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Archive for the ‘LGBT’ Category

The Nashville Shooting, a Few Thoughts

Posted in LGBT, tagged , , , on April 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »

LGBTQ rights activists rally at the Texas Capitol in Austin, Texas on March 27, 2023. (Lauren McGaughy / Lauren McGaughy)

Over 2,500 years ago, the prophet Isaiah penned the words, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”  Isaiah was writing about the collapsing theocracy in Judah in the 7th and 8th centuries B.C., but he could just as easily have been commenting on 21st-century America. 

What Isaiah was describing has been termed by some a “satanic inversion.”  That is, what is put forth by the devil’s votaries as good is the mirror opposite of what is commanded by God and vice versa.   God cannot lie.  But when Satan lies, he speaks from his own resources. For lies are his native language.

Lies have become the native language of America’s ruling class.  Their daddy is the devil.  And by ruling class, I mean not just those in positions of political authority – mayors, governors, senators, judges, presidents – but leaders in business, leaders in the schools, leaders in the universities, leaders in publishing companies, leaders in entertainment, leaders in the media, and, yes, leaders in many churches as well.  24/7, Americans are subject to the most extraordinary propaganda, yet many seem blissfully unaware of it.

Last Monday’s horrible shooting at a Nashville church school and the aftermath is an obvious example of a satanic inversion and one that bears closer examination. 

It’s not the Guns 

Predictably, the gun grabbers were fighting over who could get to the microphone the fastest to call for the disarming of the American people.  Oh, they’ll tell you they just want to keep AR-15s out of peoples’ hands.  Why, those are weapons of war! 

But of course, the gun grabbers have no intention of stopping with AR-15s.  If they get their way, their next target likely will be 9mm pistols.  Joe Biden himself signaled this last year when he appeared to call for the banning of 9mm handguns.  Said Biden in his garbled way, “So the idea of these high-caliber weapons (9mm handguns) is, uh, there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of thinking about self-protection.”   

It’s not surprising that the Roman Catholic, Jesuit-linked Joe Biden would come out against handguns.  His Vatican handlers have been pushing for handgun control since at least 1975. 

But here’s something to think about.  I graduated high school in the mid-1980s.  And while younger readers may find this hard to believe, no one was worried about school shootings.  The subject just never came up.  There were no metal detectors in my high school.  There were, as far as I’m aware, no armed resource officers in my high school.  The doors were not locked and barred. 

And there were guns around in the 1980s.  Lots of ‘em.  

I don’t say this to suggest everyone at my high school was a perfect angel or that there were no behavior problems.  There was a lot of bad stuff happening in the 1980s, including some school shootings.  It’s just that if you had used the term “school shooter” in 1980s America, no one would have known what you were talking about.  It wasn’t a “thing” at that time. 

And school shootings didn’t become a “thing” until two demon-possessed students at Columbine High School went on a shooting spree in 1999 killing 12 other students and one teacher before they killed themselves. 

So, if there were guns around in the 1980s and school shootings were rare, then how can guns be the cause of the raft of school shootings we’ve seen since the 1990s?   

It’s the people who have changed, not the guns. 

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The Relentless Attack on Jack Philips

Posted in LGBT, tagged , , , on January 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Baker Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, manages his shop in Lakewood on Aug. 15, 2018. Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post

Not that this should come as any big surprise, but Christian baker Jack Phillips once again finds himself under siege by the woke mafia. 

The latest round in the relentless attack on this man comes from the transgender mob.  In this case, a man pretending to be a woman by the name of Autumn Scardina filed a complete against Phillips after Phillips refused to bake him a cake celebrating his “transition” from male to female.  Phillips initially agreed to bake the cake, which was to be pink with blue icing.  But when Scardina told him the purpose of the cake was to celebrate his transition from man to woman, Phillips then refused on the ground that he did not believe someone could change genders and would not celebrate “somebody who thinks that they can.”

You may recall that Phillips won his 2018 case in the Supreme Court over an earlier legal attack on him for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.  In that case, his lawyers argued successfully that forcing Phillips to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, which Phillips opposed – correctly – on the ground that same-sex weddings were a violation of his religious beliefs, represented a violation of his First Amendment right to free speech. 

According to Phillips, he is “an artist who uses cakes as ‘canvas’ to express ideas and celebrate events.” The argument seems to be that by forcing him to bake a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding or a gender transition, he is being forced to say something that he does not want to say, and that violates his conscience as a Christian. 

As a Christian, I have a lot of sympathy for Jack Phillips.  It is an outrage that this man has been harassed for the past decade simply for wanting to live his professional life in accord with his Christian conscience.  I also understand why his lawyers have advised him to argue his case on First Amendment grounds.  His legal team probably considered it the clearest path to victory.  And they were right, at least up to a point.  Phillips did win his 2018 case before the Supreme Court.

