In this episode Trent responds to a recent article from Fr. Thomas Reese called “Religious conservatives have lost LGBTQ rights battle. It’s time to surrender.” Trent shows why this is a bad option and gives us cause for hope (along with a healthy dose of pop culture references along the way).
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Is it time for Christians to just give up? Should we just surrender already? Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today, I want to talk about an article by Father Thomas Reese. He’s a Jesuit priest. He contributes to the National Catholic Reporter. He recently wrote an article called Religious Conservatives Have Lost the LGBTQ Rights Battle. It’s Time to Surrender. What he’s referring to is the Bostock v. Clayton County case handed down by the Supreme Court recently that we talked about here on the podcast that says you cannot discriminate against someone on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender identity. These are now considered protected classes based on Title VII’s ruling from the Civil Rights Act that says you can’t discriminate on the basis of sex which, of course when it was written, was just saying you can’t disenfranchise men as a whole or women as a whole if either is capable of doing the same job.
But now it says, look, if I have a man and a woman how work for me and I say the men wear male uniforms, the women wear female uniforms, their sex-specific uniforms, but the man says, “Well I identify as a woman so I’m going to wear the female uniform,” I can’t let that person go because apparently I’m discriminating on the basis of sex even though men and women are being treated equally. We’re just not going to accommodate a man who says that he is a woman because he’s not a woman. He’s a man. We talked about all this on on the podcast, but Father Reese says this is just another example of religious conservatives losing.
I’m sure he’d also bring up the recent case that struck down Louisiana’s law requiring abortion providers to have hospital-admitting privileges. That was of course depressing to see, especially seeing Justice John Roberts who sided with the conservative block. Back in 2016, he dissented from a Supreme Court case that struck down an identical law in Texas that required abortion providers to have hospital-admitting privileges. The court struck it down saying that would cause an undue burden on women seeking an abortion because apparently abortion providers are allowed to do whatever they want and you have to keep their facilities open no matter what because women need to be able to access abortions. So the states should just tolerate whatever abortion providers do because only the bottom of the barrel choose to do abortions.
I mean only somebody who’s got serious mental issues says when they’re a little kid, “When I grow up, I want to be an abortionist.” Maybe like Sid from Toy Story or something like that. Even there, he was just torturing toys. Sid wasn’t doing anything wrong. He didn’t know that they were alive. If you have more thoughts on Pixar like I do, go back a few weeks for our free-for-all Friday episode, all my thoughts on Pixar. I think you’ll definitely enjoy it. So it’s hard to see that Roberts dissented against that case in 2016, but he sided with the liberal block in 2020, sided with the liberals as if he was distinct from them. He just said, “Well [stare decisis 00:03:01], the principle stare decisis et quieta non movere. When the Supreme Court decides something, we shouldn’t overturn it except when the cultural zeitgeist changes.”
Back in the 1980s, the Supreme Court said that the state of … I think it was the state of Georgia could ban sodomy and considered sodomy to be a public heath menace, something that could be made illegal. Then in 2003, the court overturned that in Lawrence v. Texas. Why? Because sodomy was now widely culturally accepted. So we’ll talk about this later here in the podcast, but it is important to have justices that you have a reasonable expectation will hold faithfully to the rule of law and apply sensible principles. But don’t put all your trust and hope in them.
Now, let’s get on the article here by Father Reese. I will say that Father Reese has been banging this drum for a long time. He’s been doing this now for at least the last five years. I found two articles where he makes a similar case. Back in 2015 after the Obergefell ruling that legally redefined marriage in the United States, Father Reese said, “With the US Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage throughout the United States, the US Catholic bishops need a new strategy going forward. The bishops’ fight against gay marriage has been a waste of time and money. The bishops should get a new set of priorities and a new set of lawyers.” So it’s like not Father Reese is saying it’s so unfortunate that our culture has embraced this depraved error. You don’t get anything like that. Instead, you get, “It was just a waste of time and money. Why do this? You need a new strategy going forward?”
