I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but I thought I'd go ahead and get it over with. It has been suggested that it is time for the church to expand our "limited views of sexuality." This idea was greeted enthusiastically by a train of commenters who added things like "...it appears that so many see the Bible as some kind of rule book" or "They do not have a compelling reason to brand homosexuality a sin." They call a re-examination of our views on gender, a "search for authenticity."
The issue is about authenticity for certain. The term "authenticity" is being used as a whip to bring those who disagree with certain progressive notions into line. If we don't accept the "settled science" that there are 32 different "genders" to choose from based upon how one feels, we are apparently inauthentic (which is bad in case you missed the memo). The "science" has huge holes in the argument in favor of multiple genders. What little there is in the way of research is sparse and fragmented. Actually, my own viewpoint on sexuality has some 7000 years of authenticity behind it, so I'm comfortable in claiming to be authentic even though I'm not a "progressive".
Bill Nye the pseudo-science guy just did a show with a woman who says she makes her vagina speak. Bill and the talking vagina tell his audience that there are more than just two genders, in fact claiming gender exists on a spectrum. They even do a song and dance number about it, if you can imagine. Nye, who has a BA in mechanical engineering and a failed career as a standup comic behind his claim to be a scientist, said flatly that it is "settled science" that gender exists on a spectrum. Unfortunately, for Bill's credibility, there's no such "settled science" and other than a few stray scientists' opinions, not much has been done on this politically driven scientific question.
To give you an idea of how political this type of "science" is, once in a TV interview, Nye suggested "science deniers" be imprisoned as "war criminals". My own field is psychology. In the 80s I watched psychology bow to political pressure and declare homosexuality normal, removing the diagnoses from the DSM-IIIR. I watched the powers that be shut down almost ANY research into the causes of gender displacement and especially into the treatment of gender identity problems. The quickest way to end your career back then was to do research and publish results showing either a genetic or psychological cause. The APA sent a memo out to all therapists that they were not to offer gender reassignment therapy of any sort and threatened their licenses.
Meanwhile, the gay community celebrated their new unquestionable freedom with a decade-long orgy. Meanwhile one of their number had sex with an ape of some sort or with someone who had and caught something bad. He flew it back to the states and passed it around the bath houses all over the country (he was an airline steward). AIDS took hold, sweeping through first the gay, then bi-sexual communities with devastating consequences. Then, of course the disease broke free into the main population. The common denominator for infections was unprotected sex out of marriage. The new moral standard for sexual conduct apparently came with a death toll. Anything goes was the sexual standard and sure enough, it went and with tragic results.
Everybody (if you listen to the sexual propagandists) now wants to gauge gender by "feelings". Having studied the human brain, one thing I do know. Obi-wan Kenobi was wrong to tell Luke to trust his feelings. The only time you can trust your feelings is when you have trained your feelings to do what you want them to do. Almost all "feelings" of the sort the LGBTQ community are talking about are feelings generated by persistent training of the brain stem and limbic system by the forebrain (the part we think with). Feelings are pretty much an automatic reaction we get when we have thought about something enough times to lay down a shortcut between our perceptions and our emotions, triggering emotional responses without you having to think about it.
This ability to bypass thinking allows us to learn and retain everything from swinging a baseball bat to feeling love when we see our mother or spouse to jumping high in the air when we spot a snake at our feet. Such trained emotional responses mean we don't have to think about whether or not we love our child, for instance. We train our minds to feel that love in the months before that child is born or adopted. Or we have trained ourselves to love any child, or puppy or whatever prior to out encounter with them because we've previously thought about children or puppies and decided repeatedly that we are fond of them. In the same way, we have to have a bad encounter or some cognitive lessons from our parents before we recognize that a snake might be a bad thing. If you've ever had your little boy scare you to death by running after some interesting reptile without fear you know what I mean. They have to learn to run way from snakes.
In my 40 years in the mental health business and as a therapist, I found upon drilling down that my gender-identity confused kids all had experienced some kind of traumatic reset of their "feelings" about gender during their early childhood. Some may have had a genetic predisposition that nudged them one way or the other. Others had been molested or abused, but inevitably, something had gone wrong that interfered with their normal sexual development. There was a study done once (quite a cruel one to my way of thinking) where they attempted to influence gender selection in toddlers by swapping their toys. Boys got Barbie dolls and such and girls got building blocks. What they learned from this is that building blocks are useful in building houses for play families and for making tables for tea parties and that if you grab her by the legs, bend Barbie at the waist and pull off her head and arms, she makes a pretty serviceable gun. Gender, it seems, at least in genetically normal kids, is pretty well fixed.
The Bible has some pretty specific things to say about homosexuality, enough to indicate to me that it is not a good thing to encourage. We live in a society raised on "If it feels good do it!" The fact that some gay people are being persecuted isn't a Christian issue. Hey, I'm sorry the Russians are persecuting gay people, but Russian government persecutes everybody. They are also threatening to shut down my church which has nothing to do with the persecution of homosexuals and such. Russia just doesn't like anyone who doesn't toe the government line. Even some of the Christian churches are pretty much government run.
