should remain a union of only two persons. If marriage is wholly unrelated to reproductive potential, the prohibition of plural unions makes no sense whatsoever. The public should noisily demand that our lawmakers answer this question publicly before any vote on marriage is taken.
   
   This raises another question: When conservatives argue that the government is involved in marriage because of the reproductive potential of heterosexual unions, “progressives” foolishly ask if the government is going to ascertain the fertility of heterosexual couples before allowing them to marry. By that “reasoning,” are “progressives” suggesting that the government should ascertain the objective presence of love between homosexuals seeking to marry? The reality is the government never has had an interest in the subjective feelings of those seeking to marry. The government’s interest in marriage relates only to objective criteria connected to reproductive potential (i.e., number, age, sex, blood kinship, and marital status of partners).

4. Sterility resulting from homosexual unions is not a “fertility problem.” Unlike sterility in heterosexual unions which is a sign of a disorder, sterility in homosexual unions is absolutely normal, natural, immutable in all cases, and biologically determined. In other words, homosexual unions are by nature and design sterile.

Another unpleasant truth highlighted in the article is that according to an attorney specializing in “third-party reproductive arrangements,” “‘Illinois is one of the most surrogate-friendly states if not the most surrogate-friendly,'” largely due to the Illinois Gestational Surrogacy Act of 2005. According to the Trib, “Under the Act, when a gestational surrogate (one who is the carrier but not the egg provider) gives birth in Illinois, parenthood passes immediately to the intended parents, traditional or same sex.” The Trib reports that people “come from all over the U.S. and Europe to have their surrogate babies born in Illinois,” because “[i]n many European countries and in some states, like Michigan, surrogacy is illegal.”

Well, here’s another nice mess Illinois politicians have gotten us into.

Four Important Upcoming Events:

–> October 12th — Iron Sharpens Iron Conference for Women in Moline
(Click HERE for more info) 

–> October 23rd – IFI’s Defend Marriage Lobby Day in Springfield 
(Click HERE for more info)

–> November 16th – Americans for Truth Banquet in Arlington Heights
(Click HERE for more info)

–> November 20th – Mandate Leadership Conference in South Chicago Heights
(Click HERE for more info)

In a stunning public admission during a debate on the future of marriage in Illinois, the chief sponsor of SB 10, the proposed bill to legalize same-sex “marriage,” homosexual State Representative Greg Harris (D-Chicago) acknowledged that the bill does not provide religious liberty or conscience protections for individual Christian business owners. Further, it was clear that both he and homosexual Chicago Alderman Deb Mell (a former state representative and co-sponsor of of SB 10) oppose any such protections.

In the unfortunately titled “Marriage Equality” debate, sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, moderator Bruce Dold asked Harris about the absence of conscience protections in the bill:

Dold: The bill specifically protects churches, but it does not have any language about individual conscience…. Would the bill not have a better chance if it had an individual conscience protection in it?

Harris: [D]ecades ago when the Human Rights Act was passed, it said, we the people of Illinois have decided not to allow discrimination based on race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, veteran’s status in housing, employment, or public accommodations. The question of should we treat all of our citizens equally in all of those three areas has been answered. But also there are exemptions for religious institutions in the Human Rights Act. There’s also the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and specific language in this bill…that explicitly protects freedom of religion for those churches and denominations which do not want to consecrate same-sex marriages.”

Harris publicly admitted that this bill protects the religious liberty of only religious institutions, churches, and denominations—not individuals. It was clear that Harris has no desire or intent to include such protections.

That said, the inclusion of such protections would not make this a good bill. It would simply make it a less terrible bill.

Harris tried to claim that SB 10 poses no threat to religious liberty, but was challenged by both Robert Gilligan, Executive Director of the Catholic Conference of Illinois, and Peter Breen, Vice President and Senior Counsel with the Thomas More Society, who talked about the Illinois bed and breakfast owner who is being sued for his refusal to rent out his facility for a same-sex civil union ceremony  (read more HERE).

Mell, who earlier had claimed that warnings about future religious persecution were dishonest “scare tactics,” responded “But [the bed and breakfast] is a business that does business in the state of Illinois, and in Illinois, we don’t allow discrimination.” While claiming that warnings about loss of religious liberty were deceptive and false “scare tactics,” she vigorously defended this religious discrimination. She apparently didn’t notice her own contradiction.

Neither she nor Harris seemed to notice that while they obsess about Illinois’ prohibition of discrimination based on “sexual orientation,” they pay no attention to its prohibition of religious discrimination. They don’t care if the bed and breakfast owner is discriminated against because of his religious beliefs.

Former Georgetown University law professor and current EEOC Commissioner, lesbian activist Chai Feldblum has written that when same-sex marriage is legalized, conservative people of faith will lose religious rights. She argues that it’s a zero-sum game in which a gain in sexual rights for homosexuals will mean a loss of religious rights for conservative people of faith, which she finds justifiable. She, Mell, and Harris share the view that the sexual “rights” of homosexuals trump religious rights.

Harris cited the Illinois Human Rights Act as his justification for not protecting the rights of people of faith to refuse to use their labor and goods in the service of an event that violates their deeply held religious beliefs. Well, the Illinois Human Rights Act also prohibits discrimination based on religion; hence the conflict of which Chai Feldblum spoke. Harris finds discriminating based on religion tolerable and justifiable but not discrimination based on sexual predilection.

