(PDF version available here)
EC’s 40th Eastern ConnECtion met via EC’s website over June 5-7. We’d planned to be in the Pennsylvania mountains where we’d met each summer since 1980. It was EC’s 80th summer ConnECtion, counting our Eastern, Mid-western and Western ConnECtions across the country. Though physically apart, we connected together in Christ’s ever-abiding presence.
2020’s keynoters were Jerusha and Kyle Duford, a granddaughter of Ruth and Billy Graham, along with her husband. EC’s founder also keynoted, as he has at all of our 80 ConnECtions. Their presentations are available on our EC website, www.ECinc.org through the summer.
Samaritan’s Purse set up an emergency field hospital in New York City’s Central Park at the beginning of April to help the city’s overburdened medical facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The charity is a respected humanitarian mission of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and has furnished such service in medical emergencies across the world for decades.
In New York, Samaritan’s Purse worked in partnership with the Mt. Sinai Beth Israel Hospital system, bringing added medical services to hundreds facing challenges of COVID-19. Its field hospital was staffed by more than 70 doctors, nurses and other professionals, working 12-hour days, risking their own health to serve during hard-hit New York City’s corona crisis. Dr. David Reich, Mount Sinai Hospital’ president, called the Samaritan’s Purse team, “extraordinary”.
But since this humanitarian service’s founder, Franklin Graham, a son of Billy Graham, does not endorse same-sex marriage while supporting Trump (who does support same-sex marriage), LGBTQ activists fiercely attacked the charity’s field hospital falsely accusing Samaritan’s Purse of refusing to give medical attention to LGBTQ patients. The anti-Graham forces included City Council members, led by gay Speaker, Corey Johnson and Congressional Democrats – Reps. Jerry Nadler, Carolyn Maloney, Adriano Espaillat, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the New York City Human Rights Commission investigated the accusations and found absolutely no evidence of such discrimination.
Graham’s graceless opposition to same-sex marriage is, perhaps, a misplaced overcorrection for his rebel life as a troubled teen and young adult, for it is atypical in the Graham family. But he said, quite accurately, that Samaritan’s Purse has never and will never turn away anyone in need, due to that person’s sexual orientation. Besides, he said: “We don’t believe this is the time or place to wage this debate” over same-sex marriage. He explained: “It seems tone-deaf to be attacking our religious conviction about marriage at the very moment thousands of New Yorkers are fighting for their lives and dozens of Samaritan’s Purse workers are placing their lives at risk to provide critical medical care.” He noted that, across the world, “We have provided billions of dollars of medical care and supplies, food and water, and emergency shelter without any conditions whatsoever. Our Christian faith compels us – like the biblical Good Samaritan – to love and serve everyone in need, regardless of their faith or background.” Most protesters may have had little or no idea as to exactly who this “biblical Good Samaritan” was or what he did.
Sadly, in the first week of May, under increasingly disruptive protests, Samaritan’s Purse disinfected and packed up its tents after only six-weeks of what had been intended to be a much longer deployment to render medical services to New Yorkers in Central Park.
Franklin Graham’s niece, Jerusha DuFord, a granddaughter of Franklin’s parents, Ruth and Billy Graham, and an EC keynoter this summer, commented on Twitter about the attacks against Samaritan’s Purse. “You will never hear me say anything negative about the Samaritan’s Purse relief work. It’s exceptional. But THIS is why my grandfather stayed out of politics – it cuts off your audience & now the opportunity to provide relief will be more challenging”.
Ravi Zacharias, the internationally renowned Christian apologist, died of cancer at his home in Atlanta on May 19. His ministry, RZIM, was founded in 1984 with financial support from D. D. Davis, uncle of EC’s founder, who’d attend many of the RZIM Founders Weekends as a guest of his uncle. Other guests, donors and prospective donors to RZIM, while informally chatting, learned of EC’s ministry and quietly asked to talk privately about a family member.
Ravi’s presentations in defense of Christ’s Gospel were always cogent and compassionate as he addressed both secular and religious assemblies around the world.
