By Garry J. Moes

EDITOR'S NOTE: The wife of a Southern California minister in one of the nation's most conservative denominations recently touched off a firestorm of unofficial controversy within her denomination by proposing, in a lengthy treatise on her husband's theological web site, that conservative Christians should support the idea of civil marriages for homosexuals. Misty Irons argued that this concession to gays would inspire them to reciprocate by conceding to Christians the right to refuse the sanctifying of same-sex marriage in the church — thus creating a mutually acceptable, dual-track sysvem of state-approved gay marriage and religious condemnation of church-approved gay marriage. She argued that this mutual respect for opposing positions would be a worthy political compromise which would safeguard the civil liberties of all concerned. Excerpts from the article by Mrs. Irons are reproduced at the left of this page. The storm of protest and action by the ruling elders of her husband's church prompted her husband, Pastor Lee Irons, to withdraw his wife's article from his web site. His full explanation, which falls far short of repudiation of his wife's many heresies, including her elevation of homosexual writings above the Bible as a source of guiding truth, is now found on his web site at http://www.upper-register.com/theonomy/note.html. However, the original Misty Irons article remains in circulation on her own web site Musings on Christianity, Homosexuality and the Bible. Readers are cautioned that Mrs. Irons' web page contains material which may be extremely troubling to the Christian conscience. Below is an open-letter response by Graybrook Editor-in-Chief Garry J. Moes to her article and numerous defenses made by Mrs. Irons in several Internet discussion groups.

UPDATE: At a meeting of the Presbytery of Southern California of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church which was held Saturday, March 30th) in Carson, California, four charges were filed against the Rev. Lee Irons relative to the current controversy regarding the issue of homosexuality. Due to the fact that the charges were referred to the Presbytery's Judicial Committee (which may, if it sees fit, change some of the language, or order, etc., of the charges), details regarding them were not given. Please pray that the Presbytery of Southern California will seek God's wisdom as it acts regarding this matter.

I have been aware for a long time that many in the so-called Christian church hold views that are radically dualistic, but I am disturbed to find such a view being espoused by someone who claims to be a conservative in a conservative, Bible-believing denomination. To be frank, your seemingly effortless ability to establish an unbreachable dichotomy between the sacred and the secular is breathtaking and your cutting-edge antinomianism is truly staggering! To respond as plainly as I can, the Law of God categorically cannot be categorically applied — as if to say it must be applied in the religious world but has no claim to governance of the secular world. The Law of God is God's comprehensive will for the universe, and there is no enclave in that universe which is free from its propositions and demands. A thing is wrong or right according to its conformance to or transgression of the Law of God, without exception or reservation in any part. And no attempt to compromise or negotiate with any segment in the universe which may be in rebellion and denial will change that fact. The church and the Bible do not hold, as you plainly do, that gay marriage is wrong "for religious reasons." It is wrong for any and every reason and in any and all circumstances, because God says so in no uncertain terms and without caveat. (He finds it so wrong, may I remind you, that He demands immediate death for those who practice it because they and their abominations are a defilement of the land.)

Equally disturbing is your tacit argument that it is legitimate and advisable for Christians to bargain with the devil for the right to be left alone in the practice of our beliefs. Politically speaking, this is nothing short of naive and laughable. But that such an argument could come from an articulate member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church is absolutely astonishing. I am not overstating your position, I am convinced, since you say in that the main point of your article is that Christians should respect gay marriage in the civil realm so that gays will respect our right to condemn it in the religious realm (again your runaway dualism is shockingly evident). I hardly know where to begin to point out the craziness of such an argument, both politically and biblically. To cut to the chase: it is neither right nor safe for Christians to make a bargain with sinners whereby we will not interfere with their right to sin with impunity if they will not interfere with our right not to sin. You have, in effect, argued that we will not interfere with the homosexuals' right to destroy society (and do not doubt for a second that "civil" gay marriages will destroy society) as long as they do not interfere with our right not to destroy the church (by accepting "ecclesiastical" gay marriages into it).