By the way, choosing not to participate in a same-sex “wedding” does not reflect discrimination against persons. It reflects discriminating among types of events. The elderly florist who is being sued by the state of Washington for her refusal to provide flowers for a same-sex “wedding” did not discriminate against a person. She made a judgment about an event. She had previously sold flowers to one of the homosexual partners. She served all people regardless of their sexual predilections, beliefs, sexual activities, or relationships. She just wouldn’t participate in an event that she (rightly) believes the God she serves abhors. She takes seriously Jesus’ command to “Render unto Caeser what is Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Prior to the debate, I had a conversation with one of the event planners in which I predicted Harris would refuse to answer the critical question regarding why marriage should remain a union of just two people. Dold twice asked, if marriage is a right, why should it be limited to two people? Twice Harris obstinately refused to answer.

It was an embarrassingly obvious and intellectually dishonest dodge. Harris tried to use the language of the current bill to deflect the question saying in essence that the bill’s language says nothing about plural unions. This is the same embarrassing dodge ACLU spokesman Ed Yohnka used in a program on which both he and I were guests. Three times I asked him why marriage should be limited to two people, as he claimed it should be. Three times he awkwardly refused to answer.

It doesn’t take much intellectual wattage to understand that once the ideas that marriage is just about love and has nothing to do with sexual complementarity or reproductive potential are embedded in law, there remains no reason to restrict marriage to two people. The legalization of plural unions becomes not merely possible but inevitable.

Harris also said, “All families should be created equal,” to which I would have asked, “Even polyamorous families?”

And he said marriage law should “expand to reflect the reality of society,” to which I would have said, “But there exist polyamorous families in society.”

A few additional thoughts on the debate:

1. “Progressive” language police: At one point Mell attempted to compel Breen to use the term she wanted him to use for her partner (whom she “married” in Iowa). She attempted to compel him to use the term “wife.” She correctly insisted that “terminology is important.” But the law is not the ultimate arbiter of truth and reality. Compelling Breen to use the term “wife” would rob him of the right to use the term he wanted to use and believes reflects truth and reality. Conservatives have the ethical right and obligation to use the language they believe reflects truth and reality. Conceding terminology to the Left, as conservatives too often do, is not smart, not truthful, not helpful, and not compassionate.
   
   In reality, a wife is the spouse of a man (and each partner must actually be the sex they claim to be). No one is ethically obligated to participate rhetorically in any fiction the government has foolishly decided to join.

2. Media bias and the “equality” chimera: The importance of terminology is the reason I described the title of the debate, “Marriage Equality” as unfortunate. “Marriage Equality” embodies and reflects assent to “progressive” assumptions. Conservatives recognize that the notion of “equality” in this context is strategically effective non-sense.  Treating different things differently does not reflect unjust, unequal treatment. Equality demands we treat like things alike. When homosexual men and women say they are attracted only to persons of their same sex, they are acknowledging that men and women are fundamentally and significantly different. As such, a union composed of two people of the same sex is fundamentally and significantly different from a union of two people of opposite sexes. Society has no reason to treat them as if they are the same.
   
   
3. The connection between marriage and children: Both Mell and Harris talked about children deserving, in Mell’s words, “the label” of marriage. Inconsistencies abound. While homosexuals claim that marriage has no inherent connection to reproductive potential, they use arguments about children as justifications for the legal recognition of same-sex unions as marriage. This points to the fact that homosexuals are pursuing the acquisition of children, which necessarily means that in their view, children have no inherent, unalienable right to be raised by their biological parents. Homosexual couples are creating children who will be wholly unconnected to either their biological mother or father or both. In addition, they are creating intentionally motherless or fatherless children, which means homosexuals believe children have neither a right to be raised by both their mother and father, nor a right to be raised by a mother and father.
   
   The issue of children naturally and inevitably arises because marriage is centrally about the next generation. If marriage weren’t centrally about the procreation of children, if children weren’t procreated via sexual unions, there would be no such thing as marriage. The government has no more vested interest in recognizing inherentlysterile homosexual relationships as marriages than it does in recognizing platonic friendships as marriages. The government simply has no vested public interest in recognizing or affirming loving, inherently non-reproductive relationships. If it does, Harris and Mell need to explain what it is. And remember, they cannot include children in their answer, because the Left says marriage has no inherent connection to children (and by extension, their rights).
   
   If the government is compelled to recognize as marriage any loving relationship that involves the raising of children, then, for example, a grandmother and aunt who are raising the children of their deceased daughter/sister, should be permitted to marry.

4. Appeals to emotion and redefining marriage: Mell’s “arguments” amounted to little more than appeals to emotion: She really loves her partner. She and her partner have been together for nine years. Her partner has stuck with her through difficult times. Therefore, the government should legally recognize their relationship as a marriage.
   
   Say what? If marriage has an inherent nature, it doesn’t change simply because she and her partner wish it were different. Harris and Mell have concluded that because they are not attracted to people of the opposite sex, marriage has nothing inherently to do with sexual complementarity or reproductive potential.
   
   What’s interesting is that they don’t deny marriage has a nature that is inherent and immutable. They believe marriage is inherently and immutably constituted solely by the presence of love between two people. But then they can’t provide a single reason for their stubborn insistence that marriage is an inherently binary institution. Harris and Mell need to provide reasons for jettisoning sexual complementarity from the legal definition of marriage while retaining the less essential requirement regarding number of partners in a marriage. Simply asserting that marriage is a union of two people is not an argument.

