 So, a while ago, about a month ago, my friend Lila Rose and Kristen Hawkins were on a podcast called the Whatever Podcast, debating a gentleman, a popular liberal YouTuber on the issue of abortion, and the general consensus was that it was kind of a missed opportunity for pro-life advocates. It didn't go as well as one would have hoped. And I do debates and dialogues a lot, and you don't always do things perfect, but it was, I would call it a missed opportunity. And I thought, oh, I wish I could be, and this is a very big platform, the Whatever Podcast, it is so funny because I was just on it to debate the same person on abortion, and trying to explain to my wife and my mother-in-law, this is a very secular dating podcast that tends to use women's looks and immodesty to get a lot of views. They have about four million subscribers. Who would have thought that a lot of people would tune in for something like that? But I guess, apparently they do in this culture, people really seem to like immodest women. I don't know. I just go to my office and I go home, and I don't know much else in the world these days. So, it's like they have all of these immodest thumbnails and very secular, and then you have their debate, and I thought, oh, I'd love to do a redo a little bit of it. So, the host said, yeah, you can come back on and debate this pro-choice guy. I said, well, all right, let's do it. He said, we can do it on July 27th. Can you do it that date? Yes, I can. Because what am I going to tell them? I'm sorry, I can't go be on your podcast to defend the faith because I have to be at the Defending the Faith Conference. That would be the absolute worst excuse to say, oh, no, I can't do that. Because that's what we have to do, and not just defend our faith amongst friends of hand. But if you can find a large platform in the secular world that increasingly marginalizes Catholic voices, you have to be able to go on that when you can. So I went, I think it went very well. You can catch highlights of that on my podcast, The Council of Trend on Monday. If you can't see the whole three-hour debate and dialogue. But so I did that on Thursday, and then the flights trying to get, is anyone here from the West Coast? It's not easy to get here, is it? You leave at breakfast, and you get here, and all the restaurants are closed for dinner. It is going from the West to the East is, it's not easy. So that basically took all day on Friday, and now here I am. But that's why we do this, is to go out. Now you might not be on a podcast with four million subscribers. Hopefully one day you will. We need to get everybody out there sharing our Catholic faith. But in our own context, with our friends and our family members, even in our own churches with fellow parishioners, these issues come up. And one issue that I have noticed coming up that's entering the Catholic world more and more, is the issue of what did God really say about this? Or what did God really say about that? That's the oldest lie in the book, right? The serpent says to Eve, did God really say you were going to die? Did he really say that? Does the Bible really say homosexual conduct is immoral? Does it really say that? Now, a lot of people will think, well, yeah, sure it does. But you would be amazed at there are people who have written. If I were to stack, I don't, yeah, I don't think this is an exaggeration. I really don't. If I were to stack all of the books and journal articles that have been written to try to say to prove the Bible does not condemn certain forms of homosexual conduct, if I stacked all those books and journal articles written in the past 40 years to defend that view. They go from this stage up to that ceiling. I'd have no doubt hundreds books, monographs, journal articles who are committed to the idea, no, the Bible doesn't really say this. Because one thing to say, yeah, the Bible says it, but you know what? I don't believe it. I don't care. But if you can say, oh, no, God, really, we've just been interpreting it wrong all of these years. And the church has to get with the times in this. This is very popular among Protestants. Matthew Vines is a young man who wrote a whole book on this called God and the Gay Christian. Though Vines is incorporating arguments from people long before him, John Boswell Yale University really helped to start a lot of this in the modern age. This what I call theological revisionism, looking at texts that have been viewed one way for 1,900 years and saying, oh, that's not really what it means. Vines writes the following in his book, God and the Gay Christian, that he says in the Bible, the reason Christians are against homosexual conduct or believe that it's sinful is because six passages, Genesis 19.5, Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 1 Timothy 1, have stood in the way of countless gay people who long for acceptance from their Christian parents, friends, and churches. Other revisionist theologians will call these the clobber passages. And they do have a bit of a point that when someone says, well, why is homosexual conduct sinful, the first thing a Christian says is here are these verses that say it's sinful and use them to beat someone over the head, who may be struggling with a deep-seated attraction and struggling to live a chaste life. Where what I would lead with is to say, well, before we look at what the Bible says sexuality is not for, the bad news, let's look at the good news. What is sexuality for? What is the positive treatment and portrayal of it? What is its ultimate trajectory in scripture? Because you might be thinking, I don't need any of this trend. It's clear. It says in Leviticus, this is an abomination. It says it's sinful and Romans 1. But then there are sneaky people, sneaky lay people, priests with a large social media presence who like to say confusing things. You might know one or two I'm talking about, maybe. We'll say things like, oh, well, sure, the Bible, Leviticus says homosexual conduct is wrong. But it also says eating shellfish is wrong. We don't follow that rule anymore. Yeah, Paul says homosexuality is wrong. But he also said slaves obey your masters. We don't follow that anymore. Maybe we need to develop our thinking on this. So I believe someone presents an argument. It should be tested. And we should examine it very carefully. So the basic rule here is to understand how could somebody say that the Bible doesn't teach homosexual conduct is wrong when you have passages that clearly seem to say otherwise. For example, in Leviticus 1822, you shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. The revisionist theologians will say, sure, I grant