A christian parents response to an adult gay child

Last month, two very high profile Christian leaders, Franklin Graham and James Dobson, addressed publicly on a radio program how they believe Christians and the church should respond to LGBT peopleand specifically to gay children.

What Are Christians to Do with Those Pesky Gay Children?

With stations and 3. With that reach comes tremendous responsibility because, as the Bible says, the power of life and death is in the tongue Proverbs Unfortunately, Graham and Dobson said a variety of things that do not accurately represent Scripture, are untrue, and are potentially harmful to the very real people, parents, and children who have to deal with these issues in their lives.

The fallacies in their remarks need to be identified and called out so a christian parents response to an adult gay child believers will be able to respond in a holy and Christ-like manner as they encounter families and children who are dealing with these very real issues in their lives, rather than respond in an unkind and ungodly manner due to fear and misinformation.

However, when unbiblical misinformation is spread that threatens the physical and spiritual well-being of some of the most vulnerable people in our society, homes, and churches, we must step up to protect them, no matter how high-profile or well-respected the purveyors of that wrong information have been in the past.

So where did Graham and Dobson go wrong? The inaccurate statements they made are the types of inaccuracies that have led well-meaning Christian parents to throw their gay children out of their home, that have led gay children to abandon their faith, and that have even led LGBTQ children to take their own lives.

How big is the problem? Because the experience of being rejected by their family and forced from their home is so commonplace. Because of these kinds of consequences, inaccuracies of the kind held forth by Graham and Dobson must not be left unchallenged, especially when the persons espousing such fallacies are persons of tremendous influence.

The costs are simply too high. Before I address the inaccuracies and fallacies in their statements, here is a transcript of what Graham and Dobson had to say:. I was talking to some Christians and they were talking about how they invited these gay children to come into their home and to come into the church and that they were wanting to influence them.

What happens is we think we can fight by smiling and being real nice and loving. We have to understand who the Enemy is and what he wants to do. He wants to devour our homes. He wants to devour this nation and we have to be so careful who we let our kids hang out with.

We have to be so careful who we let into the churches. Is being gay a choice? It appears that Graham thinks that being gay is a choice, since he suggests people can just stop being gay. So what does the Bible have to say about whether or not being gay is a choice?

We can have great and lengthy theological debates about what the Bible says about sexual relationships as it relates to being gay, but there can be no debate about the origins of sexual orientation because the Bible never speaks to the subject. It only speaks to our behavior.

To draw our conclusions about the origins of sexual orientation, we have to turn to the life experience of flesh and blood gay people and what they tell us about how they came to be gay, as well as, for those of us who are heterosexual, our life experiences about how we came to be straight.

And when you turn to those life experiences, they are remarkably similar in description. At the dawn of adolescence, some of us naturally, through no choice of our own, started to notice the opposite sex. Others, naturally, through no choice of their own, started to notice the same sex.

Some gay people say they knew they were different long before those first actual sexual attractions appeared on the scene. To the contrary, the attempts to do so are often destructive. Countless lives have been lost to suicide, and countless families and futures have been destroyed by forced attempts at changing sexual orientation.

Is being gay contagious? Can my kids catch it from their friends? Will a gay child convince my straight child to become gay? Will being around gay children lead my children to become too compassionate toward gay people?