In 2018 when Ireland passed a referendum legalizing abortion, Father Reese said, “The overwhelming vote in Ireland in favor of allowing access to abortion shows that the pro-life movement needs a new strategy. Trying to preserve antiabortion laws or trying to reverse the legalization of abortion is simply not working.” So from Father Reese, you shouldn’t bother doing anything unless there’s 100% guarantee of success, the lowest minimal bar possible. So I think what Father Reese would only want, and this is the thing that will come up as we go through his article, that he would just want Catholics, what we do with our faith is on Sunday, we go to mass and Monday through Saturday, we think about being Catholic and that’s it. That’s what it means to be Catholic. It’s not about affecting the culture as a whole. It’s not about standing up for the rights of other human beings and enshrining them into law or protecting institutions like marriage and the family, that if the culture isn’t going to agree with us, we have to just go belly up essentially.
So let’s go through the article and I’ll point out all of the things that are wrong with it. So here’s what he says. “Leaders in the Catholic Church and evangelical Christian churches have fought tooth and nail against the expansion of LGBTQ rights whether in the form of gay marriage, benefits for gay spouses, or nondiscrimination in employment.” Already right off the bat, the language is problematic. We believe that those who are members of the LGBTQ community and people who identify as LGBTQ and of course as I’ve said in previous episodes, the acronym goes on much longer, we believe these individuals should have the same basic rights and not be subject to unjust discrimination. But just because paragraphs 2357 through 2358 of the catechism say that members of this community should not be subject to unjust discrimination, people like Father Reese run with that as if it says they should never face discrimination of any kind. Discrimination itself is not a bad thing. Okay? It’s unjust discrimination.
We discriminate all the time. When you choose to select someone to work at your office … My wife and I were watching Parks and Rec the other night because we like to watch goofy television as a nice way to round out the night. It was the episode where they’re trying to replace Tom Haverford’s old job. Ron Swanson’s trying to hire a new person to replace Tom. The candidates are all woefully under-qualified. Tom said, “Ron, that guy was a racist.” He’s like, “He’s not really that much of a racist, Tom.” It’s like, “Well, okay.” You discriminate when you have job applicants. So you wouldn’t hire someone who was unqualified for a position, who exhibits morally odious qualities like being a racist for example. So that’s you discriminate. You select one over the other. That’s what discrimination means. So when someone says discrimination is wrong, they’re wrong. When you say someone has discriminating taste, to discriminate just means you pick one over the other and you have reasons for doing so.
Now, unjust discrimination would be if you said, “I’m not hiring this person because they belong to this certain race or they belong to this certain ethnicity or nationality or I’m not going to hire women to work here.” That would be a kind of unjust discrimination, but sexual behavior … So even if someone you found out … If you were going to hire someone for a job and you found out that they attended meetings at Courage … So Courage is an apostolate that helps people live chaste lives who have deep-seated same-sex attractions. If you said, “I found out that you have same-sex attractions, that you work at this, you go to this Courage group to talk about it. I don’t want you working here,” I would say all other things being equal, all other things being equal, there could be other extenuating circumstances, but in general, I would say that could be a form of unjust discrimination. If this person is capable of doing their job and they’re not engaged in morally perverse frankly or morally degenerate behavior, but they have attractions that they can’t control, they can’t control their attractions, then why would that be problematic? Now, you’re just singling them out and making it harder for them to get by in life.
So there is a difference between firing someone because they have a certain set of attractions and firing someone because they engage in a particular kind of sexual behavior because sexual behavior belongs to the realm of morality. A lot of companies would fire someone if they found out they were engaged in adultery or prostitution. Well why? Because what we do sexually matters. Now, even the presence of attractions, if you read what the church has said about the priesthood … Now of course, the priesthood is not a job. Discrimination laws don’t apply. The courts have said, the Supreme Court has said in a very famous case, Evangelical Lutheran Church … Hosanna. Hosanna-Tabor v. Evangelical Lutheran Church. The courts said in a unanimous decision that religious organizations can hire and fire their ministers and that discrimination laws do not apply there.
