Matt Barber is the policy director for cultural issues with Concerned Women for America, a group “helping our members across the country bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy.” Barber thinks that gay people deserve the “due penalty for their perversion,” including death.
Writing for the conservative Townhall, Barber writes:
[T]here are those who… with haughty hearts and sardonic “pride,” willfully choose sin over Christ; death over life.
It’s a self-evident reality which is bolstered by medical science, but Scripture additionally reminds us in both the Old and New Testaments that those who choose to engage in homosexual conduct do so at their own peril.
Consider Romans 1:26-27…
It’s sad when people yield to disordered sexual temptations that can literally kill them spiritually, emotionally and physically. Nobody with any compassion enjoys watching others “[receive] in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.” But a corollary to free will is living (or dying) with the choices we’ve made.
Barber here makes three basic errors. First, he thinks that we should guide our lives according to bigoted comments in an ancient book of mythology. Second, he assumes that homosexuality is sinful temptation, rather than a fundamental orientation of a person developed at least from childhood. Third, he conflates risky sexual activity with homosexuality.
I accept at face value Barber’s claims that male homosexuals (he conveniently forgets about female homosexuals for this point) have higher incidences of various diseases. But the problem is risky sexual behavior with multiple partners (coupled with the greater chance of sharing blood via anal sex), not homosexuality per se.
Heterosexuals who engage in risky sex with multiple partners have a higher incidence of various diseases than do monogamous homosexuals.
Barber moves to a discussion of blood donations. He rightly criticizes “militant homosexual activists” in South Africa who “have been ‘protesting’ by deliberately and surreptitiously violating that nation’s blood ban” of male homosexual donations (again taking his claim at face value).
However, Barber is wrong to paint all homosexuals with the same brush. The fact that a Christian has murdered a practitioner of abortion does not make all Christians murderers.
I’m all for protecting the blood supply; I certainly don’t want to get HIV should I need a transfusion. But a ban on male homosexual donations does not get to the root of the problem, for it prohibits some low-risk people from donating blood, and it allows some high-risk people to donate (though I assume that high-risk heterosexuals are also screened out). The more effective screening question would be: “Have you had anal sex with more than one partner within the last X years?” (A follow-up question could ask about the partner.)
But such a question, though objectively more relevant, doesn’t mention homosexuality, and so it does not fit Barber’s bigoted agenda.
Barber continues:
…Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern has been viciously attacked and ruthlessly maligned, even receiving death threats, for saying publicly that “the homosexual agenda is destroying the nation.” She even went so far as to say that, in her estimation, homosexual behaviors and “gay” activism pose a greater threat than terrorism.
Reasonable people can debate that opinion…
Reasonable people can endorse only one side of that opinion. Anyone who thinks that homosexuals pose a greater threat than Islamic terrorists is suffering from self-induced insanity.
But I do have a couple of questions for Barber, given his faith-based approach to homosexuality. Do you believe that any literature or speech pertaining to homosexuality (including, but not limited to, pornography) should be censored? Do you believe that consenting adults should be subjected to any criminal penalties for practicing homosexuality?
In fact, those would be good questions to ask anyone who claims that homosexuality is prohibited by the Bible.