Tag Archives: gender identity

Religion in the Culture

Why do Secular Thinkers feel so Guilty?

Secularists have been known to complain that Christians obsess about sin. They even complain that Christians tell children that they are sinful. Secular thinkers allege to believe that babies are pure and innocent when they are born, incapable of sin, incapable of desiring to sin. These are the same babies that secular thinkers claim have no rights, no personhood, not even the right to be called babies if they have not yet exited the womb. Furthermore, secular thinkers who refuse to give credence even to the concept of sin willfully execute those babies if the mother so chooses. The people who advocate for this method of managing pregnancy when it turns out to be inconvenient become violently angry when people who believe that a baby has a right to life offer to pray with or counsel with women approaching abortion clinics where they can have their babies killed on demand. Secularists say that abortion is not sin, and no woman should feel guilty for cleansing her womb of a parasite.

Secular thinkers engage in numerous behaviors that Christians consider to be sin, and Christians expect people to feel guilty if they engage in such behavior, but secular thinkers claim not to suffer any qualms about these behaviors.

For example, secular thinkers are advocating nationwide for the right for adults to die. It isn’t enough that they work very hard to protect the right to kill an unborn baby; they want born babies that live to adulthood to be free to kill themselves. That is what “right to die” means. In a few US states, legislation to this effect has been passed, and there are foreign countries where it is authorized as well. Adults claim to be in terminal depression, for example, or perhaps they have learned they are suffering from an incurable disease. The laws vary widely in terms of the rules for authorization of the “right to die,” but one and all they result in suicide. It is highly incongruous that secular thinkers want some people put on a “suicide watch” out of fear that those people will harm themselves, while others are put on the “right to die” watch, because they have legally declared that they will absolutely harm themselves.

It must be mentioned here that more than one doctor in various places around the world has declared that parents ought not to be expected to keep a child that is less than desirable, and they should not need to justify their lack of desire for the child. A surgeon in England said he could see no problem with parents trying out a child for six months and then ending the child’s life if the child were a nuisance, or ugly, or sickly, or just a pain. Other spokesmen have suggested a longer trial, and one is led to wonder when it will be determined that parents have the right to get rid of unwanted children of any age.

That would close the final gap in death coverage. That would mean that in the secular mind, from the moment of conception, through the time of birth, and all the way to the moment of legal adulthood, a parent has the right to execute any unwanted child. From the moment of adulthood onward, an adult has the right to kill himself (or herself) for a variety of reasons. As everyone knows, legal language is extremely malleable, and as long as the right to die is acknowledged as a universal human right, it should be very easy to justify the decision and make the whole process quite painless.

Is it any wonder that secular thinkers all suffer from endless guilt? Yes, they do. Nobody suffers as much guilt as secular thinkers.

Obviously, no human being could go around advocating a culture of death without suffering immense guilt. Every living being does one thing more energetically than anything else: defend its own life. Even though secular thinkers contend that a human being is nothing more than a highly organized biochemical machine, one wonders why a machine feels guilty when it causes the death of another human being. In fact, secularists rise to the occasion when someone sets off a bomb at race or blazes away with a gun in a prayer meeting. Why are they so outraged? In another moment, all those people might have declared that they no longer wanted to live anyway. This statement sounds crass to sane people, but when you set it alongside the right to abortion on demand, as long as the being to be aborted is under the legal age of contract, and the right to die for whatever reason, as long as the being to be killed is over the legal age of contract, then it sounds like nothing more than a simple, routine, legal process. Fill out the forms. Sign the papers. Terminate the protoplasm.

Secular thinkers desperately need some way to cover up the culture of death that they advocate. This is why they are busy saving the planet from global warming and species extinction. They have very little fodder for the graphs they use so religiously to tell them that human beings are burning up the planet. They cannot actually prove that anything has gone extinct. The discovery of coelacanths in the ocean, millennia after they were declared to have been extinct, completely abolishes the credibility of environmental campaigns to save tigers, elephants and snail darters from the supposed depredations of human beings. We now know that key scientists have doctored the data that supposedly proves global warming, and we don’t need to be told that data from a single petrified tree in Siberia cannot possibly prove global climate warming. These frauds puncture the balloon filled with allegations of humankind’s responsibility for climate change in any direction whatsoever. Secularists suffer from a hovering, smothering guilt that cannot be assuaged by simple argument or positive thinking. Secularists are suffocated by perceived expectations that they do something! Anything! Save the planet!

