Category Archives: News

News

1 million conservative United Methodist members leave denomination

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How are things working out for the United Methodists? They used to be a pretty moderate denomination. Not as Bible-based as the Presbyterian Church in America, but not as secular and leftist as the Episcopal Church. But recently, they’ve taken positions on theology and morality that no Bible-Believing Christian could accept. How did the Bible-believing Christians in the church respond to that?

Here’s the story from Christian Post:

A regional body of the United Methodist Church with approximately 1 million members has voted to leave the mainline denomination over its acceptance of gay marriage and noncelibate gay clergy.

The Côte d’Ivoire Conference based in West Africa voted earlier this week to leave the UMC after the denomination’s decision to remove rules banning the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of people in romantic same-sex relationships from its Book of Discipline.

With approximately a million members, the conference was one of the largest regional bodies within the worldwide denomination, according to UM News.

The approved decision argues that “the new United Methodist Church has preferred to sacrifice its honorability and integrity to honor the LGBT” and that “the new United Methodist Church is now based on sociocultural and contextual values which have consumed its doctrinal and disciplinary integrity.”

This is not the only group to leave the United Methodist Church:

Over the past few decades, the UMC had been embroiled in a divisive debate over whether to remove language from its Book of Discipline that prohibited the blessing of gay unions, the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals, and the funding of LGBT advocacy groups.

In response to the never-ending nature of the debate and many liberal leaders within the UMC refusing to follow or enforce the rules, around 7,500 mostly conservative congregations disaffiliated from the denomination over the last few years.

Most of these departing congregations opted to affiliate with the Global Methodist Church, a theologically conservative alternative to the UMC launched in 2022.

At the UMC General Conference earlier this year, delegates overwhelmingly voted to remove the Book of Discipline language, opening the door for the acceptance of same-sex marriage and ordaining clergy in gay unions.

At the same General Conference, delegates voted to approve the departure of the UMC Eurasian Episcopal Area, which has four annual conferences in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

The United Methodists aren’t the only denomination who find Jesus’ definition of marriage in Matthew 19:1-6 to be factually incorrect.

American Protestant denominations, such as United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, The Episcopal Church USA, Presbyterian Church USA, Disciples of Christ, United Methodists generally oppose Jesus’ definition of marriage.

Outside of America, the Church of England approves blessing same-sex unions and Pope Francis formally approved letting Catholic priests bless same-sex couples.

How is all of this apostasy working out for the secular left denominations?

According to Religion Unplugged, it’s not working out well:

  • United Church of Christ -52%
  • Evangelical Lutheran Church in America -41%
  • The Episcopal Church USA -36%
  • Presbyterian Church USA -58%
  • United Methodist Church -31%

Meanwhile, conservative denominations are thriving:

  • Presbyterian Church in America +101%
  • Assemblies of God +51%

This isn’t the first time that United Methodists have gotten into trouble for choosing feelings over truth. The United Methodists recently adopted women pastors. Maybe that decision has something to do with their continued decline, in both orthodoxy and attendance?

News

New study: children of same-sex parents have more emotional problems

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I like to have all the research papers I need on hand to “show my work” to people who want to know why I have certain views on moral issues. This study entitled “Emotional Problems among Children with Same-Sex Parents: Difference by Definition” was published in the peer-reviewed journal “British Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science” is good research.

Here’s what it says:

Aims: To test whether small non-random sample findings that children with same-sex parents suffer no disadvantage in emotional well-being can be replicated in a large population sample; and examine the correlates of any differences discovered.

A big sample size makes the study more reliable:

Methodology: Using a representative sample of 207,007 children, including 512 with same-sex parents, from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey, prevalence in the two groups was compared for twelve measures of emotional problems, developmental problems, and affiliated service and treatment usage, with controls for age, sex, and race of child and parent education and income. Instruments included the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Kessler Scale of Psychological Distress (SPD). Bivariate logistic regression models tested the effect of parent psychological distress, family instability, child peer stigmatization and biological parentage, both overall and by opposite-sex family structure.

This is the key part. “Emotional problems were over twice as prevalent… for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents.” That’s not what you’ll see on TV or in the corporate news media, but that’s what you find if you’re looking for peer-reviewed studies with good methodology and large sample sizes.

Results: Emotional problems were over twice as prevalent (minimum risk ratio (RR) 2.4, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.7-3.0) for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents. Risk was elevated in the presence of parent psychological distress (RR 2.7, CI 1.8-4.3, p (t) < .001), moderated by family instability (RR 1.3, CI 1.2-1.4) and unaffected by stigmatization (RR 2.4, CI 1.4-4.2), though these all had significant direct effects on emotional problems. However, biological parentage nullified risk alone and in combination with any iteration of factors. Joint biological parents are associated with the lowest rate of child emotional problems by a factor of 4 relative to same-sex parents, accounting for the bulk of the overall same-sex/opposite-sex difference.

And here’s the conclusion:

Conclusion: Joint biological parentage, the modal condition for opposite-sex parents but not possible for same-sex parents, sharply differentiates between the two groups on child emotional problem outcomes. The two groups are different by definition. Intact opposite-sex marriage ensures children of the persistent presence of their joint biological parents; same-sex marriage ensures the opposite. However, further work is needed to determine the mechanisms involved.

I blogged recently about another study that found other differences between the children of same-sex couples and the children of heterosexual couples.

