Straight Pride; Why Our World Adores The LGBTQ Agenda

            Nothing is more important than the LGBTQ agenda to our world. Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire nailed it, “As everyone knows, June is African-American Music Appreciation Month. It's also National Safety Month and National Smile Month. And we can't forget that it is ALS Awareness Month, Alzheimer’s and Brain Awareness Month, Cataract Awareness Month, Hernia Awareness Month, Myasthenia Gravis Awareness Month, National Aphasia Awareness Month, National Congenital Cytomegalovirus Awareness Month, National Scleroderma Awareness Month, and Scoliosis Awareness Month. But all of these holy observances must take a backseat to the most hallowed of them all: LGBT Pride Month.”¹

            Interestingly, Matt Walsh claims that the LGBTQ community is not persecuted in the USA, rather they are privileged.²

            The secular world worships the LGBTQ community. Suddenly, the LGBTQ community has become a privileged community. Why?

            Oppression could be the key reason.

            An article in the USA Today enlightens us:³

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently apologized to the thousands of LGBTQ men and women who were fired by government agencies, including the military, between the 1950s and 1992. They were investigated and interrogated, some even forced to undergo polygraph testing, then discharged because they were considered threats to national security. It was a “gay purge,” and it was still happening less than 30 years ago.

Visibility and equality

These fights for acceptance and equality aren’t over.

Living proudly and openly in societies where your well-being (emotional, physical, professional) is constantly at risk is nothing short of brave. The fact that we are seeing more people live openly and honestly despite these challenges is a miracle.

Almost every day, we see threats made against members of the LGBTQ community. The scaling back of hard-earned rights and protections of LGBTQ people, particularly transgender people, is difficult to ignore.

So when straight people ask why there is a need for gay pride or wonder why there aren’t straight pride celebrations, it feels a lot like they are saying contributions by LGBTQ people — a minority group that faces constant adversity — are simply not worthy of recognition. Further, they’re denying the importance and significance of identifying as LGBTQ and achieving things — surviving, even — when the odds are stacked against you.

The resilience of the LGBTQ community alone is worthy of celebration.

            Fair enough!

            The laws that govern our world ought to provide protection to everyone – offenders included. The innocent cannot suffer and the guilty cannot not be punished. Even the guilty should be protected, which is precisely why prisons or correctional centers exist.

            This then is precisely the reason for the divide – in supporting or opposing the privilege offered to the LGBTQ community.

            First, the secular world does not find anything morally wrong with the practices of the LGBTQ people. For instance, they claim there’s nothing morally wrong in practicing homosexuality.  They claim homosexuality is an accepted behavioral practice, for it offends none (God excluded). On the contrary, most theists claim that homosexuality is a sin against God.

            Second, the logical second step for the secular world is to protect those being [apparently] incorrectly incriminated for their lifestyle. Thus the insulation-era of the LGBTQ community was ushered. They are being insulated/protected from all means of persecution. Thus, they are no longer persecuted in many progressive societies.

            Those who oppose the LGBTQ agenda (hardcore conservatives excluded) would welcome the protection and the provision of equal status to the LGBTQ community.

            LGBTQ may not be morally wrong in the eyes of our lawmakers. Our lawmakers act according to the forces that reign in their era.

            The practice of LGBTQ is an assault on God. It is a sin against God.

            Thankfully, an eternal and omniscient God cannot be outdone by finite human forces. Hence, HIS commands remain. HIS command that homosexuality is a sin remains irrespective of the human era or the forces that rule. (Homosexuality is taken as a specific case in point.)

            Although the forces that rule our era cannot outdo God, it has the power to vanquish susceptible humans. This is accomplished under the deceptive guise of love.

            Hence, they built a narrative to make the LGBTQ community a privileged one. A narrative in which love is the brand that sells the LGBTQ product. (But the adoration of the LGBTQ community has nothing to do with love; rather it has everything to do with moral blindness.)

            Thankfully for these morally corrupt forces, the Bible speaks much about love. Significantly, the two greatest commandments of the Lord Jesus did not emphasize worship, obedience or belief in God. Rather they emphasized love for God and love our neighbor. These commandments were predicated on love.

