Dangerous Affirmation with M.D. Perkins: Part II

I think where they want to hide is in this appreciation for beauty. Like, I almost get that, that sense and when they're talking about attraction or orientation that there's a, there's an appreciation they have for the male form or something if they're.

Male.

Right.

And that, that doesn't have to lead into anything sexual. But the problem with that in my mind is that they, they make the jump in like a thousand different ways in their movement from it's like you gave the example of the heart skipping a beat or whatever.

I mean, but they, there's whole talks on queer culture and, uh, and being married to someone who's in a heterosexual relationship, being married in that, but still identifying friendships.

Right.

And it's to me, I'm like, you're not Leonardo da Vinci appreciating the male form at that point. You're, you're saying something a little more than that. You're signaling that it's not just an appreciation, but a, you want to be with them.

And that's where, that's where something I think can be right in heterosexual sense and wrong when it's something you say, coveting is something God forbid. So I think of it that way, where it, it can be right if you're pursuing someone for the to have a, to appreciate them, but also have this sort of inclination towards, you know, one day, um, if things go well, that you're going to, there's going to be a fulfillment of that relationship.

And I mean, this is, you can't really have a romantic relationship without that. There has to be some kind of, I mean, what are you doing if you're dating and you're, you're not, you don't want to pursue that somewhere down the line, you're, you're just, you're wasting time.

So I think there is this sort of foreshadowing or this, this anticipation of something that is to come that God intended for good purposes in a rightly ordained relationship. And they want to take that, whatever that is.

And I don't know if I can fully quantify that because love is, and, and, um, I mean, even Paul talks about that. There's a mystery, Christ in the church and the marriage relationship. And there's, there's so much of the mystery there.

It's, we can put some words to it, but I find it difficult to get into the, fully the weeds on that. But yeah, I think, but that's where they want, that's the, that's the box they want to bring out to say, I have the same thing.

It's just towards inclined towards men and that's okay. And it's like, wait, no, that's not okay.

Homosexual Desire, Beauty, and Coveting

Right.

And what you're getting at, I think is worth noting is the way that they see homosexual desired heterosexual desires, basically equivalent in the fact that they're both sinful, right? You know, that they're, you know, if you like Johnson says that, yeah, yeah.

But you know, Paul in, in Romans one, you know, for this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions for their women exchange, natural relations to those that are contrary to nature. Now is homosexuality a breaking God's law?

It absolutely is. But the reference that Paul makes in Romans one is to it being against nature that it's, it's unnatural. And so there is kind of a further degradation of, of even how God made us. And that's why homosexuality is even used in Romans one as a recognition of just how far mankind can slide and it's rejection of God to where even the women and the men exchange these natural relations.

You know, you look all through the, through the world, you know, and the, the common theme is men and women together, and then they, they have children and then they, they procreate and make the, the human race and procreate society.

But even in the animal kingdom, you know, there's not, you know, homosexuality when people have, I mean, that's a whole separate discussion, but people have tried to claim that you know, there's these homosexual tendencies within certain, certain animals in the animal kingdom, which is always, the creatures are always under duress and it's never kind of this natural thing that is happening and in normal, you know, situations.

I don't know when we started taking our cues from the animal kingdom, maybe we should eat zebras. It's weird.

But, you know, when you refuse to acknowledge the unnatural character of homosexuality and you just treat it as kind of, it's just another sin, like we all struggle with sin. And so it's just this other thing.

And then you treat it as something that, that isn't a natural and that isn't in itself sinful even by its desire, you know, cause you can always relate it to the covetousness idea, you know, in a, in a male female relationship, when a man is pursuing a woman and he has desires for, and even sexual desires begin to emerge, you know, is that always sinful in itself?

I mean, you know, you'd have to, you'd have to examine the heart in that situation and only the Lord knows, but him pursuing that relationship is not a natural though.

But there seems to be, okay. So like, this might be a good example of it. Like when a daughter even is dressed in a certain way and, and she asked her mom, like, is this okay for me to go out like this?

And sometimes mothers will say, go ask her father, you know, and you know, oftentimes mothers know enough that they can give advice there. But I've heard this before where they'll say, go ask your dad.

And then she's got to pass the test with dad. Why is that? It's not because the dad is sexually attracted to his own daughter, right?

That's right.