One way secularists celebrate life is by advocating that when two men marry and want children, all the stops should be pulled out in order to create a person they can claim as their child. This is one way that they claim to celebrate life.

They also celebrate life when a little girl of five declares that she has discovered she is really a boy. People get to be whatever gender comes to mind. There was a time when two genders covered everything. No longer. Now we need fifty genders for people who are experimenting and inventing and flipping back and forth among the variations. Secular thinkers know this way of thinking is ridiculous, uncomical, outrageous, and they feel guilty about playing with something so fundamental to our happiness and well-being as human beings.

How do we know that they feel guilty? Because they worry about every little thing more than they worry about something people want and need as much as they want and need life: liberty. Secular thinkers cannot allow anyone to have liberty any longer, because if people have liberty, they might say things other people do not want to hear. Things such as: “That is not true!” Things such as “God loves you.” Things such as, “Don’t try to make up some way to be offended. Nobody has done anything to you.”

Several months ago, I saw a statement online that declared that the right to exercise personal faith and the right to speak freely without being arrested were special privileges granted to citizens by the government. This is another problem secularists have. Because they do not acknowledge that God exists, they can hardly acknowledge that he grants liberty to human beings from the moment of conception. Yet the people who wrote the Constitution knew that God gave people life and liberty. The authors of the Constitution knew that God allowed people the freedom to choose the God they would serve. Those men knew that God gave people the freedom to speak and have opinions on everything. When they wrote the Constitution, they declared that the new government in North America would protect the rights God had already given to people rather than making a concerted effort to suppress or remove those rights.

Secular thinkers believe that those rights are gifts of the government, and they believe that the government has the right to restrict the boundaries of those rights. People have the right to speak–as long as they don’t say anything that offends the government. People have the right to exercise their religion–as long as the people don’t think their God is more important than government.

Secular thinkers are always on a guilt trip of some sort. They want people to feel guilty for saying things. They want citizens to feel guilty for thinking God’s will is more important than the government’s will. They see babies dying or worse, being dismembered for research while still alive, and they want the people who try to stop it to feel guilty for being at war with women. It is a terrible burden to be a secular thinker.

There is an answer to this guilt. The apostle Paul wrote about it in his letter to the Romans. Ancient Rome was a place where a secular thinker might feel right at home. Despite the so-called national religion, most Romans were very skeptical of both religion and politics. The ancient Romans suffered from just as much guilt as contemporary secular thinkers. Paul wrote to them with a message of hope. He said, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8 ESV) Paul was writing about the guilt the Roman Christians suffered. In fact, he told them that they could have “peace with God through [the] Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1 ESV) He even said, “While we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10 ESV). The beautiful thing about this letter is that the news Paul sent to the Romans is just as fresh and true today. God, the God whom secular thinkers reject, does not reject them. Instead, he reaches out for them with loving arms, ready to wrap them in the love that cleanses and forgives all the guilty pains they suffer. In this letter, Paul wrote that not only does God take away the horror of all that guilt, but God also receives secular thinkers with love that can never be taken away. They worry that all the animals and plants are about to die off. They worry that the earth is about to burn up. Paul promises them what Paul promised to the Romans: “I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39 ESV) Even if the plants wither, the animals die and the globe melts, they are safe in Christ’s love.

In the meantime, they have life with him both now and hereafter.

Secular thinkers can get rid of the guilt. They can stop trying to be the wrath of the god they don’t acknowledge to people who are guilty of a slip of the tongue or of the crime of thinking there are two genders. Secular thinkers can shrug off the weighty responsibility to be the world’s police–for speech, water use, and air quality. Christ will set them free to do the good works and great accomplishments for which they were created, and he will carry them guilt-free into eternity.

Secular thinkers really do not need to be so weighed down with guilt.

By Katherine Harms, author of Oceans of Love available for Kindle at Amazon.com. Watch for Thrive! Live Christian in a Hostile World to be released during winter, 2016. 

Religion in the Culture

Legalizing Immorality Misleads Children

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Jesus said that someone who led children astray would be better off dead. If Jesus is who the Bible says he is, then many people would be better off dead. Those would be the people who insist not only on pretending that a union of two human beings of the same gender is a marriage, but also insist on teaching children to think that homosexuality and gender confusion are normal, all the while encouraging them to fondle themselves and learn what sexual stimulation they prefer.

Contemporary culture is a moral wasteland. The same people who police everyone’s speech and want to filter out the “N” word from conversation do not want to filter any sexual reference or behavior out of the public eye. The immorality condoned by the culture, and the advocacy for public law that condones and protects immorality owns the floor of the public forum.

