Why is it that people believe what the Bible teaches, right up until the time that it applies to themselves or their children?

Patti and Jeff Ellis are like thousands of other parents. They were conservative, Bible-believing parents and they understood that the Bible clearly teaches that homosexuality is sin. They believed it until their teenage son announced he was homosexual.

Now the Ellises have abandoned the Word of God in order to condone their confused boy’s destructive sexual choices and they have embarked on a quest to “reinterpret” Scripture. They cite the story of the adulterous woman as evidence of Jesus’ forgiveness toward sexual sin and Jeff Ellis asks:

“If the story were to be exchanged with a gay man, would Jesus have responded differently? Would he have said, ‘You have my blessing in stoning this man to death?’ I don’t think so.”

Now, of course, Jeff Ellis knows that no serious Christian advocates stoning homosexuals to death. And he mysteriously elects to ignore Jesus’ closing admonition to the adulterous woman:

So our response to Mr. Ellis is: Would Jesus have responded differently to your son? We don’t think so. A father who understood the earthly and eternal consequences of homosexuality would, with tears of love in his eyes, tell his precious son the Truth. —Sonja Dalton

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Apparently, Dr. Albert Mohler was contemplating the same principle, as it relates to the Cheneys, when he composed his Dec 12, 2006, blog entry:

…In order to keep family peace, show love to a loved one, or avoid awkward conversations, major moral issues are simply overlooked. Some even change their position on questions of grave moral significance, only because a relative is involved.

This happens with reference to divorce, cohabitation, homosexuality, adultery, and any number of other issues. It is a habit we must break.

Moral integrity demands clear and convictional moral thinking, based in the infallible wisdom of God’s perfect Word. Love demands that we love persons, no matter what their sin may be. Honesty demands that we admit the difficulty of knowing how to combine moral integrity and love with perfect pitch. The Gospel demands that we tell the truth with love.

No one ever said this was going to be easy. But becoming a moral relativist when a relative is involved is a path the faithful Christian cannot take. We must resist moral relativism — even with relatives.

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The following is excerpted from Evangelicals and Same-Sex Marriage, by Lis Wiehl, published by FOX News:

…Patti and Jeff Ellis, a conservative Christian couple from Atlanta, GA, experienced a similar shock when their 16-year-old son Adam announced he was gay.”Patti and I were devastated,” writes Jeff on his family’s website, Familyacceptance.com. “Our response was typical. We prayed for a miracle. We pleaded, ‘God, please remove this burden from our son and our whole family. If Adam is truly gay, then please change him.'”

Patti and Jeff now say their prayers have been answered, but not in the way you might think; in fact, not only have they come to accept Adam’s homosexuality, they both now favor laws which permit gays to marry.

“This is the same as civil rights,” says Patti. “More parents need to stand up for their children.” …

The key to the Ellis’ “conversion,” they say, was being able to put a face on the otherwise abstract issue of homosexuality. “It’s not about the gays,” says Patti, “It’s about the Ellises.” Or as Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, puts it, people like the Ellises “go from an abstract idea to a real person with a real name and a real story,” and come to understand “there’s no negative impact on their own lives to have gays and lesbians living out in the open.” …

For Jeff Ellis, the Bible was clear that being gay, much less being gay and married, was a sin in the highest order. Rev. Bob Hudak, of the Church of Nativity in Fayetteville, Georgia, puts it even more bluntly. “If I were to take the Bible literally,” says Hudak, “every homosexual should be put to death because of what Leviticus says.”

Nevertheless, with some interpretation, the Ellises have found other passages in the Bible that have given them hope, such as John 8:7, in which Jesus says to a crowd criticizing an adulterous woman, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Jeff asks: “If the story were to be exchanged with a gay man, would Jesus have responded differently? Would he have said, ‘You have my blessing in stoning this man to death?’ I don’t think so.”

Ultimately, say the Ellises, coming to terms with their son’s homosexuality deepened their beliefs. “Faithful to his word, God answered our prayer,” says Jeff. “However, the changes that took place were not in Adam but in us. God…opened our eyes to the fact that he had created Adam gay for his own reasons and we, in our arrogance, viewed God’s creation as flawed.”

The Ellises now view their son’s homosexuality as a kind of blessing. “I believe God’s purpose for making Adam gay was to show Patti and I, and the rest of the world, the true meaning of unconditional love,” says Jeff.