That case actually dealt with a woman who was let go I think because she was pregnant actually, but she was considered a minister at the church. She might have been like a music minister or something or a teacher. So the court said, “Look, if you’re a minister, the state can’t step in and say who churches and synagogues and mosques select to be their ministers because if it could, then all of the wacky women priests out there, the women who think they’re priests that have been ordained that raise a ruckus every now and then, they could sue the church and they would win, saying ‘Well we want to be priests and the Catholic Church won’t let us have this job,'” because it’s not a job. It’s not a job. It’s a vocation and it’s a ministerial occupation protected under the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of religion. So the state can’t tell the church what to do in that regard.
So when it comes to selecting priests, for example, the church says now as a policy that people with deep-seated same-sex attractions, something that’s transitory is one thing, but if it’s deep-seated same-sex attractions or advocacy for LGBT behavior, it says they are not to be admitted to seminary because they don’t have the proper psychological makeup that is necessary for them to have a healthy priesthood. Frankly, it would be scandalous because many priests live in community. Just as I as a married man if I’m traveling and going about, I’m not going to spend the night in a sorority house, a man with deep-seated same-sex attraction should not live in community with other men. Even when I was single, when I was unmarried, I should not have lived in an environment where I had just a bunch of female roommates because that’s a bunch of temptation and it’s awkward.
So as I said, all other things being equal, but people who have these attractions or inclinations or sense of identity should not be the victims of unjust discrimination. But it doesn’t follow from that that any kind of discrimination whatsoever, especially on morally relevant issues of sexual behavior, don’t fall into play. Oh, gosh. I hope I can get through this whole thing. That was just on one paragraph. “Despite spending millions of dollars on media campaigns and legal fees, they have consistently lost at the US Supreme Court where these cases are inevitably decided. They have also been losing in the court of public opinion where Americans, especially young Americans, now strongly support LGBTQ rights. Church leaders should have seen this coming and followed the advice of Jesus.” This is the part that really gets me. He quotes Jesus as saying this. “What king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with 10,000 troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with 20,000 troops, but if not while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms.”
You might say, “Where in the world did Jesus say that?” It’s in Luke 14 and it’s the exact backwards way of understanding what Jesus is talking about. Father Reese, I cannot believe he would take this metaphor, this analogy, this parable … Not a parable. It’s more of an analogy and a metaphor that Jesus is using and apply it to say that the church should just submit to and surrender to the culture when the culture opposes the church. That is not what Jesus is talking about at all. Father Reese gets the whole point of this analogy backwards. Let me read the whole thing from Luke 14:25-31 to show you what I mean.
Trent Horn:
Jesus says, “Now great multitudes accompanied him and he turned and said to them, ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all how see it begin to mock him saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.” Or what king going to encounter another king in war will not sit down first and take council whether he is able with 10,000 to meet him who comes against him with 20,000? If not while the other is yet a great way off, he sends an embassy and asks terms of peace. So therefore whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.'”
Jesus is not saying in this passage, “Look, church. If the culture is going against you, be sure to practically negotiate with the culture so that you don’t lose in battle.” The whole point of this is to say to be a Christ disciple, you have to count the costs because in order to follow Jesus, this is not a part-time job. This is a full-time occupation to give our whole self. Jesus is Yahweh. What he’s trying to tell the Jews here, that back in the Book of Deuteronomy in the [Shema 00:13:47], it said, “How do you follow Yahweh? You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. You will give everything to your God, to Yahweh.” Well Jesus is Yahweh incarnate. In order to follow him, we have to love him with that same intensity and love him more than our family, than our occupation so that we are able to follow him and know that if we do follow Jesus, if we do follow the way of righteousness, our moral life in Christ He has laid out before us, it will be difficult and we will be rejected.
