Scott Klusendorf, President of the Life Training Institute
Here’s the video, featuring one of my favorite pro-life speakers Scott Klusendorf. Scott is the founder and President of the Life Training Institute. LTI’s mission is to make a rigorous, rational defense for pro-life positions with respect to a variety of ethical issues.
Three topics:
right to life of the unborn
reproductive technologies
end of life questions
40 minutes of guided discussion, 20 minutes of Q&A. This video was apparently recorded in the summer of 2016.
Abortion:
the 1-minute case for the pro-life position (excellent)
dealing with those who dismiss the pro-life case as religious
how and when do people win arguments?
how does one get better at discussing moral issues?
who are some of the best books to get informed about life issues?
what are some of the best books from the other side?
what is the SLED test? do pro-abortion scholars accept it?
if abortion were illegal, who should be punished and how much?
is it inflammatory and dangerous to say that abortion is killing?
Assisted reproductive technologies:
how should we speak to people considering ARTs?
what is the underlying issue in ART discussions?
should pro-lifers be opposed to all use of ARTs?
what should pro-lifers think about surrogacy?
which books provide an introduction to ART ethics?
End of life issues:
what is the central issue in end of life discussions?
should treatment always be continued or are there situations where treatment can be withdrawn?
Final issues:
if a student wants to take courses in bioethics, where should they go to take courses or do a degree?
what is the policy situation for pro-lifers in terms of legislation and SCOTUS decision-making?
what are some policies that pro-lifers can support as incremental measures that move the issue in the right direction?
I liked this discussion. I tried to listen as someone new to the issue and he did a good job of not assuming any prior knowledge of the debate. My favorite part was his survey of books and arguments on the other side, and what they say. I don’t think that most people realize what the implications of the pro-abortion worldview really are for things like infanticide, and so on. The discussion about who should be punished for abortion and how much was new to me – and that actually came up during the last election, during the GOP primary. Personally, I would let the woman get off, and just prosecute the doctor.
It’s very very good to listen to crystal clear thinking on these controversial issues from someone who has encountered the other side in their writings, and in public debates with them. Not to mention having to interact with people making decisions in these areas.
I am tempted to say that this is the best podcast I have ever heard on the Unbelievable show. Do anything you have to do in order to listen to this podcast.
Details:
Prof Robert Gagnon has become a well-known voice advocating the traditional biblical view on sexuality. In a highly charged show he debates the scriptural issues on sexuality with Jayne Ozanne, the director of Accepting Evangelicals who came out as gay earlier this year.
If you can only listen for 15 minutes, then start at 49 minutes in and listen from there.
The following summary is rated MUP for made-up paraphrase. Reader discretion is advised.
Summary:
Intro:
Speaker introductions
Gagnon: scholars who support gay marriage agree that the Bible doesn’t support it
Gagnon: scholars who support gay marriage agree Jesus taught male-female marriage
Ozanne: I went to the hospital because I was sick from trying to suppress my gay desires
Ozanne: Doctors told me that I would die if I didn’t act on my gay desires
Ozanne: I decided to reinterpret the Bible to fit with my gay desires
Ozanne: According to my new interpretation, Jesus actually supports my gay desires
Segment 1: Genesis
Ozanne: In Genesis the Bible says that Adam needs a woman to complete him
Ozanne: I reinterpret this to mean that Adam needed a “complementarian human being”
Ozanne: Genesis doesn’t say whether Eve was complemented by Adam in that chapter
Ozanne: It’s not critical that men are complemented by women, a man could complement a man
Ozanne: Genesis 2 doesn’t talk about children, it’s all about adult needs from a relationship
Gagnon: Genesis 2 has never been interpreted that way in all of history
Gagnon: Genesis 2 language specifically implies a human being who is opposite/different
Gagnon: Genesis 2 language translates to complement or counterpart
Gagnon: Genesis as a whole teaches that the sexuality is for male and female natures
Gagnon: The extraction of something from the man that is given to the woman is complementarian
Ozanne: I think that people can be complementary outside of male-female Genesis language
Ozanne: I don’t want to discuss specific words and texts and Greek meanings
Gagnon: the text has always been read and interpreted to support male/female complementarity
Gagnon: the male-female nature argument is made because the two natures are complementary
Ozanne: the text was interpreted by patriarchal males who treated women like property, it’s biased
Ozanne: what is important to me is how Christ interprets Genesis (?? how does she know that?)
Ozanne: I am passionate about my interpretation of Scripture which supports my gay desires
Gagnon: just because a person is passionate about their interpretation it doesn’t make it right
Gagnon: I am not arguing for the male-female view based on passion, but on scholarship, evidence and history
Ozanne: both sides are equally passionate about their interpretations (?? so both are equally warranted?)
Ozanne: the real question is why God “allowed” two different interpretations of Scripture
Segment 2: Is homosexuality a sin?
