Liberals have attempted to define the Gay Liberation movement as an exercise in religious liberty. The argument is founded on the fact that tolerance, compassion, and acceptance, to say nothing of equality, are all religious values of the theological left. They are part and parcel of the prime religious values of secular humanism. This is wrong for at least two significant reasons. First of all, religious liberty as Biblically defined means that the civil magistrate is restrained from enforcing the first table of the law and enforces only the second table dealing with man’s relationship with his neighbor. But homosexuality is not a matter of faith and worship; it is a matter of the second table of the law. Specifically it is a breach of the seventh commandment which requires sexual purity in thought, word, and deed. It therefore falls outside the pale of those things that are covered under the aegis of religious liberty. Secondly, as we shall see, it as actually destructive of religious liberty as Scripturally defined.

What is the true agenda of the Gay Liberation or Gay Rights movement? Is it merely to establish the civil right to practice their perversions? If that is all it entailed it would simply be an issue of law and law enforcement, and not a matter totally subversive of the religious liberty of the Lord’s people. It would simply be an issue of whose law would prevail in the statute books and be enforced by the civil magistrate. Actually the goals of the movement entail much more. Homosexuals have already accomplished the above stated objective. There is simply no government at any level in the American republic, whether it be federal, state, county, or municipal, that any longer has any laws that criminalize sodomy and enforces legal penalties against such practices. If that was the true objective of the movement they could all declare victory, pack up their bags, and go home.

What then is the true objective of this movement? The true aim of this movement is, having accomplished the liberation of the homosexuals from any civil or legal harassment, is to compel the general society to accept homosexuality as a viable, acceptable, alternate lifestyle. They will not rest until they have accomplished this goal. They will accept nothing less than the utter annihilation of all cultural and social opposition to their perversions. They are not content to carry out their abominations in the privacy of their bedchambers. They insist on their right to flaunt them in our faces and compel us to acquiesce and say that it is good. Now this is something that Christians can never do. And therefore any and all civil or social pressures to do so are destructive of true religious liberty.

Gay used to mean bright and cheery. There is nothing "gay" about this subculture of death. It is a culture of death not only for the obvious reason that it is a sterile culture that cannot reproduce itself and must die out unless it can find new recruits from the heterosexual community. It is also a culture of death because it is under a Biblical sentence of death, both in this life and in that which is to come. The tortured individuals that have chosen this way of death seem to be unable to live with themselves and whatever remnants of a conscience God still grants them. For they are almost fanatic in their efforts to compel the rest of society to grant them their approval and acceptance. And this is what drives the real agenda of the gay community.

Christians in management positions in American corporations have long felt the sharp edge of this contradiction. As corporations have added "sexual orientation," one of the current euphemisms for homosexuality, to the list of those things that they will outlaw any discrimination with respect to, it has placed Christians on the horns of a dilemma. This is because the gays are different from any other ethnic or religious group that may be present in the workforce. Islamic employees, for instance, do not generally conduct a campaign to compel management and other employees to affirm the virtues of Islam. They are content to come to work and do their job, as do atheists, secular humanists, Jews, Buddhists, and New Age types. The homosexuals by contrast have an agenda of being in your face and compelling all and sundry to affirm that "Gay is Good." But the same corporations that have a non-discriminatory position with respect to gays have a long standing, and unrepealed policy of banning discrimination with respect to religion. And now the religious freedom of the Christian employee has come into direct conflict with the policy of requiring employees to "accept" homosexuality.

And in this regard the case of Lot in Sodom is instructive. Lot pitched his tent toward Sodom, a city that was so licentious it has given its name to the particular perversion practiced by male homosexuals. Lot wound up living in the city and even becoming a civil elder, sitting in the gate where the elders conducted the business of the city (Genesis 19:1). Apparently, although he "was vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked," as Peter records for us, he seemed to have gotten by and even materially prospered in Sodom. And also seems to have been socially accepted and was made a civil elder of the city. What was Lot’s downfall in his relations with the men of Sodom? What led to an open breach that threatened his very life? It came when he spoke out against their homosexuality. When he attempted to restrain a mob of Sodomites from sexually abusing his male guests. It came when he said to them, "I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly." (Genesis 19:6). This rebuke of their homosexual lust drove the crowd of militant gays to a fury. They responded, saying, "This one fellow came in to sojourn, and he will needs be a judge: now will we deal worse with thee, than with them." (Genesis 19:9). This is how homosexuals react to godly criticism. And this is again confirmed in the Scriptures by the account of the tribe of Benjamin, where Gibeah, a city of Benjamite sodomites, militantly defended their practices and refused to repent of a horrific example of homosexual lust. As Paul states it in Romans 1, God truly seem to have "given them up" because their refusal to repent of their perversions almost led to the extinction of the tribe (Judges 19 & 20). The lesson here is clear. Homosexuals will brook no opposition. They will tolerate no defiance of their lifestyle. They will militantly defend it and savagely threaten and assault those who dare criticize and condemn it.

Now this is exactly where the Christian community and the gay community will come into inescapable conflict. And recent history documenting the rage of the homosexual community at Christian criticism shows that little has changed since the days of Sodom. In this conflict the politically correct, secular humanist religion of the masses will assert it self to condemn the Lord’s people as bigots spreading hate and prejudice. The free expression of the Christian conscience with respect to God’s condemnation of this vice will not be tolerated. And as the drive to tighten the screws of "hate legislation" to include "sexual orientation" continues to its logical conclusion the Christians will no longer be granted the religious liberty to discharge their consciences. It will become illegal to teach and preach the will of God in this matter. For this will no longer be restricted to a matter of competing opinions freely expressed in an open society. It will transcend a matter of merely reaping the abuse and scorn of this world for faithfulness to the word of God. It will become a matter of law; it will become a crime; to express "hateful" opinions about the gay community. And thus it will become totally destructive of the religious liberty that it hypocritically pretends to maintain.

I can see almost no other issue that will shortly bring the Lord’s people into open harassment and civil repression than in the issue of its testimony against the abomination of homosexuality. May the Lord grant us grace to be faithful in that day that we may endure to the end and gain a crown of life. May we conduct ourselves so that we may be counted worthy to inhabit that eternal kingdom, that new earth in which dwells righteousness of which the Apostle John said, "And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life." (Revelation 21:27).