“Is the Church guilty of beating people with the Bible?” This is the question with which Southern Baptist seminary president Al Mohler begins a recent blog attacking those who say gay people get “clobbered” with Bible verses. Feigning shock, he says: “As strange as that argument might sound, it is actually a powerful weapon in the hands of those who are determined to normalize homosexuality and same-sex marriage within the Church.”
Ralph Blair responds: “There’s, of course, nothing at all ‘strange’ about religionists misuse of scripture to beat up on people. They did it in Bible days – as Jesus said the expositors of the Law did – and as Mohler’s Baptists did during days of slavery, segregation and miscegenation and as he does today in this blog against gay folk.” Still, Mohler concludes: “When the Bible, in part or in whole, is dismissed as ‘clobber Scriptures,’ it is not only the Bible that is subverted, but also the Gospel. The Church must recognize that fact clearly – and fast.”
A breakfast crowd in a down-home Texas diner defended gay parents under verbal attack from an antigay waitress while diners in New York did not. These scenarios were staged by John Quinones and ABC’s “What Would You Do?”. The “waitress” and gay “couples” and children were actors. Those who defended the couples and those who “didn’t want to get involved” did not know of the candid camera set-up. The videos are on YouTube.
“It’s being touted as a gay cure app, and nothing could be further from the truth.” This was the claim Exodus International spokesperson Jeff Buchanan made on Fox News in the aftermath of Apple’s removal of Exodus’ iTunes iPhone app. Buchanan told The Christian Post: “In no way, shape or form is our message about trying to cure or do we try to promote that type of methodology or message.”
But for some 35 years, Exodus has pushed and promoted the promise of sexual reorientation, “ex-gay” change. In the wake of wider public awareness of “ex-gay” scandals, testimonies of former “ex-gay” leaders who now admit the movement is both fraudulent and harmful, and the psychiatric and psychological associations’ denouncing the claims of “reparative” therapy, the movement’s promises of reorientation have carried some caveats in recent years. The more recent version of Exodus’ rationale is this: “Exodus believes the opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality. It is holiness.” The network’s self-description seems now to be a single, bland sentence: “Exodus International is the world’s largest ministry to individuals and families impacted by homosexuality.” After the latest flap, the Exodus website states: “we don’t do ‘ex-gay therapy’” and “we do not label ourselves ‘ex-gay’”. However, Exodus still pushes a book with the big, bold title: Ex-Gay. (For Ralph Blair’s reviews of this book and other works by its co-authors, see EC’s Reviews of Winter 2008, Summer 2008, and Winter 2011)
Alex Haiken is a Jewish believer in Christ, a recent graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary and a gay man. When he came to faith in Christ, his mentors told him that being gay and Christian “was a contradiction in terms”. Serving as a leader in an “ex-gay” ministry, he found it to be “a scripturally unsound mirage, a specious illusion that deceitfully draws people, not to a life-giving oasis but to a deeper and deeper spiritual desert.” He now lives as a Christian who’s also gay and he’s involved with EC ministry. JewishChristianGay.wordpress.com is his blog address.
Historian Nancy A. Hardesty has died. Most widely known as co-author, with Letha Dawson Scanzoni, of the groundbreaking, All We’re Meant To Be (Word Books, 1974), called “the most significant book” of 1975 by Eternity magazine. (1974’s winner was Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.) In 1974, Hardesty was a founder of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus. Her University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, Women Called to Witness (Abingdon, 1984), linked today’s biblical feminism to the 19th century women’s rights movement rooted in Finneyite revivalism and Wesleyan Holiness. Her most recent academic post was at Clemson University where she taught religion. She was a longtime supporter of EC and keynoted all three of EC’s regional summer conferences.
Belmont University, the largest Christian university in Tennessee, has given official recognition to a pro-gay/lesbian campus group. The group, Bridge Builders, had been turned down twice before, but provost Thomas Burns says “ongoing campus dialogue about Christian faith and sexuality” has resulted in the school’s change of policy. Founded by Southern Baptists, Belmont is no longer formally related to the Baptists, but this Nashville school’s website says Belmont still “seeks to show every student how the love of Christ can compel them to lead lives of disciplined intelligence, compassion, courage and faith.”
Seattle Pacific University reverses its decision and now recognizes a gay issues discussion group as an official campus organization. In January, the administration denied the group the right to meet on campus and refused to recognize the group as an official club. That decision prompted a backlash from many students, faculty and alumni. Now, the administration says its ‘goal is to respond to the need of our students to have a ‘safe space’ for conversations regarding human sexuality, including sexual orientation.” Founded in 1891 by Free Methodists, SPU is a major evangelical university.