People who want to pretend that homosexuality and many other perversions are merely variations on normal behavior make an issue of the fact that Jesus fulfilled all the law. They want to pretend that Old Testament proscriptions on homosexual behavior are null and void, because Jesus ended all those silly ritual rules. With regard to law, it is true that Jesus did away with food laws, and it is true that Jesus fulfilled and transcended ceremonial laws. However, Jesus did not do away with moral law; rather, he enhanced it and called people to higher standards.

Look at Jesus’s response on the subject of marriage. Pharisees asked Jesus to comment on divorce, but he answered by defining marriage: “from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mark 10:6-9). Jesus clarified that humans have two genders, and only two. He clarified that marriage is only the union of a man and a woman, that union and no other. Jesus took that definition farther than the Old Testament law, and he made it clear that a marriage is a permanent union. Jesus called people to the highest standard, with no accommodation for sin.

Therefore, those of us who have experienced divorce are guilty of sin. It is important to remember that Jesus said this. Some of us have been led down the path to the sin of divorce by other sins—abuse, for example, or adultery—but divorce is still a sin, and we still need forgiveness if we do it. A marriage that is full of sin may be so evil that the sin of divorce looks trivial by comparison, but the ultimate truth is that sinful humans constantly need forgiveness. Even when we escape the evil of abuse by running to the evil of divorce, it is all still evil. When we participate in evil, we need forgiveness.

Parents and teachers have the huge responsibility to teach children what they need to know in order to live confident, blessed lives. Among the important subjects are marriage and family. Jesus told us what to teach our children when he answered the Pharisees. If we insist on teaching what Christ taught, and we refuse to teach children the current cultural notions, both we and our children will suffer cultural pressure to “fix” our “wrong” notions. If we teach them the cultural notions, however, God will punish us. Jesus himself said, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea” (Mark 9:42). In the vivid poetic language of the author of Hebrews, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).

The culture will demand its price, as Kim Davis learned recently, but like many people who have gone to prison for their faith, she found that being confirmed in her commitment to the living God was a better thing than falling into his hands for punishment because of failure to live by his standards. God will demand his price, when people flout his law. Those who lead children to accept abominations as truth will pay a price to the living God.

God does not want to punish them, or any of us. That is why Jesus suffered and died. The people who promote and enable sexual perversion and gender confusion in the culture all earn fearful punishment at the hands of the living God. Their sins, as well as mine and the sins of the whole world, weighed heavily on Christ as he hung on the cruel cross, but he endured that suffering and endured death itself in order to redeem us from enslavement to sin. There is hope for all of us, even people who teach that sin is good behavior and that knowledge of various ways to sin is knowledge everyone needs. People can turn away from that sinful way of life and receive Jesus. They can be saved from the punishment being laid up for them by the living God. They can give up their sinful ways and give themselves to Jesus. He will cleanse them from all the degradation they have suffered. He will heal their minds and hearts from all of Satan’s lies.

The remark Jesus made about the horrific punishment in store for people who teach children that wickedness is righteousness was a warning we all should heed. I am very sure that my children heard and saw me mislead them by word and deed more than once, and I know that I only escape the dire judgment in store for people who do such a thing, because the blood of Christ has poured over me and washed me clean. The living God will judge every person who tells children that families with two mothers are normal or that it is normal for two men to have sex with each other. Science tells us that the universe is vast, and nobody knows how vast it is. That fact should give pause to everyone who contemplates the necessity of facing the one who created the universe and loves every person in it. People who are enslaved by sin earn punishment, but when they act and speak with the intent of enslaving children in the same sin, they multiply the punishment awaiting them. Imagine the additional punishment that piles up for those who go even further, legalizing immorality and making it illegal to reject immorality.

People who teach children lies are pretending that the Bible does not mean what it says about homosexuality. People who make it illegal to call homosexuality sin have gone a step further by requiring that people support the homosexual lifestyle with the skills they use for earning a living. LGBTQ activists consider themselves to be doing good work when they suppress biblical truth in public life. They invented a “right” to tell children that homosexuality and gender confusion are normal and that any Bible teaching to the contrary is ancient scribbling to be ignored by the more highly evolved human beings who live today. The activists and teachers who advocate and teach lies as if they are truth need to hope, therefore, that the Bible does not mean what it says about misleading children.

By Katherine Harms, author of Oceans of Love available for Kindle at Amazon.com. Watch for Thrive! Live Christian in a Hostile World soon to be released.

