Excerpted from For Gays, a Loud New Foe, by Rone Tempest, published Oct 14, 2006, in Los Angeles Times:

Organizers of the annual Rainbow Festival [sponsor list]were prepared for trouble.

The Q Crew, a local “queer/straight alliance,” distributed cards telling people what to do if approached by hostile demonstrators. Sympathetic local church groups formed a protective buffer along the festival ground’s cyclone fence. Mounted police were on patrol.

Jerry Sloan manned a table for Stand Up for Sacramento, a recently formed gay self-defense organization.

“So far, so good,” he said. “No Russians.”

The festival, held last month amid the gay bars, restaurants and shops of midtown’s “Lavender Heights” neighborhood, went off without conflict. But the elaborate security preparations reflected growing tensions between Sacramento gays and the city’s large and vociferous community of fundamentalist Christians from the former Soviet Union.

Over the last 18 months, Sacramento Russian-language church members have picketed gay pride events, jammed into legislative committee meetings when gay issues were on the agenda and demonstrated at school board meetings.

Incited by firebrand Russian Pentacostal pastors and polemical Russian-language newspapers, the fundamentalists turn out en masse for state Capitol protest rallies.

Last June, urging readers to attend a massive rally, the Russian newspaper the Speaker told them:

Make a choice. It’s your decision.

Homosexuality is knocking on your doors and asking:

“Can I make your son gay and your daughter lesbian?”

…The Sacramento community…s overwhelmingly evangelical — Baptist and Pentecostalist. The charismatic Pentacostal church, introduced in the Ukraine in the 1920s by missionary and martyr Ivan Efimovich Vornaev, includes speaking in tongues and washing of feet. The churches’ social views are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.”The main issues in the Russian community here,” said Vitaly Prokopchuk, a Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy, “are gay issues, abortion issues and family-definition issues. To these people, these issues are very cut-and-dry in the Bible.“…Leaders of the religious right…celebrate the Russian efforts as a revival.

“My hope and my prayer,” said Mark Matta, a former legislative aide who heads the Christian Public Awareness Ministries, “is that they will become a voice in the wilderness for the rest of the country.”

“It’s not only about homosexuality. It’s also about drinking, about premarital sex and about drugs,” Prokopchuk [Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy]said. “Some of these people even regret coming here because they have a feeling they are losing their kids.”

“Honestly, I’m scared for the kids,” Bugriyev [a mother] said. “We have a 5-year-old and a 1-year-old. I’m scared that when they go to school they will be in a class where they are taught it is OK for a man to sleep with another man. We are thinking that after another five years, we will move back to Moldova.”

“We feel the American church already lost the battle 20 years ago by remaining silent,” said Victor Chernyetsky, 47, a Soviet-trained engineer who serves as administrator for the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church. “We can’t remain silent. There are a lot of sins.”

Continue reading in Los Angeles Times …

Listen to this 1 minute audio from Dr. Albert Mohler, citing examples of public (taxpayer supported) universities promoting homosexuality.

Click HERE to listen.

A woman who grew up with a same-sex-attracted father has launched an effort to help similar people deal with the pain they experience.

Excerpted from New Website Offers Support For Adult Children of Homosexuals, by Gail Besse, published Oct 8-14, 2006, in National Catholic Register:

She had every daughter’s natural need for affirmation,
but that was something her homosexual father just couldn’t give his little girl.

Now in her 40s, Dawn Stefanowicz knows there are others like her — others who as children ached with silent hunger for that missing connection. To help them, she has set up the first website that specifically addresses the impact of homosexual parenting from the adult child’s perspective.

“It pierces the inside of you when you know the truth. Men who struggle with their own masculinity cannot affirm femininity,” she said. “Six-year-olds cannot tell you how they’re being impacted. We can’t comprehend what we went through until we’re adults.

“People aren’t comfortable sharing this, but keeping it hidden hurts children,” she said. “The secular media is not carrying the message that this impacts children long-term.”

Now an accountant and home schooling mother of two, Stefanowicz and her husband of 22 years live in Ontario.

Her website, http://www.dawnstefanowicz.com, went online in early September. It outlines her childhood story, which includes being exposed to nude beaches, “gay cruising” sites and sexually transmitted diseases. The website lists scientific studies and news articles, secular and religious support groups, and confidential contact information.

Her Christian faith and counseling helped Stefanowicz come to terms with her past and with the biological father whom she loved but lost to AIDS.

In the past three years, she has testified in the United States and Canada on behalf of marriage protection laws, and she appeared Sept. 21 on EWTN’s “Life on the Rock.” Her autobiography, Out from Under: Getting Clear of the Wreckage of a Sexually Disordered Home, will be out in 2007.