People in the 1st century were thrown out of the synagogues. They were crucified by the Romans. They endured all kinds of persecutions. Jesus said, “If you’re going to be my disciple, you have to be willing to pay this cost. You have to be willing to pay it.” So that is what it’s talking about here and for us as a church, yeah, we shouldn’t go on a fool’s errand necessarily in everything that we do to try to impact our culture. We have finite resources so we should allocate them to the most prudent ways. Matthew 10:16, Jesus says, “You must be as gentle as doves, but as wise as serpents.” So we have to have that approach, but not in a way where we’re mealy-mouthed and we’re just belly up, we lay belly up for the culture as a whole.
All right. Let’s continue. He writes, “The Mormons showed the way by secretly sitting down with state legislatures and gay activists to work out a compromise that became the law in Utah. The compromise did not make everyone happy, but what compromise does? Instead of seeking a compromise, religious conservatives bet all their credibility on the Republican Party and President Donald Trump who promised to appoint judges who would roll back the expansion of gay rights. This has been a costly bet that has alienated millions of young people from Christianity. It is a bet that failed.” Now when it comes to justices on the Supreme Court, I do not expect them to magically fix this country. I mean to be honest, a lot of Republican presidents have nominated justices and those people have turned around and burned us, going all the way back to George Bush, Sr. back in the early ’90s and even before that with Reagan. A lot of the people that they have nominated have turned around and not upheld decisions as we would have liked.
So I don’t see them being able to magically fix this country. When it comes to choosing a president and choosing these justices, it’s more about preventing the worst case scenario from happening. So it’s not like they’re going to magically fix everything, but you want to elect presidents and hope that they will nominate people so that the least amount of bad will happen. So I agree we can’t trust them to magically fix everything. That’s not a bet that you should make, but it doesn’t prevent you from trying to choose the lesser of two evils or trying to choose what is the most pragmatic approach that will cause the least amount of harm. There’s nothing wrong with that.
He goes on to say, “Catholic bishops were also ill-advised by the ethicists and lawyers they consulted. The ethicists forbade compromise and the lawyers promised victories. Other ethicists noted that political compromise was acknowledged as legitimate since at least the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas counseled against legislating perfect moral conduct. He understood that unless laws were supported by most citizens, the laws would not be observed. He and St. Augustine even condoned legalized prostitution.” Well just because we tolerate some evils doesn’t mean that we should tolerate them forever. I mean prostitution is illegal now. Imagine when people were trying to outlaw prostitution or outlaw slavery. Watch the film Amazing Grace. It’s a wonderful film. [Ioan Gruffudd 00:17:03], I forget his name, he was Mr. Fantastic in the Fantastic Four movies. It’s a wonderful film about William Wilberforce showing them trying to abolish the slave trade in England and it was hard defeat after defeat after defeat and a lot of public support.
It’s similar to the fight for civil rights here in the United States, defeat after defeat after defeat for decades and decades until public opinion changes. What happens is you start to change laws, minor ones, public opinion changes, and it creates a kind of feedback loop. So laws can’t change hearts, but honestly, they do restrain the heartless and the law does serve as an educator. By changing laws at the lower level … For example, you take abortion. We’ve made great strides at the local level with informed consent laws, parental consent laws, laws that prevent funding for abortion services overseas that have saved lives and have led to the closing of abortion facilities. Look up a pro-life sociologist, Michael New. He has wonderful research that shows pro-life legislation does reduce the number of abortions which is something that Father Reese won’t admit to, but it does.
Also, the Supreme Court has handed down decisions that have been really helpful for the church. It’s not just like it’s all bad news. People keep forgetting about this. Father Reese would have you think it’s failed time and time again. No, I’ll give you a recent example where the court did come through for us and it’s a case that invalidated a law that was anti-Catholic in its nature when it was first passed I guess almost like over 100 years ago in Montana to help disenfranchised Catholics and prevent them from going to Catholic religious schools, prevent them from using state funds to be able to access their choice in private education. So this article says, “The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Tuesday, June 30th,” so just this week, “that a Montana scholarship program that indirectly provided state funds to religious schools is protected by the Constitution.” So it was a 5-4 decision. The court’s four Democratic appointees dissented.
