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We may be witnessing the “official” split of the American pro-family movement against homosexuality into two camps: the principled groups and churches that oppose all efforts to recognize and approve homosexuality as normal (AFTAH is in this camp); and “soft” family organizations and churches that oppose homosexual “marriage” (and sometimes “civil unions”) but which support other parts of the homosexualist agenda. Below is a version of an e-mail I sent yesterday to pro-family leaders across the United States upon learning of this misguided decision by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to support special legal “rights” based on homosexuality and gender confusion.
The pro-“gay” decision by the LDS Church to back a local “sexual orientation” law — widely reported by the media — is very bad news for our side. The proliferation of newfangled laws granting special protections based on objectively disordered sexual/gender behaviors created the basis for punishing dissenters and people of faith long before the “gay marriage” debate became the dominant issue that it is in the “culture wars.” I think I speak for us all in saying that we are very grateful to the Mormon Church for all it has done to defend against same-sex “marriage” (I personally am astonished by the LDS’ huge contribution to the cause). But “protecting marriage” while legitimizing government-backed preferred status based on changeable, wrong, and very unhealthy (even deadly) behaviors is a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.
Moreover, allowing homosexual special rights will only be used by liberal judges to rationalize their imposition of “gay marriage,” anyway (as has already happened), so what’s to be gained by such concessions? [See Gary Glenn’s article on this point HERE]
A relatively new person on the victim list is Julea Ward, a graduate student at Eastern Michigan University’s (EMU) School of Counseling who was expelled from the program because she said that as a counselor she could not affirm a client’s homosexual relationship due to her belief in Jesus Christ and biblical morality. Ward is being helped by Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a Christian legal defense group. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org. This is an ADF video:
Obama’s Expanding Anti-Christian Agenda: Photo of President Obama appearing on the website of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the world’s most powerful homosexual lobby group. Obama was the keynote speaker at the group’s annual fundraising dinner. He echoed HRC’s talking points by claiming that homosexuality-based relationships are “just as real and admirable” as normal and natural relationships between a man and a woman.
CHICAGO, Illinois — President Obama used the bully pulpit tonight to defy the Creator, by brazenly declaring before a homosexual activist audience that homosexuality-based relationships are “just as real and admirable” as normal relationships between a man and a woman.
Here is how influential one homosexual activist — Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign, whose annual fundraising dinner Obama keynoted tonight — reacted to the president’s unprecedented endorsement of the homosexual lifestyle:
“Finally, we heard something quite remarkable from the President: ‘You will see a time in which we as a nation finally recognize relationships between two men or two women as just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman.’
“This was a historic night when we felt the full embrace and commitment of the President of the United States. It’s simply unprecedented.”
Americans For Truth About Homosexuality President Peter LaBarbera issued this response:
President Obama has taken his ‘audacity’ to new levels tonight, equating sin-based ‘relationships’ to the normal and natural male-female relationship that finds its best fulfillment in God-ordained, procreative marriage.
During the presidential campaign, Obama once punted on an abortion-related query as to when life begins, saying that was above his “pay grade.” Too bad he didn’t attempt a similar evasion on homosexuality. The president has gone way over his pay grade on this one. Homosexual practice is a moral issue, settled by the Creator and His clear design of nature since the beginning of time. Obama can no more declare with any authority that abnormal, homosexuality-based relationships are as “admirable” as normal relationships than he can proclaim that each day will now have 30 hours instead of 24 to increase American productivity.