you homosexual conduct is always presented in a negative light in scripture. But they'll say the Bible only condemns some kind of homosexual conduct. It doesn't condemn that kind. When you talk to people who make this argument, that is the number one that's what they're always going to return back to over and over again. The Bible only condemns some kind of same-sex relationships, not all kinds. They'll say the biblical authors had no idea, no idea. You could have been two people of the same sex, could have been in a monogamous relationship like we see in the modern world today. They would say that ancient people understood homosexual conduct as when you let your passions get out of hand, you might just engage in the sexual act with anybody because you've got out of hand a little bit. Or they're condemning relations with prostitutes. The Hebrew word karashim, for example. Or it's condemning pedorasty, man-boy relationships, not adult relationships. But we'll go through each of these passages and see the problems with that. Let's talk about the so-called clobber passages then and how revisionist theologians reworked them. So the first one would be Genesis 19. That's the story of Lot. He is his uncle Abram. They see that the land cannot support both of them. So it says that Lot went to settle in the Valley of Sodom. And if you were an ancient Israelite reading the story, there would have been a sound effect, dun, dun, dun, which we miss a lot now that he went and he did that. It says actually that Lot was someone who sat at the gate of the city. Judges often sat at the city gate, the entrance and exit of the city, to mediate disputes between people. So Lot was considered a righteous man. The second letter of Peter says that God will rescue the righteous, he rescued Noah, and he rescued Lot. He calls him righteous Lot, does not mean perfect Lot, as we'll see later in the story. What happens is that Abraham and God, they have a little bit of a bet. Who couldn't win a bet with God, right? You're gonna destroy Sodom? What if there's 50 righteous people? How about if there's 40 people, will you destroy it? Then finally he bargains them down to 10. I won't destroy the city if there's 10 righteous people and there ain't. Two individuals, angels in disguise, visit the city and Lot recognizes they are in danger if they are staying in the public square. He takes them under the roof of his home to protect them. The story picks up in Genesis 19.5, a group of men from the city come to Lot's house. Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them. Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him and said, I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Behold, I have two daughters who have not known men. Let me bring them out to you and do them as you please. Only do nothing to these men. They have come under the shelter of my roof. But they said, stand back. This fellow came to Sojourn and he would play the judge. They were probably in Sodom and their wicked lifestyle. We're growing ever and ever more frustrated with righteous Lot who sat around judging them. Now we will deal worse with you than with them. They try to break in. The angels blind them. Few Michael Bay special effects later. The city is destroyed. Lot's wife looks back, turns into her favorite table condiment, salt, turns into a pillar of salt. And then Lot and his daughters go into the Hill Country. Then the story gets interesting because I think Lot was a bad man for saying, please don't rape these strangers. Have my daughters instead. If you're a righteous man, you would say, do whatever you want with me. Leave these people alone. And now some people will read the Bible and say, well, God never says what Lot did was bad. Well, the Old Testament often likes to describe people as getting their just desserts. A lot of times in the Old Testament, the narrator doesn't come right out and say, this guy was being bad. Instead, a person's sins will catch up with him. For example, Jacob, what does he do to steal the birthright from Esau? He puts on the fuzzy gloves, right? Because Esau was a hairy man. And he uses the fuzzy gloves to deceive Isaac to steal the birthright. What happens then with Joseph and his technicolor dream coat? Joseph, his coat of many colors. His brothers are jealous of him, sell him into slavery. And how do they trick their father, Jacob, into believing Joseph is dead? They take his coat and show it to him, just as Jacob had deceived Isaac with fabric. So now, he's deceived by his own children with fabric. Lot offers his daughters up to be raped to an angry mob. What happens later is that Lot gets so drunk, his daughters say, there's not a man among us. There's not a man here. It's the apocalypse. Let us be with our father to have children. So he offers his daughters to be raped. They end up raping him. And the text says their children went on to become the founders of Moab and Amon, Moabites and the Ammonites, the people that would always give Israel trouble after that point. So does this narrative provide evidence that homosexual conduct is wrong? Yes, I would say so. Now, it's not the strongest piece of evidence. It isn't a command, for example. But those who would try to explain away the story entirely, I would say that they missed the point. The letter of Jude, for example, condemns those in Sodom for going after strange flesh. And Second Peter talks about their sexual immorality. Now, the strange flesh, of course, they weren't condemned. They were going after the men, saying, oh, well, it's because they were trying to rape angels. Well, they didn't know they were angels. They're going after strange flesh. But I'll say this. Imagine that there was a story in scripture. Well, there essentially is one, actually, when it comes to what happened to Noah after the flood. When you get into Bible studies, you realize, wow, they really censored a lot of things when I was in Sunday school and watched Veggie Tales. They were really in this. The children's Bible had a lot of pages cut out of it once you start reading scripture and then actually going back through the text itself. That's why I know this will be the most controversial thing I will say today. But I refuse to show my children Veggie Tales. I absolutely, 100% refuse to do it because the Bible is not a bunch of fun stories. It is a historical recollection of God's dealings with his people. Like when I saw the story of Noah's flood on Veggie Tales, you've got a tomato jumping around talking like Jerry Lewis, God's going to flood the earth. The only cartoon I will show them, you can only find it on YouTube in VHS tapes now, are it was produced