That's nonsense. It's because the dad is wired in a certain way to detect where he can, he notices the female form in a different way than a female notices the female form.

Right.

And that's, that's something that just seems to be in nature that got infused that ability or that, that detection mechanism in men. And the same as in women, women notice things men don't notice that tend, they tend to, I'm saying these are broad tendencies, right?

And that is very I think there's something mysterious about that to some extent, but it's, there is something beautiful about it. I think that there's a way that even if you look at like older literature, like if you look at Victorian era novels, or even I'm thinking of like even American novels from like the 1800s, I've noticed sometimes there is kind of like the social mores that exist whereby men can compliment women and treat them in a very different way than they would treat men.

And it's not, it's not viewed as sexual. It's viewed as respectful, as honorable, but there's something there even in dancing and sometimes even married men, you know, older married men can compliment younger women in certain ways.

And it wasn't viewed as creepy. Whereas today it probably would be because everything's sexualized.

Right.

And, and that, I, it seems like that's constantly where, where I see revoice type advocates going where they want to just say that they have that same mechanism in them. Only it's for men and if they're male or female, it's for women.

We have this mechanism that notices beauty and knows kind of, if I were to allow my heart to go farther, I, there could be a potential temptation that might arise. So it's so humble. It's so like pre-lust in their mind, but it's clearly not because if it was that innocuous, they wouldn't be having conferences about it.

It wouldn't be, they wouldn't be making the analogies like the one you just referenced. And so there's a bait and switch it seems to me where they, they want to claim something that's so, I don't know, just it's, it's not regressive.

It's so just non-threatening, but actually that when you get into the weeds and what they're actually saying, it is lust. It is something that's threatening.

It is.

And even, you know, best case scenario, let's say they don't, they don't do that bait and.

Switch.

They just say at the front end, we just kind of noticed the male form or something like.

That.

It's not in a scientific way. And there, there is something there that there is something God wired men to just notice women more. I mean, isn't that why Job said that he even had to make a covenant with his eyes because he couldn't handle that not to behold the Virgin, not even to look.

And sometimes that is what I think you have to do, but it's like the goal should be to, to reach that, that God's design to, to get to a place where if you're a male where you are noticing women in those, not men in those ways, but your attraction or your inclination would be more towards women.

So it's not a Freudian, like, you know, sexual orientation concept. It's just, it's cause that's not rooted in creation, but it's rooted in creation that there's a, a certain way that you view women, you interact with women and it doesn't have to be sexual.

I have such a hard time articulating this, which is why I'm using so many words to do.

It.

But that's, I think you started to penetrate this a little bit in your book. You, you, you started to get to that point of recognizing that the SSA revoice stuff is making this kind of bait and switch distinction and more work, I think just probably should be done on it as in, in other books or, but, but you're doing the pioneer work here, which is why I'm talking to you about it.

I mean, so, so what do you think about what I just articulated? However, however I did it, maybe not so of an articulate way, but do you see what I'm trying to get at?

Aesthetic Orientation, the Image of God, and Poetic Theology

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And part of what you're getting at is something that actually has been articulated by guys like Nate Collins and Gregory Coles where, you know, Gregory Coles in his book, a single gay Christian, which was sadly endorsed by D .A. Carson.

You know, it's basically a memoir, but he has this portion in it where he, he pontificates, you know, and just kind of thinks out loud, so to speak about like, well, what if God did make me as a eunuch, you know?

And so that, that category of eunuch kind of gets immediately co-opted by anybody who has wants to be identified within the LGBT kind of spectrum as a biblical word that suddenly, you know, they can take and run with.

But, you know, what if God did design me this way? You know, he's just, he's not saying that God did, you know, so he's still got plausible deniability, but he's just kind of thinking out loud and he doesn't really know how to think about it, you know, but maybe God did design him, you know, to, to be single and to desire, you know, things in a certain way.

And Nate Collins goes so far as to, you know, basically give a philosophical concept to this whole thing that he calls aesthetic orientation. And I talk about that some in the book, you know, basically what you're getting at, this idea that God hardwired us for beauty and to, to enjoy certain aesthetics.

And so in that way, you know, he's almost acknowledging that maybe God did make him gay, but just, you know, the fall is what took that initial, you know, aesthetic orientation that he had to recognize the beauty of maleness, whatever that means in his mind.