Gagnon: Jesus affirmed traditional sexual morality, which forbids homosexuality
Gagnon: Jesus teaches that marriage is male-female, and limited to two people
Gagnon: No one in history has interpreted the Bible to say that homosexuality was not immoral
Ozanne: Jesus came to bring life, and that means he supports homosexuality
Ozanne: I was dying, and embracing my gay desires allowed me to live, so Jesus approves of me
Ozanne: God says “I am who I am” and that means he approves of me doing whatever I want
Ozanne: There is an imperative to be who I am, and that means embracing my gay desires
Gagnon: Jesus argued that the twoness of the sexual bond is based on the twoness of the sexes
Gagnon: Jesus did not come to gratify people’s innate desires, he called people to repent of sin
Gagnon: Jesus did reach out to sinners but he never condoned the sins they committed
Gagnon: Jesus’ outreach to tax collectors collecting too much and sexual sinners is the same: STOP SINNING
Ozanne: I don’t think that Romans 1 is talking about homosexuality
Ozanne: I think it’s talking about sexual addiction, not loving, committed gay relationships
Ozanne: Paul was condemning pederasty in Romans 1, not loving, long-term, consensual sexual relationships between gay adults
Gagnon: nothing in the passage limits the condemnation to pederasty
Gagnon: the passage was never interpreted to be limited to pederasty in history
Gagnon: rabbis and church fathers knew about committed two-adult same-sex relationships, and said they were wrong
Gagnon: the argument for marriage is based on the broad two-nature argument, with no exceptions
Gagnon: the condemnation is not limited to exploitative / coercive / lustful / uncommitted relationships
Gagnon: even pro-gay scholars agree the passage cannot be interpreted Ozanne’s way (he names two)
Segment 3: The showdown (49:00)
Ozanne: I don’t care how many pages people have written on this
Ozanne: God says that “the wisdom of the wise I will frustrate” so you can’t use scholars, even pro-gay scholars, to argue against my passionate interpretation
Ozanne: I am not interested in the text or history or scholarship or even pro-gay scholars who agree with you
Ozanne: what decides the issue for me is my mystical feelings about God’s love which makes my sexual desires moral
Ozanne: you are certain that this is wrong, but your view does not “give life” to people
Ozanne: your scholarship and historical analysis is “a message of death” that causes teenagers to commit suicide (= you are evil and a meany, Robert)
Ozanne: “I pray for you and your soul” (= opposing me will land you in Hell) and “I hope that listeners will listen with their hearts” (?? instead of their minds?)
Ozanne: you can prove anything you want with research, even two mutually exclusive conclusions, so you shouldn’t rely on scholarship and research since it could be used to prove my view as well
Ozanne: instead of relying on research, you should rely on your heart and your feelings about God’s love to decide what the Bible teaches about sexual morality
Gagnon: you are distorting the gospel in order to make your case
Gagnon: attacking my “certainty” is an ad hominem attack to cover your dismissmal of the scholarship and history
Gagnon: you distort the gospel to make it seem like Christ just wants us to get what we want, when we want it, with who we want it with
Gagnon: Christ calls us to take up our cross, to lose our lives and to deny ourselves
Gagnon: you have a notion of what “fullness of life” is, but it’s not reflective of the gospel
Gagnon: Paul’s life was much more troubling than yours, mine or anyone else around here
Gagnon: Paul was beaten, whipped, stoned, poorly sheltered, poorly clothed, poorly fed, shipwrecked, and anxious for his churches
Gagnon: on your view, he should have been miserable and angry with God all the time
Gagnon: but instead Paul was constantly thankful and rejoicing to be able to suffer with Jesus and look forward to the resurrection
Gagnon: I have suffered too, but the suffering we go through never provides us with a license to violate the commandments of God
Ozanne: “the ultimate thing is what people feel God has called them to”
Ozanne: My goal right now is to tell young people that homosexuality is fine so they don’t commit suicide
Ozanne: the view that homosexuality is wrong is “evil and misguided”
Gagnon: the greater rates of harm in the gay community are intrinsic to homosexual unions, not caused by external disapproval of homosexuality
Segment 4: Concluding statements
Gagnon: gay male relationships on average have more sex partners and more STDs
Gagnon: female relationships on average have shorter-length relationships and more mental issues
Gagnon: the greater rates of harm are because there is no complementarity / balance in the relationships
Gagnon: everyone has some disappointment or suffering in their lives that hurts them, and that they are tempted to break the rules to fix, but we should not break the rules in order to be happy
Ozanne: both sides are passionate, so no one can be right, and evidence proves nothing
Ozanne: only feelings about “what God is doing” can allow us to decide what counts as sin or not
Ozanne: the main thing that is at stake here is to make people like us, not to decide what the Bible says about sin
Ozanne: my message to people is to do whatever you want, and ignore mean people who don’t affirm you
Ozanne: we should be more opposed to mean people who make non-Christians feel unloved than about doing what the Bible says
Lesbian Glennon Doyle Melton in a church, surrounded by female Christian fans
My friend Wes posted an article from Dalrock’s blog about how Spain is trying to get people to make babies after repeated laws punishing men for marrying and having children, such as forcing men to do housework, assuming that men are guilty of domestic violence without any evidence, making no-fault divorce more unfair for men, and now allowing children to sue their parents for maintenance throughout their 20s. Spain is feminist, and no sane, intelligent man marries and has children there.
