According to today’s Wall Street Journal, a homosexual activist named John Becker owes Marcus Bachmann’s counseling practice $150 for failing to cancel two counseling appointments. Becker disputes this, asserting that he canceled the appointments on time and therefore owes nothing. As a result, Bachmann has told the gay rights organization “Truth Wins Out,” under whose auspices Becker secretly filmed an interview session with a Bachmann counselor in an effort to get anti-homosexual comments on tape (Becker failed; the counselor was tasteful and helpful throughout) that he will turn the bill over to a collection agency unless it is paid forthwith.

Bachmann, whose wife is running for the presidency and is therefore a target of activists who oppose his views on traditional marriage, argues that “it’s not the amount of money. For us, it’s the principle.” Imagine that: a business owner standing up for his staff and himself, using legal means to do so, and insisting that since Becker “signed a contract that stated he would pay for no-shows,” that Becker be held to account.

All I know of the case is what the Journal reports. If Becker is telling the truth – that he canceled his meetings in an appropriate time-frame – let him prove it. If he’s not, let him pay what he owes.

This is not a “petty and vindictive campaign of harassment and threats” against “Truth Wins Out,” as the group’s director, Wayne Besen, asserts. It’s about responsibility, keeping one’s word, and paying what is owed. “A promise made,” wrote the poet Robert Service, “is a debt unpaid.” Enough said.

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I went to theological seminary in Portland, Oregon.  That might sound rather ensconced and safe, but I worked at a large commercial bakery in a run-down industrial section of the city.  This exposed me to some things I would rather have not seen, as when, driving along a side-street one evening, I found myself running a narrow gauntlet of hectoring prostitutes; I drove away as fast as I could.

Portland has a justified reputation for urban renewal and natural beauty.  Bisected by the Willamette River and set among lush, fir-laden hills, Portland’s charm is hard to forget.

Yet now, as Katelyn Beaty documents in her moving article about the sex trafficking trade in the City of Roses (that would be Portland; I proposed to my wife in the city’s massive rose-test garden, albeit in the winter when none were in bloom), Portland has become perhaps the single most dominant city in one of the ugliest “industries” ever devised – the trafficking of persons for sexual purposes.  Veteran journalist Dan Rather has called Portland “Pornland,” and according to Joslyn Baker of the Multnomah County (Portland area) unit that specializes in child prostitution,  “most Portlanders accepted the ubiquitous strip clubs as part of their premium on individual freedom—until February 2009, when the FBI swept the Portland-Vancouver area and found seven underage girls, the most in any FBI raid at the time. With the ensuing national media coverage, Portlanders began realizing that their lucrative sex industry is the main ‘gateway’ for pimping children.”

Christians are fighting back, with love and tenacity.  They have now started the Oregon Center for Christian Voices (OCCV), which over the past four years “has … become Oregon’s flagship nonprofit for passing laws that make it harder to sexually exploit children. In the same four years, two Christians in Portland’s leading assault advocacy group and police department have created a unique model for assisting underage victims. Their model earned their county a $500,000 federal grant that created a special committee on CSEC (‘commercial sexual exploitation of children’).”  Additionally, Oregon State Legislator Andy Olson (R-Albany) “has worked with OCCV to try to amend Oregon’s Constitution (whose free speech provisions open the door for prostitution and illicit sexuality among youth). A Christian, he calls trafficking a ‘family values issue.’”

Rep. Olson is dead right, and the noble efforts of committed Christians to change Portland’s culture of prostitution and sex trafficking are animated by the same spirit of sacrifice and compassion that led the early believers to rescue unwanted babies from the Roman ash-heaps.  As Shoshan Tama-Sweet, executive director of the Oregon Center for Christian Voices, told journalist Beaty: “The church has something special: We have the Good News.  We have a vision of the way the world is supposed to be. And it doesn’t include the rape of children on our streets.  When you realize that God loved every victim when they were born, that he’s with them every day they’re traumatized—it’s incumbent on believers to protect them, to help them become whole, and to insist that, in our society, we are not going to tolerate the antithesis of God’s beloved community.”

I believe Mr. Tama-Sweet is among those Jesus is unashamed to call brothers (Hebrews 2:11).  May God bless him and his colleagues in their efforts.

Earlier this year, FRC held two events focusing on human trafficking and what Christians can do to fight it.  You can view them here and here.

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Two acts of vandalism were committed in recent days against facilities associated with the debates over homosexuality—one on each side of the issue.

