A LETTER ABOUT SEXUAL IDENTITY DISORDER

A LETTER ABOUT SEXUAL IDENTITY DISORDER

xxxxx,

Several days ago your letter came, revealing your struggles with sexual identity disorder and what you have proposed to do about the matter. You will not be surprised, I am sure, to find a concerned ear for you in the situation you are handling, but you will not find a sympathetic ear for what you are contemplating doing with it. There is a distinction between the disorder itself and what a person proposes to do with it. The disorder may be understandable; what people decide to do with it is another matter.

My comments are rather lengthy, but please hang in there. Several things included here you have probably heard before, but I have no way of knowing what they were or how they were presented.

The origin of the matter is something neither you nor your immediate family can easily determine. My guess is that trying to figure that out will probably be a fruitless endeavor. Tracing back through past experiences is a major task that may not even hit the right experiences or get back far enough to identify anything relevant. Besides, it is not environment as much as reaction to it that sets the feelings, habit formation, and perhaps other aspects of the resulting situation. I imagine that some of these would not be conscious, deliberate choices. Stepping on past the origin of the disorder removes an important source of any guilt feelings involved. Assigning guilt to the wrong factors is an easy error and a big complicating factor in working through the matter. Assigning guilt stifles efforts to manage the condition or experience conversion from it.

A second important point about origin is that there is no evidence for the idea that homosexuality has a genetic base. That notion has been constantly claimed as the reason for the disorder, which in turn allows it to be compared to the race issue and then to draw off of that all the parallels that would derive from it. Race is not a behavior, but homosexual acts are. (As far as that goes, there is a separation between nature and voluntary actions. We don’t have to carry out our impulses. In 1 Thessalonians 4:2-8 Paul includes the comment, “Each of you knows how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passions.”) There is no more reason to think homosexuality is inherited than to suppose that being a pedophile is genetically based—or being a habitual adulterer, and other sexual deviances. The idea that homosexuality is inherited is anecdotal, being inferred from the fact that people find it hard (they might say impossible) to change. So is being a pedophile, but we expect pedophiles to “possess their own vessel” and avoid acting it out. Supposing it is genetically based may come from a person’s having this inclination as far back as he can remember, hence, he has been “born” with it. Trying to view the inclination as genetically based seemingly removes the need to refrain from homosexual acts; what you are born with you cannot help.

So as regarding origin, we summarize these points:

keep the guilt factor out of origins,

identify reaction to environment rather than environment itself as the precise concern,

and do not suppose the disorder has a hereditary base.

            For our part, the first thing that has to be said about managing sexual identity disorder is that scripture teaches that it must be managed. It calls for adhering to God’s intentions for sexual morality. The ethical teaching on sexual behavior is clear: sexual involvement with (an)other(s) is sin outside of monogamous marriage. There are several responses people try to make to this point. Of course, non-Christians do not really care what the Bible says any more than we care what the Koran says about polygamy. They write it off as the contemporary disposition among some Jews that accepted Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah. Liberal influences in Christendom operate a step closer, and simply say that the New Testament writings are the “main” source for religious faith and practice; other religions, social decision, and the scientific method have a role as well and can overturn various items not deemed essential or accurate. The teaching against homosexual behavior supposedly reflects an unenlightened time. Divine inspiration that would protect against error is not part of their belief about scripture. They may rewrite the texts in a way that endeavors to remove the issue from the scripture.

            The most deliberate New Testament passage on the subject is Romans 1:26-27:

“For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, ²⁷and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire towards one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error” (NASB).

Please do not just set this aside as a familiar proof text that everybody uses for this question, so it won’t have any impact on what you would like to believe and do. Homosexuals and homosexual sympathizers know the passage is there, and they try to do various things to remove it from forbidding homosexual behavior, especially “committed homosexual relationships.” Many attempts by people who claim to accept Paul’s inspiration try to reduce its scope to some smaller element(s) among possible homosexual acts. They suggest that Paul is talking about homosexual abuse, homosexual rape. That cannot be his intended meaning (cp. Leviticus 18:22; 20:13). He makes a general statement about homosexual behavior as such; he does not insert any qualifiers alongside his expression, and there is nothing in the context that serves to limit his reference. Besides, the first verse talks about lesbians; women do not rape each other, and Paul joins the women’s sin with the men’s: “in the same way . . . .” Now, of course, in modern legal parlance, the term rape has been broadened to cover other forcible acts one woman could do to another that would be harmful or at least degrading or unwanted (like forcing a coke bottle into the vagina). It could be applied as well to an adult having lesbian relations with an underage girl. Those extended usages provide a frame of reference for sentencing actors in such crimes. But they have nothing to do with normal usage even today, much less in ancient usage.

