GAY TRUTH

Today the High Court denied me leave to appeal against the Chief of Defence Force ’s decision to terminate my appointment as an officer, as upheld by the Full Court of the Federal Court earlier this year. I have been fortunate to have had so much support in this battle. Today we have been defeated and for that I apologise. I feel that I have let many Australians down. This defeat does not just affect me personally. It affects all Australians. And the implications if the laws change on marriage are obvious. The Full Court of the Federal Court’s decision now stands. It found that it was legal for the Chief of Defence Force to impose ‘cultural change’ policies that include official support for events like the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and its campaign for homosexual marriage . It found that it was legal for the Chief of Defence Force to prohibit any private comments objecting to this overt display of support for a radical political agenda and anti-Christian vilification. It

The Necessity of Godly Outrage as a Moral Force Several church leaders have stated that Christians should not express outrage during the homosexual marriage debate. Some say outrage and panic are not the responses of those confident in the promises of a reigning Christ Jesus.  Jesus expressed outrage at sin repeatedly in his ministry. The cleansing of the temple is a fairly concrete case in point. So too his "brood of vipers" lambasting of the  Pharisees . Most would see outrage in his indictment of Galilean cities: "Woe to you,  Chorazin ! Woe to you, Bethsaida ! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, in sackcloth and ashes. But it shall be more tolerable in the judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Capernaum , will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades" (Luke 10:13-15 par. Matt 11:21-24). John the Baptist too expressed outrage by criticizing publicly Herod

In a historic study of children raised by homosexual parents, sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin has overturned the conventional academic wisdom that such children suffer no disadvantages when compared to children raised by their married mother and father. Just published in the journal Social Science Research , [1] the most careful, rigorous, and methodologically sound study ever conducted on this issue found numerous and significant differences between these groups--with the outcomes for children of homosexuals rated "suboptimal" (Regnerus' word) in almost every category. The Debate Over Homosexual Parents In the larger cultural, political, and legal debates over homosexuality, one significant smaller debate has been over homosexual parents. Do children who are raised by homosexual parents or caregivers suffer disadvantages in comparison to children raised in other family structures--particularly children raised by a married mother and fa

I had not previously heard of Vicky Beeching but she was celebrated a couple of days ago in a slanted interview from a British newspaper The Independent for "coming out" as a self-affirmed lesbian ("Vicky Beeching, Christian rock star 'I'm gay. God loves me just the way I am'" Aug. 13). Judging from the interview, this attractive and sympathetic 35-year-old remains spiritually impoverished in her theological reasoning—and this in spite of the fact that she has a B.A. and Masters in Religion and Ethics from Oxford University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Durham University . The "focus of her doctoral thesis" will be on (surprise) "what the Biblical texts actually say about same-sex relationships/marriage" ( http://vickybeeching.com/about/ ). In the article she states that the battle between her same-sex attraction and her picture of God as opposed to homosexual unions "was ripping me in half."   I am sympa

Newsweek, in an article by Kurt Eichenwald , says that Christians who regard homosexual practice as sin (or who—horror!—favor prayer in public school) “are God ’s frauds, cafeteria Christians,” “hypocrites,” “Biblical illiterates,” “fundamentalists and political opportunists,” and “Pharisees.” To support his slurs, Eichenwald first tries to undermine reliance on Scripture as a supreme authority for moral discernment and then to show how Christians, oblivious to the problems with biblical inspiration, ignore its clear teaching. Eichenwald claims that the New Testament Greek text is unreliable, ignoring the fact that no other ancient text comes close to being so well attested. For example, while the oldest surviving manuscript for a significant portion of Plato’s fourth-century B.C. dialogues dates to 895, for the first-century a.d. New Testament the dates are ca. 200 (Paul) and the third century (Gospels, Acts), with over a dozen substantial manuscripts from the fourth–sixth centur

Russell Moore 's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has posted a flawed "Evangelical Declaration on Marriage" entitled " Here We Stand ." While I appreciate the effort at getting evangelical leaders to declare affirmation of a male-female requirement for marriage, I think that every evangelical leader who signed this (and there are already quite a few) signed a statement that errs at some points and gives the wrong advice at others. This is not an attack on those who have already signed the document. Doubtless, many signed simply because it does contain a number of good statements. For example, the first paragraph states, "We will not capitulate on marriage because biblical authority requires that we cannot"; and the second paragraph affirms strongly Jesus' own affirmation of marriage as a male-female union. Nor should my comments be construed as a personal attack on any formulators of the statement or an accusation of doctrinal heresy. Ho

Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach makes a bad case on this video for regarding homosexual practice as a purely religious offense rather than a moral one. Of course, to assert as I will do here that homosexual practice is a moral offense is not to deny that it is also a religious offense.   Every moral sin is at one and the same time an offense against the Creator. Take the seventh commandment, the prohibition against adultery, which Rabbi Boteach classifies as a moral rather than religious commandment since it belongs to the second half of the Decalogue . Yet David acknowledges to God in his adultery against Bathsheba: "Against you, you alone, have I sinned" (Ps 51:4). Rabbi Boteach's problem is not that he characterizes the prohibition of homosexual practice as religious but that he does so to the exclusion of it being a moral offense. Here are six problems with his position : (1) In the Levitical chapters on sex laws (18 and 20), the prohibition of homosexual prac

In what has to be a new low for the New York Times , the Gray Lady (or should we now say the Bearded Lady ?) has published an op-ed piece titled “ Is God Transgender? ” by a New York rabbi named Mark Sameth. Cousin to a man who “transitioned to a woman” in the 1970s, Sameth contends that “the Hebrew Bible, when read in its original language, offers a highly elastic view of gender.” He marshals many purported examples of gender fluidity in the Hebrew scriptures , in order to argue that religion should not be put in service of “social prejudices” against transgendering. But his treatment of the Bible amounts to propaganda, not scholarship. Proposing that the God of Israel was worshipped originally as “a dual-gendered deity,” the rabbi asserts, untenably, that the etymological derivation of Yahweh is “He/She” (HUHI). His argument requires that the Tetragrammaton be read, not from right to left (as Hebrew always is), but from left to right: The four-Hebrew-letter name of God, whi