Contact:
Peter LaBarbera (630) 717-7631
Linda Harvey (614) 442-7998

CHICAGO, Ill. —Today, World AIDS Day, a coalition of pro-family and Christian leaders is asking “Purpose-Driven Life” author Rick Warren to address head-on the issue of homosexuality and “gay” promiscuity as prime contributors to the spread of HIV in the United States, as Warren leads a “Global AIDS Summit” at his Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.

The “AIDS Truth Coalition” is asking Warren and other leaders in the AIDS-fighting community — including the new U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, Mark Dybul (who identifies as “gay”) — to call for the closure of all commercial homosexual bathhouses and sex clubs to help slow down the disease’s spread in the United States.

“While Christians and churches mobilize to fight the HIV pandemic on far away continents, let us not neglect the major catalyst for AIDS here in the United States of America: homosexual promiscuity, tolerated and encouraged by pro-‘gay,’ ‘safer-sex’ advocates,” said Peter LaBarbera, President of Americans For Truth and member of the AIDS Truth Coalition. “It’s time to acknowledge the pink elephant in the room: fighting AIDS without talking against homosexuality is like fighting lung cancer without talking against smoking.”

Noting that the response of “politically correct AIDS organizations” is to distribute condoms, even at homosexual bathhouses, LaBarbera said, “Passing out condoms at sex clubs designed specifically to facilitate men having reckless, anonymous sex with other men is preposterous. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mobilize all government agencies — federal, state and local — to close down these disease-spreading centers to save men’s lives?”

Even homosexual leaders are “reclaiming” the link between homosexuality and HIV/AIDS. Lorri Jean, CEO of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, which recently launched an ad campaign built around the message, “HIV is a Gay Disease. Own it. End it,” said:

“In Los Angeles County, gay and bisexual men make up less than 7% of the population but account for more than 75% of the people living with HIV/AIDS … The men in our community continue to get infected at an alarming rate, continue to get sick, and continue to die. Most alarmingly, a new generation of young gay men has grown up accepting the epidemic as a community norm. That must change.”

Linda Harvey, president of Mission America, said: “We call on Rick Warren to get real about HIV and AIDS in this country. Males having sex with other males is the single largest cause of HIV in the U.S. Will Warren get to the heart of what’s really at stake here? Will he say, flat out, that people who are practicing homosexuality need to get out of that lifestyle? Will he tell his millions of followers that being an open and unrepentant homosexual is incompatible with the Gospel?”

Harvey said even more critical is the need to strongly direct youth away from homosexuality, and encouraged him to work for the closure of homosexual school clubs that lead students to embrace unhealthy “gay” and “transgender” identities.

“The Saddleback Church web site says they believe that ‘the Bible is God’s perfect guidebook for living;’” said Harvey. “Scripture calls homosexuality an ‘abomination,’ and the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 1 describes how homosexual sex is an affront to God’s beautiful creation. The outcome of unnatural sex is the death of thousands of people in this country. We ask Pastor Warren to step out courageously and call for an end to the misguided endorsement of homosexuality and ‘gay marriage’ (and its twin, ‘civil unions’) by those in positions of influence.

San Diego Christian activist and former homosexual James Hartline issued the following statement:

While Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church is doing a noble service for the people of Africa by holding a global summit on AIDS, I must ponder in my mind where pastors like Rick Warren were those many years when I was struggling to get out of homosexuality. For thirty years, I struggled with homosexuality and it was not until I was finally infected with AIDS at a homosexual bathhouse in San Diego, California that the physical consequences of that sin finally began to lead me away from that destructive lifestyle.

Like me, hundreds of thousands of young men have been infected in the death chambers of the gay bathhouses in California and across America. Sadly, most of them are now dead from the HIV that they caught in these establishments. … It is noble that Rick Warren cares so much for the Africans living 10,000 miles away from his church who are infected with AIDS. It is tragic, though, that he and others like him have not spoken out forcefully against the holocaust of homosexuality and the dozens of bathhouses in California where so many men are getting sick and dying. Not to mention the millions of families that are forced to pay for the financial costs of caring for all of those sick and dying from homosexuality and the gay bathhouses where they were infected with AIDS.