            But the Bible makes a very significant distinction. Love of God and of our fellow men does not relegate sins into the realm of endorsement or acceptance. A sin remains a sin and love remains love. 

            In fact, sin mars/ruins the love between God and man. When man sins against God, HIS relationship with God is marred. Hence repentance, confession, and forgiveness become the order of the day.

            This is God’s economy.

            Man’s economy is rather atypical/different from God’s.

            Since the progressive secular man does not consider homosexuality as a sin or an offense against the law, he rides the love-bandwagon and loves the LGBTQ community (and there’s nothing wrong in loving the sinner). That love ride blinds the moral senses of the secular man. When his love for his fellowmen blinds his moral senses, the secular man commits a great blunder.

            That blunder is his endorsement of the LGBTQ practices. This is where he chooses to not realize that love for someone need not necessarily lead to an endorsement of every behavior (only in the context of legitimizing LGBTQ).

            Elsewhere the secular man does not conflate love and endorsement. He may love his neighbor, but when his neighbor steals from another, the secular man imprisons his neighbor under the force of his law. In this context, theft is an offense against the law of the land. Love cannot, in any which way, override the law of the land to acquit a convict.  

            Therein the hypocrisy of the secular man dawns into full-blown brightness/intensity. 

            On the one hand, he loves his neighbor who practices homosexuality, and he even endorses homosexuality. But on the other hand, he accuses his thieving neighbor and throws him behind the bars, thereby condemning the act of theft and the subject/person who steals. 

            The reason for this hypocrisy is the secular man’s choice to endorse homosexuality as an acceptable practice. The secular man has no difficulty, whatsoever, to endorse a behavior that God condemns because the secular man refuses to bend his knee to God.

            Upon removing God from his horizon, he has no difficulty whatsoever to legitimize homosexuality.

            Or is it so?

            When God is removed from the moral equation, evidently the evolutionary paradigm reigns. The secular man contends that homosexuality is perfectly acceptable within the evolutionary paradigm.

            This is where he goes blatantly wrong.

            It can be proved that homosexuality is an aberration even according to the natural law theory. In an earlier blog entitled Does Consensual and Harmless Sexual Intercourse Legitimize Homosexuality? I emphasized the manner in which the natural law theory debunks homosexuality:⁴

(1)  The nature or essence of every biological organ, according to natural law theory, involves its purposes (or final causes). So the purpose of the eyeball is to make us see. Similarly, sexual intercourse also has its own purpose, which is to procreate (bear children).

But I have heard arguments that the final cause or the purpose of sexual intercourse is the pleasure. This is wrong! Pleasure cannot be a purpose for sexual intercourse.

Think about eating. You may argue that eating is pleasurable, but the biological point of eating is not to give pleasure, but to offer the body the nutrients it needs to be healthy and survive. The pleasure of eating is nature’s way of getting us to eat.

As Professor Edward Feser states, “So, the final cause of sex is procreation, and the final cause of sexual pleasure is to get us to indulge in sex, so that we’ll thereby procreate…Notice also that nature makes it very difficult to indulge in sex without procreation. There is no prophylactic sheathe issued with a penis at birth, and no diaphragm issued with a vagina. It takes some effort to come up with these devices, and even then, in the form in which they existed for most of human history they were not terribly effective.”3

(2) Natural law theory states that an action or a behavior, even if it does not harm anyone else, need not be acceptable or need not be the normal way of living life.

The life of an alcoholic is not acceptable, even if he/she does not harm anyone. Similarly, a person – inclined to molest children (even if he has not molested children) – who masturbates to pictures of naked children is living a sick life. Such a person is not living the way a normal human ought to live.

Therefore, gay sex cannot be justified even if it were harmless.

(3) In the same manner, consensus cannot be a legitimate reason for an action/behavior. Gay people cannot argue that consensual sex is always righteous.

Consensual sex cannot be righteous always. A pedophile cannot argue that he had sex with a child because the child consented. A parent cannot claim that he/she had sex with his/her child (minor or major) because the child agreed to have sex with the parent. In a marriage, consensus between the husband and the wife to have sex with others outside the marriage does not justify their affairs.