STUDENT/PASTOR AFTAH BANQUET DISCOUNT:sponsor your pastor or teenage students (and their friends) for $25 — half off the regular banquet price of $50/person — to attend AFTAH’s banquet Saturday, Oct. 24 at 6:30 PM at the Christian Liberty Academy outside Chicago, featuring Matt Barber as keynote speaker. Sign up online using the “Banquet Sign-up” link at www.americansfortruth.com/donate/, or send your check for $50/person or $25 per sponsored student or pastor to: Americans For Truth, P.O. Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522. Write americansfortruth@comcast.net or call 910-308-7619 if money is a problem for a student or pastor to attend.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.” (Daniel 3: 16-18)
By Peter LaBarbera
Folks, in the few years I have known Matt Barber — I met him in 2005 after he was fired by Allstate Insurance Company after writing an article on his own time critical of homosexuality — I have come to see him is an antidote of sorts for the ills besetting the “anti-homosexual-agenda” movement. (Calling it “anti-gay” makes it sound like we’re against people when we really oppose destructive, unnatural and changeable behaviors that for centuries have been prohibited according to Judeo-Christian moral teachings; “gay” self-identity is a very new concept, historically speaking.)
Barber’s contribution to our noble cause should not be underestimated: he is just as unapologetic and aggressive for biblical truth as hell-bent activists like Kevin Jennings and HRC’s Joe Solmonese are for their evil agendas. That’s why coming to see him at AFTAH’s banquet on Saturday, October 24 will be so good for your soul. Each of us needs to have our batteries recharged to fight the anti-Christian Left — and there is no force, short of Muslim extremists perhaps, that poses a greater threat to our God-given American liberties than the homosexual/transsexual activist juggernaut.
By celebrating this “queer” organization, the president honors a new form of bigotry that equates Bible-believers and even pastors with “hate”
Promoting Human Wrongs in the Name of Human Rights: HRC and its president, Joe Solmonese, love to smear defenders of traditional marriage and the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality (including preachers) as “haters” and “extremists.” Barack Obama demeans the office of the presidency of the United States by celebrating this radical and profoundly anti-Christian organization.
President Barack Obama is telegraphing his left-wing sympathies and defiance of America’s historic, Judeo-Christian-based morality to the world. The same man who didn’t have time for the National Day of Prayer has worked into his busy schedule a keynote address at a fundraiser Saturday for the world’s largest homosexual lobby group — one that glories in its anti-religious bigotry (masquerading as tolerance, of course). Yes, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is really all about Human Wrongs — whether it’s demonizing as “extremists” Americans who are simply trying to protect the age-old definition of marriage; crusading for legislation that denies our First Amendment right to defend normalcy and Judeo-Christian mores; lobbying for taxpayer funding of transsexual “sex-change” mutilations operations; or its ongoing attempt to redefine the clear Word of God to serve the sinful cause of “proud” homosexuality. (HRC’s Harry Knox — an Obama “faith council” appointee — outrageously calls his own homosexuality a “gift from God.”) At bottom is the HRC press release below highlighting Obama’s address Saturday evening.
President Obama continues his pro-homosexuality pandering in a September 28 “Family Day” proclamation — by including children raised by a “same-sex couple” in a list of types of “American families” (see bolded text below). Of all the family types he lists, only one — homosexual-led “families — intentionally creates motherless or fatherless households. There is no moral equivalence between children raised without a mom or dad due to a tragedy (death of a spouse, divorce, a father who abandons his family, etc.) and the same caused by two homosexual adults who defy nature by borrowing from heterosexuality to produce a child — and then dispense with God’s wise provision of mother-father parenthood to raise it.
This is the obvious difference between Obama’s “families” that social liberals refuse to acknowledge, or make relevant to public policy. “Queer” parenting and “gay” adoption are a part of radical social experiment in progress — and innocent children are the guinea pigs. Who can know the effect on a young child being raised by two homosexual men like Gay Adoption Poster Boy Dan Savage — who boasts of the “three-way” sex he and “husband” Terry engaged in while parents of an adopted boy. (News flash for the naive: “gay monogamy,” at least for men, is largely a farce.)
