Andrew Marin. Us Versus Us: The Untold Story of Religion and the LGBT Community. NavPress, 2016. 213 pp. Andrew Marin begins Us Versus Us by introducing us to a photograph of Marin himself and his wife hugging a gay man at the 2010 Chicago Gay Pride Parade (see below). They didn’t know the man but he was prompted […]
LGBT
Is Sex Reassignment Surgery Genital Mutilation?
This article is constructed from three tweets I posted on Twitter this morning. Some folk are outraged by Rand Paul’s provocative framing of sex reassignment surgery as “genital mutilation”. I’m not a Rand Paul fan by any stretch, and I’m aware of the manifold trauma experienced by transgender folk. But mutilation means “infliction of severe […]
Transgender Children and the Ethics of Therapeutic Treatment
Two recent studies in the journal Pediatrics provide evidence that gender-dysphoric children generally have improved mental health outcomes when therapeutic measures such as hormone blockers are employed early on. Of course, this data is consistent with a subset of children having worsened mental health outcomes (e.g. gender dysphoria dissipating naturally thereby leading to regret over […]
The US Supreme Court Decision on LGBT Civil Rights Meets Mere Christianity
Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a 6-3decision that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extends to sexual minorities including gay and transgender people. Predictably, this produced cheers from some and hand-wringing from others. As for me, it provided an occasion to post the following tweet: Just a reminder to Christians on […]
Is Franklin Graham a bigot or a victim?
Franklin Graham is scrambling to reschedule venues for his upcoming evangelistic tour of Britain. All the venues he had booked have since canceled because of his stance LGBT people and his view that gay marriage is an abomination. From the perspective of LGBT advocates, Graham’s stance is no different than a person who calls interracial […]
Should Conservatives Protest LGBT Hallmark Movies?
The Hallmark Channel has a reputation for producing movies that social conservatives find wholesome. Not surprisingly, these movies get satirized by cynical Hollywood. Consider, for example, this 2017 satire courtesy of Saturday Night Live: (Yes, it is true that SNL is in New York while the Hallmark Channel is actually headquartered in, ahem, Studio City, California. […]
A Review of Blue Babies Pink: A Southern Coming Out Story
There is an idea, popular among evangelicals, that Christian theology is simply a matter of counting Bible verses. While that simple notion has had a major impact on evangelicalism — for example, it’s the basic method of Wayne Grudem’s bewilderingly popular and very bad textbook Systematic Theology — it is based on a myth. Theology and doctrine […]
Gay-Affirming Christians and Charismatics: A response to Michael Brown (Part 1a)
I didn’t quite get through my response to the first part of Michael Brown’s rejoinder in my previous article, hence the continuation of part 1 in this article. In my original review, I noted that Brown attempts to argue that gay-affirming Christians errantly allow their experience to shape their reading of the Bible and understanding […]
Is gay culture necessarily promiscuous? A response to Michael Brown (Part 1)
A few years ago, I posted a four-part review of Dr. Michael Brown’s book Can You Be Gay and Christian? A couple of weeks ago, on June 11th, Brown responded to my review on his nationally-syndicated radio show The Line of Fire. He later stipulated to me that he intends to offer a fuller response to my review in […]
The “Nashville Statement”: Three Problems with the Preamble
Yesterday the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood issued “The Nashville Statement“. I’m sympathetic with many concerns of The Nashville Statement and I believe many of the statements in the document are well-crafted and fundamentally correct. Unfortunately, I also have significant concerns with the document and they start at the beginning. In this article I’m going […]
Gender and Sexuality Any Damn Way You Please?
It looks like I’m back using tweets as a catalyst for discussion. This tweet appeared as a retweet in my feed the other day: Raise a glass to presenting gender and sexuality any damn way you please pic.twitter.com/114xx72j0w — aging quickly (@anyharder) December 26, 2016 Wow, this single tweet has more retweets and likes than […]
More than half of American Christians are now gay-affirming
I’ve been speaking a lot recently to various church and parachurch groups on issues pertaining to the LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual) community. To be sure, this isn’t because I’m an expert on such matters: far from it (indeed, very far from it). Rather, it is simply because these issues are among the most […]
What would Jesus say to Caitlyn Jenner?
This is the plenary address I gave in May at the 2016 FCA Canadian National Convention. * * * Good evening! I am truly honored to be joining you here at the FCA Canadian National Convention to speak on a topic that I assure you I have never addressed in public before: What would Jesus […]
