If you think the homosexual activist movement and liberal media are going to lay off churches and religious groups as they promote legal rights based on homosexual sexual behavior and gender confusion (“transgender rights”), read this terrific piece by Paul Edwards.

By all indications, High Point Church in Arlington, Texas, had the right balance of love/compassion and Biblical truth, but it didn’t matter: the pro-homosexuality crowd and “mainstream” media still went after them. (Even FoxNews.com misled readers with its headline for the story.) Here is the church’s official statement on the Cecil Sinclair affair.

TAKE ACTION by CLICKING HERE to send the church a supportive e-mail and by sharing this story with your family, friends, pastor, priest or religious authority to educate them on the threat that pro-“gay” activism poses to people of faith and our freedoms.– Peter LaBarbera

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From radio talk show host Paul Edwards’ “God and Culture” blog:

The Gay Vet Memorial Flap: It’s the Lifestyle, Stupid!

By Paul Edwards

Posted August 14, 2007

The Main Stream Media wants you to believe that a conservative evangelical church deep in the Bible belt has refused to bury a Gulf War veteran because he was gay. Some in the Christian media want you to believe that the church hasn’t shown the love of Jesus to a dead man’s family. Neither is anywhere near the truth.

Here are the facts. High Point Church, a non-denominational church in Arlington, Texas, had been praying for Cecil Sinclair after Cecil’s brother, Lee (the only member of the Sinclair family who was a member of the church) requested prayer for his brother who had been awaiting a heart transplant. When Cecil Sinclair’s health became critical last week, the family called a staff member from the church to be with them at the hospital. In the hospital, in the moments immediately following Mr. Sinclair’s death, the family asked the staff member if the church would be open to holding a memorial service for their loved one. The staff member assured them the church would be available to help the family in any way appropriate, a response any pastor would give in that situation.

Cecil Sinclair was not a member of High Point Church, yet this church selflessly and sacrificially ministered to his family in the wake of his death, preparing and delivering food for the family and one hundred relatives and friends, along with many other expressions of kindness. The church offered to produce a video retrospective of Mr. Sinclair’s life for use during the memorial service. When the family provided the pictures to the church it was then that the church learned of their intention to make the memorial service a celebration of Cecil Sinclair’s gay lifestyle. One of the photos provided by the family “showed a man with his hand touching another man’s genitalia,” along with other inappropriate photos, according to a statement on the High Point Church website.

Statement by High Point Church in Dallas, Texas

Mr. Cecil Sinclair was not a member of High Point Church. Neither was anyone in his family except for the deceased’s brother, Lee Sinclair who is an employee of the church.

Lee recently requested the church to pray for his brother who was ill. The church prayed for Mr. Sinclair both enthusiastically and faithfully.

Lee called an employee of the church to inform him that his brother was in the hospital in critical condition. When the High Point Church employee arrived at the hospital, Mr. Sinclair had already passed. The church employee reached out to the family and tried to comfort them the best he could. The church did offer the family, free of charge, the use of its facility for the memorial service. It was not clear at this time that the family desired a memorial service that would openly celebrate the homosexual lifestyle of Mr. Sinclair.

The family requested that the church produce a video of Mr. Sinclair’s life for the memorial service. When the photos were presented to the church the day before the scheduled memorial service, there were some inappropriate images that alerted the church to the homosexuality of Mr. Sinclair. One photo showed a man with his hand touching another man’s genitalia. The phrase “like hugs and kisses” used by a staff member to describe to the pastor the blatant homosexual reference was mild at best.

The family desired an associate of an openly homosexual choir to officiate the service and for the choir to sing. They also desired an open microphone format to allow anyone in attendance to speak. High Point Church ministers would not be directing or have control over what was said or emphasized. It became clear to the church staff that the family was requesting an openly homosexual service at High Point Church – which is not our policy to allow.

The decision was made to retract the offer to host the memorial service based on the fact that the service requested would be an openly homosexual service celebrating the homosexual lifestyle. It is important to emphasize that this was not a funeral service with a body to be buried, but a memorial service. The family was informed of the decision.

The decision had nothing to do with the fact that Mr. Sinclair was a veteran. High Point does now, and has always, supported our men and women in the military. This decision was not based on hate, or discrimination, but upon principle and policy.

“The sins which he proceeds to specify are the most indelicate, vile, and degrading which can be charged on man….Perhaps there is no sin which so deeply shows the depravity of man as this; none which would so much induce one ‘to hang his head, and blush to think himself a man.'”— Nineteenth-Century Christian Commentator Albert Barnes describing the “shameful sin of Sodom,” as condemned by the Apostle Paul in the Book of Romans. 

Below we look at the writings of Albert Barnes (1798-1870), a popular Presbyterian minister and Bible commentator who crusaded against slavery and lived to see it outlawed in the United States. Over a million volumes of Barnes’ commentaries on New Testament books were sold by 1870.

Note Barnes’s clear explication of the Biblical text against homosexual behavior (the modern notion of an innocuous homosexual “sexual orientation” hadn’t been invented yet).

Also, note Barnes’ discussion of the ancient phenomenon of homosexual pederasty in Greece and Rome.  Gee, it looks like NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association), which marched in the early “gay pride” parades — a right which  “gay” American “founding father” and icon Harry Hay fought to defend — isn’t such an historical aberration after all? 

Ask yourself: what is the justification for discarding the historic Christian view laid out by Barnes against what the King James Bible calls the “vile affection” of sodomy? If there is none — i.e., no serious indictment to be made against Biblical truth in this area, as the leading Bible-and-homosexuality scholar Rob Gagnon asserts — then we need to get back to the basics on homosexuality. 

Thanks to the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, you can view Barnes’ entire commentary on Romans 1 online HERE, but below are some excerpts from Romans 1:26-28. Here are some passages from Albert Barnes’ commentary on Romans 1: 

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;  (Romans 1:26-28)

Excerpted from When the Gender Line Isn’t Clear?, by Dr. Albert Mohler, published Dec, 2006:

As a society, we are falling (or diving) deeper and deeper into gender confusion. A considerable percentage of the policy-making elite has bought into the ideology of fluid gender and absolute self-expression. Once that idea takes hold, the reality of cross-dressing kindergartners becomes inevitable.

This is where the Christian worldview runs into direct collision with the new sexual ideologies. Christians see the reality of biological identity as a gift–one important way the Creator has told us who we are and how we are to glorify Him with our lives.

Continue reading at Albert Mohler…