We interrupt the solving of all of the world's problems with a little aside on two subjects that have bothered me for quite awhile.  You can see by the title what the first one is.  I'm not going to try to defend homosexuality from a Christian perspective; it's stated in some places in the Bible that it's a sin, and I'm don't want to argue here about different interpretations.  Whenever I've gone down the rabbit-hole of, say, Leviticus 19-20, where there are all kinds of things that were forbidden in those times, including shaving the sides of your head, wearing wool and linen together, and tattoos, that aren't forbidden now, I end up more confused than when I started.  What I don't understand is there are many sins in the Bible, and many, many sinful acts.  In Matthew, Jesus mentions anger, mocking, adultery, lust, divorce, blasphemy, boastfulness, hoarding, judging, false prophesying, faithlessness, ungratefulness, stealing, lying, deceit, self-indulgence, hatred, persecution, sloth, betrayal, and His two biggies, hypocrisy and greed.  It is obvious by His word that Jesus holds a "special" place in His heart for hypocrites and the greedy.  He never mentions homosexuality.  Some Christians seem to go out of their way to make homosexuality a "greater" sin than almost any other, and to demonize and/or satirize homosexuals.  Making fun of gays seems to be the current-day version of the derision and scorn that African-Americans put up with in generations past.  There is a large and lingering disagreement among psychologists and people of faith about whether homosexuality is from "nature" or "nurture."  I think it is wrong to assume that there is any definitive answer to this debate.  I would just ask the common sense question whether it would be worth it to go through the harassment and bullying in high school, and the discrimination and further harassment later on if it were merely a choice.
            I'm not trying to change anyone's mind about the actual act itself.  I personally feel like promiscuity is the bigger problem, whether we're talking about hetero or homosexuals.  A father or mother who sleeps around and eventually breaks up a family would seem to be a much bigger pox on society, in my opinion, than a couple of old gay guys who have been monogamous for thirty years.  And yes, there are a whole bunch of angry, left-leaning, religion-bashing homosexuals out there.  I must ask the question though: Who turned them into that?
          The fact is that the vast majority of gay people just want to be left alone.  Geez, these are at least people who have made a commitment to each other, and who are vowing to be monogamous.  The divorce rate among Christians is over 50%! You can't rank sins!! One of the most famous passages in the New Testament is: "And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the plank in your own eye?"
          There seems to have been a need over the last eighty years or so for fundamentalist evangelical Protestants to have a "them," or an "other" to demonize.  There were always the blacks and the liberals, and early in the twentieth century there were the suffragettes, and then there were the labor unions, and the communists.  After that there were the Integrationists, and the communists again, followed by the anti-war protesters and the feminists.  This in turn was followed by the communists again, who were then replaced by the Muslims and the homosexuals.  The homosexuals seem to be winning out over the radical Islamists these days as the most demonized community in the evangelical Christian community.  This is incredibly sad.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
          -Romans 3:23

          This would be the place to bring up something that happened a few years ago that I thought said so much about what fundamentalist evangelical Christianity has come to mean for so many people.
          Once a year, Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida holds a Gay Appreciation Day.  I'm not sure that's exactly what it's called, but whether it's Gay Pride Day, or whatever, you catch my drift.  Disneyworld also annually holds "Night of Joy," which is actually several nights of Contemporary Christian entertainment set up all over the park marketed to church youth groups and is a rousing success.  Well, even one day of Gay Anything was too much for the people at Focus on the Family, led by Dr. James Dobson.  He organized a boycott of Disneyworld, in conjunction with the Southern Baptists, and they set up a picket line at the entrance to the facility.  If you've ever been to Orlando in the summer, you know it could get mighty hot carrying a "God Hates Fags/Down With Disney" sign around for several hours in the middle of the day.  So what did the morally contemptible people that run the Mouse House do in response to this righteous act of moral indignity? Why, they brought out a table to the entrance, and placed upon it cold drinks and cookies for the protesters.  A more Christ-like act, I can't imagine.  It felt great to be a Christian that day.