She went public because children’s voices were one dimension missing from the same-sex “marriage” debate. Adults who as children had first-hand experience of the “gay” lifestyle could speak for them…

A host of parental problems can challenge children raised by those who act out same-sex attraction, according to Dale O’Leary, a writer and researcher for the Catholic Medical Association and author of ­ The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality. For example, boys reared by two “mothers” face hostility toward their masculinity within the lesbian community.

“Same-sex attraction is the tip of the iceberg,” O’Leary said. “Many such people were victims of sexual child abuse themselves and have multiple problems. Many have suicidal impulses, anger management issues, drug and alcohol abuse, a high level of partner change, serious depression and mental illness. The scary thing is, when children are raised by dysfunctional parents, they often think the problems are their fault,” she said.

Even adult children hesitate to discuss their pain for fear of hurting their parents, Stefanowicz said. Some become promiscuous, when they are really seeking love. Others become perfectionists, seeking a sense of identity through their profession.

She hopes her website will be a vehicle for mutual support and healing, and a resource to uphold marriage as the union of a man and a woman for the sake of all children.

Continue reading in National Catholic Register…

By Sonja Dalton and Peter LaBarbera

The October 1, 2006, “Oprah” program was entitled “Wives Confess They Are Gay.” (Click on that link to read about or watch the show online.)

After years of suppressing her sexuality, Chris decided to come out to her husband, Joe…

“I said, ‘Joe, I think after lots of soul searching and lots of reading and lots of praying I do believe that I’m a lesbian,'” she says. “It was very painful to do.”

But Chris wasn’t alone…

Joe says he was supportive of Chris because he loved her…and because he was also gay! Four years after his divorce, Joe followed Chris’s footsteps…

Chris now has a lesbian partner, Libby, and Joe has a homosexual male partner, Paul, who was also formerly married and who has children. Oprah calls the foursome “One Big, Happy Family.” Her audience applauds, as though there is something to be happy about in this tangled mess.

According to Oprah, they “are now living [their] best life.” According to God, however, they are deluded, deceived – given over to sexual impurity and degrading of their bodies, given up to dishonorable passions, abandoned to a debased, depraved mind (see Romans 1 in the New Testament).

So much for the broken homes, broken hearts – and broken promises before God. Oprah, we ask: where is your compassion for the children whose families are shattered, and the husband who said he cried every day, with anguish over the destruction of his marriage and family that, he said, almost killed him?

Exodus Youth offers an excellent resource for young people (as well as for parents, Bible class teachers, and youth ministers) entitled “Truth & Tolerance: A Student’s Guide to Understanding Homosexuality.” The 20 page booklet is available FREE in pdf form HERE.

Excerpted from The Road to Nowhere? Middle Church, by Dr. Albert Mohler, published Oct 3, 2006, by Crosswalk:

Bob Edgar wants to rescue America from the religious right. In his new book, Middle Church: Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right, Edgar intends to reset the nation’s agenda when it comes to matters of Christian concern.

…Edgar could have offered a careful, exegetical, historical, and theological engagement with moral issues. Instead he offers irresponsible generalizations such as this: “The Bible mentions abortion not once, homosexuality only twice, and poverty or peace more than two thousand times. Yet somehow abortion and homosexuality have become the litmus test of faith in public life today.”

How can an intelligent reader, armed with even the slightest knowledge of the Bible and the Christian tradition, take such a statement seriously? The Bible does not mention abortion only in the sense that it does not make direct reference to the practice of surgical abortion as is common today. The Bible speaks clearly to the sanctity of human life and to the priority of protecting unborn life. Furthermore, to state that the Bible mentions homosexuality “only twice” indicates that Edgar has redefined homosexuality as something other than that which the Bible addresses in numerous passages.

There can be no doubt that the Bible’s consistent judgment is that homosexual acts are inherently immoral and sinful. The Christian church in all of its major branches has understood this for two thousand years. This has been a true ecumenical consensus until recent years when some more liberal churches in the West have abandoned the Christian tradition in order to endorse homosexual practice.

Thus, it is an act of intellectual dishonesty for Edgar to claim to speak for “classic historical Christianity.”

Just in case we might miss his point, Edgar offers this assessment of Scripture: “The far religious right is fond of condemning homosexuality because they say the Scripture is immutable and its words are literal.” Again, Edgar identifies the scriptural consensus that homosexuality is sinful as an example of the radical nature of the “far religious right” [italics his]. Once again, one need not be very conservative to end up in Edgar’s category of the far religious right…

In an amazing passage, Edgar asserts: “People of faith must be able to conduct a respectful and open conversation about all aspects of sexuality including homosexuality. God has a lot to say on all these topics, and if we skip the listening and rush straight to the judging–an enterprise in which we’re not supposed to be involved anyway–we can’t hope to make serious progress in our discussion.”