Religion in the Culture

What’s the Big Deal About Sex?

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 Currently, the culture says firmly that people are incapable of controlling their drive for sexual gratification. The discussion gravitates elliptically around two points—birth control and abortion. The notion that human sexuality might be about something bigger than whether intercourse does or does not result in pregnancy is dismissed as irrelevant to post-modern people.

The culture is becoming utterly chaotic with regard to human sexuality. Biologically, there are two options for gender—male or female. By the directive and model of God himself, there is one option for sexual fulfillment—marriage, the union of one man and one woman. This is the teaching of the Bible, positively established during God’s own work of creation, reinforced through history by instruction and in the prophetic revelation of God’s union with his people, and celebrated at the end of time when Christ is united with his bride for eternity.

How did we, then, come to a place where both gender and sexual fulfillment are being described in fifty different ways? How is it that we are now told people need not settle on either a single gender or a single sexual orientation? They may choose one or several and move among their choices at will. No effort is made , by the way, to explain how this explanation gibes with the equally forceful declaration that gays are “born that way.”

Those who declare that this time/space universe is all there is, the same people who declare that the universe exists by chance, life is the result of a chemical experiment, and humans are simply the latest stop in the evolution of life forms also tell us that gender and sexual orientation exist in infinite variations along a spectrum of options. Those who believe that humans are only evolved animals with a little more brain power than a chimpanzee consider sex to be a purely animal instinct and they consider it something to play with.

Why do Christians make such a big deal about sex? Pastor Tom Goodman has explained the answer to this question very well. Read his post “Where in the Bible does it say that sex should be restricted to marriage?” For human beings, sex is not merely what happens when physical sensation climaxes in some form or other. Human beings exist simultaneously in both time and eternity, and for humans, sexual relationships transcend physical boundaries. Read Tom Goodman’s post for yourself. It will put the “rules” with which Christians fence in the discussion of gender and sexuality in a much different context than sensation and risk. Human life is not limited to time and space, and neither is the experience or the effect of sexual congress.

After reading Tom Goodman’s post, how would you explain the sexual union to a young person who complains that abstinence is a silly method of birth control?

Religion in the Culture

Born Sinful

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One of the Christian teachings that secularists strongly reject is the teaching that human beings are born sinful. In fact, some secularists have advocated that Family Service agencies find parents guilty of child abuse if they tell their children that they were born sinners. Muslims might also reject this idea, because they teach that the child of a Muslim father is born Muslim.

Right now, there is energetic disputation between the LGBTQ community and Christians who consider homosexuality sinful, because the LGBTQ advocates declare that they were “born that way.” They believe that the fact they were born with gender confusion or with sexual orientation toward their own gender means that God made them that way. (That is, if they believe God is the Creator.) The conversation has in many instances been completely sidetracked from the real issue by the question of whether gender identity or sexual orientation is a congenital trait.

The fact is that this issue can be resolved easily for a Christian. It cannot be easily resolved for people who reject the existence of God and/or the authority of the Bible. Christians know that human beings are fallen, sinful creatures from birth. That means that a person who is attracted to the opposite sex is, nevertheless, a sinner. It also means that a person who is attracted to the same sex is, nevertheless, a sinner. Sexual orientation, a politically contrived term with a politically contrived definition, is irrelevant to the fact that someone is a sinner. Every human being is born sinful. The definition of sin is disobedience to God. A sinner is a person who practices disobedience to God. A sinful person has the trait of being disobedient to God. Every person ever born is born with that trait, regardless of whether that person also has the trait of homosexual orientation. These traits have nothing to do with DNA. They are about human nature, a spiritual quality expressed in the bodily life of a human being.

Some people do wish there were a heritable trait that could explain homosexuality, but no evidence of such a thing has been found. Whether one attributes the design of living things to God or to chance, the way sexuality functions in living things decrees that any organism which acts on a homosexual attraction will not produce progeny and therefore will not pass on any of its traits to any new generation. If a whole generation of organisms were homosexual, the organism would become extinct. Whether one believes that the origin of heterosexual attraction is God’s will or nature’s drive, the fact is that a homosexual organism is the origin of its own demise.

However, the DNA argument is actually irrelevant to the conversation. The energy of the discussion is rooted in the fact that people who claim to be homosexual do not want homosexuality defined as sin. They want homosexuality to be viewed as one of many different sexual orientations, and they want all sexual orientations to be considered normal.

The Bible stands firmly in the path of such a view.

