Monday, February 25, 2019

NO GETTING STRAIGHTENED OUT ALLOWED

Let's think through this ban on gay conversion therapy for anyone under 18 that is now the law in 14 states, soon to be 15 or 16, as in Utah and Colorado. Yes, Utah. A formerly highly conservative state that has now almost completely recharacterized itself to all-out liberal. Even far left.

If things go as planned, it will soon be against the law for, say, parents to get their teenager professional help in overcoming unwanted homosexuality. In Utah. This is the place, folks. It's the place where we found brilliant help for our son all those years ago, our son, who voluntarily rooted out and conquered his unwanted problem and later got married to a lovely woman, our son who is now the father of three lovely children. This is the place that is now about to outlaw that sort of help, with the whole-hearted imprimatur of the dominant church. Yes, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has denounced reparative therapy, at the same time refusing to accept gay marriage. Try figuring that one out.

The church did not technically support the bill, but rather announced publicly it would not oppose it, which is tantamount to supporting it. In reading the bill it appears that the church is satisfied with protecting itself legally because of a clause in the bill that gives exemption to ecclesiastical members or counselors in a religious capacity saying anything that might be construed as converting someone from gay to straight.(In our church these are most likely to be lay people who have no training in giving any such help anyway. And apparently, according to material the church has produced welcoming gayness, gospel principles such as sin and repentance through Christ are not to be considered. All the counseling anyone will get on this topic is maybe abstinence and warning of the gay lifestyle, the likes of which we don't hear over the pulpit.) Any additional concrete reason the church has refused to support professional sexual orientation change therapy are not common knowledge. The best members can do is make unfounded second-guesses and conjectures to try to excuse this travesty. The position the church has taken concerning this type of therapy is certainly politically correct.

Granted, in the 1960s and early 70s, Mormons with homosexual tendencies were convinced to submit themselves to shock treatments and other crazy procedures in the hope of ridding themselves of the lust for homosexual sex, that is, lust for sodomy. That was stupid. Look, sodomy and all that goes with it is an age-old sin. Key word: sin. It doesn't seem right or effective to try to use electricity to shock somebody out of sinfulness.That is not how Christianity is supposed to be conducted.

After all, the scriptures say that it's the gospel that works better than anything else in overcoming sin. Indeed, the gospel of Jesus Christ was the foundation of our son's therapy, as in we are human beings who go astray, and because of Jesus Christ we can retrace our steps, get on the right path through truth, and repentance and faith in Him, and become humble new creatures with new hearts and new desires fit for the presence of God. (Correct us if that is not the pure gospel of Jesus Christ in a nutshell. You either believe in it or you don't.)

In this oversexed world that celebrates homosexuality like the newest fad, supposed followers of Christ, as in leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ, are against counseling to help young people figure out and overcome and repent of this lawless trendy lust? Really? People, that's just anti-Christ. A heads up for you Mormons: all the anti-Christs in the Book of Mormon were intent on abolishing the whole idea of repentance.

Besides being anti-Christ, another frightening thing about this development is its assault on liberty (which is related to Christianity because we have to be free to live it). Who do these gay activists think they are, going around conniving to make it illegal to act according to the dictates of one's own conscience in their personal life by seeking out counseling that supports their worldview? And why would any church go along with such a thing? A church supporting a bill that outlaws people living their lives according their religious beliefs? Like one of our kids said, it's like outlawing religion. Why would a church want to do that?

This bill is nothing short of tyranny. As per Thomas Jefferson, "I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against any form of tyranny over the mind of man." We're talking about tyranny over children, young people, families, people's private lives and consciences.

We must also bear firmly in mind where all this is coming from, ergo, the spirit of the times. Traditional moral values are being flushed down the toilet. We are living in enemy territory, in an excessively sexual environment where porn (including same-sex porn) is ubiquitous and where normal sexual development and proper sexual feelings are commonly interfered with, inflamed, and distorted. We're seeing the emasculization of manhood and the masculization of womanhood. Perverse and unnatural sexuality in any form people can imagine is paraded in the streets and touted as heroic. People can even decide which sex they really want to be despite their obvious anatomy, or even make up some new sex that can change with the wind. Oh, except from gay to straight. That's the only change increasingly not allowed societally, and now even legally.

The truth is, the Godless gay juggernaut doesn't want anybody to find out how they got into homosexuality or how they can get out. They don't want anybody to question homosexualism (as in both homosexual tendencies and homosexual acts), even if it is unwanted, even if it does violence to the person's conscience, even if they change their minds and want out, even though it is very hazardous, even though it is abominable to God, even though it is a mockery of the procreative act and an abuse of humanity. No, apparently these activists are so miserable themselves that they don't want anybody else getting help out of their dead-end misery either.

Gay activists and their supporters, their sympathizers, and those who for their own reasons are suddenly fine with this "identity," (read: homosexual lust and behavior), have acted so as to show that they don't want anybody to be able to understand these dangerous and perverse feelings, or root them out, or live a normal fulfilling life. This isn't love, it isn't compassion. It's ignorant, self-serving, cunning, deceptive, fawning, cruel, tyrannical, or all of those and more.

As Euripides wrote, "What brashness has the human heart! How far will it push?"

