A pro-homosexual advocate named Ed Himes sent a lengthy letter to American Vision decrying how groups like American Vision and the American Family Association (the targeted recipient) “continue to harass, degrade and demean the Gay Community on a regular basis.” He objects to Christians who “pick on a group of good people that are NOT BAD and who hurts [sic] NO-ONE.”

Mr. Himes’ operating assumption is that homosexuality is not a morally bad behavior and does not have bad consequences. Of course, in a godless universe nothing is good or bad, but only pleasant or unpleasant, depending on one’s point of view. Definitive moral distinctions can’t be made. Once a person enters a God-defined world, defining good and bad is the prerogative of God. In a non-God world, people are free to do what they want. This includes rejecting homosexual behavior (or any behavior for that matter). There is no cosmic moral governor that stands in judgment over anyone’s beliefs or actions. Homosexuals recognize this, so they use bullying tactics to force compliance to their worldview.

What Mr. Himes does not consider is that basically good and productive people can do some very bad things. His comment that homosexuals are “not bad” people is overreaching. There are many “good people” (a relative term) who do some bad things.

For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger is idolized among bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts and revered for the way he built a film legacy, business enterprises, and political career after coming to America handicapped with a thick Austrian accent. But the revelation that he was unfaithful to his wife and fathered a son fourteen years ago with an employee made this aspect of his life morally bad. Adultery, like homosexuality, is bad even though there may be parts of an adulterer’s life that are good.

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), was engulfed in a call girl scandal, and admitted his actions as a “sin.” He had replaced Congressman Bob Livingston after Livingston resigned due to an adultery scandal.

Liberals believe that Anthony Weiner is a great guy personally and politically, but revelations of his sexting women while married — one of them a teenager — and sending suggestive photos of himself are considered morally bad behaviors, so much so that he has been encouraged to seek psychiatric help. Even the very liberal and pro-homosexual Nancy Pelosi and DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz have called for Weiner’s resignation. Why? He, like Schwarzenegger, Vitter, and others, men were only engaged in acts of sexual preference. No one was hurt. In fact, Schwarzenegger brought a new life into the world.

Film director Roman Polanski is another example of someone who engaged in immoral sexual acts but who continues to do good work. In March 1977, “Polanski was arrested and charged with a number of offenses against Samantha Geimer, a 13-year-old girl — rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. At his arraignment Polanski pleaded not guilty to all charges, but later accepted a plea bargain whose terms included dismissal of five of the initial charges in exchange for a guilty plea to the lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse.” Even so, Polanski is a well respected international film director having received numerous Oscar nominations. His 2002 film The Pianist, an adaptation of the autobiography of the Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman (1911–2000), is a moving cinematic masterpiece.

Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) was an aviation hero. In May of 1927, he became the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris, France. In his later years, he became a prize-winning author, international explorer, inventor, and environmentalist. From 1957 until his death in 1974, Lindbergh had an affair with German hat maker Brigitte Hesshaimer (1926–2003) who lived in a small Bavarian town called Geretsried, south of Munich). On November 23, 2003, DNA tests proved that he fathered her three children: Dyrk (1958), Astrid (1960) and David (1967). The two managed to keep the affair secret; even the children did not know the true identity of their father, whom they saw when he came to visit once or twice per year using the alias “Careu Kent.” At the same time as Lindbergh was involved with Brigitte Hesshaimer, he also had a relationship with her sister, Marietta (born 1924), who bore him two more sons: Vago (1960) and Christoph (1966).

On the extreme, consider the serial killer Dennis Lynn Rader, known as the BTK killer. “BTK” stands for “Bind, Torture, Kill.” He never raised any suspicions among his friends or family that he had a malevolent nature. Rader’s wife, who had been married to him for more than 30 years, had no knowledge of his crimes. He was a Cub Scout leader, and his son became an Eagle Scout. He led a normal and productive life, yet he harbored a dark side that did not affect his public persona. The people at the church where Rader attended were “stunned, confused, and bewildered” when they heard what the man they thought they knew did when left alone with his inner demons of his own making.

Homosexuals aren’t the only ones who operate on two moral planes. We all do! The question is, how do we determine what’s moral and immoral, and what does the Bible say on the subject? Mr. Himes tries to answer these questions (among others) but does not do a very good job. We’ll look into some of his other arguments in tomorrow’s article. But now let’s consider Mr. Himes’ premise that no one is harmed by consensual homosexual activity.