Stephen Bennett, a man who once engaged in the homosexual lifestyle for over 11 years and is now happily married to his wife of 13 years and father of the couple’s two children, said:

“The spread of HIV and AIDS worldwide CAN come to an end ONLY when the promotion, acceptance and tolerance of homosexuality worldwide comes to an end. Pastor Rick Warren knows that truth—yet does he have the courage to proclaim that? Warren chose the noble battle to end HIV and AIDS. Well, homosexuality is a big part of that package. Rick Warren should make it his ‘purpose’ in his ‘driven life’ to drive home the truth about the destructive and deadly alliance between homosexuality, HIV and AIDS. To do anything less is hopeless, ‘purposeless’ and simply a waste of time.”

All members of the AIDS Truth Coalition said the Bush administration sent the wrong signal about fighting AIDS when Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice officially “blessed” the homosexual relationship of Mark Dybul, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, at his swearing-in ceremony Oct. 10. With the First Lady present, Ms. Rice publicly recognized Dybul’s male partner, Jason Claire, and referred to Claire’s mother as Dybul’s “mother-in-law,” thus radically redefining the family and helping to mainstream homosexual behavior.

The following pro-family leaders and organizations are part of the HIV Truth Coalition:

Peter LaBarbera, Americans for Truth

Linda Harvey, Mission America

James Hartline, James Hartline Report

Phil Burress, Citizens for Community Values

Brian Camenker, Mass Resistance

Sandy Rios, Culture Campaign

Michael Heath, Christian Civic League of Maine

David Smith, Illinois Family Institute

Stephen J. Bennett, Stephen Bennett Ministries Worldwide

Dr. Vic Eliason, VCY America Radio Network

Randy Thomasson, Campaign for Children & Families

Diane Gramley, American Family Association of Pennsylvania

Joe Glover, Family Policy Network

Cathie Adams, Texas Eagle Forum

Anthony Verdugo, Christian Family Coalition

Christopher Long, Ohio Christian Alliance

Gary Morella is a Catholic member of the research faculty of Penn State University, and a father and grandfather who is concerned whether there will be a recognizable faith left to his children and grandchildren. He is also a friend (although we have never met in person) and a bold critic of inane political correctness, especially at his own university. While as a non-Catholic I do not concur with every theological assertion herein, I have the utmost respect for Morella as one who applies faith, reason and courage in debunking the sophistries of the day. — Peter LaBarbera, AFT

By Gary Morella

Thoughts on: Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care

The main problem with this document is the mindset since Vatican II that no longer condemns a sin that cries out to Heaven for vengeance but rather condemns those who remind the world of that fact, the latter being called charity by those in the modern Church who are unrecognizable as Catholic. This document is written in “gayspeak” in the same manner that the horrendous Always Our Children was. The biggest concern of the USCCB is homophobia, not helping those inclined to homosexual acts to leave, as opposed to live, lifestyles that are an abomination before God, or resist temptations to same.

The comparisons between the traditional Church teaching on sins against nature vs. the post-conciliar attitude is striking when one uses Sacred Scripture and Tradition in the form of statements from the Popes, Councils, Saints, and Apologists combined with the tradition of civil legislation to show the moral chasm that has resulted when the language of “pseudo charity” replaces the language of “tough love” for salvation’s sake. The result being that the necessary feelings of revulsion toward those proudly trumpeting their sodomite tendencies are no longer there opening the door for a misplaced compassion that such individuals do not deserve. There is a huge difference between an ontological dignity to which all are entitled by virtue of being made in the image and likeness of God, and a moral dignity as a function of being endowed with an intellect and will whereby good can be accepted and evil rejected. Moral dignity does not exist for those having no problem with inclinations to homosexual acts, a distinction that the post-conciliar Church never makes using language that would have us erroneously believe that there exists something called the homosexual person, a concept which turns Christian anthropology on its head making God, Who is Perfect Good, out to be a liar in creating man with a built-in one way ticket to hell in complete ignorance of the effect of the concupiscence due to Original Sin.

Words have consequences with a litany of saints to include St. John Chrysostom telling us that “A murderer only separates the soul from the body, whereas these (sodomites) destroy the soul inside the body” vs. the post-conciliar attitude of Cardinal Basil Hume who was quoted as saying “The particular orientation or inclination of the homosexual person is not a moral failing …. Being a homosexual person is, then, neither morally good nor morally bad; it is homosexual genital acts that are morally wrong.”

