Same Gender Intimacy and Coition Is Bad and Worse

I'm trying to allow this article to pass through sensitive filters, so those, mainly Christians, won't be blocked from it.  That is the only reason I'm avoiding certain terms and used same gender intimacy and coition (SGIC).

******************

The NFL had its first openly SGIC claimant drafted this year #249 by the St. Louis Rams.  ESPN covered Michael Sam and his "boy friend" celebrating his success by playfully messing each other's faces with cake and icing and smooching.  Miami Dolphins defensive back Don Jones 'came out' with this tweet -- "Horrible" -- before quickly deleting.  Too late, Don.   Saturday night, Dolphins general manager Dennis Hickey said the team wouldn't tolerate Jones's actions and coach Joe Philbin echoed that sentiment.  Men who don't like male on male smooching get Hickey (sorry, couldn't resist).   He was fined an undisclosed sum, temporarily discharged from the team, and required to complete an educational training class before he can join other activities.

Horrible.  The same night I heard the above news on radio, a popular talk show host, speaking of some other event, said, "Holy [expletive]."  Education class for him?  Nope.  Anyone surprised?

I am truly interested in Jones's mandatory class.   Must he keep straight lipped while shown videos of men feeding each other cake and cuddling each other cheek to cheek?  Are Christians required to remain in the closet?  How could we have gone to required unmitigated support in such short time?  "Horrible" less than explains a genuine Christian attitude toward the activity of Sam and his collaborator.  The NFL forbids a genuine Christian reaction to this sin.  Maybe Christians should boycott the NFL -- no attendance, no products, no television.  I'm afraid that financial loss is the primary motivation here.

My friend, Bobby Mitchell, wrote about this same phenomena two weeks ago and then half the discussion revolved around opposition to his isolated mention of former Bob Jones University president, Stephen Jones (SJ).  SJ thinks the Bible contradicts SGIC, but Mitchell was decrying his softness toward it. In 2013, Jones delivered several messages on 'same gender intimacy' and said such statements as the following:

I want you to know that I also have close SGIC friends. Several of them are unsaved, and I’m trying to be a testimony to them. They know my position. We’re close friends. In fact one of the nicest guys I know is a SGIC.

Would Jones talk about his close fornicating friends?  Isn't friendship with the world enmity with God?  And then:

Alright, so don’t feel prideful sitting there, “Well I don’t have a same-[gender] attraction, so I’m doing ok.” If you lie, if you’re a liar, God says you are an, you are abominable. Your sin is abominable. It’s in the same category. The same thing with dishonest business practices. Those who are dishonest in business, it is an abomination. God uses the same word to describe it. In fact he says everything the wicked do - their thoughts, their walk, their sacrifice, their prayer - it’s all an abomination.

The first major point in SJ's outline on the subject regarded man and woman as "God's ideal," which implied that man and man or woman and woman were not God's ideal.  "Ideal" isn't the way to describe hetero marriage.  Why?   Someone who sees an act as "less than ideal" sees it as "less than the best."  I don't think SJ would consider it only "less than the best" if pressed on this (maybe not), but that is the connotation of the terminology he used.  In light of everything else he said, it reads as if he uses the soft language to favor the Sams of the world.  I agree with Bobby Mitchell here.

In reading about this terminology, "God's ideal," I found this is language used by those who divide between qualified acceptance and non-acceptance.  Those who claim to be Christian and give qualified acceptance will use the "God's ideal" type of language to indicate that.  They usually add that the person didn't choose to be born that way, so it is a condition for which he doesn't have control.  And, we should be sensitive to that condition, like we would other ones.  I'm not saying that SJ believes the latter, but he uses the language of qualified acceptance, blows that particular dog whistle for it.

Qualified acceptance language poses as evangelistic compassion, arguing that SGIC will listen better to the saving message and feel a drawing kind of "Christian love" by the qualified acceptance.   I contend that the acceptance is a bow to the culture, which requires it, and Christians today feel shamed by a new morality. SGIC requires acceptance.   Acceptance lessens the guilt and doesn't properly represent God's hatred of the sin.  We become children of God, not by the will of man, and this strategy smacks of pelagianism, attempting to fan a spark within the dead soul through human means, instead of using the law as a schoolmaster (Gal 3-4). 

I want to hone in on one of SJ's points.  Over all the messages in a big series from the BJU staff, a common theme was that SGIC is no worse than any other sin.  There were at least three major arguments:  it is listed with other sins, God calls other sins an abomination, so all sin is an abomination, and SGIC really was only one sin among others that destroyed Sodom.   This argumentation itself furthers the cause of toleration or acceptance of SGIC, attempting to explain away its uniqueness.  SJ and others shamed the students who viewed SGIC as worse than different sins like it was a Pharisaical attempt to reduce the seriousness of their own sinning.

Is it true that SGIC is morally equivalent to lying and idleness and other sins?  SGIC is listed with other sins in the Bible like a lifestyle of and lack of repentance over those sins mark a lack of conversion.  It's true, but that doesn't make each of them equal in abhorrence.  I don't think we should say that the abomination label makes a sin equal to other sins with that label.  It really gives no information except that the act is an abomination or in certain cases the person is one.  SGIC is an abomination.  Abomination is a more serious designation than "not God's ideal."

Romans 1 makes SGIC sound more serious than just any other sin, based on a legitimate argument.  Romans 1:26:27 portray SGIC as reaching the apex of rebellion against God, as the chief indicator that God had given up the participants in SGIC.  No other sin is mentioned as that.  We can see that it is a sin against nature, that is, a sin against design.    Read it:

26  For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

If you read all the verses around these above two, you see that it is the essence of unthankfulness.  At the root of God's work as Creator is His designed distinctions between the genders.  SGIC erases those distinctions and says there's a better way.   SGIC adherents shove in the face of God at the root level their hatred of how God made them.  Nothing is more basic than man and woman and the people reverse that in favor of their own lust.  Nothing rebels against God like SGIC.  It's in its own category.

I probably overuse the metaphor, "if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."   The hoofbeats say that SGIC is worse.  SJ and others are looking for zebras.