            The fact that Paul is making an unrestricted comment likewise eliminates other attempts to mishandle the passage. He does not have in mind only promiscuous homosexual relationships; that would allow “committed partners” and gay marriage to go “uncondemned.” But in Paul’s general comment it would be “indecent” just the same. Likewise, he does not describe a man in a regular marriage also participating in homosexual acts on the side. He is not talking just about older-man-younger-man, teacher-student or apprenticeship associations that got homosexual activities worked into them in the first-century pagan world. Paul is not talking about incestuous relationships between fathers and sons, or brothers in a family, or any other less-than-general homosexuality. He calls the general behavior sin, and casts it as an extreme sin.

            All these attempts to make out that we “now know” homosexuality is normal for some is an example of modern man attempting to act enlightened and intellectually superior to ancient New Testament writers and modern-day believers, and to paint people that hold the line on sexual behavior as uniformed or behind the times. They do the same thing with pre-marital sex, cohabitation, and “open marriage.” These departures fit Paul’s earlier comment in Romans 1:22: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” The New Testament teaching on this subject makes an uncompromising condemnation on the refusal to conform to divine expectancy.

            Another New Testament passage, in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, lists homosexuals right alongside adulterers, fornicators (general term for sexual relationship outside of monogamous marriage) as people engaging in behaviors that eliminate them from the kingdom of God:

“Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God” (NASB).

There is no room here to accommodate a circumstance envisioned where a person would go into an “accepting church.” If the people were “accepting,” it is something going on outside the auspices of “the kingdom of God.” The same thing goes for finding a “faith community.” Becoming a practicing homosexual means leaving the faith community, not going into another, accepting one. There is only one such community, and it is limited to those who respect and love the Creator and Savior enough to abide by his expectancy in behavior and attitude, faith and practice. That course of action parallels what Jeroboam did when he set up a whole alternative system of worshiping Yahveh in the northern kingdom. He established a new capital and appointed a rogue priesthood and the use of idols. The fact that it had some trappings of genuine Yahwism did not satisfy God; he let the kingdom fall to the Assyrians.

We did not create ourselves or redeem ourselves. In both matters, what fits behaviorally derives from purpose—purpose of creation and redemption and divine choice in matters.  Purpose is always the factor that determines good and bad, and God the Creator by virtue of being the Creator is the only one who has the natural right to identify behaviors that fit with or work against his creation purposes.

Out of God’s nature come God’s purposes that conform to his nature and express it.

Out of the purposes of God comes the creation by God, including mankind.

Out of the purposes expressed in creation come the behavioral expectancies, which are

communicated by revelation.

There is no such thing as writing our own rules contrary to his and setting agendas contrary to his and then expecting to be part of his family, part of relationship to him, part of the eternal results that only come from being committed to conforming life to the way he intended it to be. We cannot have Christ on our own terms any more than we can expect an employer to hire us on our terms. Going into such a “faith community” would be going into a fake community. It would be comparable to the ancient Israelites’ trying to worship Yahveh by using and idol—the golden calf—to do it. It was “fake worship.” That was, in fact, the deviation from divine intent that kept cropping up over hundreds of years in the northern and southern kingdoms until God let the nation be destroyed for seventy years. Mixing homosexual practice with relationship to Christ is a kind of syncretism of paganism and Christianity. “Gay marriage” is fake marriage. (The celibate gay marriage idea is a pipe dream in the face of sex drive cycles that are going to synchronize between the partners at times.) A person may very well find “an accepting group” of people; but in this respect, they have departed the faith and are not part of God’s kingdom that Paul references in 1 Corinthians 6. In fact, there are whole denominations trying to act this way, but they do not represent God’s kingdom in doing so. It is a turning away from Christ. Creation with purpose dictates behavior.  