The Bible simply and clearly says that homosexuality is sin. It also says that all people are born sinful. It does not say that every person is born attracted to the same sin. The Bible names many sins, but the root of each of them is the same: rebellion against God. Sinners believe that God has no right to tell them what to do. Sinful people born with a sexual attraction to people of the same sex are no more sinful than people who are born with a propensity to steal anything not nailed down. Both people reject God’s right to tell them that the things they like are sinful. The Bible calls stealing a sin. Adultery and lying are both named sins in the bible. The human race, however, has a history of explaining away these sins and all the others. Homosexuality is no different.

What is the answer, then, for someone born attracted to the same sex? That sin is one of many that shape sinful human nature, and God has an answer for it: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned” (John 3:16-18 ESV).” Despite God’s declaration that homosexuality is sin, he loves people so much that he does not want homosexuals to be destroyed. He wants them to live.

The value of this offer is not restricted to life after death, either. As many sinners saved by grace will attest, it is a great blessing to confess to God that they are sinners and then receive his gracious forgiveness and healing. It is good to let go of sin and live for Jesus. In this life! Here! Now! The sins of a lifetime go away forever when any sinner confesses his sinful nature and receives Christ into his heart. Life in the here and now is better immediately and better thereafter.

Many secular thinkers mistakenly believe that people who tell others about Jesus are trying to bribe them to believe with the promise of heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth. Heaven is a wonderful reward for someone who loves and serves Jesus, but it would be endless torment for someone who rejects Jesus. In fact, it has occurred to me that the worst possible thing that could happen to an unrepentant sinner would be for that person to be condemned to live in the heavenly throne room for eternity.

People who advocate for the LGBTQ lifestyle are, according to the Bible, advocating for a life lived in rebellion against God. They want to be justified, because, they say, they are born that way. Recently a young man, openly gay and openly Christian, explained why that argument does not hold water. He said, “As someone who is attracted to the same sex, I assure you, it is not a choice. Rejecting God’s call to repentance and instead embracing sinful desires is a choice.” He is saying that being “born that way” does not excuse the behavior that arises from the sinful desire. How does he dare to make this statement? He was born with the sinful desire, but he has confessed that desire and given it to God. He lives with the battle against homosexual attraction the same way alcoholics live with the battle against alcohol and liars live with the battle to speak truth. He lives with the same battle every human being faces: the battle to accept the sovereignty of God in his life.

This is the real battle. No human being naturally wants anyone or anything to be sovereign over him. Every human being wants to be free to do anything that occurs to him. The fact that humans want freedom is not the root problem, however. The root problem is that people naturally choose to do destructive things. Everything God calls sin is destructive to human beings. God gives humans freedom, and, when they misuse it by choosing death instead of life, he lets them have death. It breaks his heart, but he allows it, because freedom is his gift to them. Only when they use their freedom wisely, choosing to stop listening to self and its self-serving choices, only when they choose to deny self and choose Christ, can he bless them with real life. Everyone is born sinful, but nobody need suffer the destruction of sinful choices. God wants us to use our freedom to choose life. The apostle Paul points out where that choice leads when he writes, “by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8-10 ESV). We are all born sinful, but God has beautiful plans for us anyway. All we need to do is to choose to follow Christ, not self.

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Cultural Restriction

Free Speech? Of Course. Suppress Only Wrong-Headed Speech

 

People have freedom of expression, blah blah blah, but until we make those people pay for their wrongheaded beliefs, they’ll continue to hold them. Tony Woodlief at Patheos

It has not always been the case that someone expressing a viewpoint with roots in Christian teaching was accused of discrimination. It has not always been the case that someone expressing a viewpoint different from the majority was accused of discrimination. The new wrinkle in the culture is that someone expressing the majority viewpoint, Christian or not, is accused of discrimination. The really new wrinkle is that someone who supports a viewpoint validated in millennia of human history is accused of discrimination.

This is what is happening to people who support the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

 Something more mind-boggling could hardly be imagined.

The concept of marriage as the union of a man and a woman has never been questioned throughout human history till now. In fact, except for dictionary devotees, the specification that the parties to a marriage will be a man and a woman has not needed to be discussed. It has not been a uniquely Christian idea that marriage is the union of a man and a woman. Archeology and paleontology alike demonstrate that humans have always viewed marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and humans have always considered marriage to be the foundation for a family. Only recently has it become necessary to argue about what constitutes a marriage or a family.

What happened to the culture?

