The Evangelicals Concerned Presidents Day Weekend Bible Study was held, once again, up in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. It was our 32nd annual winter Bible study weekend and we focused on the books of Jonah and Nahum and their respective prophetic callings regarding pagan Nineveh on the Tigris.
The 2019 EC ConnECtion will be EC’s 79th summertime conference. One of our guest keynoters will be Linda Robertson, mother of a gay son who had tried very hard to change through the “ex-gay” movement’s false promises. In 2009, he died from a drug overdose, at 20. In 2013, his parents were invited to speak at the final Exodus conference after “ex-gay” leader Alan Chambers had concluded that “ex-gay” promises had done a lot of harm. Other parents at Exodus wouldn’t even speak to them but their struggling gay sons and lesbian daughters were open to Robertson’s testimony. She is on the Board of Justin Lee’s new ministry, Nuance. EC’s other guest keynoter will be Daniel Dobson, gay son of Ed Dobson, former leader of the Moral Majority and a Liberty University executive who, in the 1980s, became disillusioned with the Religious Right. He then pastored a large evangelical congregation in Grand Rapids. After Daniel’s military service in Iraq, he came out to his parents who very graciously received the news. And, as always, Ralph Blair will be giving a keynote.
The ConnECtion will be held once again at the Lodge at Kirkridge in the eastern mountains of Pennsylvania. It will be during the weekend of May 31 – June 2.
Register at EC’s website: www.ECinc.org.
EC’s 2019 Columbus Day Weekend at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, will be in honor of the 200th birthdays of Susan B. Warner, Philip Schaff, and Julia Ward Howe. The overall theme of Ralph Blair’s introductory talk and his three teachings will be: “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, His Truth Is Marching On” – throughout biblical history, as taught to West Point cadets by Susan B. Warner, throughout church history, as taught by historian Philip Schaff, and on throughout all time and eternity, as envisioned by Julia Ward Howe.
As usual, historical artifacts and autographical items of our honorees will be on display and there’ll be time for relaxing at the shore and homemade ice cream, too.
Register at the EC’s website: www.ECinc.org.
The National Association of Evangelicals and The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities support the combining of explicit support for basic human rights of members of the LGBT community with comprehensive religious freedom protections” according to Houghton College’s President, Shirley Mullen, who is on the boards of both organizations. Still, the NAE and CCCU reaffirm that, “We believe that God created human beings in his image as male or female and that sexual relations be reserved for the marriage of one man and one woman [and] we support long-standing civil rights laws and First Amendment guarantees that protect free religious exercise.
President Trump supports the end of criminalization of homosexuality around the world. In 72 countries, homosexuality is illegal and in 10 of them the penalty is death. Countries that are most dangerous for homosexuals are also the most dangerous for Christians. The President, through his U. S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who’s both gay and an evangelical Christian, joins in this effort with the United Nations, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
President Trump has nominated yet another openly gay man for a federal appeals court judgeship. He’s nominated U. S. Attorney Patrick Bumatay for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. If confirmed, Bumatay would become the first openly gay judge on the Ninth Circuit and the first Filipino American to serve as an Article III federal appellate judge.
Bumatay advised former Attorney General Jeff Sessions on issues of organized crime and opioids and he worked on the confirmations of U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Gorsuch.
When Nikki Haley announced her leaving the post as U. S. Ambassador to the U. N. at the end of the year, rumors circulated that Richard Grenell, openly gay graduate of Evangel University and Harvard, Trump’s U. S. Ambassador to Germany, might replace her. But the President said: “Rick is doing so well that I wouldn’t want to move him. I’d rather keep Rick where he is.”
President Trump’s support of gay people is not what many LGBTQ activists welcome, given their distaste for Trump. Of course, it doesn’t please the antigay Religious Right, either. But, before the Republican Party nominated him and before he won the 2016 Presidential election, even the New York Times had headlined: “Donald Trump’s More Accepting Views on Gay Issues Set Him Apart in the G.O.P.” The Times quoted him on Elton John’s marriage to David Furnish, when he said: “I know both of them, and they get along wonderfully. It’s a marriage that’s going to work. I’m very happy for them. If two people dig each other, they dig each other.”
