Donald Trump is getting some bad advice from somebody. Giving that
advice is on the “somebody,” whoever that is, but the president has
taken their advice, and that’s on him.
Placating during Pride Month
Trump is already running for re-election, although the formal
announcement won’t come for a couple of weeks. But somebody (JaVanka?)
has convinced him that it will help him in 2020 to launch a global
campaign for homosexuality today.
Here’s how the president put it over the weekend:
“As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding
contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation, let us also
stand in solidarity with the many LGBT people who live in dozens of
countries worldwide that punish, imprison, or even execute individuals
on the basis of their sexual orientation. My Administration has launched
a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality and invite all nations
to join us in this effort.”
If the president’s advisers think this is going to cut any ice with LGBT
activists, they haven’t been paying attention. Gay activists are
hostile, implacable, and vengeful toward their political adversaries.
Thus the president will pick up virtually no LGBT support with this
move, but he could lose a lot of evangelical support along the way.
Purely from a political standpoint, it’s a bad move.
Eroding the Voting Base?
Perhaps the president has lost sight of the fact that 81% of
evangelicals voted for him in 2016, and they’re the reason he’s in the
White House. It is a fact beyond dispute that 81% of evangelicals are
not going to be down with President Trump using the power of his office
to promote sexually abnormal behaviour around the world.
If he sticks to this position, despite counsel to the contrary from
folks like Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, Rev. Franklin Graham, and
Jerry Falwell, Jr., it will erode his base, not expand it. A significant
percentage of evangelicals, to be sure, will continue to support the
president and will vote for him in 2020. But it will dampen, diminish,
and perhaps even extinguish the enthusiastic support he has enjoyed from
his evangelical base. At a minimum, it will rattle and confuse them all.
Evangelicals have enthusiastically embraced this president for three
reasons: his embrace of religious liberty, his defence of the sanctity
of human life, and his appointment of federal judges who apply the
Constitution instead of rewriting it.
Such judges know that the free exercise of religion is embedded in the
Constitution as the first right enshrined in the First Amendment. On the
other hand, they also know that no right to engage in sodomy is
articulated anywhere in the Constitution, which means that religious
liberty should prevail in any legal conflict.
Religious Liberty/1st Amendment Threat
But the stubborn reality is that the homosexual agenda, which the
president just enthusiastically embraced, is the single greatest threat
to religious liberty in the history of the Republic.
The president, naively in my view, seems to believe that gays can have
their “rights” and Christians can have theirs and nothing bad will
happen. But as we have seen repeatedly with wedding vendors, adoption
agencies, bathroom policies, employment policies and the like, the two –
religious liberty and the gay agenda – come into repeated conflict. In
those showdowns, one side of the other has to win. Either
constitutionally protected rights of religious liberty will win or
purely manufactured “rights” will. On this issue, it is simply
impossible for everybody to get what they want.
President Trump, just like everybody else, is going to have to pick a
side.
Every advance of the homosexual agenda comes at the expense of religious
liberty. Where the LGBT agenda advances, religious liberty retreats. The
two things are locked in mortal combat, and one side or the other must
in the end prevail.
We’ve seen this with Christian bakers, who have been given the grim
choice between adhering to conscience or getting punished. As Tammy
Bruce observed, to be forced to work against your will is slavery, and
to be forced to violate your conscience is tyranny.
Evangelical voters believe sincerely in a Bible which teaches that
homosexual conduct is an “abomination” in the eyes of God, is contrary
to nature, and has lasting and even lethal consequences for those who
practice it. Those who engage in it “receive in themselves the due
penalty for their error” (Romans 1:27). The worldwide HIV/AIDS epidemic
is just one example.
The Roman Catholic Church has always correctly taught that homosexual
acts because they deviate so far from God’s design for human sexuality,
are “acts of grave depravity” which go not only against Scripture but
“against natural law.”
Because homosexuality is immoral, unnatural, and unhealthy, it is a
practice that no rational society should ever embrace, celebrate,
subsidise, or celebrate.
But even among those who believe homosexuality should still be contrary
to public policy, I do not know a single one who advocates the death
penalty for it. There are plenty of alternatives to the death penalty if
we are looking for appropriate sanctions. Our first commander-in-chief,
for example, did not execute a homosexual soldier who was found in his
ranks, he simply dismissed him from the army.
Outside of Muslim countries, the death penalty for homosexuality is
largely a myth. For instance, there is not even one confirmed example of
a homosexual being put to death in Victorian England, not one.
We don’t want to hurt homosexuals, we want to help them, just as we do
with those trapped in other pathologies. We don’t, for example, put drug
addicts to death in America, we try to help them by putting them in
treatment programs. That’s what drug courts are all about.
President Trump is simply and badly wrong to grab the rainbow flag and
cheerlead the global LGBT parade.