As the battle over religious liberty wages, don't lose heart

I have a recurring dream where I’m searching a huge building for a restroom. I eventually find one, but I discover the doors to the stalls leave a big gap when closed. Some stalls have no doors at all. “Well,” I tell myself, “it’s the women’s bathroom. I can deal with them seeing me.” In a recent dream, however, a man appeared. And another. And another.

Have you had similar dreams? If homosexuals and their powerful lobby continue to have their way, those dreams will become reality. They want boys pretending to be girls, and vice versa, to be allowed to use opposite-sex bathrooms and locker rooms. Although the powers-that-be removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders and struck down laws criminalizing it, that wasn’t nearly enough for them.

They want to force Christian business owners, through the power of the government, to bake cakes and take photographs for same-sex weddings. They demand extra-constitutional rights while depriving Christians of our enumerated constitutional right to freely exercise our religion. As the city of Houston recently demonstrated, special rights for them mean fewer rights for us.

A city in Arkansas has scored one, small victory for religious freedom and common sense. LifeSiteNews reports that voters in Fayetteville struck down an ordinance that would have allowed men to use women’s restrooms and changing facilities, and vice versa, even in private businesses.

With the victory in Fayetteville comes defeat in D.C. The city council voted to expose the city’s religious schools to lawsuits if they bar transgendered people from using opposite-sex bathrooms or otherwise oppose the homosexual agenda in their institutions. These schools were protected from related lawsuits for the past 25 years. But in the name of so-called human rights, the faithful are being forced to aid and abet the sin of homosexuality.

How did feelings and fantasies come to trump modesty, privacy, decency, and sanity? Perverse thinking leads to perverse actions. This country is on the verge of criminalizing, not merely violating, religious expression. While it makes sense not to discriminate against individuals based on immutable characteristics like race and sex, behavior is fair game. If what someone chooses to do gives him special rights, what’s to stop pedophiles from demanding “protected” status? On what basis could the government deny them their “human right?”

Such battles will continue until Christ returns. The human heart indeed is desperately wicked, and deceitful above all things. When you start lowering the walls of decency, open depravity increases. Shame erodes. And once shame is gone, anything—and I mean anything—goes. Slouching toward Gomorrah? More like racing past it.

But there is always hope. “Therefore, since we have this ministry,” the Apostle Paul wrote, “as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.”