Leading diplomatic observers agree that this Berlin posting is probably Trump’s most important ambassadorship and they agree that Grenell’s achievements in the post have been outstanding. The conservative Washington Examiner adds: “Grenell’s faith has guided his work, and he has challenged the assumption that a religious, Christian, gay man is a contradiction.”
Ten members of Congress – 8 in the House, 2 in the Senate – sworn into office after the 2018 midterm election, are gay, lesbian or transgender. This is an historic first in U.S. history.
Rightwing religionist Jim Denison’s take on America’s culture clash is expressed in this myopic header of his: “Our culture is locked in an ongoing conflict between those who value ‘civil rights’ for LGBTQ persons and those who value religious rights for Americans who affirm biblical morality. Denison blatantly ignores the growing numbers of American evangelical Christian leaders who see that, affirming the biblical morality, summed up by Jesus in The Golden Rule, includes civil rights – and, without Denison’s scare quotes – for all.
First Baptist Church in Dallas celebrated its 150th anniversary in December. In an interview with the Christian Post about this anniversary, head pastor Robert Jeffress was asked: “At a time when many churches are in decline or closing, how is it that First Baptist Dallas is celebrating its 150th anniversary and still going strong?” Jeffress insists – against the embarrassing evidence of First Baptist’s history: “There’s one simple answer to that. We are a church that’s not built on a denomination or a church built on tradition or a church built on popular opinion. We are a church built on the Bible. The fact is, denominations change, culture changes, opinions change, but God’s Word never changes. I think the reason God has blessed First Baptist for these 150 years is, this is a church that has been dedicated to proclaiming the unchanging truth of God’s Word.”
However, Jeffress reply ignores very major changes in First Baptist’s history. For well over a century of those 150 years of which Jeffress boasts, First Baptist Dallas loudly proclaimed a distortion of “the unchanging truth of God’s Word”, pushing the Old South’s culture-bound dogma in defense of slavery, racist segregation, legal opposition to racial integration and condemnation of interracial marriage as unbiblical. It was all done with popularly distorted Bible verses that were twisted into so-called “proof texts” for what was, in those days, called, “the unchanging truth of God’s Word” on slavery and the separation of the races.
Today, of course, Jeffress doesn’t endorse slavery or segregation of the races, even though the previously misused Bible verses are still there in the Bible. But, Jeffress is still engaging in a culturally dominated hermeneutic against same-sex marriage and he uses “proof texts”, the meanings of which, he puts into the Bible, just as his racist predecessors put their “proof texts” into the Bible.
Allegations of sexual misconduct against 380 Southern Baptist Convention church leaders over the last 20 years, across 20 states and involving some 700 victims were collected and reported in The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News this winter. Although most of the allegations involve heterosexual offenses, over the same two decades, Southern Baptist opposition to even faithful same-sex couples has been severe.
Paul makes a reference to “homosexual” behavior in Romans 1. Asbury Theological Seminary biblical scholar Craig S. Keener calls this reference, “the strongest New Testament passage to challenge homosexual activity”. But, as Keener rightly points out, as do all diligent biblical scholars, Paul’s statement is basically “a set-up”. As Keener explains: “Paul first condemns what his fellow ancient Jewish people regarded as stereotypical Gentile sins – idolatry and homosexual intercourse (Rom 1:19-27). After his Christian audience (1:7) is presumably applauding his condemnation of these activities, however, Paul turns to a wider list of vices, including greed (certainly a widespread value in U. S. culture), envy, gossip, slander, disobedience to parents, and so forth. All these sins, Paul concludes, merit death (1:28-32).” So, Keener concludes: “If we shout against homosexual practice yet tolerate or even celebrate materialism or gossip in our churches or in our lives, we miss Paul’s point.” Biblical scholars go on to point out, as well, that the “same-sex” behaviors in Paul’s world were matters of pagan rituals and rape of slaves and prisoners of war – hardly what we know today as loving, peer partner marriages.
“The Gay Patriot’s” Bruce Carroll has been permanently banned from Twitter for being “hateful”. Previously, he’d been suspended from Twitter for calling the convicted traitor, Chelsea Manning, who was found to have stolen classified military files, a “traitor”, and for “deadnaming” Manning, i.e., using Manning’s former first name.
