“Homosexual Myths Exposed” by Walter J. Chantry, The Banner of Truth, November 1982.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Chantry, a Pennsylvania Baptist preacher with a short and selective sense of history, heads a small faction of legalistic Sabbatarians who think that the zenith of Christianity was a 17th-century Puritan theocracy. Overlooking the fact that, as a Baptist, he would have been in the same danger in old Massachusetts Bay Colony as were Roger Williams, the poor “witches” and sundry “sodomites”, he seems oblivious to the heritage of toleration for minority rights granted in the Quaker Penn’s “heretical” woods and in the exiled Baptist’s “Rogues’ Island” (as Williams’ Rhode Island was called by the disdainful Puritans). Oweing to the non-Puritan custom of freedom of the press, this piece was published previously as an ad in a local weekly and paid for by Chantry’s flock. His being one of the editors of The Banner of Truth – in this case, a misnomer – doubtless helped in getting reprinted. The bearing of false witness against neighbors, though, is unbecoming to John R. de Witt and Geoffrey Thomas, co-editors with a wider following.
In the bloody tradition of “us” vs. “them” – as though there were no gay Baptists – Chantry fills his expose with warnings of homosexuals’ “rising tide”, “major force” and “political clout [that is] staggering” (and all this in only his first paragraph). He claims that, an “alarming social change” and an “ugly threat to social order” from the “explosion of this indecency [is] due to a new atmosphere of ‘tolerance’.” He says he is sure that “filthy and contagious” homosexuality is designed “to subvert the moral fiber of the commonwealth” and that, “you and your children are the victims” and so homosexuality is “as destructive [as] violence and tyranny [to] your children and grandchildren”. His theocratic ideology has no room for those who are as negatively different from himself as he says homosexuals are, so his first attack is what he calls, “The Myth of Gay Rights”. Drawing a stupid analogy between homosexuals wanting gay rights and other “criminals” wanting rights to steal, Chantry seems ignorant of the real analogies between his arguments and those of Puritans against Baptists, slave owners against slaves and abolitionists, etc. He complains that an “anything goes” mentality will lead to dueling in the streets. He argues in effect that, “the government should keep its nose” in homosexuals’ bedrooms but out of Baptist preachers’ schools.
Trying to counter “The Myth of Consenting Adults”, he claims that homosexuals are bent on seducing his unsuspecting readers who, in their confused “shock and revulsion [at] amorous advances and flirtations”, won’t know how to say no. In order to get them to “manfully oppose” homosexuality, Chantry tells them that all homosexuality is “lewd”, “gross”, “base”, “outrageous”, “vile”, “filthy”, “degenerate”, “degrading”, “perverted”, “pernicious”, “evil”, “indecent”, “repulsive”, “ugly”, and “obnoxious”. In “The Myth of Sexual Preference”, he continues to make the analogy between homosexuals and murderers, thieves and liars as though homosexuals elected to be homosexual. Chantry, though, is the one who is guilty of the character assassination of homosexuals he knows nothing about. He would rob them of their right to be themselves and to speak for themselves, to live and work where they’re qualified regardless of their sexuality, and he is the one who is guilty of spreading lies about them.
There is a bit of English Bible-quoting here, but it shows poor understanding of hermeneutics. In pressing a strange idea about Lot’s children, for example, Chantry says that, “everyone” of them “became sexual perverts through the ‘liberated’ society of Sodom” and because “Lot ‘tolerated’ his homosexual neighbors”. Chantry warns his readers not to do likewise. But the truth is not that Lot’s neighbors were “homosexuals” or that Lot’s daughters became lesbians. Townsmen tried to sexually abuse aliens. Lot offered his daughters for rape by the townsmen. The daughters engaged in drunken incest with Lot, whereupon the eldest daughter conceived Moab, an ancestor of Jesus. Yet Peter’s epistle calls Lot “a righteous man”. The Bible knows a righteousness in God’s grace – something to which Chantry’s legalism, for all its Reformed vocabulary, gives short shrift.
Chantry’s recommendations about solving the problems he raises are only partly followed by the preacher himself, for his “first requirement is clear thinking on the issue”. His readers should “stop contributing your money and your backing” to the “morally corrupt … theologians and churches [and] universities [that] gut us into this mess”. Instead of following those who “have conditioned minds to think that the noble thing to do is to ‘tolerate’ and ‘understand’ homosexuals”, he says that homosexuals should be “manfully oppose[d]” and be “driven underground … into dark corners for the good of all”. That, of course, is sadly exactly what the churches have already done quite literally to their gay children – and it has not been for the good of anybody.
Seeming to be more caring than to leave homosexuals in “dark corners”, Chantry tells his readers: “It is possible to rescue homosexuals from their perversion.” But he offers no evidence of any real “rescue”. He merely notes his implied, but misapplied, meaning in I Corinthians 6:10. And he is probably not aware that even antigay church leaders in the past never used this passage because they did not read homosexuality into it.