5. Catholic Charities and religious discrimination: During the debate, a brief discussion arose about Catholic Charities being forced to drop out of the adoption business following the passage of Illinois’ civil union law—a change that Harris views as serving the “best interests” of children. Neither Harris nor Mell expressed concern about the clear presence of religious discrimination—something which deeply concerned Princeton University law professor Robert George. In a 2011 CNN debate among candidates running in the Republican primary, George asked the following question and in so doing, told congressmen and women what they should do:
   
   

   In Illinois, after passing a civil union bill, the state government decided to exclude certain religiously affiliated foster care and adoption agencies, including Catholic and Protestant agencies, because the agencies, in line with the teachings of their faith, cannot in conscience place children with same-sex partners.

   Now, at least half of Illinois’ foster and adoption funds come from the federal government. Should the federal government be subsidizing states that discriminate against Catholic and other religious adoption agencies? If a state legislature refuses to make funding available on equal terms to those providers who as a matter of conscience will not place children in same-sex homes, should federal legislation come in to protect the freedom of conscience of those religious providers?

There is no more critical legislation pending than SB 10. Despite what some lawmakers and pundits fecklessly claim, this issue is more important than even pension reform. The rights of children, parents, and people of faith are at risk.

Demonstrate that you care more about preserving marriage than the Left does in destroying it. Demonstrate your willingness to endure hardship and even persecution in the service of truth.

Please call your lawmaker, and please try to attend the Defend Marriage Rally in Springfield on Oct. 23. The Left will be marching on Oct. 22. 

Click HERE to make a donation to the Illinois Family Institute.

Written by by Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D.

This summer, a British television network called to interview me for a show about efforts toward sexual-orientation change. The host of the show, they informed me, was a gay man. I declined the invitation, stating that the host’s gay identity would disqualify him from a fair evaluation of the ex-gay experience.

To refuse participation because the host is gay may seem unreasonable, until we recognize that the adoption of a gay identity typically prevents someone from honestly assessing the experience of the other man who has taken a different developmental route– i.e., the ex-gay person. 

Why would this be true? Let me explain.

According to the literature, the “coming out of the closet” process begins in early adolescence with the discovery of same-sex attraction. The teenager then usually rejects his homosexual feelings because of the negative social values around him. His painful and lonely efforts to suppress, repress and deny his feelings result in guilt and shame, which eventually culminates in self-loathing.

But shortly thereafter, this teenager discovers that there are others like him, and often through the support and encouragement of a gay counselor, coach, teacher or religious leader, he decides that gay is “who he is.” The adoption of this gay identity necessitates the abandonment of any hope that he could ever modify his unwanted feelings and develop his heterosexual potential. He must surrender his earlier wish that he could have a conventional marriage and family. So in order to internalize this gay identity he must mourn the possibility of ever resolving his unwanted homosexuality; i.e., he must grieve the loss of what he yearned for.

It is this process of grieving his own hopes and mourning his own dreams which prevents the person who later identifies as gay from believing that change is possible for others: “If I myself could not change, how could they?” Perhaps on a deeper level, this thought is also rooted in anger: “If I cannot have what I wanted for my own life, neither should they.”

Explaining this inherent bias of the gay-identified person against the ex-gay person’s experience, an Orthodox Jewish friend of mine commented: “It would be like a group of rabbis deciding that they themselves would determine if Jesus really was God.” “Worse,” I responded. “It would be more like a person desperately trying to find God in his life, abandoning the hope and adopting atheism, then setting himself up as the person who determines the reality of God in the lives of others.”

And it is that grieving process, that painful letting-go of one’s dreams, that has biased the gay person’s evaluation of the ex-gay experience.

However, public-policy decisions on homosexual issues are, in fact, typically determined by gay activists who carry this intrinsic prejudice.  It is gay teachers who determine policy for homosexual students; gay librarians who determine what books are permitted on the library shelves; and gay mental-health professionals who get to tell the world whether any sort of sexual-orientation modification is possible.  For example, anyone who has a comment or question about APA (American Psychological Association) policy is referred to the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns, which does not recognize ex-gays or the concerns of people struggling to change.

In fact, the most grievous and damaging example of this prejudice is the recent APA Task Force Report on the treatment of homosexuality, written by a panel that consisted almost entirely of gay mental-health practitioners. Of the six APA panelists, five self-identify as gay or bisexual, and the APA Staff Liaison who chose them, Clinton Anderson, is also gay. All of the panelists admitted, at the start of their work, to being opposed to reorientation therapy. Not a single  reorientation therapist who applied to be a part of the Task Force–and there were several distinguished and scholarly psychologists who did apply– were permitted to join the committee.

This dominance of gay-identified homosexual persons on panels that determine policy for non-gay homosexual persons is due, in large part, to the larger community’s intimidation and subsequent avoidance of the whole polarizing issue. Faced with policy decisions, the straight person, ignorant of the fact that gay-identified homosexual persons are a category that is quite distinct from non-gay homosexual persons, readily relinquishes his authority to a gay co-worker, and takes the easy way out. “I don’t know about such things myself, of course; but Steven is gay– he’ll know the best policy for the library collection.” (Needless to stay, “Stephen” is all too ready to comply.)

An additional result of gay activism’s power to determine public policy is the fact that ex-gays are then marginalized and intimidated into silence. Gays see them as “gays-in-process,” or gays with a small “g,” and not entitled to claim a valid identity in their own right. Ex-gays, they believe, are merely gays who have not yet come out of the closet; they are simply “inhibited by their own homophobia.”

But the emergence of the ex-gay person can change this balance of power. Despite the intimidating influence of gay activism, society is beginning to recognize the ex-gay person’s  existence, as ex-gay men and women are telling us about their lives.  Further, there is an impressive group of ex-gay websites, such as peoplecanchange.com, restoredhopenetwork.com, and voices-of-change.org, where ex-gay men and women tell their stories.