The AIDS epidemic alone proves that there are bad consequences to homosexual behavior similar to way that venereal diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea are caused by promiscuous heterosexual activity. Millions of people worldwide have died from AIDS, a self-inflicted and easily preventable disease. While not all of these deaths are related to homosexuality, there are a disproportionate number of homosexual men who have died from AIDS-related diseases when compared to the general population. When in 1981 five young “active homosexuals” were diagnosed with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), public health workers and physicians believed there might be a connection between homosexuality and the rise of certain diseases that were mostly seen in older populations. These homosexual-related diseases were at first dubbed “gay-related immune deficiency,” or GRID. When homosexual advocates objected to the GRID acronym, it was changed to “auto-immune deficiency syndrome” (AIDS). Surgeon General C. Everett Koop under Ronald Reagan upset homosexual activists because he linked “gay [sic] sex and the risk of infection through anal sexual intercourse as primary vectors of the disease.” The homosexual lobby has worked long and hard to disassociate homosexual behavior with sexual diseases.

Non-homosexuals have also been affected by AIDs. These infections came by way of those who practiced certain immoral behaviors: sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and intravenous drug use with needles shared with an AIDS carrier. There were also innocent victims of AIDS. Ryan White (1971–1990) was a hemophiliac who became infected with HIV from a transfusion of contaminated blood. There were others.

Then there are the general mortality rates of homosexual and bi-sexual men when compared to the general population. “In the U.S., recent research has identified HIV/AIDS as the leading cause of death among men aged 25–44 in the states of New York, New Jersey, California, Florida and Massachusetts, and 64 out of 170 cities having reported at least 25 AIDS-related deaths.” ((Robert S. Hogg, et al., “Modelling the Impact of HIV Disease on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men," International Journal of Epidemiology, 26:3 (1997).))

A great deal of attention is focused on tobacco-related health costs. Knowing these costs, our government has forced tobacco companies to warn consumers of their products and the inherent dangers of tobacco consumption. Our tax dollars also go into prevention of tobacco use, but there is almost no similar prevention apparatus when it comes to AIDS-related behaviors. “The U.S. government is spending, according to a Congressional Research Services report to Congress, in the range of $20 billion a year for treatment and research, with a small fraction for prevention that, analysts explain, includes testing but largely doesn’t address the behavior itself.”

Lives and families have been destroyed by the claim that homosexuality is equal to and even superior to God-designed heterosexuality. Who knows how many young people have been lured into the homosexual lifestyle because, in a time of brief sexual confusion, they were told that being homosexual is good and normal. Many of them remain tormented because they have been told that they were born that way with no hope of change. Homosexual activists argue that a homosexual desire after leaving the homosexual lifestyle is evidence that once “gay” always “gay.” This is nonsense. That’s like saying a reformed drunk who has a desire to have a drink is still a drunk, or a reformed thief who is tempted to steal again is still a thief. Every person in the world is tempted with past sins. It’s giving into them that makes the difference. Mr. Himes blames teenage suicides on anti-homosexual rhetoric. There may be another reason. It could be that young people who experimented with homosexuality and want to change their behavior believe they are hopelessly trapped.

Mr. Himes continues to blame anti-homosexuals for homosexual bullying and even deaths. He mentions Matthew Shepard as an example of anti-homosexual violence. But Shepard’s killers told “‘20/20’s’ Elizabeth Vargas that money and drugs motivated their actions that night, not hatred of gays.” (Also see here, here, and especially here.) Is there anti-homosexual violence? Most certainly, and it should be dealt with like every other incident of violence. Violence against homosexuals gets harsher treatment than violence against a 70-year-old woman.

Consider the murder of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising. He was bound, drugged, tortured, raped, and died as a result of the drugs given him and the position in which he was tied down by his captors. The perpetrators were known homosexuals. Dirkhising’s gruesome death came nearly one year after Shepard’s murder and got scant media attention until it was covered by World Net Daily and later The Washington Times. You can read all the horrible details here. Because this type of homosexual violence did not fit the pro-homosexual agenda, it was not deemed a “hate crime.”

In 1993, Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N.Y.) published “Defining Deviancy Down.” Moynihan started from Emile Durkheim’s proposition that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can “‘afford to recognize’ and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard. This redefining has evoked fierce resistance from defenders of ‘old’ standards, and accounts for much of the present ‘cultural war. . . .’” As the amount of deviancy increases, the community adjusts its standards so that conduct once thought deviant is no longer considered so. What seems like a trivial accommodation today devolves over time into extravagant ways generationally.

Thirty years ago, who would have thought that homosexuality would be accepted as a rational, normal, and moral lifestyle choice? Homosexuals must go through extraordinary means to have children, while it’s the exception that proves the rule among heterosexuals. Not only is the biology all wrong, the lifestyle itself makes a mockery of what sexuality was designed to be. When’s the last time you saw a parade celebrating pride in adultery and promiscuity? Don’t you think it’s rather odd that homosexual men and women put on parades celebrating a sex act? The slippery slope of homosexual respectability can be seen in the public proclamation of the former Chastity Bono who now goes by the name Chaz. We’re supposed to believe because of something cut off here and something sewn on there, coupled with hormone therapy, that she is now a man. I’m not buying it.

Homosexuals and those who support their sexual behavior are in denial. The moral center has been lost. With God out of the picture or redefined, any consensual behavior becomes protected behavior, and damn anyone who says otherwise.