“Roberts wrote that a decision by the Montana Supreme Court to invalidate a scholarship program on the basis that it would provide funding to religious schools in addition to secular schools bars religious schools from public benefits solely because of the religious character of the schools.” So Montana had a scholarship program that would have helped kids go to Catholic or Christian schools, but they didn’t want to support that anymore. So instead of just saying you can only use it for public schools which would have been shut down, they tried to get rid of the whole program, but even that was seen as an infringement on our constitutional rights. It says, “The provision also bars parents who wish to send their children to a religious school from those same benefits, again, solely because of the religious character of the school.”
Justice Gorsuch actually … And I know we were disappointed with Gorsuch in the recent decision, but he came out actually dissenting a bit against Roberts in his reasoning for the majority decision, that he wanted to have a stronger protection for religious freedom saying that, “The First Amendment protects not just the right to be a religious person, holding beliefs inwardly and secretly. It also protects the right to act on those beliefs outwardly and publicly.” So I’m like, “Yeah, Gorsuch!” Then it’s like he wrote the Bostock case. I’m like, “Gorsuch, what are you doing, man?” But he wrote this great book on assisted suicide. Yeah, Gorsuch! It’s like Forrest Gump. Supreme Court cases are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
All right. Back to Father Reese. “Rather than negotiating compromises with the gay community, religious conservatives fought on to the bitter end. Church leaders have a hard time acknowledging defeat since they think they are fighting God’s battle. The thought of surrender is inconceivable, but surrender here does not mean abandoning church teaching. It means abandoning attempts to use the state to impose church teaching on people.” Notice here these kind of weird phrases that Father Reese is using. “They think they are fighting God’s battle,” as if God does not want us to try to end no-fault divorce, restore legal protection for the unborn. Doesn’t God want us to stand up for … I would ask Father Reese, “Does God want us to protect the rights of little babies in the womb? Does God want us to protect the institution of marriage that He have humanity? Is that something God wants us to do?” I’m not sure Father Reese would say yes to that. I don’t know.
Trent Horn:
The idea that you’re using the state to impose church teaching on people, it’s not like we’re trying to impose saying that non-Catholics have to go to mass or something like that or even using the state to say that fallen-away Catholics have to come back to mass. This isn’t arbitrarily imposing purely sectarian notions on people. Rather, it’s putting forward common sense thinking that everybody believed in when it comes to so-called same-sex marriage, something that everybody believed in for 5000 years of human history. I love that Justice Alito in his dissent when he was arguing about the Obergefell decision was reminding fellow justices, “We’re legislating something here, the redefinition of marriage, that is newer than the cellphone that we’re talking about here.” This is not arbitrary things when it comes to marriage or the right to life. So the way he phrases it here, notice it’s odd.
“The list of failed attempts to use the state to support church teaching is long. Protestant leaders fought for the use of their Bible in prayers in public schools even after Catholics and Jews became significant parts of the student body. Many of these same denominations pushed for Prohibition and then fought for its repeal.” Of course these are what Protestants were advocating for, not for Catholics. This legitimately did involve imposing purely sectarian notions like that drinking alcohol is a sin or that you need to read the Protestant Bible because obviously they’re not going to read the Catholic Bible in public schools. They’re trying to inculcate people with the King James Version of the Bible. That is imposing sectarian thinking onto the public. That you cannot do, but standing up for marriage, standing up for life, standing up for the nature of man and woman and our biological sexual identity, standing up for religious freedom, that is something that anyone committed to the common good should be able to understand.
