marriage

After warning that marriage equality in New York will hasten the coming of the Antichrist, Renew America’s Michael Bresciani claims that Satan is behind the LGBT-rights movement and using demons to spread lies that will turn people away from God. “In our world most of those spreading the gay lie are liberals, activists, spineless academicians, Hollywood sellouts, and now we can throw in a president and a large contingent of fully duped politicians,” Bresciani writes, adding, “There is little doubt that the entire gay and lesbian community is guided by a powerful demon spirit who is subordinate to Satan.” He claims that at the center Satan’s lie is that people are born gay:

The work of the devil throughout the centuries has kept pace with the so called enlightenment of man. He has not tried to lay ideas on us collectively until we were well prepped to receive them. I'll skip all the increments in between and pull you into the present. In the last days before the second coming of Christ the bible says demons are released in great numbers all over the earth. Their work is to prepare people who have already decided that God must have been wrong about a lot of stuff, to get ready to receive the, lawless one, otherwise known as the antichrist.

The lies will be disseminated by the willing propagandists that first believe the gobbledygook themselves. In our world most of those spreading the gay lie are liberals, activists, spineless academicians, Hollywood sellouts, and now we can throw in a president and a large contingent of fully duped politicians.

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The greatest of them place rulers into place and guide nations and kingdoms while the lower level minions cover everything else in the realm of lust, greed, violence and perversion along with a few dozen other areas too many to mention. There is little doubt that the entire gay and lesbian community is guided by a powerful demon spirit who is subordinate to Satan.

One of the easiest ways to determine if a new trend is a lie of the father of lies is to compare it to what God has said. If it is off center, subtly askew or slightly perverted it is probably wrong. In the case of being gay, or even worse, being born gay, that lie is directly opposite of God's word.

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Unlike the lie that alcoholism is a disease, this lie of Satan may endure until the second coming because it is part of what precipitates the final judgment over a lawless and reprobate world. In the absence of the magic alcoholic's gene that no one ever found, and the need to curb spending alcoholics were bounced off social security disability benefits all at once years ago. Gays are not drawing benefits for being gay but are yet clamoring for same sex civil unions and gay marriage benefits for their so called spouses.

The most damning aspect of Satan's lies about being born gay is that it reveals who the source of the lie is, and at the same time identifies the believers of the lies, as his very own children.

After defending kidnapper Lisa Miller, Liberty Counsel is set to take on its next big case against gay rights: stopping marriage equality in New York. Liberty Counsel, which has emerged as one of the Religious Right’s most vocally and virulently anti-gay organizations, is representing the social conservative group New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedom in the lawsuit:

In response to the flagrant violations of the New York state constitutional and legal procedures, Liberty Counsel has filed a law suit in the New York Supreme Court for declaratory and injunctive relief against the same-sex marriage law (the “Act”) which was signed into law on June 24, 2011 by Governor Cuomo.

Numerous constitutional and legal violations were committed using strong-arm tactics to pass the Act, thus infringing the rights of the citizens of New York. For example, the Governor pressured Republican Senators to vote for the Act at a private meeting at the Governor’s mansion and with the millions of dollars he had raised from Wall Street financiers. There were also unprecedented Senate lock-outs during the days leading up to the vote, where lobbyists and the public were shut out from the Senate lobby and denied access to elected representatives.

The full list of violations can be found in the complaint. Liberty Counsel is representing New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms (NYCF), and several other plaintiffs. NYCF is a statewide, issue-oriented, lobbying organization committed to voicing the pro-life and pro-family perspective to New York state elected officials. They represent constituents throughout the state of New York.

New York law requires that the government be open and transparent to keep political officials responsible. When government operates in secret and freezes out the very people it is supposed to represent, the entire system fails. The back-room tactics were rampant in the passages of this law. The law should be set aside and the process should begin again to allow the people a voice in the process.

Here is what Matt Barber of LC thinks about marriage equality:

Really, this is an anti-marriage movement. Homosexual activists are not looking for the white picket fence; they don’t really want marriage in the traditional monogamous sense of a lifelong relationship. The reality is that most of these activists are looking to attack the institution of marriage because it is something that was given to us by God, something designed by God; ultimately this is an act of rebellion against God.

Televangelist James Robison continues to position himself as a behind-the-scenes leader of the Religious Right’s political planning and mobilization for the upcoming presidential election. Today, Robison posted on his blog a chart from writer Wayne Grudem on how to “defeat the enemy’s plan” (read: Satan's plans) in politics and “fulfill the will of God.”