By reducing moral culpability only to acts, Cardinal Hume (and the entirety of the post-conciliar Church) appeared to legitimize sinful thoughts and words. However, such concessions incur culpability with regard to the vice of homosexuality like any other vice, as Catholic doctrine has ALWAYS taught.” The rest is history as Hume opened the door for the condemnation of homosexuality in the post-conciliar Church to be needlessly qualified, if at all, something that Saints Peter, Jude, Pius V, Basil of Cesarea, Augustine, Aquinas, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Peter Damian, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Catherine of Sienna, Bernardine of Sienna, Peter Canisius, and the councils of Ancyra, Toledo, Nablus, and Third Lateran did not suffer.

From the Task Force’s 2005 Creating Change conference:

Creating Change closed with a thunderous speech by Bishop Yvette Flunder, founder and senior pastor of City of Refuge United Church of Christ in San Francisco, who spoke to the separation many LGBT activists feel from spiritual traditions, saying,

“Somebody stole God from some of us. Somebody reached down inside you and stole your spirit from you.”

But she encouraged activists not to abandon the spiritual dimension of the work they do for justice, saying,

“Activism that is rooted in spirituality can bust Hell wide open.”

The audience wildly applauded Flunder’s speech and left the conference with her words resonating as a spiritual call to all justice-seeking people:

“I challenge you, prophets, to stand up!”

From Prince Charles Praises Openly Gay Anglican Priest, by Terry Vanderheyden, published Oct 11, 2006, by LifeSite News:

Prince Charles, the future head of the Church of England, has sparked controversy by endorsing an openly homosexual Anglican clergyman.

Harry Williams, the former dean of Cambridge University who died earlier this year, was praised by the Prince in the forward to a new book of poems being published. The Prince of Wales wrote that Williams’ “proved to be a star; a man of intense humanity and warmth whose humour and originality created an aura of approachability,” according to a UPI report.

Williams’ 1982 autobiography meanwhile, titled “Some Day I’ll Find You,” describes the pastor’s experiences as a practicing homosexual while at Cambridge.

“I slept with several men, in each case fairly regularly,” he wrote, adding that “I have seldom felt more like thanking God then (sic) when having sex.”

Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary – the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention – wrote about Prince Charles that

“In just over 50 years, Prince Charles has managed to make himself a mockery of marriage and morality and to pose, as one leading British newspaper observed, as ‘a well-intentioned eccentric seeking divine inspiration.’”

Mohler added:

“There is indeed much to learn by observing the example of Prince Charles. He has become a living portrait of what happens when Christianity is separated from its central truth claims, and when faith becomes a matter of emotional aspiration rather than firm belief in the truth.”

We agree with Christopher Leighton, rector at St. Paul’s Church in Darien, who called Smith a ”perpetrator of false teaching” and said his decision defies ”Scripture and worldwide Christianity.”

Excerpted from Episcopal Bishop in Connecticut OK’s Same-sex Blessings, published Oct 24, 2006, in the pro-homosexuality newspaper The Advocate:

Episcopal parishes in Connecticut may bless same-sex couples, the state’s bishop announced over the weekend in Hartford. Bishop Andrew Smith‘s decision does not create an official prayer service for the blessings and does not allow Episcopal clergy to officiate at civil unions. But it allows parishes to acknowledge gay and lesbian couples who have had a civil union granted by the state.

”What I have permitted is a pastoral ministry of blessing, which does not mimic a wedding ceremony,” Smith said Saturday after the diocese’s two-day annual convention ended.

…At the heart of the matter is whether the church will ”bless persons who are homosexual and partnered as cherished and fully accepted members of the body of Christ,” Smith told the convention.

Continue reading in The Advocate…

By Sonja Dalton, AFT Research Analyst

Listen for the riches made possible by the holy integration of intimacy and sexuality. When lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender folk come out of the shadows, the whole community of faith can begin to embrace holiness. This holiness is a God-given wholeness that embraces both intimacy and erotic love.

That is the introduction to this week’s “Out in Scripture” a new campaign by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading homosexual pressure group, to defend homosexual practice using sacred Scripture and religious arguments. Among this week’s Bible selections is Song of Solomon 2:8-13, about which the HRC says:

Love, in this book, is embodied in the longing of lovers for one another… The passage can be read dramatically by two men without changing any pronouns, or by two women by simple pronoun changes. Such a reading becomes a gift to the church, a reminder that our presence as openly LGBT folk in the church raises to consciousness the reality of erotic love and sexuality…

Nothing could be further from the Truth.

Song of Solomon is indeed an erotic love story – between a man and a woman. Like all scripture, it affirms God’s design for human sexuality: one man, one woman, the two being made one in marriage, joined for a lifetime, mirroring the relationship between Christ and the church.