Category: Cultural news

Michael Brown responds to the Southern Poverty Law Center article on ex-gays

I posted yesterday about a Southern Poverty Law Center article, titled Straight Like Me, by Casey Sanchez, which blasted the ex-gay movement. In my post, I note several inaccurate reports. In this post, I provide a brief email interview with Michael Brown, president of the FIRE School of Ministry, who was named in a companion piece, Former Ex-gay Minister Speaks Out. I emailed Dr. Brown with some questions about these statements and he was very kind to respond quickly.  

Throckmorton: In a recent SPLC article, you are referred to as giving a keynote at the latest Exodus Conference. This subject of this article asserts that you believe the Old Testament law should be followed regarding homosexuals. Is this your belief?

Brown: Absolutely not! I am not and have never been a reconstructionist or theonomist, and if we were to put practicing homosexuals to death, we would also have to put Sabbath breakers to death, among many others. 

Throckmorton: Furthermore, in that same article, you were paraphrased as saying in that same Exodus speech that  you encouraged the audience to “give up their lives” in the fight against homosexuality. 

Brown: Out of context. What I did say was that JESUS was worth living for and dying for, and I often quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to illustrate what Jesus meant when he said that if we try to save our lives we lose them but if we lose our lives for him and the gospel, we find them. King said, “A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right; a man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice; a man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.” I was encouraging those fighting unwanted SSA in their own lives to be strong in the Lord and to give themselves unconditionally to His service, then talking about the threat to our freedoms coming through an activist gay agenda as a wake up call.

Throckmorton: Could you react to the following excerpt from the SPLC article: “When you have a keynote speaker like Michael Brown, to me that’s unacceptable. It’s preaching a message of Christians not just simply opposing gay civil rights and believing a spiritual revival is necessary for this country, but actually calling on Christians to lay down their lives in a spiritual revolution to set up civil laws based on one extreme interpretation of biblical laws from the Old Testament [that calls for the death penalty for homosexuals]. It’s Christian Reconstructionism [a doctrine that calls for imposing harsh Old Testament laws on civil society], Christian dominionism. It’s abhorrent, and it’s dangerous, not just for LGBT people but for our entire society. Because if civil laws are based on [Brown]’s interpretation of the Bible, it’s not going to be a democratic society.”

Brown: Well, as a Jewish believer in Jesus and a frontline apologist, I have been accused of many things, but I don’t think I’ve been accused of calling on people to sacrifice our lives to set up OT law!  I can actually send you my power point notes from the message or get Exodus to send you the message itself. I have no clue how such a claim could be made based on my message, which completely contradicts the tone and content of my preaching. Interestingly, since the Exodus conference, I have been invited to become a regular conference speaker with Love Won Out, which is hardly known for calling for the death penalty for homosexual practice.

I was also provided with this link [Straight Like Me] in which the following was written about me: “Brown is “a millennial Jew who once described the red T-shirts worn by his ministry students at a gay rights march counter-demonstration as ‘the shed blood of Christ flowing toward the gates of hell.'” I have no idea if anyone ever said that, but it certainly was not me. Also, our red-shirted students were not part of a counter-demonstration but rather of a compassionate, one-on-one outreach during the city’s gay pride event in 2005.

I intend to send the links to the this and the other post about the SPLC article for their reaction which, if I get one, I will post.

UPDATE: Michael Brown sent a link which provides proper attribution for the quote about the red shirts and the gay pride parade. Flip Benham, head of Operation Save America wrote that in this website newsletter.

FBI hate crimes report for 2006

The FBI hate crimes report is out. Click here for a summary and check out a couple of interesting articles examining local relevance. For instance, in California, San Francisco has more of such crimes than anywhere in the state. And how about this? Mississippi reported no hate crimes.

So that means it is safer to be in Mississippi than San Francisco, right? This is the kind of interpretive question I enjoy posing to my students. Let’s see how readers do.

Montgomery County, MD votes tomorrow on gender identity ordinance

For sure, Montgomery County, MD is a hotspot for cultural change. My information is that tomorrow, the county officials there vote on whether to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity that a person expresses or asserts. Here is the paper trail on this issue with the current ordinance.

I cannot see any exemptions except perhaps for “distinctly private or personal” facilities (what are those like – is a church in that group?). Not sure what that means, but it appears children might exposed, literally, to adult nudity in public facilities.

Let’s have an open forum on this.

Christian Post reports on youth attitudes toward homosexuality

Lillian Kwon integrates several lines of reporting to craft an article about trends among youth and attitudes toward homosexuality.

She first notes the Exodus International Allies Too campaign and then quotes Jared Barber from the same article by older brother Matt Barber that I cited in a recent post. Finally, she mentions the research from the Barna group which suggests that youth believe opposition to homosexuality may be out of balance.

Speaking of this tension, Peter LaBarbera posted on his website some of the discussion on the topic from this blog.

Youth movement: Quit bashing homosexuality

Although this article in the Ventura County Star doesn’t predict a new Jesus Movement, the conditions described seem to be a good foundation for such a prediction. And the information relating to homosexuality should be read by every evangelical leader.

Last night at GCC, I gave a talk to a group called God and the Gay Neighbor. This article dovetails very nicely with that talk and with what I heard from the students. A couple of students asked questions about how to counter activism but mostly, the interest was in how to love.

And then there is there is this column by Matt Barber which includes an excerpt from a paper by his little brother Jared Barber, age 19. This illustrates nicely the type of sentiment described in the polling by the Barna group, noted in the Ventura newspaper piece above.

Jared Barber wrote:

Another problem arises here, though; and it is this: Christians, as a whole, focus too much on the homosexual issue alone. They attack it solely, denounce it, and live whichever way they please. Adultery, fornication, racism, pride, jealousy, selfish ambition, drunkenness; all of these immoral acts take to the background in view of homosexuality, and so we as Christians are set up as anti-gay instead of anti-immorality. We need to end our own hypocrisy, all of us, I as much as any, so that we can more blamelessly broach this subject and others.

And foremost, we must remember that Christ preached one thing above all else: Love. We must love others, with, as [C.S.] Lewis said, “…a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner — no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.”