Bracing straight talk about the West's cultural rot

Robert Oscar Lopez has had his principles tempered in the furnace of leftist outrage. He's a bisexual English professor, raised by lesbians who, after a period of intense hedonism, came to Christ (he's now a Southern Baptist) and married a woman. After getting his head on straight, he began writing and speaking as a conservative, drawing ire from the expected quarters.

In his latest American Thinker piece, he uses the 1952 cinematic masterpiece High Noon as his metaphor for illustrating where Christian America is, with bandit Frank Miller, due to arrive on the noon train and sure to start menacing Hadleyville right away, serving as the emblem for the forces distorting human nature in our society.

His reason for choosing this movie to make his point is that a major aspect of the plot is the moral cowardice former sheriff Will Kane encounters when he tries to enlist townspeople to help him prepare for Miller's arrival.

There's a lot of moral cowardice going around right now, say Lopez:

Everyone who was supposed to fight alongside us has conveniently vanished.  The classical liberals who once had some influence in the Democratic Party have retired or died off, leaving behind a heartless progressive wing uninterested in religious freedom, academic freedom, free speech, and the preservation of traditional cultures, be they Western or third-world.  By now it seems that half the Republican Party, from Ken Mehlman to Milo Yiannopoulos, has come out as flamingly homosexual – what a bonfire in honor of log cabins! – while the other half has to kowtow to the wealthy gays on their staff, with the result that the GOP now stands for a Grand Orgy of Pandering.  Don't expect a mad rush to pass the First Amendment Defense Act or a constitutional amendment protecting marriage.

They'll talk a good game about family values, of course, especially when they are asking for money or begging voters to plug their noses and return them to office.  Some may even deign to quote Tony Perkins once in a while.  But whether it's Jan Brewer or Mike Pence or Chris Christie or countless others, they will end up somewhere shaded and safe, counting all the benefits they got by making sure the LGBT gang got what they wanted and churches got screwed.  They will veto religious liberty bills, ban therapy for youths with unwanted same-sex attraction, and okay the Obama administration's overreach on transgender bathrooms.  And when they do it, they'll proudly claim they're true Christians conforming to Jesus Christ's generous and forgiving attitude, while those insisting on such measures are meanies.

In other words, they'll take the last train out of town before high noon so Frank Miller and his gay bullies can steamroll the Christians with impunity.

And what of interfaith alliances?  Jewish people face their own internecine battle between a highly fertile Orthodox population averse to politics and their Reform and "Conservative" counterparts who embrace politics largely to show gay people how open-minded and not-like-closed-minded-Christians they are.  Given the centuries of anti-Semitism and atrocities in Europe seventy-five years ago, we may give Judaism a pass for not exactly rushing to stand shoulder to shoulder with Christians against their present adversaries.  Buddhists, animists, and Hindus would find it hard to see theological commonality with Christianity.  As for Islam, there's a town called Orlando that serves to remind us that Muslims have no problem violently persecuting gays while also encouraging gays to persecute Christians.

It gets worse. Even churches are rotting from within:

Like Will Kane hoping that, at the very least, some of our own might stand with us, Christians who hope for help from other Christians are sure to be disappointed.  The LGBT movement shrewdly backed a phony counter-theology based on the seductive but biblically unsound theories of dissenters like John Boswell, author of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, and Mark Jordan, author of The Invention of Sodomy.  Now there is a whole generation of theologians like Jeff Hood, the queer-affirming organizer of Dallas's infamous Black Lives Matter protest, and Matthew Vines, the boyish Bible-quoter who thinks Scripture supports men's wrecking their bodies with anal penetration, as long as they do so in a loving, St. Paul-offering-his-body-as-a-living-sacrifice kind of way.In a recent interview with former pornographic performer Joseph Sciambra, I struggled to make sense of "gay-affirming" ministries.  I can remember when I studied under John Boswell and sat enraptured by his Yale lectures in the early 1990s, enthralled by the welcome notion that somehow Christianity, Judaism, and Islam could all be construed as rubber-stamping and even glorifying homoerotic urges.  One couldn't resist the sheer theological shamelessness in sanctifying lusts that I'd seen played out in Manhattan sex dungeons, full of middle-aged white perverts and Puerto Rican boys paid to dress in chain harnesses.As Sciambra points out, the folly of the "gay-affirming ministry" is a new blight on Christianity, and we must accept that the blight has disabled a large percentage of our fellow believers, if not a vast majority.  Perhaps the first warning sign I saw was the common practice of gay Christian churches renting out their multi-purpose rooms to sadomasochism societies and boyfriend-swapping clubs.  Protestant churches can bloom like mushrooms after a rainfall, and the multitude of fly-by-night pro-gay congregations in the 1990s were bound to set off a domino effect, eventually dashing any hopes of orthodoxy in the mainline denominations – the United Church of Christ, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Disciples of Christ.  That my faith – the Southern Baptists – is still maintaining its position on sexuality and marriage is nothing short of a miracle.Pope Francis's most prescient comments came when he stated that gay marriage is the tool of the Devil.  For almost all of the mainline Protestant churches to be split and ruined by this one issue, one would have to conclude that there is a global evil at work in the LGBT agenda.  The agenda has perhaps little to do with improving gay people's lives and much to do with destroying Christianity everywhere.  But Catholics are gradually going the way of others in Hadleyville when they defend every disturbing quote from Pope Francis on the topic of homosexuality.  True to his Jesuits and Latin America's penchant for liberation theology, he did say that the Church should apologize to gay people.  Catholics who keep struggling to see an orthodox pontiff in him are sliding, one yard at a time, into error.In context, Pope Francis's statement about apologizing to gay people is far worse, contrary to what many of his apologists argue.  He stated the following:I think that the Church must not only ask forgiveness – like that "Marxist cardinal" said (laughs) – must not only ask forgiveness to the gay person who is offended. But she must ask forgiveness to the poor too, to women who are exploited, to children who are exploited for labor.I have pious Catholic friends who want desperately for this quote to mean nothing ill about the Vatican's future.  They are kidding themselves.  Yes, it is true that the pope shifts attention to paupers, women, and children – subjects better suited to a true Catholic mission – but he does so by equating these groups' vulnerabilities and historic grievances with the situation of "gay" people.An intelligent Christian should not concede that "gay" people exist, because they don't exist.  God created men and women for each other.  He did not create other subcategories of sex and sexuality; all human beings are oriented toward finding the opposite sex and forming a procreative union with them.  Some of His creations rebel against God's vision and defile themselves by engaging in sodomy.  But gayness is not an identity; it is a fallen condition for individuals who have revolted against God and set their own desires above the call to follow their Creator's design.  Christian churches have almost always maintained that these are children of God who need to be saved from such iniquity with prayer and compassion.

Quite a splash of cold water.