That article was fine, so I decided to run through his last dozen posts. In many of them, he talked about how pastors, confronted with the decreasing numbers of marriage-minded men, were blind to the root cause of the problem: radical feminism. In fact, the pious pastors continued to blame men for refusing to marry like they did before radical feminism removed all the incentives for them to marry.
[…][O]ver the past decades we have witnessed an explosion in out of wedlock births. Feminists have been entirely open about their desire to make single motherhood an attractive option for women, and after decades of social and legal “progress” 40% of all children are now born out of wedlock in the US.
For feminist Christians this isn’t a problem, as they can simply celebrate their victory while pushing for even more “progress”. But for complementarians and other conservative Christians, this poses a huge challenge. How can they appear to take biblical morality (and the welfare of innocent children) seriously while avoiding upsetting women in our thoroughly feminized culture? There is only one answer, no matter how absurd it is. The answer is to pretend that feminists aren’t really in the final mopping up stages in the culture war, and assert instead that what we are experiencing is a sudden and mysterious change in men. Here is how Glenn Stanton, the Director of Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family (FotF), explains the incredible increase we are seeing in out of wedlock births*:
Women want to marry and have daddies for their babies. But if they can’t find good men to commit themselves to, well… Our most pressing social problem today is a man deficit.
The level of denial here is astonishing, and would be laughable if it weren’t entirely commonplace. Even more astounding, often times the denial of feminism is expressed using feminist terminology, and even includes calls to join feminists in their push to re order our society**:
Whatever our views on specific economic policies, we must recognize that much economic hardship of women in our age is the result of men who abandon their commitments. We should eschew obnoxious “welfare queen” rhetoric and work with others of goodwill to seek economic and social measures to provide a safety net for single mothers and abused women in jeopardy. We should join with others, including secular feminists, in seeking legal protections against such manifestations of a rape culture as sexual harassment, prostitution, and sex slavery.
The quote above is from Dr. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
In the past, I’ve blogged about pastor Mark Driscoll, an otherwise excellent pastor, who was asked by a Christian woman in a premarital sexual relationship with a non-Christian man how to get him to commit to her. His answer was not to rebuke the woman for choosing a hawt bad boy because of her feelings of attraction. His answer was to bellow how dare this non-Christian man who signed up for recreational sex with this fake Christian woman not act as if he were actually a Christian man (even though she was not acting like a Christian woman). It’s rare (I mean really rare) to hear a sermon where the pastor actually says that prohibitions against premarital sex apply to men and women. Instead, you get people like Moore and Driscoll refusing to confront these sinful women, because that’s just too scary! It doesn’t matter if women’s choice of bad men has caused abortion, divorce, fatherlessness, etc. to skyrocket. Pious pastors can’t hold women accountable for putting feelings above the Bible – that would take courage, and the pious pastors don’t have that. Women need to be told that they should be focused on marriage when they are choosing men. They shouldn’t choose the exciting promiscuous binge-drinking bad boy with the spotty resume and the empty balance cheat. They should choose the man who can actually do the job.
50 Shades of Feminism
The refusal to apply the Bible to women’s decisions can be seen in the response from pious pastors to the widespread popularity of 50 Shades of Gray among Christian women.
Excerpt:
Christian women are just as enthralled with 50SOG as non Christian women are:
What is surprising is who is viewing the film and reading the book—and why in the world they even would. Many refer to the book as “mommy porn” because of its wild popularity among adult women. And ticket sales are briskest in the typically-conservative deep south…
…it’s also reaching our young daughters. According to IMDB (Internet Movie Database), the movie drew the highest reviews by far from girls under 18.
And just in case you’re wondering, a Barna survey found that women who identify themselves as Christians are reading the books at the same rate as the general public. It’s captivating women everywhere.
Christian women are reading these books for the same reason as non-Christian women: because they like the sociopath man.
What is the solution to this? To tell Christian women that their feelings of attraction are morally wrong? Oh no, that’s too frightening to the pious pastors. Women are protected when we tell them not to be responsible with alcohol, responsible with their choice of man, responsible with their sexual choices.
You would think that pious pastors would confront women about their attraction for 50 Shades, but they don’t. The solution is always to get the sane, moral men have to bullied to “man up” so that women don’t act badly. The pious pastors simply refuse to see what the problem is: women being taught that their feelings are a hotline to God’s will for their happiness, so that the rules don’t apply to them, and they can choose godless men and try to make things work out by giving them recreational sex. Pious pastors are flat out teaching women in their churches that God’s job is to make them happy, that their feelings are God speaking to them, that the Bible doesn’t apply to their decision making about men and marriage, and that if their crazy, emotional selfishness blows up in their faces, then it’s somehow the innocent male bystander’s fault that it happened.
