OPINION
Tani Newton
How long will it be before rainbow pedestrian crossings are left alone? Will this all blow over, and will we go back to our humdrum lives? Or will pedestrian crossings become the new battleground of the culture war?
There are many sides to the culture war; many battles and many groups of combatants. But two groups have emerged as utterly irreconcilable, namely, Christians and homosexuals. Or to be more precise, Christians of a certain stamp and the people who stand with them, versus gay activists. These two groups have no common ground on which they could meet, and represent the opposite poles of moral philosophy. Yet neither group will articulate what should be their actual position. Christians will not make a stand for, and nobody wants to talk about, what the Bible actually says on this matter. For their part, homosexual activists are not going to say that all they want is to be able to have sex with anyone or anything they please, whenever, wherever and however they please, even though that is what the whole liberal agenda has always been about.
It gets more complicated. There are professing Christians who think that any kind of sexuality is fine. And there are homosexuals who are genuinely nice people who would never hurt a child. Neither party is consistent with the philosophy they espouse. But nobody wants to be fully consistent. Instead, everyone stakes out some kind of compromise position and tries in vain to defend it. Thus we end up with the ludicrous spectacle of women wearing trousers protesting at men wearing dresses.
Now there are peace-loving people who try to make a case for everyone’s just doing their own thing. Indeed, this would probably be the closest thing we have to a consensus: just do what you like in the privacy of your own home, and don’t try to force your views on other people.
The difficulty is that neither the Christian crowd nor the homosexual crowd (as defined above) can do that, despite both of them using the “leave us alone” line of rhetoric. Neither is actually free to leave others alone and do their own thing. Christians have the command of Christ to go into all the world and make disciples of the nations, while homosexuals have committed themselves to a lifestyle that precludes procreation and can therefore only maintain their numbers by recruiting younger people to join them. Each group sees the other (rightly so, I would argue) as inimical to its own progress and an intolerable danger to its own members.
And so they are slogging it out in the libraries and on the pedestrian crossings of this world, perhaps some of the most unexpected places to have become the theatres of war. Where will this end? Governments and the media rally to the homosexual cause, perhaps because they want to destroy Christianity and all that it represents. Meanwhile, a quiet groundswell of popular opinion rises on the opposite side, perhaps because people are tired of the government and the media more than anything else. Perhaps new and even more entertaining battles will be waged. Perhaps all of this will be forgotten as we are overtaken by the cataclysms of a collapsing civilisation. The one thing that will not happen is that the two views will be reconciled. And one thing that definitely will happen is that the meek shall inherit the earth.