Note 2/26/19 We will let you know here if this Utah bill passes. It is in the rules committee now. We bet it will, simply because the dominant church is not opposing it.

Note 3/9/19  Surprise! The bill failed in committee because a new version was introduced (by our friends and our son's counselor all those years ago) and the sponsor of the bill did not like it and did not appear, which automatically tables the bill. The new version banned physical therapies such as shock and aversion (which haven't been done for decades anyway), but allowed talk therapy, and the bill's author wouldn't go for even that! Anyway, parents and young people with unwanted homosexual tendencies can still get the kind of counseling they desire in Utah for another year.  

Sunday, February 3, 2019

A Person's a Person No Matter How Small

--Janice Graham

We've been listening  some reactions to New York's evil abortion law and Virginia's attempt to pass the same sort of thing. It appears that even those who are generally pro-abortion are cringing at it. After all, they say, it's obviously a baby at the time of birth. So, yes full term abortion would be murder. But not say, during the first trimester. Let's take this supposed logic apart.

First, we never hear anybody talk about how the woman chose to have sexual intercourse in the first place. This is the case in the great majority of abortions. (Pregnancies aborted because of the health of the mother, rape, and incest are very rare indeed. More on that later.) Yes, sexual intercourse is most often a choice for both men and women. Sexual intercourse is the one choice that makes babies. Making a baby can be a result of sexual intercourse. Both the male and the female old enough to have sex know this fact from the start, and yes, it's the female, not the man, who is physically affected by pregnancy, which is just the way life is. If she, or they, makes the choice to stop the baby's life, that is her or their second choice. Yes, the pro-choice movement should more accurately be called pro-second-choice. And people assume it's the woman's choice alone to abort. But if the father is involved in the decision to abort, he knows, too, that this is a second choice he is making. The first was to engage in sexual relations, you know, that thing that makes babies.

Notice how no one talks about that first choice. They just fly off the handle saying how unfair it is that a woman should have to carry and give birth to a baby if or when she doesn't want to. We have even heard pregnancy/motherhood called a form of slavery. Really? The pregnancy? News flash. In the great majority of cases, the baby grows automatically in the protected safety of the mother's womb. She  really doesn't have to do anything extra or different to make the baby grow. There is the possibility of morning sickness, which can be all sorts of bad, and it might get uncomfortable toward the end, but that doesn't sound like slavery. After all, the woman chose to do the thing that made the baby. We are not talking about rape-induced pregnancy (very rare), so nobody forced her. So no, that is not even anything like slavery. It's just a fact of life that she knew from the start. Are they talking about motherhood? Is motherhood slavery? Again, no, because the woman chose to do the thing that made her a mother. And if she doesn't want to be a mother, there are countless infertile couples dying to have a family. She can give the baby away to some extremely grateful couple of her choice and walk away free as a bird. That doesn't sound like slavery either.

Granted, pregnancy and birth may be inconvenient, scary, even painful. I carried and gave birth to seven children, including a pair of 7 pound twins, some quite easily, some with difficulty. But this is what life is.  On the one side it can be inconvenient, scary, even painful. There is no way around that in some form or other. All of us came to be on this earth under those very same conditions. Hopefully the woman who finds herself inconveniently, scarily, even painfully pregnant learns a lesson or two, one of which is that sex is serious. If you choose to participate in it, there are all sorts of consequences. One of them is that you might get pregnant and have a baby, whether you want to or planned to at the time or not.This is a biological fact about the physically matured human female.


Second, people talk about some "gray area" in the course of human life between when a human has no value and when that human suddenly has great value The fact that people cannot pinpoint this moment in time, and admit that they cannot, is highly problematic. That judgment becomes an arbitrary one, subject to all sorts of whims and conditions, including the state or country you live in. Thus, the whole human race is tossed to and fro. That's because that supposed gray area between non-human and human is not only arbitrarily decided by anyone who happens to be in charge, but imaginary.Yes, a human being begins at conception, or as Dr. Seuss put it, "a person's a person no matter how small."

Now, as to the very rare cases of pregnancies that come about by rape or incest, at first glance in
these days when abortion is commonplace, this may appear the thing to do. We might especially worry about the pregnant female being a minor. After all, rape victimizes an innocent female. It's a horrible crime that greatly affects her life and it's not her fault she got pregnant. But it's not the new human's fault either. Perhaps it is best to let nature take its course, seeing as how abortion is yet another violent act against humanity. Pregnancy and birth are natural, whereas abortion is not. Such a  female, pregnant by an act of rape, who has an abortion may someday regret it because abortion is also an act of violence---to the death---against an innocent being, while the one who gives the child a life has just let nature take its course and need never regret it. As for incest the same logic applies. Any human life that results from these situations is not at fault and is valuable nonetheless.Same with a baby with defects. Human life is human life, and valuable in all its conditions. If we stray from this ideal, anything can take its place. Anyone can be deemed unnecessary or burdensome.

Life is complex. Life can get messy. But whether people like it or not, life is irrefutably life, amazing, inexplicable, and of immeasurable value. Abortion is the most blatant example of what happens when the current human powers that be decide to mock and defy the gift of procreation, step by step, until we cannot deny that at any stage needless abortion is an egregious self-loathing act of man's inhumanity to man and rebellion against God and Creation.