In Arlington Heights, Illinois, bricks were thrown through the glass doors and windows of the Christian Liberty Academy. That night, the Christian school was to host a banquet put on by Americans for Truth about Homosexuality (AFTAH), a pro-family organization led by Peter LaBarbera. The banquet was to feature presentation of an award to Scott Lively, another pro-family activist who heads Abiding Truth Ministries.

In the other incident, an office door and two display cases of the GLBT Center at North Carolina State University in Raleigh were defaced with spray paint, including an anti-gay epithet.

Both acts of vandalism were contemptible, and Family Research Council (FRC) condemns them both equally. The debates over homosexuality, however emotional they may become, should be carried on peacefully by those on both sides. Physical attacks on people or property are never justified. (Will liberal groups join us in equally denouncing both acts? The Southern Poverty Law Center, which is quick to accuse conservatives of “hate,” chose to blame the victims, criticizing the attackers in Illinois primarily for “[a]dding fuel to a fire started and stoked by anti-gay activists.”)

So are there any differences between these two incidents? Yes. There is not the slightest evidence that the spray paint attack at NC State had any connection with any religious or political organization or public policy issue, or that it was perpetrated by anyone other than a lone thug.

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The New York Times ran a stunning story yesterday “Contraceptive Use May Double Risk of H.I.V.“, about a new study published today in the Lancet showing that hormonal contraceptive use is strongly correlated with an increased vulnerability to contracting HIV/AIDS.

The study was conducted in seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the region most impacted by HIV/AIDS in the world. Three thousand, seven hundred and ninety serodiscordant couples (one partner is HIV positive and one is not) participated in the longitudinal study running for six years, from 2004-2010. The bottom line? Women who used hormonal contraception had a “two-times increased risk of acquiring HIV.” Additionally, women who were using hormonal contraceptives were significantly more likely to transmit HIV to their partners.

The NYT reports that the World Health Organization is convening a meeting in January to review the latest research about the relationship between hormonal contraceptives and HIV/AIDS vulnerability and review if/how current recommendations require revisions.

For more information click here.

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A recent Relevant magazine piece entitled “(Almost) Everyone’s Doing it” reveals that young adults ages 18-29 are having pre-marital sex more often than not. According to a 2009 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 88% of all young adults have had sex before marriage. What should be shocking is that 80% of all self-identified Evangelical young adults have done the same.

Don’t Christians understand the Bible on this issue? According to a Gallup poll quoted by Relevant, 76% of Evangelicals have a clear Biblical understanding on this issue. Or, to reverse the data, 24% of Evangelicals are alright with premarital sex.

Is the data really shocking though? In a world where nothing is sacred, and where what used to be considered sacred is now fodder for ridicule via every form of entertainment and media, why should the sanctity of marriage be considered any different? Young adults have grown up in an “MTV” world, where sexuality is glorified in television shows like “Skins” and where one cannot buy groceries without being confronted by magazine covers taunting chastity.

One professor quoted by Relevant says that a major sociological difference that contributes to (but does not excuse) the growing statistic of pre-marital sex is the average age of marriage. He compares Biblical arranged marriages of early adolescents to the current average ages of 28.1 for men and 26.1 for women. I posit that this temptation is not a modern one: Paul addresses it in 1 Cor. 7:8-9. Instead, it can be argued that adults ages 18-29 have grown up in an “instant gratification” society, where patience is no longer a virtue. This is even understood and glorified by secular society, as exemplified by the Black Eyed Peas song “Now Generation” with lyrics like “I just can’t wait, I need it immediately.”

Merge the two contributing factors of an over-sexualized society, along with a generation craving instant gratification, and it is no surprise that young adults are engaging in pre-marital sex more than ever. What we need is an Evangelical culture that not only volitionally is against pre-marital sex, but practices what is preached. The church needs to restore that which is sacred, encourage young adults to stay pure, and exemplify purity to the secular world. Eighty percent of young Evangelicals is eighty percent too much.

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This is Part 2 of a 2-part blog post based on the transcript of the Proposition 8 trial–the legal challenge to the state constitutional amendment, adopted by California voters in 2008, which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Today (Monday, September 19), Broadway will be the scene of a star-studded “staged reading” of a new play–one based on the transcript of the trial in the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger (now known as Perry v. Brown). The unprecedented trial, presided over by the (then closeted, now “out”) homosexual judge Vaughn Walker, resulted in Walker’s opinion in August 2010 declaring that the male-female definition of marriage violates the U. S. Constitution. The ruling is currently on appeal in the Ninth Circuit.

