Any Truth Spoken Today Incenses the Militants
It is getting to the point that if I declare in public that two plus two equals four, I may well offend somebody. If I aver in the public arena that we need to eat and breathe, it is possible I can get in trouble with someone or some group. If I say children should be protected, some militant group will try to sue me or take me to some court or tribunal.
Sound a bit far-fetched? Well, it is not at all sadly. We live in such a morally inverted, politically correct world that to stand for any truth in the public square is likely to get you into all sorts of trouble. And this is happening all the time unfortunately.
Take one of the most common sense observations there is – which happens to be backed up by thousands of social science studies. Simply declare in a newspaper, on the radio, in a public debate, and so on, that children do best when raised by their own biological mother and father and all hell will break loose.
You will be bullied, threatened, demonised, pilloried and treated like an utter pariah. How do I know this? Well, I get this treatment all the time. And so do many others. Simply state the truth about the social science data as to the well-being of children, and the homosexual jackboots and their PC buddies in the media and courts will jump all over you.
Consider the case of a terrific man in Perth. This elderly gentleman is a longstanding medical doctor, a loving family man, and also happens to believe the social science research on what is best for children. But daring to state this in a submission to a public inquiry has meant he nearly lost his head.
Indeed, it is surprising that we did not see him hanging from the gallows by now, or at least tarred and feathered and run out of town. Imagine that: daring to speak up for the welfare of children! That sure gets the activists furious and scurrying for the heavy hand of the law to shut you up instantly and permanently.
Here is the story of how this brave soul faced the wrath of the homosexual inquisition. Fortunately he just managed to escape with his life: “A Perth GP investigated after he led a group of doctors opposing gay marriage on health grounds has reportedly been cleared by the Medical Board. Founder of the Doctors for the Family group, Lachlan Dunjey, made a submission to a Senate inquiry into marriage equality last year stating gay marriage was a health risk.
“The submission prompted outrage from civil liberty groups because it stated that marriage should remain between a man and a woman, and if same-sex marriage were allowed it would normalise homosexuality and have ‘health consequences’. ‘We submit that the evidence is clear that children who grow up in a family with a mother and father do better in all parameters than children without,’ it read.
“In May last year the Sunday Herald Sun revealed 22 Victorian GPs, anaesthetists, obstetricians, palliative care specialists and psychiatrists, including Victoria’s deputy chief psychiatrist, Prof Kuruvilla George, joined 150 colleagues interstate to argue gay marriage posed a health risk to society.
“Dr Dunjey told website Australian Doctor this week he had been investigated by the Medical Board of Australia after allegations of misconduct made by another doctor and cleared. Dr Dunjey ran as a Senate candidate for the Christian Democratic Party in the 2004 federal election. ‘It is about freedom of speech … it was sad really as I received a lot of hate mail and I don’t believe people should be vilified or targeted for expressing a view,’ he told the website.”
I have already written about poor Prof George who was hounded out of his position by the tolerance brigade: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2012/05/15/equal-opportunities-are-only-for-some/
Simply speak the truth, and claim what everyone until recently knew to be just plain common sense, and you will face the wrath of the PC witch hunters, led especially by the homosexual militants. They are on a search and destroy mission to eradicate or at least silence anyone who dares to question their radical agenda.
In this regard I quite appreciate a recent article saying much the same thing by an American evangelical. Owen Strachan puts it this way: “I fear that some of my evangelical friends are not seeing reality even as it bears down on them. Do you realize that if you define marriage as the exclusive union of a man and a woman, you are already, even if you speak in the gentlest, softest, most nuanced, most hyper-qualified terms, considered a bigot by a vocal and highly influential contingent today?”
Yes, to affirm marriage as between a man and a woman – something which basically almost everyone did throughout all of human history, except for the past decade or two – will result in you being attacked and vilified by the PC thought police.
He explains how this came about, and why we cannot keep silent: “When it comes to evangelical public engagement, many of us are metaphorically in rocking chairs. The culture’s sure shifting, we say as we gaze at the sunset. In twenty years, you might lose your pulpit. We whistle low and shake our head. Crazy world.
“When it comes to all that cultural rabble-rousing, we grimace. We don’t want to go all Moral Majority in our pastorates and our churches. We’re avoiding all those overheated controversies. We’re not going to lose our soul to politics. You see, we have found the third way, the option that allows you to hold biblical beliefs on politics, society, and culture but not make a major issue of them.
“We believe accordingly that we can ‘sit out’ the major moral challenges of our day. But our convictions are stronger than this: we actually think that these moral challenges may not even come to our doorstep. Sure, maybe in twenty years, pastors and churches will face serious threats to their pulpits. Not now, though. We can keep our heads down and they’ll pass us by.”