People Can Change continues to offer its JIM (Journey Into Manhood) Weekends, scheduled in 2013 for several locations in the U.S., as well as one in Israel. The ex-gay person was also recently legally acknowledged by Washington D.C. as a distinct sexual minority.

The new support group Restored Hope Network has also emerged, vibrant and powerfully committed, to replace Exodus Ministries (which recently closed down). Further, the Executive Director of HA (Homosexuals Anonymous), Dr. Douglas McIntyre, launched a 10-day tour this summer to lobby for freedom of choice for youth to pursue counseling for unwanted homosexuality.

Every social movement has used as a tool toward its success the shaming and intimidating of others who do not agree with them. Those who disagree with them are stigmatized and excluded from the cultural discourse.  As time goes by, I believe this swing to extremism will ultimately right itself. But in the meanwhile, we must look to that core of committed individuals who understand that our bodies tell us who we are– that humanity was designed and created for heterosexuality, and we must support those men and women who are brave enough to speak out and say, “We have changed.”

This article first appeared at the NARTH.com blog. You can see the original article HERE.

The movement to normalize homosexuality is not just asking people to affirm this lifestyle, it’s demanding it. Your objections mean very little to homosexual advocates who believe their sexual preference should be more than tolerated-it should be celebrated. But this demand goes one step farther in seeking approval from Christians and those with sincerely held religious convictions against homosexuality.

People of faith are a primary target for homosexual advocates because they know that only Bible believing Christians with deeply held religious convictions stand between them and total societal acceptance. It’s no surprise then, that the campaign to gain approval from Christians is becoming increasingly active.

The latest example of this effort comes from the newly launched “Not All Like That” Campaign. This campaign seeks to give Christians supporting the homosexual lifestyle an outlet for sharing their view. The “Not All Like That” (NATL) campaign is the collaborative effort of homosexual advocates and a California pastor; all modeled after Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” Campaign.

Savage is an extreme liberal, homosexual, and despiser of anything conservative, traditional, or Christian. He has regularly been filmed in speeches bashing Christians, the Bible, and anyone opposing homosexuality. With this kind of reputation it is hard to imagine a pastor wanting to model a campaign after Savage’s, yet John Shore was a party in founding the NALT campaign.

Shore recently shared what led him to help start the NATL campaign. He said it was an experience at his church when he and his wife wanted to join the leadership of the church and a current church leader asked them to sign a document agreeing that no one in a same sex relationship should have a position of authority at the church. Shore recalls:

“I thought the lady was joking…The idea that becoming a Christian meant that I was supposed to suddenly have an understanding that my LGBT friends were suddenly immoral was repugnant to me. It wasn’t reasonable to me that it would be integral to Christian theology.” His wife, Catherine, put it even more strongly: “If this is an inextricable part of the Christian experience, I’m out…Somebody’s misread something.”

There’s a lot that needs correcting here. First, I would say that how we view everything, our world, our friends, should always be through the lens of transcendent truth from the Bible. It’s not a matter of seeing our friends as immoral; it’s a matter of seeing them as lost, living in sin, and in need of a Savior. This is precisely how Jesus viewed us and we are to imitate such a view as part of a Gospel-centric worldview. It’s not loving;, and shows no mercy, grace, or compassion to elevate our own feelings for people above the truth of God’s Word.

Second, whether something seems unreasonable to us or not is irrelevant. Being a Christian, living by the principles of Scripture has absolutely nothing to do with how we feel, whether we agree, or if we can reconcile it all logically. Being a Christian means surrendering our will, our desires, and our lives to the supremacy and sovereignty of God. At times this means simply accepting the fact that we don’t understand it all.

But an important point needs to be made here. The experience of Pastor Shore and his wife is not unique and is being exploited. Homosexual advocates are preying on the emotional narrative of “regular, everyday homosexual people” in order to gain legal ground. Many people, not just Christians are being duped into supporting homosexuality and marriage redefinition in an effort to support their LGBT friends. It’s a deceptive tactic that is working.

The proof that this tactic is working is when Christians say they have studied the Bible and concluded that it doesn’t speak against homosexuality. As a pastor and student of God’s Word for nearly 20 years I cannot fathom such a conclusion. However, Shore’s words further prove this trend, “It actually is more Biblical if you make affirmation of LGBT people part of your understanding of the word of God,” he said.

I’m unclear as to how it is “more biblical” to affirm that which the Bible clearly says is sinful. Any pastor, or student of God’s Word with an understanding of biblical history, Jewish customs and culture, and biblical principles and commands will walk away firmly convicted that the neither the Bible nor God supports or endorses homosexuality in any way. A proper understanding of what the Bible says marriage is shows the picture of complementarity intended to picture the relationship between Christ and His church. This picture is only visible in the man-woman relationship.

I’m certainly not alone in this view. The majority of pastors, priests’, scholars and even rabbi’s agree with this conclusion based on Scripture. The UK’s newest Chief Rabbi reiterated this belief, saying “We have a clear Biblical definition of marriage which is the union of one man and one woman and through that we value traditional family life.”

The fact that a majority of people, especially religious people view homosexuality as sin and marriage as between one man and one woman will not stop the NALT campaign from trying to change minds. Not merely change minds though, the goal is to, as one homosexual advocate recently put it, “rehabilitate.” This is a clear indicator of the true intentions of the homosexual movement. They do not want to simply encourage tolerance; they want to demand rehabilitation of anyone that disagrees with their lifestyle for any reason.

No, we’re “not all like that” Pastor Shore. Most of us still allow the Bible to shape our worldview and then live accordingly; rather than pre-determining what we want the Bible to say then twisting it. And I actually think it’s more Biblical to make this practice central to my understanding of the Word of God.

