Thursday, April 09, 2015

Matt 24 watch, 256: Dr Alveda C King (of that family) on the need for religious freedom and mutual respect

Dr Alveda C King, a niece of the late Dr Martin Luther King,
Dr Alveda C King, pro-life advocate &
niece of Dr Martin Luther King
has a NewsMax column, and has commented on the recent Indiana case of media entrapment of the daughter of the owner of a Pizzeria used to feed a mob-rule media lynching frenzy and driving intimidation of the state legislature.

First she sets key context:
God said: "Be fruitful and procreate." From a biblical perspective, both abortion and homosexual sexual unions are deterrents to God's mandate on the sustainability of the human family. So the battle over who is right and who is wrong rages . . . .
Everybody, unconditionally, needs love. Many people desire, not necessarily need, sex. The sexual drive is a primal instinct. There is a difference between need and want. 
In this super hyper-sexual environment we live in, much of it artificially manufactured, people are crossing all types of lines, barriers and boundaries, sometimes without knowing or understanding what is happening. Breaking natural rules not considering consequences.
In other words, people are dying for lack of knowledge. Not knowing or agreeing with the purpose of things like marriage and sex. So in the name of lust, divorce, adultery, abortion, clandestine sexual encounters, gender confusion, and human abuse abound. 
Human beings, in general, have a hard time seeing beyond our own desires. Yes, that’s a very selfish yet human attitude. What's the solution?
She then focusses:
. . . hatred is not the reason Christians turn down offers of money to participate in gay weddings — love is. Christ gives his children two commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Repeatedly, the Bible instructs us to share our love for God by obeying Christ's teachings. 
So how does our love for God conflict with gay marriage? 
God's word is clear. God ordained marriage between one man and one woman. For a Christian to contradict this teaching by participating in a ceremony that goes against God’s word would not only be disobedient, it would be to mock God. 
When Christian are asked to share our God-given talents to create a cake or floral arrangement or photograph for a gay wedding, it’s important to realize what is being demanded. Because no matter how much a merchant loves his or her customers, he cannot be expected to choose them over the Lord of his life . . . .
If we are asked to deny Jesus for a sale or even for the threat of financial and professional ruin, we know what — and who — is more important. God.
She asks for a reasonable position:
So, if someone is disappointed that a business owner will not serve a wedding because of religious beliefs, let's hope that more tolerance, common courtesy, and respect for that businessperson’s love for God would win the day. Instead of running to the courthouse to file a lawsuit to destroy someone’s business, maybe just walking across the street to another merchant would show grace and tolerance. It's a two-way street.
I would add, that we need to ponder:
He who would rob me of means to bread,
would rob me of my life;
He who would rob me of my children,
would rob me of my posterity;
He who would rob me of my conscience,
would rob me of my soul.

Is the sort of good-neighbourly consideration Dr Alveda C King calls for, likely to be the case? (Remember, we are talking of cake bake shops, photographers, videographers, pizzerias and guest houses here.)

 Not, when there is a rage-driven polarisation and deep-rooted contempt leading to unwillingness to respect the Christian and historic view on marriage and family, backed up by a demand to affirm one's twisted (and demonstrably, patently unhealthy and even insanitary) behaviour in the teeth of thousands upon thousands of years of civilised consensus across the whole world on a matter pivotal to social stability, human thriving and the future of the race: marriage and stable family. An historic view, that, by the way is also naturally pretty obvious . . . and arguably, perhaps even a self-evident moral truth (i/l/o patent consequences and the undeniable XY-XX chromosome driven facts of our human, sexual nature) . . .  through the biological complementarity of maleness and femaleness as well as the need for sustained child nurture.

Things are so bad that it is worth excerpting a book-length summary of relevant evidence by Neil and Briar Whitehead that deserves to be far better known than it is. Clipping the introduction and summary:
The West has been subject to such a campaign of misinformation and disinformation in the last 20-30 years that its public institutions, from legislatures and judiciaries to the church and mental health professions widely believe that the homosexual orientation is innate—in the sense of biologically imprinted—and therefore unchangeable. 
The implications of this are that anyone who makes the scientifically true statements below is considered the one who is misinformed.
• sexual orientation is not inborn but develops over some years in response to an individual’s response to life events— as many human predicaments do
• homosexual orientation can change, i.e half the homosexual population naturally moves towards heterosexuality over time (without any therapeutic interventions), and further and faster with counselling and support
• The same-sex attracted are not 10% of the population but (including bisexuals) much closer to 2.5%
The West has lost its way on this issue, and today we are seeing the outcome . . . 