The LGBTQ folk are confusing government persecution with religious persecution. Christ
I get accused of having conversations in my head when I bring up the concurrent gender identity crisis and the progressive political agenda around it. The conversation is not in my head, though, it is out in the public square. As a mental health professional, I listened for most of my career as the LGBTQ community shouted down suggestions that the gender displacement was genetic AND that the gender identity was entirely choice. These explanations were used interchangeably depending on which best met the objections. What they seemed to want was for everyone to shut up about it and let them get on with whatever they were doing and approve of it. I worked a brief time in school as a cab driver. I cannot tell you how many eager teenaged boys I picked up at the downtown Ft. Worth bus station and carried to an Eastside gay bar where they were met by gay men who paid their fare. Predators every one. I watched kids we treated for gender identity issues who, when they turned 18, had pretty well come to terms with the abuse behind it and even joined a local church. I vividly remember when one young man, who had been serially molested by 3 uncles, turned 18, his caseworker picked him up and took him home. Looking in his record she saw that he had at one time exhibited homosexual behavior and took him straight down and signed him up with a local gay activist group. Their idea of "helping" him was to take him to a gay bar and get him some experience. The kid called us and was in really a bad way by the time they got through with him. They weren't about helping this kid at all. They were about increasing their own opportunities for gay sex by recruiting confused youth.
I've had several friends in the church who were gay or at least had those feelings to deal with. With God's help, they did not practice gay sex. That I can accept. People struggling with sin do not make me uncomfortable. They do not demand I approve of their sin.
In the interest of fairness, I did once check out the website of a gay Adventist church in California. What brought me up short was that in their online church bulletin, they listed the best local bars for hooking up with gay and lesbian partners. Can you imagine if a mainline SDA church put up a list of singles bars in the church bulletin? The LGBTQ community doesn't appear to be looking for a dialogue. They are looking for everyone to submit to a line of reasoning that doesn't make sense to us and which demands that we all bring our feelings into submission to a kind of absolute truth about gender that they can't even describe in a way that makes logical sense.
Here's the deal; Scripture says "Male and female created He them." It does NOT say, "Male and female, Gay and Lesbian, Bi-sexual and trans-gender, trans-species and trans-racial, created He them." Had Moses listed all of the (so far) 32 species of gender identity the LGBQTLSMFT community has so far championed. there should be an entire chapter of Genesis on what sorts of genders God created and how to choose one. Let's look at science then, if Moses is not to be believed. Scientifically, there are two brands of gender determined by DNA. One is boys and the other is girls. There occasionally occur aberrations where there is an extra gender chromosome present in a person's DNA, but such folk tend to go one way or another. Only if you're born with both sets of genitalia, do you get a choice and even then it's better to go with the chromosomes if you want to be healthy.
The point is that SEX ISN'T EVERYTHING. That is utter heresy in the modern world, but there are plenty of Christian folk who have lived long and productive lives without ever "dipping their wicks". Jesus, who fulfilled all righteousness, never had sex. So apparently you won't die if you don't screw something sometime in your life AND it's not required to fulfill all righteousness. Forgive my bluntness, but there it is. There's not a better example than Jesus of righteous behavior. Some LGBTQ apologists have suggested that Jesus was, in fact, gay. If so, that's just another sin he resisted during his life and only supports my point that feelings aren't everything. Like Jesus, we go on principle.
We must not attempt to twist the natural world or the Scriptures into some shape that suits our feelings. The best we can do is emulate the pattern for behavior that we are given in the Word to the best of our ability with the help of Almighty God. We should be submitting to God's will, not the will of a highly organized group of sexual deviants. And you are going to have to give me a valid reason as to why God should create or blind evolutionary chance should pump out a bunch of gay people I have to stick by my judgment that gay six isn't right. You might make a case that Gaea gave us gay people in order to reduce the world's over-crowding by loading it with people who don't reproduce, but then the LGB etc. folk don't want to do that. Myself, I will continue to believe that other than the two basic genders, there are no others that are natural or useful except possibly to relieve a shortage of interior decorators and choreographers. Barring genetic mutation (which seldom works out well for the mutant) I shall stick to the two identified genders and will avoid any sexual experimentation with numbers or genders as being what Scripture describes as "sin".
I love all my brothers and sisters including those who are gay and lesbian, bipolar, ADHD, schizophrenic, kleptomaniac, and have every other kind of mental disorder, dysfunction and trauma-induced psychological issue. I would never hurt one deliberately. In fact, I made a career of helping those kinds of people. I accept my homosexual friends with all their emotional and psychological struggles in the same way I would accept a brother or sister who struggles with gossip, anger or a lust for power. We are all sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God. The church is a hospital for sinners.
Leviticus is pretty specific about whether or not homosexual behavior is a sin. Notice I did NOT say homosexual "feelings". Someone called the Scriptural prohibition "flimsy" evidence, but it seemed pretty solid to me. I will, therefore, not change my beliefs about the issue of whether sexual behavior outside of marriage in any form is a sin or not. It's a sin. My church and I are entitled to believe that so long as we don't go round stoning gay people. Just because we've grown past that sort of thing, doesn't mean the sin is any less a sin.
My worldview is simple on that point. I won't be bullied into changing my belief in order to somehow magically stop the Russians from persecuting homosexuals. Oh, those naughty Russians and those intolerant Christians! Always it's Christians the progressives demand must water down their beliefs and accept ever more and more sinful behavior as "normal".
It's not just happening around sexual and gender issues in our culture. Christians are being marginalized, ridiculed and downright persecuted unless they adopt the new blended culture in which all beliefs are equally valid, except, of course, for the Christian ones they disagree with. As then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said, "...deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed." She was talking about abortion, but normalization of alternative sexual identity is also clearly part of the political agenda the left ascribes to. And I, for one, refuse to change my religious belief on either of those points.
Who could be behind such a thing as that here in the last days of Earth's history? Makes you wonder doesn't it? Who could it be? Now who could it be?
© 2017 by Tom King
