Christian Canary, World Canary

The UK court system is now serving as the coal mine for the place, purpose and future of Christianity in Western civilization in this era. In a ruling that ought to wake up Christian thinkers and leaders around the world, the UK court has ruled that a Christian couple can no longer participate in the foster care of children, because of their conviction that a homosexual lifestyle is immoral.

The couple, actually of grandparent age, had already raised 15 foster children, and apparently very well. They voiced their view that homosexuality is ‘against God’s law and morals’ but they are not homophobic and would ‘accept and love’ any child. They have a gay nephew, and have visited he and his partner in San Francisco. But they were told by the UK court that their values could conflict with the local authority’s duty to ‘safeguard and promote the welfare’ of those in foster care.

So gay rights have officially trumped Christian morality in the UK. As the UK judges explained: Britain is "a secular state, not a theocracy.”

Let’s think about that explanation and where it’s headed.

What if the foster parents believe abortion is wrong? Are they allowed to be foster parents?

What if the foster parents believe marriage should be between a man and a woman? Are they allowed to be foster parents?

What if the foster parents believe adultery is wrong? The view of adultery as immoral is entirely religious; it’s one of the Ten Commandments. If secular wisdom proclaims adultery to be ok, are foster parents allowed to teach children otherwise?

And let’s point out the obvious direction of all this. If it is wrong for society to permit foster parents to teach Christian morals to children under their care, why is it ok for natural parents to teach such morals to their own children? There is no logical basis for treating natural parents differently than foster parents; it’s only a matter of time before the gay rights power grab goes right to the heart of what any parents can or can’t teach their children.

“Slippery slope” doesn’t begin to capture the hell that is being opened up by these kinds of vacuous court rulings. Setting society’s choice as an either/or between secularism and a theocracy is just bogus, a completely phony dichotomy.

No one would argue that the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution set up a theocracy, yet no one with any integrity would argue that Judeo-Christian principles and teachings are not central to the substance of them. There is a sequencing issue that the UK court doesn’t grasp—which is that without Judeo-Christian morality, there is no society capable in the long term of being organized and living under a reasonable sense of individual freedom, decency, law and order. There really is no such thing as a secular state. Without moral grounding, the alternative structure for society is the brute force of authority, through guns and mobs and armies and dictators, which is what the human condition has been striving to be free of for centuries until the advance of Judeo-Christian teaching gave birth to the Magna Carta and later to the founding of America.

Forget the nonsense that gay rights are unique and resolving them to the satisfaction of gay rights activists is a finite, containable issue that does not impact Christianity beyond this one area where Christianity is, in the opinion of gay rights activists, so obviously wrong and unenlightened. That’s not what this is about. What it’s about is another dimension of the effort to rid the world of the concept and relevance of the Judeo-Christian God; to exterminate faith in and the acceptance of guidance from anything outside the realm of the physical senses.

It’s actually nothing new; ‘the worldly’ have been trying to do this since the time the children of Israel first escaped from Egypt. But it’s the modern Christian canary in the coal mine. It needs to be seen for what it is and resisted; the future health and well-being of humanity depend on it.

Paul Gable

March 3, 2011