Not Gay or Straight, Repentant or Unrepentant

Solid (if slightly polemical) insight by Doug Wilson on the way Christians view and engage the culture wars:

Mark Twain's wife was a long-suffering woman, and one day she walked up to him and calmly repeated back to him every foul word she had ever heard him use, and he had probably used them all. When she was quite done, he looked at her and said, "My dear, you know the words, but you don't know the tune."

The problem that many conservative Christians have when it comes to dealing with public sins and outrages (like the current homo crusades) is that they do the same kind of thing. They know the words but they don't know the tune. And so Christians generally either capitulate, and use the language that our secular masters assign for us to use (sexual orientation, gay, bi, diversity, and so on), or they retreat to the bunker mentality of frat boy insults. But the fact that some of the frat boy insults can be justified from Scripture does not mean that we know the tune.

In our culture wars, Christians too often carry on like the elder brother who refused to the come to the party when the prodigal son returned. We have divided the world with false antitheses -- like gay and straight, for example. But the real antithesis is repentant and unrepentant, and our language and demeanor must reflect that. A repentant homosexual who is spending the rest of his life in prison because he had molested numerous children will be received into glory, and an unrepentant Christian culture warrior whose private grime-fantasies are all exclusively hetero will not be. Mark the antithesis well.

Whole thing.