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Tree Huggers

"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"
          -Henry David Thoreau

          While I'm on a roll, I thought I might wade into the environment debate for a moment.  What, in God's name, are we doing to this planet? Individually, most people wouldn't toss a bag of garbage out of their car window when no one was looking, or pull up our neighbor's flowers and place them in a nice vase in our house, or empty a bucket of pesticides in the nearby stream, or even take a bottle of hairspray and spray it directly into a baby's crib, but collectively, as a nation, and as human beings on this planet, that's about what we're doing.  How many scientists, experts on climate change, oceanographers, and geologists have to go on record to say that we're heading for a climate-induced catastrophe before certain radio talk-show hosts stop calling the whole bunch "tree-hugging environmentalist wackos?" Of course, there are always going to be the lunatic fringe out there on the edges of every righteous or reasonable cause, diverting attention away from the main issue.  The reactionary types use these people to deny that there's anything wrong at all!  In study after study after study, in computer models, and pictorial data, and in interviews with natives who have lived in the harsh nether regions of the world all their lives–the evidence is overwhelming that the ice caps are melting, the glaciers are receding, and the oceans are rising, all at an unnaturally accelerating pace.  What possible motive other than selfishness or greed, could anyone have in denying this? It's the ultimate act in saying, "Look, it's probably not going to be a disaster in MY lifetime, so why should I worry about it?” People can accuse others of being Chicken Littles all they want, but the fact is, this is the first time in history that both this amount and this potent of industrial and chemical pollutants have been loosed into the atmosphere. Under President Bush, the Environmental Protection Agency has gone from watchdog to lapdog.  According to information gathered by the Sierra Club, the polar ice caps are melting at a rate five times faster than computer models showed just five years ago.  It is true that the earth has been remarkably resilient, but it has never been assaulted from all sides like this before.  Isn't this a Christian issue? Did God give us dominion over His creation to use and abuse it until it becomes unlivable for future generations?
          On the other hand, we could always take the advice of Ann Coulter, who never fails to come up with just the right thing to say at the right time:

"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it! It's yours.'"
          -Hannity & Colmes, June 20, 2001.

