“Coalition of Conscience” crowd of more than 500 prepares to offer Gospel witness at homosexual “pride” event in Charlotte, N.C. Their message: “God has a better way.” See www.godhasabetterway.com.

Dear Readers,

I commend to you my friend Dr. Michael Brown’s and the Coalition of Conscience’s response to the “gay pride” movement in Charlotte, N.C. In a speech last week to Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ, I said that the appropriate Christian response to homosexual/”trans” activism and homosexual strugglers is a tightrope walk – balancing a witness for truth on the one side and the gracious love of Christ for sinners on the other. I too often fall off that tightrope, but Michael hangs on it as well as any pro-family leader I have observed in the last 20 years. (My only cautionary note is Brown’s use of the term “homophobia” [see this excellent NARTH analysis] – an artificial construct that is now so elastically defined that almost any rejection of homosexualist goals (including same-sex “marriage”) can be and is deemed “homophobic” by “gay” activists and the liberal media. That said, his point it correct: it is wrong to fear and hate men and women trapped in homosexuality – people who need God’s love and grace.)

How I wish that decades ago Christian leaders in Chicago had taken Dr. Brown’s “God has a better way” approach of a mobilized witness against “proud” homosexuality and the dangerous agenda that goes with it. Perhaps if they had, we wouldn’t be seeing the annual, raucous, debauched homosexuality “pride” celebrations on Chicago streets with attendees (“gay” and straight) numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The Church of Jesus Christ in America has largely abdicated its role as a bold witness for truth and Biblical morality in the culture. (And who says proclaiming the Gospel and confronting sexual sin agendas must be mutually exclusive?) I challenged Oklahoma Christians to be as aggressive in defending God’s truth about homosexuality as self-described “queer” activists are in advancing their lies (enumerated below). Such is the spirit that Michael Brown and the Coalition of Conscience have displayed in Charlotte; believers across the nation would do well to learn from and imitate them. – Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH,www.americansfortruth.org

P.S. As if to prove my theory that no matter how loving biblically faithful Christians are, they will always be cast as hateful, “homophobic” bigots by radical “queer” activists, click HERE to read homosexual militant Wayne Besen’s response to Michael Brown’s “God has a better way” campaign. It is vicious, even by Besen’s low standard.
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STATEMENT TO THE MEDIA, JULY 25, 2009
GOD HAS A BETTER WAY RALLY, CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA

DR. MICHAEL BROWN, DIRECTOR, THE COALITION OF CONSCIENCE [links added by AFTAH]
www.coalitionofconscience.org; www.godhasabetterway.com

We are here today to reach out and resist — to reach out to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community with compassion, as neighbors and friends and fellow-workers, and to declare God’s great love for GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender] people. And we are here to resist the gay activist agenda and to send a message to the nation.

As followers of Jesus, we first confess our own sins — our lack of ardent love for homosexual men and women, our lack of compassion for their struggles, our adding to their sense of rejection through insensitive words and deeds.

We acknowledge the fact that homophobia is alive and well in some churches, and we renounce and repudiate that hateful and destructive attitude.

Our love also compels us to speak the truth, and we do not believe that all sexual orientations should be celebrated.

We do not celebrate the fact that some people believe they are women trapped in men’s bodies;

We do not celebrate the fact that two men or two women cannot reproduce their own unique offspring and that same-sex families guarantee that a child will never have either a mother or a father;

We do not celebrate the fact that some people choose to surgically mutilate their God-given organs and must take hormones for the rest of their lives just to be at peace with themselves;

We do not celebrate the sexual confusion that exists in many young people today, to the point that they can only identify themselves “as genderqueer”;

We do not celebrate the pain and brokenness that exists in the lives of many of those attending Pride Charlotte today — completely apart from societal rejection — and we proclaim to our GLBT friends that God has a better way, that there is a place of wholeness and transformation to be found in Jesus. And we are here for the long-term to help them on that journey.

And because of our sense of justice and rightness, we take strong exception to the gay activist agenda. We watch its trajectory, we see where it has gone and where it is going, and we say, “It stops here in Charlotte.”

Since gay pride events have been rallying points for GLBT activism, we take our stand here today and declare:

We don’t believe that elementary school children should be taught to find their “inner-trannie” (meaning their inner transgender identity) as advocated in GLSEN’s training materials.

We don’t believe that it is in the best interest of our society to seek to eradicate gender or to multiply it exponentially.

We completely reject the Los Angeles Unified School District Reference Guide when it states that Gender identity “refers to one’s understanding, interests, outlook, and feelings about whether one is female or male, or both, or neither, regardless of one’s biological sex.”

We don’t believe it is good or right for four-year-old children to have their preschool teachers read them books like One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads or to be lined up by sneaker color rather than gender so they don’t feel “boxed in.”

We don’t believe in “Queering Elementary Education,” to use the title of a well-known book.

We believe it is outrageous when an African American woman is fired from her university position of vice-president of human resources because she writes an editorial objecting to the concept that sexual orientation is equivalent to skin color.

We believe it is outrageous for the media to cover up the gay identity of a sexual predator who repeatedly raped his adopted, five-year-old African American son and offered him for sex through the internet – for fear of making homosexual couples look bad.

We believe it is outrageous for the mayor of San Francisco to welcome warmly a public fair featuring nude, sado-masochistic displays, and to do so in the name of “diversity.”

And what does it say of our country today when our president, in the White House, could say “We are very proud of you” to a man who leads an organization devoted to making harder core pornography more readily available and who says that bestiality is fine as long as the animal doesn’t mind?

We don’t believe in fining a Christian photographer in New Mexico for politely declining to shoot a lesbian commitment ceremony, or punishing an Anglican bishop in England for choosing not to hire an openly gay youth worker, or for putting a lifetime ban on Christian leaders in Canada, forbidding them from expressing the biblical teaching on homosexual practice and threatening them with imprisonment.

We don’t believe in laws that could jail the owner of a Christian bookstore for choosing not to hire a cross-dresser as a receptionist.

We don’t believe in a Hate Crimes bill that is so flawed that even the ACLU is concerned that it could restrict freedom of speech.

We don’t believe it is right for major Charlotte-based companies like Bank of America and Wachovia and Duke Energy to pour tens of thousands of dollars into a radical organization like the Human Rights Campaign, an organization that has stated that supporters of male-female marriage are “right wing extremists” and that mandates that businesses must have special bathroom accommodations for employees undergoing sex-change surgery.

We are saddened by the fact that some of those who came out of the closet forty years now are now trying to put conservative Christians in the closet.

We don’t believe in tampering with the foundations of human society — male-female marriage and family — and creating a new institution previously unknown in human history.

We utterly reject the new theologies that advocate “Queering Christ” and writing “Queer Commentaries” on the Bible, and we say to Charlotte and the nation, “By God’s grace, it stops here.”

So, we say “Enough is enough” to the destructive goals of gay activism, and we say to the GLBT community, “Jesus loves you and God has a better way!”