Joe Dallas: Three Talks

Report by Maggie Heineman

Conference bio: Joe is an author, public speaker and conselor who serves as the program director of Genesis Counseling in Orange, California. He has served as the president of Exodus International from 1990 to 1993 and is the chair for the Committee on Human Sexuality for the Orange Country Family Impact Council.  His books on homosexuality include Desires in Conflict and A Strong Delusion.  Joe and his wife, Renee, life in Orange Country, California ,with ther two sons.

Selected links:
Joe Dallas' Testimony
How Should We Respond?
Responding to Pro-Gay Theology
Are Gay Christians Really Christian?

Closing Plenary Session: How Should We Respond?

The transcript of this session is on another page. This is a summary.

And I believe today that God would call His people to repentance and recommitment in three areas that I'd like to address as we close. 

Well, first of all, before we address the issue of homosexuality in our culture, I  would call his church to repent of whatever immorality exists within her own walls and to recommit herself.  [APPLAUSE]  Well, may I say, with delightful surprise, that is not normally the point the point that gets an applause. [context]
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And secondly, I believe God would call the body of Christ to repent of hostilities towards homosexual people and he would call us to recommit ourselves to.  [APPLAUSE]  He would call us to repent of hostility. [context]
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To listen to some of us talk, you'd think it's more important to defeat these people politically then it is to see them won into the Kingdom of God.  And that ought not to be.  And my wife and I are unapologetically politically active.  We are unapologetically a part of that vast right-wing conspiracy.  But we are also aware of what Jesus himself said, having been presented with a political out, a short cancellation of what he was facing.  My kingdom is not of this world.  There are more important things than defeating the gay rights movement.  There are the souls of the lesbian women and homosexual men themselves, of infinite value to God, of much more value than any political gains we may make or losses we may suffer.  [APPLAUSE]  And so when the short term success of the church's goal becomes more important to the church than the eternal well-being of the people she is responding to, the priorities are skewed. [context]
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But in taking that stand we seemed to feel it was more important to convince people that homosexuality was wrong than it was to speak the truth.  So in addition to simply saying the Bible condemns this behavior, it's unnatural, we're not built for it. These people are engaging in something they ought not to engage in.  We needed to pepper our statements with lurid, sometimes very false exaggerations and stereotypes about homosexual people themselves.
[Dalls gives examples.] And so a wall of hostility and mutual mistrust escalated and a message was sent then that they will never forget.  Now, is the hostility between the church and some factions of the gay community all the church's fault?  Oh, of course not.  Don't even get me started on their duplicity and some of the games they play and some of the dishonesty that they also employ.  But you see, we are not responsible for the way they respond to conflict.  We are responsible for the way we respond to conflict.  We can't say because they do it, we're going to do it too.  [APPLAUSE] [context]
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 And lo and behold, lesbian and gay people started coming.  Not necessarily to repent, just to hear what this guy had to say.  And the congregation got nervous.  They said, "Pastor, the homosexuals are coming.  They're coming down the isles.  They're coming by twos.  They're sitting next to us.  What are we going to do about that?"  He said, "Oh, I guess they can take a seat next to the gossips and the idolaters and the liars and the fornicators.  It's a big church, plenty of room."  [APPLAUSE] [context]
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And so we are desperate for Christians to take on and carry the mantle of the credibility of service to the homosexual community via AIDS ministry by being the first to speak out loudly, uncompromisingly, passionately when a homosexual is beaten, assaulted or murdered.  [APPLAUSE]  And on a smaller scale, by being willing to listen.  To engage in people and listen to what they have to say.  I think the days are gone when we can see people won into the kingdom of God by handing them a copy of the four spiritual laws and say read it and pray.  People are looking for community, they're looking for connection.  They're looking for someone who takes an interest in them and says you know, let's start somewhere here and try to develop something.  I'd like to know about your life.  What is it like being gay?  How do you feel about the church?  How do you feel about me?  Where are we going?  The service of listening. [context]
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 If we say we hate something we should have evidence that indeed we do and if we say we love someone, there should be tangible evidence that we do that as well.  Now, I think we've got the hate part down.  [LAUGHTER]  I think we've got plenty of good, verifiable, clear evidence that we hate the sin of homosexuality. [context]
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We throw the phrase militant homosexuality and militant homosexuals around a good deal.  I think it begs definition.  I define a militant homosexual as a person who has a rigid agenda to normalize homosexuality.  That's the  part, a rigid agenda to normalize homosexuality.  Combining with intolerance for opposing viewpoints.  A rigid agenda to normalize homosexuality combined with intolerance for opposing viewpoints and it is the latter that scares me, not the former.  Everybody's got an agenda, to an extent in this kind of a group.  When we talk about the gay agenda.  I mean there is the Christian agenda.  There's a Joe Dallas agenda.  There's an agenda for everyone.  We all want something and we work towards that end.  There's no crime there.  It's the intolerance to opposing viewpoints that is truly frightening. [context]
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You give it just a few more years and if current trends continue it will be literally impossible for a psychiatrist, psychologist or psychotherapist in American to treat a homosexual who wants to change without losing her or his license.  That too is gay militancy. [context]
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 We get pushed so far for so long, so unfair that you get worn down and you finally want to say, "Okay, you want to see homophobia, I'll show you homophobia. " You know.  And then of course we have lost.  When we become what they say we are, hateful, mean spirited, bigoted, we have surely lost the war - not just the battle, the war.  No matter what other gains we make, if we become less than Christ-like we have lost because we will have failed to represent him accurately [context]
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And the pastor said, "Well, now, there's no room for fags in this church."  He said, "Sheila, I'm sorry.  It won't work.  They don't want me."  This is why a different voice has to go out from the body of Christ that is unsparing in its conviction that homosexuality is wrong and equally uncompromising in its passionate, aggressive love for homosexual people. 