And then the fall comes in and then takes that and kind of co-ops it to where now it has the sexual bent to it, which is wrong, but, you know, in its purest form, it's just this appreciation of, of the male form and maleness and male beauty and, and, and whatever.

And honestly, I think some of that was created by wishy-washy evangelical discussion of, not necessarily of sexuality, but just of creation in general. You know, I just actually did a Sunday school class on the image of God at my church.

And, you know, it's funny how, you know, there's a Paul David Tripp book where he, he makes the claim that, that the image of God isn't defined by scripture. It's described by scripture, you know, I'm just like, no, I mean, it's, it's defined by the Bible, you know, but like part of what he means by that is he wants to embrace this kind of, I, you know, anything that separates us from the animals basically.

So becomes an aspect of the image of God. So whether it's creativity or relationships and community, or, you know, all of these different things. And so, you know, when, when evangelicals can sometimes use really kind of just wishy-washy language that they think is, is really more sentimental, honestly, than it is anything else, you know, that, that we just have this, this desire for glory, or we just have this desire for relationship, or we just have this desire for community.

And that's how God made us. And if that's all that you really say about it, and then you hold that up as somehow the image of God, then it makes arguments like the ones that Revoice is posing, like a lot more plausible because now you already have an unclear and uncertain definition of what that even means.

And so it's real easy to take that very generic sentimental idea and feel like whatever you like in life is what makes you made in the image of God. And so then you can kind of take that and use it in these, in these other settings.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I might've gone off track there.

So you like green, you like blue, you like yellow, and it's, but the Bible says you can't like totally live out completely your love for yellow. So we have to like put a stop sign there at a certain point, but you're still somehow wired to like yellow.

So it puts into this aesthetic realm. That's interesting.

There's a lot of movement in that area, basically, because, honestly, just because people like art and pop culture and, you know, so they tend to speak poetically about these things rather than concretely and clearly.

And so even with just the pithy kind of, you know, Twitter statements and things like that, that almost feel like fortune cookie morality.

Tim Keller.

Yeah.

I was trying not to use his name, but I'll say it.

Yeah.

I mean, he does that thing. I mean, you were talking about the Trinity as an orgy. I mean, Tim Keller talks about it as a divine dance, whatever that is. Like it's it's very strange.

Well, that's that's where some of these lines get real blurry, because like you can see how you could get on the on the worst possible. And I mean, Keller would totally reject the idea of Trinity as orgy, obviously.

Right, right.

But when you talk about the Trinity as a dance, you're kind of opening up that door a little bit and the latch has been unlocked and you're kind of just wedging it open a little bit with this poetic notion.

So then, you know, you can fill it with kind of whatever because it's not very clear, you know, so that's that's unfortunate that so many, you know, and maybe guys have done this in a well-meaning way, you know, where they're just trying to and but some of it is just like filler.

They're just trying to, like, fill up, you know, the Twitter feed or keep new books coming. And so they throw out ideas that are really half-cooked and really have no business belonging to the general public.

Creation Norms, Spiritual Disciplines, and the Limits of Poetic Language

Yeah, I mean, to speak concretely would just to say, I think, be to say that God has creation norms that he's established and that people fall into these. And if there's and we are sinners. So if you don't fall into it and in a perfect way so that you're completely your desires are completely aligned up with his design for you, then the Christian wants to make sure those things are aligned.

And so that's where spiritual disciplines come in and accountability and prayer and just all the tools that God's given us. That seems to be the common sense concept that we've had for thousands of years.

Yeah.

Can I illustrate this point?

Yeah, please do.

Please real quickly. So there's there was a tweet that a guy named David Bennett, you know, he's a side B proponent in the in the UK. So he's he's not American, but he's he's been involved some with living out, which is Sam Mulberry's thing over in the UK and all all the side B revoice guys kind of retweet him and like him.

But he had this this statement, you know, this was from September 14th. So just a few days ago, he said, I find the language we use in pop theology to refer to singleness slash celibacy really frustrating.

It lacks clarity. He says no one is really ever single or celibate. We are beings who are socially slash relationally constituted and all need the love of God and others in covenant faithfulness. So no one is really ever single and no one is ever really celibate.

You know, somebody directly asked him, no one is ever really celibate. Can you flesh that out a bit for me? He said celibacy seems to infer absolute desirelessness and does not involve ever falling in love or in lust.