Excerpted from Catholic Bishops’ ‘Gay’ Guidelines ‘Gravely Flawed’, by Mary Jo Anderson, published Nov 9, 2006, by WorldNet Daily:

“Gravely flawed” – that’s the dire warning of medical experts who have seen copies of the proposed guidelines for “Ministry to Persons with Homosexual Inclinations,” to be released by the Catholic Bishops of the United States at their annual conference in Baltimore next week.

Catholic psychiatrists and physicians have quietly sent selected bishops detailed memos outlining their objections to the document in advance of the Nov. 13-16 meeting. Among the chief objections to the document, the critique notes, is that a truly charitable ministry includes “the truths that medical/psychological science has discovered about homosexuality … In particular, the health risks inherent in the lifestyle and the real grounds for hope of recovery and healing are never mentioned in the [proposed] document.”

The memo summarizes key points from medical and psychological literature on homosexuality that these experts had hoped the bishops would acknowledge, including:

• no genetic basis [for same-sex attraction] was found in last year’s [human]genome study
• fluidity of sexual attractions, with people spontaneously moving out of the lifestyle
• rampant promiscuity
• inability to maintain commitment

Richard Fitzgibbons, M.D., a contributor to the Catholic Medical Association’s statement on “Homosexuality and Hope,” was explicit:

“Persons with SSA (Same-Sex Attraction) suffer real physical and emotional physical illness in this lifestyle. There is no mention [in the document] of the deleterious effects of homosexual behavior on the person; the abuse, the diseases and the psychological pain that accompanies that lifestyle.”

Continue reading at WorldNet Daily…

A Plea to Pastors and Christian Leaders

By Linda Harvey of Mission America

The conflict in our culture over homosexuality is heating up at an astonishing pace. The battle now needs to be waged on many fronts simultaneously: in the media, in our schools, in the courts, on campus, and within the medical profession. Most tragically of all, the battle over sexuality threatens to divide Christianity as nothing has since the Reformation.

It is in this last arena where I entered the fight to begin with, and where I believe our central focus should be. We are in a fight to determine who we are created to be. God is our Creator, so the battlefield always ends up at the foot of the cross.

So why isn’t this issue of immediate concern to more confessing Christians? Homosexual activists and their allies are, in case one hasn’t noticed, the torch-carriers for a movement to destroy biblically-oriented Christianity and its positive influence on our culture. They won’t be able to reinvent Christianity, of course. Christ’s authentic Church of true believers will remain steadfast even if we’re stripped of all we have in this world. But they could destroy our culture.

The bigger point is, how will Christians account to God for how we responded to this challenge, and the people whose souls, health and lives could have been salvaged?

I am increasingly convinced that much of the Church will have a lot of explaining to do. Why did most pastors allow evil to be “sold” to our young people with barely a whimper of protest? Why did you allow this tragic behavior to become a chic cause celebre in the media without trying to take a stand against it? Why did you let seminaries teach this blasphemy? Why did you spend little or no time in the pulpit dealing with this and all the related sexuality issues – promiscuity, pornography, adultery, fornication – sins that are tearing apart the families and personal lives of even Bible-confessing Christians? Why did you constantly decry “political involvement” when this is a deeply moral issue, one for which there are ready arguments to be made in the public square had more Christian leaders been willing to make them?

And the big question is: why do you let the world define what’s right to do? What will be “accepted” or not? What is “hate” or not? This defense of inaction completely undermines who Christ is and what God is able to do. Such cowardice should make us tremble. For God would not only be with us if we tried to talk some sense into the world, He is just as able to judge each Christian and the society we live in for our disloyalty and cold-heartedness. I believe right now, He is doing just exactly that.

The moral decline in our world — the violent images that are the daily bread of our children, the school shootings, the acceptable treason of our elected leaders — will not stop until the Church is willing to be politically incorrect and cry out loudly in protest to proclaim what is good, instead of meekly retreating in the face of evil. With all the hope that is in the Gospel, why do so many remain silent?

We win the argument in the end, of course. Homosexuality will eventually be seen for the lie it is, a lie against all that God created a person to be; a lie about how people are best to love and relate to one another; a lie of omission about the health hazards involved, the sinful origins of homosexual desire and the real possibility of change. It will be seen for a lie that invalidated the authenticity of Scripture for many, leading them to believe in false gods and goddesses, creating worship of a “Jesus” that does not exist. They will realize that the defenders of homosexuality were wolves masked by this false worship, leading many of Christ’s sheep to be fed in fields fertile with enticing poison.

But it will be too late for America as we know it when “experts” and “authorities” — and even the Church’s leaders — finally realize their error. My fear is that we’ve already crossed a line where Pandora’s box cannot be closed. These practices are well-established already in the lives of many teens and young adults, and we are soon to live in a society of sexual barbarians where all types of unspeakable practices are accepted.

