The chaplain for a Christian university has shocked many by working alongside a California assemblyman whose controversial resolution condemns biblical beliefs about human sexuality.
Kevin Mannoia, a chaplain for Azusa Pacific University, testified June 20 in favor of Assembly Concurrent Resolution 99 despite numerous Christian leaders raising alarms over its anti-religious claims and its controversial author.
The non-binding resolution, introduced by open homosexual Evan Low, not only proclaims that homosexuality is not a “disease, disorder, illness, deficiency, or shortcoming” but also calls on pastors and counselors “with great moral influence” to agree with that statement.
But that political message conflicts with biblical orthodoxy that God created the family, led by a husband and wife, and thus homosexuality is both sinful in God’s eyes and an unnatural act.
The world’s “Abrahamic” faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all condemn homosexuality.
Further down in the resolution it claims the high suicide rate and depression among the LGBTQ community can be traced not only to so-called “conversion therapy” but also to anyone claiming that same-sex attraction is wrong.
The resolution appears to be an attempt by Low (pictured below) to confront religious leaders in the state after he pulled a controversial bill last year that would have used the state’s consumer protection laws to ban so-called “conversion therapy,” which has become an easy target of homosexual activists across the country.
California, in fact, banned conversion therapy on minors in 2012.
Lowe’s own anti-conversion therapy bill went farther than simply banning the practice: it identified any licensed therapy over an adult’s unwanted same-sex attraction as consumer fraud, which makes it an “unlawful business transaction” to claim a homosexual such as Low can become a straight male.
Critics quickly raised a First Amendment issue over the bill, questioning if a religious book claiming Low can become a straight man, or a transgender woman could return to being a normal man, would also be considered consumer fraud under California law.
That claim was scoffed at by supporters of the bill but others pointed out the bill’s broad language gives the State of California that authority if its “progressive” leaders ever decide to use it.
“We have learned on LGBTQ matters,” seminary professor Robert Gagnon wrote last year, “what is exempted is not exempted for long and what is not exempted has no exemption.”
According to Mannoi, who once led the National Association of Evangelicals, he views Low’s resolution as an attempted compromise with the religious leaders who spoke out last year and forced him to pull it.
Speaking before a committee that included Low, Mannoia thanked the assemblyman for a “willingness to dialogue” with people of faith whose views differ with Low’s views about human sexuality.
“The resolution you have is because of that willingness,” Manoia told the committee.
Considering the language of the resolution, religious leaders were angered by Mannoia’s cooperation with Low, who is now tying their religious views to sucide.
"This goes to show what happens when Christian institutions care more about pleasing the government and pleasing the culture than pleasing the Lord,” Jonathan Keller, president of California Family Council, tells OneNewsNow.
“We expect Christian leaders to be about the business of saving, not caving,” pastor and speaker Joe Dallas commented via Facebook.
Dean Broyles, an attorney with the National Center for Law and Policy, called it “heresy” to defend the resolution.
“To shamefully join forces with the enemies of Christ, to defame all change-allowing therapy, and to surrender to the idea that people can’t change,”Broyles wrote on his blog, “is to surrender to the satanic lie that the Gospel has no actual transformative power.”
The comments from Dallas and Broyles were included in an extensive California Family Council story that recalls Mannoia’s committee testimony.
Concern over a leftward drift in the Southern Baptist Convention has the largest Protestant denomination in America at a crossroads as its messengers prepare to gather in Orlando this summer.
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