That is never true. We all have a mixture of desire, sinful and good. We must resist and accept into the greater faithfulness of our love for Christ. It's a really weird thing to say at the end. But, you know, but basically, like even so here's a guy who identifies as both single and celibate and says that the language that we use in pop theology is really not very clear.

You know, the language that you've been using, single and celibate, which is just a description, you know, of the fact that you are not married and the fact that in that lack of marriage that you are trying to remain chaste sexually and that you've committed to abstinence from sexual behavior.

So like, how is that unclear language, though? You know, and so like even just that little subtle push of like, actually, even this language over here is not good because, you know, we are beings who are socially and relationally constituted.

So there again, this idea just keeps bubbling up of like, well, fundamentally, we're relational beings and we're constituted in a certain way. And so really, even when we sin, it's almost just like the fall is not even it really removes culpability even from sin in a lot of ways where, you know, you fall into a situation and it's like, well, you know, I was well, honestly, I was just relationally and, you know, socially constituted.

And so I can see how I would have misproperly understood this in light of the fact that clouded over by the fall. And I'll try and not do that, you know, or something rather than just recognizing no like temptation came to me.

I fell prey to the attack of the enemy. I committed sin. I need to repent. And I want to walk in newness of life. And I want to mortify, you know, that deed by the flesh, according to the flesh and not not walk in that way anymore.

And I want I want the Holy Spirit's power at work within me to overcome those temptations and desires when they come to me so that I'm not pray to it in the same way anymore. You know, but they don't talk like that.

It's always this little accommodation. It's always just bring it in a little bit. And, you know, we'll we'll kind of figure it out. And like God's grace kind of covers over everything anyway. So we'll just kind of all all arrive fine in the end, because because Jesus paid it all, you know.

Yeah.

So it's a concrete example. I was just thinking that's really good. I was thinking, like, have you ever heard a revoice advocate or a side B proponent address something like, I don't know, like romance novels or or just just a novel that happens to have a romance in it or a movie like, you know, Pride and Prejudice or I don't know, something like that.

And kind of give the advice of, OK, if you're, let's say, a male watching this movie and you're constantly. Kind of you're putting yourself in whatever this romance story is in the seat of the of the woman, let's say, in the movie, and you're just you're kind of taken with or admiring the the male character in in a way that a female normally would when she reads a novel like that or something which and I realize I'm getting into a dicey area because romance novels themselves are fraught with danger.

But I'm a story that includes a romance in it. I'm trying to think of something that's not not lusty or, you know, over the top.

Right.

You know, bad kind of trying to play on lusts or whatever. But if you just see yourself naturally in your head, at least it feels natural to slide into the position of the character who's a female and to look at the male character in a romantic type of way, would a side B proponent say, well, you need to stop reading those novels, right?

Or like, we need to address this. This is this is a problem. Here's one of the tricky ways that the devil can use to get you to not be in accord with God's will. So you need to reject that. I've never heard that kind of thing.

But you would think those would be the kinds of examples and things that if they're trying to restore someone from a sinful and they often use the term broken longings that they would be diving into that and trying to give practical advice on that.

But I don't see that kind of thing. It seems like it would be like, well, that's just the way you're wired. And they're like, I guess. Go ahead. Enjoy. Just don't act on it like that. That would be the difference in my head.

Discipleship would say, stop watching that. Stop reading that. It's not helping you. It's reinforcing something that's not good in you.

Well, they would say, well, that's kind of legalistic for you to say that the legal language immediately comes up. I mean, to your point, I mean, I was initially when I started researching Revoice, I wasn't necessarily, I mean, I knew that there were people that I trusted who were speaking out against it.

So in some ways I was somewhat predisposed against it. But I mean, I'm able to think objectively and critically about these things. So like I wanted to know, is this a legitimate helpful ministry or is this what is going on there?

And that was the kind of thing I was looking for. Where's the warning? Guys, if you're feeling this way and they're saying that they're constituted this way, kind of innately, so there's no way to escape from it.

So then why are you not warning people against the dangers of certain situations and places, but rather you're embracing aspects of the culture? And to use the example you used earlier, the guy going to the gay nightclubs to dance, like you should be warned against that if that, I mean, because that's obviously not healthy for you to go there.

