Christians are sometimes accused of being “in denial,” especially when it comes to matters of sex. But after reading about a recent AIDS conference, I have to ask: Who’s really living in fantasy land?
At the recent UN international AIDS conference in South Africa, the actress Charlize Theron announced that HIV “has no biological preference for black bodies, for women’s bodies, for gay bodies . . . HIV is not just transmitted by sex,” she explained. “It’s transmitted by sexism, racism, poverty, and homophobia.”
Matthew Hanley, a Senior Fellow with the National Catholic Bioethics Center, writes at Mercatornet that while it was Theron who made these nonsensical remarks, they could have been made by almost any professional at the conference. When Theron says AIDS is not spread just by sex, “she means to direct attention away from sex itself, to minimize its primary role, and to shift ultimate [blame] anywhere else.”
“Statements like these,” Hanley adds, “sound less like medicine than a strand of Marxism—cultural Marxism.” Marxism has “morphed away from the sphere of economics and into the sexual revolution,” he explains. This means that “every form of sex has necessarily come to be regarded … as equal; therefore . . . Nothing must jeopardize the truly radical assertion that there are no differences in the arena of sexuality . . . Objective hazards must be repackaged to conform to the value assigned to sexual behavior—which is something we don’t do for other public health matters.”
For instance, nobody says smoking cigarettes or drinking huge amounts of sugary drinks is healthy and normal--or distributes pills in schools to offset the effects of tobacco and sugar. Instead, we urge young people to avoid cigarettes altogether, and cut down on the soft drinks. But heaven forbid we tell them to avoid sex.
The United Nations isn’t the only place we're witnessing an absolute refusal to acknowledge that all sex is not equal when it comes to public health. Dr. Paul Church, a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, was fired from his position at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center last year for telling the truth about homosexual behavior: That, as Bryan Fischer writes at barbwire.com, it “leads to a higher incidence of HIV/AIDS, STDs, hepatitis, parasitic infection, anal cancers, and psychiatric disorders.”
This, folks, is a new form of totalitarianism. As Hanley explains, those who seek to promote the equality of all sexual behavior—married, unmarried, gay or straight--“seek to triumph by means of the will” and by “various forms of coercion.”
The idea that nothing should interfere with sexual pleasure goes back a long way. In 1930, Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich wrote a book titled “The Sexual Revolution,” in which he announced that ideas—particularly moral ideas--that diminish sexual happiness should not be tolerated.
By contrast, Christianity teaches that sex was designed by God and should be reserved for monogamous, life-long marriage between one man and one woman. Sex within marriage is intrinsically linked to complementary love and childbearing.
When we hear people spouting off about the so-called “equality” of any and all forms of sexual behavior, claiming that the wrong attitudes cause disease, or attempting to punish anyone who dares to point out the truth about health risks, we need to help our families and friends understand where all this comes from.
Ultimately, it’s a rejection of God’s loving—and healthful--design for sexuality.
BreakPoint is a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life. Begun by Chuck Colson in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print. Today BreakPoint commentaries, co-hosted by Eric Metaxas and John Stonestreet, air daily on more than 1,200 outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. Feel free to contact us at BreakPoint.org where you can read and search answers to common questions.
Eric Metaxas is a co-host of BreakPoint Radio and a best-selling author whose biographies, children's books, and popular apologetics have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Publication date: August 10, 2016