As an example of abusive language,

Mr. Parker slanders Pastor Turner by implying that he is a Nazi when he

refers to him as "Herr Turner." And yet, by such slander, Mr.

Parker vilifies Pastor Turner in the very same way that the Nazis vilified

the Jews as they moved them along a path to the gas chambers.

Recall that Pastor Turner presented

a series of what he said were definitions of certain words or ideas and

that those definitions had been altered over time and that the new definitions

stood in stark contrast with the original ones.

Mr. Parker summarily dismisses

all of this on the grounds that what Turner offered as definitions were

not, in fact, definitions at all. And then having arbitrarily and without

explanation dismissed the basis for any conclusions being made by Turner,

Parker calls into question all of the rest of what Turner had to say.

Even if Parker is correct in

asserting that the definitions were not definitions at all, he misses

the whole point that Pastor Turner was trying to make. Clearly, the point

was that the meanings of the words and phrases mentioned were being altered,

not in some natural way as when words become obsolete because the things

being signified fall from common usage, but rather by the deliberate design

of those who reconstruct language to accomplish a political or social

agenda.

But, by failing to address

the point of Turner's article, Mr. Parker is guilty of exactly what he

accused the pastor of doing, i.e., "set the reality, pose the premise,

and pre-load the conclusion." Rather than addressing the meaning

of what the pastor was saying, Mr. Parker, with simple rhetorical élan,

eliminates the entire basis for his argument and by doing so, sets his

own premises and pre-loads the conclusion.

Mr. Parker says that he noticed

that Pastor Turner was "keen to judge" and refers him to Biblical

verses which command Christians not to judge. Aside from his faulty interpretation

of Scripture, Mr. Parker fails to recognize that the entire content of

his article is based on a judgment that he made concerning the merit of

the article he is responding to. It must not have occurred to him that

he himself is judging the validity of the arguments made in the Turner

article.

But, clearly his is since from

his own analysis, he concluded (judged) that Turner was being, among other

things, judgmental.

If Mr. Parker believes that

somehow we go through life without making moral judgments about the behavior

of others and that such judgments derive from sources of divine command

as well as the common sense of his fellow citizens, then he is deluding

himself and denying the truth.

Implicit in every moral choice

that a person makes, whether it concerns abortion, same-sex marriage,

premarital sex, the use of illegal drugs, or whether or not to engage

in extramarital sex, is a judgment that one way of behaving is morally

acceptable and the other is not. We all make these judgments concerning

ourselves, or children, and, yes, even our neighbors.

In every political election

voters make judgments as to which candidate best reflects their economic,

social, and moral point of view. The very founding of this country was

based on the judgment of the Founders with respect to the rightness or

wrongness of the behavior of the monarchy that ruled over them.

Further, those judgments were

very publicly articulated without the slightest fear that the speaker

would be accused of being judgmental. Right or wrong, they never shied

away from arguing in support of their moral beliefs or from giving justification

for those beliefs. Had Lincoln and his fellow abolitionists adhered to

the, "judge not lest ye be judged" credo advocated by Mr. Parker,

slavery might have persisted for much longer than it did.

This brings me to the next

point that I would like to make. Mr. Parker seems to be offended by the

moral implications of the Turner article. He suggests that Turner is a

closet homophobe because he uses the term, "lifestyle choices"

and implies that homosexual behavior is perverted. Parker goes on to suggest,

however, that the source of such behavior is at least mysterious to him

because such men, "opt for a 'lifestyle' that puts them at odds with

most of society" in spite of, "the fine curvature around them."

homosexual behavior is a minority behavior within the general population.

Nevertheless, Mr. Parker raises high the banner of privacy as protective

cover for such behavior when it is between consenting adults. This is

clearly a moral judgment that he is making; i.e., any sexual act between

consenting adults has on its face the moral approbation of society and

having such a sanction, it is morally wrong for the state to interfere

with it.

In this argument, what seems

to have been missed by Mr. Parker is the absence of any justification,

in the absolute sense, for his claim that such behavior is right behavior

in the moral sense, either with respect to the participants or on the

part of the state.

On what principle or axiom

does he ground his claim then? He offers little more than an appeal to

tradition by pointing out to us that, "in the West we believe in

personal privacy and a natural outgrowth of that belief is the gradual

relaxation of prejudices (there's that judgment thing again) against private,

adult, consenting sexual behavior."

But, what Mr. Parker fails

to address is whether or not such a "gradual relaxation" is

a morally good trend. Perhaps this is because by appealing to privacy

as the ground for his moral claim, he logically removes from any further

analysis the behavior which is being shielded behind that privacy.

Pastor Turner attempts to place

the grounding of his moral claims in Biblical Christianity. Whether or

not one believes that Biblical Christianity is the ultimate ground for

all moral truth, his appeal to such a ground is at least a reasonable

one. If Christianity is true, then what Scripture teaches with respect

to the moral behavior of humans is also true, in the absolute sense.

Mr. Parker, in spite of his

profession that he is a Christian, makes no such link between his moral

claims and their justification. It seems clear that he is not relying

on Biblical injunctions for such grounding. In fact, he seems to be agnostic

on the issue by admitting that he, "does not know if your (Pastor

Turner) book (the Bible) is infallible."

So, if he can not rely on the

Bible to ground his moral claims, what can he rely on? One can only conclude

that Mr. Parker relies on little more than his own opinion. And yet he

feels so strongly that his opinions are the correct ones that he is willing

to go on record and state that Pastor Turner is little more than a fear-mongering

Nazi.

Such strong positions should

be made of weightier stuff than mere opinion. But, here once again Mr.

Parker contradicts himself. When he reminds Pastor Turner that human beings

are fallible, especially when they lay claim to moral truths found in

the Bible, he apparently fails to realize that he, as a human being, is

subject to the same fallibility, even with respect to his claim to be

a Christian.

For if a fallible human being

reads a book which may itself be fallible, and if that book is the basis

for that fallible human being to claim that he is what the book commands

him to be, then how can he know with certainty that he is what he claims

to be?

Parker denies himself the very ground for claiming to be a Christian.

And, given his premise of fallibility, he has to admit also that all of

his assertions, all of his reasoned conclusions, and the basis for each

of his personal attacks on Pastor Turner might be based on a fallible

understanding of the way things really are and, as such, might very well

be wrong.

In other words, Mr. Parker,

as such, he has lost the authority to make any claims whatsoever with

respect to moral truths. In fact, by virtue of being a skeptic, he must

remain agnostic concerning the very existence of absolute moral truth

and fall back into moral relativism, the logical conclusion of his position.

Randy Hough

Peachtree City, Ga.