Day: June 10, 2010

A little while ago, this statement appeared on Lou Engle’s blog:

TheCall Uganda Press Release: Part 2

Posted on June 10th, 2010

June 2010

Three weeks ago I returned from Uganda where I participated in TheCall Uganda. Prior to going I released a statement declaring the intent and purposes of my going there and holding TheCall. In that statement I clearly declared that TheCall was not going to Uganda to promote the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (”Bill”). Instead, the purpose of the event was to pray and fast for this nation in crisis.

I was actually asked to release a petition at TheCall for the people to sign in support of the Bill. I did not allow that to happen because the purpose of the gathering was not a political gathering; it was a prayer gathering. However, I had to leave the prayer meeting early to catch our flight back home. After returning home, I was told that the Bill had been clearly promoted after I left the meeting. I apologize that this took place and that my stated purpose of not promoting the Bill was compromised. I take responsibility for what was done on the stage of TheCall, even in my absence.

That being said, I am grateful that I had the privilege of going to Uganda and meeting Christian leaders who explained their heart concerning the Bill. Not one was carrying even an ounce of hatred for homosexuals. They actually desired to influence the lawmakers in Uganda to lessen the penalties. However, they were committed to raise up a principled stand to protect their people and their children from an unwelcome intrusion of homosexual ideology into an 83% Christian nation, an intrusion that is being pressed upon them by the UN, UNICEF, and other NGOs and Western colonialist powers.

These powers are threatening to withdraw funding from Uganda if they do not open their doors to these ideologies. They shared with me with broken hearts some of the painful stories of the effect of this worldwide pressure, as it is being pushed and promoted into their educational system. I appealed to them that in all their labor and their stand they express the mercy of Christ to broken people, but I also stood with them in their desire to not succumb to the political ideological pressures of the West and many of the voices of the Western Church that have come strongly against them.

These brothers in Uganda will give an account to the Lord on how sternly they stood as a prophetic community in their nation and we, the Church of the West, will give an account for our response when homosexual ideology swept into our nations.

For TheCall,

Lou Engle

I am confused by this statement. He apologizes for The Call being used for promotion of the bill and identifies the promotion as taking place after he left the meeting. And indeed, Minister of Ethics and Integrity Nsaba Buturo spoke directly about the bill after Engle spoke. However, Apostle Julius Oyet spoke just before Engle and also promoted the bill. According to the Religion Dispatches account (which matches other on-the-scene accounts which I am not at liberty to identify), Oyet spoke directly about the Anti-Homosexuality Bill:

“We call on parliament not to debate heaven. We call on them to pass the bill and say no to homosexuality,” preached Julius Oyet, a pastor with Life Line Ministries in Uganda who titles himself Apostle. Oyet also brought up the common Ugandan perception that homosexuality is an import of the West which “recruits” new members primarily by bribing children. “Father, our children today are being deceived by the West. To buy them, to give them school fees so that they can be homosexuals. We say no to that,” Oyet said with a rolling voice as a live band played smooth jazz in the background.

When Engle himself finally took the microphone at about 5 p.m., he dug almost immediately into the controversy, saying he hadn’t known about the bill and nearly canceled his trip over questions raised by his presence. But at no point did he contest Oyet’s support for the bill.

Why apologize for what happened in your absence if you don’t apologize for what happened in your presence? By not saying anything about Oyet’s call on Parliament “to pass the bill,” he dilutes the impact of his acknowledgement that the bill was in fact promoted.

Further confusing the impact of this statement is the statement about the intent of the bill promoters. It appears that Engle favors criminalization in that he commends those involved with The Call Uganda for seeking to lessen, but not eliminate the penalties. I am reading between the lines but it appears that he thinks they are correct to pursue a specific law relating to homosexuality but advises the Ugandan supporters to be stand less “sternly” as a “prophetic community” and “lessen the penalties.” In essence, since he views them as pursuing a reasonable goal with reduced penalties, he supports what the Ugandan bill supporters are doing. I suspect that is exactly what they believe.

I have altered the title of this post to reflect that his apology seems to be directed to The Call Uganda and not the bill itself. If he opposes the actual bill, it is not clear at all from this statement and actually seems to make it more clear that if the bill has lesser penalties, he is fine with it.

In response to the Current TV documentary, Missionaries of Hate, Canyon Ridge Christian Church (Las Vegas, NV) today issued this statement to me regarding their mission partner, Martin Ssempa.

The mission partners of Canyon Ridge Christian Church are more than just names on a bulletin board or a web site, they are our dearly loved friends and family. Because of this, we take seriously our commitment to them.   When accusations or ill reports come to us about one of our partners and their ministry activities, we’re committed to do what the Bible instructs us to do; we go to our partners (when possible, going to see them face to face) and work through the issues with them personally. We don’t make public statements about our partners until we have worked through issues with them personally and brought those issues to resolution. We have been and are currently in conversation with Martin Ssempa and others regarding the controversy in Uganda and his activities in addressing it.