Westmont College’s newspaper published an open letter from Westmont’s gay and lesbian alumni telling of their “loneliness and fear” during their days on this evangelical campus. Other alumni of this evangelical college near Santa Barbara have signed on with support and half of the Westmont faculty has asked these gay and lesbian Christians for “forgiveness for ways we might have added to your pain.” The late Robert N. Wennberg, Westmont’s very popular professor of philosophy – named the school’s teacher of the year a record five times – was a welcoming and affirming confidant of closeted students.
A Wheaton College gay and lesbian alumni message of support for gay and lesbian students on campus: “You are not tragic. Your desire for companionship, intimacy and love is not shameful.” The alumni witnessed to an on-campus feeling “like you’re the only one.” Response “has been completely overwhelming”, though the college president did issue a routine antigay policy statement while “condemn[ing] violence and injustice directed towards LGBTQ people.”
Point Loma Nazarene University student chaplain Todd Clayton announced that he is gay and resigned the post to which the student body had elected him two years in a row. A graduating senior, Clayton spoke of his decade-long struggle when he addressed 340 members of the PLNU family at an “All God’s Children” forum at San Diego’s First Nazarene Church in late March. The congregation’s pastor thanked him for his testimony and said: “The church needs to be a safe place to engage these topics.” But, fearing that the forum has become a “gay advocacy” group, the Nazarene district superintendent has ruled that the group may no longer meet at the church.
Clayton has the love of his parents, who are Nazarene ministers (his mother is on the PLNU board), as well as the support of some faculty and students. He’s plans to begin his studies at Princeton Seminary this summer.
Harding University gay and lesbian students launched an e-zine, The State of the Gay, “to give voice to the experience of gay and lesbian students at Harding.” The site was immediately blocked on the Searcy, Arkansas campus. The president of this school, operated by the traditionally separatist “churches of Christ”, said he found the website “offensive and degrading … vulgar and extreme” though, he granted, some of the postings “appeared to be sincere and heartfelt”. The site is at
Abilene Christian University has several students who openly acknowledge their same-sex attraction. Other ACU students are supporting them and urging better befriending. ACU, like Harding, is affiliated with the “churches of Christ”. The administration forbids formation of a campus Gay-Straight Alliance. The vice president for student life says the school wants to support students in their “struggle with same-sex attraction but we’re not going to embrace any advocacy of gay identity.”
Hope College’s board has issued a statement in the wake of controversies over campus discussion of homosexuality. The statement says: “Hope College promotes the indispensable value of intellectual freedom and recognizes that there are Christians who take scripture seriously and hold other views. Hope College affirms the scholarly examination and discussion of all issues surrounding human sexuality even if they differ from the institutional position. The College provides safe places for the Hope community to discuss issues of human sexuality as well as educational programming on a variety of human sexuality issues.” Hope College, in Holland, Michigan, is affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, the nation’s oldest Protestant church.
Baylor University has rejected a request from a group of gay and gay-supportive students for official recognition. Baylor administrators say that these “kinds of issues are best carried out through professionally facilitated discussions” and that the group’s advocacy is “contrary to biblical teaching.” The group, Sexual Identity Forum, is filing an appeal and some 60 GLBT students and their allies have been meeting on campus. Baylor, in Waco, Texas, was founded by Southern Baptists but is more loosely affiliated with Baptists today.
Liberty University hosted “The Awakening”, an antigay conference, in April. Matt Barber, formerly with Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America and now a dean at Falwell’s school, warned that gay men in the military would be preoccupied with sexual attraction to other soldiers and would spread AIDS. Ryan Sorba of Young Conservatives of California, urged that the term, “gay”, not be used by Christian lobbies and suggested “sodomy” or “unnatural vice” be used instead. Another conferee suggested using “anti-Christian”. Greg Quinlan, president of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays says he was re-oriented to a marriage with a woman. He is now divorced.
Sojourners, the progressive Christian social action periodical headed by Jim Wallis, is still rejecting pro-gay ads. In May, Sojourners turned down an ad promoting the welcoming of same-sex couples in churches.