During our recent Leadership Summit, Wayne Grudem, Ph.D., who is a professor at Phoenix Seminary and a gifted author, began to write what God revealed to him concerning the strategy and effectiveness of the enemy. He outlined the enemy’s tactics and contrasted them with the will of God as it relates to many issues of deep concern to everyone who understands the importance of faith, family and freedom. The information he shared was sobering, but true.

With God’s help, believers can defeat the enemy’s plan. We must join together to see hearts changed and fulfill the will of God. We can and must defeat the enemy’s strategy. Remember, we are not warring against flesh and blood, but against spiritual powers and hidden sinister forces of darkness and deception. Satan is the father of all lies.

Grudem’s chart contrasts “the enemy’s desired result” and “God’s desired result” on issues like evolution and LGBT rights. The chart is extensive, but here are a few examples:

Tim Dunkin of Renew America and Conservative Underground wants to warn America that not only is same-sex marriage not a right, but that homosexuality itself “is a lifestyle choice that lends itself to violence, degradation, disease, selfishness, and exploitation.” Arguing that gay rights must be “fought, defeated, and thrown back” along with “the rest of the broader revolutionary socialist agenda,” Dunkin claims that “homosexuality is destructive” and will ultimately destroy America because, he says, homosexuality is associated with violence, pedophilia and abuse:

So, marriage is a right because it is natural. Society benefits when men and women bond monogamously to raise children and devote themselves to each other. The obvious naturalness of heterosexual marriage is even testified to by the simple facts of anatomy. Men and women can procreate. Men and men, or women and women, cannot. If you take fifty men and fifty women, drop them on a desert isle, and come back a hundred years later, you will find thousands of their descendants filling the land. If you take one hundred homosexual men or one hundred lesbians and do the same, you will come back and find nobody there, because they all died of old age and had no means of reproducing themselves. Heterosexual marriage fits the natural and Scriptural order. Homosexual "marriage" does not.

Homosexual marriage is also not a natural right because it is intrinsically not "right." Nobody has the right to harm others. Yet, homosexuality is a harmful behavior. It is obviously harmful to its practitioners — the clinical evidence for all manner of psychological and physical problems created by acting on homosexual impulses is well established. Homosexuality is destructive to self because it uses the human body in ways that it simple was not intended to be used by nature and nature's God. Homosexuality is also, however, more likely to be harmful to others who do not practice it. Let's not forget that the threat to our blood supply presented by AIDS largely exists because of the tendency within the homosexual community to practice unsafe, unprotected sex with multiple partners (one study reported up to 53 different partners a year, on average). Despite the cries of outrage that usually accompany when pointed out, homosexuals are statistically much more likely to be involved in pedophilia and child abuse. Historically, some of the most violent societies, both internally and externally, were also practitioners of adult male homosexuality, especially. Simply put, it is a lifestyle choice that lends itself to violence, degradation, disease, selfishness, and exploitation. As a result, those who practice it may not only harm themselves, but are more likely to also harm others. One does not have the right to that. Yet, if a homosexual keeps his degradation to himself, then it remains only his business and the business of those he participates with consensually — as I've said before elsewhere, freedom includes the right to do things that harm yourself so long as you don't harm someone else in the process.

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In summary, homosexual marriage, along with a great many other things that the Left has and continued to try to impose onto us, cannot be considered a "right" under the system of natural law that our Founders believed in and based this nation upon. This is, of course, why the Left has made such a concerted effort to remove that underpinning, by attacking the Judeo-Christian heritage of this nation, and by trying to shift us over to a social justice/positive rights/subjective social rights framework. If this nation is to return to what it was and become what it should be, then the homosexual agenda, like the rest of the broader revolutionary socialist agenda, must be fought, defeated, and thrown back.

As we noted the other day, organizers of Gov. Rick Perry's "The Response" prayer rally have removed the link to the endorsements page from the event website, perhaps out of concern that people would actually be able to see all of the radical leaders with whom Perry is partnering for his event.

But they did not remove the actual endorsement page and, in fact, continue to update it and today added Dwight McKissic of Cornerstone Baptist Church to the ever-growing list:

You may perhaps remember McKissic from his appearance at the Values Voter Summit back in 2006 where he asserted that the gay rights movement had come straight out of "the pit of hell itself" and suggested that the Antichrist will be gay:

It wasn’t easy at this conference to distinguish yourself by the ugliness of your anti-gay remarks, but Rev. Dwight McKissic of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Texas rose to the occasion in a Saturday workshop on “Impacting the Culture Through the Church.” His remarks were one part bragging about “Not on My Watch,” his road show of opposition to marriage equality for gays, and four parts attacking the gay rights movement.