But that is not the case at all, as the Dr Dunjey case amply testifies to – as do thousands of others. He continues, “But the pressure some of our best-known leaders are experiencing is a sign of dammed-up cultural vitriol. Satan is real. He hates the church. He despises God’s plan for men and women. He’s not like God; he doesn’t want humanity to flourish in rightly ordered homes, he wants it to be destroyed, judged, and damned. He’s launching an attack, I think, on the church. Under God’s rule, he’s pushing the culture to a point where to simply declare biblical convictions on marriage is to label oneself hateful.
“Do you see this? There is no third way on this issue. Sure, you may not hold marriage rallies with your church. No, you may not thunder from the pulpit against governmental tyranny. But we’ve already reached the point where in influential cultural circles pastors and Christian leaders are seen as morally backward and against the times on the issues of marriage and homosexuality. You don’t need to be a foam-mouthed culture warrior to wear these epithets. You simply need to believe God’s truth, proceeding from elemental texts like Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5, and the deal is done. There’s no amount of non-controversial, politically averse gospel preaching that can take away this sting.”
So what are we to do then? “Our response is not to damp down our witness, be quiet, speak in hushed tones, adopt ‘a softer’ approach, retreat from the cultural debate, ignore ‘political’ stuff, or any other such tactic. Our response must be to pray to God for courage, and then to bravely speak the truth wherever appropriate on crucial cultural issues. Andrew Walker and I just wrote a piece for First Things on this issue. Working from the examples of figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we argue for the need for ‘theological courage,’ for bringing biblical-theological reality to bear on the major matters before us.
“Evangelicals, in one sense, should continue to do exactly what we’ve been doing. Pastors and churches should keep preaching the gospel. All sorts of meaningful work in a hundred areas should continue. But we must be theologically courageous. We must give an answer on morally inflammatory issues. We cannot silence ourselves. We can’t fool ourselves into thinking that if we’re just really, extraordinarily, super-erogatorily nice, we’ll somehow win everyone over. We need to be full of grace and truth as Christ our king was. We need to speak in those tones. But some people will dislike and even hate us for doing so.”
Yes quite so. Now is not the time to wimp out. We already have far too many evangellyfish, too many wimps for Jesus. Now we need men and women with some backbone who will stand up for one of the most primary moral and social issues of our day. Now is the time to stand strong for this most basic and most important of social institutions, and to stand up for children who are the biggest losers when we allow marriage to be gutted by the activists.
Leonard Ravenhill had it right when he said, “It’s going to demand a lot of courage before too long— to really live and maintain the true Christian life according to the Word of the Living God.” And A.A. Hodge was quite right to observe: “It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.”
Warfare it is then. We are not called to a life of ease but to a life of battle. The stakes are too high and that which we fight for too important. Now is not the time to lose heart. As Martin Luther reminds us in his glorious hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God: “And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God has willed his truth to triumph through us.”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/anti-gay-marriage-doctor-lachlan-dunjey-cleared-by-medical-board/story-fncynkc6-1226562511152
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thoughtlife/2013/01/dear-evangelicals-you-dont-need-to-be-quiet-you-need-to-speak-up/
[1695 words]
Finish the hymn Bill:
“The Prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him.
His rage we can endure for lo his doom is sure-
One little Word shall fell him.”
Ed Sherman, Holland
Yes quite right indeed Ed
Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch
I believe God, he is good.
I pray God will shine through us and his robust love be made available to any on the way. We thank you God… and only you. Lord let even one ear open tomorrow, to see the light come on in their eyes.
Amen.
Daniel Kempton
Bill, do you have a response to the tarring and feathering of Bob Katter this week on channel 10? It is related to this issue in the way that the interviewers attacked him like blood hounds.
Rodney Gynther
In some cases, when people complain that Christians are “hateful” towards gay marriage, it is the complainers who are really being hateful.
I think it is important to counteract the freedom-hating activists on two levels. We must let people know what the Bible says about marriage. We should also emphasise the plain fact that same-sex marriage is absurd on biological and other grounds, whether people have “religious” beliefs or not. There are many actively gay people who think same-sex marriage is an absurd concept.
The “freedom” lovers should be constantly taken to task over their regular use of question-begging empty slogans such as “equal love” and “marriage equality”.
And we should remember that it doesn’t take all that much courage to speak out against absurdity in Australia
where we still have considerable freedom- for the moment. I am amazed at how so many people are afraid to say anything that might be “politically incorrect”. I have even written to a vice-chancellor telling how absurd it is that a university marks out words such as ‘mankind” in assignments, and that is just a minor example of how the tiresome ones are trying to remove our freedoms.
And I am not a brave person. Just a little bit of fire in the belly is enough to drive me to counter these absurdities. Why are so many good, hardworking, sensible people whose lives and jobs are not on the line unwilling to fight back a bit?
People in Bill’s position of course have to take far more flack than we occasional commenters do, and we admire them greatly for that.
