SHOULD COMMITTED CATHOLICS STAY AWAY FROM LGBT+ PRIDE?
Roman Catholic Bishop Tobin condemned Catholics supporting Rhode Island Pride 2019 and got a severe backlash.
Any promotion of Christianity to children is a microaggression against LGBT. No lies by some LGBT activists that you can reconcile gay sex with Christian faith can stand up.
Many LGBT and their allies know fine well that the Catholic Church cannot change its teaching on homosexuality simply because strictly speaking it is not the Church's teaching. It came from Jesus and the apostles who were clear that people have a right to a religion that does not change with the times and which believes it has got its information from God which overrides any human opinion. I don't find any Catholic honest in calling his/her support for gay sex (I didn't say gay rights) Catholic. He or she is not Catholic when it comes to that.
The Bible calls man with man as with a woman an abomination.
Building on research by Trent Horn in his book Counterfeit Christs let us make something clear. The word abomination is used of cultural and religious impurities such as eating fish without fins. It refers to mores like that but is also used of grave ethical abuses and evils. Toevah is the word we are looking at. It appears in Deuteronomy 12:31 when it is used to describe the evil of child sacrifice. It is used to call adultery an abomination in Ezekiel 18. Proverbs 6:17 calls the murder of a human being a toevah.
Etymology has value but too many try it to get loopholes to get around awkward teachings. The fact that abomination refers to some food and to gay sex only means that that the word was used. That is all. It does not mean they are considered abominations for the same reason. It does not mean that you can abolish either or both abominations. It depends on the reasons for the condemnation.
Ezekiel 16.50 has it used against the sins of Sodom in a general way which obviously could have and would have included gay sex.
The New Testament says Jesus authorised the apostles to be the ones to go to if you wanted to know about him. He even did that during his ministry. And all the New Testament is really from the people around Jesus not Jesus himself - the doctrine that Jesus divinely inspired them to write it notwithstanding.
Paul in Galatians says that the risen Jesus taught him his gospel. The apostle Paul condemned homosexuality, particularly in Romans 1. Thus he wrote what Jesus would have written. And without Paul there would be no reason to value the resurrection of Jesus as a core doctrine of the faith so to discard Paul is to discard Jesus. He wrote down the reasons the resurrection matters and claimed his message was Jesus'. Paul was always clear when he gave his own opinion which is why he says if he got a command from the Lord or not. See 1 Corinthians 7:25 where he says he got no rule from Jesus about virgins but was going to give his own judgement. Romans 1, where he says gay sex is an unnatural sin, then which we will examine came from Jesus and that was accepted by the apostles. No LGBT revisionist asks themselves why if Paul was only condemning abusive degrading sex why he singled out those sleeping with the same sex!! That says it all. In fact such sex would have been more rife among heterosexuals.
A quote, "A contextual and exegetical examination of Romans 1:26–27 reveals that attempts by some contemporary writers to do away with Paul’s prohibitions against present-day same-sex relations are false. Paul did not impose Jewish customs and rules on his readers; instead he addressed same-sex relations from the transcultural perspective of God’s created order. God’s punishment for sin is rooted in a sinful reversal of the created order. Nor was homosexuality simply a sin practiced by idolaters in Paul’s day; it was a distorting consequence of the fall of the human race in the Garden of Eden. Neither did Paul describe homosexual acts by heterosexuals. Instead he wrote that homosexual activity was an exchange of the created order (heterosexuality) for a talionic perversion (homosexuality), which is never presented in Scripture as an acceptable norm for sexuality. Also Hellenistic pederasty does not fully account for the terms and logic of Romans 1:26–27 which refers to adult-adult mutuality. Therefore it is clear that in Romans 1:26–27 Paul condemned homosexuality as a perversion of God’s design for human sexual relations." From D E Malick's article in Bibliotheca Sacra, 1993.
You cannot point to Old Testament rules such as a woman needs to marry her dead husband's brother as being a cultural or pragmatic rule like a man lying with a man. The difference is obvious for one is a detail and the other reads more like a principle. Some say that you would not say a human biology is a guide to what is sexually natural for surely it is right if you have no arms to learn to write with your feet. That argument insinuates that something in the brain forces gays if they want to have sex to improvise like the foot writer. It defeats the notion that God plans people to have gay sex. If gays were not good campaigners we would not even be hearing the arguments. The notion that the Old Testament is evil and cruel and has no authority is actually an example of how people indirectly malign its Jewish devotees, including top devotee Jesus, in the name of LGBT equality!
Today it is held that though biology is important, biology is messier than what we think so body fits body does not count very much if nature has programmed a person say to need love from somebody of the same sex. But nobody can prove that the biological criteria of sexual morality is significantly wrong or that if it is that it can be discarded. There is a link between biology and what is good for us so we must use biology in a loving life-affirming way. To say that biology is complex with sexuality is fine but as sexual behaviour is a choice it makes no sense to say that anybody saying gay sex is wrong is stupidly affirming a biological morality. They are but it is not just a biological morality. Support for LGBT can only arise from man and woman rising up in defiance of nature and being affirmed in doing so and that entails atheism.