I will summarize now:

A. According to natural law theory, the main purpose of sex is procreation through the sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. Thus gay sex cannot be natural, but it is an abnormal activity/behavior.

B. For reasons mentioned in (2) and (3), consensual and harmless sex cannot justify gay sex.

            So the reason behind the reverence of the LGBTQ community is the failure to recognize the practices of the said community as sinful against God and as an unnatural act according to the Natural Law Theory.

            While we should love every member of the LGBTQ community, we still maintain that the practices of the LGBTQ community are sinful and hence should not be endorsed. Although the secular world may adore and revere the LGBTQ community, we Christians should remain committed to God’s ways.

            And yes, we do take pride in being straight.

Endnotes:

¹https://www.dailywire.com/news/48006/walsh-lgbt-people-are-not-oppressed-or-persecuted-matt-walsh

²Ibid.

³https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/01/why-we-have-lgbtq-pride-not-straight-pride-column/658306002/

⁴http://rajkumarrichard.blogspot.com/2018/06/does-consensual-and-harmless-sexual.html

Websites last accessed on 12^th June 2019.

Beware Of The Transgender Activists; They Are Out To Destroy Our Children

          Transgender activists are on a rampage. They are hellbent on destroying the biological basis for gender identity.

            The fact that children are determined to be male or female by their biological sex¹ is being aggressively challenged by transgender activists. Instead, they argue that our gender has nothing to do with our biological sex.

            Nancy Pearcey, hailed in The Economist as America's pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual, has authored a book Love Thy Body. In the book, she addresses hard questions on transgenderism, homosexuality, abortion etc. Christian apologist, William Lane Craig quotes Nancy Pearcey’s exposition of the transgender ideology, “…the transgender movement expresses the negative view of the body even more clearly and more obviously. Because the transgender narrative itself says your gender has nothing to do with your biological sex. In fact there are trans websites now that are treating biological sex as a hate term, because it reminds people that they are denying their biological sex when they adopt a trans identity. So today, kids down to kindergarten are being taught that their bodies are completely irrelevant to their identity. And that matter does not matter. That all that matters is your personal feelings, your internal sense of self.”²

            This transgender movement is here to stay. This is not a transgender moment,³ but it is a definite transgender movement.

            Western countries have a strong commitment to the transgender cause. In June 2017, Canada passed Bill C-16 that enshrines the rights of transgender Canadians by including them under human rights and hate-crime laws. In other words, “Canadians who deny gender theory could be charged with hate crimes, fined, jailed, and compelled to undergo anti-bias training.”⁴

            Gender theorists argue that gender is not a biological concept, but a sociological construct. There is no connection between gender and biological sex, they contend. “According…to Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990), and most other gender theorists, there is no connection at all between sex and gender (where gender is understood to refer to one’s identity as male or female). Sex “is an analytic attribute of the human; there is no human who is not sexed; sex qualifies the human as a necessary attribute. But sex does not cause gender, and gender cannot be understood to reflect or express sex.” Gender is “always acquired.” In short, a person’s identity as male, female, neither, or both has nothing to do with one’s biological sex…”⁵

            Application of this transgender ideology is very scary.

            Jonathon Van Maren’s article in lifesitenews.com enlightens us of this scary predicament:⁶

To illustrate just how radical the transgender ideology is, consider some advice given to parents at a 2016 conference (attended by over 400) people by Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, who is a developmental psychologist and the author of The Gender Creative Child…

After Ehrensaft’s presentation, one mother stood up to ask how best to “explain gender to a three, for, and five-year-old? My daughter asks a lot of questions about gender expression and identity without knowing what she’s asking, but I don’t quite have the language to talk to her about it…Is that a boy, is that a girl, what does it mean to be a boy, what does it mean to be a girl? Is it because they have a penis? Is it because they have a vagina? And I don’t quite know how to use language to talk about gender…” Dr. Diane Ehrensaft’s answer gives a clear picture of how trans activists wish to impart the ideology of gender fluidity to children:

