How Can Evangelical Christians Love Their Homosexual Neighbors?

[laughter]

NADINE: I enjoyed this very much and I especially appreciate you spending a Friday night into the late hours. I certainly have learned a lot about Christianity and about the positive values of love that I see as being consistent with many of my civil liberties values. I hope that at least some of you will feel the same way, that you see some consistency between what we're trying to achieve in terms of basic human dignity and equality, that that will resonate with your beliefs as Christians.

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JOHN: Nadine, thank you so much. In most of my Mars Hill Forums I'm in the minority, at Smith College or Cornell or wherever. For Nadine to be willing to come to an evangelical bastion I think is very gracious. Thank you for doing that.

NADINE: My pleasure.

[applause]

JOHN: I'm utterly biased in favor of this place, having graduated from it. They gave me the degree. It's their choice I guess.

Real quick word of advertisement. There are information tables in the back on your way out, both for the ACLU and the TEI. If any of you would like to be on my propaganda list, otherwise known as mailing list, you can sign up and see what comes in the mail.

Real quickly in terms just of my final thoughts. I think the real issue as I've seen it crystallized tonight is a question, Nadine, for you and for the rest of us, when we talk about unalienable rights given by our Creator. I think the greatest threat to democracy or a democratic republic or any civil society, is a lack of definition of terms, when there's a fuzzy definition between good and evil, between what is right and wrong. At certain levels we agree that drunk driving and rape is wrong, but we don't agree on issues of same-sex relationships or abortion or things like that.

My argument in a nutshell, and again this is my whole thesis I'm finally trying to get all in one written form, is that if you look at every religious origin text from which cultures spring across the planet, you'll find that all of them apart from Genesis have petty, finite, jealous deities who beat up on each other and beat up worse on us. They lead to tyranny. They lead to destruction of human life. The only basis we have for civil liberties is the biblical ethics in the order of creation and their application in a pluralistic society. I think the genius of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence was his instinctive recitation of the core of those realities, of unalienable rights of life, liberty, and property.

My observation is this. Unless we as a culture -- and I oppose the theocracy, I oppose forcing anyone to believe -- but unless we recognize the historical basis for civil liberties being rooted in the Bible and in Genesis, and if we move outside of it, I think moving the definition of marriage outside of its historical reality is the greatest jihad against civil rights that I see today. Unless we recognize those roots we are in trouble. And so if my diagnosis is correct, then the debate's going to sharpen in the years and decades ahead of time. There may come the time when people, whether Nadine or others who disagree with my views right here, may look at what society has become. The biblical prophecy of the last days being like Sodom and Gomorrah, which was far more than just one homosexual gang rape incident, it was complete lawlessness, complete abandonment of the poor, complete injustice all the way through society.

My observation and conviction is, the only place for civil liberties to be founded in all human history is Genesis 1 and 2. That's my passion. God bless.

[applause]