Note: The following is a correspondence between Steve Deace, radio commentator and USA Today columnist, and Dr. Michael Milton, PCA minister, Faith for Living President, and recent President-Chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary.
Dear Steve:
Thanks for sending the article on the National Right to Life severing ties with its highly successful Cleveland office over Cleveland’s refusal to join the Gay is Good for children parade. I read it with careful interest. I am saddened. I am not surprised.
We are now seeing the rise of the preeminent test of modern ‘civil’ society membership: open and necessary enthusiastic support of the State’s “codification” of homosexuality, which, until in relatively recent years, was a crime. While states like my own, North Carolina, have a state law that defends the sanity of marriage, I look for the U.S. Justice Department and/or others to seek to overrule the overwhelming majority of North Carolinians—and other states and citizens who have passed such laws by popular, democratic vote—in order to ‘reign us in’ to the progressive agenda underway. It will take nothing short of a revival to stop the machine—or better, to convert those in the engineering car.
So now conservative groups will begin to splinter with otherwise faithful colleagues in the struggle for human life, like the stalwart Cleveland chapter of Right to Life, that refuses to endorse what God has prohibited.
This is in only the first salvo. Expect more to come. Yet can we not expect more prayer? More clearly articulated positions? More appeals to divine revelation and less to conservatism void of an ethical compass?
Your friend and brother in the battle
Mike
Michael A. Milton, Ph.D.
Matthews, North Carolina
On Aug 5, 2013, at 8:48 PM, “Steve Deace”
Dear Mike:
Disgraceful, if true.
“National Right to Life chooses partisan politics over defending marriage?
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/national-right-to-life-committee-disowns-cleveland-chapter-for-defending-ma
After reading the accompanying website, I honestly think that the letter to Steve overstates what is happening. Certainly, CRTL violated the NRTL policy and I can understand the disgruntlement on both sides. But to interpret this as showing the new test for civility requiring the “enthusiastic support of the State’s “codification” of homosexuality” seems to be an overreaction.
But something else must be added. It seems that some of us Christians want our biblical beliefs about homosexuality to dominate the land whose laws were partially based on religious freedom. And we take that position of power for granted. Thus, it seems that we have too easy of a time to interpret the change of direction in the pendulum swing to be just as controlling. Certainly that is a possibility but perhaps that is because of how far we had the pendulum swing in our direction in the first place. It would seem to be more “civil” to work for a society where both we have a right to speak our peace and those who disagree have the right to live differently from what we preach.