by Hannah Barbera in the 1980s called The Greatest Adventures. The greatest stories ever told, Adventures from the Bible. Great voice acting. Ed Asner is the voice of Joshua, people of Israel. And it's just taken so seriously. But it's still kid-friendly. It has modern protagonists who go back in time to witness biblical events. And the story of the flood is so different. When you watch the flood episode, it opens, it's dark and lightning. And there's a big booming voice. And God saw the world had become depraved and filled with violence and lust. And you see idols and women dancing in a bar and a guy clubbing another guy over the head. And God sought to purge the world of its wickedness with a flood like none had ever seen to judge mankind for its sins. Take that, you dumb tomato. That's how you tell kids about sin and God's righteousness and his judgment, but also his mercy, the mercy he has on us. So when Noah, you know, Ham ends up defiling Noah or Noah's wife for interpretation. But you see here, imagine there's a story where a man rapes his own father as a part of the story of what happens. Would you read that story and say, oh, that's awful? But you know, it doesn't really say anything about consensual incest. No, you would say that the fact that there was rape and it was incestual, because people will say the story of Sodom and Gomorrah only condemns rape. It certainly does. They'll say it only condemns the sin of inhospitality. Yes, the people of Sodom were gonna be very inhospitable. But the fact that the act of violence is so disordered if it were a case of incest would just add more depravity to the story to make the events more unseemly. So I think that those who try to rework this story, it's futile, but to their credit, it's not the strongest verse to rely on because it is more of a narrative. It doesn't give an explicit injunction. So let's move ahead then to the book of Leviticus. So you have in Leviticus 1822, you have the holiness code, and there you have a long list of rules, most of them dealing with incest. Now, you need a lot of rules to explain how do you explain the sin of incest to someone? Like, who's your family and who isn't? Most of us today would draw the line at your first cousin. There it's like, you can if you have permission, but unless you're royalty, you're not sure we're really gonna do that. But it's typically your first cousin. After that, you're fine. So your second cousin twice removed, you're okay. Because in the ancient world, when you lived in one of these villages, most people were your cousin, you know? Most people were related to you in an intimate way. So you have a long explanation of who you cannot have relations with based on it's your mother's son, your mother's brother's son or sister. You go through all of that. Then you get a few more. But here's the thing. So you get a lot of these serious prescriptions and then others that are universal in scope. So right, but it's interesting. So right after the incest rules, there's another one about not sacrificing your children to mullock. And then 1822, you shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it is an abomination. Leviticus 2013, if a man lies with the males or the woman, both of them committed an abomination, they should be put to death. Their blood is upon them. So it seems very clear with the Bible speaking here. Now, this is stronger biblical evidence, but it's still not the lynching, but it's still very strong to satisfy what the catechism says in paragraph 2357, which it says it presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity. Now the immediate one, the lay person's objection will be this. It's what I call the shellfish objection, all right? Well, you guys follow Leviticus on homosexuality, but you don't follow Leviticus on not eating shellfish. Keith Sharp in his book, The Gay Gospels, writes the following, until Christian fundamentalist boycott shellfish restaurants, stop wearing poly cotton t-shirts and stone to death their wayward offspring, there is no obligation to listen to their diatribes about homosexuality being a sin. So the reference there, of course, Leviticus 1110, you shall not eat shellfish, described more in the text, was meant by that. It also says you're not supposed to wear fabrics of different types blended together. Leviticus 1919, don't mix different kinds of seed in when you're sowing seed. All of these are in rules. If you don't follow all of them, you don't need to follow any of them. What's wrong with this? What's funny is there are, I remember, I know a certain priest, for example, when this comes up, likes to make this objection, well-known priests on social media. And so he'll say, oh, it's a different context. You know, we don't do everything Leviticus says, but then, when this priest wants to comment on Twitter about the immigration debate, about, well, what kind of immigration policy should we have? He'll cite Leviticus that says, you shall welcome the stranger and foreigner in your land for you are sojourners in Egypt. You shall welcome the foreigner in your land. There, the Bible says it. We should let everyone immigrate. We should have open borders. Now, notice what happens here, is that those who will say, we don't need to listen to Leviticus on sexuality because times have changed and we don't do everything Leviticus says, will cite Leviticus and say, ah, be kind to the foreigner. That means no borders. Without understanding that we've changed the law from a wandering tribe of the chosen people in a hostile land to modern day nation states. So it's truly an interesting double standard there when that arises. So I'll talk about some of these objections. First, just because the Bible prescribed a death penalty for things like blasphemy, violating the Sabbath in the Old Testament, it doesn't follow those things aren't still wrong. The penalties have just changed. Adultery is still wrong, even though the death penalty is no longer attached to it. Now, what about the mixing? You say, well, wait a minute, how do you know that the rule on homosexual conduct is a permanent moral rule and you can just ignore the others. We don't ignore the other rules. We recognize their limited scope. They served a pedagogical purpose. In the letter to the Galatians, St. Paul said he calls the law of the Old Testament, the Torah, he calls it a pedagogos. So pedagogy, pedagogical means how to educate someone. It refers to an educational methodology, pedagogy. Pedagogos was a kind of tutor slash babysitter, kind of like Mary Poppins without the flying umbrella. It was like a custodian, but it was someone who was a tutor and a babysitter wrapped