“Churches fought the legalization of divorce especially no-fault divorce. Catholic bishops fought the legalization of birth control. Blue laws forbidding business and entertainment venues to open on Sundays were defended by church leaders long past the time they had wide support. Many church leaders supported censoring movies and books. Expanding women’s rights was also opposed by some churches.” So I agree though that the church, we have limited resources. So when it comes to fighting certain causes, I agree that we should be working towards the end of abortion before we work towards the end of contraception. I agree with that because something like 97% of people support contraception. So on the one hand if Father Reese was just saying a purely pragmatic argument, saying, “Look, we have limited resources. Sunzi, The Art of War. He who fights everything fights nothing. As a church, we should dedicate our resources to where we have the best chance, but we should also focus on the most important fights that are out there.”
For me prudentially, I’m going to focus on abolishing abortion before I try to rid our country of contraception, before you try to make contraception something that no longer exists because you have a way better chance with abortion. More people are morally ambivalent towards abortion than contraception. I also agree with Father Reese. People have asked me before, “Would you ban birth control?” I would say, “Well when it comes to banning things, laws don’t really work unless you’ve got more than 60, 70% of people in favor of them.” The Supreme Court honestly, I really do feel like it hands down these rulings based on what the culture is thinking. When it comes to so-called same-sex marriage, we’ve seen that and also with a lot of other cases. It seems like the court is just checking the cultural temperature or barometer and handing down its appeals accordingly.
Anyway, let’s go on. “All these fights were lost by church leaders who failed to understand the mood of the country or the Constitution as interpreted by the courts, but rather than entering negotiations as Jesus recommended, they demonize their opponents and fought on.” Well I’m sure there are individuals who used that kind of language, but it’s not demonization to tell someone that they are in error about a serious issue, that what they are doing is causing harm to the common good and harm to themselves and that legislative approaches need to be taken in reply. That’s not demonization. That’s admonishment and scriptures even call us to admonish our brothers and to rescue them from sin. He says, “It is time for religious conservatives to admit defeat. It may well be past time in fact to negotiate good terms for their surrender. They’ve burnt too many bridges along the way to defeat. As a result, liberal activists may well simply crush religious conservatives by mobilizing to end existing religious exceptions designed to accommodate conservative consciences.”
All right. Right here, right here, this is the flaw, that he’s saying that it may be too late. We should have surrendered earlier. We burnt too many bridges. Now, the liberals are going to crush us. This is the thinking that if you just cooperated with those who oppose the natural law, those who oppose the will of God, if you just cooperated with them, they would treat you fairly. Why would you think that? They don’t believe in fairness. They believe in winning. They will always go for their goal that they want, and the question is, “Will we lay down or will we fight back in a dignified and gracious way?”
Father Thomas Reese is literally Kent Brockman from the Simpsons. There’s an episode of the Simpsons where Homer goes into space in the space shuttle and he accidentally because he’s an oaf, he collides with the terrarium on the space shuttle that has ants and ant colony that they were going to study in space. We want to see if the ants can sort tiny screws in zero gravity. So there is a big mess and there’s debris and the ants are floating around, and Kent Brockman tunes in to give a live news update of the space shuttle mission and one of the ants comes close to the camera and looks gigantic. So that’s the context. Let me pay the clip for you.
Kent Brockman:
We’re just about to get our first pictures from inside the spacecraft with [averagenaut 00:26:37] Homer Simpson. We’d like to … Ah! Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just lost the picture, but what we’ve seen speaks for itself. The [inaudible 00:26:51] spacecraft has apparently been taken over, conquered if you will, by a master race of giant space ants. It’s difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive Earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain. There is not stopping them. The ants will soon be here. I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
So literally, you could just take out ants and put in liberal activists and it would be the same thing that Kent Brockman is saying, Father Reese is saying. There is no stopping them. There is no stopping liberal activists. They will come for us. I for one welcome our new liberal overlords and the new regime they will impose upon us. In fact, I’m happy to round up conservatives that are not abiding by the rules that we negotiated upon in our peace treaty.
