The American Family Association today is promoting a 2013 article by research director Ed Vitagliano, who warns that the rise of gay rights in the U.S. “is a sign of a deep spiritual sickness” and “a downward death spiral” that will incite divine wrath.
“[H]omosexuality often becomes the barometer of a culture rotting out from the inside,” Vitagliano writes, lamenting that “[s]traight America has embraced homosexuality because straight Americans first embraced the sexual revolution for the satisfaction of their own perverse sexual appetites.”
He concludes that pushing gays “back into the closet (if that were possible)” is not “enough to forestall judgment,” but that conservatives must go even further in driving out the “underlying wickedness that permeated the entire culture.”
It is sometimes difficult for Christians to comprehend the breathtaking speed with which the gay movement has succeeded in America. While the political movement itself began in 1969, it has only been over the last decade that homosexual activists have seen virtually every one of their dreams come true.
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Yet Scripture is clear that embracing homosexuality is a sign of a deep spiritual sickness. In particular, three important passages warn cultures about taking this step.
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How can a reasonable person do this? How can a society clearly see that humanity is divided into male and female genders, with corresponding, rather than identical, genitalia, and shrug its collective shoulders?
Romans 1:18 states that this is done because they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” The Greeks did this. America is on the verge of doing so.
A downward death spiral results from such suppression. These individuals (and, we must assume, the cultures such individuals create) sink into further darkness and eventually (unless God intervenes) become hardened and blinded to the truth.
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In Jude 7 the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is made even more explicit: The inhabitants “indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh,” and what could be stranger than men fornicating with other men?
But the Genesis account takes note of the utter depravity of these particular homosexual men, for it was the violence of their predatory behavior that seems most abhorrent in the passage. They literally threatened to have forcible homosexual intercourse with Lot’s visitors – i.e., to rape his guests.
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Straight America has embraced homosexuality because straight Americans first embraced the sexual revolution for the satisfaction of their own perverse sexual appetites. Judgment came to Sodom because violent homosexuality was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. As a prevalent sin, however, it was the manifestation of an underlying wickedness that permeated the entire culture – a wickedness that was not limited to the homosexual.
Thus homosexuality often becomes the barometer of a culture rotting out from the inside. If the problem were only homosexuality, then the simple act of pushing it back into the closet (if that were possible) would be enough to forestall judgment.
But what Ezekiel 16 teaches us is this: By the time a culture accepts idolatry, abortion and homosexuality, it is already ripe for the devastation wrought by God’s wrath.