GAY TRUTH

Last week, two Christian preachers were summoned to Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Tribunal for preaching their faith’s stand on traditional marriage and homosexuality. Hobart pastor Campbell Mark­ham and street preacher David Gee, from Hobart’s Cornerstone Church, were denounced by an atheist offended by, among other things, Markham quoting a verse from the Bible. We’ve seen this before. Hobart’s Catholic Archbishop, Julian Porteous , was two years ago ordered by this tribunal to tell by what right he spoke against same-sex marriage. How cowed the churches have been before this looming persecution, now picking off vocal Christians, one by one. Just this year, Sydney University ’s Student Union threatened to deregister the university’s Evangelical Union unless it stopped insisting members declare their faith in Christ. Meanwhile, same-sex marriage extremists bullied Coopers Brewery into taking down a video of a Christian MP Andrew Hastie debating same-sex marriage , and lobbied IB

In just a moment I would like to interact with a post by Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Merritt, which you can read here if you haven’t already. In one sense, I wish they hadn’t written that thing together, because I have some respect for Kirsten Powers. She has done some very fine against-the-tide work on things like international persecution of Christians , and on the Gosnell horrors. I don’t know as much about Merritt, but what I have seen seems to indicate someone who is being wafted along by the breezes emanating from the Zeitgeist Wind Farm, which is a bad metaphor because that’s not how wind farms work. To change metaphors , it is as though they happened to be at the same place on the road because she was walking into a great city while he was walking out of it. Anyhow, however they came to say it, what they said needs a response. But before saying anything about their argument, I want to say something else about a necessary scriptural backdrop to all such discussions. As conser