McKissic denounced as “insulting, offensive, demeaning, and racist” the gay right’s movement trying to “hitch itself” to civil rights. Gays, he said, can’t “compare their sin to my skin.” He repeated the classic charge that gays “can’t reproduce so they have to recruit.”

But he was just warming up. The civil rights movement, he said, was grounded in moral authority, truth and righteousness, the impetus to freedom, constitutional authority, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In contrast, he said, the gay rights movement was inspired “from the pit of hell itself,” and has a “satanic anointment.” The gay rights movement was birthed and inspired by the anti-Christ. He suggested that the anti-Christ is himself gay, citing a verse from the book of Daniel saying the anti-Christ will have no desire for a woman.

“I don’t think there is any issue more important than how we are going to define the family,” said McKissic. Television shows portraying homosexuality in a positive light have put us “on the road to Sodom and Gomorrah,” and “God’s got another match…He didn’t run out of matches.”

Or for his claims that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to "to purify our nation":

"I'm raising the question," Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, said last week at meetings of the Texas Restoration Project, according to the Austin American-Statesman. "At some point, God will hold us accountable for our sins."

"They have devil worship. They advertise 'Sin City' tours. They celebrate Southern decadence. Girls go wild in New Orleans," said McKissic, a founder of the "Not on My Watch" coalition against gay marriage. "Sometimes God does not speak through natural phenomena. This may have nothing to do with God being offended by homosexuality. But possibly it does."

While reparative therapy, which intends to make gay and bisexual people straight, has already been thoroughly discredited and rejected by the American Psychological Association, among others, a new study from Pat Robertson’s Regent University may also shed doubts on the ability of people to transform from gay to straight. Warren Throckmorton points to a study by Regent University, “Characteristics of Mixed Orientation Couples: An Empirical Study” [pdf] in the Christian psychological periodical Edification, that may deal a heavy blow to the popular right-wing argument that people can just change their sexual orientation.

Pat Robertson, one of the country’s most prominent and harshest critics of gay rights and the LGBT community, is the founder and chancellor of Regent, which was originally named CBN University after his Christian Broadcasting Network.

A study from two Regent professors and four Regent doctoral candidates undermines a common refrain from the Religious Right that gays and lesbians can simply marry people of the opposite sex and become heterosexual. Many endorse “reparative therapy” for gays and lesbians, such as the ‘ex-gay’ counseling practiced at the clinic run by Rep. Michele Bachmann’s husband.

The group surveyed people currently or once involved in mixed orientation marriages, or one spouse who identifies as heterosexual and an opposite-sex partner who identifies as a sexual minority (like gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer or bi-curious).

The researchers used two versions of the Kinsey scale (0 as completely heterosexual, 7 as completely homosexual) to measure both sexual behavior and sexual orientation. Unsurprisingly, they found on the Kinsey scale that measured sexual behavior that gay, bisexual or queer spouses had more heterosexual behavior when they were involved in a monogamous marriage to someone of the opposite sex. But they found that heterosexual behavior did not mean changes in sexual attraction, emotions or fantasies in the Kinsey scale (Kinsey Expanded) which measured sexual orientation. Essentially, while their sexual behavior changed, their sexual orientation remained the same:

On the Kinsey Expanded version, the mean score for both before marriage and the current assessment were 4.33 and 4.57 respectively. Both of these scores fall in between the Equal amounts of heterosexual and homosexual and Largely homosexual, but more than inci­dental heterosexual categories.

A paired-sample t-test was conducted to deter­mine if there was a significant difference in their Kin­sey scores before marriage and currently. There was a significant difference in their Kinsey behavior scale scores, indicating the sample’s sexual behavior signifi­cantly shifted toward the exclusively heterosexual side of the continuum since they have been married. This is likely simply a result of the fact that most of the par­ticipants were in a heterosexual marriage, thus decreas­ing the frequency of same-sex behavior. On the Kinsey Expanded scale, there was not a significant difference between their ratings before marriage and currently, suggesting there has been little change in their degree of overall sexual orientation (attractions, behavior, emotional attachment, and fantasy).