            Since homosexuality does not come up specifically in Jesus’ teaching, some interpreters have tried to pit Jesus against Paul and make out that Paul represents a subsequent step in the evolution of Christianity. Neither Jesus in the gospels nor Paul in his letters condemns pedophilia, rape, or incest consensual or otherwise; no one considers that a basis for approval. Silence is not approval. The reason Paul speaks of homosexuality and cross-dressing (effeminate in 1 Corinthians 8:9 evidently has transvestite in view) is that he was the “apostle to the Gentiles,” where those sins took place more prominently. The rest of the New Testament writings address a more Jewish audience where the Old Testament moral background might not need to be reiterated. Paul is repeating the long-standing prohibition against homosexual acts in Leviticus 18:22, “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination” (NASB); cp. “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them” (Leviticus 20:13 NASB; cp, Deuteronomy 23:17-18; 1 Kings 14:24; 2 Kings 23:7). These texts show that it is not abusive sex that Paul has in mind in Romans 1; both parties were to be put to death, hence, consensual homosexual acts. Homosexual rape gets especially harsh treatment in Genesis 19:1-29 (cp. Judges 19).

            The absence of direct comment on this subject by Jesus in the gospels dismisses the pattern in which the apostles that Christ chose were to carry his message to the ends of the earth. The Great Commission sets the agenda by saying, “teaching them everything that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19). The idea is not that he sends them out with a general message about, say, love and

to propagate additional ideas that occur to them,

to reinforce cultural practices already present wherever they go so as to avoid stifling the love message,

to teach as the Christ’s message what “science” at the moment may be saying about practices incompatible with the message he gave those apostles, or

to syncretize philosophical understandings of reality like the Gnosticism that started infiltrating the early believers from the very start. Tolerating homosexual behavior among Christs’ disciples illustrates one more attempt at the common problem of syncretism that occurs when the gospel goes out into the world. 

The apostle Paul claims in Galatians 1:12, “The gospel I preached was not according to man. I did not receive it from men, nor was I taught it. I received it through revelation by Jesus Christ” (cp, 1:15-2:2; 1 Corinthians 2:10; 2 Corinthians 12:1). Peter speaks similarly when he says that no prophecy in scripture comes about from one’s own personal interpretation (2 Peter 1:20). Both writers make their comments on the Jewish background of their work. Paul comments in regard to the salvation message, but he does it on the background of previous revelation through Moses. That fact connects the moral precedents and earlier prophetic work with their own ministries. That brings in the earlier clear strictures on immoral practices. So Paul is not elaborating a basic message with ramifications he thinks make sense. Elsewhere he distinguishes between the commandments he received to teach, on the one hand, and advice he gives for handling circumstances in light of those commandments (1 Corinthians 7:5, 12-14, 25-40).

In Matthew 19:4-6 Jesus comments,

“He who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.’ They are no more two but one flesh.”

God did not create one man and two women; he did not create pairs of two men or two women, or one pair of man and women and other pairs of men or pairs of women. Those other “pairs” would not be “one flesh”; there is no sexual unity in that combination, and it is their sexual combination to form a complementary union that leads to filling the earth with human kind; that cannot happen between homosexual partners. The New Testament teaching on marriage derives from the picture Genesis 2-4 so Jesus can say, “What God has joined men are not to separate,” an inference that is comparable to saying, “What God has kept separate men are not to combine.”

            One final effort at dismissing scripture’s testimony is to blur the distinction between custom and morality. We do not require women to wear veils; so the claim goes, we do not require homosexuals to refrain from sexual relationships. Custom always addresses what can be done variously without affecting the underlying value that derives from purpose. Sexual acts are never viewed simply as representing social custom; they do not come from society but from God who creates with purpose and reveals and judges. The Sodom and Gomorrah episode in the Old Testament applies here as well, but it too easily chalked up to homosexual violence; and is then not allowed to have its force. The objection, however, is not just in the rape aspect of the episode. Jude comments on the event by saying,

“Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire” (v. 7). “Went after strange flesh violently” is not what the text says.