So he says, “The churches need to acknowledge that allowing gays to marry has not brought about the end of the world or undermined heterosexual marriage. On the contrary, it might spur heterosexuals to get married rather than just live together in sin.” Well look, once again, I’m sure there were individuals who were spouting off this kind of rhetoric. I never thought or said that … No one’s going to say that the world is going to come to an end, but it’s going to have negative consequences that we may not see for a long time. The same thing happened with no-fault divorce. People said, “Look, we have these no-fault divorce laws. The world didn’t come to an end, people, with no-fault divorce,” but look at the fruit that we reaped, the harvest that we reaped from no-fault divorce and how it’s occurred over the past 50 years. I mean just look at the data though. Even with so-called same-sex marriage, I’m concerned about where we’re seeing the trends go.
So look at the rates of marriage per 1000 people, the rates of people getting married every year. In 1990, it was 9.8 per 1000. In 2009, it dropped down to 6.8 and it flat-lined at around 6.8 for the next five or six years, but then after the Obergefell decision, it shot back up a little bit to 7 and then plunged down again to 6.5. So is this a momentary plunge that’s just going to go down a bit and then correct and head back up again or is it going to continue to keep going down? I don’t know, but like I said, when we see how our culture is devolving, in 1990 … Sorry. In 1980, only 18% of children were born out of wedlock. In 1990, that went up to 28%. Since 2008, that has plateaued at around 40%.
So this idea that, “Oh, if opposite-sex couples see same-sex couples getting married, that might encourage them to get married rather than live in sin,” what in the world are you talking about, Father? No, all it’s going to do is reinforce that relationship view of marriage that says marriage is for fulfilling my desires as an adult. So if this unmarried opposite-sex couple says they’re more fulfilled not being married, they’re just going to stay that way because they see marriage not as something that binds us and holds us to a standard beyond us, the conjugal view, but rather it’s something that just fulfills the personal private standards that we already have within us.
“But even in defeat, the Constitution protects religious conservatives from being forced to hold gay weddings in their churches. They can also continue to teach that gay sex is a sin just as they teach that heterosexual sex outside of marriage is a sin.” I mean can you teach though that gay sex is a sin? Can you teach it in a Catholic school? Can you teach it … How can you teach it, but then say, “Well we are still going to hire people who are in so-called same-sex marriages?” Your teacher might be saying the church teaches X, but if the students see that you hire a teacher who engages publicly and flagrantly in these very behaviors, the entire teaching is undermined. “Nor do they have to have gay ministers although who is a minister is open to litigation which in turn makes disputes more toxic. The Supreme Court has left many issues unresolved in its recent decision against employment discrimination that could come before the court in the future. However, would it not be better to resolve these disagreements through negotiations rather than litigation?”
No, because negotiations, all that means is you are at the mercy of whoever makes the terms and we better pray that they don’t renegotiate the terms. At least the law, you’re protected under the law and under an equal footing under the law in having an advocate of the justice system to stand up for you. With negotiation, you just always have to hope that you’re on that person’s good side because those who giveth, they can taketh away. A prime example of that of course is in Empire Strikes Back between Darth Vader and Lando Calrissian: about handing over Han Solo and the other prisoners which you see in this scene.
Lando Calrissian:
Lord Vader, what about Leia and the Wookie?
Darth Vader:
They must never again leave this city.
Lando Calrissian:
That was never a condition of our agreement nor was giving Han to this bounty hunter.
Darth Vader:
Perhaps you think you’re being treated unfairly?
Lando Calrissian:
No.
Darth Vader:
Good. It would be unfortunate if I had to leave a garrison here.
Lando Calrissian:
This deal is getting worse all the time.
Darth Vader:
Calrissian, take the princess and the Wookiee to my ship.
Lando Calrissian:
You said they’d be left in the city under my supervision.
Darth Vader:
I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.