This article first appeared at the Engagefamilyminute.com blog. You can see the original article and comments HERE.

The urgent battle to defend and preserve marriage in Illinois is heating up in Illinois and is being watched with feverish interest by homosexual activists and their ideological allies throughout the country (Click HERE to read what the powerful Washington D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign is doing).

As evidence that “progressives” outside Illinois are watching Springfield, here is an email IFI received late last week from a Tampa, Florida attorney, followed by my response. It’s my hope that this exchange may help others in their discussions about marriage with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and lawmakers—which we should all be having:

Do you realize that U.S. citizens are not required to be religious, let alone Christian?

Do you realize “traditional marriage” was polygamy and trading women for property?

I have two friends in Chicago who want to get married.  They are gay.  I am 100% in favor of that.

Jonathan S. Coleman, Esq.
Johnson, Pope, Bokor, Ruppel & Burns, LLP
Counselors at Law
Tampa, FL 33602

Dear Mr. Coleman,

The term “traditional” is imperfect in that not all past (i.e., traditional) marital customs were sound, right, or good. As most readers understand, when we use “traditional,” we are referring to the most enduring, cross-cultural, and inherent feature of marriage: sexual complementarity. We are also fully aware that polygamy has been legal in some countries at different times in history. A better term would be “natural marriage” or “true marriage.”

But just as “progressives” believe that marriage has some inherent constituent features, so do we. Very few “progressives” argue that society creates marriage out of whole cloth. Most “progressives” assert that marriage is inherently binary and is inherently constituted by the presence of subjective feelings of love. We, in contrast, believe that marriage is inherently binary and sexually complementary. Government doesn’t create marriage. Government merely recognizes and regulates a type of relationship that exists and predates the state.

If, as “progressives” assert, marriage has no inherent connection to either sexual complementarity or reproductive potential, and is constituted merely by the presence of love, why the magic number two? Why should the government prohibit the legal recognition of polyamorous unions as marriages? Are polyamorists being denied their equal rights? Why should the government prohibit two brothers who love each other from marrying? And why not recognize platonic friendships as marriages?

The government has no vested interest in the feelings of those seeking to marry. There is no government interest in promoting, recognizing, or affirming love between two people (homosexual or heterosexual)—never has been, never will be.

The government is involved in marriage because the sexual union of one man and one woman is the type of union that produces children (whether every union can or will produce children is irrelevant to the government). And the government has a vested interest in protecting the needs and rights of children. If humans did not procreate sexually, there would be no such thing as government-recognized/regulated marriage.

From your peculiar question regarding whether we are aware that U.S. citizens are not required to be either religious in general or Christians, I have to assume you’ve read virtually nothing of what I’ve written about marriage because the reasons given in my articles for defending marriage as inherently sexually complementary are secular and logical—not religious.

If marriage were solely a religious institution or practice, like Communion, the assumption embedded in your question would make more sense. But marriage is both a religious ritual or sacrament and a civil institution that directly affects the public good and necessitates and justifies government involvement.

I don’t see the relevance of your friendship with a homosexual couple to the question of what marriage is or why the government is involved. If I knew a father and daughter who were in love and committed to spending their lives together, my view of the importance of the criterion regarding blood kinship would not change. And recognizing homosexual unions as “marriages” is far more radical a redefinition of marriage than would be recognizing incestuous heterosexual unions as marriages.

One final question: Do you believe that children have an inherent, unalienable right to be raised whenever possible by their biological mother and father?

With all due respect, I am continually surprised by the poor thinking of so many attorneys who are trained to think logically and base arguments on reason and evidence rather than feelings. I have asked multiple “progressive” attorneys this question: Why should marriage be limited to two people? No response. I have asked if children have a right to be raised by their biological parents. No answer. Not even a bad answer. Frankly, I don’t sense that many of our leaders or pundits on either the Left or Right are thinking deeply, logically, or philosophically about the implications of this radical redefinition of marriage. We’re an intellectually lazy, morally degenerate, self-centered culture. And it’s children and the First Amendment that will suffer.

Sincerely,

Laurie Higgins

We frequently hear that the views of many Americans, including elected leaders like U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) or Illinois State Representatives Ed Sullivan (R-Mundelein) and Ron Sandack (R-Westmont), on the issue of marriage are shaped by the knowledge that someone they love experiences same-sex attraction. It’s passing strange that so many Americans base their moral convictions on the feelings and behavioral choices of friends and loved ones. By that dangerous moral reasoning, we should abandon virtually all moral proscriptions since all moral proscriptions arise precisely because there are people (including people we love) who experience powerful, seemingly intractable feelings to engage in the proscribed behavior.

Conservatives should care more about protecting marriage than the Left does in destroying it.  To demonstrate our investment in marriage, we must extricate ourselves from our self-imposed moral paralysis. The consequences of our unconscionable acquiescence to the feckless voices of the Left are perilous. In order to indulge our fear and intellectual laziness, we’re even willing to bequeath to our children and grandchildren an America with religious and speech protections as well as children’s rights in tatters. We’re willing to teach our children by example to conform to evil and rationalize it as love.

For those of you who attend churches whose leaders rationalize cowardly, unbiblical inaction by claiming that the church has no business being involved in political issues (including, apparently, even political issues that are also biblical issues), ask them this question: 

If a bill were pending in Springfield that would legalize slavery and which was very close to passing, would you still refuse to speak and act publicly? 

If they answer that they would remain silent, perhaps it’s time to find a new church.

Help us protect marriage & family!
Click HERE to support IFI’s work in the public square.

