Why Draw the Line at Gay Marriage? Based on and paraphrased from a response provided by Al Mohler E. J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist, asked conservative Christians this question:"Why draw the line here?" And by here, he meant in opposition to same-sex marriage. It was a serious question that deserves a serious answer. Yet, to a certain extent, Dionne begins to answer the question himself, writing that "many traditionalist Christians view homosexual relationships as sinful. I think they are wrong. But, I acknowledge that this is a long-held view." However, he then goes on to write that "many of the same Christians also view adultery as a sin, and Jesus was tough on divorce, stating that, 'What…God has joined together, let not man put asunder.'" Well, he is absolutely right. (Of course, the interesting thing is that he doesn't go on to cite Jesus as making very clear that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.) But then, the challenge from Dionne arrives with these words, "But unless I'm missing something, we do not see court cases from website designers or florist or bakers about refusing to do business with people in their second or third marriages. We do not see the same ferocious response to adultery as we do to same-sex relationships." He goes on to say, "Conservative Christians in large numbers were happy to put aside their moral qualms and vote twice for a serial adulterer. Why the selective forgiveness? Why the call to boycott only this one perceived sin." In his judgment, "What we are seeing in the opposition to same-sex marriage is less about religious faith than cultural predispositions." It's interesting to note however that in 1995, the argument against same-sex marriage made sense to none another than E.J. Dionne himself, when he disagreed with the insistence of applying the word "marriage" to committed homosexual relationships. At that time he stated, "That word and the idea behind it carry philosophical and theological meanings that are getting increasingly muddled and could become more so if it were applied even more broadly." In other words, he said there are philosophical and theological issues at stake and it would be important to recognize those and not to threaten those. So, use some other word for what you will call these relationships, but don't call them marriage. That was 1995. By his book published in 2008, E.J. Dionne was arguing to the contrary. Although to his credit, he was acknowledging that he had held the contrary position as recently as 1995. But at least back in 2008, E.J. Dionne was not asking conservative Christians why the line would be drawn here. He seemed to understand it in 2008. He wrote this, "I do not expect social conservatives or religious traditionalists to accept these arguments immediately or without qualms." In fact, he wrote in the book entitled, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith in Politics After the Religious Right (again, in 2008), "Indeed, to the extent that I still agree with what I said on this subject in 1995, I understand how hard it is for people who live traditional lives, as in fact I do, to accept gay marriage. I worry, as they do, about the problems' marriage confronts. I agree with them entirely that for all its problems, the two parent family is, in most cases, still the best mechanism we have to raise children; and that family breakdown is the enemy of economic equality." So, we have one position in 1995, another position in 2008, and now in 2022, the man who said he basically understood conservative theological reservations about same-sex marriage, has turned around and asked in 2022, "What are you guys thinking?" But... Dionne did ask the question, so let us provide the answer: Why draw the line here? It is because unlike divorce and adultery, which after all, accept a definition of marriage—in what is called "same-sex marriage" you have a rejection of any stable objective definition of marriage. Marriage is no longer the union of a man and a woman. It is declared to be what marriage is not and cannot be. A same-sex relationship, to use the historic language of Christianity, lacks many of the capacities and many of the dignities of marriage. Most importantly, it lacks the procreative possibility. A man and a man and a woman and a woman cannot on their own, alone, the two of them together, create a baby. It simply can't happen. But, we have to take this one step further. What is the biblical basis for drawing the line here? It has to do with the fact that according to scripture, same-sex sexual relationships are not merely contrary to scripture, but contrary to nature. That is what is different. That is why, just to give an example, throughout Christian history, you would have something like polygamy that would not be judged as harshly as say, homosexual relationships or the claim of something like homosexual marriage. It is because polygamy is judged to be wrong. It is judged to be sinful. Jesus again, made that very clear. But, it is not in the same sense as same-sex relationships/behaviors given that they are against nature. It is really interesting that in Romans chapter one, when the Apostle Paul is talking about same-sex relationships, he explicitly defines them as against nature. So, when E.J. Dionne says, why draw the line here? I'll simply say it's because scripture draws a very clear line here—even though you have adultery and divorce as grave injuries and insults to marriage which bring about grave damage and danger to a society, and in particular, to the most vulnerable, starting with children. I'm willing to bet that even if adultery is not a part of the criminal code in your state, it is at least factored into considerations, including negotiations that have to do with divorce. We are living in an age in which our society wants to act as if it has escaped or outgrown all moral scruples. But the fact is that still is not the case, and by our moral nature given to us by our Creator, I will argue it will actually never be the case. I fully recognize that in our society, you'd be hard pressed to find even a conservative Republican who would have the theological conviction to look into a television camera and say, "Yes, I believe that homosexual acts are against nature." But, that doesn't change the fact that they are against nature. And conservative Christians, by the way, are perfectly capable of any number of forms of moral hypocrisy; but arguing for marriage as the union of a man and a woman and exclusively so is not a form of moral hypocrisy. We may be on the losing side of the argument in politics, but on the basis of divine revelation and the history and tradition of the Christian Church, including by the way the Roman Catholic Church of which E.J. Dionne is a member in communion, the fact is that the Christian Church through 2000 years has known exactly what marriage is. And thus I'll simply say that one of the reasons to draw the line here is that the Christian Church has drawn the line here for 2000 years, and I think rightly so.