Over 30 years ago, The Other Side, a similar social action periodical put out by evangelical Christians, formulated what the fall, 1980 issue of EC’s Record reported as “a new policy on advertisements from organizations working with homosexuals.” The Other Side will “accept advertising both from groups which approve of covenantal homosexual behavior and from groups which do not approve of homosexual behavior under any circumstances [but] will not accept advertising from groups which say that homosexual orientation is in itself sinful or which promote orientation change.” In addition, The Other Side “will not accept advertising from groups which oppose or limit the civil rights of gays or lesbians.” The Other Side was published from 1965 to 2004.
“My family decided it was best to cut me out of their life.” This was the reaction after a gay young man who’d grown up in a conservative Christian home came out to his family. “It didn’t go down too well.” Lee McCracken says: “I don’t hate them, although I am disappointed.” McCracken has made a video “primarily for my own mother, but also for all the parents of gay kids out there.” He’s found support in the Gay Christian Network and urges others to be in touch with GCN. Google: “Lee’s video to his Mum” (with Avalon’s song, “There are No Orphans of God” ).
Gay teen suicide is more common in politically and socially conservative areas. This finding is Columbia University psychologist Mark Hatzenbuehler’s from his study of some 32,000 high school students in Oregon. He found that the rate is not tied to outright bullying but rather to the antigay attitudes and values of the community. It was published in the journal, Pediatrics. Response from Robert Blum of Johns Hopkins’ School of Public Health: “Is it surprising? No. Is it important? Yes.” But economist and Baptist preacher, Peter Sprigg, head of the antigay Family Research Council, was adamant: “ The most effective way of reducing suicide attempts is not to create a ‘positive social environment’ for the affirmation of homosexuality. Instead, it would be to discourage teens from self-identifying as gay, lesbian or bisexual.”
“The truth is, same-sex attracted students and those who are bullied because they are perceived to be gay have a point,” observes Grove City College psychologist Warren Throckmorton. Responding to Focus on the Family’s continuing complaint that anti-bullying efforts are examples of the “gay agenda”, Throckmorton notes that “there are far too many instances where our youth groups and gatherings are hostile to kids and people who are different.” He says: “I spoke to a group of Christian athletes several years ago about bullying and many admitted their participation in harassing kids who were gay or who were thought to be.”
Ontario’s Roman Catholic bishops want gay-straight alliances in their schools. They support these clubs for combating “bullying related to sexual orientation” as their “primary goal.” In response, many angry Catholic parents are protesting. They complain the bishops are “letting down our children” and are going against Catholic teaching.
Tim Keller, in a Focus on the Family interview, said “pro-family” conservatives are buying more into a “consumer, secular conformity to the world” than they realize. Talking to Focus president Jim Daly and calling it his shortest answer on contemporary conservatives’ emphasis on the family, he warned that families are turning into idols. Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) in New York City.
Ashley Madison has been criticized as “a business built on the back of broken hearts, ruined marriages and damaged families.” That’s because it claims more than 9-million-members in a “social network” that’s used by heterosexual men and women to find surreptitious hookups outside their marriages. The biggest sign-up day at Ashley Madison is the day after Mother’s Day. Last post-Mother’s Day Monday, 31,427 women signed up. The second biggest day is the day after Father’s Day. (The name of the service combines the two most popular names for baby girls these days.)
There’s no mention of Ashley Madison on the websites of the major lobbies for the so-called protection of marriage, i.e., National Organization for Marriage, Focus on the Family, Traditional Values Coalition, et al. But these sites are full of propaganda against gay men and lesbians seeking the right to marry a person of the same gender.
Within 5 years of the birth of an unmarried couple’s baby, 60 percent had split up. Only 15 percent had married. Up to 75 percent of the “fathers” provided little or no financial support. These findings are reported in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs journal, The Future of Children. “Multipartner fertility” adds to the problems for the children. Problems increase with every “transition”, i.e., every new boyfriend and breakup, including greater risk of abuse.
For the first time ever, married couples form minority of US households. The 2010 Census Bureau reports that married couples constitute only 48 percent of American households – four points below the previous year’s statistic.
The “Protect Marriage: One Man, On Woman” Facebook page now supports marriage equality for same-sex couples. Louis Marienelli, who set up this 290,000-strong Facebook page, changed his mind after meeting lesbians and gay men at stops along the route of a National Organization for Marriage nationwide tour. He says that in meeting these couples, they “became real people for me almost instantly. For the first time I had empathy for them and remember asking myself what was I doing.”