Folks at Powerline find it ironic that there’s no place for “The Gay Patriot” on Twitter, but “there’s a place on Twitter for [Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] who describes himself as a ‘Husband, Dad, Grandfather, University Professor, President, Mayor, Proud Iranian’.” Powerline posts: “A better description [of Ahmadinejad] would be ‘Jew hater, Holocaust denier, homophobe, serial human rights violator, and “Death to America” advocate’.”
Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, does acknowledge that, “We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is more left-leaning. And I think it’s important to articulate our own bias and to share it with people so that people understand us. But we need to remove our bias from how we act and our policies and our enforcement.” Dorsey admits: “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company. They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.”
“Gender-neutral names like Rowan, Harper and Quinn are jumping onto both sides of the charts”, says BabyNames.com founder Jennifer Moss. New girls’ names include Kaia and Athena. New boys’ names include Kai and Alaric.
Liberty University as one of “The 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech”. Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of the school his Rightwing father founded, claims it “promotes the free expression of ideas unlike many major universities where political correctness prevents conservative students from speaking out”. But Liberty University has its own version of “political correctness” and it prevents students from speaking out in ways the LU administration doesn’t like. So, some editors of the student newspaper were removed or resigned after printing what the LU administration doesn’t like. They were told, “Your job is to keep the LU reputation and the image as it is.” And, in writing what reinforced LU’s bad reputation, they were canned.
The Student Assembly for Gender Empowerment at the University of Southern California sponsors a month-long celebration of “Body Love”. It was billed as “an intersectional approach to Body Love that focuses on people of color, people with visible and invisible disabilities, people with mental illnesses, people from working class backgrounds, queer ppl [sic],womxn [sic], and transgender, non-binary and non-gender conforming folx [sic].” Included among USC’s celebration events: make-up classes for the transgendered, a seminar on how “menstruation and environmentalism go hand in hand”, a “Period Positivity” opportunity where free menstrual cups were handed out, and plenty of “safe spaces for self-love”, with mantras of, “I’m in love with myself!”
Christian pastors joined with some 130,000 folks in Taiwan’s recent parade in support of LGBT rights. This was Asia’s largest parade on behalf of LGBT rights. A public vote on same-sex marriage will be held on November 24. During Mao’s “Cultural Revolution”, Chinese homosexuals were persecuted as “disgraceful undesirables”.
India’s Supreme Court, by a vote of 4 to 1, has overturned a Hindu temple’s ban on the admission of menstruating women. According to Justice Indu Malhotra, the only dissenting judge and the only female on the bench: “Religious practices cannot solely be tested on the basis of the right to equality. It is up to the worshippers, not the court, to decide what is the religion’s essential practice.”
The Supreme Court ruling is the latest in a series being celebrated by gay rights and women’s rights activists.
Malaysia’s punishment of lesbian couples by caning is among the most recent examples of the influence of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The OIC stretches across 57 Muslim-majority countries and constitutes the major international opposition to human rights protection of sexual minorities.
An Orthodox Rabbi lost his congregation and his job for his support of the LGBTQ community. But now, Rabbi Mike Moskowitz is serving New York City’s LGBTQ Congregation Beit Simchat Torah. He says: “I think we’re all put in this world for a specific purpose, and for me, I’ve found clarity in the invitation to kind of expand the space that religion I think is meant to provide, as a container to help support relationships with God. There’s just a huge segment of society that is being told, ‘There’s no room for you here,’ and as a fundamentalist, I believe that God is everywhere, all the time. We need some restorative religion to heal for some of the trauma that has been meted out by those who want to constrict the space that God occupies.
Hate crimes against LGBT folks are 21 percent of all hate crimes in Los Angeles County. Of hate crimes against religious folks, 72 percent are against Jews, 15 percent are against Christians and 12 percent are against Muslims – according to the LA County Commission on Human Rights.
A biological man who identifies as a woman, wins $20,000 in a discrimination suit for being cut from an all-women’s football team in Minnesota. Christina Ginther was awarded $10,000 in punitive damages and $10,000 for emotional distress. Ginther, who is nearly 6 feet tall with a second-degree black belt in karate, had been rejected from playing on the all-women’s team due to safety concerns.