Will that stop the Gay Rights Movement in its tracks?  I don't know.  It could.  But more important than that, we will surely answer for the way we have responded to the issues of our time.  May God help the church in 1999 that when we stand before the body of Christ and the judgment seat of Christ and we are asked how we responded to this issue, we will be able to hear Him say, well done, good and faithful   Thank you. [context]
 
 

In June, 1997 there was a conference at Georgetown University under the auspices of the American Public Philosophy Institute (APPI) at the Department of Political Science at Marquette University called "Homosexuality in American Public Life." The conference led to a book by the same name, published in February, 1999, edited by Christopher Wolfe, president of the APPI, with a foreward by William Kristol, who gave the closing "Where do we go from here?" talk at the Georgetown Conference.

While Dallas' 1996 book, A Strong Delusion includes considerable scriptural argument, it also contains the essential message, or strategy if you will, of the conservative response presented in 1999 in Homosexuality in American Public Life.

His Tale of Two Cities analogy (American Public Life breakout session) provides an unforgettable picture of Dallas' view of the gay rights movement.

I can’t help but  make the comparison between the situation we have now and Dickens’ version of the French Revolution, The Tale of Two Cities.  In Dickens we have the description of one group that has been oppressed by another group. Horribly oppressed. Taxed unfairly, treated animalistically, used at the whims and pleasures of sadistic people.  Essentially reduced to non-human status. In one crucial scene, early in the book, a horrible scene, the aristocrats are driving their carriages really full speed through narrow steets of the underclasses’ quarters and of course the peasants would have to scurry out of the way when the aristocracy would come barrelling through with their horses and carriages. And one little baby boy happened to be out in the street and the  father couldn’t get him out of the way in time. And the aristocrat just ran over the kid. The horses stopped. the wheels screeched. Everybody  gathered around and the distaught father came screaming out into the streets screaming, "Oh God my boy is dead, you killed him." And the aristocrat just looked at him and said, "I don’t understand you people, you can’t keep hold of your children, one of my horses might have been hurt."

And you look at that and you start feeling, as the reader, as the spectator, some of the collective rage that is growing in the French peasantry.  And the discontent evolves into rage and the collective rage gives birth to a revolution! The whole system gets overthrown. And as a spectator, as a reader, you cheer. You look at the way they were treated and you say, "YES!" Change everything. You celebrate it when they take the Bastille.  You’re thrilled! And, if you’re reading the story for the first time you assume, or at least  you hope, that the new order that is introduced will exercised a level of justice and tolerance that the old order did not.  You sympathize with the overthrow and now you hope for the best. Surely now we are going to have justice, but oh no. No, immediately you have overkill, you have retaliation. Free speech is crushed. You cannot speak a word against the Republic. You cannot speak a word in favor of the tyrants, the aristocrats that oppressed and were finally overthrown by the people and in fact to question the goals or the methods of the new Republic as they crush free speech, retaliate against enemies, and alleged enemies ,and supposed enemies, and introduce a regime every bit as tyrannical as the one they have overthrown.  You can’t have any objections to that  because to do that is to become an enemy of the Republic.  And as the spectator, or the reader, you want to say, "Wait a minute, look what you people are doing. You're guillotining the masses? You are becoming as intolerant, as cruel as the people you overthrew used to be to you, you ought to know better. "

And the man whose little boy was crushed under the carriage might appeal to two points that rhetoric appeals so well to.  Sympathy and Guilt. He would appeal to your sympathy by saying, "Do you remember my David?  I think about him every night. I go to bed without him every night.  I recognize that I lost my son, my heir. Do you think that can ever be replaced?  Do know my pain?. Don’t you remember what they were like?" 

"Oh yeah. Yeah, that, that  induces more sympathy in me  I remember those past injustices and I can kinda forgive the present injustices in light of what was done to you.  Turn about is fair play. Okay I can go with that."