In Q&A, Ravi was often asked about homosexuality and Christians asked how to present the Gospel to them. Ravi cautioned sensitivity, telling them to avoid wounding already-wounded people. He illustrated this with an experience he’d had while recovering from back surgery. His doctors told him that he’d need to be turned in his bed from time to time, but it must be done by two strong men so as not to cause needless pain. When a small nurse came into his room and insisted that she could turn him all by herself – and tried – she caused him excruciating pain, and he let out a loud yelp. She jumped back: “You had back surgery!? I thought you’d had a hip replacement.” He’d joke with audiences that, at that moment, he thought he’d need a hip replacement! So, he’d urge folks not to rush into an undertaking if they’re not prepared for it. He urged, instead of arguing over homosexuality, share the Good News of God’s love in Christ.
The LGBT Cancer Network has sent out an alert, warning the LGBT community that it’s at greater risk of complications from COVID-19. LGBT folks smoke at rates 50% higher than the general population, many already have compromised immune systems from HIV/AIDS and, what the Network calls, “antigay bias in healthcare” is also of concern. More than 100 national organizations signed this letter of warnings.
Rumors that a spike in coronavirus infections in Seoul is linked to gay clubs is fueling an antigay backlash. It’s also hindering gay men from coming forward for diagnostic testing.
In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals are cutting down on non-essential surgeries to free up hospital beds and equipment for the most serious medical cases. Among postponed surgical procedures are those for cosmetic reassignment for gender identity. The transgender activists are upset and axious over this shifting in healthcare priorities. VICE magazine claims that transgender surgery “delays can be dangerous and even life-threatening.” A 26-year-old trans woman in Canada must now wait to have her C$86,000 surgery to make her face more feminine. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this procedure. What scares me is … people saying it’s going to be years before we’re going to have a vaccine and things are never going back to normal. My fear is never getting my care.”
Keira Bell began looking into sex-change options in the UK when she was 16. She says no one questioned her on its advisability. So, she took puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and eventually had a double mastectomy, trying to become a man. Now, at 23, Bell regrets that she wasn’t “challenged more”. Such regret is a very common outcome among transgender folks.
Now, Liz Truss, U.K.’s minister for women and equalities, says that the well-being of children under 18 will guide a government police review on gender identity. “Grown adults should be able to make decisions, to have agency to live life as they see fit,” she told House of Commons’ Women and Equalities Committee. “But before the age of 18, when people are still developing their decision-making capabilities, they should be protected.”
Truss promises specific policies, including restrictions for children with gender dysphoria and changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, which allows adults in England and Wales to obtain new birth certificates with a sex other than the one they were born with. She says that protecting restrooms and changing rooms is also “extremely important”.
Previously, U.K. children were able to begin “gender identity development” treatment after only three therapy sessions and without any parental consent. The Tavistock and Portman National Health Service Foundation Trust conducts U.K.’s only gender transition center. It offers puberty-blocking meds and cross-sex hormones – testosterone for girls, estrogen for boys – on average, at age 14, but some as early as age 12. At age 17, sex-change surgery is legal.
Given the contagion of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” in school rooms where another student gets lots of affirmation for talking of transition, as well as increased media attention, the number of children who desire such treatment at Tavistock went from 94 in 2010 to 2,519 in 2018.
Thirty-five psychologists resigned from U.K. gender identity clinics in the last three years. But prior to resigning, they say they’d felt pressure to pursue the drug treatment rather than treat the patients with psychotherapy. They feared they’d be socially branded as “transphobic”.
Ohio’s House of Representatives announced a bill, the “Save Women’s Sports Act,” aimed to promote fairness to all and preserve the integrity of school sports” by keeping biological males out of female athletic competitions. The Act ensures that women are not forced to compete against men playing on women’s sports teams. This would apply to all public and private schools that are members of state or national athletic associations. According to sponsors: “We want every little girl to achieve her athletic dream here in the state of Ohio.”
Connecticut’s Interscholastic Athletic Conference allows athletes to compete as the gender with which they identify. So, transgender women are beating women in women’s sports. The CIAC claims that Title IX, the federal law allowing girls equal educational opportunities, includes those who’ve transitioned from male to female. Women athletes see it as discrimination against women who are then forced to compete against competitors who were boys at birth.
