Tag Archives: sexual orientation

Cultural Restriction

Is This the End of Humanity as we Know It?

When I was barely sixteen, my English teacher suggested that I read Brave New World. She did not pick that book specifically for me, or me for the book. It was on a list of 50 books college-bound students should read. I was an avid reader of science fiction at the time, and that whole idea was intriguing.

I was less than half through the book when my mother discovered I was reading it. I was lying sprawled on my bed, my favorite way to read, and when my mother saw the title of the book, she snatched it out of my hands. “Let me see that!” she said. “Where did you get this book?” After I caught my breath, I told her about the list.

“We’ll see about that!” she said, and left the room with the book in her hands. I learned from my teacher that Mother had accosted the principal, the school counselor, and my teacher about that book. She was angry that the school promoted such an immoral book. They made the best of things, telling me that I should simply choose something else from the list and not worry about it.

My mother was affronted by Brave New World because it promoted an amoral view of human sexuality. The most imaginative element of the story was the harvesting of eggs from females as they reached adulthood and the subsequent production of human beings under the government’s direction, along with the details of a strategy to produce people who did work commonly described in current political debates as “jobs Americans won’t do.” The element that outraged my mother the most was the “Malthusian drills” for schoolchildren and the game “Find the Zipper” in the brave new world of the book that replace familiar children’s games like “tag” and “ring around the rosy.”

My mother would be completely traumatized, therefore, if she were alive to read the daily news or see television broadcasts today. Today’s schools don’t even mention the fabled Malthus so honored in Brave New World, but they do teach heterosexual and homosexual practices to schoolchildren, and they routinely refer pregnant children (children! As young as 10) for abortions without the knowledge and consent of parents. There is no national standard for harvesting the eggs of all young women, but the horror of calling a couple of homosexual men a “marriage” has already raised the specter of rented wombs and genetic selection of physical traits in unborn babies. I often give thanks to God that my parents died before these issues became the grist of daily conversation.

As a writer, I have long struggled with the tortured language that arose after rabid feminists protested against the word chairman. When I read about that protest, I laughed aloud, because I knew the language, and I knew that the common usage of the suffix –man did not in any way injure or prejudice women, but the depths of my error in judgment soon became evident. The battle moved to the words fireman and policeman, and soon it had progressed to a distaste for calling God our heavenly Father. (Even if I could stomach the protest in general, which I cannot do, I would balk at changing or denying the language Jesus himself gave us for prayer. He said, “Pray this way” and “this way” begins with the words, “Our Father.”)

Today I read another article that records further degradation of the culture’s view of human sexuality. Princeton University has issued “communication guidelines” that “reflect the inclusive culture and policies at Princeton University.” Under those guidelines, students will no longer be called men or women. The correct term will be student, individual, or person. People who used to be called our forefathers, must now be called our ancestors. Work requires person hours not man hours. In order to avoid traumatizing .001% of the student body, the university is traumatizing 100% of the student body – minus .001%.

Someone will dispute my numbers. Someone will point out that every day some new “person” declares self to be gay or to be trans or to be other things for which I do not even know the vocabulary. Therefore, some will say, I must have vastly underestimated the number of people subject to be hurt if we address people according to the gender identified at birth by the simple process of examining the physical traits of the newborn baby. I contend that the vast new numbers of gender-confused and sexual-orientation-confused people is largely attributable to the fact that to be confused is the most popular trait anyone can have right now. People who are confident in their genitalia or their skin color or their nationality are viewed as conceited and arrogant. They are accused of subconscious demand for and expectation of privilege, and they need to be taken down a notch.

The culture today is a morass of confusion on many points where there need be no confusion. It is quite true that human beings have invented privileges for themselves. Hillary Clinton is a very public example of someone who does it daily. Historically every human being wants to be the best or the first or the fastest or the strongest. People naturally want to be superlative by some or by several standards, and that is the common theme behind hateful behavior related to gender or skin color or any other trait.

My mother was right to recognize the moral danger expressed in Brave New World. However, she was wrong to believe that suppressing the reading of that book would suppress the evil it contained. No amount of laws or policies or regulations will ever change human nature. Secular thinkers who flout all the existing laws are the very ones who propose an endless stream of new laws to suppress things they do not like.

