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LGBTQ+

Homosexuality, in all of its forms, is not good.

Perhaps most of those who refer to themselves as progressive or atheist agree with so many conservatives and Christians that the greatest commandment given to humanity is to "love your neighbor as yourself." Because it is the foremost principle on which the practice and support of homosexuality supposedly rests, it behooves us to explore the concept of love.

WHAT IS LOVE? (Baby, don't hurt me - no more.)

Frequently confused with feelings of attraction or infatuation, fondness or preference, tolerance or acceptance, true love is, at its foundation, correctly understood as "the commitment to the good of another." If you disagree with this definition, please ask yourself, "Can I rightly say I love the one whose good I'm not committed to?"

Infatuation and attraction are not love. Otherwise, we reduce love to a meaningless, uncontrollable impulse. If love is attraction, then to love our neighbor as we love ourselves is to be as physically attracted to others as we are to ourselves. If that's the case, the most narcissistic among us have the greatest potential for love. Moreover, if infatuation is love, and we ought to love everyone, should we force ourselves to be infatuated with every human we encounter? Is that even possible? No, we must not confuse fleeting feelings of attraction with love, for even the rapist is infatuated with his victim.

Then what of love as "fondness" or "preference"? The terms love and hate might be used colloquially as the furthest extension of like and dislike, as in "to love Moonbills coffee" or "to hate vexatious IKEA furniture," but to relegate love as being synonymous merely with "what is preferred" is to make love so common, subjective and impotent as to be virtually meaningless. I may prefer my children over my neighbor's, but that doesn't mean I'll work to feed or clothe any of them. If I want to love my children truly, I will commit myself to their health and safety - to their good. To describe what is preferred or not, use the words "like" and "dislike." Love is not preference.

Also masquerading as love are the leftist tenets of Tolerance, Acceptance, and Inclusion, herein referred to as "TAI." Though we won't offer a comprehensive treatment of the absurdity of this redefining of love, some low-hanging fruit demands our attention.

First, TAI, by definition, requires "tolerating" behavior you find to be intolerable, "accepting" what you think is unacceptable, or "including" someone or something that you usually would not. What vocal supporters of TAI don't want you to realize is that they already fully approve of and embrace the things they want you to TAI. And if you expect the same courtesy back, that they would TAI your fondness of merit or Biblical morality, they will flatly refuse. Remember, though they act like TAI is an absolute moral standard, it is just a requirement for you, never for them.

Second, TAI is frequently the opposite of loving. Everyone would agree that it is not loving to tolerate your uncle's self-destructive alcoholism, to accept a band of murderous gang members into your family's home, or to include a pedophile at your child's birthday party. No, love is often intolerant, not accepting, and non-inclusive. As an absolute moral standard, TAI is self-refuting in this very way, as it would have to tolerate intolerance, accept non-acceptance, and include non-inclusion - it would literally have to tolerate, accept, and include opposition to itself.

Lastly, as leftists push people begrudgingly into accepting all manner of things that seem dysfunctional, harmful, or horrendous, TAI often manifests not as loving inclusion but as indifference since people who would usually object instead look the other way. And, as people become accustomed to keeping their proverbial mouths shut, they begin to fall into a false sense of security, believing that their tolerance and acceptance of, for example, their uncle's self-destructive alcoholism are displays of love. In reality, as we withhold judgment and correction, we are allowing our loved ones to destroy their lives.

True love often looks like the opposite of TAI.

WHAT IS GOOD?

Because love is the commitment to someone's good, what is objectively "good" must also be established. As with love, "good" is often confused with preference. But "good" is not merely what someone prefers. Though we could undergo a vast exploration and analysis of what is and isn't good, we will say that those things that are morally right or neutral and functional are good… such as a warm, healthy drink on a cool spring morning. Conversely, all morally wrong things are not good, including those things that seem to be in some way functional, such as fornication, adultery, drunkenness, abortion, or homosexuality.

The most brilliant thinkers admit that without God, there is no right, wrong, good, or evil. Proving the existence of God and absolute morality is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say we agree with Nietzsche that morality and God are inextricably linked. Without God, everything is relative. No opinion is more valuable than another. Without God, a drug dealer who thinks it's good to make a living getting 8th graders addicted to meth is no less correct than one who wants kids to stay off drugs and excel at school. In a world where EVERYTHING and ANYTHING can be considered good - nothing is.