What possible basis, acceptable to a biblical Christian, could any civil law have if it is not the Law of God? If there is some other legitimate basis for law, it must be concluded that there are two gods in this world, one for religious people who must obey their God's law and one for secular people who are free to obey their god's law or lack thereof. My mind absolutely boggles when I contemplate the ignorance and iniquity of your argument...and the political naivite you simultaneously exhibit.

In this latter regard, the beauty of the American constitutional system is that religious people are never required to negotiate their beliefs or practice. The presence in our Constitution of a guarantee of freedom of religious belief and practice makes us free from the necessity to negotiate, bargain or compromise. My father recently pointed out that "All people have religious views which color their political thinking. Therefore all political decisions favor the majority religious root." Historically, that would mean that the political thinking of American public life would be Christian, since that has been the majority religious root. The nature of the national religious root, however, may be changing to a non-Christian one, and when the majority comes to hold a religious worldview which favors things anathema to the Christian worldview, we who will then be (or already are) in the minority will become subject to the dictates of the majority political thinking. And our Christian society will be destroyed. This is why the Founders insisted that their experiment in civil self-government would be a disaster unless Americans maintained their Christian religious root. But they wisely foresaw that it might be possible that this root one day would be lost. Therefore, they guaranteed the freedom of religion, and this guarantee means we have no need whatsover to bargain or negotiate any aspect of our belief, including our beliefs about the Biblical moral and ethical basis of our civil laws. We are guaranteed the right to clamor like champions in defense of those laws and their foundations. To wimp out of such a battle in the face of a militant group of sinners, as you advocate, is an insult to the God who calls us to obey Him and administer His laws in our world.

My daughter has a pro-life-message T-shirt which asks: "How can a moral wrong be a civil right?" The question seems appropriate to raise in the context of your argument for recognition of same-sex civil marriages. It's obviously intended to be a rhetorical question, having for its answer an implied: "It can't." The question and answer seem perfectly logical when asked in the context of the abortion debate; i.e., murder cannot be a civil right. A Bible-believing Christian knows that homosexual marriage (no matter how constituted) is a moral wrong...just as much as murder is a moral wrong. For this reason, no Bible-believing Christian can sanction, advocate or tolerate it. You profess to believe that homosexual marriage is a moral wrong, yet you seem perfectly willing to make it a civil right.

What I can't figure out is why you are taking this position and why you thought it necessary to try to convince the Bible-believing church that it should tolerate, even advocate, the notion of making this moral wrong a civil right. What possible reason could you have? You know that gay marriage is wrong. Why do you feel obligated to offer it to them anyway as a civil right? The only possible explanation which seems to emerge from your proposal is this: You seem to believe that if we help to secure this civil right for them, those who engage in this moral wrong will be willing, politically, to tolerate us in return. Both sides can maintain their moral high (or low) ground and still live out their respective lifestyles/beliefs without interference from the other.Your entire argument boils down to the assertion that an exchange of tolerance between Christians and Sodomites will secure the peace for all concerned. This is essentially, then, a POLITICAL deal. Actually, it is entirely a political deal. And this brings me to why I pointed out that you are politically naive — dangerously so.

Politically speaking, your argument is a classic case of appeasement — something akin, say, to telling Hitler he had a legitimate case for seizing the Sudatenland and thinking that this concession would somehow halt his grand vision to rule the rest of the world. I submit that no "Munich Pact" with the gay stormtroopers is going to stop their determined march to take over the world, or at least to normalize it according to their perverted vision. (If you intend to further promulgate your position, I suggest you form the Neville Chamberlain Society for Christian Advocacy of Civil Gay Marriage.)

You suggest that I believe that the Law of God and the law of the land must be considered coterminous, and you seem to be aghast at such a notion. Again I ask you, just what standard for the law of the land would you, as a "conservative Christian," raise in place of the Law of God. All law, by definition, establishes a standard of right and wrong for behavior. What fixed standard would you build civil law upon? Human Wisdom? Human Whim? The Modern Sacred Principle of Tolerance and Diversity? Islamic Sharia? The Political Correctness of University Professors? What? (Perhaps "Fairy" Tales?)