And if that doesn’t work,  Guilt. "Do you remember the tyrants who oppressed me,  ran over my baby, reaped all of this havoc on us. Do you want to be like them?  Don’t you know what is becoming of them? Do you want to be considered a sympathizer to the aristocracy?"  Oh no.  Guilt. Iintimidation. "I don’t want to be one of those." And so you are silenced because of guilt and intimidation. 

You can't miss the gay parallel.

Dallas: "And the collective rage grew"

"Hey now wait a minute, not only are you asking for tolerance, you stormtroop churches where they hold conferences like this one, and pass laws not only to protect people who are homosexual but also to take action against people who speak about homosexuality. You ridicule and vilify people who have views different from yours even though you claim to be the champions of diversity, but diversity stops short of including all people so it isn’t even diversity, now what gives here? What sort of a revolution is this?"

"And gay sympathy and guilt."

"Don't you know how sinister the right wing  is?  If they all came back into power we’d all be shipped off to Siberia or sent to the gas chambers or some such thing."

"When I see a movie with a gay character and a conservative character, emotionally I would want to be associated with the gay character because they choose such baffoons and draw the character to be that way.  That’s propaganda at its finest."

 Dallas'  books, articles and speaking engagements teach conservative Christians how to respond to to the gayrights movement. Dallas says that the proper response to pro-gay rhetoric is reason.  On Bridges-Across we agree to disagree about the religious question. The commentary and readers' responses which we upload will be limited to discussion of the secular arguments.

Together the two breakout sessions gave a summary of most of Dallas' book A Strong Delusion Confronting the "Gay ChristianMovement."  His refutations of pro-gay secular and religious argument are on the web in the article Responding to Pro Gay Theology, which maps to Chapters 6-9 of his book. 

Joe Dallas was bisexually promiscuous. The book reports that by the time he was 23 he had been defrocked because of his sexual escapades. He then committed adultery with the wife of a close friend--losing a child to abortion as a result. In the workshop he said that he slept with young girls and women as well as with young boys and men. Some of his life story is given in his web testimony, "Out of Deception."

Dallas quoted scripture of biblical prophesy that there will be an era of deception prior to the tribulation.

In his section titled "social justice arguments," Dallas does not discuss social justice arguments. Rather he discusses the three scientific questions about sexuality: nature/nurture, immutability/fluidity, and normal/pathological.

Dallas argues that both the religious and the secular gay rights movement rest on convincing the people  that homosexuality is normal because it is inborn and immutable. Consequently, a major portion of the American Life workshop consisted of showing (1) that there is no proof that homosexuality is inborn and (2) presenting evidence for fluidity of sexual orientation. The definition of "normal" was fluid. Sometimes "normal"  meant common. On the web soscial justice argument #3 is the 10% figure. Sometimes "normal"  meant moral or unbiblical.  Part of his case that homosexuality is not normal he gave examples of conditions which are may have a genetic influence which are pathological. Dallas writes, "We cannot rewrite scripture, as they have, to accommodate a sin simply because it has been shown to be inborn, unchangeable or common." 

The report on Joe Nicolosi's three sessions has more about the biological and psychological debates.

The Gay Theology breakout session  presented  the general religious and scriptural argument which are in online at "Responding to pro-gay theology."

In the general religious arguments section, Dallas begins with an assertion, based on a gallup poll, that most Americans, including born-again believers, no longer believe in absolute truth. In responding to Bible-believing gay Christians, Dallas calls on them to  "return to the objective truth of the Bible, in lieu of the subjective winds of human experience and understanding."

Although he places "gay Christian" in quotes, Dallas chooses not to dispute whether the presence of God is in gay churches or whether His gifts are manifest in gay Christians. He says these are the wrong questions;  the bottom line issue is  whether homosexuality is right or wrong.

"In other words, being a Christian is no indication, in and of itself, that your life is pleasing to God. And any honest believer knows that. It is a waste of time to argue intangibles, such as whether or not a 'gay Christian' is truly born again, or    "saved." We may argue that if he continues in sin, he risks hardening his heart toward God, or reaping corruption, since God is not mocked. But we cannot  see inside his soul to determine how hardened or deceived he may be."
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"A Christian may, indeed, be openly homosexual; that is no proof homosexuality and Christianity are compatible. In fact, a Christian may be openly sinning; that is no proof sin and  Christianity are compatible, either."
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"Even if God is present in gay churches and if His gifts are manifest there, does that prove He condones homosexuality?  Not at all. God's presence, wonderful as it is, and His gifts, valuable as they are, are given freely. They are neither a reward for, nor evidence of, righteousness. (I am not arguing that God IS present in gay churches; I'm only saying that, like the "I'm gay and Christian" argument, it is best to stick to the bottom line issue:  Is homosexuality right or wrong?)"