But now he’s back in legal hot water again, and part of the problem is that his legal advisors did not attack the fundamental issue in his original case.  Phillips had the right to refuse to bake the same-sex wedding cake.  But the ground of his rightful refusal was not the First Amendment, but rather his rights as a private property owner. 

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Pride Month in Light of Scripture

Posted in LGBT, tagged , , on June 12, 2022| 6 Comments »

When I was in first grade it was “see spot run.” In 2022, a different message is being given to students.

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.

  • Romans 1:27

It wasn’t my intention to write on Pride Month again this week.  But sometimes the need to speak out on an issue is such that to remain silent is impossible. 

Homosexuality is a sin, both the acts and the desires.  In the not-too-distant past, this was understood by nearly everyone.  Even those who weren’t Christians by and large understood that sodomy was unnatural and not something to be proud of. 

As recently as 1973, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, an organization that could hardly be considered Christian. 

Yet here we are, forty-nine years later, being told by corporations, government officials of all levels, teachers, schools, healthcare professionals, churches, colleges and universities, athletes, and entertainers that one must not only tolerate sodomy but actually celebrate it.

I personally know someone in the medical field, a Christian, who told me that the organization he works for, a large healthcare provider specializing in children, was actively soliciting doctors to lobby the Ohio legislature in opposition to a bill that would ban puberty blockers, hormone treatments and gender-change surgery for minors in the state.      

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Reflections on the Month Formerly Known as June

Posted in LGBT, tagged , , , , , on June 23, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Pride 2019_Pride Flag Cincinnati

The Pride flag is raised for the first time at Cincinnati City Hall, June 21, 2019.  Photo by: Dwayne Slavey.

“Today is about saying that we are in this fight for civil rights and social justice and that love is love is love is love.”

    – Cincinnati Councilwoman Tamaya Dennard

When I was growing up, way back in the day, the sixth month of the year was known as June. It was a without a doubt one of my favorite months. School ended for the summer – yes, we had to go to school into June – the weather was beautiful and I had three glorious months do pretty much whatever I wanted.

But all that has changed over the years. June has largely been wiped off the calendar and replaced by something called Pride Month. Now when considering just the name itself, Pride Month, this ought to give any Christian reason to be skeptical of it. Pride is not a thing commended in the Scriptures. In speaking of the wicked men of his day, the psalmist wrote, “Therefore pride serves as their necklace.” In Proverbs we read, “Pride and arrogance and the evil way and the perverse mouth I hate,” and, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Luke records for us Mary’s words, “He [the Lord] has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.” Writes the Apostle John, “For all that is in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – is not of the Father but is of the world.”

Clearly, pride is a concept at odds with the Word of God. But these passages do not exhaust what the Bible has to say about pride and its related concepts.

Writing to the Philippians, the Apostle Paul said of the enemies of Christ that their, “glory is in their shame.” These enemies of Christ were guilty of doing what the Prophet Isaiah had warned of, calling good evil and evil good, putting darkness for light and light for darkness. In the things of which they should have taken shame, in these they instead found honor, praise and enjoyed an excellent reputation among men.

When thinking about contemporary applications of this principle, that is, taking pride in that which should bring shame, it is hard to find a better example than in the many assertions of pride in the homosexual lifestyle made both by homosexuals themselves as well as by their supporters.

Now it doesn’t exactly take a theologian of the caliber of Martin Luther or John Calvin to understand what the Bible has to say about homosexuality. The Scriptures condemn homosexuality and homosexuals in the strongest terms. There’s really no debating this point, although some have tried.

But despite the clarity of the Bible on the issue of homosexuality, American society’s view of it has undergone such a profound change in just my lifetime that it constitutes a most extraordinary revolution.

To give you just one example of what I mean, consider the quote at the time of this post by Cincinnati Councilwoman Tamaya Dennard. The occasion for her remark was an event held outside Cincinnati City Hall where, for the first time ever, the Pride flag was raised. The event received a good deal of coverage in both the local and national press.

According to this report from a local television station, Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley, echoing the remarks of Tamaya Dennard, said that life is too short to prevent people from loving each other, the decision to fly the flag by Cincinnati City Council was unanimous, and Pride flags also were flown over six Hamilton County buildings as well as Cincinnati City Hall.

(more…)

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And He Took Away the Sodomites Out Of The Land: The Shame of Pride Month

Posted in LGBT, tagged , , on June 3, 2018| 3 Comments »

And Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, as did David his father. And he took away the sodomites out of the land…

– (1Kings 15:11-12)

“How did it come to this?,” I muttered to myself the other day. “How did it come to this?” My words were my reaction to the latest story in the mainstream press about the collapse of Western Civilization. Specifically, I was referring to yet another story about the normalization of homosexuality in the United States.