Coterminous is not the word I would use to describe divine law as it relates to civil law. What the Bible teaches is this: God's Law rules over all, i.e., its JURISDICTION is infinite. The Bible, furthermore, teaches that the right of civil government to legislate (make law on the human level) is limited to the jurisdiction God grants to civil government. God does not grant the civil government, for example, any jurisdiction over the conscience of men, or the doctrines of the Church, or parental authority in the upbringing/education of children, to name only a very few examples. (*See footnote below.) The Law of God, being comprehensive, has jurisdiction over all of these things. God has granted to the civil government, jurisdictionally speaking, the right (indeed, the duty) to ensure that no power interferes with the conscience, ecclesiastical doctrines, or the parental role in the raising/education of their children (again, to name just a few examples). In short, civil government's primary role is to protect God-given rights, to administer God-ordained justice, to secure the blessings of life, divinely ordained liberties, and the pursuit of true happiness (true religion).

Interestingly, our Christain Founders understood this with great precision when they wrote the American Constitution. They wrote the Establishment Clause into the First Amendment to prevent any power from interfering with conscience, etc. We know what the foundation for the Bill of Rights was when we examine the Declaration of Independence. There we learn that the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are those rights which the Founders saw as "unalienable," and they were "unalienable" because they were granted by the Creator. Thus these rights are beyond the jurisdiction of civil government and any other power on earth, except those whose jurisdiction is to bind the conscience.

I bring this up to point out to you why there is no need to bargain with anyone to secure our religious rights, including our right to believe that homosexual marriage is a moral wrong which, as God sees it, is capital treason against the family and the general society built from families. Furthermore, our Christian conscience requires us to oppose the intrusion of this family-and-society-destroying moral wrong with all just means within our power, including legislating against it in accordance with the dictates of the moral law of God. There is no need to bargain with anyone to secure our religious rights because they are already ours, unalienably, due to a grant from our Creator.

And if there is no need to bargain to maintain our inalienable rights, your proposal loses all of its impetus, because, as I have shown, the only possible reason for the church to offer tolerance of same-sex marriage, according to your proposition, is to hope the queers will reciprocate tolerance toward us (which, of course, they will not, no matter how logical that quid-pro-quo may seem to you and your reasonable gay friends). In the process, you have bargained away a moral necessity for a political expediency which will never be realized. (If this isn't political naivete/folly, I don't know what is.) And if you think that granting the right to civil gay marriage is some kind of act of love and understanding for our poor confused brethren of the Sodomite persuasion, I must conclude you are even further into heresy than you appear to be already. Christians must have the deepest compassion for sinners, but that compassion is not demonstrated by offializing or approving their sin on any front. Love is whatever will rescue a sinner from his folly and his certain destruction, and in this case it would be denying sinners approval for building a family on an abomination which will earn them eternal death in the end and all sorts of grief in the meantime.

Whether you realize it or not, your proposition is based squarely on foundations laid in Rousseau's "Social Contract." While many have supposed this to be the foundation for American democracy, it is not. Civil order is not (must not, according to God) be built upon negotiations among men of goodwill. Civil order built on this theory is very shaky, indeed, because, as we Biblical Calvinists know, there ARE no men of goodwill. There are only depraved sinners bent on evil. (Even the Redeemed have this proclivity and are restrained only by the Holy Spirit and/through the Law of God.) Civil order can only be safely built upon a divine moral infrastructure, because this is the only fixed point in the universe which cannot be moved by the whims of sin-bound men.

I am tempted to ignore your silly suggestion that I seem to believe that the civil government should legislate and enforce against "lusting in one's heart, daydreaming at work, eating too much for dinner, overspending at the mall, arriving late for one's doctor's appointment" and similar moral wrongs. Of course, I don't. Besides inappropriately comparing apples (gay marriage) and oranges (your list of moral laxities above), you have entirely missed the principle of jurisdiction, as I have outlined it previously. Civil government may not legislate in these areas of moral wrong because God has not granted it jurisdiction over such things. God HAS given to the church the duty (and jurisdiction) to be guardians of the heart in these and all other moral areas. God HAS given to the church the right and duty to testify and proclaim to civil authorities and civil society concerning God's moral requirements (the church in the public square). God HAS granted to civil government the duty to protect the family and other divinely ordained social structures, and it therefore has a right and duty to prohibit same-sex marriages. It seems most of our current officeholders and American voters have a better understanding of this than you do, since legislation prohibiting same-sex marriage is passing on every front. Only a few radicals, morally crippled judges, and you seem not to understand. Incidentally, in those areas where God has given civil government the right and duty to act, He has undergirded that right and duty with a very powerful weapon — "the sword," the police power. We once took this matter seriously, and every civil jurisdiction in the land had criminal laws against sodomy (many still do). Yet you would have the church now give its civil blessing to this criminality. Incredible!