Written by Austin Ruse

Matthew Shepard was the winsome young homosexual in Laramie, Wyoming who in October 1998 was tortured, killed, and left hanging grotesquely from a fence. He was discovered almost a day later and later died in the hospital from his horrific wounds.

On the night of October 6, Shepard met “two strangers” in the Fireside Lounge in Laramie. The two men offered Shepard a ride home but instead drove him to a remote area, robbed him, beat him with pistols, and left him splayed on a fence.

Cops found the bloody gun along with Shepard’s shoes and wallet in the truck of the two men — Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson.

McKinney and Henderson claimed the “gay panic” defense, that they freaked out when Shepard came onto them sexually and killed him in a rage. They made other claims, too, but were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Almost immediately Shepard became a secular saint, and his killing became a kind of gay Passion Play where he suffered and died for the cause of homosexuality against the growing homophobia and hatred of gay America.

Indeed, a Mathew Shepard industry grew rapidly with plays and foundations along with state and even national hate crimes legislation named for him. Rock stars wrote songs about him, including Elton John and Melissa Etheridge. Lady Gaga performed John Lennon’s “Imagine” and changed the lyrics to include Shepard.

Thanks to a new book by an award winning gay journalist we now know that much of this narrative turns out to be false, little more than gay hagiography.

As gay journalist Aaron Hicklin, writing in The Advocate asks, “How do people sold on one version of history react to being told that the facts are slippery — that thinking of Shepard’s murder as a hate crime does not mean it was a hate crime? And how does it color our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?”

This startling revelation comes in The Book of Matt to be published next week by investigative journalist Stephen Jiminez, who over the course of years interviewed over 100 people including Shepard’s friends, friends of the killers, and the killers themselves.

According to The Advocate, one of the premier gay publications in the country, Jiminez “amassed enough anecdotal evidence to build a persuasive case that Shepard’s sexuality was, if not incidental, certain less central than popular consensus had lead us to believe.”

Even before Shepard died, two of his friends were peddling the narrative that he died at the hands of vicious homophobes. Within days the gay establishment latched onto what would drive the hate crimes story for years to come; even now, the Laramie Project, a stage play about the killing is performed all over the country. Indeed, it will be performed next week at Ford’s Theater in Washington DC.

But what really happened to Matthew Shepard?

He was beaten, tortured, and killed by one or both of the men now serving life sentences. But it turns out, according to Jiminez, that Shepard was a meth dealer himself and he was friends and sex partners with the man who led in his killing. Indeed, his killer may have killed him because Shepard allegedly came into possession of a large amount of methamphetamine and refused to give it up.

The book also shows that Shepard’s killer was on a five-day meth binge at the time of the killing.

As to be expected, Matthew Shepard Inc. is rallying to denounce the new narrative that his homosexuality had little or nothing to do with his murder. The Matthew Shepard Foundation released this statement:

Attempts now to rewrite the story of this hate crime appear to be based on untrustworthy sources, factual errors, rumors and innuendo rather than the actual evidence gathered by law enforcement and presented in a court of law. We do not respond to innuendo, rumor or conspiracy theories. Instead we recommit ourselves to honoring Matthew’s memory, and refuse to be intimidated by those who seek to tarnish it. We owe that to the tens of thousands of donors, activists, volunteers, and allies to the cause of equality who have made our work possible.

The agenda of the sexual left lives on lies. As we all know now, the back-story that brought us Roe v. Wade was a lie. And here we find the Matthew Shepard story was also a lie.

The sexual left approves of such lies because they get to what they consider to be an underlying truth. The author of The Advocate piece writes, “There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness.”

This article first appeared at the Brietbart.com blog. You can see the original article and comments HERE.   

Written by Ryan T. Anderson, The Heritage Foundation

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court of New Mexico ruled that the First Amendment does not protect a Christian photographer’s ability to decline to take pictures of a same-sex commitment ceremony—even when doing so would violate the photographer’s deeply held religious beliefs. As Elaine Huguenin, owner of Elane Photography, explained: “The message a same-sex commitment ceremony communicates is not one I believe.”

But New Mexico’s highest court, deciding an appeal of the case, agreed with the New Mexico Human Rights Commission and ruled against Elane Photography, concluding that neither protections of free speech nor free exercise of religion apply.

Elaine and her husband Jon, both committed Christians, run their small photography business in Albuquerque, N.M. In 2006, she declined the request to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. In 2008, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission ruled that by declining to use its artistic and expressive skills to communicate what was said and what occurred at the ceremony, the business had engaged in illegal discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The commission ruled this way based on New Mexico’s human rights law, which prohibits discrimination in public accommodations (“any establishment that provides or offers its services … or goods to the public”) based on race, religion and sexual orientation—among other protected classes.

Elane Photography didn’t refuse to take pictures of gays and lesbians, but only of such a same-sex ceremony, based on the owners’ belief that marriage is a union of a man and a woman. New Mexico law agrees, as it has no legal same-sex civil unions or same-sex marriages. Additionally, there were other photographers in the Albuquerque area who could have photographed the ceremony.

Groups supporting Elane Photography filed friend-of-the-court briefs. The Cato Institute argued that, under the First Amendment, photographers have freedom of speech protections against government-compelled artistic expressions. The Becket Fund argued that New Mexico’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects the “free exercise” of Elane Photography. The Alliance Defending Freedom—the lawyers defending Elane Photography—also argued that the First Amendment’s free exercise clause protects their client.