David Morrison
Why can’t we have different viewpoints? A sign of maturity is the ability to accept others views and agree to disagree. But it seems that unless you are prepared to turn the other cheek and tell the radicals they are right then you’re the person with a problem. Postmodernism and the “do what makes you feels good” culture is very quickly removing the truth. I guess 1 + 1 will not equal 2 but 3,4,5 or ?? and then we will have pollies make a law that says that 1 + 1 does not = 2. It seems we are almost at the point where common sense will be outlawed.
Annette Lawson
This is surely a time for God’s people to be courageous, to be silent-no-longer and to engage with the culture, always speaking the truth in love. As you say, Bill, now is not the time to lose heart but the time to move forward even if labels such as ‘hater’ are used.
Ian Blackburne
Same sex attraction and discomfort with and confusion about one’s sex are symptoms, not a sign of a different orientation, gender or identity. All our emotions and responses are conditioned, from birth or as is being learned, before birth. The time from conception to 2 years of age are crucial to the development of identity, security, and emotional stability…as much as the dynamics and spiritual/emotional condition of one’s parents and the stability of the environment.
Approval of sin is NOT love, and silence about it is not being a Christian…to the contrary, the Bible holds us responsible for failure to warn another from evil. ‘Their blood is on our hands’ so to speak.
One impeccable and reliable resource for facts on the sexual identity/orientation/gender propaganda is Dale O’Leary’s blog. Her work compiling data from research is conscise, factual and irrefutable. http://daleoleary.wordpress.com/
See her article on the Syndemic of STDs Among Gay Males which cites the CDC and other research sources.
Research, medical and mental health practice, police and CDC reports show that MSM and FSF are correlated with a high incidence of violence, physical injuries, abuse, mental health problems and addictions. MSM = 44 times greater incidence of HIV and 46 times greater incidence of all other STDs.
It is wrong to affirm, normalize and to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars promote in schools such high risk lifestyles and activities.
It is even more wrong for the Church to approve and affirm what is a conditioned response and a symptom of trauma, a hunger for real love, that is misdirected and confused. Whatever GOD calls sin is always harmful. We cannot cross the boundaries God has set without harming ourselves and others, even our society.
God forbid we back down and cower before the roar of the activists and propagandizers. They are promoting deadly practices and lifestyles at the expense of taxpayers. Obama has spent hundreds of millions of dollars for the Safe Schools Czar, Kevin ‘Fisting’ Jennings to promote the unsafe gay lifestyle in US public schools.
We must stand firm and maintain the right of Biblical faith and conscience on which our nations were founded…despite what the apostate churches and coercive governments do.
Sibyl Smith
Joyce Meyer says that “common sense” is a blessing of God. How right she is! To a society accustomed to the Word of God, what Father God says seems normal, because it is. It fits in with what human beings are like, and actually works! If I was brought up with only buddhism or hinduism or islam, I suppose I would find that teaching to be “normal”, but do those systems work? Ask a refugee – they are the ones who almost always choose a Christian-based society to flee to. Think about it.
Ian Brearley
To be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, what does that mean for our actions? Doves were the poor man’s sacrifice in the old testament.
The hymn still goes on by the way
“Let friend and kindred go, your mortal life also, the body they may kill, but truth abideth still…”
I have just discovered Chris Walley’s trilogy “Lamb among the stars” and though not a science fiction lover, it has me absolutely fascinated. He describes the nature of the war we face accurately on so many levels.
Many blessings
Ursula Bennett
Bill, I’m a preacher and study group leader in my denomination. If any of my lay and ministerial friends speak the truth in the realm of faith and works, interfaith discussion, and ethics: just for starters, we are going to ‘put our foot in it’ every week. What a prospect! How silly is it to promulgate such a ‘law’?
Brian Hoffman
In the world you will have much tribulation, but be of good cheer ! I have overcome the world…
Kevin McDonald
I agree! Thank you for your writing.
Jenna Priest
I know Lachlan, Bill, and his name appears right next to your own on my list of evangelisers of God’s people, for whom I pray daily. No matter how much worse things become, and that surely looks likely, nothing can thwart the fulfillment of the Divine plan. All things are coming together in Christ our Lord and by His grace, we can persevere till that day when He comes again in glory.
Anna Cook
Those who demand tolerance and diversity are always unwilling to extend tolerance to and accept diversity in others.
Politically Correct really means Punitive Conformity and they mean to enforce it by any means they deem necessary.
Sibyl Smith
name blame defame and thus (they hope) tame.
Terry Darmody
Thanks for posting this Strachan article Bill. Very timely.
Terry Darmody
I am encouraged when I read articles and comments such as the above. But I fear we are preaching to the converted. Maybe we need to be as vocal and outraged for the sake of our children and society as the leftists are for their vile causes. After all we have God and science on our side, we know they reject God’s authority and only accept science which supports their ideology, seems like an uphill battle, but know this, we have the victory.
Anthony McGlone