What I have addressed so far primarily is the wrong-headedness and moral vacancy of your political position. More serious are your spiritual and theological errors. I am particularly concerned about what you have characterized as the key foundational underpinning of your argument. I am referring to various statements in which you emphasize your considered belief that homosexuality is not a moral choice but some kind of a mysteriously programmed condition or inevitable response to genetics or upbringing in some people. You write with great passion about your encounters with people who have struggled overwhelmingly with their unnatural sexual orientation, and you cite with warm approval the heartfelt conclusions of various homosexual intellectuals, writers and researchers. The prevailing undertone of your writings on this subject is that a failure on the part of a hetereosexual Christian to recognize this orientation and empathize with the social and moral struggles of these tortured souls shows cruelty, misunderstanding and a failure of love.

While you occasionally give tacit concession to the Bible's powerful and plain characterization of homosexuality as being among the grossest of sins and abominations, you quite eloquently refuse to deal with it as such. With your repeated assertions that homosexuality is not a choice, you inescapably, if inadvertantly, declare that this particular sin cannot be avoided — that this is one temptation for which God has not provided a way of escape. This is heresy of the most profound kind, and a terrible cruelty to those bound up by this sin.

There is doubtless no Christian who has not at some time in his or her life struggled with a besetting sin or sins. This is the painful curse that sin has imposed upon all mankind, and millions of people, including most saints, have quietly or loudly confessed feelings of wretchness over their apparent inability to escape the entanglement of some sin. I know a particular woman of great faith and integrity, a woman who has keen insights into moral and ethical fine points, who loves and warmly worships the Lord; yet she cannot seem to escape the debilitating hold of alcoholism and crippling depression. I have the greatest love, concern and empathy for this sister, and my heart grieves over her plight. But my observations are that she finds some perverse satisfaction in holding on to her besetting sin of alcholism and finds some form of escape in what looks powerfully much like a willful surrender to her depression. How I have longed to see her find release and deliverance, but she takes dark comfort in retreating into her sinful self, a cruel comfort indeed, because it holds her in a terrible captivity which is destroying her life.

In my profession, I have had close contact with a ministry to drug and alcohol addicts, people whose lives have been utterly devastated by their commitment to their addictions. I have seen many of these men come to a knowledge and understanding of salvation in Christ and a seemingly sincere profession of faith, and yet, while some experience victory in Christ, some of them continue to struggle with, agonize over and repeatedly surrender to the sins which have held them captive.

The struggles these people, some of them saints, experience is nothing more than a testimony to the extreme power of sin — the cruel taskmastery of the corruption of the world, the flesh and the devil. Yet when you witness the struggle of some of your gay friends and acquaintances, you conclude that the source of the struggle, their own supposedly inherant natures, is best alleviated by recognizing the ontological character of their character. This is a tragic cruelty on your part, because it provides a rationale for permanent enslavement. You acknowledge that homosexuality is a sin, yet you want the world, including the people of a holy God, to stop harassing them with scriptural condemnation and Biblical promises of deliverance.

I once met a former gay man who, by God's grace, discovered those promises, was delivered from his sin and later formed a ministry to help others like him find their way out of their moral prison. He testified to what he came to see as the cruelty of well-meaning Christians who, out of supposed love, encouraged him to accept and even glory in his gay identity. But when he found in scripture the hope of transformation through becoming a "new creature in Christ," his joy could find no bounds. It was to him as great as former slaver and slave John Newton's life-changing discovery of Amazing Grace.

So your misplaced compassion and "understanding" are utterly false and tragic for those to whom you offer them. More grievous, they are an insult and blasphemy to the Savior-Redeemer whose name you confess. Remember, it is a Deliverer who has come out of Zion into the human condition.

