Rev. Franklin Graham has declared that presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg should “repent” his “sin” of being a homosexual. Graham explained that homosexuality “something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized.” It is a bizarre and deeply insulting declaration. I have seen no evidence of Buttigieg flaunting anything. He has conducted himself as any candidate in embracing his spouse and discussing his marriage. When heterosexual candidates cite their marriage, it is not declared “flaunting.”
Not to be outdone Pastor E.W. Jackson denounced Buttigieg’s candidacy as an effort to establish a “homocracy.”
The South Bend, Indiana mayor has answered questions about his sexuality and emphasized that “I get that one of the things about Scripture is different people see different things in it.”
Graham shared a CNN story about the town hall on Twitter, and said, “Presidential candidate & South Bend Mayor @PeteButtigieg is right—God doesn’t have a political party. But God does have commandments, laws & standards He gives us to live by.”
He added: “Mayor Buttigieg says he’s a gay Christian. As a Christian I believe the Bible which defines homosexuality as sin, something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized. The Bible says marriage is between a man & a woman—not two men, not two women.”
Buttigieg’s comments however seem not only more measured but moral on this issue: “It can be challenging to be a person of faith who’s also part of the LGBTQ community and yet, to me, the core of faith is regard for one another. And part of God’s love is experienced, according to my faith tradition, is in the way that we support one another and, in particular, support the least among us.”
Easter was last weekend, just a few days ago.
You would never know it by the “conservative” commenters on these forums.
Darren, you should close this thread. It is an embarrassing reflection of the intellectual, spiritual and moral rot in our culture.
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Whether pride is the most grievous of sins?
I answer that, Two things are to be observed in sin, conversion to a mutable good, and this is the material part of sin; and aversion from the immutable good, and this gives sin its formal aspect and complement. Now on the part of the conversion, there is no reason for pride being the greatest of sins, because uplifting which pride covets inordinately, is not essentially most incompatible with the good of virtue. But on the part of the aversion, pride has extreme gravity, because in other sins man turns away from God, either through ignorance or through weakness, or through desire for any other good whatever; whereas pride denotes aversion from God simply through being unwilling to be subject to God and His rule. Hence Boethius [Cf. Cassian, de Caenob. Onst. xii, 7 says that “while all vices flee from God, pride alone withstands God”; for which reason it is specially stated (James 4:6) that “God resisteth the proud.” Wherefore aversion from God and His commandments, which is a consequence as it were in other sins, belongs to pride by its very nature, for its act is the contempt of God. And since that which belongs to a thing by its nature is always of greater weight than that which belongs to it through something else, it follows that pride is the most grievous of sins by its genus, because it exceeds in aversion which is the formal complement of sin.
– Summa Theologiae,,Secunda Secundæ Partis, #162
St Thomas Aquinas