LDS Becomes Advocate for LGBT Rights

SALT LAKE CITY (RNS) Top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called Tuesday (Jan. 27) for passage of laws granting statewide protections against housing and employment discrimination for gay and lesbian Utahns — as long as those measures safeguard religious freedom.

“We call on local, state and the federal government to serve all of their people by passing legislation that protects vital religious freedoms for individuals, families, churches and other faith groups while also protecting the rights of our LGBT citizens in such areas as housing, employment and public accommodation in hotels, restaurants and transportation — protections which are not available in many parts of the country,” said church apostle Dallin H. Oaks.

~RNS

Not much different than what Al Mohler has recently claimed in part:

"In his June 15 comments at the SBC meeting, Mohler -- president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. -- said Christians have "not done well on this issue," have told only "half the truth" regarding homosexuality and have practiced a "certain form of homophobia." He went on to say it's "clear that it's more than a choice" and is "not something that people can just turn on and turn off." He also was clear in calling homosexuality a sin."

"To simply use the word 'choice' fits the question of behavior," Mohler told BP. "In other words, each of us makes a choice concerning what we are going to do in the face of temptation. We are fully accountable and fully responsible for that. So when it comes to the question of homosexual acts, 'choice' is a fully legitimate category. But when it comes to that pattern of temptation, the reality is that all of us struggle with some kind of temptation that we have simply known from our earliest self-understanding. It could be gluttony, it could be dishonesty, it could be any number of things. But every single human being past the point of puberty has some form of sexual temptation, and we need to be honest about the fact that that pattern of sexual temptation is something that will represent a lifelong struggle."

The same would be true, Mohler said, of someone who grew up in a family of alcoholics and faces a culture of alcoholism. Despite the temptation, he said, that person is "responsible for his or her own decisions related to drinking and to drunkenness."

End quote.

You can see the really bad thinking here, so foreign to scripture but wholly worldly. Christians often are no different than the world, ignoring clear passages like Romans 1 on how and why people become sodomites. They also put sodomy into a catagory God never does: that of "natural" sin. God places sodomy in it's own catagory, giving it special punishment because it goes against His order of things, as we see happened with Sodom and Gomorrah. He didn't destroy entire cities because of gluttony or drunkenness, for crying out loud.

The biblical Jesus, nor any of His Word, ever wavered on this issue. Jesus didn't play games, nor did the Father nor the Spirit. In all ages God condemns sodomy as well as worldliness. And Jesus already pronounced all men under God's wrath and condemnation for those outside of Him (John 6:36, Rom. 8:1).

- In the patriarchs (Genesis 19:1-28)

- In the Law of Moses (Leviticus 18:22; 20:13)

- In the Prophets (Ezekiel 16:46-50)

- In the New Testament (Romans 1:18-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Jude 7-8)

Joh 7:7  The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil.

Joh 15:18  "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.

Joh 15:19  If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

Joh 15:20  Remember the word that I said to you: 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.

Jas 4:4  You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5  Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: "He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us"?