THE HIJACKING OF EMPATHY AND EQUALITY By Dr. Michael Brown During the 1960's, many young Americans (myself included) were looking for more than the American dream, asking deeper questions about the meaning of life. The rapid changes in the culture, the challenges to the status quo of the day, the shocking assassinations, and the specter of the Vietnam War created a deep sense of uncertainty, also leading to a spiritual search. Why are we here after all? A deep void existed in our hearts, one that led many of us to a transformational encounter with the Lord during the Jesus Revolution. Unfortunately, it was not only the Lord who filled that void. Satan and the world rushed in to fill it too, especially with sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and Eastern religion. That was the path many of us took before we came to know the Lord, a path from which many others never returned. In our day, as a young generation deals with its own set of uncertainties and frustrations, longing to see justice and equality prevail, Satan and the world have rushed in to hijack these sentiments, many of which are good and noble in themselves. Nowhere is this clearer than in the hijacking of empathy, defined as "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another." It is partly because of empathy that a disproportionate percent of Gen Z'ers identify as LGBTQ+, even though only a small percentage of them are actively, let alone exclusively, involved in same-sex relationships and activity. As a result, this quality of empathy, which can be very positive in and of itself, has been co-opted in a destructive, negative way. And so, to give just one example, out of empathy, many teens will instinctively defend a trans-identified peer, not realizing that this peer is about to destroy his or her life via chemical castration and genital mutilation. Their empathy in the short-term actually contributes to their friend’s long-term pain. And so, rather than lovingly help their friend not to mutilate and alter the healthy body God has given them, their empathy moves them to side with an act of self-destruction. It’s the same with the pursuit of justice and equality, in the name of which a male who identifies as female can compete against real females, not to mention share a locker room with them. Yes, this uncomfortable, unequal, and potentially abusive situation is justified in the name of equality. And so, in a recent court case where a weightlifting association was ordered to "cease and desist" from banning biological males from competing against biological females, the verdict was reached in the name of fairness. The association must not discriminate against a man who believes he is a woman, thereby discriminating against all the true women. What a travesty. Almost 20 years ago, in April 2005, Dr. Al Mohler noted that, "When Christian Smith and his fellow researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took a close look at the religious beliefs held by American teenagers, they found that the faith held and described by most adolescents came down to something the researchers identified as 'Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.'" (Remember that these adolescents, today, are in their 30s or 40s.) "As described by Smith and his team, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism consists of beliefs like these: 1. 'A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.' 2. 'God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.' 3. 'The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about ones self.' 4. 'God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.' 5. 'Good people go to heaven when they die.'" Note again principle #2: "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions." In practice, this means, "If your religious beliefs or biblical standards offend me or cause me any discomfort, then they (and you) must be wrong, since they (and you) are not nice, and being nice is the essence of the gospel." Add empathy to the mix, and you end up with this: "You and your religious beliefs are obviously wrong, since they make my friend feel bad." Add the pursuit of equality to the mix, and you end up with this: "You and your religious beliefs are obviously wrong, since they are unfair to my friend." This, in short, is the hijacking of empathy and equality. A remarkable example of this can be found in a recent dialogue between the social media superstar (and wrestler) Logan Paul and his good friend and co-host, who is a professing Christian. (I watched the video clip but cannot locate it at the moment.) Paul justified the open hostility he was showing towards his friend because his friend was a Christian, and Christians believed in "conversion therapy." That was it. Presumably, this alleged Christian practice made Paul's gay friends feel bad, and therefore Christianity itself was bad. Case closed. (See again the chapter, "If Gay Is Good, the Church is Bad" in my new book, Why So Many Christians Have Left the Faith.) Charlie Kirk pointed me to a 2022 article by Perry Glanzer titled, "Is Empathy a Christian Virtue? Comparing Empathy to Christian Compassion." While recognizing the potential value of empathy, Glanzer noted that, "surveys reveal that having greater empathy may lead to less sympathy for enforcing certain unpopular moral or legal principles on college campuses, such as freedom of speech. Empathy, in this case, becomes a weapon welded by those concerned about the feelings of the majority who are disturbed by speech from the minority. "In this respect, empathy by itself is like a tool. It can be used properly or improperly. Whether it becomes the Christian virtue of compassion depends upon whether it is directed to God-ordained ends and results in action." This reminds me of a quote by Ayn Rand (hat tip to John Hawkins for the quote): "Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent." How easy it is to turn something good on its head. Those who reach out to the younger generation (and others who share their values) should recognize how some good values have been hijacked. And rather than simply react to the wrong positions they espouse, we can point them in the direction of Christian compassion and biblically-based justice. Then, working together, we can take back what has been stolen and steer that passion in a positive, life-changing direction. It's called being redemptive. That’s a virtue that is almost impossible to hijack, pervert, or twist.