Opponents of this new policy state the obvious: “Males will always have inherent physical advantages over comparably talented and trained girls. That’s the reason we have girls’ sports in the first place. A male’s belief about his gender doesn’t eliminate those advantages.”
The U.S. Justice and U.S. Education departments agree. But, ignoring biological facts, the American Civil Liberties Union claims, in a non sequitur, that it’s deeply troubled that the U.S. government and those who oppose transwomen’s participation in women’s sports, “don’t believe girls who are transgender enjoy protections under federal law.”
Hungary’s Parliament has legislated against citizens changing the sex listed on official documents, e.g., birth, marriage, and death registries. Listings must conform to “sex at birth” or “biological sex determined by primary sex characteristics and chromosomes.” It noted that it is a given that, a “complete change of the biological sex is not possible”.
In spite of the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling, 7-2, in favor of Jack Phillips, due to the “religious animus” that was so very evident in Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s ruling against the Christian cake artist, a transgender lawyer is now attacking him in a Denver state court for declining to design a cake to hail their “gender transition”. Having won in the Supreme Court, he’s lost almost half of his business and, apparently, he’ll be targeted repeatedly for not changing his Christian beliefs or renouncing his freedoms as an American citizen.
Brad Polumbo, in The Washington Examiner, states: “This litigant obviously targeted Phillips and specifically sought a means of putting him in further legal jeopardy.” He adds: “This stunt, and the broader extreme and out-of-touch approach to this issue by the activist Left, will only backfire. The extreme levels of vitriol and antagonistic lawsuits leveled at Christians for failing to endorse popular views on gay and transgender rights will only make those Christians appear more sympathetic to the public.” But, if that’s so, why has he lost almost half of his business?
Christianity Today admits: Just “minutes after” publishing the online version of Mark Galli’s malevolent editorial calling for the President’s impeachment, “the phones in CT’s offices began ringing off the hook”. Managing editor Andy Olsen: “They did not stop for days. Written responses, numbering in the tens of thousands, poured in by mail, email, social media, and online.” He avers they were “negative and positive”. They were “overwhelmingly upset”, some, “as a pastor correcting a wayward member of the flock, but others spoke more like a judge at a sentencing [of] an apostate worthy of varying punishments.” Cf. EC Review, Vol 45, No 2.
“Must Pro-Life Mean Pro-Trump?” This was Karen Swallow Prior’s Christianity Today essay in February, 2020, not long after Mark Galli’s tirade against the President in his CT editorial and between her leaving Liberty University’s English department for Southeastern Baptist Seminary’s faculty. She’s pro-life and anti-Trump. She has her reasons for both.
She says that, at January’s March for Life, where Trump was the first president to join the March for Life, “it was a historical moment both for the pro-life movement and in the history of American politics.” But she “feels” she “heard truth being spoken, but not love. The letter did not reflect the spirit.” A fallen world is messy; perceptions can be blurry. But her essay question is already answered, albeit not to her satisfaction. In the 2020 election, the alternative to the pro-life Trump is a pro-abortion Democrat. She gets to choose who she “feels” is a hypocrite or what she knows kills an unborn baby. Either/or choices are intrinsic on most election days.
Richard Grenell former U.S. Ambassador to Germany was appointed the acting Director of National Intelligence (the highest serving openly gay man to hold such a high federal office in history). He told The New York Times that the President is considering reducing intelligence cooperation with any nation that has criminal penalties for homosexuality: “We can’t just simply make the moral argument and expect others to respond in kind because telling others that it’s the right thing to do doesn’t always work. To fight for decriminalization is to fight for basic human rights.” Says the President: “Richard Grenell is a superstar. He had guts, he had courage to do what he did”, e.g., he exposed testimony that Russian “collusion conspiracy” pushers had hidden.
Geraldo Rivera asked President Trump, “Would Americans vote for a gay man to be president?” Trump responded, “I think there would be some that wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t be among that group. You and I would not be in that group.” Geraldo agreed, “We would not.”