A quarter of America’s evangelical Christians back legal marriage for same-sex couples, according to polling reported by the Public Religious Research Institute. That figure has been growing in recent years, especially among younger evangelicals.
The Gallup Poll and polling for ABC News/Washington Post find that 53 percent of Americans back legalized marriage for same-sex couples. Last year, 53 percent were against it.
While his supporters shouted “clobber verses” over the loudspeaker, Bronx Democrat, New York state senator and Pentecostal preacher, Ruben Diaz, Sr., held his anti-gay-marriage rally on a Sunday in mid-May. His lesbian granddaughter, Erica Diaz, took part in a competing marriage equality rally with her girlfriend. She said: “I started crying a little bit because they don’t believe we’re people.” Diaz, Sr., in white suit and cowboy hat, said he loves his granddaughter but would not attend her wedding if New York passes marriage equality. In June, Erica Diaz wrote a piece for The New York Post in which she said her grandfather told her he was proud of me for “respectfully speaking up for what you believe in.” She wrote: “He could quietly vote ‘no’[to gay marriage] if that’s what he believes is right. But I want him to know that every word he utters hurts his own blood.”
Carl Cannon supports same-sex marriage but faults pro-gay lobby bullies. On RealClearPolitics.com, he criticizes Human Rights Campaign for intimidating a top law firm into abandoning its agreement to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. Saying, “It’s getting difficult to figure out who the real liberals are these days,” he harks back to the days when a Clarence Darrow would be applauded for defending unpopular causes.
Country and Gospel singer Dolly Parton presented a Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Award to Kristin Chenoweth in April. The Broadway star is also an outspokenly committed Christian and was one of several honorees at the 22nd annual event held in Los Angeles.
Ann Coulter chides the Right for its obsession with homosexuality. While saying that gay sex is sinful, she points to the Right’s “extra animosity” over that sin while it fails to say much about the sexual sins of heterosexuals.
The Colorado Senate approved civil unions for same-sex couples but House Republicans killed it. The bill would have allowed the right to share medical decisions and other rights that heterosexuals take for granted. The main opposition was from the Religious Right. Focus on the Family granted that fair-minded people support civil unions but that the next step would be legal marriage, so Focus fought the bill. Catholic opponents claimed that, with the civil union option, heterosexuals would stop getting married. Strangely, on several levels, Roman Catholic Bishop James D. Conley argued against civil unions, insisting that only a one-man, one-woman marriage is in the image of the Triune God.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) will allow ordination of openly gay ministerial candidates, including those who are in committed same-sex relationships. The denomination has been debating the issues of homosexuality since the 1970s. The latest constitutional change is expected to prompt more of congregations to bolt the denomination. In the last four years, 120 PC(USA) congregations have moved ot the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
The Church of Scotland will allow ordination of openly gay ministerial candidates, including those who are in committed same-sex relationships. Some 40,000 members among the half-million parishioners had threatened to leave if the decision had not been made and, now that it has, some 100,000 are talking of leaving.
“I want to emphasize the need to respect the human dignity of people regardless of our moral judgments on behavior.” Bryan Massingale, a Jesuit priest who teaches moral theology at Marquette University was summing up his remarks at an Equally Blessed event in Milwaukee in March. It was sponsored by “a coalition of faithful Catholics who support full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people both in the church and in civil society.” When Massingale was asked if he was speaking against “the Catholic position” on homosexuality, he clarified that “it’s not Catholic law, it’s a Catholic teaching. It’s a distinction and a difference there.” He also noted that a Public Religion Research Institute survey finds that “64 percent of Catholics who attend Mass weekly or more, favor some form of recognition of same-sex relationships of some kind.” Massingale was joined at the event by Sr. Simone Campbell, director of a Catholic social justice lobby.
A “Catholic Family Conversation”, sponsored by Catholics for Equality and campus Catholic Republicans and Catholic Democrats, was held at Georgetown University. It was a lively – even heated – debate on same-sex marriage and drew some 300 attendees, most of whom were predisposed to a pro-gay position. Moderated by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, the event featured Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage, in opposition, and Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan, in support. Sullivan thanked God for homosexuality and told the audience that, “The first person I came out to was God.” He blamed the Roman Catholic hierarchy for its “dehumanizing” of gay and lesbian couples. Gallagher insisted that marriage is, by natural law, strictly for heterosexual union and she said that the push for the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples is “repressive and marginalizes” those who see marriage as an institution for procreation.