We once asked an atheist high school student, "Was it absolutely wrong that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews?" to which she replied, "It was right for them." That's philosophical consistency. If you don't believe in God, you acknowledge that there is nothing inherent in any action which makes it morally wrong. There is only what one person prefers vs what another prefers. Some prefer life, and some prefer death; some prefer work, and some prefer theft; some prefer The Beatles, and some prefer listening to Christmas music in September.

Right and wrong, and good and evil only exist if God exists. And God does exist. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen so that they are without excuse. God wrote his moral code on our hearts, and we can know what is good by looking to Him. Can you rightly say you love the one whose good you are not committed to? We boldly assert that if God does not exist, there is no such thing as objective good, and if there is no such thing as good, there is no such thing as love.

HATRED AND APATHY.

While hate is to desire the destruction of another, apathy is the indifference thereof. Though we resist admitting it, rather than love, many or even all people on both sides of the political, ideological, and religious aisles dislike (that is, do not prefer), are indifferent toward (apathetic), or even hate (desire the destruction of) different individuals or people groups.

Dislike or hatred of one human by another is usually motivated by a fixation on differences, which fall under three general categories:

People agree that we should love each other, but in reality, we hate or don't care for far more people than we love. Frequently, what we think is our love is, in fact, apathy. Nothing is more demonstrative of apathy than tolerance for or acceptance of others' self-destructive behavior. The one who looks the other way or goes so far as to encourage a so-called "trans" person to mutilate their own body either hates that person, is confused, or doesn't care.

Truly, apathy is at the heart of the leftist worldview. It's the mindset that won't be bothered with what doesn't affect me and declares, "What you do in your bedroom is up to you. Just leave me out of it." We agree with the first part, as everything one does is their choice. But we love the trans person enough to warn them, "Before you go cutting off your breasts or penis, please consider the existence of detransitioners and just… think about it."

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

MOTIVATION.

It might seem as though any action taken superficially in the interest of the good of another is evidence of love - but true love ultimately comes down to motivation.

My wife is disgusted by the smell and sight (and probably by the sound, taste, and feel, too?) of vomit, but she nevertheless cares for our children when they are vomiting. The motivation that drives one to endure such things is usually love. But she can also be externally motivated. For example, if I threaten her, and she helps them only to avoid some consequence, her actions are not an expression of love for them but for herself. Alternatively, she may want to help them out of a desire to be perceived a certain way, to keep up appearances; lacking the motivation of commitment to their good means, she is not acting out of love. And, of course, it goes without saying that if, in her disgust, she cannot bear to help them, and they are absent any other form of assistance, an onlooker would be right to conclude at that moment that she doesn't love them. She may pity them, but one who is not committed to the good of another lacks love.

Do you give a panhandler money because you believe doing so is in his best interest? Or do you hand over that $20 bill to feel good about yourself? Do you wash the dishes for your wife to help her or to get her to stop nagging you? And do we say that homosexuality in all of its forms is wrong out of self-righteousness and a desire to control others, or do we say it because we are committed to the good of the LGBTQ+ community?

Love is hard. It takes an immense amount of sincerity and effort to love someone truly. It cannot merely look like what you do or abstain from is in the interest of one's good; it has to actually be.

LOVE IS A CHOICE.

A commitment is the conscious choice to obligate oneself to perform in accordance with a proposition.

People often say things like, "We just fell out of love," or "You can't choose who you fall in love with." But what they mean is that you can't choose who you are physically attracted to. Love and attraction are not the same thing. Though you may not get to choose who you find attractive, committing yourself to someone's good is ALWAYS a conscious choice. In other words, love is NOT something you fall into, and being attracted to someone is never a requirement for loving them.

Wedding vows usually involve a promise to obligate oneself to another's good, for better or worse, until death. That's love. The selfishness of marrying someone expected to "make me happy" is a prime cause of the divorce epidemic. Marriage should be a man and a woman, each seeking not their own, but each other's good. If husbands and wives fussed only over each other's good, if they LOVED each other, divorce would vanish.