Violence, as in Sodom and Gomorrah, accompanies widespread sexual license, already evident in the millions of abortions performed each year. Why are we surprised when violence emerges from behind the closed doors of clinics, and into our schools and eventually, our streets and homes? Decline will be swift and painful and Christians will not escape the trauma in this world. We can look forward to eternity, which in all its glory will be a blessed aftermath. But tribulation here and now is coming unless we turn our society around. Only Christians can do this, for we are the only ones willing to stick it out.

Or so one would think.

There aren’t many folks in this fight, but this is why we are. It simply represents the essence of who people are, and who Christ is. We don’t know how much impact we can have, but we know we are called to try. It would be encouraging to have more Christians join us.

Preach the word!
Be ready in season and out of season.
Convince, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and teaching.
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine,
but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears,
they will heap up for themselves teachers;
and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables.”

–2 Timothy 4:2-4 NKJV

Excerpted from Gay demands shift from equality to special endorsement, by Michael Medved, published Dec 6, 2006, by Townhall:

[Discussing the homosexual adultery of Ted Haggard, Jim McGreevey, and Eugene Robinson…]

In high profile cases, in other words, we seem far more willing to forgive and forget faithless behavior if that infidelity involves a homosexual connection. This amounts to the granting of a special dispensation, a privileged position, to same-sex attraction—giving more latitude to gay relationships than we’d ever grant to straight romances. The justification for this attitude involves the notion that gay men who leave or destroy their families for the sake of homosexual affairs are simply discovering, at long last, their true identities after years of repression– coming to terms with “who they really are.”

But what about those aging heterosexuals who may also suddenly discover– at age sixty, say—that they’ve been repressing their true identities? Couldn’t they also argue that it seemed suddenly inauthentic to remain trapped with a sagging partner of similar age, when a powerful, undeniable inner voice and the evolutionary imperative demanded they connect with nubile twenty-somethings eager for experienced and wealthy companionship?

In fact, every study of human sexuality would suggest that far more men feel tempted to heed their deep-seated, undeniable authentic desires to cheat with other (particularly younger) women than feel drawn into relationships with other men. Does this greater incidence of heterosexual temptation make it more – or less– “natural” and worthy of respect than homosexual impulses? The tendency to forgive, or even endorse, same-sex attractions while condemning the vastly more common opposite gender desires, amounts to the granting of a preferential position to homosexuality.

One of the most common arguments for gay marriage also carries with it the implicit assumption that gay relationships count as inherently superior, more durable and more meaningful than their straight counterparts…

The idea of special recognition for gays and lesbians also applies to the efforts to grant homosexuals “protected status” as part of our civil rights and hate crimes legislation. No one would ever advance the idea that other common sexual behaviors based on deep-seated urges – such as chronic womanizing, or nymphomania, or obsessive addiction to pornography, or masochism – deserved governmental defense against discrimination or expressions of disapproval.

As the national argument continues to rage regarding the proper social and governmental response to homosexuality, some of the advocates for radical change have unobtrusively but unmistakably shifted their campaign from a request for equal treatment to an assertion of innate superiority. They demand for gay impulses not the same treatment accorded to heterosexual desires, but far greater latitude and acceptance, along with uniquely privileged social sanction and legal endorsement.

Continue reading at Townhall…

From Study Finds New Evidence that Childhood Family Factors Influence Sexual Orientation, by Linda Ames Nicolosi of NARTH, published Nov 29, 2006, by LifeSite News:

A major study published last month in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal, Archives of Sexual Behavior, provides striking new evidence for the influence of childhood family factors on sexual-orientation development.

The study used a population-based sample of 2,000,355 native-born Danes between the ages of 18 and 49. Denmark — a country noted for its tolerance of a wide variety of alternative lifestyles, including homosexual partnerships — was the first country to legalize gay marriage. The researchers assessed detailed marriage records for all Danish-born men and women marrying a same-sex partner from the years 1989 through 2001.

With access to the “virtually complete registry coverage of the entire Danish population,” the study sample therefore lacked the problematic selection bias that has plagued many previous studies on sexual orientation.

Parental Influences on Sexual Orientation Development

The authors conclude: “Our study provides population-based, prospective evidence that childhood family experiences are important determinants of heterosexual and homosexual marriage decisions in adulthood.”

“Baptist minister” and author Oliver “Buzz” Thomas suggests in the USA Today article linked below that the church will lose its moral authority if it does not admit that homosexuality is innate and acceptable to God.