My spirit was perhaps most sorely vexed over the following cleverly deceptive statements you made to a correspondent:

Sometimes I think my gay friends are actually glad that I am a conservative Christian, because deep down they know that their homosexuality is a sin against God, and they can hardly dare to believe that God could ever love someone like them. When they see that a conservative Christian loves them, it gives them hope that maybe God loves them too.

I want to tell my gay friends that the Reformed faith has answers for them. Most evangelical Christians can only offer them the Pelagian answer that all sin is a choice, and since homosexuality is a sin, it too must be a choice, and unless they can choose it away they will perish. I want to tell my gay friends that even if they didn't choose their homosexuality it is still a sin, and they will still be judged by God because their plight is the plight of all mankind. We are all doomed to perish not because of our sinful choices but because of the imputation of Adam's sin to our account and the inherited corruption of our nature. The doctrine of original sin is extraordinarily difficult for most people to swallow because it says that we had no choice in the matter of our eternal fate. It speaks of our utterly helpless and hopeless condition before a holy God, and people don't want that. Instead they want to fool themselves into believing that they can still choose to be moral. But the homosexual is not fooled. He knows differently. He experiences every day what it means to be truly powerless to morally redeem himself, and every day he must live in the misery of that condition. I want to tell gays and lesbians about the good news of justification through the imputation of Christ's righteousness to their account, exhort them to take hold of Christ by faith, and like Abraham who contemplated his own body to be as good as dead, to look away from themselves and ahead to the promise of the resurrection of the body (Romans 4:19-25).

Telling them that I support civil same-sex marriage is just a small way of reaching out to them. It's a way I can communicate to them that I know they don't choose their condition. And it's a way of exhorting them to try to move in the right moral direction, that at the very least on a purely social level I would like to see them to put away their promiscuity and be in committed, sexually responsible relationships.

Let's summarize and systematize some of the points you made — or probably didn't realize you made — in those high-sounding paragraphs:

• Homosexuality is a sin.
• Homosexuality is not a choice, contrary to what the Pelagians would argue! The homosexual "knows" he also cannot choose to be moral.
• Supporting civil, but not religious, sexual union by persons of the same sex is an act of love and understanding — a way of "reaching out" to them.
• This act of love is designed to show them that they should "try to move in the right moral direction," which, though you do not say so, presumably means moving out of their sin of homosexuality. Yet they did not choose their sin of homosexuality and therefore, presumably, they cannot choose to repudiate it. And despite the fact that they did not choose their sin, they will be held accountable for it by God.
• Their only hope is to be "justified" by Christ in their inescapable condition of sinful homosexuality and wait out their life in a "sexually responsible relationship" with one of their own kind until the resurrection makes them over again, presumably with a different sexual orientation. Assuming, of course, that their resurrection will result in a positive transformation to holy immortality in eternal perfection, and assuming, conversely, that their resurrection will not be one to eternal destruction because of their unrepentant sin.
• In the meantime, they should share in the social blessings of marriage like other folks, only they will be married to persons of the same sex and engage in intercourse in this way, even though this kind of intercourse is an abomination to God.
• Faithfulness in this "committed, sexually responsible" fornicating union that is abominable to God is a way for them to "put away their promiscuity."

Forgive me if I can't find a way that you should avoid being brought before the courts of the church to answer for these horrendously sinful, not to mention impossibly illogical, conclusions.

A book could be written to answer your paper and defenses of it — especially one remark you made to the effect that you were tired of people making biblical arguments against same-sex civil marriage but might be willing to consider some arguments on the adverse social consequences ( ! ), but mostly what needs to be said is this: Repent as soon as you can, retract what you have written and rectify the error you have spread into the church and world. You must urgently ask God to forgive you of your transgression against His command to "take every thought captive" to the Word of God, to name just one of your central errors.

FOOTNOTE: I recognize that individual freedom in these three example areas and most others is not absolute, and that the government may have some God-given authority to act in certain cases of abuse of these freedoms. Freedom of conscience is not absolute when it translates into harmful action, the government may intervene when a religious doctrine poses a threat to life and safety (snake handlers, Islamic terrorists, pantheistic eco-terrorists, etc.), and parental child abuse may be declared a crime, for example. [Return to text]

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