OPINION:
Dear Dr. E: I disagree with your last column, where you suggested homosexuals were in the same moral category as adulterers, pedophiles, or other sexual predators. To compare the actions of these kinds of people to those of a committed homosexual couple is disingenuous at best and fearmongering at worst.
Pedophiles, for example, harm others. However, a committed homosexual couple does not necessarily harm anyone. Their actions affect themselves, and that is a major distinction. The unnecessary comparison of homosexuals to people who prey on others for sex leads to anti-Christlike attitudes in the church. This is not the rhetoric of love or grace.
And I’d like to add this extra point: The theological side of this debate is significant. Let’s assume that in the years to come, there is legitimate scientific proof that homosexuality is genetic. In that case, what are we to say about those people and their relationship to God?
Did God create them? Absolutely. But wouldn’t that mean that God had created them in a way that prevented them from following him? Why would a loving God make a human being with a predilection that such a person has no choice about or control over?
The existence of a homosexual gene — should it ever be proved — would cause some major theological concerns and require significant rethinking of our understanding of God and humans. — Wesleyan Pastor Who Seriously Disagrees with You
Dear Wesleyan Pastor: You seem to be attempting to draw a distinction between a sexual sin that “harms others” and a sexual sin that doesn’t. I am not sure I can agree with you on this one. Christ and Paul both make it clear that sexual sin (any sexual sin) is not only a compromise of your own body but also the compromise of another’s, and therefore all sexual sin “harms others.”
Thus, the claim that there is a “major distinction” between homosexual sin and other forms of sexual sin falls short in my view.
Furthermore, how is it “anti-Christlike” to point out that it is dangerous for anyone to compromise centuries-old standards of personal and social health? To remain silent while others hurt themselves does not seem all that loving to me.
On the contrary, such silence is akin to enabling people as they endanger themselves, their families and their culture. There are consequences to all ideas, and the consequences of libertine sexuality are obvious and quite ugly.
Finally, I’m taken aback by your argument concerning our sinful nature, free will, and a loving God. You seem to be saying that people created with any genetic propensity to sin would have to be created by God in such a way that prevents them from following him. You then argue that such human beings predisposed to sin would have no choice or control over their behaviors and their sinful nature.
I don’t know how to respond to this other than cite the fact that “all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and that “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleans us of all unrighteousness.”
It seems pretty clear that all of us are born sinful. We can call it what we will, but sin is clearly part of our identity as human beings, and we all have physical predispositions to do things that we shouldn’t do because they are purely and simply wrong. The fact that it is part of our DNA does not justify the wrong behavior.
To be as candid as I can, how could helping people realize such facts about themselves and then show them how to stop their destructive and unhealthy behavior — to tell them that while they may have been born that way, they can be born again — be misunderstood as lacking love and grace? It would seem to me that enabling the same person to continue to harm their body and
someone else’s would be anything but love.
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