up in one that would raise up someone, pedagogos. So Paul said that for the chosen people, the law was their pedagogos, but we don't need that anymore now that we are in Christ. Doesn't mean we don't need all of the law, but we don't need the Torah as Torah. We don't need that. We need to be united to Christ through baptism, whether you are Jew or Gentile. That's Paul's main beef with the Judaizers. Don't listen to Protestants who will tell you, oh, Paul said we're saved by faith. There's no works you do to get to heaven. He was worried that he couldn't do enough good works to get into heaven. That was absolutely not Paul's concern. Paul did not feel, because he will say, oh, well he was a guilt-ridden Pharisee who couldn't do enough work to get into heaven. No, he said when I was a Pharisee, I was rock solid. I was getting, read Philippians chapter three. I tribe a Benjamin, studied in the Pharisees. I was top of the top. Then he met Jesus and realized he's not. But what concerned him was not, oh, I'm not gonna do enough good works to get into heaven. He was mad. There were people who were saying to be a good Christian, you have to be a good Jew. That's his beef. That's why in Galatians 512, he told the Judaizers they should castrate themselves. Because these people, demanding adult men, if you wanna be Christian, you have to get castrated. I'm sorry, you have to be circumcised. That would really make it hard, dude. Hey, look, I will tell you, for a lot of men when they're offered up the choice, they're both like, oh, I just know what I was really signed up for for this. Anything mixing blades and important part of continuing on our patriarchal line. That's why men are willing to put up with this when they're eight days old. After that, not a fan. Paul saw that this is a barrier to people coming to Christ. You don't need to become a good Jew and be circumcised in order to be Christian. You don't have to follow the Mosaic law, but it doesn't mean you don't have to follow any law at all. In Galatians 6, Paul says we should follow the law of Christ. And Paul lays down specific moral commandments too. He talks about, and we'll get to this later, things we must follow. So how do we know the difference here? Well, when you look at the shellfish rule, the mixing rules, they're all about don't mix things. Why? Why would you give people a special diet and special practices? Well, for the chosen people, God's role is to keep them protected and pure in a pagan world until the Messiah can come into the world. And so the idea here is to keep the chosen people separate. Their job is not to proselytize. Their job is to continue giving God's revelation. And they do proselytize, and people do come into the chosen people, but it's not a great commission like we have. So in doing this, once we get to the time of Christ, the kosher laws from the Hebrew kashrut, think about it like when you have a diet, right? It keeps you apart. This happens to us every year in Lent. You go over to a friend's house. Oh, having barbecue today? We having barbecue on Friday? You're going to join us? I can't eat barbecue. It's Friday. We don't eat meat on Fridays during Lent, or for many people Fridays all year round. That's your choice, obviously. Now, if you have non-Catholic friends, just even night eating meat on Fridays, they can tell, hey, there's a difference here. When you have a dietary restriction, walls come up. We're set, we're different than you are. The Jews having so many restrictions keeps them from illicitly mingling and assimilating the beliefs of their pagan neighbors. But then eventually the chosen people have to branch out now. So that's why Jesus says it is not what goes into you, the stomach that defiles, it is what comes out. That those laws serve their purpose. We don't need them anymore. To give you an example, here's two rules for my kids. Hold my hand when we cross the street, and don't drink what's under the sink. One of these rules is permanent. Which do you think it is? Like when my son is 30 years old, he doesn't have to, maybe, you know, if my knee doesn't get better, I had an injury. If you listen to my podcast, I had a jujitsu injury. I'm fine telling you, it's better than like, I tripped over my kid's fire truck and threw my knee out. I wanna be like, yeah, I was fighting this guy, he's a cop, and we were rolling at it, and he sweeped my knee, and it popped out, and I was like, ah! That's like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ah, get in the chopper, ah! Ah! So maybe he'll have to walk me across the street if it doesn't get better. But that's fine for him when he's a child, he doesn't always need it. Don't drink what's under the sink. No matter how old he gets, what's under the sink will always be bad for him. So there are rules in the Old Testament that there are some things that are temporary and provisional. There are some things, murder, adultery, prostitution, stealing, blasphemy, idolatry. There are many of the rules in the Old Testament that are always gonna be bad for God's people no matter what stage of revelation or stage of the life of the church we are at. And so those are permanent. So when we look at Leviticus 1822, which does it fall under? You shall not lie with the males or the woman it is an abomination, Hebrew Toa Ba. The scholar John Boswell said Toa Ba, or Va, Toa Ba, that just refers to ritual impurity. It has nothing to do with moral laws. It's just about ritual impurity. He says here, the Hebrew Toa Ba does not usually signify something intrinsically evil like rape or theft, but what is ritually unclean for Jews. But that is just simply not true. Jeremiah says murder is Toa Ba. The Proverbs say lying is Toa Ba. Ezekiel says adultery is Toa Ba. And Jeremiah also says child, or sorry, Deuteronomy says that sacrificing your children is Toa Ba, an abomination. So it can also mean something that is a moral abomination that one must never do. We also see the context where Leviticus 1822 is placed. It says you shall not lie with the males or the woman. This comes after the prohibition of sacrificing your children to mullock, but before the prohibition on bestiality. So it's clearly sandwiched between a section of serious moral rules. And the fact that the death penalty is attached to it shows that it belongs to a serious moral category that has to always be followed. The penalty might not always be attached, but it is an enduring moral rule. Because in Leviticus 18, the revisionist will say, well, it also says that a man cannot have relations with his wife if it's during her time, her fertile period during menstruation. But it actually does not attach