We've run a couple of columns

recently to which at least two readers have objected. Their letters appear

in this issue.

One of the writers accuses

us of having an "anti-gay agenda." It's time to fill in a few

blanks, lest more erroneous conclusions be drawn.

It is more precisely accurate

to define my position this way: I am "anti-agenda-espoused-by-some-homosexual-activists-and

-some-of-their-apologists."

This agenda to which I am opposed

is militantly in-your-face and uncompromising. It says this: Tolerance

is not enough. It says you must acknowledge and even promote homosexuality

and its accompanying sexual practices as not just normative but as a morally

equivalent and equally desirable lifestyle. And, furthermore, it says

you must teach your children that homosexual behavior is not just a tolerable

activity; you must declare that homosexual behavior is just as good and

moral a choice as the historic and traditional Christian marriage.

Political correctness and the

AJC editorial board notwithstanding, I reject that agenda. And this paper

will stand for nothing less than a rejection of that activist agenda.

Do I "hate" homosexuals?

No. But I intensely dislike and actively oppose the cultural and political

agenda described above. Am I a "homophobe"? Other than my objection

to the misuse of otherwise perfectly good Greek prefixes and suffixes

(homo = man, phobe = fear), I am not afraid of homosexuals.

Using the mindless criteria

some activists and apologists employ, I could as equally well be labelled

the following:

A "liberal-phobe"

because I object to some of their public giveaway policies and weak-kneed

foreign-policy stances.

A "Democrat-phobe"

because I disagree with some of their political platforms.

A "Gov. Barnes-phobe"

because I dislike how he dismembered Georgia political boundaries in his

quest to win at any cost.

An "adulterer-phobe"

because I think heterosexual married folks should remain sexually faithful

to their spouses.

A "16-year-old-driver-phobe"

because I worry about inexperienced teen drivers operating a ton of metal

aimed in my direction just a few inches away in the oncoming lane.

Using the gay rights activists'

criteria, I am a "phobe" of anything that I disagree with or

don't care to indulge in or don't have a taste for. Call me a "watermelon-phobe"

if you want to; I still won't eat the stuff.

In the spirit of this debate

I should add further: I am more than a "divorce-phobe." I hate

divorce. And I am a divorced and remarried person. And a sinner, saved

Let me say what I am for: an

historic Judeo-Christian worldview, which includes traditional norms of

social and cultural morality. (May I note this fact: The whole notion

of "gay rights" is a recent development in Western civilization,

40 years at the most; in terms of the West's "moral history,"

it has no precedent.) My belief system is based on Martin Luther's Reformation.

And with 1,900 years of Christian

history behind me, I stand solidly with the early Church Fathers, Luther

and the Reformers and Christian theologians until the 20th century, in

stating categorically: All willful sexual activity outside of the marriage

of a man and a woman is sin.

The One who made us set limits

on our sexual expression. Western morality is foundationally Biblical

in origin. Laws were enacted to reflect that origin. Only in the past

50 years or so has more than a sliver of society challenged that foundation.

And the challenge is as old as the apple in Eden: "Did God really

say ... ?" And thus sin.

Sin. What a quaint concept.

How judgmental. How dare you say that my behavior is SIN! Aren't we all

getting better and better every day in every way? Well, no. Not without

outside help. Way outside.

With others of the Reformed

persuasion, I believe with Saint Paul: "All have sinned and fallen

short of the glory of God." So, we're all in this sin thing together.

We all do it. A believer in Christ simply says with St. John, "If

we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and

to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

Yes, God made us all, but he

did not make us to sin. He didn't create me to be an adulterer, although

my fallen nature tends in that direction. He didn't create us so that

my wife and I had to divorce, but we did, anyway, despite His admonitions

against divorce. He created us humans with that most frightening of all

the things in creation: A free will, the ability to choose to go our own

way. He had to send his only Son to die on a cross to rescue us from going

our own ways, including our own sexual ways.

What is sad is that the activists

who still hold to a concept of God, however removed that concept is from

the Biblical revelation of the One who made us, contort familiar scriptural

concepts to conjure up the reverse of the passages' plain meaning. It

is simply that age-old attempt at self-justification. We try to find some

warrant for our lust rather than calling it what it is. The plain truth

is that both adultery and homosexual sex are sinful acts and cannot be

made unsinful by appealing to "love" or, "He made me this

way."

And I suggest that to denounce

as "bigotry" what have been gold-standard moral standards for

nearly 2,000 years denotes an overweening arrogance of an especially high

order. So smart have we become, have we? So morally advanced, so intellectually

enlightened as to throw off 19 centuries of Christian belief because we

21st centurions are so much more morally advanced than that poor, benighted

Paul of Tarsus? Who do we think we are?

It's laughable, were it not

so sad.

Don't believe in all that religion

mumbo-jumbo, you say? Religious beliefs have no claim on my sexual preferences

or practices, you say? I was born this way, you say?

May I turn your attention to

the "science" of evolution, then. By all definitions of natural

selection and the "reproductive imperative" of modern evolutionary

understanding, homosexuals are an evolutionary dead end.

Homosexuality cannot be explained

in any scientific terms as a "biological" or "genetic"

imperative. In humans, there is no same-sex reproductive capability. In

strictly evolutionary terms, those who practice purely homosexual sex

select themselves out of the gene pool in a remarkably short time. Thus,

unless homosexual "nature" is a "mutated" development

of the past 100 years or so, then homosexuality as some kind of dominant

inherited trait would have simply faded out of the human gene pool.

Any argument that homosexuality

is a fixed, inherited, biological imperative shipwrecks upon the immutable

scientific rocks of Darwin's natural selection theory.

Thus, we get