Every day, hundreds of Americans join the gay movement."

So claimed a prominent Seventh-day Adventist evangelist during the 1970s in a sermon titled "Pornography and Homosexuality." He distributed copies of his sermon after each meeting of the series, so I’m able to give you exact quotes.

The sermon characterized homosexuality as "a proselytizing religion [which] can exist only by continually recruiting new victims." But, it said, "there is no more reason to allow such persons to continue dragging new victims into their miserable existence, than to allow a person sick with any other serious communicable disease to spread his illness to the public. If it spreads, homosexuality must inevitably end in the extermination of the race that practices it."

Fortunately, I was well on the way to self-acceptance before hearing this drivel. I cringe to think that some young people in the audience might have been hearing it at a crucial moment in their lives when they sorely needed a good dose of honesty rather than garbage.

Homosexuality "has been anathema in human society for centuries....," the preacher said, "the vast bulk of the citizens scorning and condemning it." It "is unquestionably the greatest moral evil of our time.... Yet every day hundreds of new Americans join the 'gay' movement and leave the ranks of the 'squares.'"

A woman is insulted by the very presence of a homosexual, the preacher believed, and the sermon described gays as "a sad and miserable lot," saying "there is no typical homosexual; no two are alike, but there is something seriously the matter with every last one of them."

After describing how straight, married adults fall into homosexuality (it starts with pornography), the preacher alluded to a different cause: "Why are there no laws to punish parents who have caused this condition?" he asked, quoting another writer. "Let all these parents be tried for murder! To take a poor innocent child and make him into an unhappy, wretched, miserable person, to ruin his life—there is no punishment hard enough.”

So does pornography cause homosexuality, or do parents cause homosexuality? I can hardly wait to find out what causes heterosexuality. Maybe there will be a sermon titled “Sports Illustrated and Heterosexuality.”

"Let all these parents be tried for murder!”

by Larry Hallock