“The men of the city beset the house both young and old, all the people together. And they called Lot, and said to him: Where are the men that came in to thee at night? bring them out hither that we may know them: Lot went out to them, and shut the door after him, and said: Do not so, I beseech you, my brethren, do not commit this evil.” – (Gen 19:4-7)
We haven’t devoted a great deal of space to the latest push — which feels more like a rising tide — for not just tolerance, but a flat-out compulsory embrace of sodomy and the homosexual “lifestyle.” We’ve touched on some stories here and there. There are others we haven’t covered at all that deserve attention.
But something I’ve become suddenly and alarmingly convinced of is this: this is the way the new persecution of the faithful will come to pass in the Western world. You’re looking at it, in its nascent stages. When I say “suddenly and alarmingly convinced,” I mean this is not just the fruit of reason. Our beliefs have been under attack for a very long time, in many ways, and the homosexual agenda is nothing new. I was fighting my health teacher about her promotion of homosexual experimentation among my peers back in the eighth grade.
But this is something different. Visceral. It’s a gut feeling that sends little waves of panic through me. People are definitely going to lose their livelihoods over this. But I suspect many will also lose their freedom, and some may even lose their lives over it. Soon. And as with all the seductive, slowly-advancing evils of the world, most people won’t wake up until it’s at least a week too late. What powers they might have mustered to stop the growling, guttural advance of the demonic hordes foisting sins that cry out for vengeance upon the world, they will not invoke. Because there’s stuff to watch on the tee-vee. And did you see that one weird trick to lose stubborn belly fat? BTdubs, these cat videos are hilarious.
Feeling at least somewhat alone in my instinctive dread that a fetid Rubicon has just been crossed, largely unnoticed, I was gratified to see that friend of the site and podcast guest Ann Barnhardt, never one to pull a punch, is broadcasting the same message:
Writing about current events has become almost impossible. I sit down at my computer, and nothing happens. Oh, I have plenty to say, but you can only say stuff so many times over and over before you just start to feel like a hack, luxuriating in the act of screaming. And that’s no good.
I’m doing the Andrea Shea King show on Friday morning and have specifically asked Andrea to focus the show on secular current events, just to force me to engage.
In the mean time, here is my video series from July of ARSH 2012 on the French Revolution and its parallels to the situation in the overthrown U.S. Given the recent escalation in forcing acceptance, ratification and PARTICIPATION in the sodomite agenda, this presentation is, every day, even MORE relevant and more prescient and more terrifying than it was three years ago. No one believed that the sodomites posed any threat. No one believed that sexual perversion would be a catalyst of tyranny, genocide and war. It was just a sideshow. It was just a curiosity to be pitied, and nothing more. It was JUST SEX, after all. And as we learned from the Clinton years, SEX DOESN’T MATTER. Riiiiiight. And John the Baptist was a creepy loon obsessed with Herodias’ and Herod’s sex life because that’s what happens to people who don’t get laid. They get all judgmental and bitter. Do I have that about right? Mmmmmmmm?
[…]
Those of us who have been calling out this massive threat, both in the secular world and in the Church, have been accused of being “obsessed” and even latent or “down-low” sodomites ourselves, engaging in “compensation” and “projection”. Well, this lady didst protest not nearly enough, as it turned out. I hope you all wake up before YOUR livelihoods are destroyed, YOUR children are recruited into sodomy, and the bullet enters YOUR head.
It’s coming, friends. Sooner than you think. Do you honestly believe this will stay contained to the realm of bakers and florists and pizza shops and weddings? The scent of blood is in the air, and they’re coming for more victories.
What I’m writing here, right now, will very soon be considered hate speech. Laws will be passed. Rights will be trampled. This pestilence has been given a wide berth for too long, and it has grown to epidemic proportions.
Get ready.
UPDATE: Just minutes after I hit “publish”, I had a chance to read an Op-Ed in the New York Times that hints at what is to come. I’ll highlight some of the thinly veiled threats in bold:
That many Christians regard them as incompatible is understandable, an example not so much of hatred’s pull as of tradition’s sway. Beliefs ossified over centuries aren’t easily shaken.
But in the end, the continued view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It’s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.
It disregards the degree to which all writings reflect the biases and blind spots of their authors, cultures and eras.
It ignores the extent to which interpretation is subjective, debatable.
And it elevates unthinking obeisance above intelligent observance, above the evidence in front of you, because to look honestly at gay, lesbian and bisexual people is to see that we’re the same magnificent riddles as everyone else: no more or less flawed, no more or less dignified.
Most parents of gay children realize this. So do most children of gay parents. It’s a truth less ambiguous than any Scripture, less complicated than any creed.
So our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.
[…]
[I]t’s a vital message because of something that Indiana demonstrated anew: Religion is going to be the final holdout and most stubborn refuge for homophobia. It will give license to discrimination. It will cause gay and lesbian teenagers in fundamentalist households to agonize needlessly: Am I broken? Am I damned?
“Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people,” Gushee said.
[…]
Creech and Mitchell Gold, a prominent furniture maker and gay philanthropist, founded an advocacy group, Faith in America, which aims to mitigate the damage done to L.G.B.T. people by what it calls “religion-based bigotry.”
Gold told me that church leaders must be made “to take homosexuality off the sin list.”
His commandment is worthy — and warranted. All of us, no matter our religious traditions, should know better than to tell gay people that they’re an offense.
If you’re wondering how we got here, it’s the answer the Church has given us (and I’ve been trying to get through to people) all along: it starts with contraception and an abandonment of the procreative paradigm. Don’t believe me?
“Human understanding of what is sinful has changed over time,” said David Gushee, an evangelical Christian who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University. He openly challenges his faith’s censure of same-sex relationships, to which he no longer subscribes.
For a very long time, he noted, “Many Christians thought slavery wasn’t sinful, until we finally concluded that it was. People thought contraception was sinful when it began to be developed, and now very few Protestants and not that many Catholics would say that.” They hold an evolved sense of right and wrong, even though, he added, “You could find scriptural support for the idea that all sex should be procreative.”
Christians have also moved far beyond Scripture when it comes to gender roles.
“In the United States, we have abandoned the idea that women are second-class, inferior and subordinate to men, but the Bible clearly teaches that,” said Jimmy Creech, a former United Methodist pastor who was removed from ministry in the church after he performed a same-sex marriage ceremony in 1999. “We have said: That’s a part of the culture and history of the Bible. That is not appropriate for us today.”
And we could say the same about the idea that men and women in loving same-sex relationships are doing something wrong. In fact the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have said that. So have most American Catholics, in defiance of their church’s teaching.