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When we look at the sexual minorities specifical­ly, it is noteworthy that the findings from the Kinsey scale suggest that they did report significant behavioral change. This likely reflected the commitment to their heterosexual marriage and the decrease in frequency of same-sex behavior. However, when the Kinsey ex­panded scale was administered, sexual minorities did not report a statistically significant change in the com­bination of behaviors, attraction, fantasy, and emo­tional attachment – the combination meant to convey sexual orientation rather than just behavior.

Bryan Fischer has been demanding a ban on the construction of mosques in the United States for a year now and argues that such a prohibition is entirely constitutional because the First Amendment does not apply to Islam.

In fact, as Fischer is fond of saying, the First Amendment does not apply to any "non-Christian religions":

[T]he First Amendment was written neither to guarantee freedom of religion to Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus nor to prohibit their free exercise of religion. It wasn’t written about them one way or another.

It was written for one specific purpose: to protect the free exercise of the Christian religion ... We must be clear: the First Amendment does not prohibit the free exercise of alternative religions, but neither does it guarantee it. It simply does not address the issue at all.

In defense of this view, Fischer has lately started arguing that prohibitions on polygamy prove that "non-Christian religions" (i.e., Mormonism) do not have First Amendment protections:

That the free exercise clause provides no guarantee for non-Christian religions is made clear in the case of Mormonism. It was part and parcel of the “free exercise” of the Mormon faith to have as many wives as you wanted. Congress said nope. In fact, the Mormon church was required to prohibit plural marriages as a condition of Utah’s statehood.

(It’s worth noting in passing that the Mormon church has never renounced plural marriage. It has simply instructed its followers to obey federal law in the matter.)

Idaho came into the union in 1890, at virtually the same time as Utah, and the first page of Idaho’s state constitution makes it explicitly clear that the free exercise of religion shall in no sense be construed to justify plural marriages.

...

In fact, the Republican Party came into existence in 1854 to combat two evils: slavery and the pernicious Mormon practice of plural marriage, what the original GOP called "those twin relics of barbarism." (Let me point out that I’m talking about the LDS faith as it existed then, not as it exists today.)

Clearly, then, as our political experiment with the Mormon faith makes clear, there is no guarantee of the free exercise of religion for religions which are outside the stream of historic Christianity, as Mormonism is. (It denies the Trinity, the virgin birth of Christ, the unique deity of Christ, his all-sufficient atoning sacrifice on the cross, and the completeness of God’s revelation in the Old and New Testaments.)

Following Fischer's logic, it only stands to reason that local communities likewise have the power to deny Mormons permission to build temples in their communities as well.

Fischer claims that the Mormon church "never renounced plural marriage" and therefore it must be entirely acceptable for local officials who do not want Mormons or their "pernicious" teachings polluting their communities to deny them permission to build houses of worship, precisely because the First Amendment does not apply to "non-Christian religions" like Mormonism. 

• Towleroad: Rudy Giuliani Tells GOP To Lay Off Gay Marriage.
• Alvin McEwen: Marcus Bachmann lies again - 'Barbarian' tape not doctored.
• Joe Sudbay @ Americablog: Leader of discredited ex-gay movement compares it to Weight Watchers.
• Frances Martel @ Mediaite: Fox & Friends: Romney ‘Obviously Not Being A Christian’ Helps Perry Run.
• Robin Marty @ RH Reality Check: Kansas Considers "Heartbeat" Ban.
• Nick @ Bold Faith Type: Herman Cain Contradicts Himself on 'Separation of Church and State.'

Don Wildmon, the president of the American Family Association and the official host of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s The Response prayer rally, said onTruth that Transforms radio program that liberals “hate Christians.” He told Jerry Newcomb of Truth in Action ministries (formerly Coral Ridge Ministries) that the Religious Right needs to use the Internet to disseminate their message or else they will “hand it over” to the left and the “homosexual agenda.” Wildmon’s views are right in line with those of AFA’s spokesman, Bryan Fischer, who has declared that “liberals hate God, liberals hate religion, liberals hate faith, liberals hate Christianity.”

Wildmon was speaking to Newcomb to promote his book Speechless: Silencing Christians, about how “homosecularists” are using the “(made up) bullying problem” to impose the “homosexual indoctrination of children” and hate crime laws to outlaw Christian preaching.

And not turn this tool over to the liberals who really, and I know I’m using this word, who hate Christians…. Hollywood hates Christians. The only thing standing between, let’s just say the homosexual movement, homosexual marriage and the whole homosexual agenda, is the church. And not just the whole church but the evangelical dedicated Christians, and they are hated by the liberal-left because we stand in way, we stand in the way, of their achieving of what it is they want to achieve.