Martin Ssempa was featured prominently in Missionaries of Hate showing deviant porn to a stunned audience. He is shown praying with Islamic clerics for David Bahati, the author of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. This statement seems to move slightly away from their earlier position which was:

Canyon Ridge Christian Church partners with missionaries and ministry leaders around the world, including Martin Ssempa, for the purpose of reaching people with the gospel of Jesus Christ and providing humanitarian aid where possible.

 

With the oversight of our elders and missions team, we constantly evaluate our ministry partners and their activities. We will only support those who engage in and promote activities consistent with the redemptive and grace-filled purposes of Jesus Christ in the world.

 

Canyon Ridge Christian Church does not wish to enter into the debate over the legislation in Uganda. We do encourage those involved to seek God’s leadership in humility and grace and to follow Jesus command to love one another as they wrestle with this difficult issue. Our prayers are for the good of the people Uganda.

It seems to me that Canyon Ridge has entered the debate through their mission partner. He has become one of the public faces of the bill around the world and has recently partnered with Islamic clerics on a renewed effort to promote the bill.

In various ways, over the last two weeks, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association has advanced three theories about Hitler, the Nazi Party and homosexuals. They are:

1. Hitler was an active homosexual.

2. Hitler could not find straight soldiers who were savage enough to carry out his evil plans, so he recruited homosexuals to do it.

3. Homosexuals in the Nazi military led to the Holocaust.

Fischer produces several quotes from historians and students of the Nazi movement to support him. It seems to me that he pulls these quotes right out of their context and uses them to paint an incomplete picture of history.

Hitler’s sexuality has been examined from several different angles. He is an enigma for sure, but you wouldn’t know it by listening to Fischer who called Hitler “an active homosexual.” In the historical record it is clear that Hitler displayed some interest in certain women but this was glossed over by Fischer. Even if Hitler did have a homosexual period –this is by no means proven — there was a clear shift in attitude toward homosexuals after the murder of Ernst Rohm. It is accurate to say that Rohm and several of the SA Brownshirts were homosexual. Hitler tolerated them until they were no longer useful and had them executed in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knive purge. The man who led the execution of Rohm and who later had responsibility for instilling the uncompromising cruelty of the concentration camps at Dachau and later as general inspector of all camps was Theodore Eicke. Eicke, not mentioned in Scott Lively’s book, was married with two children; very straight and very savage.

What follows are just a sampling of quotes which are relevant to Fischer’s theories.

Hitler avoided contact with women, meeting with cold indifference during visits to the opera alleged attempts by young women, probably seeing him as something of an oddity, to flirt or tease him. He was repelled by homosexuality. He refrained from masturbation. Prostitution horrified but fascinated him. He associated it with venereal disease, which petrified him. (p. 23)

–Ian Kershaw in Hitler: A Biography (2008). WW Norton & Co. 

“Diels says of Hitler, “He [Hitler] lectured me on the role of homosexuality in history and politics. It had destroyed ancient Greece he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most manly of characters, elimination from the reproductive process those very men on whose offspring a nation depended. The immediate result of the vice, however, was that unnatural passion swiftly became dominant in public affairs if it were allowed to spread unchecked”. (p.118) (Rudolf Diels was the first chief of the Gestapo)

–Frank Rector. (1981). The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals.  Stein & Day Publishing. 

Hitler was prudish in his abhorrence of the “sins” of the modern big city like prostitution, homosexuality, and even immodest dress. He wrote of these matters as the “political, ethical and moral contamination of the people” and the “poisoning of the health of the body politic.” (p. 336)

–Robert Gellately (2007). Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Random House.  

In November, 1941 Hitler even signed a decree making homosexual offenses among SS members and policemen a capital offense. Two months earlier, Hitler had explained to Goebbels the Darwinian underpinnings of his opposition to homosexuality. After remarking that homosexuality should not be tolerated, especially in the Nazi party and the Army, Hitler continued:

The homosexual is always disposed to drive the selection of men toward the criminal or at least the sickly than the useful in the selection of men. If one would give him free rein, the state would eventually be an organization of homosexuality, but not an organization of manly selection. A real man would defend himself against this endeavor, because he sees it as an assassination of his own evolutionary possibilities. (p. 131)

—Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress  (2009). Richard Weikart. Palgrave MacMillan.

There are many more such quotes and accounts which demonstrate the clear distain for homosexuality from Hitler and the Nazis. Last week, I noted that Lothar Machtan, who Bryan Fischer quotes at length, discounted points 2 and 3 above. For more on homosexuality and the Nazis, consult this link and this one.