Because it is a choice, one cannot force true love. While you could chain a man up in your basement and force him to live with you as a husband (but… don't.), you cannot force him to be motivated by a commitment to your good. Each of us decides how to dispose ourselves toward another, and consequently, the ability to love cannot exist without the ability to hate. If you want to know the answer to the problem of evil, we believe this is it. God allows evil because the possibility of even a little true love is worth enduring much hate - and people must be able to express hate if the choice to express love is to mean anything.

We are all free to decide what we love and what we hate. Any attempt to force one to love or to "not hate" should be considered futile mind control. And so, rather than fruitlessly trying to force people to love one person or hate another, we ought to teach the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, and that humanity ought to love their neighbor as themselves.

"LOVE" SUMMARIZED

Love isn't just two people sleeping in a bed together. It's the decision to obligate oneself to perform in accordance with the objective good of another. Being committed to another's good is a heart attitude that can only be a choice, and it's a choice each of us is presented with thousands of times a day, every single day. Often, where another's good directly conflicts with our desires, our self-interest precludes us from choosing to love someone else. That's why 1 Corinthians 13 says love does not "seek its own."

Scripture is living water.

IS HOMOSEXUALITY GOOD?

Objective good only exists if God exists.

If the absolute arbiter of right and wrong (God) doesn't exist, there is no such thing as objective good. If the Judeo-Christian God exists, homosexuality is objectively wrong. Either way, homosexuality is not good. (1 Cor 6:9-10, Rom 1:26-27, Mark 10:6, Deut 22:5, Jude 1:7, Gen 2:24).

Those who warn about the dangers of homosexuality are justified to do so whether God exists or not because we are either entitled to our subjective viewpoint just as everyone else in this accidental, purposeless, indifferent world or because our belief is not in vain, and the true God of the universe opposes homosexuality.

WHY OPPOSE HOMOSEXUALITY?

Homosexuality is a perversion of God's design, is harmful to those who practice it and has therefore been strictly prohibited by the very Designer of sexuality.

We do not fear or despise those who live out an LGBTQ+ lifestyle. On the contrary, we love them enough to share the love of Christ with them and encourage them to acknowledge objective truth, right and wrong, good and evil, and endeavor with us to stop living in sin.

There are a variety of factors that lead an individual to ignore or resist our default heterosexual setting in favor of a homosexual lifestyle. For the last century, common factors included rejection or abuse by the opposite sex, childhood exposure to same-sex pornography, and same-sex childhood molestation.

As the prevailing public reaction to homosexuality has moved from stigmatization through tolerance, and now a fashion statement, LGBTQ+ lifestyles are increasingly adopted in the interest of satisfying curiosity, seeking community, satisfying a need to belong, succumbing to peer pressure, and even in response to societal advocacy/indoctrination. As with drug use, experimentation with various forms of homosexuality can be a response to trauma, a coping mechanism to distract from loneliness, depression, or other pain. One can presumably be inclined toward homosexuality absent any of the circumstances mentioned above, but we believe that such cases are rare. In other words, homosexuality is most often a choice but sometimes the result of abuse and mental illness.

LGBTQ Proponents may ask, "What studies or evidence can you cite to corroborate your claims?" and to that, we ask, "What evidence would convince you that you're wrong?" the answer, of course, is "nothing." Nothing would convince them because belief is a choice, and those who are not committed to truth will always uncritically reject evidence and arguments against their position in favor of a baseless assertion from their favorite biased pandering "expert" (2 Tim 4:3-4).

The reality is that those in the LGBTQ+ community, especially those who call themselves "trans," have the highest suicide rate in the country. Leftists argue that disproportionate homosexual suicide is the result of bullying and lump all words of opposition to LGBTQness under the bullying umbrella (yet another example of how they like to redefine terms). If bullying were the cause, wouldn't we see disproportionate suicide rates in other bullied groups, such as the obese? A study examining the relationship between obesity and suicide ideation among young adults in the United States found that "Not only was body weight not related to young women's odds of suicide ideation, but overweight men had significantly lower odds of suicide ideation compared to men who were normal or healthy weight." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9079098/

While true bullying of anyone is a problem, any word of opposition to homosexuality is not, by definition, "bullying." When an LGBTQ+ suicide occurs under the bullying pretext, leftists claim the victim was "killed" by a lack of encouragement and acceptance. We call this false dichotomy "encourage or kill." Just as many will overlook the sleight of hand when Tolerance, Acceptance, and Inclusion subtly replace love, a bait and switch is occurring with ‘encourage or kill’ as well. Encouragement to mitigate suicide is not necessarily love, and discouraging bad behavior is not killing. Furthermore, suicidal tendencies within a given group are not the sole validator of its behaviors.