            This first major section about managing the disorder shows the scripture’s main statements of prohibition against the behavior and states the necessary corollary against justifying some kind of non-violent, consensual homosexual behavior. It all represents values, ideas, thoughts, which are intangible and abstract and lie underneath behaviors. Feelings and emotions seem more real than thoughts because they are more sensed and intense. That leads to modern culture’s willingness to give in to drives more than follow understandings about restraint.

The second point about managing is to recognize that the sinning is in homosexual acts, not in the unfulfilled inclination to do them. Feelings, emotions, the affective dimension are difficult experiences to keep from happening—difficult to stifle, but not “acting out” is doable though admittedly not as easy as we often would like. If this idea is correct, then it follows that guilt (and derivative punishments) does not attach to the feeling stage, but to the overt sinful-act stage. Some comments in your letter as well as in discussions of homosexual experience imply that this point has not been kept in mind, believed, or brought to bear on the problem. If so, it is no wonder that homosexuals sense isolation, descend into depression, and, in the extreme, start contemplating suicide. Getting rid of guilt for the feeling-action combination seems—and very well may be—impossible to do from a practical standpoint. A person does not just will them away, say “do not feel that way,” or “sit on them.”  Feelings feel pretty much the way they want to feel. (“The heart wants what the heart wants,” is the saying.) Wanting them to go away does not seem to do much good. Even praying for God to take the feelings away may not help much; apparently, he does not typically do for us what he expects us to do for ourselves or manage on our own.

So it seems to me that the doable solution comes from separating the feeling from the acting and attaching guilt to the acting alone. Feeling temptation does not require yielding to it.  Guilt is an uncomfortable psychological experience. People will do almost anything to be rid of it: they will project the blame on somebody else, try to define it out of existence (“there’s nothing wrong with it”), lie about not having done it, try to hide it from other people, do something violent to eliminate a snitch. If the feeling-acting separation does not happen, then refraining from the acting would not remove the discomfort; the homosexual feeling is still going to be there along with the guilt that attaches to it. As regards guilt, the temptation is to say a person may as well go ahead and do it, because he is going to feel guilty anyway. He might as well go ahead and do it because God is going to hold him guilty anyway. Furthermore, forgiveness will not help much, because the guilt-engendering feeling is going to come back tomorrow and the unending cycle will begin again. It is an inescapable circumstance with eternal condemnation in prospect.

Detaching feeling from acting and attaching guilt only to acting, levels the challenge of the playing field for unmarried heterosexuals and homosexuals. People with sexual identity disorder should not feel any worse about their experience than heterosexuals, any more desperate, suicidal, and so on. They have no more justification for “coming out” and “acting out” than their counterparts. God and fellow Christians expect unmarried straights to manage their condition without feeling God and other people have laid something unfair or different on them. We do not consider them justified in seeing prostitutes, “sleeping around,” engaging in pre-marital sex; likewise, the homosexual. Do not get the idea that the rest of us do not understand what you are facing. We all have faced this same experience; there is little to make us believe that a homosexual’s situation is worse or their celibacy less doable than ours is.

Detaching feeling from acting also removes the temptation to feel like heroes for coming “out of the closet,” as if they were admitting to the rest of the world that they were saddled with a condition people unjustly condemn them for, one they cannot help being in, one other people do not understand or appreciate the difficulty of coping with. They can feel like they are helping correct a social-cultural wrong in the “glamor” of coming out—just as people felt when they took part in the racial protests in the 1960s and beyond. For one thing, nobody would know about their orientation. For another, they do not have to feel discriminated against for not being allowed to carry out their inclinations any more than a straight would consider himself discriminated against if he can never find a spouse. As regards managing the situation, the two orientations are required to put up the same resistance.

The preceding comments set up a response to the idea that a loving “god” would not set a person up for failure. There is no evidence that “God” makes people homosexual. There is no guilt implied about God for creating us in a way that we can pervert. That would approach determinism and remove us from being ethical creations. There is also no reason to claim the disorder cannot be managed and changed. Setting a person up for failure sounds like sexual desire cannot help being fulfilled. Homosexuals have no reason to suppose their drives are any more intense or uncontrollable than a heterosexual’s drives, and yet we expect unmarried young people at, say, twenty-two to “possess their vessels” (1 Thessalonians 4:4). We do not tell them, since “god” made them that way, it is all right to have one-night stands or see prostitutes no matter how old they are before, or till, they ever find a spouse. The men Paul includes with himself in 1 Corinthians 9:6 did not have wives. They were not set up for failure; they were celibate for a reason. You can be too; living otherwise is not more “authentic”; it is simply more “consistent” with the disorder.