From a public policy point of view, there are always going to be times where there is a conflict between the needs of small children, and the wants of selfish adults. In that case, I think we should side with the small children, since they are more vulnerable. It’s alarming to me to see many “conservatives” put the desires of adults over the needs of children. That doesn’t seem like a good position to take, morally speaking. Children do better when they are raised by a Mom and a Dad. We should pass laws to encourage grown-ups to live their lives in a way that they don’t harm children.

News

New study: there is no gay gene that causes homosexuality

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I heard one of the authors of this new study commenting on how he was a gay man, and the purpose of his research was to show a genetic basis for homosexuality, in order to make it equal to race. His goal was to make it impossible to disagree with homosexual behavior, because homosexual behavior would be seen as natural and normal. Let’s see if his new study helps him out.

The blog of the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One reported on the new study, which was published in the prestigious journal Science.

Excerpt:

The once-prevailing concept of a “gay gene” dictating sexual orientation has been put to rest in a powerhouse study published today in Science. The work brilliantly illustrates the very nature of science: evolving with the input of new data, especially the large-scale contributions of bioinformatics and crowd-sourcing.

“We formed a large international consortium and collected data for more than 500,000 people, comparing DNA and self-reported sexual behavior. This is approximately 100 times bigger than any previous study on this topic,” said lead author Andrea Ganna, of the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Finland and an instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, opening a news conference earlier this week.

[…]The investigation estimates a genetic contribution to same-sex sexual behavior as under 1 percent, thanks to analysis of a trove of data from the UK Biobank and the consumer genetic testing company 23andme.

So, there you have it, there is no gay gene. But this is of course something we’ve known for decades, as all the previous studies had found the same thing.

The normal way that people do these studies is to analyze identical twins, and see how often both identical twins are gay.

Eight major studies of identical twins in Australia, the U.S., and Scandinavia during the last two decades all arrive at the same conclusion: gays were not born that way.

“At best genetics is a minor factor,” says Dr. Neil Whitehead, PhD. Whitehead worked for the New Zealand government as a scientific researcher for 24 years, then spent four years working for the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency. Most recently, he serves as a consultant to Japanese universities about the effects of radiation exposure. His PhD is in biochemistry and statistics.

Identical twins have the same genes or DNA. They are nurtured in equal prenatal conditions. If homosexuality is caused by genetics or prenatal conditions and one twin is gay, the co-twin should also be gay.

“Because they have identical DNA, it ought to be 100%,” Dr. Whitehead notes. But the studies reveal something else. “If an identical twin has same-sex attraction the chances the co-twin has it are only about 11% for men and 14% for women.”

Because identical twins are always genetically identical, homosexuality cannot be genetically dictated. “No-one is born gay,” he notes. “The predominant things that create homosexuality in one identical twin and not in the other have to be post-birth factors.”

Dr. Whitehead believes same-sex attraction (SSA) is caused by “non-shared factors,” things happening to one twin but not the other, or a personal response to an event by one of the twins and not the other.

By the way, a previous study also found that transgender behavior was not genetic, but was clearly linked to environmental factors such as peer approval and social media.

Here is the report from Science Daily:

This month, a Brown University researcher published the first study to empirically describe teens and young adults who did not have symptoms of gender dysphoria during childhood but who were observed by their parents to rapidly develop gender dysphoria symptoms over days, weeks or months during or after puberty.

[…]The study was published on Aug. 16 in PLOS ONE.

Littman surveyed more than 250 parents of children who suddenly developed gender dysphoria symptoms during or after puberty.

[…]“Of the parents who provided information about their child’s friendship group, about a third responded that more than half of the kids in the friendship group became transgender-identified,” Littman said. “A group with 50 percent of its members becoming transgender-identified represents a rate that is more 70 times the expected prevalence for young adults.”

A previous study also found that children are more likely to be gay if they are raised by gay adults. It was reported in AOL News.

Excerpt:

Walter Schumm knows what he’s about to do is unpopular: publish a study arguing that gay parents are more likely to raise gay children than straight parents. But the Kansas State University family studies professor has a detailed analysis that past almost aggressively ideological researchers never had.

[…]His study on sexual orientation, out next month, says that gay and lesbian parents are far more likely to have children who become gay. “I’m trying to prove that it’s not 100 percent genetic,” Schumm tells AOL News.

His study is a meta-analysis of existing work. First, Schumm extrapolated data from 10 books on gay parenting… [and] skewed his data so that only self-identified gay and lesbian children would be labeled as such.

[…]Schumm concluded that children of lesbian parents identified themselves as gay 31 percent of the time; children of gay men had gay children 19 percent of the time, and children of a lesbian mother and gay father had at least one gay child 25 percent of the time.

[…]Finally, Schumm looked at the existing academic studies… In all there are 26 such studies. Schumm ran the numbers from them and concluded that, surprisingly, 20 percent of the kids of gay parents were gay themselves. When children only 17 or older were included in the analysis, 28 percent were gay.

It’s very important for people to understand that there is a trend in society to make every behavior traditionally seen as sinful into something caused by genetics. The twin goals of this effort are to insulate the behaviors from criticism, and to minimize evaluation of the effects of these behaviors on society as a whole. The genetic argument was used extensively to normalize same-sex marriage and transgenderism. I have seen the genetic argument used to defend other behaviors like pedophilia and incest. But the scientific research does nothing to support any of these arguments. What’s amazing is how a majority of people in the United States have such false beliefs about the scientific research. They vastly overestimate the number of gay people, and also the influence of genetics.