The real moral danger of Brave New World was the way it opened the door to an amoral worldview in which humankind became factory products. Chairs and automobiles cannot commit sin, because they are incapable of moral choices. Only human beings have that capability, but human beings produced by an amoral process and spit out into an amoral world can absorb the programming “it is good to be an eta,” and never worry about anything.

Today’s evil is really nothing new in the moral sense. The only difference between today’s amoral activists and Caligula is technology. Christians in the Roman Empire were hated for their moral standards, and Christians today are hated for the same reasons. The news gets out faster and goes viral today in ways not possible in the first century CE.

Today’s agenda is to suppress any moral standard not invented by some human being to make himself feel good. That was the agenda of Caligula, and that is the agenda of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. This agenda is not invented by the people who are promoting it. As Paul pointed out in his letter to the Ephesians, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12 ESV).

Christians in the first century were asked to look to their government for all guidance. The Emperor thought of himself as a god, and he expected Roman citizens, and all the people Rome had conquered, to worship him as their duty in return for what Roman government did for them, i.e. the emperor. Today, the government makes the same request. The government uses money as its tool of oppression. People who receive money from the government must put the government ahead of all other powers in their lives. The government wants to be the god of the USA. The government wants people who worship any other god to keep their god somewhere out of sight in a box marked “worship space.” There, and only there, may any god other than the federal government be honored. Without a doubt, the people behind this agenda intend those little boxes to go away, too, as they did in the Soviet Union, where churches became at best museums of a defunct sort of cultural phenomenon and at worst, factories or warehouses for instruments of oppression.

The spiritual armor about which Paul wrote, and the spiritual fiber exhorted by the book of Revelation are the means of our warfare. In the case of gender confusion and the associated sexual chaos it creates, Satan’s battle, expressed in the lives of people who deny his existence as firmly as they deny God’s existence, targets the creation of human beings.

That moment is recorded in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27 ESV). There is no room for confusion in this statement. Like all the other living things, God gave humans gender and sexuality, precious gifts, gifts that were encoded so deeply into their being that even the very first cell, at the moment of conception, already had gender. The moment of creation is followed by God’s blessing, evidence that God was pleased with human beings.

The first instructions God gave to humans grew out of the blessed power he had given them by creating them male and female. “God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” Genesis 1:28 (ESV). They could not have been fruitful if not for gender and the process of sexual reproduction. That is the only means God has provided for humans to “be fruitful.” The Bible tells us that God is not the author of confusion, a fact that explains where gender confusion and sexual confusion originates; those problems are due to Satanic work in the lives of human beings.

There is a way to deal with gender confusion and warped sexual orientation. The solution to every sin is the work of Christ on the cross, where he defeated Satan. Human beings who succumb to the temptation to be confused and warped need Jesus. The existence of such sin does not justify name calling or any other ungracious behavior toward the people who have been enslaved that way. It was not Christ’s way to call people names and authorize stonings of sinners. Rather, he invited them to find a better way, and people such as the Samaritan woman at the well, Zaccheus the tax collector, the woman caught in adultery, and the man born blind were transformed by his grace. They turned their lives around and became different. They were reconciled with God and with creation, and they were not confused about the source of their moral guidance.

If the human race (the only race I ever acknowledge) loses God-given gender and God-given sexual procreation, it will disappear. That is why I ask the question: Is this the end of humanity as we know it? I don’t actually believe that will happen, because the Bible predicts that there will still be people on earth when Jesus comes back. I do believe that Christians are in for a long period of cruel persecution by Satan’s slaves. The book of Revelation makes it pretty clear that there will be persecution, to a greater or lesser degree, until Jesus returns. That means that even if the fad of confused gender and warped sexuality fades away, Satan has many other ways to assault Christians, always with the goal of separating them from Christ. Whether or not humankind vanishes from the earth, it is good to know 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)

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

Religion and Politics

What is the difference between faithful conviction and discrimination?

Is your church on a mission to end the existence of all other churches?

You will probably answer a resounding NO to such a question. Then you will probably try to understand who would ask such a ridiculous question. It is a ridiculous question, but in the current cultural malaise it makes more sense than might seem reasonable at first glance.