It was a story about how the State of California banned official travel to yet another state deemed by its all-wise legislators to be insufficiently submissive to the enlightened LGBT – or whatever this month’s alphabet soup variant happens to be – movement. If you’d like, you can read USA Today’s version of the story here. The short version is this, California has a state law requiring its attorney general to keep a naughty list of states subject to a travel ban due to “laws that authorize or require discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”

Now you’re probably wondering what outrage against humanity Oklahoma committed to earn the opprobrium of California’s Attorney General. It was this, the Governor or Oklahoma recently signed into law a statue that allowed private adoption agencies to refuse to place children with same-sex married couples.

How did it comes to this? Well, I doubt a single blog post can fully answer that question, but I would like to outline at least a few of the major factors that have produced the current state of affairs: the disappearance of Christianity in the West, the usurpation known as Judicial Review, and the Civil Rights Movement’s attack on property rights.

The Disappearance of Christianity in the West

As John Robbins argues in Christ and Civilization, Western Civilization is the by-product of the widespread preaching of and belief in the Gospel of Justification by Belief Alone. In nations to which the Reformation came, the role of government was reduced to something close to its Biblical norm of punishing evildoers and the secular work, what the Reformers called “vocation”, came to be seen as pleasing to God. As a result of this explosion in political and economic freedom, the nations of the West became the most prosperous on earth.

But Christianity has long been under attack in the West. 200 years ago, higher critics in Germany were ruining the nation’s universities with their skeptical attacks on the truth of the Bible. At the same time, those who professed to defend Christianity embraced irrationalism, perhaps the greatest heresy of all. Feminism, Marxism, Darwinism all rose to prominence as the 19th century wore on and helped to lay the groundwork for our modern world. Even many in the professing church, instead of being salt and light in the world as Jesus commanded, were instead swept up in these anti-Christian movements and began to use the aegis of the Bible as cover for advancing their unbelief, and thus was born the social gospel.

It stands to reason that if the ideas that formed a civilization are no longer held by the people in that civilization, the laws and social mores of that society will be changed to conform to the new belief systems that rush in to fill the void.

Even in the churches, few there be who hold to the teachings of the Reformation which birthed the West. And if the spiritual heirs of Luther and Calvin no longer believe what their forefathers believed, why would one expect those outside the Protestant churches to have any use for laws based upon a Biblical worldview?

The Old Testament associates the presence of sodomites in Israel with times of apostasy, and the removal of such persons from the land with periods of reformation. In the New Testament we find homosexuality condemned as a sin, saying of those who practice it that they will not inherit the kingdom of God. And from the colonial period right up to the recent past, the American legal system reflected this with the multitude of sodomy laws on the books.

But to take such a stance today in our post-Christian world is to court being branded a hater, a bigot, and unfit for polite society. The shift from laws criminalizing homosexuality to ones promoting it is a stunning change, and one that was made possible by Americans’ rejection of Christianity.

The Usurpation of Judicial Review

One assumption shared by both political liberals and political conservatives is that the Supreme Court has the right to declare a law either constitutional or unconstitutional. Liberals want to pack the court, so that liberal judges can give constitutional blessings to current laws favored by liberals and pave the way for more such legislation. Conservatives want conservative justices to do the same for their favored causes.

Almost no one stops to ask whether the Supreme Court actually has the power to do what it does, declare laws constitutional or not.

The short answer to this question is, no, it does not. This probably comes as a shock to many people. I know it did me when I first heard it.

As originally conceived, the Supreme Court was to decide, not whether a given law was Constitutional, but whether it had been applied properly. With Marbury v Madison in 1803, that all changed. For it was in this decision that the Supreme Court first asserted what is now known as judicial review, the power to decide whether a given law is constitutional.

Judicial review is essentially the Roman Catholic view of the Church applied to Constitutional law. In Rome, the Bible is what the Church says it is. In Christianity, the church is what the Bible says it is.

In like fashion, those who argue that the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is are legal Romanists. The correct view, the Supreme Court is what the Constitution says it is, is legal Protestantism.

The Romanist view of the Supreme Court is one of the major, and very underappreciated, sources of the massive change in American law with respect to homosexuality. It was just three years ago in 2015 that the US Supreme Court in one fell swoop declared unconstitutional all laws prohibiting same-sex marriage.

The astounding arrogance of five lawyers on the Supreme Court has basically gutted the ability of Christians to find any legal recourse to resist the unchristian and aggressive LGBT agenda.

But these ungodly men and women would never have had the power to do this were it not for the Court’s prior usurpation in claiming for itself the power of judicial review.

The Civil Rights Movement’s Attack on Property Rights

Of the three reasons for the success of the homosexual movement, probably the most controversial is to point out the role of the Civil Rights movement in paving the way for the explosion in LGBT friendly legislation in recent years.