First of all, in terms of the question is that a boy or is that a girl, I would say we don’t know—we’ll have to ask them. So that would be the start, that only they know for sure. Some people like to be asked and some people don’t. I’d say you know, some people think (because by three you’re learning) that if you have a penis you’re a boy and if you have a vagina or a vulva you’re a girl, but actually it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. If you’re a boy it’s because your mind is telling you I’m a boy. If you’re a girl it’s because your mind is telling you you’re a girl. Some girls like to wear dresses and some girls like to dress as Darth Vader—that’s a people thing, but there are some people where we live who think one thing is a boy thing and one thing is a girl thing. So there is a teaching moment there. Kids by three know their culture. Remember I said gender socialization starts at two? So we have to sometimes unsocialize those messages with new messages. Then the next thing is: Some people think there is only two genders. But there is lots and lots of genders—it’s just like a rainbow. It has all different colors. And then I’d stop there because that’s almost way too many words already for a three-year-old.

There you have it, in her own words: Children must be “unsocialized” out of antiquated beliefs such as the idea that men have penises and women have vaginas, or that there are only two genders. Instead, children as young as three years old are to be told that you can be whatever you decide to be, regardless of biological reality.

            Our children are in danger.

            Transgender activists, as this author says, are focused on our children, “Trans activists are especially focused on young people because they rightly feel that indoctrination is more effective at a younger age. The fact is that experts like Ehrensaft are the ones informing new sex-ed curriculum for schools, new governmental policies, and new social responses to the transgender ideology. In her view, her ideology applies even to children under the age of five, including those who are “preverbal.” Most parents are unaware of what activists like Ehrensaft believe and teach, but it is incredibly important for people to be aware of what this ideology constitutes, and to find out whether it has infiltrated the curriculum of your local schools, as well.

            Trans activists are waging a war for the hearts and minds of the next generation. Don’t fool yourself: That means your children, too.”⁷

            How should Christians respond to this scary predicament?

            Christians, who subscribe to Historic Christianity, will affirm in God’s creation of human beings as either male or female. God assigned gender to children even before they were born, as it was in the case of John and the Lord Jesus (Luke 1:13, 31). If God assigns gender to children even before they’re born, then man does not have an option to rewrite his/her gender after they are born.

            You cannot call yourself a Christian if you support/endorse this transgender ideology. William Lane Craig says that the transgender movement is predicated on the notion that God does not exist, “…the best defense for homosexual or transgender lifestyles would be to simply say God does not exist and therefore there are no objective moral values and duties that I'm obliged to respect.” He goes on to say that if we call ourselves Christians, then we have objective duties to fulfill, which also includes a firm belief that our gender is based on our biological sex, “I don't think trying to found them in the body alone is going to suffice. There's got to be something more than the body to ground objective moral values and duties because the body in and of itself is just an animal organism – an electrochemical machine. We need to say that these bodies that we possess are en-souled by human person and therefore designed by God to function in certain ways, and that we have objective prohibitions and obligations to fulfill that God has laid upon us. The worth of the human body and its respect is therefore grounded in theism.”⁸

Endnotes:

¹The end result of the development of a person’s genes. The presence of the SRY gene leads to the development of a male (a person with a penis and other biological attributes of the masculine sex). The absence of SRY leads to the development of a female (a person with an ovary and other biological attributes of the female sex. Source: https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/the-absurdity-of-gender-theory/

²https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/nancy-pearceys-love-thy-body-part-2/

³The term ‘Transgender moment’ is referenced to Ryan T. Anderson's book When Harry Became Sally, Responding to the Transgender Moment

⁴https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-canada-passes-radical-law-forcing-gender-theory-acceptance

⁵https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/the-absurdity-of-gender-theory/

⁶https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/in-their-own-words-what-transgender-activists-have-in-store-for-your-childr?

fbclid=IwAR0F4A2jRm_0YjBeMm6WTgRl6_ppg-_d0juF7YQdVUiS2DA4a0Jh_zOH5oQ

⁷Ibid.

⁸https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/nancy-pearceys-love-thy-body-part-2/

Websites last accessed on 24^th November 2018.