Suppose mass quantities of serial killers are suicidal - and their suicide rates decrease when they are encouraged to murder people. In that event, would rational people begin promoting murder? Of course not. That's because murder is wrong, and no quantity of suicidal serial killers justifies it. The same is true of homosexuality. It's wrong, and the fact that those who engage in it are suicidal should not evoke our encouragement but an urgent concern over the correlation between their chosen lifestyle and the depression and hopelessness it leads to.

Like TAI, "encourage or kill" is a standard forced only on conservatives. Leftists wish for us to encourage only the behaviors and ideas which they value. They will not reciprocate - even if we're suicidal. If we so-called "transphobic people" become suicidal the more we are forced to embrace and perpetuate the idea that men dressed as women are women, will the leftists encourage us to actualize our authentic "transphobic" group identity? Quite the opposite. They'll give us the rope with which to hang ourselves.

Those promoting transgenderism and homosexuality never bother to wonder if something other than society's meanness is the root cause of LGBTQ+ depression & suicidal ideation. Is there a causation between childhood molestation and adulthood homosexuality? Is the very act of homosexuality so defiant of our designed nature that it leads one to depression? Could it be that cutting off your body parts to pretend you're something you're not is actually what breaks a human? The fact that leftists do not concern themselves with these possibilities illuminates their obvious apathy, not their love, for those in the LGBTQ+ community.

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR

To the LGTBQ+ proponent reading this…

We all get things wrong sometimes. Yes, even you do.

What if your sexuality isn't something you need to discover? What if non-hetero sexual thoughts or impulses are a perversion of God's straightforward and functional design? And what if encouraging others to live out LGBTQ lifestyles is hurting them more than you realize? Are you willing to even contemplate the implications of these questions?

At Moonbills Coffee, we're willing to face your rejection because loving you means more than just approving of whatever it is you want to do. Love is the commitment to your good, and LGBTQ is objectively not good. We hope that you will choose to begin a journey of self-discovery that includes understanding why you are inclined toward advocating or engaging in homosexual behavior (because God did NOT create you that way). We urge you to develop a pure desire to know the truth, even if learning the truth demands drastic change. Change can be hard, but If you accept Christ into your heart and surrender to His will, HE will do the heavy lifting for you.

Please consider exploring the possibility that everything your parents and schools taught you about God, right and wrong, sexuality, and reality as you know it, is false. What if He hates sexual sin but loves you, wants to forgive you, and designed you for a purpose? What if Jesus Christ, who said, "Go and sin no more," died and rose 2000 years ago to pay the penalty for your sin?

What if there is hard evidence that God created the Earth as described in scripture? What if objective good exists? And what if the only real difference between us is that we acknowledge that what we're tempted by is evil while you take pride in the wrong you do?

We're all working toward the goal of truly knowing ourselves. We all want belonging and community, to feel valued. We all want to feel like we understand the world. And we all want to leave our mark, do what seems right, and feel good about our choices. But we shouldn't adopt beliefs to avoid rejection. We shouldn't mindlessly shut out perspectives that conflict with our worldview. We should always be eager to put our views under a microscope, consider alternative viewpoints, and pursue the TRUTH no matter where it leads. Consent is not an absolute moral standard, for even one who commits suicide consents to doing so. And when it comes to right and wrong, we must remember that might does not make right; the majority is not the arbiter of morality. For if the majority legalized rape by popular vote, it would still be wrong.

So yes, what you do in your bedroom is your choice, but some choices are wrong. And just as you judge our opposition to homosexuality and tell us that we are wrong, we look at your views and your behavior and tell you that you are wrong because wrong actually exists in our world.

But again, the choice is up to you. Gal 4:16