Yet the testimony of one of the actual plaintiffs in the case, Sandra Stier, undermines the argument by same-sex “marriage” advocates that “gay people are denied the fundamental right to marry just because of ‘who they are.’” It also directly contradicts Judge Walker’s “finding of fact” number 51: “Marrying a person of the opposite sex is an unrealistic option for gay and lesbian individuals.” In fact, Stier’s testimony undermines two of the most fundamental premises of the entire homosexual movement–the claims that people are “born gay,” and that a person’s sexual orientation can never change.

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On Monday, September 19, Broadway will be the scene of a star-studded “staged reading” of a new play—one based on the transcript of the trial in the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger (now known as Perry v. Brown).

The Perry case is the federal constitutional challenge to Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman which was adopted by California voters in 2008. The unprecedented trial, presided over by the (then closeted, now “out”) homosexual judge Vaughn Walker, resulted in Walker’s stunningly biased opinion in August 2010 declaring that the male-female definition of marriage violates the U. S. Constitution. The ruling is currently on appeal in the Ninth Circuit—but if upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court, it would force the legalization of same-sex “marriage” on all fifty states (overturning the constitutions of thirty).

The play, titled simply “8,” was written by homosexual writer Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for the biopic “Milk,” about the murdered homosexual San Francisco politician Harvey Milk. Actors Morgan Freeman and John Lithgow will portray attorneys David Boies and Ted Olson, the prominent Democratic and Republican attorneys (respectively) who teamed up to argue the case against Proposition 8. The one-night reading is a fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the organization formed to finance the lawsuit.

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A study released earlier this week by sociologists at the University of Buffalo shows an area where men and women are NOT equal: oversexualization in the media. “Opportunity Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone”  reveals that women have become increasingly overly-sexualized by the media over the last few decades whereas men are not increasingly viewed in this demeaning and harmful way.

This is a “lose-lose” in that not only does the oversexualization of women have negative ramifications for a healthy understanding and anthropology of the dignity of women, and ultimately lead to exploitation of women and girls with such as things as child pornography and sex trafficking, but it is getting worse and worse as time goes on.

For more information you can read the study here.

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Last month’s Senate hearing on a bill to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) featured a clash between Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) and one of the witnesses defending DOMA, Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family.

Minnery’s testimony referred to the social science evidence showing children do best when raised by their own mother and father. He referred to one such study in his prepared testimony this way:

“In fact, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services explains in its new and exhaustive report, Family Structure and Children’s Health in the United States: Findings from the National Health Interview Survey, 2001-2007, that children living with their own married biological or adoptive mothers and fathers were generally healthier and happier, had better access to health care, less likely to suffer mild or severe emotional problems, did better in school, were protected from physical, emotional and sexual abuse and almost never live in poverty, compared with children in any other family form.”

Franken, however, triumphantly noted that in fact, these superior outcomes were associated with “nuclear” families, defined as “one or more children living with two parents who are married to one another and are each biological or adoptive parents to all children in the family.” Since the definition made no mention of the gender of the “married” parents, he concluded that “nuclear” families could be headed by “married” homosexual couples, too.

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Have you ever wondered what it was like to be a federal prosecutor taking on the ugly, arrogant criminals in the porn industry, and winning?

Wonder no more, and read this interesting PBS interview of Bruce Taylor from 2001.

Bruce is the most experienced porn prosecutor in our history and, in my opinion, a national treasure.

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This week CBS online reported that Playboy is getting out of the pornography business.   According to Jim Edwards of Bnet, the whole commercial porn industry is tanking.  He cites Playboy’s losses of $15 million last year on revenue of just $55 million (down 9 percent from the previous year), as well as the declining revenues of other companies and cable pay-per-view porn.

Wouldn’t you just like to gloat?  I sure would.  That reaction might be misplaced.

As for Playboy, while it will no longer actually make pornography, CEO Scott Flanders says the company is moving into “brand management,” licensing its name and logos.  So it could survive and thrive yet.

And the assumption from every quarter is that the hits to this vile industry are due not to some beneficent cause but to the glut of free porn on the Internet and elsewhere.  It could be even worse than that.  My friend Donna Rice Hughes, who heads Enough is Enough, believes it’s not quantity but content:  the big industry leaders can’t compete with the type of deviant hard-core material that is now available on the Internet.