Roman Catholic Bishop Raul Vera Lopez celebrated mass at a pro-gay conference in Saltillo in March. The bishop, who is a public supporter of the state of Coahuila’s civil union legislation for same-sex couples, gave his blessing at this Fourth Forum on Sexual, Familial and Religious Diversity at which both clerics and lay people presented.
“There was no single cause” in Catholic clergy sex abuse cases according to the recently released in-depth study by the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But, since these incidents peaked in the 1970s, that era’s “sexual revolution” in general is an obvious associated factor – as it was in an upswing of similar incidents in other vocational relationships with students, patients, parishioners, etc. Incidents of abuse rose in the 1960s and declined in the 1980s. Neither the celibate priesthood policy nor the presence of homosexually oriented priests was found to have played a significant role.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Robert Steinback’s blog (May 27) cites Ralph Blair’s Summer, 1990, review (cf. Review Archive at ECinc.org) of Are Gay Rights Right? by antigay lawyer Roger Magnuson. Steinbach notes Magnuson’s influence in the “vicious falsehoods” being spread by the Right-wing Minnesota Family Council’s current assault against that state’s gay citizens.
Gay, atheist, British historian and public intellectual, David Starkey, is at his best contrarian form in defending Christian B & B proprietors whose consciences won’t let them host unmarried and same-sex couples. Speaking on the BBC Question Time panel, Starkey said he fears “we’re producing a tyrannous new morality that is every bit as oppressive as the old … a liberal morality as intolerant and as oppressive” as the antigay morality of years ago. The clip is at YouTube under “Christian B&B” and “Starkey”.
The Young Women’s Christian Association in the UK has changed its name to “Platform 51”. If the organization is embarrassed over its historic Christian roots, it should be more embarrassed over so publicly getting its figures wrong. The new name was chosen to boast of the percentage of women in the world’s population. But the current world population sex ratio is actually 101 males to 100 females.
David Noebel will retire as president of the antigay Summit Ministries in October. He was fiery Fundamentalist Billy James Hargis’ assistant until Hargis was accused of having sex with male students of his American Christian College. Hargis retired and died in 2004. Noebel once sent a signed copy of his 1977 book, The Homosexual Revolution, dedicated to Anita Bryant, to Ralph Blair. He inscribed it: “Orientationally yours.”
“It’s a terrible idea!” That’s the professional judgment of the director of training in child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, Eugene Beresin. He’s talking about the Canadian couple’s decision not to disclose the gender of their baby so that “Storm” (the baby’s name) can pick Storm’s own gender. Beresin explains: “To have a sense of self and personal identity is a critical part of normal healthy development. This blocks that and sets the child up for bullying, scapegoating and marginalization.” Another leading child and adolescent psychiatrist and researcher points out that “an infant is not born as a clean slate … we can’t pretend there are no differences between the sexes.” Harold Koplewicz goes on to explain that the parents’ enlisting the other two siblings to keep this secret is harmful as well.
Storm’s mother practices “unschooling” her other two children (no textbooks, no tests, no grades). Storm’s father teaches at an “alternative” school where all his lessons plans revolve around “social justice” issues.
Bishop Eddie Long has settled out of court with the four young men, former church members, who accused him of coercing them into homosexual acts. This means that the details of the alleged incidents will now not be made public. When the scandal broke last fall, the antigay preacher promised his Georgia congregation that he’d fight the allegations. The settlement comes shortly after the judge said he’d set a trial for this coming fall. Former DeKalb County prosecutor J. Tom Morgan said Long undoubtedly paid the accusers millions of dollars to end the matter.
CNN political contributor Roland S. Martin, a former regular attendant who tithed at Long’s church, states: “Bishop Long has utterly failed even his own preaching. He has stood in the pulpit and demanded accountability of others but clearly believes that different rules apply to him.”
AND FINALLY
According to Harold Camping: “God has planned today’s situation of Gay Pride and same-sex marriages to show the world that it is on the threshold of Judgment Day.” The founder of Family Radio goes on to say that God “has shown us that an obviously parallel situation exists between Sodom, when it was on the threshold of destruction and the world of our day, which is on the threshold of destruction.”
Camping says he was “flabbergasted” when May 21, 2011 passed without his predicted world destruction. He now says it was an invisible or spiritual destruction on May 21 and that the physical destruction will be on October 21, 2011.
BTW, if you think Camping got the world’s catastrophe wrong, what about Paul Ehrlich? Google Kyle Smith’s “Profits of Doom” in The New York Post, May 29.