capital punishment to that. It was considered morally offensive because blood and semen are considered liquids of life that you should treat with reverence. And blood is a symbol of death, so that's something to reverence them to understand. But it's something that can happen accidentally, even. It's not considered a sin so serious it needs capital punishment, because it goes against God's design for sexuality, like bestiality or sodomy, or God's design for our familial relations, like child sacrifice, would go at. Also, some people, it's not a ritual law that was meant only for ancient Israel because here's the next verse in verses 24 through 25. Where it talks about sacrifice in the mulloch, sodomy, and bestiality. Do not defile yourselves by any of these things. For by all these, the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves, and the land became defiled so that I punished its iniquity and the land vomited out its inhabitants. So these were things that anyone by reason should know you ought not sacrifice children, you ought not engage in these grave sexual sins that the other pagan nations were judged for this as well. That will come up also in, when we talk about Paul and his vice list. A last point here is yeah, when people try to say that, oh well this was a, in the ancient world, this only referred to dealings with prostitutes. The problem is there is a Hebrew word for temple prostitutes, kadashim. That's not here, the kadish or kadashim. That's not here in this verse, there's no reference to that. When you look at other ancient law codes, the Assyrian law code, Mesopotamian law codes, you find homosexual conduct is prohibited and the person who is punished is the active agent. It is the man who is the active initiator of it, rather than the one receiving the conduct. Because these rules saw the, they saw the punishment, they saw the crime as being one where a man uses his sexuality to dominate and rape another man and show him the power he has over him, similar to what you might see in prison for example. People might have a opposite sex orientation even, but in prison use rape as a weapon to dominate others. So in these ancient law codes, only one party was punished, the one who dominated and humiliated the other man. But here, both parties are held equally liable for acting just as those who are committed adultery or fornication, they are acting in contradiction to God's commands. Now we don't have the same punishments, but it's considered grave because if you have ancient people misusing sexuality, well look how messed up our world is, we have at least modern resources to try to pick up the pieces for people. But 4,000, 3,000 years ago, it's more of a matter of life and death when people are fighting you and warring tribes and you're one bad harvest away from famine if you're gonna completely disrupt the social and familial order. Going this, before we get to Paul though, I think it is helpful that some people will say, well, this isn't a big deal because Jesus never said anything about it. Jesus never said anything about this, so why would you think that it's wrong? Well first, how do you know Jesus never said anything about this? It might not be recorded in scripture, but we as Catholics don't believe in Sola Scriptura. I've actually read Protestants who say, well, Jesus could have taught this to the apostles even if it's not explicitly recorded in scripture, he could have said that to them and then we've received it from the apostles. Only a few steps away from where we're at, okay. He taught it to them in an oral, unwritten way, like something to hand on, like a tradition, maybe. Interesting, very sacred tradition, very interesting. But when we look at what scripture says, now what people will say, which is interesting, those who are the academic revisionists, they'll say, well, look, scripture, we have moved beyond the toleration of slavery. Women have more rights than they had in scripture, so why wouldn't we allow homosexuality? There's a book written by a scholar, his last name is Webb, and it's actually called Slaves, Women and Homosexuality. And it chronicles the trajectory in scripture, but when you look at sexuality, so when you look at slavery, for example, something that exists in the Old Testament, something that is regulated and allowed to happen, in many cases, to prevent greater evils like starvation and to tolerate something that was just a universal norm, like credit cards are today for us, because you didn't have credit. The only credit you had was your own physical body. In Genesis, when there's a famine and people go to the land of Egypt, they go to Joseph and say, we will sell ourselves as slaves to you so we do not starve. But then eventually we get to the New Testament, where Paul encourages Philemon to be welcomed back as a brother and not just as a slave, welcoming back and looking in 1 Corinthians 7 about having slaves and releasing them. We see an understanding of that whether you are free or slave, you're equal in the eyes of Christ, that while it may be necessary for now as a social institution, it's not ultimately God's plan. There's a trajectory here and for women. But in scripture, there's an interesting trajectory on sexuality that it's not like, oh, sexuality gets more and more liberal in attitudes as scripture goes on. Rather, we see a tightening. We see allowing sexual impropriety for people with hard hearts in the Old Testament, polygamy, divorce. And then eventually though, when God's people are able to receive the grace to say no, that was something God tolerated. But is not his plan. Mark chapter 10, for example, the Pharisees asked Jesus, we're debating about divorce. The schools of Shami and Hallel, the rabbinic schools disagree. You can divorce your spouse for a cause, but how much cause do you need? One rabbinic school says, you really need a really severe thing like adultery. And the other says, hey, your wife burns dinner, you can cut her loose. That's literally what the rabbis are saying. She burns your dinner, you can cut her loose. And they're like, so where do you stand, Jesus? Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery, full stop. And he says, yeah, Moses gave you this law for your hardness of hearts, but he goes back to Genesis. It wasn't God's plan. God's plan had to be suspended for a little bit. He had to tolerate your shenanigans. But now we are raising marriage, which was given to all people, not just Catholics, not just Christians, God wrote marriage into the human heart and Christ raised it to a sacrament. Now you have the grace to receive, to make this a lifelong. This is what God intended from the very beginning. So those theologians, and you'll have self-described queer theologians, I've read their books, and it astounds me that they will say that Jesus' primary value in our sexual relationships is consent, honesty, openness. No, what Jesus values is complementarity of uniting men and women together and each one being able to bring to fulfillment and perfection a whole greater than the two separated. So that when they are brought together, they achieve this wholeness that ought not be divided. That when man and woman come together in marriage, it's like when the ingredients of a cake come together in the oven. When they come together, you have the cake, you can't go back to batter. Won't change anymore, can't go back. You can chop up the cake, but what two have become one? They cannot be undone. Now some people try to get around this to say, oh, well, Jesus is just being sarcastic. Whoever divorces his wife, marries another, commits adultery. If she divorces her husband, she commits adultery. Well, women couldn't divorce. So he's being sarcastic. He's not saying divorce is wrong because here's the thing. If Jesus said remarriage after civil divorce was wrong because of violated God's plan for marriage and your personal consent and relationships don't change that, there's no way he would endorse a view of marriage and sexuality completely removed from the natural design that God gave us. And also we have discovered gets. These are divorce certificates from the first century issued by women to men, usually wealthier women. So Jesus, it didn't happen often, but it did happen. All right, so moving on. Let's go to the New Testament then how some of these passages can be misinterpreted. So and a lot of people will go to the New Testament because obviously we're under the new covenant, we're under the new law. This should be something that's more binding for Christians. Let's talk about this a little bit here. Romans chapter one, Paul is giving his argument for why we need, we were justified by faith in Christ, justified by being united to him. We have faith in Christ, so we choose to be baptized. So then we die with Christ, we're buried and we rise with him, Romans six. So Romans one and two, he talks about the need, why we, everyone needs this. And it's not just for Jews. God loves everybody, just because there are chosen people doesn't mean there are unloved people. God wants everyone to be saved, including the Gentiles. Well, but Paul, how could he want the Gentiles to be saved? He didn't give them the Torah. He didn't give them anything. What does he expect of them? If God didn't give them any revelation, why would God expect anything from the Gentiles? Well, God did give them something. In Romans two, 14 through 16, Paul says that those who have not received the law on stone, the 10 commandments, they receive it on their hearts, it's written on their hearts and their conscience, which may condemn or excuse them on that day, the day of judgment. And he says there are some things that while they don't get everything right, there's some certain things that they should have gotten right by just using their heads and see it's disordered. And he gives two examples of that. He gives idolatry and homosexual conduct. Why does he give these examples? He gives these examples because just as even as pagans, they should know there is an order in the world. God worship is not for a thing, it is for the creator of all. God is not a thing in the universe, God made everything. Worship is not for a wooden box and sexuality is not for people of the same sex. It's supposed to be a complete gift of self between man and woman. That's what it's ordered towards. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. Romans 122 onward. And exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error. So he's presenting these examples. How do people argue against this? One argument is that, well, look, Paul is just condemning idolatry. Yeah, if you go crazy worshiping an idol and you have same sex relationships, that's bad. But if you're a faithful Catholic, it's totally different. Well, no, Paul would also give examples of people who fall into idolatry. They murder, they steal, they defame. It doesn't follow that, oh, well, you can do that stuff as long as you're not an idolator. No, not at all. He's saying that those who become disordered in their view of the world are more likely to commit disordered acts as a result. And we see this today. These people back then knew when Paul said a man and a woman what he was talking about. And who could be, who's supposed to be with who? When you exchange the glory of the creator and worship the creature instead, you lose your bearing, you lose your moral compass as a result. To take a few, what are some other arguments that are presented here, Boswell is interesting. So Boswell is an argument that even modern revisionist scholars don't like anymore. It's not a very good one. He says the persons Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual. What he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons. What Boswell is saying is that when Paul says women exchange natural relations for unnatural, he's saying that people who have a heterosexual orientation and opposite sex orientation, they went crazy worshiping idols and then they went and had relations with people that they're not normally attracted to. That is what Paul's all worked up about. Not the act itself, but that someone went against their orientation. It's a bad argument. So Matthew Vines, the gentleman I referenced earlier, the newer young guy, but scholar in this area, not a scholar, he writes popular books on this. He went to Harvard, undergrad. I don't know if he's done another grad work since then. But he says here, so he's what Vines writes about Boswell. Paul seems to be describing latent desires that were being expressed, not brand new ones. I don't think it's consistent to say that Paul rejected same sex behavior only when it didn't come naturally to the people involved. So another example is that people will say, look, Paul was concerned that if you sinned a bunch, they'll say this, in the ancient world, there was no concept of homosexual orientation. They'll say that the word homosexuality came into language in the 19th century, first in German, and then later in English, it would be like homosexual before homosexual. And so there's no concept of it that someone could have just an innate desire towards someone of the opposite sex. And so the idea is that they say, oh, well, Paul is just saying, anybody in his time period, who I referenced earlier, if you just ate too