Is Gay Marriage a Moral Issue or a Civil Liberties Issue? - Pt. 3
Part 3 in a 4 part series. Part one can be viewed here and part two here.
The battle for the family is heating up with one of the most important issues that could cause a huge tipping point in culture-the redefining of marriage by the Supreme Court. This is part 3 of a 4 part series on the topic of gay marriage. In this segment we look at how the failure of Christian marriages and how it has contributed to the issue of the rising gay community and the agenda of the gay community.
How failure in marriage got us to this place
In the last 50 years the Christian evangelical church has allowed the value of covenant in marriage to be exchanged for contract in marriage. We no longer honor the marital covenant and we make it easy for marriages to break up and reproduce the same pain through remarriage, which also violates scripture. There is no longer shame for divorce or remarriage in the church. The problem has become epidemic and so divorce has become a manufacturing mechanism for dysfunction in society. Consequently the church has lost its moral authority to speak on this issue of gay marriage. Also, the failure of the Catholic Church regarding sexual abuse contributes to the failed authority within the Catholic Church.
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We have compounded this by the church making homosexuality as the unpardonable sin by judging and condemning those in this lifestyle. A friend of mine who was delivered from the gay lifestyle said to me one time, "If there was a divorce rate of less than 5%, you would not be talking about gay issues." It would be a non-issue. That's because healthy marriages produce healthy children with healthy identities.
Danny Wallace, friend and author of Masquerade which describes his journey to freedom from a gay lifestyle and speaks internationally on the topic, shares his insights about the issue:
"Homosexuality is what it is in this country because those of us who carry the beacon of hope for 'all' broken people have stood against the sin rather than 'for' the answer. We have the same problem in every instance where we have chosen to do the same. Abortion is no different. We were caught broad side by the onslaught of changing legislation because those of us with the answer were concentrating on the 'right or wrong' of the law while ignoring the brokenness within these young mothers. The same will stand to be historically true of homosexuality and gay marriage. I think that you and I both know that in a very short time period gay marriage will be legal in all 50 states. In a very short period of time this will be a continued religious argument, but nonetheless…it will be signed, sealed, delivered, and done."
Danny further explained his findings on the pattern of becoming gay. "You will never find a person who has a healthy relationship with their father who is gay. In 100% of the cases being gay is rooted in the failure of a father to love that child and validate him/her during their growing up years."
Wounds can happen so early that a person can believe they were born that way. One thing is for sure, God never made a person gay. That would violate what the Bible teaches.
There's only one way to deal with the root problem; that is to heal marriages and return to covenant commitments in marriage learn to love those who are caught in a web of bondage. Only then will we see a reduction in the gay population.
A 2009 report on the state of marriage in America was published by the
Institute for American Values in America. In this report we got a snapshot of the health of families and marriages in America.
Over the last forty years, marriage has become less common and more fragile, and the proportion of children raised outside intact marriages has increased dramatically. Between 1970 and 2008 the proportion of children living with two married parents dropped from 85 percent to 66.7 percent, according to census data. About three-quarters of children living with a single parent live with a single mother.
These important changes in family structure stem from two fundamental changes in US resident's behavior regarding marriage: increases in unmarried childbearing and high rates of divorce. More than a third of all US children are now born outside of wedlock (39.7 percent), 71.6 percent for African American babies and 27.8 percent for whites and other ethnic groups.
The divorce rate in America is 45–50 percent for first marriages, 60–67 percent for second marriages, and 70–73 percent for third marriages, according to
Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri.
"Sixty-five percent of young adults whose parents divorced had poor relationships with their fathers (compared to 29 percent from non-divorced families)," according to a study on family life released by sixteen of the top scholars on the importance of marriage.
The Washington Times described the impact of divorce on children. "More than half of American teens have grown up with parents who 'rejected each other,' which bodes ill for the nation's future leadership, productivity, wealth, and well-being, says a new national report on American families. Only 45 percent of teens, aged 15–17, have grown up from birth with their married, biological parents, says the new US Index of Belonging and Rejection."