Christians must reach out with Gospel in love but avoid “soulish sympathy” for practicing homosexuals, says Bible scholar
By Peter LaBarbera
Folks, Dr. Michael Brown gave an excellent presentation at AFTAH’s monthly dinner-lecture last week. We hope to post a YouTube on Dr. Brown’s succinct and compelling response to my question on the “Big Three” hostile questions thrown at Christians who defend the Bible’s prohibitions against homosexual conduct:
“But Jesus Christ never said anything about homosexuality”;
“Why should we believe the Old Testament says about homosexuality when it also bans wearing polyester and eating shellfish?”; and
“You Christians are so judgmental.”
Dr. Brown, a world renowned biblical scholar, hit it out of the park. He also challenged what he calls the “celebration of ambiguity”in describing neo-evangelicals’ and the “Emergent Church’s” evasive and equivocating — and unbiblical — positioning on the issue of homosexuality.
Brown specifically challenged Chicago evangelical Andrew Marin (right), founder of the Marin Foundation and author of “Love Is Not an Orientation.” Brown praised Marin for wanting to reach out to homosexuals and the portions of the book in which Marin relays personal stories of homosexuals he has encountered who have been hurt by the Church. But he was highly critical of Marin’s misuse of Scripture in interpreting verses dealing with homosexuality.
Brown said of the Emergent Church — which is much more accepting of homosexual identity, uses the controversial term “gay Christian,” and generally scolds Christians for actively condemning homosexuality and the “gay” political/cultural agenda: “Their cure is worse than the sickness …. [they] have shown more solidarity with [homosexual] people than with God.”
“How are we helping anyone when we make the clear unclear … the unambiguous ambiguous? … How is that love?” Brown asked, calling on Christians to share the full truth of the Gospel in love. After first noting that Christians need to repent for neglecting to lovingly share God’s salvation plan with people caught up in homosexuality, Brown warned against believers falling into a “soulish sympathy” for homosexuals that overrides Biblical truth and their Christian conscience. [AFTAH will be offering a DVD of Brown’s talk; write americansfortruth@comcast.net for more information.]
Americans For Truth is pleased and honored to welcome Dr. Michael Brown (left) — a world renown Christian apologist and dynamic pro-family defender of Biblical truth on homosexuality — at its monthly dinner-lecturer tomorrow — Thursday, September 17, at 6:00-9:00 PM — at our office at 25W560 Geneva Rd., in Carol Stream, IL. This is a wonderful opportunity for you to learn from a world renown Christian apologist (author of 20 books) and dedicated pro-family advocate who shatters all the stereotypes about Christians opposing the “gay” agenda. You will be blessed by this man of God who has such a strong heart for proclaiming both the truth about homosexual activism and the love of Christ that sets all men and women — including homosexuals — free.
WHO:Dr. Michael Brown, director of the Charlotte, NC -based Coalition of Conscience and president of FIRE School of Ministry in Concord, North Carolina. Dr. Brown, who holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University, is the world’s foremost Messianic Jewish apologist. (Messianic Jews are Jews who believe in Jesus Christ (who was Jewish!) as their Messiah.) Brown is the author of 20 books and in 2010 will publish “A Queer Thing Happened to America,” which exposes the extremist teachings of “queer theology.”
WHAT: AFTAH’s monthly dinner-lecture: Dr. Brown will be preaching on how faithful Christians are called to both RESIST the radical homosexual activist agenda and REACH OUT in grace and love with the Gospel of Jesus Christ to men and woman practicing homosexuality.
WHEN:Thursday, Sept. 17, 6:00-9:00 PM. Casual dinner begins at 6:00, followed by Dr. Brown’s talk from 7:00-9:00. There will be a time for Q&A after a mid-talk break for refreshments. A free will donation will be taken to cover the cost of the event. This event will be videotaped and a tape will be offered by AFTAH for purchase.
WHERE: AFTAH’s office at 25W560 Geneva Rd., in Carol Stream, IL. We are located on Geneva Rd., just west of Gary Rd.; (Carol Stream is next door to Wheaton in Chicago’s western suburbs.) Look for the “Kingsland” sign out front and park in the rear.