I don't know that it's healthy for anyone to go there, but how could you go there with the idea of exuberantly participating in this, yet you've got certain little boundaries that you're not going to cross and how do you think those lines aren't going to get blurred immediately once temptation emerges?

It's like there's no warning, there's no recognition of danger or threat. There's no sense that these things are actually destructive to your soul and to embrace, to continue to feed into that sense of sexual identity as a homosexual or bisexual, that that's good to keep feeding that.

That's good to sit there with the romance movie or novel and that's actually a safer form of it than going out and pursuing relationships maybe, how some people could perceive that, but no one should bar you from that because to do so would be legalistic and would be setting up an artificial boundary.

You should let the people who have that experience determine what their boundaries are. You shouldn't try and impose some kind of outside wisdom into the situation because to do so is to speak against their ultimate identity.

So it'd be fair to say it's not an off-ramp from homosexuality, it's either an on-ramp to more homosexuality, or it's like a highway. There is no off-ramp or on-ramp. Once you're on, you're on. So Christians should have an off-ramp.

That's exactly why I include it in this book. It is an attempt to reconcile homosexuality in the Christian faith. It doesn't do it in exactly the same way the Affirming Church does or the way that queer theology in its blasphemous attempts does, but it is a way to say homosexuality, which they even don't typically like that term because they feel like Christians use that too negatively.

But basically, it's a big idea that talks about desires, behavior, community, language,.

Culture.

All of those things are included within that overall idea of homosexuality. And there is an attempt to reconcile aspects of culture and LGBT culture with the Christian faith and to say that, well, everyone's an image bearer and culture is basically neutral and you can just go and you can see the way the image bearers are trying to creatively find a place for them or explain their situation or all these kinds of things.

But it's an attempt to reconcile the Christian faith and homosexuality. And further down the line, it is removing the Christian witness on this and diminishing it by saying that there are certain aspects of how we've spoken about homosexuality that are wrong.

Are you saying that Paul is a spiritual abuser, for example, when he calls it a dishonorable passion or when he says that homosexuals and effeminate will not inherit the kingdom of God? But we shouldn't use that language ourselves.

We know the Bible uses it and there's some contextual things there, but we're not going to use it because that's actually going to send these people away. They've already heard that. They don't need to hear that.

They need to hear that they're accepted and that they're loved and that you're here to empathize with them and be sympathetic toward their experience. And so, I mean, to your point, there have been people who have left, who started in the Side B world, but really Side B is legalism, though.

It's just setting up these little parameters, but it's individualized legalism. Like an individual kind of sets up in their head, okay, I can't do this or that or this or that, but I'm not trusting that the Lord is holding me and that the Lord is conforming to Christ-likeness as I pursue him.

I just want to take in enough of this that I can feel like I participate in it because there is this desire to participate in the broader LGBT culture, even though there's still some distance from it.

So I want to participate in it, but not as fully as I would if I were married to someone of the same sex or if I was participating in all of these various activist things.

Can I ask you, I want to throw out two names really, and you don't have to if you don't feel comfortable answering these, but there's two kind of, I would say, gospel coalition kind of approved rising stars in helping the church navigate homosexuality.

One is Sam Albury, and I guess he's been around for a while. One is Christopher Juhans. Where do these guys stand in your mind as far as, I mean, are they with the kind of the revoice crowd or are they something else?

Should Christians be cautious of their ministries? I haven't seen them really take on what you've been willing to take on in book form at all, which is, in my mind, at the very least, a yellow flag. So where do you see these guys?

Well, I can speak, I'll just say initially, Christopher Juhans has reached out to me personally and has been very appreciative of the things that I've written with The Little Leaven and with Dangerous Affirmation.

So I don't know him very well, and I haven't been following his public speakings on this very closely, but I was certainly encouraged by that, and I've had conversations with Rosaria Butterfield, and she's a close friend of Christopher's as well.

So I'm encouraged by that, and so I can't speak to things that he said on the topic at this point, but I can say that he's certainly aware of the danger, sees the issues of the Side B movement, and is concerned that so many Christians are embracing it.

So I can speak to that. In regards to Sam Alberry, Alberry has been a frustrating one to follow, because there's things that he says that seem good, and then there's things that he says that are really troubling, and then there's a lot of things that he says are just real wishy-washy and murky, and you can't really make heads or tails of it.

