Perhaps Father James Martin Should Write for Teen Vogue

By Stephen Herreid Published on July 17, 2017

Teen Vogue has published a “how-to” article promoting anal sex. As I’ve written before, the magazine’s audience includes children as young as 11. I recommend my colleague Jennifer Hartline’s excellent article about it here at The Stream.

To anyone who cares about kids, the Vogue article was an obvious outrage. But what if I told you that influential Christians are laying the groundwork for Teen Vogue-style sodomy instructions to be introduced into Christian youth groups and catechism classes?

That’s where pro-LGBT Christians are leading us. And since teens and children would suffer the most from this outcome, Christian parents have an urgent duty to speak out.

Jesuit Father James Martin: “Update” the Catechism

Vatican Communications Counselor Fr. James Martin just released a book called Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter Into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion and Sensitivity. He points to Psalm 139:14: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” LGBT people are “Born This Way” by God’s design, he argues.

Teaching that “one of the deepest parts of a person — the part that gives and receives love — is ‘disordered’ in itself is needlessly cruel,” he writes.

“The language used in the catechism on that topic needs to be updated,” he said elsewhere. Instead of “objectively disordered,” he suggested the term “differently ordered.”

No wonder Fr. Martin praised Lady Gaga’s pro-LGBT anthem “Born This Way,” which includes the lyric, “A different lover is not a sin.”

“There’s some theology in that,” Fr. Martin said of the song.

The General Synod of the Church of England Went Gaga Too

The General Synod of the Church of England just adopted a new stance against so-called “conversion therapy.” The decision was based on a motion that contained language eerily similar to Fr. Martin’s.

“The Bible teaches us that we are each fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps. 139.14), and that we should praise God’s gift of our creation,” the motion argued. Different “sexual orientations and gender identities are not inherently sinful.”

Christian Parents: Demand Answers to These Three Questions

Stream contributor Dr. Robert (“Bobby”) Oscar Lopez has written about Fr. Martin’s work, and he personally attended the General Synod in York. I drew from his insights to come up with three simple questions for Christian parents to ask powerful men like Fr. James Martin and the churchmen at the General Synod.

1. Why Do You Want to Normalize Strangers Talking to Other People’s Kids About Sodomy?

The pro-LGBT push will lead to strangers talking privately to other people’s kids about sexual acts. These strangers will have a bias in favor of sexualizing kids by introducing them to Fr. Martin’s various “differently ordered” sex options. After all, it’s the only way to determine whether a child was “born this way.” (See question 2.)

“Most gay activists believe children are sexual enough to have a sexual orientation to be preserved,” Dr. Lopez stated in an outside presentation during the General Synod.

The Synod focused on the “cruelty” of Christian counseling caricaturized as “conversion therapy.” But why, Lopez asked, is there no concern about “LGBT-affirming” counselors introducing sexual ideations to kids at an inappropriate age?

“Law enforcement groups define ‘grooming’ as doing just this,” Lopez said.

2. What is an “LGBT Child?”

It’s a simple question with a simple, incriminating answer.

How do you know that, say, a 12-year-old boy is homosexual or bisexual? Even if he were “born that way,” how do you determine that he has a sexual appetite for males?

There is no way to define his “sexuality” that is appropriate to his age. Go ahead. Try to define homo- or bi-sexuality without any reference to sexual arousal in response to male or female stimuli. Can you even define the “gay” boy’s “sexuality” without reference to homosexual acts — to sodomy, oral sex, petting?

Now try defining “transgendered” and “cisgendered” without reference to genitalia and genital pleasuring.

You can’t. More ominously, neither can LGBT counselors who speak to Christian children about sexuality.

3. What Will You Do to Christians Who Don’t Conform?

The General Synod didn’t just condemn “conversion therapy.” They called in the British government to catechize children, and to monitor Christian pastors (and parents!), lest they teach anything contrary to the new LGBT orthodoxy.

After all, what do Christians know about LGBT children? Christian pastors who teach sexual morality aren’t “licensed medical and psychological professionals,” the original motion complained.

In counseling young people, pastors may even attempt to “convert a transgender person’s gender expression to match that of the sex they were assigned with at birth.”

“Born this way,” indeed.

A “Theology of Pederasty” Can Help Predators, but There’s Nothing in It for Kids

I once wrote an exposé about a predator priest named Fr. Carlos. He lured young boys into his bed and called it “spiritual direction.” Another priest, who helped blow the whistle on Fr. Carlos, called his grooming method a “theology of pederasty.”

Fr. Martin weakly denies it, but the logical conclusion of his claims is obvious. What’s more, it could be very useful to men like Fr. Carlos. If homosexual desire isn’t a temptation toward sin, but a “differently ordered” appetite ordained by God, then sodomy itself is also merely “differently ordered,” and not sinful.

“Don’t believe me?” I can just hear Fr. Carlos asking a nervous boy under his spiritual care, “Just listen to Fr. Martin. He was handpicked by the pope.”

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