Trent Horn:
See, wouldn’t it be better to just negotiate with Vader? I mean what could be wrong with that? Is compromise … He goes on. “Is compromise possible? I hope so, but I am not optimistic. Both sides need to remember that working through the courts and the executive branch is a crapshoot. Administrations come and go while judges are unpredictable. Would it not be better to preserve your most cherished values from the rollercoaster of electoral politics? Would it not be better to resolve the less important conflicts through negotiations rather than spending years in expensive court battles? Continuing these battles only benefits lawyers and organizations that use these conflicts to raise money.”
That’s a very cynical view to look at here. Frankly, I know very good lawyers who are fighting for Christian freedom, for Catholic religious freedom, and they could be making way more money in the secular field than if they were doing this. “Negotiating compromise is both the American and Christian way of preceding. I hope it is not too late.” I say no to that. I’m not going to negotiate with people, especially the activists, especially the people like at Planned Parenthood who will lie through their teeth that these people, their end goal is … Remember how it is … This idea of negotiation. Remember back in the ’90s, the good old ’90s when people only wanted tolerance? “All we want is like … We’re not saying you have to go march in a gay pride parade or anything like that. We’re just saying we want you to practice tolerance.” So imagine if we had negotiated then like, “Okay. Well we’ll give up all this stuff and you be tolerant of us,” but now it’s not just tolerance. Nobody asks for tolerance anymore. That’s such a ’90s way of doing it.
Now, it’s celebrating diversity. Now, it’s if you refuse to wear the gay pride pin on your employee lapel or march in the parade with everyone else, you’re an enemy and you have to be dealt with accordingly. So these people will not stop until they have the boot on our necks. So no, I am not going to negotiate with them. I might come up with practical alternatives when I can’t get the ideal victory, the ideal ruling, or the ideal set of laws that I would want, but I’m not going to be mealy-mouth and just negotiate with these people and hope they play nice. No, I’m going to follow Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest. “Never give up. Never surrender.” An awesome movie by the way you have to see.
To motivate you then to end our episode, I’m going to play the clip from Independence Day to say no, we are not going to negotiate. We are going to stand up for the truth no matter the cost. It’s highly appropriate I’m playing this clip from Independence Day because July 4th is this weekend. Have a safe July 4th, everybody. Independence Day, it is one of the best movie speeches of all time, probably the best. It’s probably the best movie speech of all time to encourage us as we enter into the July 4th weekend to know we as a church have stood up to impossible odds and we can do the same. President Thomas Whitmore played wonderfully by actor Bill Pullman who is not Bill Paxton by the way, take it away.
Pres. Thomas Whitmore:
We’re fighting for our right to live, to exist, and should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday for it is the day when the world declared in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We’re going to live on. We’re going to survive,” the day we celebrate our independence day.
Trent Horn:
I tear up. I always end up getting a little bit misty during this part. I’m like, “Yeah, we are going to beat those aliens with our old Mac computer and Jeff Goldblum. We’re going to beat the aliens. We’re going to stand up for what’s right. We’re not going to let them take our Earth. You go back to that planet you came from.” So I hope this was edifying for you. I hope this was helpful for you guys. I’ll leave a link to the original article here at trenthornpodcast.com. Be sure to support us at trenthornpodcast.com by the way and pray for everything we’re doing here. I’ve got a lot coming up soon, prep work for my debate with Alex O’Connor, cosmic skeptic, at the end of the month on Pints with Aquinas. So pray for the prep work that will go into that. Very excited for that and everything else we have coming down the [pike 00:36:07].
Be sure to leave a review for us on the iTunes podcast app. I asked a friend to do it recently and it was kind of difficult. He didn’t quite … I had to walk him through it. So it was kind of hard if you go on iTunes. I think you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to click “Write a review,” but if you could do that for me, I would greatly appreciate it. It would be a big help. Stay tuned for tomorrow, free-for-all Friday. Should be a lot of fun. Got a special guest coming on the show just for that. You all have been awesome. Continue standing up for what’s right and doing so in a Christ-like way. Love you guys and I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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