I hope she’s wrong.  Whether it’s big porn syndicates tied in with organized crime or “mom and pop” amateurs dumping more and more deviant material on the Internet, the heart of the issue is still the same.  As Bruce Taylor, the nation’s most experienced porn prosecutor, told PBS:  “It’s still the same industry.  These are a bunch of pimps who make hardcore porn […] by hiring people, turning them into prostitutes, and then distributing illegal obscenity.”

The problem is the same, and so is the solution.  These people are violating long-standing federal obscenity laws.  Prosecute them and convict them.  It’s deceptively simple.  Enforce the law, and the Internet porn industry will decline.

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Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) husband recently came under attack for his involvement in Christian-based counseling for individuals with unwanted homosexual attractions. While it is no surprise to see Christianity under assault from homosexual activists, these groups are also on the wrong side of medical research. In this interview with Washington Watch Weekly, FRC President Tony Perkins speaks with Dr. Julie Hamilton, President of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), about what the research shows and the importance of using this successful therapy to help patients achieve their self-identified goals.

Listen to the interview here.

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Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are trying to raise awareness about child trafficking and prostitution in the United States and have created a technology task force to create solutions to end human trafficking online. Their blunt slogan is, “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls,” and they’re recruiting celebrities to make this pledge and spread the word. Here’s a video from their launch.

Good for them; they could be spending all of their free time (and money) redecorating their homes.

The sleezy yet still influential Village Voice mocked Kutcher saying he wildly inflated the number of girls who are sex trafficked in the United States. That number is notoriously hard to get, but Kutcher and his program are working with NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a source to be trusted. Not only did the Voice play down the problem – suggesting, ludicrously, that the number of actual arrests gives some scope of the problem — but Kutcher is right to point to the Voice as potentially part of the problem. Turn to their back pages and see dozens of ads for prostitutes. (They call people like us who support laws against prostitution “prohibitionists.”)
Good for Kutcher. He slammed the Voice with a tirade of late night Tweets. A sampling:

Hey @villagevoice hows the lawsuit from the 15 year old victim who alleges you helped enslave them going?
Hey @villagevoice speaking of data, maybe you can help me… How much $ did your “escorts” in you classifieds on backpage make last year?
Hey @villagevoice speaking of Data… How many of your girls selling themselves in your classifieds are you doing age verification on?
Hey @villagevoice Find another way to justify that YOUR property facilitates the sale of HUMAN BEINGS
Hey @villagevoice if you want to dispute the online data I’ve collected about the consumption of child porn or the hard facts from NCMEC lmk
Hey @villagevoice REAL MEN DON’T BUY GIRLS and REAL NEWS PUBLICATIONS DON’T SELL THEM

Read more on the Kutcher-Village Voice face-off here.

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Efforts to legalize homosexual “marriage” in New York remain stalled, at this writing, with the supporters of redefining marriage needing one more Republican vote in the state’s Senate.

Reports indicate that efforts are underway to draft expanded “religious exemptions” that could protect the liberty of religious organizations that disapprove of homosexual conduct or of homosexual “marriage.”

It is true that pro-family groups (including FRC) have argued that legalizing homosexual “marriage” would create a threat to religious liberty. The most often cited example is how Catholic Charities was forced out of the adoption business in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia after those jurisdictions legalized homosexual “marriage,” because the group was unwilling to compromise its principles by placing adoptive children with homosexual couples.

But even if religious non-profits like Catholic Charities were to be protected, what about Christians in business, like the wedding photographer in New Mexico who was sued for declining to photograph a homosexual commitment ceremony?

The only kind of religious exemption broad enough to completely protect rights of conscience—one saying, basically, “Any person, organization, or business that does not approve of same-sex ‘marriage’ will not be required to recognize homosexual relationships as ‘marriages’”—would be completely unacceptable to the advocates of homosexual “marriage.” Forcing the rest of society to affirm and celebrate homosexual relationships is precisely the goal of their movement.

However, even such an absolute religious and conscientious exemption to a homosexual “marriage” bill would not make the redefinition of marriage acceptable, or even tolerable, for one simple reason—the principal objection to homosexual “marriage” has nothing to do with religion. This is something that people on both sides of this debate need to be constantly reminded of.

We are not just fighting for “the right of religions to define marriage for themselves,” apart from the definition of “civil marriage.” This is because, at its heart, marriage is neither a civil institution nor a religious institution.

Instead, marriage is a natural institution—rooted in the order of nature itself.

The reason marriage is defined as the union of one man and one woman is because it takes precisely one man and one woman to create a new human life. Marriage is treated as a public institution because it is in the public interest (not just in the private interest of particular couples) for the human race to reproduce and continue into future generations.