Those are quite strong words, but they are backed up by facts; facts, that are too often suppressed. Clipping the summary from Ch 1 in the 2010 online downloadable version (and of course, there is much more, with a lot of details; especially note the rebuttals to common myths):

No mainstream geneticist is happy with the idea that genes dictate behaviour, particularly homosexual behaviour.
• Genetically dictated behaviour is something that has so far been discovered only in very simple organisms.
• From an understanding of gene structure and function there are no plausible means by which genes could inescapably force SSA or other behaviours on a person. Genes create proteins not preferences.
• No genetically determined human behaviour has yet been found. The most closely genetically-related behaviour yet discovered (aggression in Dutch males) has shown itself remarkably responsive to counselling.
• If SSA were genetically dictated, it would have bred itself out of the population in only several generations, and wouldn’t be around today.
• Generally, geneticists settle for some genetic influence of rather undefined degree, most agreeing that many genes (from at least five or six to many hundreds) contribute to any particular human behaviour.
• A genetically dominated SSA caused by such a cluster of genes could not suddenly appear and disappear in families the way it does. It would stay around for many generations. So SSA is not produced by many genes.
• The occurrence of SSA in the population is too frequent to be caused by a chance mutation in a single gene. So a single gene is not responsible for SSA. Nor would many genes all mutate at once.
• SSA occurs too frequently to be caused by a faulty pre-natal developmental process, so it is not innate in that sense either.
• The widespread age-range of first homosexual attraction is very unlike the narrow time-spread of genetically driven phases of human life, e.g gestation time, puberty, menopause, making homosexuality very unlikely to be genetically driven. 
The histone system which controls genetic expression is strongly affected by the environment, e.g nurturing, making searches for individual genes responsible for certain behaviours, mostly pointless.
• Same-sex attraction could be about 10% genetically influenced and opposite sex attraction about 15%. But this is weak and indirect, e.g genes making a man tall don’t also produce basketball players.
• SSA falls more naturally into the category of a psychological trait
A is A. 

Yes, A is A.

Even, when every rooftop is trumpeting the opposite and raging mobs roam the street demanding that we affirm the opposite.

A is still A.

Period.

Now, too, as I pointed out in my last post on this subject:
Sometimes, when truth is obscured and driven out, one of the most powerful things is to state the truth: A is A -- yes, A. 
The obvious thing,  is A is A. 
Namely, that Christians in our civilisation today, are being targetted because of our Bible-anchored belief that homosexual behaviour is inherently sinful, and onwards, that we do not get to define or redefine marriage, it is part of the God-given and naturally evident creation order for humanity. 
In Jesus' words -- in the face of a very similar situation of being challenged with loaded questions publicly posed by opponents:
Matt. 19:1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. 2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” 
4 He answered, 
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 
7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”  
8 He said to them, 
“Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” [ESV]
Whose report will we believe?
But in the end, it is going to take some courage and sacrifice to stand up to intimidation and bullying, to make it clear that there is such a thing as an uncrossable line of conscience under God.

 That is why I went on to say:
We can hardly plead that we were not warned about the consequences of clutching an asp of sinful perversity to our bosoms. 
Now, there patently is no credible threat to the core human rights of homosexuals to life, liberty, proper fulfillment of oneself -- and no, the so called "my genes made me do it" concept has long since collapsed -- or property, etc.  
No, this is a brazen latterday witch-hunt that targets the indisputable fundamental rights of Christians to freedom of conscience, association and expression;  with an activist in false clothes of a reporter of news pushing for targets for a media lynching . . .
I am confident (I lived to see the collapse of Marxism!) that, at some point, as the ugliness that is going on becomes more evident, people are going to wake up from the homosexualist agenda spell and realise that there is no real sound basis for the persecution -- and blame- the- victim- by- smearing- him- or- her- as- a- bigot does not change that reality.

 That is going to take time and courage and sacrifice on our part. And so, it is time to stand unflinchingly in the face of intimidation and threat, out of simple respect for our Lord and concern to avert a catastrophe triggered by the irreparable harm done to the foundations of stable society, marriage and family across our civilisation.

It is time to stand.  END

PS: As there is a stronghold of rhetoric trumpeted far and wide to promote a nexus of linked agendas, let me again list this blog's response:
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