            One quick aside here before proceeding. Detaching guilt from feeling, as we have done, could seem to run counter to Jesus’ comment in Matthew 5:28, “Everyone that looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.” His comment addresses something different from our intended reference here. “Looks at a woman to lust” is a purpose formula expressed by an infinitive. It seems clear that our Lord means intentionally “looking her over” for the purpose of arousal. The situation we are contemplating is one in which the feeling is physically generated from internal drives, not from deliberate efforts to stimulate or heighten such drives by a chosen behavior like “looking” (pornography).

            Now we can speak to the ineffectiveness and frustration of using the will directly on a feeling. Choosing not to feel “that way” does not do much for any problem. The recommendation is to use the will indirectly on feelings by using it on actions to refrain and manage the feelings indirectly through the action and substitute behaviors. Experience teaches us that actions can change feelings and do so more effectively than thinking (which also can help somewhat). We have gained a tool for managing the disorder and, by extension, overcoming it. And it is more effective than guilt and condemnation. It taps into the technique for undoing habits, the mechanism of replacement, in this case, the replacement of one action for another. That means doing the opposite of trying to find an accepting circumstance or alternate faith community or giving into homosexual urges. From a practical standpoint those courses of action only intensify and reinforce the problem. Besides, those options are taken out of play by their classification as sin, hence, guilt, hence, etc. It may even be useful to discard the pattern of seeking identity by embracing the unusual. Instead, gaining self-esteem comes from service/self-giving for the joy of others/love/the outward-directed life. The echo effect provides the sense of worth that comes from acceptance by other people you helped, especially those who stand as God’s tangible manifestations around you. It probably goes without saying here, that it only makes problems worse to see how close to the unacceptable a person can get without actually doing it, as Proverbs 4:14-15 advises, “Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not proceed in the way of evil men. Avoid it, do not pass by it; turn from it and pass on” (NASB). Paul says the same thing in 1 Corinthians 6:18, “Flee sexual immorality.”

            The last text from Paul leads into another facet of the issue. He speaks about the uniqueness of sexual sin in that every other sin is “outside the body,” but sexual sin is sin against a person’s own body. He does not explain himself, but I think he means that sexual sin is against a person’s own sense of identity, “body” being his term for the total self as expressed in the physical body. Sexuality is closer to who we are than any other aspect of ourselves. That spills over into sexual identity disorder and may make it more difficult to correct than other sins.

Finally, we can be confident that sexual identity disorder can be re-ordered. Obviously, it takes commitment and deliberate effort to make that happen, and it will probably take a while to change what has taken root over a number of years. (There was a time when you could not play that instrument either.) That the “healing” can occur is indicated again by Paul in 1 Corinthians. After his lengthy list of sins, cited earlier, that keep people out of God’s kingdom, he says, “Such were some of you; but you were washed . . . sanctified . . . justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God” (6:10 NASB). Experience has verified that sexual orientation conversion can happen. There are testimonies to that effect, and counselors talk about having helped that take place.

Summary of points about managing and reversing sexual identity disorder:

scripture teaches it can and must be managed,

sexual experiences do not have to occur for a person to be well-adjusted;

guilt is figured relative to acts, not feelings—so separate them;

changing actions more easily changes feelings than thinking or guilt assignment;

feelings are not a good read of reality though they are more vivid.

This lengthy letter still needs to speak about ongoing associations between us. If you continue as you were before writing to us, our personal relationship to you as friend, family, and Christian brother will continue as always despite your indicating to us the fact that you are been living with this disorder. I do not believe that has affected our associations in any way you would have detected because you had not tried to act out your drives in an immoral way to our knowledge, especially around us, or tried to justify a person’s doing so. The extreme piercing, extreme tattooing, unnatural hair coloring, wearing tight jeans the way women wear them. To us those were also indicators of self-depersonalization, trying to communicate that you were “different” or wanted to embrace being different and being accepted that way. Trying to get accepted in these non-normal matters was akin to, and perhaps preparatory for, the real issue you brought to light later.