Dr. Albert Mohler responds in his Nov 27, 2006, radio program entitled “In the World, But Not of the World: Credibility and the Church.”

Click HERE to listen online

The following is excerpted from When Religion Loses Its Credibility, by Oliver “Buzz” Thomas, published Nov 20, 2006, by USA Today:

Galileo was persecuted for revealing what we now know to be the truth regarding Earth’s place in our solar system. Today, the issue is homosexuality, and the persecution is not of one man but of millions. Will Christian leaders once again be on the wrong side of history?

What if Christian leaders are wrong about homosexuality? I suppose, much as a newspaper maintains its credibility by setting the record straight, church leaders would need to do the same:

Correction: Despite what you might have read, heard or been taught throughout your churchgoing life, homosexuality is, in fact, determined at birth and is not to be condemned by God’s followers.

Based on a few recent headlines, we won’t be seeing that admission anytime soon…

Continue reading in USA Today…

A Breakpoint Commentary by Chuck Colson, published Nov 21, 2006:

Well, it may finally be time to send for the guys with the white coats to wrap me up and cart me off.

It used to be, in the old days, that the biggest decision new parents had to make was the name of their baby. The one thing they didn’t have to decide was the kid’s sex—that decision had been made for them, all they have to do is take a peek. That would be that.

Well, not any more, at least not in New York City.

You see, under a proposed Board of Health rule, “people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates.” They would need only to provide “affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex.” They would also have to promise that “their proposed change would be permanent.”

The proposed rule isn’t aimed at people who have had “sex-change surgery.” They are already permitted to do this. Instead, it’s directed at people who “had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years . . . ”

Read those words carefully: adopted and especially gender, instead of sex. It is a big hint that there’s some major postmodern mischief at work here. “Sex” is what scientists call “binary”: You either have an XX (that is, female) or an XY (that is, male) chromosome.

But if nature can’t be twisted and shaped to suit our ideological predilections, words, especially in the hands of postmodern vandals, can be. If the goal is to separate “anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman,” then the use of the word gender is a must.

You see, “transgender” activists can get away with saying that gender is just “socially constructed” and more than “the sum of one’s physical parts” because gender is a word that most people don’t regularly use.

Substituting an obscure word, in this case, gender, for the more common one, sex, is intended to confuse and obscure. It’s the kind of verbal tactic George Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” compared to a cuttlefish squirting ink to confuse its predators.

Of course, what makes this squirting necessary is the denial of the obvious: “Living as a woman,” whatever that means, no more makes you a woman than hiding a pot of gold makes you a leprechaun.

These verbal parlor games may wow them in the faculty lounge, but nature is unimpressed. They remind me of the hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal. He submitted a paper to a leading postmodern journal filled with postmodern gibberish like “physical ‘reality’ . . . is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”

After the paper was published, he revealed the hoax, that it was all gibberish, adding that those who believe that physics really is a “social construct” should test their beliefs from his twenty-first floor window.

Christians should not be shocked at any of this. Romans 1 tells us that God’s truth is made plain in creation, and to deny this truth—in this case, “male and female created He them”—is to exchange the truth for a lie, which Paul illustrates by an example of men lying with men, in other words, rejecting their God-given gender, which is a challenge to God’s created order. Well, today we have renewed that old lie—that we can create ourselves the way we want, and peeking doesn’t make any difference.

(Additional resources are offered on the Breakpoint site.)

Excerpted from Ex-Gay Advocate Urges Telling Truth About Molestation-Homosexuality Link, by Ed Thomas, published Oct 26, 2006, by Agape Press:

The executive director of an organization that offers support to members and to the families of members of the “ex-gay” community — former homosexuals and those struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction — has a unique perspective on the Mark Foley scandal. While reproaches and recriminations abound in the media, she says someone needs to offer the disgraced former Congressman and others like him a message of hope and truth.

Regina Griggs of the group Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, or PFOX, says it is not enough for the public discourse to ignore Foley’s homosexuality or to affirm its existence while condemning his immoral and possibly criminal actions — specifically his alleged sending of sexually suggestive e-mails to underage boys in the Congressional Page Program. But even getting to the bottom of a criminal investigation of the allegations against Foley, she suggests, would not adequately address his situation.

“So why are we not providing hope? Why are we not publishing the facts?” Griggs wants know. And why is no one really telling the clear though politically incorrect truth — about the link between his sexual initiation and his sexual orientation — to “people like Mr. Foley, who decided that he was gay based on something that took place during his teen years?” she asks.

Continue reading at Agape Press…