Try this question. Is Barack Obama on a mission to end the existence of Christian schools at all levels? You might think that this is a ridiculous question, too. He has not even mentioned Christian schools in any recent speeches. He has been busy with ebola in Africa and ISIS in the Middle East. However, he recently signed an executive order that forbids federal contractors to discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity. This order does not include a conscience exemption for anyone whose religion regards homosexuality or gender confusion as sin. Like so many other actions of the president, this one eludes easy examination. Most of us do not easily translate the legalese in such orders to simply human language. However, the fact that the president thought such an order was so urgent that he promulgated it even as the Congress was considering a similar order that would have included the exemption does raise the antenna of anyone watching for evidence that the executive branch of the government wants to shut down the free exercise of religion in the USA.

The order sounds relatively ordinary until one is made aware of another piece of news.

On August 5, 2014, Michael Zigarelli reported a most unusual situation. The president of Gordon College, a Christian college in the Boston area, recently signed a letter in which he exercised his right as a citizen to express his view on an action of the federal government. He joined others (the others who signed the letter are not named in this article) in a request that the executive order forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity be modified to include a conscience exemption for people whose religious convictions conflict with the order. The president of any institution is responsible to whatever board operates the institution, and if the board found this action unacceptable, it would not be news to hear that he suffered some consequence. However, the board that runs Gordon College has not expressed any concern about this letter. The concerns have been expressed by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. This Association is the accrediting authority for Gordon College. When this Association learned that Gordon College’s president had asked for this conscience exemption to be included in the executive order, the association pulled out Gordon College’s accreditation for formal review. Gordon College, a Christian college, could lose its accreditation because its president asked that the president of the United States include a conscience exemption in an executive order. How can this be?

There are many reasons for Christians to be very concerned about the possible consequences of the president’s executive order. It sets a precedent for federal action that could ripple out through many, many consequences. This issue with a college immediately calls to mind the fact that federal student loans are the most widely used plan for paying college costs. If an accreditation association can even consider pulling the accreditation of a college whose president merely asked for an accommodation on a very controversial executive order, what happens if the administrators of the federal student loan program declare that student loans may not be issued for colleges that ask for a conscience exemption in hiring. In other words, if a college refuses to hire a gay professor, because to do so is inconsistent with its statement of faith, will students no longer be able to attend and pay with federal money? Is a college that accepts federal student loan money therefore a contractor with the federal government? Does anyone know the answer to this question?

Is it possible that a college with religious scruples about hiring gays and transgenders could be denied the right to be paid with federal student aid? Is it really possible that a college with religious objections to hiring gays and transgenders could be refused accreditation for that reason when all other educational standards were met or exceeded? Is it possible that the LGBTQ agenda for social and political activism is about to overwhelm every corner of the country without any recourse for the people to who have religious convictions rooted in teachings as old as humankind?

This is a matter for serious prayer. Christians have no interest in hurting or diminishing people with sexual problems – homosexuality, gender confusion, adultery, or any other affliction. Christians, however, do have strong convictions about placing people with any of those problems, and an assortment of others, in positions of leadership anywhere. Christians do not want to spend their days in close proximity with people who are advocating these behaviors as if they were normal and desirable. Christians make this distinction with regard to advocacy much more than with regard to the behavior itself. If a pastoral candidate told the church’s call committee that he or she thought it was important to march in the streets for the right to adultery in open marriages, the church would almost certainly reject the candidate. If a pastoral candidate told the church’s call committee that a previous marriage failed, but a new marriage is more successful and the pastor has no desire to advocate divorce as a positive action, the church would almost certainly give the candidate an unbiased review. The same thing would likely be true with regard to a candidate for professorship in chemistry at a Christian college. It is unlikely the review board would probe the sexual orientation of the candidate unless the candidate compelled examination of the matter. If the candidate brought it up as an important issue, it would be easy to expect that the reviewers would reject the candidate simply because a professor of chemistry does not need to be putting his primary energy into advocacy for deviant behavior.

Christians must pray for wisdom, insight, and leadership with character. This nation was founded with deep respect for the religious convictions of people of all faiths. The balance between the prohibition of state religion and the assurance of the freedom for free exercise by private individuals has always redounded to the benefit of the nation as a whole. May the USA not be deluded by a call to suppress free exercise of faith by people who have faith, more than 90% of the people.