Romans 1:22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools... How Do You Have a Woman’s College If You Do Not Know What a Woman Is? Historic Seven Sisters Colleges Reckon with the ‘T’ of the LGBTQ Revolution BY R. ALBERT MOHLER, JR. The American academic landscape includes many different kinds of institutions. You've got vast private universities, you've got the big state funded universities, you have land grant universities, you have small colleges, community colleges, private colleges. You also have the so-called Seven Sisters. The Seven Sisters are a system of very elite women's colleges in the United States. It's actually a very interesting history, and what's going on right now means that all seven of the Seven Sisters are really at the center of a massive controversy. Because the Seven Sisters are very liberal sisters as you think about these liberal arts colleges, and they're doing their dead level best with very liberal faculty and probably even more exceedingly liberal students to keep up with the liberal movement, the wave of liberal or progressivism. But when it comes to the LGBTQ revolution, well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out, we had a head-on collision here. You can have a women's college, but only if you know who a woman is. But of course, those are extremely liberal colleges. They have been for about a century now, and they are also intending to be, and they're recruiting students who want to be on the leading edge of all this cultural change. And that means the sexual and gender revolution. And of course it means the LGBTQ revolution. But that leads to one of the most interesting questions of our modern time, and that is how do you have a women's college if you really don't know who a woman is? And that's where the story gets a lot more interesting, and it does so really fast. If you go back into about the middle point of the last decade. So we're not going back a century, just going back the last decade. One of the interesting issues was that you already had this form of LGBTQ activism on these historic women's college campuses, and the demand was made we got to find a way to be an enthusiastic champion for all of this, LGBTQ, and of course now IA plus mark and all the rest. But here's the problem, you can understand how the L and the G and the B might work out with the idea of a women's college. But what do you do at T, not just transgender, but the non-binary when it comes to gender and all the rest? What in the world do you do with this? And of course, you're a school, you've got to make decisions. Who can and can't apply to your school, who may and may not be admitted to your school. How does the campus culture work? And just to point out the obvious, if you define yourself historically, and I don't think it's the wrong word to say here aggressively as a women's college, then at the very least you have to define your student body by being women. Otherwise, you're not a women's college anymore. And trust me, they intend to be women's colleges. As a matter of fact, as you look back to the 20th century, one of the issues in many of these colleges, especially the late part of the 20th century, was that there was the argument of gender feminism, not just the argument of say, first wave feminism about equality. You had the second wave feminist argument on these campuses, which was about creating special, safe place for women and indeed creating what was declared to be the necessity of a women only form of environment for education because the presence of men would be itself threatening. So the idea of a woman's college, particularly with the ideology of second wave feminism, was to privilege or protect the distinctively female or women, it was claimed ways of knowing, ways of teaching, ways of living on a campus. But at this point, if you want to know where the controversy's headed, all you have to say is J. K. Rowling or say Martina Navratilova. Because what you have here is the inevitable collision between feminism, which after all is based upon knowing who a female is and the non-binary revolution. But if you're on the left, you can't say no to any aspect of the revolution. That's the big insight of what happens when you watch the left. By definition, the left has no natural limit. So that is to say the argument is going to be going further and further and further. You say, well, the same thing's true on the right. No, that's not true. The conservative argument in its essence is about conserving something real and that means objectively real. So at least in theory, the conservative argument should be pretty much the same argument throughout time. We need to conserve what God has created, what God has given us, the categories that God has created and has revealed to us, and the structures of existence that lead to human flourishing, human happiness, and good government, to state the very obvious minimum. But as you're thinking about the left, the left says no boundaries. So there are no boundaries. There are no limitations upon where this is going to go. That's why, as I've often said, the most scared person on the planet has to be a professor on one of these campuses because he or she can't possibly keep up with the even more liberal students showing up on the campus, they become a part of the problem really, really quickly. Where were we? Well, these historic women's colleges were trying to say we're pro-LGBTQ and yes, that means T and non-binary, and that requires a redefinition of our admissions policies and of our campus housing policies. You just go down the whole thing including the very identity of a women's college. So you have to come up with all kinds of, let's just say complicated definitions. For example. What are the possibilities here? Well, I'm going