Human society has many ongoing arguments. Who ought to be in charge, and how ought a group of people figure out who should be in charge? What is worth fighting about? What is a fair fight? There are a lot of arguments that are not yet settled. But the definition of marriage and family were settled so far back that except for the revelation of the creation story in Genesis, nobody would know how marriage began. The record of human life on earth shows that marriage has been the normal basis for family in all human groups, almost as if it were written on the human heart.

That fact meant that until very recently, anyone who used the word marriage did not need to define it or qualify it. The word itself was sufficient to convey the intended meaning. It also meant that until very recently, nobody would have had any reason to write laws about the language used for marriage or sexual orientation or gender identity. The issue of sexual orientation was settled by the recognition that normal human beings are attracted to the opposite gender, and the gender of a normal human being is the gender of the DNA (of which there are only two options – male or female). All other expressions of gender, sexual orientation or sexual union were abnormal simply because they were not normal. It wasn’t discrimination to recognize that fact; it was plain common sense. It still is. Unfortunately, plain common sense does not seem to be valued very much in the language of marriage, family, gender identity or sexual orientation.

The fact that a marriage was expressed as a union of a man and a woman throughout human society meant that when religions used this definition, it was not regarded as privilege, oppression or discrimination. It was considered normal. Any other definition would have been regarded as bizarre and would have resulted in ostracism of its practitioners for engaging in behavior equivalent to wearing aluminum foil hats.

Where do Christians get their definition of marriage?

Christians use this definition of marriage for the same reason as humankind at large; it is normal. However, when the definition is challenged, as is common in contemporary cultural disputes, Christians actually have a basis for defending their contention that it is normal. They don’t rely on the fact that people have used this definition for thousands, perhaps millions, of years. They rely on the revelation of the Creator, God Himself. The Bible records that God created humans male and female and ordained marriage as their proper relationship. God further ordained that they produce children within that relationship and nurture them to adulthood, each generation teaching the next the things they needed to know in order to have good lives – God’s truths, skills for daily living, and so forth. Human failing and wicked acts have not changed God’s truth: marriage is the union of a man and a woman.

What justifies suppression of anybody’s speech?

Which brings the subject back to freedom of speech. The culture is busily attempting to suppress the freedom to speak of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Someone recently said that the culture war is necessary in order to make speaking of heterosexual marriage as unacceptable as suggesting that slavery is good. To that end, the army of LGBT activism persuaded Mozilla to fire a man whose only crime was to express his legitimate view on the definition of marriage. To that end, JP Morgan quizzed its employees to determine who is and who isn’t an ally of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. To that end, the Department of Justice demanded that employees not only tolerate homosexual colleagues but also express their delight at the opportunity to support their lifestyle choices. Freedom of speech necessarily requires the culture to permit people of all viewpoints to express their viewpoints. There must not be penalties for expressing minority viewpoints. There must not be penalties for expressing majority viewpoints.

Yes, the majority must be free to speak of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Because most American citizens, the majority of the population, holds the traditional view of marriage, those citizens must be just as free to express and act on their definition of marriage as the minority, a very tiny minority, who want marriage to include homosexual union, polyamory and bestiality. The US Constitution protects the right of a man to donate money to a political action group that promotes traditional marriage. Marriage. The only marriage that is marriage. The Constitution says that people have a right to their opinions and a right to express their opinions and a right to advocate for legislation in keeping with their opinions.

To have an opinion at odds with the latest Twitter hashtag campaign ought not to be grounds for dismissal from a job or for exclusion from the cultural conversation. Tony Woodlief points out that the culture wants the dissenting opinions on the subject of marriage, or any other subject in fashion at the moment, to be gone. Snuffed out. Squashed. Shut down. The only real way to defeat that objective is to be tireless in support of one’s viewpoint and be willing to pay the price the opponents will impose. Woodlief is right. Those who never give up their unwanted opinions will be made to pay, because the opposition will continue to exact the price. Those who support normality and common sense must be willing to pay in order to continue to hold their views.

What should we do?

The opposition says, “People have freedom of expression, blah blah blah, but until we make those people pay for their wrongheaded beliefs, they’ll continue to hold them.” We who love the Lord and trust the Bible for guidance in faith and life say, “People have freedom of expression, because God gave people this right, and we will advocate for the preservation of that right for as long as it takes.”

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletters/2014/08/the-new-truth-squashes-dissent/#ixzz3AN3PIF4h

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletters/2014/08/the-new-truth-squashes-dissent/#ixzz3AN3PIF4h