The Civil Rights Movement was a mixed bag. To the extent that its supporters sought to overturn Jim Crow laws, they have the support of this author. But to the extent they attacked property rights they deserve to be rebuked.

The attack on property rights by the Civil Rights Movement was codified into law in Title II of The 1964 Civil Rights Act. This section of the Act drew an unbiblical distinction between types of property, one called places of public accommodation and another called private clubs. Specifically, it made it illegal to discriminate in places of public accommodation – places of public accommodation were defined, for example, as inns, restaurants, movie theaters – “on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”

One could read the Scriptures from cover to cover and find no such distinction between places of public accommodation or private clubs. Private property is private property, regardless of whether it’s a home, a private club or a lunch counter in a drug store. And just as a home owner has the right to refuse to all someone in his house, so too does a business owner have the right to refuse to serve someone.

“So,” someone will say to me, “Matthews, by arguing this way you’re just an apologist for racism!” To which charge I would answer, “Not at all.” Racism is a sin. It is a failure to love our neighbor as ourselves.

But not all sins are crimes. Just look in the case law of the Old Testament. Some sins, theft for example, were crimes. We know this because theft, while being condemned in the 10 Commandments, which are the summary of the moral law, also had civil penalties attached to it in ancient Israel. It is the presence or absence of civil penalties that determine whether a specific sin is also a crime.

The Bible’s stance on private property is summed up in Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard. When the workers complain to the vineyard owner about their wages, he responds, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things?”

The answer to this rhetorical question is, yes it is. And one implication of “doing what I wish with my own things” is that a business owner has the right to decide with whom he wishes to do business and with whom he does not. This includes making decisions with which we may disagree and which, in fact, may even be sinful. Ultimately, that’s between the businessman and God to whom he must give account.

So why do I bring up the errors of the Civil Rights Movement? Because the LGBT Movement has followed in its footsteps. For example, the homosexual activists have applied the principle of public accommodation to those who refuse services to LGBT persons. For example, there have been a number of Christian business owners in serious legal trouble for refusing to provide cakes, flowers, or wedding photography services for same-sex weddings. These cases occurred in states that have statues preventing business owners from discriminating against homosexuals in the same way the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, religion, or national origin.

Had the principle of “places of public accommodation” not been established in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, LGBT activists would not be in a position to force Christians to serve them.

Many veterans of the Civil Rights Movement have been shocked by the tactics of LGBT activists, who have appropriated the logic and methods of the Civil Rights Movement to promote the homosexual agenda.

For example, commenting on then President Obama’s use of 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march to advocate for same-sex marriage, Rev. William Owens of the Coalition of African American Pastors said, “I marched with many people back in those days and I have reached out to some of my friends who marched with me, and all of them are shocked. They never thought they would see this day that gay rights would be equated with civil rights. Not one agreed with the comparison.”

Admittedly it is shocking. But once the LGBT Movement was able to attach itself to the Civil Rights Movement, by force of logic all the laws enacted in the 1964 Civil Rights Act also apply to them. Hence the proliferation of state-level laws prohibiting business owners from denying service to someone based on his being a homosexual.

And don’t suppose that this is going to stop with traditional businesses either. For example, this 2017 story “Ohio LGBT Group Announces Plans to Target Churches for Homosexual Weddings” is a shot at Evangelicals, not just in Ohio, but across the nation. As the article explains, An LGBT organization in Ohio has announced plans to target churches if they refuse to offer their property to be used in a homosexual wedding. In opposing the Ohio Pastor Protection Act (HB-36), the group Equality Ohio announced that they would target churches, forcing them to rent church facilities to groups that oppose their beliefs.”

This is seriously dangerous stuff, and perhaps represents the biggest threat to religious freedom in the US today. Given the current legal climate, it is this author’s opinion that it is just a matter of time before we see such a case in court.

Had the “places of public accommodation” clause not been included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the threat posed by the LGBT Movement to the churches would be much less than it is today.

Conclusion

In conclusion, as a Christian I’m embarrassed at the current moral climate of our nation. And nothing highlights the current mess we’re in more than the stunning advance of the LGBT Movement over the past 50 years.

I’m embarrassed and ashamed that every year we’re enjoined to “celebrate Pride Month” as if sodomy were something to rejoice in. I’m embarrassed and ashamed that the leading institutions in my country not only do not stand up to the LGBT lie, but actually actively promote it. But perhaps most of all, I’m embarrassed that we Christians have been so ineffective in putting a stop to this nonsense.

Perhaps one of God’s purposes in allowing the stunning success of the LGBT agenda in the US is to chastise his people for their intellectual laziness and lack of faith. If so, may God grant us repentance as well as the knowledge of the truth and the wisdom and the courage to apply it to good effect.

In times past, God raised up Asa, Jehoshaphat and Josiah to put an end to the LGBT agenda in Israel. Has his arm been shorted that he cannot save today?

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