Somebody says, ‘Oh, but this homosexual matter—people are made that way.’ No. Everybody is made a sinner. Everybody has some sex drive. Everybody would like to satisfy it some way, particularly men. Whether through a woman, or whether it is with a beast, or whether it is with a man, the truth is, it is all the same sin. God has ways for men to have control over themselves and do right! You need not call it sickness; it is wicked sin.
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Note this: sodomite—that is the sin of those men of Sodom, that is homosexual sin, and it is clearly forbidden, like the sin of the harlot.”
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They Are Perverts
Such people are not safe as teachers. I wouldn’t want to hire a man as a teacher if he is likely to lead one of the high school girls into immorality and sin. He is not safe. Such a teacher is likely to lead the boys into sex perversion. So he is not a good teacher and he ought not be hired. We have a right to make laws to safeguard the schools and churches and others from sex perverts. They are not good citizens. They are not safe.
Now when people are married, they have children. But sex perverts—men with men and women with women—don’t have children, but they are always out to solicit, to involve somebody else in sin, to grow up some more homosexuals and sex perverts. And that is wicked.
— John R. Rice, editor of the Sword of the Lord, Adultery and Sex Perversion, 1978
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Funny. Most pedophiles are heterosexuals. ALSO, these types of Christian don’t care about Josh Duggar-type of sexual abuse. Oh, but he was just a horny teen and well, you know, sisters were close by. THAT is the Christian message I’m getting about sexuality. Dr Rice can take a long walk off a short pier.
BJW–Yes! I was sexually abused by another man [a family friend) besides the priest I’ve mentioned in a few of my articles. I am sure that man was heterosexual–or, at least, he never indulged himself with a male who was “of age” and who consented. For men like him, it’s about the availability and vulnerability of the victim.
I suppose the same might be said about the priest who abused me. He may well have gotten on with other priests, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t because he was attracted to males. I also wouldn’t be surprised if he “switched roles,” if you will: Perhaps other priests did to him what he did to me and other children because, well, he was as available and vulnerable to those priests as I and other kids were to him.
The man is a human mud puddle of dead brain cells. He parrots the stupid idea that people are born evil and he profits on it. He died in the Winter of 1980. Thank goodness for mortality!
Why do you suppose religious people are so ultra obsessed with SEX? I’d like to get a topic going on here about this, because the way this issue is handled in church circles, in tandem with my singleness into middle age now, is a HUGE part of the reason why I left the ‘faith’!!
I always thought, when fundy, that it seemed god had a hierarchy of sins and sexual sin was right at the top of his list. A fellow-x-tian said something I secretly agreed with that when we got to judgement day**, and all our sins were being revealed, we might well be surprised to find our list of sins in descending order of magnitude might be very different from god’s. We knew so-called x-tian businessmen whose business practices weren’t as squeaky clean as they claimed. What about the sin of greed? There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, but we in the west take more than our fair share. That white lie I told when I should have known better etc etc. Like you, so pleased to be out of all that voyeuristic obsession to know about everyone’s sex lives.
** not that I believe in judgement day now, but I did then!
Matilda: I always remember what William Blake wrote in “Songs of Experience”:
Prisons are built from stones of law,
Brothels from bricks of religion.
I think organized religions’ obsession with people’s sexual lives is the first brick in the wall, if you will, of gender heirarchy. If men (who almost invariably control religions) can police sex, they can control reproductive freedom–and women.
Keep ’em horny, deny them all relationships except straight marriage, and do whatever you can to poison the marriage relationship so there isn’t much sex there and what is there isn’t joyful. It’s another tactic for keeping butts in pews, hoping that Jesus (or whoever the deity is) will bestow magic joy from above if they pray hard enough.
But, far more wrong than that is, is the constant preaching that humanness is vile and disgusting by definition. Humans make mistakes. Humans hurt others. A few humans are sociopaths or psychopaths, and burn down every relationship they have and/or destroy other people. Sorry, but ordinary humanness is not vile or disgusting, it is the potential for a range of BEHAVIORS that can be harmful or helpful for ourselves, the important people in our lives, and our fellow humans in general. Nudging people toward helpful behaviors is a good idea, just as nudging them away from harmful behaviors is also a good idea. Insisting as a society that some behaviors are unacceptable and have unpleasant consequences is an obligation of any society, because that’s how we keep the ‘civil’ in ‘civilization’. Declaring ANY behavior as being wrong for everyone because it offends YOUR imaginary friend is unacceptable to me. So is insulting people with the message that they’re vile and disgusting by definition.
This John Rice was building up hatred towards same sex oriented persons in the churches over which his writing had influence. These people make up about 3% to 5% any any human populations but this guy takes the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah to frighten IFB congregations into imagining that whole populations of human cities will become same sex oriented. It’s totally absurd.