Tennis legend Martina Navratilova tweets: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.” Navratilova has been supportive of gay rights for decades, but angry LGBTQQ activists attacked her fiercely for her concerns over the unfair competitive advantages held by trans-women in women’s sports. Pushing back, she stated: “I stand by what I said. When it comes to sports, we need to make sure we have a level playing field. That is all in talking about fairness. The end.”
Spain’s entry at the 2018 Miss Universe pageant was transgender. Given opportunity to speak about this inclusion at the event in Bangkok, Angela Ponce said: “I don’t need to win Miss Universe. I only need to be here to represent diversity.” Ponce insists: “My identity is here [pointing up at the head], not down there [pointing down at the crotch]. This determines my being a woman.”
Transgender women on hormone therapy are 80 to 90 percent more likely to have a stroke or a heart attack than biological females, according to the largest study of the health of transgender persons ever done. The study relied on 8 years of medical records of some 5,000 transgender patients in the Kaiser Health system. Over 97,000 cisgender patients were studied for comparison.
“We are losing an entire generation of sisters to this madness.” These are the words of a radical lesbian feminist, Julia Beck. She’s referring to the well-funded transgender lobby’s effort to silence any and all criticism of its agenda. She says: “It’s personal. It’s infuriating. It’s devastating. And I have had enough.” The venue for her remarks was a meeting of the politically and culturally conservative Heritage Foundation. She was explaining why she had been cruelly dropped from the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ commission simply because she refused to kowtow to the transgender ideologues.
While on that mayor’s commission, she referred to a violent British sex offender who’d assaulted two women in a women’s prison, to which he’d been assigned by law after self- identifying as a transwoman. Says Beck: “As crazy as that sounds, it actually reflects the current state of law in England, and the fact that a lesbian feminist got kicked off a municipal commission in Baltimore for stating an indisputable fact – the rapist is a man, no matter how he may ‘identify’ – shows how transgender ideology is a threat to basic First Amendment freedoms and threatens the health and safety of women and girls.”
Now, teenagers and even younger kids are suddenly fixating in unison on wanting to change their “gender identity”. This phenomenon, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, is being played out in classrooms across the country where, first, two or three kids, and then several others, start imagining that their young life’s problems would be solved if only they’d “come out” as the other gender. They insist that they’re really boys, not girls or they’re really girls, not boys. ROGD appears to be connected, and even pushed, by the Internet propaganda and by major media narratives as well as by peer pressure and by social justice-signaling adults in their lives. The media and adult mentors are either ignorant of, or suppress, the tragic history of transgender regrets and suicides.
Most people are unfamiliar with the checkered history of incoherence that surrounds transgender issues, formerly called, transsexual issues. Today, poorly considered choices for radically invasive “solutions” to depression, anxiety and symptoms of immaturity, are said to be solved by a child’s self-diagnosed problem and a child’s self-prescribed remedy in “coming out” as the other gender. This overlooks predictably far reaching, even lifelong tragic consequences, notwithstanding the compliance of cooperative legal and medical agencies that so readily provide puberty blockers, hormone injections, cosmetic surgeries and mastectomies, castrations, etc. All who even begin to try to raise pertinent questions about this totalitarianism – even the parents of minor children – face threats to professional reputation and career, not to mention criminal prosecution. And parents who object, face loss of custody of their children.
This panel of well-informed, liberal professionals, are pushing back against what they understand to be totalitarian threats to liberty. One, the man on the panel, is a scientist who used to be a trans-woman. Their panel discussion can be viewed in full at: https://www.heritage.org/event/the-inequality-the-equality-act-concerns-the-left
An earlier and similar panel discussion, also sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, can be viewed at: https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/event/biology-isnt-bigotry-why-sex-matters-the-age-gender-identity.
A group that’s informing the public against popular media notions of transgender issues is Hands Across the Aisle and it can be found at https://handsacrosstheaislewomen.com.
Philip “Pips” Bunce, Credit Suisse’s Head of Global Markets’ Core Engineering Integration Components, came in 32nd on a list of the “Top 100 Women in Business”. Peers at work nominated the winners. The HERoes organization created the list. Married for over 22 years, Bunce is the father of two, aged 18 and 21. Bunce sometimes wears a wig and women’s clothes at work, explaining the choice: “It’s really silly, me hiding this, why am I putting on this façade. … I am non-binary, at no fixed-point on the gender expression spectrum. I personally have no desire to transition. … There really are no hard and fast rules as these are only labels.”