Richard Grenell was Dave Rubin’s guest on The Rubin Report. Both are gay, each is married to a man, both are conservatives, though Rubin was on the Left and has wavered from atheist to agnostic. He grants that there’s more than a material world. Grenell is a devout evangelical. In their engaging conversation, they discuss, among other matters, a loss of diversity and tolerance in LGBTQ leadership. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7ySm9veJVc
Rubin has hosted other major evangelicals as guests, e.g., Ravi Zacharias and Andrew Klavan.
Veteran gay activist and social critic Bruce Bawer says: “It doesn’t matter that Richard Grenell is gay. But at the same time, it does.” Writing in Frontpage Mag, (May 20), he explains what he means. It’s, “Partly because a few people still need to learn that not all gays are pedophile socialist drag queens, but mostly because the fact that a gay man plays a key role in the Trump Administration drives the left absolutely nuts.”
Bawer faults the LGBTQ Advocate’s failure to celebrate Grenell’s Intelligence appointment, albeit temporary, while serving as America’s Ambassador to Germany, “as a step forward for gay Americans and as yet another sign that the supposedly antigay Trump is nothing of the kind”. The Advocate took “the angle that Grenell, although gay, is ‘not necessarily popular with LGBTQ people’.” Bawer replies: “Well, put it this way: Grenell probably isn’t admired by the tiny minority of gays who call themselves ‘LGBTQ people’.”
Bawer adds: “The left-wingers who control the gay press have long considered it their prerogative to decide who is and isn’t properly gay.” In 2016, PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, who is openly gay, gave a strongly pro-Trump speech at the GOP convention. Bawer recalls that the Advocate’s Jim Downs “wrote a widely cited article in which he pronounced that Thiel, because of his politics, couldn’t rightly be called gay. Grenell has gotten the same treatment.”
Bawer notes that, in another LGBTQ glossy, Out, we find that, “by pressuring other countries not to imprison, torture, and execute gays, Trump, Grenell, and their U.S. and European partners in this initiative weren’t being humanitarians; rather, since the countries they were targeting are ‘mostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean’, they were being ‘racist, colonialist, and paternalistic.’ This is precisely how academic postmodernists have taught the woke left to think about such matters.”
Bawer wraps up by sounding that inspiring note that was so memorably spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr. while his great civil rights work, too, was under attack from radicals on the Left: “Richard Grenell is gay precisely because he doesn’t place much weight on it. By doing so, he negates the leftist obsession with group identity; and by serving his country, his president, and the cause of justice so spectacularly well, he provides a stellar role model for other gay Americans who don’t want to be defined by their sexual orientation but by the content of their character and the value of their contribution to the common good. Long may he thrive.”
Sen. Josh Hawley calls for investigation into double standards, i.e., state officials allowing protests but disallowing worship services. “Under the First Amendment, state officials must not treat religious persons and groups worse than others, and they must not favor one kind of speech over another,” Hawley noted. “State officials have violated the free speech and free exercise rights of religious Americans by treating religious gatherings and speech differently than the speech and mass gatherings of protests. I urge you to launch a full civil rights investigation.”
Lipscomb University students object to antigay remarks made by Siran Stacy, former NFL star and now an evangelist. He was supposed to talk about “finding purpose” after losing his wife and four children when their car was struck by a drunk driver. But he drifted into linking homosexuality with pedophilia and other disparaging comments about LGBT people. These negative reactions of the students are news because this school was founded by the heirs of the Campbellites, extremely separatist Fundamentalists, now called, “churches of Christ”.
Brigham Young University reiterated that “same-sex romantic behavior” is not allowed on campus. This backtracking has been tough on same-sex oriented students who had welcomed the previously revised code of conduct. BYU said it was clarifying misinterpretation of previous statements.
But a heterosexual neuroscience student objected to what seemed to lack “the Christ-like behavior that church leaders encourage.” He says it’s unfair to those who “came out” after the previous revision, thinking it was now safe to do so.