That Gay "Christians" and religion hating gay activists want us to ignore the majority of scholars, secular and religious, who see that the Bible condemns gay sex smacks of wishful thinking and ideology.
Gay "Christians" say homosexuality is okay today when it is about mutual support and love which was not happening in those days and the pressure back then to reproduce was what mattered. That need to help the population meant gay sex had to be banned on pragmatic grounds. The Bible says nothing about this being about being practical. Ancient writings such as the Almanac of Incantations prove that there was such a thing in those times as gay men being in a relationship. This shows that people like James Boswell who make out we do gay relationships differently today and it is about mutual respect and equality are lies. He wants you to think the Leviticus text condemns temple gay prostitution but why is the word for that qadeshim not in the text? And where were the Temples for at the time Israel was in the desert and as soon as they entered the promised land any temples never mind brothel ones did not stand for long.
He may claim that the man with man as with a woman is not allowed texts are about impurity or religious liturgy in honour of fake divinities. But why then did God rather than just ban this, not give rules for when it must be affirmed as sacred sexual love in the sight of God instead? He gives purity and hygiene laws for man and woman sex and no provision is made for the gays. Catholics say that as man with man and woman with woman implies that instead of caring about it being natural you just care that it feels natural to you while there may be love, the sexual love is not love. They say it is selfish to put feelings on that high of a pedestal. It leads to lies apparently. Yahweh warns that we are not to honour him with rites borrowed from the pagans such as boiling a goat in its mothers' milk. Clearly if gay sex is sacred in paganism, it does not become right if the gods are dropped for Yahweh. Incredibly Boswell is making out the sex between the same sex is ritual sex which is not fair to the text. It does not mention gods or goddesses or rites. The pagans we are told have distorted God and his creation to worship images and fake gods and this leads to same sex relations being validated. It is about asserting defiance over the way things are.
Boswell was a major irresponsible liar for the bans on gay sex appear amid bans on sex outside marriage, incest etc. Lies like that lead LGBT down the garden path for when they unravel real harm is done. Beatings etc start happening. The laws that protect them vanish and homophobic ones reappear.
In Jesus’ time as now, the ban on committing adultery in the ten commandments really meant “no sexual sin or sex outside of valid man-woman marriage – adultery is an example”. Matthew 19:17 shows Jesus affirmed that commandment.
Jesus did not regard equal consensual loving relationships as always good. He banned them between a divorced person and a new spouse. He did not care about any alleged mitigating circumstances.
Marriage was a process of a year in those times so when Jesus allowed parting if adultery was found that does not mean he was advocating divorce. It meant that one partner was doing something that meant no marriage contract was really happening. It was not a ceremony in those days but a process that was ended with a ceremony. You could say the year up to the ceremony was part of the ceremony!
True respect for LGBT rights is as follows, "I don't need Jesus or God's approval and I will not pretend I have them. Human rights trumps religious rights period.".
The fact remains that to promote Jesus is disloyal to LGBT rights. It is not right to hound the bishop for bigotry as if Jesus is not responsible. The bishop is merely a bigot following a bigot. Jesus gave a core teaching. Jesus the bigot said: Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? [Genesis 2:24] So they are no longer two, but one flesh. (Matt. 19:4–6)."
The statement of Leviticus that a man must not lie with a man as with a woman says that men are men and women are women. A man cannot be a woman. It is a sort of parallel with Genesis. The two texts definitely are in the same vein consciously. There is no hard evidence that he was against celibate gay relationships - chances are he was for he was a man of his time - but it is clear the sex was considered a grave sin. Leviticus says that two men are not stoned to death by God's command for being gay but for a sex act. Jesus quoted that book as having full divine authority which amounts to him saying God did the right thing.
Paul said that everything written in the Old Testament was written for our instruction. Scripture permits parents to have a wayward son put to death by stoning just for being a drunkard or immoral - see Deuteronomy 21:18-21. Clearly the parent-child relationship must be ended by the parents if a son is gay. Ideally, God wants the child murdered.
Angels in the Bible are always treated as male and take male roles and appearances. Jesus says angels neither marry or are given in marriage. In other words, marriage is not attempted even if if not really possible. There are no chaste or sexless marriages even between angels.
The story of the adulteress in John 8 does not tell us she had sex with a man or woman. It is interesting that no point is made about her possibly being pregnant. For the Bible, adultery was adultery. It was about protecting the marriage contract and about protecting the family line where applicable. So adultery was still adultery if the woman clearly could not get pregnant. A woman was brought to Jesus and he affirmed that the law said she should be stoned and told the accusers to go ahead and do so if they were worthy but they walked away. So the men saved her by walking away - not Jesus. Jesus told the woman not to sin by adultery again even though she could have been in a good relationship with the man. He did not ask or care about the circumstances and even punished her by making her feel she could be stoned - an outrageous example of vicious psychological abuse. And we are expected to ignore all that and pretend that this sounds like a man who respected gays and thought more in terms of circumstances than rules? The pretending is an insult to the cause.
Don't waste time battling symptoms of Christian homophobia. Go to the root of it. Jesus is the disease and the Bible and the Church carry the disease.
