Why? Obviously, it would have risked alienating a far greater number of people than just a few gay activists and their allies. As Orthodox, you’re free to interpret Scripture in accordance with your own traditions. However, many evangelicals consider divorce and remarriage a sin explicitly condemned in Scripture (as pastor Al Mohler clarifies) and would insist that these norms be reflected not just within the church but through the way marriage law is conducted by the state.

However, divorce and remarriage touches many, if not most, families (either directly or indirectly through extended family). Were someone to suggest these couples should not be permitted to remain within the church, that they were standing under the judgment of God or even that their civil marriages should be nullified, well … I’m thinking that they’d be considered a bit heartless, rightly or wrongly.

Either way, I stand by Mr Cathy’s ability to voice his beliefs without fear of reprisal from pandering politicians (whether I agree with him or not).

Why would that be courageous?

Ah, but Tomas, marriage, even marriage outside the Church or outside the Biblical norms, is not sin like homosexuality is sin or fornication is sin. When a marriage is commited to God in the proper context with humility and repentance, God can bring great blessing from it because of the union. A union that is, at least, in accord with the manner in which God created us. If a person has not committed adultery but been sinned against, is that cause for a lifetime of solitude or if a loving and faithful marriage is disrupted by the evil of death?

Failure to uphold the Biblical paradigm of marriage is certainly at the root of the glut of fornication and homosexuality just as abortion is at the root of the increasing violence in general, but especially against women and children.

The untethering of the sexual appetite from marriage is horrible as is the gender equality blasphemy that neuters men and makes women masculine and commends that we seek our own sex to placate the urges. Unholyness abounds but, at least in marriage, grace even more abounds and softens the hardest of hearts so that the joy of His presence is made known even though the yoke is not as pristine as it should be or as light.

I don’t know how or why God does what He does, but he blesses where and whom He blesses and what God has cleansed, call thou not unclean.

Now THAT would have been interesting.

You may find it HERE:

Among other things we should not single out homosexuality as the only sexual sin. Should we not also call to repentance the porn addicts, adulterers, fornicators and aborters in our midst? Is it not by facing our own sins in confession that true humility begins to grow?

Should not the call to repenatance be for other sins as well while at the same time we redouble our efforts to serve the poor and needy in our communities both as parishes and as private persons?

Is it not true that the more fully we reflect the reality of the Church by our visible virtue, the more powerful will be the calls to repentance and the more humble we will be?

My fear is that too many will mistake silence acquiesence to the way of the world as humility and compassion. Must we not also guard against that?