Mexican gang violence and drug trafficking has resulted in more than 34,500 homicides last year. The number of gay and transgender folks killed was 27% higher than the year before. More than half of the victims were transgender women, a third were gay men. The victims were subjected to all kinds of violence, before and after they were handcuffed and murdered in public.
Indonesian lawmakers are considering a bill to criminalize homosexuality and require treatments, e.g., exorcisms, ruqyah, that include violent attack, even rape, to drive out “demons of deviant sex”. It’s “the likely option to be taken in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, according to Usman Hamid, executive director for Indonesia at Amnesty International.
Pakistan’s Christian sewer cleaners exemplify the persistent caste discrimination in Islam. Christians are 1.6 percent of the country’s population but they are 80 percent of the sewer cleaners. They must unclog pipes of feces and other refuse with their bare hands. As a result, they drown in sludge, are asphyxiated by poisonous gases and contract deadly diseases. This is yet another example of the systemic disdain Jesus said would be vented against his followers.
Meanwhile, some of the most privileged people in world history, students in America’s elite universities, complain of so-called “hate speech” if they offend themselves over an alternative viewpoint. They’re offered play dough and a sandbox to soothe their fear and hurt feelings.
A Wisconsin high school’s gender-neutral restroom was cancelled after an 18-year-old student sexually assaulted a child in the restroom. The Rhinelander High School student was charged with fourth-degree assault, enticement, and exposing his genitals to a child. The gender-neutral restroom had been opened in October to accommodate the school’s transgender students.
Faith-based foster care and adoption groups battle nondiscrimination laws requiring them to place children with same-sex couples against the agencies’ religious beliefs. But South Carolina’s Miracle Hill Ministries received a waiver exempting it from the Obama-era nondiscrimination rules, allowing it to continue to serve families in accordance with its statement of faith. The Trump administration has proposed new rules to protect such religious liberty.
In Michigan, a federal court stopped enforcement of a state regulation requiring Catholic Charities to place children with same-sex couples. The judges criticized the state for trying to “stamp out religious belief and replace it with its own.”
On United Methodists splitting over homosexuality, he says he understands both sides since he grew up conservative and went to Pensacola Christian College. Pastor Daniel Willson, at Williamsburg Baptist Church in Virginia, says that, at PCC, “I definitely would have considered myself someone who hated gays.” It was only after he’d reflected more on the Bible and worked with the LGBTQ community that he grew to accept them. “My heart breaks for some of my Methodist colleagues who have been very distraught” over the Methodist split, and adds, “I hope LGBTQ people will experience acceptance within the church as a whole”.
Costa Rica’s law against same-sex marriage automatically expired at midnight on May 27, making it the first Central American country where same-sex marriage is legal.
Welcome to Chechnya is the third film from gay documentarian David France. It debuts in June on HBO. It shows gays and lesbians trying to escape from Chechnya where officials target, kidnap, imprison, torture and kill them.
Douglas Murray’s new book, The Madness of Crowds, critiques the “postmodern era’s crusading desire to right perceived wrongs and a weaponization of identity”, accelerated by new social and news media over “divisive issues of sexuality, gender, technology and race.” If you’re black, white, Hispanic, female, LGBTQ, or whatever pigeonhole, you must think in “approved” ways, not in “disapproved” ways, i.e., you must not think for yourself.
Joe Biden’s crack that blacks “ain’t black” if they can’t decide between him and the President, exploded, and he had to apologize. When will self-appointed evangelicals apologize for saying that evangelical support for same-sex marriage “ain’t evangelical”? As prior views on slavery, segregation, social dancing, ‘50s TV, “bobbed hair, bossy wives and women preachers”, were changed, censorious evangelical overseers will, someday change their antigay views – but when?
AND FINALLY: Facebook labels PragerU, “false news”, and restricts its reach. People who chose to follow PragerU are prevented from seeing its posts, though they’re presented by some of the best minds in the world, e.g., Pulitzer Prize winners, scientists, public intellectuals and professors from the most prestigious universities and even by former prime ministers. They’re white, people of color, gay, straight, women, men, et al. But: PragerU doesn’t proselytize for Big Tech’s sociopolitical party line.