So I caution people generally away from Sam Alberry, because I just don't think he's very clear. Like even his book, Is God Anti-Gay, which in one sense is trying to build up the biblically orthodox position about what it teaches regarding homosexual behavior, but he doesn't want to deal really much with the desire, and he still seems to accommodate it to some degree.

And even that statement, Is God Anti-Gay, is immediately putting the conversation in a bad position, in my opinion. I know you could say, well, it's just a book title, he's just trying to sell books, and it's like, yeah, but he doesn't even actually answer that question in the book.

So it's a bad book title if you don't answer the question that's literally the title of your book. But there's several little accommodations that he makes in that, that I found troubling. It's been a while since I've read it, and I've read so many things since then, it's hard to recall exactly those points.

But there have been things, like he wrote a thing on the Gospel Coalition back in, I guess it was a couple of years ago now, or maybe last year, about the rainbow. And he was trying to make this overly clever case for why the rainbow is a good symbol, and why when LGBT people hold up the rainbow, they're expressing their longing for God, and that reconciliation has happened through Christ.

And so in one sense, but it was really, it was just so cumbersome. And you're just like, how is this helpful to anybody? I'm sure you've read some things that he's put out. But part of it is, the background of experience of guys like that are, because if you have that experience, now you are able to speak into the situation, whereas someone who doesn't have that experience can't speak into it.

And so it's still that appeal to standpoint epistemology, even in subtle ways. But I don't know. Sam Albury is very murky in my mind. I don't trust him, even though I know that he says some good things, and that in some ways, it's hard to sometimes tell the difference between him and some good authors like Kevin DeYoung when approaching some topics.

And that's not helpful. I think of even Paul when he confronted Peter for being unclear about the Gospel. It wasn't that Peter was such a raging heretic, but it's like, what you're doing is you're giving cover to these other people who are.

And I just, I agree with you. And I'm not asking to get you to be an attack dog against those guys at all. I genuinely, I mean, Christopher Yuhan, I'm not familiar with, I know he's advocated things like, or he said things in the past, like we idolize, I actually have a quote in front of me, where he says that, have we the church inadvertently played into the lie that our idolatry of marriage while being pejorative and silent towards singleness?

If singleness is unfair, then it is no wonder that marriage has become a right. Just as the LGBT community appealed to the rest of the world for dignity and respect, it is time for the church to fight for the dignity and respect of single men, women, and men.

And you read something like that, and I'm like, well, that's not a revoice thing necessarily. That's just like, it's a very common refrain. I hear if you actually do a search on Gospel Coalition, you'll see this a lot where they talk about the idolatry of family constantly.

Or talking about how heterosexuality isn't the goal. Holiness is the goal. Tim Keller says that too. Right. And these are things that I think he said within the last few years, but it's possible because I know there's others that were at one time starting to go down this, I don't even want to call it gay affirming, but this just kind of revoice light path.

And then they kind of realized it because they're true Christians. And they thought, wait a minute.

Hold on.

Just like you said, you thought that they were doing a good thing possibly, or you were open to it. And then you realize, wait, they're not. And that's the thing that I think is tricky right now is there are guys out there.

I don't know if Sam Albury's in that. I tend to doubt it because he's been for a while speaking on this, but you have people who are kind of the go-to people for homosexuality. And maybe that is the standpoint epistemology thing where it's like, well, who's going to answer the homosexuals for us?

The challenge from the LGBT lobby? Well, I guess we got to find a homosexual, right? Or a former homosexual to speak on behalf of the church or to help the church navigate this because they're the qualified ones.

And it's like, we have the word of God. I don't want to discount that there's nothing to, I mean, there is a certain weight, I suppose, that someone hearing that who is in that lifestyle, they might be more apt to listen, perhaps, I guess, if it's someone who can say, I was once in your condition and now I'm not.

Just like an alcoholic will listen to someone who was once an alcoholic sometimes. But it doesn't give them an extra edge or authority on that topic just because they had an experience. And that's one of the things I think I'm concerned about to some extent is I want to see us change the metric we use for platforming people to address this.

Your book is, I think, the best thing I've seen so far on this. And you're not coming at it as someone who's like, well, you know, I'm still struggling with same-sex attraction. I used to be homosexual.

You're not saying any of that. You're just saying, this is what the word of God says. And this is what these people are saying. And I love that approach. And so anyway, I just figured I'd insert my own.