It is also in the public interest for society to work at bonding each child to the mother and father whose sexual union produced them. This was evident even to the ancients, but modern social science has confirmed—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that children raised by their own married mother and father are happier, healthier, and more prosperous than children raised in any other living situation.

I wrote a pamphlet earlier this year listing “The Top Ten Harms of Same-Sex ‘Marriage.’” The threat to religious liberty was only one out of the ten. Even if that harm could be thoroughly forestalled—a grade of 10% is still a failing grade.

The core message of the opposition to homosexual “marriage” is not just, “Don’t make us perform same-sex weddings in our church.” Instead, it is: “Society needs children, and children need a mom and a dad.”

That’s true whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, or an atheist.

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In October 2010, the Australian Human Rights Commission published a “discussion paper” on “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and sex and/or gender identity.”  According the Commission, there are the categories of “LGBTI” – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexuals and intersexuals.  That would seem rather comprehensive, but the Commission is only beginning:

“Gender can be understood as a person looking, dressing or acting as male or female. Some people do not have a gender identity that is either exclusively male or female. Some people do not have a gender identity that is linked to their sex.  The phrase sex and/or gender identity is used in this paper as a broad term to refer to diverse sex and/or gender identities and expressions. It includes being transgender, trans, transsexual and intersex. It also includes being androgynous, agender, a cross dresser, a drag king, a drag queen, genderfluid, genderqueer, intergender, neutrois, pansexual, pan-gendered, a third gender, and a third sex. It also includes culturally specific terms, such as sistergirl and brotherboy, which are used by some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”

Whatever these various terms mean, biologically, there are two sexes.  On very rare occasions, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, hermaphroditism can occur, but this can be corrected surgically and through hormonal treatments.

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Jim Wallis’s Sojourners’ magazine has decided not to publish an ad by “Believe Out Loud,” an organization which describes itself as follows:

We believe Jesus’ message compels us to welcome all, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. Show the world that you can be Christian AND believe in LGBT equality. Join the movement to unite a million Christians for LGBT equality in the church and beyond.

Although in past years, Sojourners has taken stridently liberal positions on all manner of hotly-contested issues, tacitly endorsing homosexuality is, apparently, too far a stretch.  “Sojourners’ constituency, board, and staff are not of one mind on all of these issues,” wrote Wallis at the Sojourners blog this week.

This indubitably is true: At least one of the publication’s Board members, Ron Sider, is a signer of the Manhattan Declaration, as is contributing editor Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.  In signing the Declaration, they  joined other signatories (including this author) in affirming that “we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and to rebuild the marriage culture. How could we, as Christians, do otherwise?”  How, indeed.

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Last week, the journal Pediatrics published a study designed to bolster the political case for pro-homosexual policies in schools.

The Associated Press described the findings this way: “Suicide attempts by gay teens — and even straight kids — are more common in politically conservative areas where schools don’t have programs supporting gay rights.”

The study’s author, Mark Hatzenbuehler of Columbia University, called his findings “a call to action in providing a roadmap for how we can begin to reduce suicide in LGB youth.”

Enact anti-discrimination policies that include “sexual orientation” as a protected category, adopt anti-bullying policies that give special protections to homosexuals instead of protecting everyone equally, and form pro-homosexual “gay-straight alliances” in the schools, and you will save lives, he appears to be saying. (Oh, and it also helps to have more homosexual couples and registered Democrats living in your county.)

Those five variables were used as a measure of the “social environment.” The study, based on self-reports in a survey of young people across Oregon, found:

Among LGB [lesbian, gay, bisexual] youth, the risk of attempting suicide was 20% greater in negative environments compared with positive environments (25.47% of LGB living in negative environments attempted suicide at least once [in the last year] versus 20.37% in positive environments).

But to focus on the results this way is to ignore the study’s most significant finding. Reuters did a much better job than AP in identifying it, beginning its story this way:

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Lila Rose, President, Live Action and Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council talk about Live Action’s undercover videos of Planned Parenthood. To watch the entire webcast, click here.

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How you can protect your children from the dangers of child pornography and sex trafficking. Watch Bob Flores, former Administrator of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJD), and Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council to learn more. You can view the rest of the webcast by clicking here.

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Are your children at risk? Samantha Vardaman, Senior Director of Shared Hope International, and Tony Perkins, President of FRC, talk about the growing number of American children exploited and trapped by Sex Traffickers. Samantha lists signs to watch for in safeguarding our children.

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