Bill Muehlenberg, author of “Strained Relations: The Challenge of Homosexuality,” took to BarbWire today to claim that “loving homosexuals means telling them they don’t have to be homosexual.”
He writes that just as it wouldn’t be considered hateful to tell a slave-owner that slavery is wrong or demand that a murderer stop killing people, people who believe that “talking about a ‘cure’ for homosexuality is harmful and hateful are also unbiblical and unhelpful.”
“The only haters here are the activists who want people to stay trapped in an unhealthy and deadly lifestyle, and the confused Christians who reject Scripture for worldly wisdom,” he writes.
When you are loving in the biblical sense, you cannot be indifferent to the lost, to the plight of those heading the wrong way, to those on a one-way trip to hell. To love such people means you will warn them, you will wave [sic] the red flag, you will do everything in your power to get them off the road to ruin.
It is only when you hate someone that you will not think of their welfare – both temporal and eternal. Thus the Christian who pleads with the homosexual to be set free from his dangerous and dead-end lifestyle is acting out of love.
…
Those pushing this line might as well say opposing the criminal gangs wanting to hook kids on drugs is being hateful. They might as well say Wilberforce was “hating on” the slave owners as he stood up for blacks. Sorry, but to love people means resisting what enslaves them.
By this unhelpful advice, Wilberforce should have just shut up about abolition, and not make people feel guilty about their sinful activities. Loving people always means telling them the truth. Loving homosexuals means telling them they don’t have to be homosexual.
And those who claim that talking about a “cure” for homosexuality is harmful and hateful are also unbiblical and unhelpful. They might as well tell a murderer: “Hey, Jesus loves you, but I certainly won’t try to cure you of your desire to kill. Feel free to keep on doing it. I don’t want you to feel guilty after all, or feel hated on.”
…
The only haters here are the activists who want people to stay trapped in an unhealthy and deadly lifestyle, and the confused Christians who reject Scripture for worldly wisdom.
