[umbagi]

You and I agree on a lot (I've read back over many of your posts), but we could probably enjoy a day or two or three covering the finer points of theology and politics, in the latter case particularly in the area of whether it's worthwhile to be "right" while casting (or not casting) a vote that puts the Obamanation into a second term. I don't like Sir Mitt any more than you do, but I'll gladly punch his button on the voting machine, as a vote against His Oneness, Obummer.

But that's beside the point here. If we fight over gays and their perversions, ignoring the big issue of freedom of speech and belief, we'll lose the latter and, as a consequence, the former. It's really that simple. In our law and society, it's simply not true that "Before you get to 'constitutional' rights expressed in written form there is that 'beginning' that certain unalienable rights come from the Creator," because the Declaration of Independence is not law, and the Constitution is (or used to be...).

That may not be what God says is the best case, but we have His world to live in as we find it, and we're to work within that world to forward His plan. Right now, in that world, it's more important to preserve our right to speak out against the abominations we abhor than it is just to speak out in a given case against those abominations while our right to speak out is under attack -- as it certainly is now.

Sure, we all need to stand against this evil -- I'm not saying you're wrong to speak out -- but let's stand where the battle is, not where we (or they) want it to be.

Martin Luther said, If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Word of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle front besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

Free speech, and free thought, are where this battle rages, my FRiend, and if we flinch on this one, we'll never get to the issues of homosexual perversion or gay marriage. We'll be silenced.

Tim Dunkin has a pretty good Christian perspective on it -- it's all about the other guys trying to tell us to sit down and shut up, and that's where we've got to confront them.

[lentulusgracchus]

[You, quoting Luther] Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle front besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

Very muscular of old Martin Luther. This is a rather different POV than we often get from fatalistic chiliasts, who expect the imminent unfoldment of the Eschaton, and who seem to require a compleat proof of human incompetence (this would include collapse of all the American political institutions and constitutions) for their climactic epiphany.