Unmasking Mel White, Part I

 

        THE FIRST PREMISE: WORD ON THE STREET 

     White launches his booklet with the low-brow arguments that seek to trivialize homosexuality. He is trafficking in common, unsophisticated talking points you might often hear on the street. The first issue is where he seeks to gain the confidence of every true Christian by discussing a very real problem. It is the issue of biblical illiteracy:

Most people have not carefully and prayerfully researched the biblical texts often used to condemn God’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children, (White, p. 3).

      Of course ignorance about the Bible prevails on any given topic: abortion, marriage, divorce, racial issues,  etc. So why should we be surprised if most people also cannot give a cogent biblical response for why they believe homosexuality is immoral? Surveys have found that many Americans can’t even name the Ten Commandments. White here begins with an issue that he knows is solid ground for every evangelical Christian.

     But then he employs a series a bullets that are common talking points for homosexual activists seeking to justify their perversion. I am going to take these one at a time since some of these sound pretty impressive on the surface.

•      ”Jesus says nothing about same-sex behavior.”

     It is interesting that White begins with this bullet in a pamphlet that is designed to address what the Bible says, not just what Jesus said in His three years of ministry. That’s because there are plenty of other places in the Old and New Testaments that do in fact address the issue. What is even more interesting is that while White is attempting to get mileage out of this well-worn talking point, he in fact will later show that he doesn’t believe the Bible addresses homosexuality at all. But apparently this tidbit about the words of Jesus is just too juicy to resist. Remember that White is seeking to justify homosexuality. He is not really interested in what the Bible says.

     The Bible is the whole word of God. ”The words in red” do not carry more significance than the rest of the book. 2 Tim. 3:16 says, “ALL scripture is given by inspiration of God.” The apostle Paul, who does condemn homosexuality as we shall see, tells the Ephesian believers that the Church is ”built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner stone,” (Ephesians 2:20). So while Christ is indeed the chief corner stone, Paul’s architectural imagery is that of a strong edifice that is just as much founded upon the words of the rest of Scripture, i.e. the apostles and prophets. Attempt to separate the words of Christ from the rest of the Bible, and you have a Church that is foundationally compromised.

• “The Jewish prophets are silent about homosexuality.”

     Here White is again parsing through Scriptures, seeking to make it appear that the Bible is silent about homosexuality. The Jewish prophets in the Old Testament can only be said to be silent about homosexuality if you do not include the five books of Moses (Moses is often considered the chief of the Jewish prophets) and the history books (such as 1&2 Kings, 1&2 Chronicles, etc.). The Old Testament does speak about homosexual behavior in those places, but again, White will later show he really doesn’t believe the Bible condemns homosexuality at all. 

• “Only six or seven of the Bible’s one million verses refer to same-sex behavior in any way — and none of these verses refer to homosexual orientation as it’s understood today.”

     Now White is beginning to branch out into a new argument that is pretty flimsy. The Bible is not a list of rules. While God occasionally spoke in that way, He normally communicated through other more effective genres (histories, letters, parables, visions, etc.). To say that God has to speak a certain number of times on an issue before we will take Him seriously is not even a credible argument for a true Christian.  Anyone that is familiar with the landscape of Scripture knows that the Bible illustrates much more than an endless series of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots.” 

     But there is something else White is saying here that is really his major premise. No matter how graphic Scripture gets about homosexuality, White has just unloaded on his reader how plans to deal with it all. When he says, “none of these verses refer to homosexual orientation as it’s understood today” he is saying that he believes that the modern perceptions of homosexuality that he advances radically alter the physical reality of the sex act. Even if the physical homosexual acts are occurring in the Scripture, White is saying that the real difference lies in the mental perspective in which those acts are taking place. As we shall see later, however, the Bible does not simply condemn a mindset. It utterly condemns homosexual behavior.

        These are the last of the low-brow arguments that seek to exonerate homosexuality. In Part II, I will deal with the emotional arguments of White’s second premise.