Thursday’s decision highlights the increasing concern many have that anti-discrimination laws and same-sex marriage run roughshod over the rights of conscience and religious liberty. Thomas Messner, a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, has documented multiple instances in which laws forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation, as well as laws redefining marriage, already have eroded religious liberty and the rights of conscience. Indeed, earlier this year, the United States Commission on Civil Rights held an entire hearing on conflicts between nondiscrimination policies and civil liberties such as religious freedom.

In a growing number of incidents, government hasn’t respected the beliefs of Americans. Citizens must insist that government not discriminate against those who hold to the historic definition of marriage. Policy should prohibit the government—or anyone who receives taxpayers’ dollars—from discriminating in employment, licensing, accreditation or contracting against those who believe marriage is the union of a man and a woman.

We also must work to see marriage law reflect the truth about marriage. If marriage is redefined, believing what virtually every human society once believed about marriage—that it is the union of a man and a woman ordered to procreation and family life—would be seen increasingly as an irrational prejudice that ought to be driven to the margins of culture. The consequences for religious believers are becoming apparent.

You know how conservatives are always warning against non-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation and gender identity language? We try to communicate that not only are such laws unnecessary, but also pose a threat to other freedoms. For example, they will prevent a Christian school from requiring its teachers adhere to a statement of faith. Such laws also lack common sense and will lead to abuse by disturbed individuals that pose both privacy and safety concerns for people.

Adding sexual orientation or gender identity to non-discrimination laws eventually leads to allowing transgender and cross-dressing persons into bathrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities for the gender they are biologically the opposite of. So, in the end, cross-dressing men get to go into women’s locker rooms, and transgender females are allowed into men’s bathrooms.

Our opponents try to laugh it off, as if that sort of thing has never happened and will never happen. Enter Rodney Kenneth Peterson. A recent article explains that Mr. Peterson decided to get“dressed up in women’s clothes — and a brunette wig — and unsuccessfully attempted to sneak into student-only areas of a women’s residence hall on the campus of Loma Linda University in Southern California…Eventually, dormitory staff members noticed a cross-dressing, middle-aged man in their midst and confronted him.”

It has been determined that Mr. Peterson sought to take pictures with his cell phone of the females in the residence hall and that he has tried this stunt in other places. Evidently Mr. Peterson hasn’t been listening to the politicians that assure us these things never happen as a result of adding sexual orientation and gender identity to non-discrimination laws.

Another ill-effect of this language being added is the story of Don Ennis. Don is a middle-aged ABC News editor that believes he is a woman trapped in a man’s body. So he decided to become transgender, leave his wife, and change his name to Dawn. Don, err…um…Dawn of course used the women’s restroom and other facilities since “she” was obviously identifying now as a woman. The problem is that Dawn decided she was really a he and changed his name back to Don and apologized to friends after realizing that he is “not transgender after all.”

The problem in each case is that laws are being passed to accommodate a minority group that is very confused. If a person can wake up one day and conclude that he is a she or that she is really a he trapped in a woman’ body, the opposite can be just as true. Just as Don came to the conclusion that he was “not transgender after all” so can others now saying they are trapped in the wrong body.

Just as Mr. Peterson decided to cross-dress in order to fulfill his perverted fantasy, so others can abuse non-discrimination laws with sexual orientation and gender identity language to similarly take advantage of unsuspecting girls and women.

Add to this the very dangerous trend of adults encouraging gender confusion in children. Rather than recognize the natural curiosity of children which can lead to a temporary period of gender experimentation, parents are quick to conclude their sons are girls and their girls are boys. From there, with the encouragement of their parents, these children become locked into a pattern of behavior that at one time was classified as a mental disorder, but is now seen as “normal.”

So what happened to Don Ennis? He says he was diagnosed as transgender and began living accordingly. Now he says he is absolutely certain he was misdiagnosed and is “totally, completely, unabashedly male.” Was Mr. Ennis confused about being confused? Was he trying to take advantage of a politically correct corporate world in order to fulfill a perverted fantasy?

The danger with non-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation and gender identity is that they elevate one class of people based on variant characteristics over the rest of the population with non-variant characteristics. No African American has ever suddenly realized he was “a white guy.” Outside of surgical procedures even biology is non-variant. Homosexuality, transgenderism, and other sexuality based characteristics seem to be unstable.

Do we really want our daughters to become accustomed to grown men seeing them in the bathroom or the locker room? Where does that kind of “normal” lead? I submit that it leads to a society where our daughters become so accustomed to grown men seeing them in various states of dress and undress that they think nothing of sending pictures of themselves in their underwear, or even nude, to the boys in their school. Pornography becomes a routine part of life. Engaging in sexual activity with numerous partners of various sexual orientations at a young age becomes the standard.  

Is that really the society we want to leave for our daughters and grand-daughters?

I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been saying this, but I know it’s been a few years. I wasn’t alone in declaring this truth, but I was among the minority willing to state it publicly. I was ridiculed and mocked for even suggesting such an idea. But now it seems those of us that did declare this dark result of marriage redefinition were right after all.

I’m talking about the fact that redefining marriage will lead to acceptance and legalization of polygamy, incest, and pedophilia.

The problem is that mental health professionals are ignoring the effects of graphic sexuality on children. With the advancement of technology and the readily available amount of pornography, kids are “growing up” at ever younger ages. But the long-term effects on the brain from exposure to explicit sexual images at young ages are still being discovered.

So what appears to be a “sexual orientation” that cannot be changed through therapy may in fact simply be an effect of years of exposure to certain kinds of sexually explicit images.