much food and worshipped idols and you were just so undisciplined, you might have sex with anybody because you're just totally out there. And there are some people even today who become so inebriated, who knows what they end up doing? So there is a bit of a point there. I see the point. But it is a stretch to say there is no one who had these deep-seated attractions in the ancient world, and that Paul is only condemning those who get a little crazy one night after a Shabbat or something like that, right? One Saturday night. Here's the problem. Paul really knowledgeable about the Greco-Roman world. He was cosmopolitan. He traveled all around. He went to Athens. He understood Greek culture. He would quote Greek poets in his speeches to four people. He understand Greco-Roman culture. And Greco-Roman culture does describe people who have deep-seated attractions towards people of the opposite, sorry, at the same sex. About 400 years before Paul, Plato writes the symposium, or sorry, yeah, BC3. Yeah, it's line, I got the note here. It's line 180, but it's in 385 BC. That should be right, yeah. He talks in the symposium as Plato's treatment on love. It's all about love. There actually is a sweet love myth in the symposium. It's goofy, but I do kind of like it. It says that there was a creation myth that, and I think actually this relates to same sex. I know it has an opposite sex element to it. At the beginning, we were all connected to somebody and we were like face-to-face with them and we got around by doing cartwheels and stuff and then at one point we were separated and then now we're always trying to go back and find that person and that's where the desire comes from. I mean, that's kind of cheesy and sweet, but I hate the idea of soulmates. If they're a decent person, just get married. If they're your soulmate, if you say yes, it's fine. Stop overthinking it. I am telling you, Laura and I, like seeing how dating is right now for people, we are like in the life raft of the Titanic looking back. There's like relief that we're not sliding down the deck. Sorry for everybody else who is in the midst of it or if you have children who are in the midst of it. But in the symposium it says he talks about women who quote, do not care for men but have female attachments and men who hang about men and embrace them exclusively. Pausanias talks about those who indiscriminately have sex with men, boys and women, but he praises those who seek older boys for a lifelong commitment. Oh, yippee, but that's the culture. In some ways it was worse, in some ways it's better. I don't know, the culture back then, but that's what they're dealing with. So that was there, the Roman satirist juvenile even describes men marrying other men in Roman wedding ceremonies. It was made fun of, but it did happen. So Paul is aware of this stuff. He's quite aware of it. And so Vines, though, he says, oh, well Paul is just the natural unnatural. He's talking about how that the women decided not to be the passive element in the sexual act and took on a new position that are more active. That's what Paul's worried about. No, that doesn't really square because it loses the connection with the exchange metaphor that Paul uses. The exchange metaphor, you know, he talks about, it's interesting in Romans one, it doesn't even say men and women exchange. It uses the terms male and female rather than men and women. Now, why might that be? Well, what God made them man and woman in Genesis? No, God made them male and female, he made them. So this is hearkening back to the language of Genesis. It also does this talks about the birds, the animals and the reptiles. That's the created element. So what Paul is saying here is that this behavior, it undoes the creation element in Genesis one in when you commit idolatry or sodomy. It undoes this, that males and females, this created element very built into us from creation is undone. And when that happens though, it's interesting that some revisionists will take at this point, they sometimes have a very basic argument. What is the big deal to you? So this argument, this counterargument I'm gonna give is not a knockdown one, but it's one to make you think. Look, this is the argument, this is the argument we've heard. We don't wanna change anything. We're not trying to change marriage, we just want to get married. We're not trying to change what the church is doing, we just want our relationships recognized. That's that. Mark Ragnaris is a sociologist who did a study on moral attitudes among Christians, secular people and LGBT Christians. And he found that LGBT Christians overwhelmingly more likely to support abortion, polyamory, contraception, remarriage after divorce. So it's just not the case. We had people now, oh, we don't wanna change marriage and now you have people trying to remove husband and wife from federal law. They didn't want it to just be a part, you wanna change and tear down a whole thing. So I would say you know them by their fruits. To say, it's not just, oh, we want just exactly what you have, it's always more than that. I mean, not with every single individual, but on the whole it often is. So I would say that the arguments they're given here, they don't succeed. All right, finally, let's talk about First Corinthians 6. There's a word used here that is also repeated in First Timothy 1. In First Corinthians 6, Paul gives something called a vice list. He gives a list of behaviors that will keep someone out of the kingdom of heaven. And Paul cares about sexual immorality. He gives people freedom by the way. Paul will say, look, if you want to eat meat, sacrifice to idols, if you wanna celebrate the Jewish Sabbath, fine. Don't tell other people they have to do those things. Paul was a pretty live and let live guy, except when it came to sexuality. Because in First Corinthians 5, Paul is apoplectic. He is mad. He is mad because in Corinth, there was a guy who was sleeping with his stepmother. His dad died. Now, what's interesting here, it's possible if his dad was an older, more elite fellow, and maybe it was his second wife, that it's possible his stepmother was his age. Because it says the relationship with his mother was probably his stepmother. It's possible his stepmother was around his age. And then he decided he wanted to have his father's former wife. And, well, I don't know, his father may have died or may not have died at that point, I'm not sure. But the point is that to go after his mother, his stepmother, he says that he's mad about that, but he's mad about the Corinthians for saying, well, we're not gonna, it's not my business. And he says the man should be handed over