Divorce is the entry point of dysfunctional and wounded lives that often lead to aberrant behaviors in human beings in each new generation. Unless there is a stop-gap somewhere in the cycle, more and more expressions of aberrant behavior will be the result until we end up like the Roman Empire and disintegrate from within.
The church and the Christian Right exhibit hidden hypocrisies evidenced by their intensity against this particular sin, though they are very soft on divorce, adultery, greed, and materialism. Somehow this one sin gets isolated above the others that are equally damaging to society.
The Strategy of the Gay Agenda
In February 1988, a meeting was held with 175 gay activists in Warrenton, Virginia. Marshall Kirk, a Harvard-educated researcher in neuropsychiatry, and Hunter Madsen, who holds a doctorate in politics from Harvard and is an expert in persuasion tactics and social marketing, were the conveners of this meeting.
In their book, After the Ball, a strategic battle plan to make being acceptable in the minds of Americans, said "AIDS gives us a chance, however brief, to establish ourselves as a victimized minority legitimately deserving of America's special protection and care. It generates mass hysteria of precisely the sort that has brought about public stonings and leper colonies since the Dark Ages and before. . . . How can we maximize the sympathy and minimize the fear? How, given the horrid hand that AIDS has dealt us, can we best play it?"
This was the beginning of a public relations multiyear plan. They developed a public relations bible of the gay movement. They outline the key strategies for the movement in their book.
Their goals included:
- Break current negative associations with our cause and replace
- them with positive associations.
- Change what people actually think and feel.
- Reframe the terms of the debate.
- Seek desensitization and nothing more (until it doesn't matter
- any more).
- Make it unlawful to discriminate against gays.
Public perception of the gay agenda
Seventeen Magazine has been doing a survey about the gay lifestyle for several years. To get an idea how effective the gay rights movement has been with public relations, one only needs to look at this survey of its readers compared to earlier years. Consider their 1991 survey, which revealed that 17 percent of their readers accepted homosexuality as appropriate. However, in their 1999 survey, after eight years of PR, the same survey said 54 percent accepted homosexuality as appropriate.
"I was born this way."
In 2011, pop artist Lady Gaga received three American Music Awards from three nominations for her smash hit "Born This Way". Millions of young people and adults under 40 heard the gay propaganda over the airwaves compliments of Lady Gaga.
CNN weekend anchor, Don Lemmon revealed in 2012 he was gay during an interview. During one of his interviews with someone else on a CNN broadcast he subtly commented to the interviewer that he knew he was born gay. Because of the power of media viewers often take what is said as truth. Our young people have especially bought this lie. Yet there is no scientific data that proves a person is genetically pre-disposed to be gay. This deception is played out regularly in the media with few willing to state the truth for fear of backlash from the gay community.
Most of us hear the rationale of gay activists that they are born gay rather than their sexual preference being an influence of how they were raised and the exposure to societal factors and childhood wounds that predisposed them to this lifestyle. After the Ball authors Kirk and Madsen made an amazing admission in their book: "We argue that, for all practical purposes, gays should be considered to have been born gay, even though sexual orientation, for most humans, seems to be the product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence." Here you have an amazing admission by gay leaders that "We are not born gay." But we want you to believe we were.
What is their ultimate goal?
It isn't just to get acceptance. It is far more than that. David Kupelian explains: "The end game is not only to bring about the complete acceptance of homosexuality, including same-sex marriage, but also to prohibit and even criminalize public criticism of homosexuality. In other words, total jamming of criticism with the force of law. This is already the case in Canada and parts of Scandinavia."
Let's face it; God didn't create Adam and Joe. He created Adam and Eve.
However, being right about an issue has very little redemptive value in helping a gay person who we know is in bondage but may be unwilling to admit it.
How did Jesus deal with sexual sin?
We find one example in His discourse with the prostitute in the book of John. "
But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"
"No one, sir," she said.
"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin" (John 8:1-11).
Jesus doesn't minimize the prostitute's sin; He challenges her to move beyond her sinful lifestyle now that a second chance is given to her. Jesus' unconditional love didn't give people a free pass to continue in their sin. He gave them an out for their sin.
In our next segment we will look at the current moral condition of our nation. Are we a Christian nation, or is this a thing of the past?