Nevertheless, mental health professionals are increasingly calling for pedophilia to be classified as a sexual orientation and given positive affirmation in society. Such a notion violates the moral sensibilities of most, yet we see comments from psychologists like this:

“Van Gijseghem, psychologist and retired professor of the University of Montreal, told members of Parliament, ‘Pedophiles are not simply people who commit a small offense from time to time but rather are grappling with what is equivalent to a sexual orientation just like another individual may be grappling with heterosexuality or even homosexuality.’”

Also emerging are honest comments from law professors like this one:

“You know those opponents of marriage equality who said government approval of same-sex marriage might erode bans on polygamous and incestuous marriages?…They’re right.”

The scary part here is not that they are making these statements. The scary part is that they are admitting that the consequences of marriage redefinition that we’ve all feared are a reality that is becoming more inevitable. Look, the bottom line is that if the government redefines marriage for one group, it absolutely must redefine it for another, and another. If it doesn’t continue to redefine it for every group demanding their rights, the government will be guilty of the same discrimination it now accuses traditional marriage supporters of.

The law professor is right. All the arguments used by homosexual advocates to push for marriage redefinition are arbitrary and can be applied to any other group. If the argument of “love” is used, well, polygamists love one another. If the argument of happiness, equality, and government benefits are used, they can be just as easily applied to pedophiles, polyamorists, and incestuous relationships.

The trend toward recognizing pedophilia is moving so quickly that even books about teachers engaging in sexual relationships with their students are not taboo to write. Not long ago such a book would have been reviled for its morally outrageous content. Not today. Today such a book is just a reflection of our society where every week another teacher or three is arrested for sexual activity with a student. Is it any wonder more parents are turning to home schooling their kids?

Ryan T. Anderson makes a statement in a recent article that helps put this argument in perspective. He wrote:

“Equality demands that we treat in the same ways things that are the same. But a same-sex relationship is fundamentally different from a marriage. No same-sex union can produce a child. And no same-sex relationship can provide a child with a mother and a father. While respecting everyone’s civil rights, government rightly recognizes, protects, and promotes marriage between a man and a woman as the ideal institution for procreative love, childbearing, and child-rearing. Recognizing that we are all created equal doesn’t challenge this historical understanding.”

Here’s where this ties into the discussion. If same-sex relationships can’t produce a child then they are less credible than polygamous, polyamorous, and even incestuous and pedophilia relationships; considering most of them can produce a child. So if we decide to recognize a relationship that can’t even bear children what is stopping our society from recognizing relationships that can bear children?

But most people recognize that marriage is not solely about child-bearing and raising; though that is a major component. It is also about the protection of the children born to a husband and wife. This protection includes protection from sexual abuse, from mental and emotional harm, and from poverty. All this can be achieved in the union of one man and one woman.

So this reality we’re speeding towards can be avoided if we will recognize that what is best for children is to be born and raised by biological parents in a home with just one mother and father. It might be difficult for some to hear this, yet every other scenario carries complications that require far too much government intervention and remove personal and parental rights. Then again, perhaps that’s the end game of all this.

 Three Important Upcoming Events:

–>  September 14th – IFI’s 3rd Annual Fun. Run. Walk in Joliet 
(Click HERE for more info)

–> October 4th — IFI’s Fall Banquet with Dr. Benjamin Carson in Northlake 
(Click HERE for more info)

–> October 23rd — IFI’s Defend Marriage Lobby Day in Springfield  
(Click HERE for more info)

Does the prohibition of same-sex “marriage” violate the separation of church and state? Does the Constitution prohibit citizens from having their religious beliefs shape their political decisions?

First, let’s remember that charges of violating the separation of church and state are selectively hurled.

When public servants like President Obama and Senator Rob Portman or celebrities like Jason Collins cite their Christian beliefs as the justification for their support of the redefinition of marriage, no one in the press or homosexual community accuses them of violating the separation of church and state.

Martin Luther King Jr. asserted the following in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.

. . .

I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, non-biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

In deep disappointment, I have wept over the laxity of the church. . . . I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

I never heard any liberals wail in indignation that this explicit profession of religious belief as the basis for public policy violated the Constitution.

Second, the Constitution does not prohibit citizens from having their faith inform their political decisions. The Constitution prevents the government from establishing a state religion and prevents the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. And the free exercise of religion is not restricted to what takes place in church. The exercise of religion encompasses or should encompass the totality of the lives of Christians, including their participation in self-governance.

It is impermissible for people of faith to enact laws that have solely a religious purpose. For example, it would be impermissible to pass laws mandating circumcision or communion. But if there are secular purposes for a law, the personal motives for any particular individual’s support for it are off-limits to the government.

People from diverse faith traditions and no faith could all arrive at the same position on a particular public policy. For example, although Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Baptists, and atheists may all oppose abortion because they value human life, the reasons for that valuation of life may differ.  Christians and Jews may oppose abortion because they see in the Bible that humans are knitted together in their mothers’ wombs, whereas an atheist may oppose abortion because he knows from science that when a sperm and egg unite, new human life begins.

If there is a secular purpose for the law (e.g., to protect incipient human life or to protect the rights of children), then voting for it does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The source of the various parties’ desires to protect incipient life (or children’s rights) is not the business of the government. It would be not only absurd but also unethical for the government to try to ascertain the motives and beliefs behind anyone’s opposition to abortion and equally unethical for the government to assert that only those who have no religious faith may vote on abortion (or marital) laws. Such an assertion would most assuredly violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

It is IFI’s hope that these answers will help in some small way to enable our readers to discuss with greater confidence and facility the dangerous proposal to redefine marriage out of existence.

Read more in this series:  Part 1        Part 2        Part 3       Part 4

For more help on questions related to homosexuality, I encourage readers to visit the Public Discourse website.

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