to Satan, so that he won't pollute the community and hopefully his soul will be saved. He's describing First Corinthians 5, by the way, essentially a form of excommunication. Take him out of the community to help him see the error of his ways before he can be brought back into the community. That's in First Corinthians 5. First Corinthians 6, Paul says this, Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God? And such were some of you. That you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the spirit of our God. So it's a viceless. These are things that if you are saved, you don't commit these things. You used to do that, you don't do it anymore, don't fall back into these habits that will keep you from God. Now the word here, nor homosexuals, there is a footnote here. When you read different Bible translations, you get a feel for the theological slant of the translators. So for example, the revised standard version, the RSV, says that these are two words referring to the active and passive participants in a homosexual act. It's referring, because when it says, nor homosexuals, it's not the words, the two Greek words, do not refer to an orientation, it refers to an action. The New American Bible, however, says it's a reference to hetera. It translates it not homosexuals, it translates it boy prostitutes and soft ones, boy prostitutes and those who abuse themselves with mankind to try to get away from the idea of this just homosexual conduct. The words themselves, the two Greek words are the malakoi and the arsenokoi-tai. So let me break those down. What do those words mean? Why would we translate them both as homosexual? The word malakoi means soft one, or softy and it was used in the ancient world to refer to someone who liked fine linen, fine food, lots of sexual relations for a man with a woman actually, someone who was very soft in their disposition, the malakoi. Not every malakoi was a passive participant in the homosexual act, the male homosexual act. Not every malakoi was a passive recipient. Every passive recipient though was a malakoi. Arsenokoi-tai is a single word, it's a new word that we don't think we've ever found it before the New Testament. So it's a Greek word, Paul may have coined the term himself or he may have borrowed it from a rabbinic source. It's a compound word, arsenok, which means male or man, it means man, male. And koi-tai, koi-tis, which means bed. We think of koi-tis in eruptives, bed as in not the bed you sleep in, but to bed someone, koi-tis. Man better, that's what the word means, a man better. So literally it says, nor idolaters, neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor man-betters, nor soft ones, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor vileers. And so what revisionists will say is that, you know what, all he's saying is softies don't go to heaven and arsenokoi-tai, we don't really know what it means, it could mean a sex trafficker, it could mean a rapist, it could mean, he's talking, oh the Malachoi would be like boy prostitutes and rapists. They don't go to heaven. And so he'll say that the condemnation here, for example, it's condemning pedorasty. It's saying that the boy prostitutes and the men who want sex with boys are not inheriting the kingdom of God. And this is supposed to be more humane. Think about it for five seconds. So Paul is saying that a boy prostitute is probably kept as a sex slave, who has no agency of their own really, obviously in ancient Roman society, who is used and abused by older men. He's not going to heaven? That is, that's a really bad conclusion to reach. It's far more humane to say the Arsena Koi-tai and the Malachoi, it's not a John and a prostitute, a boy prostitute, it's people of equal standing who are engaged in an activity with one another. That the words are united in this way for a more general activity for a group of people. They're connected to each other, and that makes sense. That the other words in this passage, they have a connection. Idolatry and adultery are connected to each other because in the Old Testament Ba'al, the ancient word Ba'al is actually translated husband or master. So when Israel goes up to worship Ba'al-Payor, Ba'al, they go off literally to serve another husband. That's why the Old Testament compares it to adultery so much because the pun is just perfectly built in to say what are you doing when you worship Ba'al, which literally means husband or our other master. Thieves and greedy are together, drunkards and revilers are often the same. So it makes sense Arsena Koitai and Malikoi are put together. And Arsena Koitai matches up perfectly with Leviticus 2013 in the Greek Septuagint translation. Arsena and Koitai, male better, male better, man better. It lines up perfectly with the Greek that if you were a Jewish scholar and you wanted to coin a term based on this, you might use the Greek translation from this passage. All right, so that is a look at the revisionists. And I hope that that was helpful for you all to understand that when you hear these things take heart, you know, when you'll hear people say, oh, it doesn't really mean this. When you have a website like Outreach, a website Outreach sponsored by a, why would I, Father James Martin, you know? I'm sorry, it's like, you know, I have a book coming out that we'll talk a little bit about him more anyways, so the name should not be named. Well, he promotes this website, Outreach, that uses these same arguments from non-Christian scholars that have been debunked time and time and time and time again. So I would encourage you to take heart when there are those who try to undermine our faith. This is something that people have been doing for decades and still won't succeed and try to secure that illusion with others. But I would say that the encouragement should be that we know what God has revealed and in knowing that, we should find peace and security in that, that a lot of times when we have conversations with people, if we don't know our faith well, we can get worried and when we get worried that makes us come off defensive and angry. That's not what we want to do. So if someone is challenging us on the meaning of these passages, maybe because they struggle with their sexuality or someone they love struggles with their sexuality, we can calmly lead them to truth without being off-putting and defensive or angry, to always be able to speak the words that people need to hear as Ephesians 4.15 says, to speak the truth in love. So I hope that that was helpful for you all and that you enjoy the rest of your time at the Defending the Faith Conference. So thank you all very much for being here.