to use the language that is common to that environment. The language is this. You have biological males identifying as male, biological males identifying as female, biological males identifying as non-binary. You have biological females identifying as women. You have biological females identifying as men. You have biological females identifying as non-binary. Now, there are all kinds of permutations you could come up with even beyond that. But the bottom line is there are at least six categories there. So two of them are recognizable throughout all of human history, biological males identifying as men and biological females identifying as women. But that's so old school when it comes to these cutting edge colleges. And their commitment to feminism is now a commitment to the transgender revolution, but not without limitations. So Wellesley College. Wellesley is one of the most famous of the Seven Sisters. It's also one of the most wealthy. It includes among its alumni, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Madeline Albright. It has been on the front lines of many culture wars throughout the 20th century and beyond. Founded in 1870, Wellesley on the cutting edge represents a commitment to values, and this appears on its current website. The values are intellectual discovery and excellence, gender equality, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Listen to this, we affirm that diversity is essential to educational excellence and we are committed to being a community in which each member thrives. Empowerment and social change, connection and community integrity and academic freedom. Those are the listed values. But here's where you understand these values run into a direct conflict. If you're talking about the word equity itself, a very controversial word these days because it generally is now an ideological replacement for equality, and that's very much a part of the thinking of the left. If you're going to talk about equity, the question is equity for whom, and the entire point of Wellesley College was that it was equity for women, but who exactly is a woman? If you go back about five years ago, most of the Seven Sisters, these most famous of American women's colleges, very historic, very wealthy, very influential, excepting only women for the entirety of their history, they decided that they would accept just about anyone except a biological male identifying as a male or even a biological female identifying as a male. In other words, they basically came to the consensus that you could be admitted to and a part of one of these historic women's colleges, so long as you did not identify in any way as a male. So they have these two goals they have established, at least in theory, one of them is the old historic understandable goal of being a woman's college. But the other is the very modern leftist progressivist goal of being on the cutting edge of the LGBTQ revolution. Again, you can have one, you can't have the other. It's going to get complicated. But in these historic women's colleges, as I say, by the time you get to the end of the last decade, it's basically anyone can apply and be admitted and be a part of the campus so long as you are not either a biological male identifying as a male or a biological female identifying as a male. If you identify as a male right now, guess what? No admission, no acceptance, no being on the campus. But that is until this week. Some of the other, among the colleges, these Seven Sisters were a bit ahead of Wellesley on this, but Wellesley's the most influential and the student body at Wellesley was pushing for change further along the LGBTQ continuum. So in other words, if you just think about the old policy, you can be anything but a biological male identifying as a man or a biological female identifying as a man. The great sin there is identifying as a man. But it turns out that if you are going to be on the cutting edge of the sexual revolution, you may now be against anyone who is biologically male identifying as a man. But otherwise, you got to say yes to everything else. You have to say yes. Even now, if you're going to follow the transgender revolution, you're going to have to say yes to biological females identifying as a male. So are you an historic women's college? If you have a so-called man on campus, if you're living by the fiction that this biological female is a male, here's where you see all of this begin to fall apart and it falls apart in a way you would think would be humiliating and embarrassing to those who are pushing the LGBTQ revolution. You would think that the sheer insanity of this would be so obvious that everyone would back up and say, "What in the world are we doing here? What are we trying to communicate? How is this a women's college, if we're saying that you can be anything but a man identifying as a man," because even now, if you're a woman identifying as a man, hey, you're all in. We even go so far in our extreme commitment to the LGBTQ logic that we say you actually are a man, but there can't be any men on campus. Well, except transgender men, I guess you're welcome. So how from a Christian worldview perspective do we look at this? Well, there's one obvious way of looking at it, and that is this is nuts.
"Now methodologically, let's just understand that if you are saying that God is no longer to be understood solely and definitively and sufficiently in terms of his self-revelation in scripture, then you're basically just inventing God as you go along." (And that's the great experiment of modern liberal theology. It's the invention of a new God, simply using the language and claiming the authority, wearing the investments and, in many cases, installing the bishops as if this is the same church. It isn't.) R. ALBERT MOHLER, JR.