The University of Iowa was wrong to strip a Christian student group of registered status when the group barred a gay student from a position of leadership. U.S. District Judge Stephanie M. Rose granted a permanent injunction that bans the school from rejecting the group’s status. She found that the university had applied its human rights policy unevenly by permitting other groups to restrict on a religious basis.
The Department of Education is addressing the problem of kangaroo courts when it comes to accusations of sex assault on college campuses. Colleges will finally be required to permit the right of cross-examination of all witnesses – including the accuser. Title IX restrictions from the Obama Administration deprived accused male students of their Constitutional right and the Education Secretary Betsy DeVos aims at correcting that.
Attorney David A. French, a past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, explains: “Cross-examination is so fundamental to adversary proceedings that it is simply incredible that some universities have been prosecuting and expelling students without permitting the accused’s representative to question his accuser. Prohibiting cross-examination irrevocably stacks the deck against the accused. The Supreme Court has rightly called cross-examination ‘the greatest legal engine ever invented for discovery of the truth’.” Indeed, the idea is ancient wisdom, as it’s related in Proverbs 18:17: “In a lawsuit the first to speak seems right, until someone comes forward to cross-examine.”
Although due process protection has been in the U. S. Constitution all along, Nancy Pelosi is complaining that cross-examination on campus will “create extraordinary new barriers to justice” for all those she already presupposes are “survivors” of sexual assault. The American Civil Liberties Union strangely claims that the proposed due process on campus would be “favoring the accused”. But a legal scholar states that the ACLU’s accusation is “shocking to civil libertarians” and amounts to “the ACLU’s epitaph.”
California’s Senate Judiciary Committee chair has ruled that only “gender neutral” pronouns are permitted to be used in Committee hearings. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) announced: “In respecting the fact that we are now a state recognizing the non-binary designation as a gender – he and she, we are now merging them, so we are using what my grammar teacher would have had a heart attack over: we are using the phrase ‘they’ and replacing other designations so it’s a gender neutral designation: ‘they’.” She added, “Basically, that’s the primary reforms and revisions to the committee rules. In the spirit of gender neutrality for the rules of this committee, we now designate the chair as ‘they’.” Jackson noted: “The world is a different place. My grammar teacher is long gone and we won’t be hearing from her.” Then, realizing [their] blunder, [they] correcting [themselves] in a fluster: “ah, — from them! From they.”
AND FINALLY
Jesus was a “drag king” with “queer desires” and Jesus did a “striptease” at the Last Supper. Such is the queer fantasy of Tat-siong Benny Liew, thee chair of New Testament Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. He fancies, too, that, Jesus’ Passion was a “(homo)sexual bonding of the Father and the Son”. The Last Supper, as Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, was supposedly a “seductive” and “womanly/slavishly task” used as an example of John’s transgender interpretation of Jesus. This Catholic college professor conjures up John’s multiple references of Jesus wanting water, giving water, and leaking water as “Jesus’ gender indeterminacy and hence his cross-dressing and other queer desire. … If one follows the trajectory of the Wisdom/Word or Sophia/Jesus (con)figuration, what we have in John’s Jesus is not only a ‘king of Israel’ or ‘king of the Ioudaioi [Jews],’ but also a drag king.” And, according to the professor, “when Jesus’ body is being penetrated, his thoughts are on his Father. He is, in other words, imagining his passion experience as a (masochistic?) sexual relation with his own Father.” Liew construes: “What I am suggesting is that, when Jesus’ body is being penetrated, his thoughts are on his Father. He is, in other words, imagining his passion experience as a (masochistic?) sexual relation with his own Father.” Of Thomas’ “putting his finger in Jesus’ side”, as Liew contrives it, John is attempting to get his readers “to perform a kind of pan-eroticism”.
When a Holy Cross student expressed objections to Liew’s delusions, the college’s Jesuit administrators framed Liew’s views as “intentionally provocative” and “not a statement of belief”. They’re merely “meant to foster discussion”. One can’t make this stuff up. But, Liew already did.