          Thomas Friedman, the respected author and New York Times syndicated columnist whom conservatives would call a liberal and liberals would call a conservative (I happen to agree with both), lambasted the Bush administration on their environmental policies (or lack thereof) in a series of columns saying, “Enough of this Bush-Cheney nonsense that conservation, energy efficiency and environmentalism is some hobby that we can’t afford.  I can’t think of anything more cowardly or un-American.”
          I could site fact after sad fact, from a multitude of sources, but one thing I read really stood out.  It was an essay entitled "Warning To Humanity," written in 1992.  Over 1,500 members of national, regional, and international science academies from sixty-nine nations, including each of the twelve most populous nations and the nineteen largest economic powers, signed this document.  The list includes a majority of the Nobel laureates in the sciences. Now I don't profess to know the political leanings of these people. I would imagine you'd find representatives from both sides of the political aisle, some from places where there are no aisles, and some who could care less about aisles.  The point is these are not wackos.  Certainly not ALL of them.  This is not a political document.  It is a heartfelt plea from some pretty knowledgeable people.  I have included this document in its entirety in the appendix to this book.  This Warning was written thirteen years ago, and very little has been done since then to remedy the situation.
          In 1972 the UN, for the first time, held a conference on the environment in Stockholm, Sweden, to consider global environment and development needs.  On the 20th anniversary of that conference, the "Earth Summit" took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  One of the outcomes of the summit was the Kyoto Protocol, which is an agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions signed by 156 nations in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997.  This agreement, while hardly perfect, was at least a positive step in the right direction after a hundred years of unrelenting industrial growth.  One of the only countries in the world not to sign the agreement was the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, the United States.  This is the same country that makes up 5% of the world's population, and produces 72% of the world's hazardous waste.  The US claims that the changes, which call for a 5.2% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2012, would be too costly to introduce.  As the world's wealthiest nation and its largest polluter, this stance is, to put it mildly, hard for much of the rest of the world to swallow.  Our president has stated, on more than one occasion, that he has to make tough choices, not necessarily ones that are going to make him popular in other countries.  He's right about that.  He shouldn't make decisions that are vital to our nation's welfare based on popularity polls in other countries.  But he should have signed the Kyoto Protocol, because small step as it is, the United States, as the self-proclaimed "leader" of the world, should be setting a positive example to the rest of the industrialized nations that we take the matter of cutting greenhouse gas emissions seriously.  The only reason he shouldn’t have signed the Kyoto Protocol is if he led by introducing even more stringent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.  The whole world needs to act together if we want to slow down or even reverse the erosion of our environment.  And it sure smacks of hypocrisy that we can't "afford" to do this, but we can afford a few more billion-dollar airplanes, and we can afford to spend a trillion dollars to rebuild a country that we busted up.
          The Bush Administration treated the overwhelming evidence of global warming, the greenhouse effect, and overall environmental degradation remarkably like they treated the evidence leading up to the War in Iraq.  If the evidence didn't square with their plans, then they simply changed the evidence.  This was unbelievably arrogant, and it took the citizens in this country for fools.  The Bush administration counted on the smokescreens laid by their friends at right-wing talk radio and Fox News to once again diffuse, confuse, and bluster their way around this issue.  This, though, was not about an opinion.  There was a major scientific document called the National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change.  The National Assessment was the most substantial scientific based document of its kind in the history of government-based climate change research.  This 300-page report called on the services of hundreds of scientists who worked along side of the National Assessment Synthesis Team to create the most comprehensive and authoritative climate assessment yet to date.  The National Assessment was an advisory committee report by a distinguished panel of experts–not a policy or regulatory document.  It was all scientific information–cited for the purpose of developing priorities for scientific research.  This document was the result of years of painstaking research and another sixteen months of careful and overlapping review.
          Philip Cooney was the Chief of Staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality at the time the report was ready to be presented.  Mr. Cooney is a lawyer and has a bachelor's degree in Economics.  He also is a former official with the American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying arm of the oil industry.  He is not a scientist.  However, Philip Cooney took this 300-page document and made roughly 200 text changes to the review draft.  Then, in the final review, he made about 450 comments throughout the document.  Many of these changes were of the same, devious sort: changing the word "is" to a more uncertain "may be;" so for example when the scientists said that the earth is experiencing significant climate and environmental change right now, he changed it to "the earth 'may be' undergoing a period of unusual climate change." There were hundreds of little changes like this that added up to a result that was horrifying to scientists working for the government.
          One scientist who was intimately involved in the entire process was Rick Piltz, who served as a Senior Associate in the Climate Change Science Program. When Mr. Piltz became aware of what Philip Cooney had done to the National Assessment, he sent a 14-page letter to twelve principals across all of the various agencies involved. The letter detailed the inappropriate editing done by Mr. Cooney. He also contacted New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, who wrote a front-page article about it the following day. Two days later, Mr. Cooney was suddenly 'resigned', but miraculously, he landed a job the very next day... at ExxonMobil, the largest oil company in the world.
          Of course, by the time the right-wing talk show hosts had finished putting this story through their House of Mirrors, enough confusion was created to make most listeners just scratch their heads and wonder what the big deal was all about, and why the Left keeps bringing up stories that have no basis in fact.  Well, in fact, the facts are all there.  These are government reports, and the paper trail is a mile long.  In fact, the National Assessment was already a rather cautious document, stressing a gradual approach to solutions concerning climate change, before Philip Cooney got his unscientific hands on it.  But even this was too much for the Bush Administration, who seems hell-bent on leaving this planet much the worse for wear than when they became its foremost stewards.  For shame.
          The earth and its environment are neither conservative or liberal, Democratic or Republican.  Although there are some short-term costs involved with cleaning up and preserving the environment, everyone loses if we don't.  As Christians, this is a moral issue.  Disregarding the degradation of the environment is a crime against future generations.  If your favorite politicians aren't concerned with reversing the dangerous tide in climate change, deforestation, and ozone depletion, they should be.  And we, as Christians, should be letting them know that this is an issue that we care deeply about.