Statements like this must leave us wondering if this author actually means to be taken seriously. His book is filled with moral judgments–judgments about ecology, justice, racism, and a host of other issues. But when it comes to sexuality, Edgar offers the facile suggestion that moral judgment is “an enterprise in which we’re not supposed to be involved anyway.”

In other words, when Edgar makes moral judgments, he’s not being judgmental. But when others moral judgments, they are being judgmental. The Bible does not say that we are not to make moral judgments, or that we are not to judge moral behavior. Indeed, the Bible makes absolutely no sense if that is the case. The Bible–in both Old and New Testaments–is filled with moral judgment and with advisement on how we are to make such judgments. Of course, the judgments we are to make concern behavior, not the heart. We are expressly forbidden to judge another’s heart. That distinction is missing from Edgar’s analysis.

…What separates Bob Edgar and biblical Christianity is the fact that God has told us how He is going to judge humanity–and the crucial issue in that judgment is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

When it comes to matters of public policy, evangelicals surely do not have all the answers. Furthermore, evangelicals are well served by a reminder that our moral agenda needs to be broader than the issues of the daily headlines.

Nevertheless, conservative Christians did not decide to make abortion, homosexuality, and stem cell research front-line issues. It is nothing less than intellectual dishonesty to suggest that evangelicals prompted the national debate on those issues. On all of these fronts, evangelicals are simply calling on the Christian church to stand by its historic convictions and moral wisdom.

Continue reading at Crosswalk…

Excerpted from Gay Marriage – An Oxymoron, by Bryan Kemper, posted on Stand True (emphasis ours):

…Stand True is most definitely against homosexual marriage. In fact, I would go as far as saying there is no such thing as homosexual marriage. Marriage is an institution created and ordained by God for a man and woman.

Genesis 2: 24 – For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

Outside of the marriage covenant, IS shame in sexual activity. The sexual act inside of marriage is a bond that brings man and wife together as one flesh, and this bond cannot happen between two men or two women. They cannot become one flesh and therefore it cannot be called marriage.

The state may recognize their illicit union as a “state marriage,” but it cannot be recognized as a true marriage ordained by God. As Christians we know the truth and must abide by it whether or not the state does. Although society may want to allow something like this, we cannot support it or even validate it by calling it marriage.

…It is very clear in God’s Word that homosexuality is unnatural and an abomination to God.

Romans 1:24 – Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
25 – They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator–who is forever praised. Amen.
26 – Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.
27 – In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
28 – Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.
29 – They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips,
30 – slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents;
31 – they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
32 – Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Our society and government want to legitimize sin, and they demonize anyone who stands for the truth as intolerant or hateful.

As Christians we have a duty and responsibility to stand for the truth no matter how unpopular it is in society. We must love our neighbor as ourselves, but we must not love or even accept our neighbor’s sin. In fact, I would say it is not love if we just close our eyes and tolerate our neighbor’s sin. How can we truly say we love them, if we allow them to continue on a path to eternal damnation without offering them the truth?

The gospel of Christ is offensive to those who do not believe.

I Corinthians 1:18 – For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

The Gospel can cut deep but also offers the only hope for forgiveness to sinners like us. The Gospel is full of grace and acceptance with God we don’t deserve. And if we reject this Grace where will we go? The Gospel is 100% truth with no room for margin or tolerance or variation. We must live by this truth and not society’s version of truth. We must Stand True to God’s law and Jesus Christ without exception…

Continue reading at Stand True…

This is part B of our response to “Out in Scripture” (from the pro-homosexuality Human Rights Campaign) by for Sept 17, 2006, by Americans For Truth writer Sonja Dalton:

“Out in Scripture” makes the following assertion about Psalm 116:1-9:

The psalmist in Psalm 116:1-9 expresses a similar strength and gratitude. In spite of distress, persecution, affliction, even death, God delivers and is merciful to those whose whole lives are grounded in God (116:5-6). What a valuable word for the LGBT community! When one claims the truth of one’s core identity in God — whether that core is known through being a teacher or in claiming the fullness of one’s God-given gender identity or sexual orientation — divine support is available.

And so we must ask: Is “homosexuality,” “bisexuality,” or “transexuality” a grounded, God-ordained identity?

Let us open our Bibles and examine what the Creator has revealed about the God-ordained identity of humankind…