NewsFaith, Freedom, Homosexuality

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NEW YORK, April 7, 2015 ( LifeSiteNews.com ) – A New York Times columnist and a corporate leader have agreed that Christian churches “must” be convinced, or coerced, to change their teachings on sexual morality and abandon an “ossified” doctrinal teaching that sex outside heterosexual marriage is immoral.

Frank Bruni wrote that traditional Christianity – whether among evangelicals, Catholics, or Orthodox – provides the greatest resistance to normalizing homosexuality in the United States in a recent column in the New York Times.

“Homosexuality and Christianity don’t have to be in conflict in any church anywhere,” Bruni insisted. “The continued view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It’s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.”

Bruni quoted furniture tycoon Mitchell Gold, who has used his millions to found a liberal pressure group Faith in America, writing that Gold believes Christian churches “must be made 'to take homosexuality off the sin list.'”

“His commandment is worthy — and warranted,” Bruni added.

The column sparked outrage at the notion that a successful businessman and an op-ed writer could induce the Christian Church to ignore a 2,000-year-old dogma.

Noting Bruni's column at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher wrote that he would find a conservative columnist lecturing liberal denominations that they “must” change their moral theology equally “appalling” as an act of imposition.

“But of course nobody on that side seems to have the slightest doubt about their cause, their motives, or their methods. None,” he wrote. “In a holy war, there is no room for doubt.”

A number of mainline Protestant churches have, in effect, taken Gold's advice, condoning – if not celebrating – homosexuality and allowing sexually active homosexuals to be ordained as pastors.

The Episcopal Church saw its membership decline by half-a-million people between 2002 and 2012. After changing its views of homosexuals, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) lost more than 600,000 people – in excess of 12 percent of its total members – in just three years. The first mainline church to allow for homosexual ordination, the United Church of Christ (UCC), lost 350 congregations within three years of its 2004 decision.

But even refraining from calling same-sex relations a sin – or, in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “intrinsically disordered” – is not enough for the modern LGBT movement.

“The LGBT militants are not asking to be left alone,” said former Reagan administration adviser Pat Buchanan, a co-founder of The American Conservative. “They are demanding that we accept the morality of homosexuality and same-sex marriages, and manifest that acceptance, under pain of law and sanctions, in our daily lives.”

Buchanan said during an interview with WND.com that orthodox Christian churches must have one response to demands that they alter their teachings to fit the modern zeitgeist: “The answer is no. If it comes to civil disobedience, so be it.”

Buchanan's statement came as a number of prominent evangelical Christian leaders have called for open acts of nonviolent resistance if the Supreme Court forces states to accept homosexual “marriages” this summer.