IO 80: Out of Left Field, a Perfect Storm

Kathy Witterick and her husband, David Stocker, are raising their 4-month-old child, Storm, without revealing the child’s gender, saying: “We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime.’ On June 23, 2011 the Los Angeles Times featured a front page colored picture of four year-old Kate Eisenpresser, being raised by her three lesbians “mommies,” calling the arrangement “normal.” A recent J. Crew catalog featured a young boy with pink-painted toenails.

Not long ago, such items would have been considered fringe elements, coming out of left field, so to speak. Not any more. Left field is now center-stage. Leading Republicans recently ensured that gay marriage became state law in New York. The sexually abnormal is the new normal, and our children’s future defies description. A worldview tsunami, made of the wildest waves of human fantasy, is bearing down on Western culture, which, shorn of its biblical moorings, will be carried helpless into a nightmare destruction of biblical values. Though proponents of this pan-sexual vision optimistically declare: “We are beginning to see the dark walls of discrimination crumble,” what is crumbling is the foundational building block of Western civilization, the monogamous, heterosexual family — with nothing enduring to put in its place. Al Mohler calls this “a moral revolution,’ and John Piper speaks of “a new calamity.’

The confusion about who we are as sexual beings creates suspicion of all limits on gender roles, as the parents of the appropriately-named “Storm” suggest. These well-meaning folks represent a growing movement, begun by the 1970s Feminists, to eliminate gender from social consideration altogether. Thus college dorms are “gender neutral”; high school homecoming proms pick random male or female “kings” and “queens; and certain State departments have abandoned “father” and “mother” in favor of “parent A” and “parent B.” Support is building for non-gender-designated bathrooms, washrooms and locker rooms.

All this was predicted by ex-Evangelical lesbian, Virginia Mollenkott, who, in her youth, memorized parts of the Westminster Confession of Faith. Sounding like a lone voice in 2001, she published Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach, proposing a then radical paradigm for the future liberation of sexuality — an “omnigender” society in which virtually all sexual choices are normal. Over a decade ago, she called for the elimination of oppressive gender-specific pronouns like “he” and “she,” and “M” and “F” boxes on government application forms, drivers’ licenses, passport applications or marriage forms. She concluded: “When all the variations of human gender and sexuality become acceptable . . . then everyone will be ‘normal’ and ‘normalcy’ will lose its coercive power.” Her predictions have come true, so we should take seriously what she also predicted in 2001: “In all probability, official church policies will be the rear guard on gender, being dragged along towards gender justice kicking and screaming when the secular society will no longer tolerate anything else.”

Church policies are coming along, some even rejoicing, because the liberation of sex has included the liberation of spirituality. By 2001, the “trans-sexual” Mollenkott had become “trans-religious,” a very spiritual pagan One-ist who converted to I Ching divination and the New Age A Course in Miracles. This, too, was no surprise. In 1977 June Singer, a spiritual Jungian psychiatrist, published Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality. Why did we need a new theory about sex? Because we were entering a new age, the Age of Aquarius, which, she affirmed, was also “the Age of Androgyny.” This new day would be a time of true spiritual liberation, including being both male and female in the same person, thus witnessing to “the primordial cosmic unity . . . of monism.”

Faced with this catastrophic moral implosion, the Church must speak out meaningfully on gay marriage, not to save America, not to pick on certain kinds of sinners, but to save souls from eternal doom. The clarity of the Gospel is at stake. Without the unambiguous embodiment of difference (hetero) in our sexuality, as part of the image of God, we begin to lose the essence of who we are as human beings. Only heterosexuality, and especially monogamous heterosexual marriage, reflects both God’s Trinitarian image of unity and difference, and the Gospel, which is the good news that God the Creator, different from us, redeems sinful creatures, to restore personal fellowship based on otherness.

In these deeply religious (why do gays want “marriage”?) issues of human identity, The Church addresses The State, so the only question is: Which church — the Church of Aquarius and of “primordial cosmic unity,” or the Church of Jesus, the image of God, against which the gates of Hell will not prevail? “You’ve gotta serve somebody.’

May our marriages, like the law, bring many to Christ, the true Bridegroom.