But, we are obliged to address the changes in our relationship if you were to choose the course of behavior your recent letter proposed. You would have to understand that regardless of how much we care about you and other people like you that are not Christians, we do not relate to them with the same depth as we do with fellow members of the body of Christ; we call it fellowship, which is above and beyond friendship. You would not sense that intangible extra dimension of Christian fellowship overlaid on top of general interpersonal relationship.

The issue is heightened in the case of being a part of one’s family. The depth of connection would be lost by seeing a person turn his back on Christ’s call on his life and knowingly enter into a sinful lifestyle. Such a person could be part of family gatherings as long as there is not some kind of flaunting homosexual behavior.

The line of relationship would be drawn at two more tangible points: a person would not be allowed to bring any homosexual partner into the home or into family gatherings (any more than bringing in a favorite prostitute or someone he would be carrying on an affair with). He would not be allowed to come into the home or family gatherings presenting as a woman—cross dressing as a transvestite, and the like.

The comments so far about our ongoing relationships stem from Paul’s comments in 1 Corinthians 5:10-13 about dealing with people who participate in flagrant sin. He distinguishes between people in the world and those who want to participate in church fellowship. He observes that we would have to get out of the world if we tried to avoid contact with such people outside the body of believers. He applies his directives to “so-called brothers”: not associating with them or even eating with such—persons that were covetous, idolaters, revilers, drunks, swindlers, for example. He does not specify reasons here, but we can suppose the advice relates to his observation later in the same epistle that “evil companions corrupt good morals” (15:33). We might add that tolerating flagrant sin in the fellowship creates the impression that we do not consider this departure from the faith the crucial matter that it is; it is not consequential as indicated by no loss of fellowship, and the person is a welcome as before. The inference regarding Christian family relations would seem to be doubly strong.

Some Christians have taken a less intense approach to the homosexual behavior issue as it relates to how they will respond to it. They allow them to come around even with their “partners” as long as they exhibit no romantic displays. The idea is that they would be allowed into the situation as friends where behaviors between them were not inappropriate. This less intense objection assumes something of a different perception in contemporary western culture of what it means to eat with someone or to have them in your home, even if they are family. Jewish culture attached more meaning to “table fellowship” as exemplified by the Jewish Christians response to Peter when he went into Cornelius’ house and ate with uncircumcised Gentiles (Acts 11:3). Peter himself had that same reaction in his original vision in Joppa as a run-up to what happened later at Cornelius’ house (Acts 10:9-16; cp. 10:28; Galatians 2:11-21; John 4:9; 18:28).

This stronger meaning attached to table fellowship may not apply significantly to the Corinthian situation that Paul addresses. He himself was at least no longer as traditional in this respect between Jews and Gentiles as the scene in Antioch shows between him and Peter (Galatians 2:11-21). The Corinthian comments do not reference cultural nuances but moral matters, which are not subject to dispensational variance: drunkenness, swindling, and the like. Homosexual behavior belongs among moral matters, not cultural ones that might vary across dispensational switches on top of variant cultural loading on table fellowship. Allowing more interaction might strike a person as more respectful and sympathetic while having it understood that allowing presence is not communicating approval. Being more in contact with those who suffer from sexual identity disorder might more realistically keep communication open in the hopes of subsequent influence away from the behavior—though correcting that disorientation is statistically not likely. Besides, there is the plain old issue of caring about someone who has turned away from the faith in this regard. All those thoughts still leave the risk of letting such persons shed their influence on the family members in the direction of approval, which is a major goal homosexuals strive for: they want society to view their condition as normal and even good.

These closing comments may sound harsh, insensitive, “intolerant” as society says about Christians. But intolerance is the only course of action open when it comes to contradictions to our faith. That is because homosexual behavior is a black-and-white issue on which there can be no compromise, therefore no soft-pedaling and overlooking. To do otherwise would communicate that we love you more than Christ.

We would have preferred to have this interchange face-to-face. There are elements of clearer communication lost in written form, but this is what we are limited to now. Any additional communication on this subject would be welcome, including objections and questions.

Till later,

Virgil Warren                                                                                                                      christir.org