In early May, 2008, the Gallup Poll research team surveyed 1,017 adults nationwide about issues concerning homosexuality:

• When asked if homosexuality should be considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle, 57 percent indicated it was acceptable (up 9 percent from a 2007 Gallup poll), while 40 percent found it unacceptable (down 6 percent from 2007).
  
  
• When asked if marriages between same-sex couples should be recognized by the law as valid just as traditional marriages are, 40 percent said they should (down 6 percent from a 2007 Gallup poll), while 56 percent said they should not (up three percent from 2007).
  
  

Congregations that would accept a member of a cohabiting unmarried couple as a lay leader: 31 percent

Congregations that would accept a member of an openly homosexual couple as a lay leader: 23 percent

On the issue of legalizing same-sex marriage, even Christians who agree that it is wrong differ about whether Christians should make it a political issue. Whether legalizing same-sex marriage is an important political issue to you or not, the beliefs that are used to argue for it should matter deeply to you. No matter what our society decides on this and other issues, when an unbiblical belief works ...

How do people argue for the church to accept the practice of homosexuality? Here is how Chicago Tribune correspondent Charlie Madigan reasons:

One of the things I have never been able to understand about religion is its capacity for setting up barriers.

If belief is a pathway toward God, what should sexual orientation have to do with any of that? If you can sit in your apartment and pray to the very ...

When a gnawing crack addiction engulfed Andy's life almost two decades ago, he abandoned family and friends. He was sleeping on park benches in Chicago's exclusive Gold Coast area when another homeless man suggested he earn an easy $250 from a car that sidled to the curb. To feed the drug habit, Andy gave it a try and began selling his body to gay men at night.

"It gave me a false sense of feeling ...

In January of 2007, the New York City Board of Health unexpectedly withdrew a proposal to allow city residents to change the sex on their birth certificates without undergoing sex-change procedures. Heath Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden, who enthusiastically supported the plan only a month before, told the New York Times that institutions like hospitals and jails raised concerns the board hadn't considered: ...

Many people justify their participation in a variety of behaviors by calling them "natural." However, the following quote from M. Scott Peck reveals the flaw in those arguments:

Calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural ...

When I was in seminary, I saw the film The Servant, which featured the great English actor Dirk Bogarde. The film tells the story of the second son of an entitled and wealthy British family. The son has come back to England after serving in the army in India…. The film takes place in England some time in the early 20th century at the height of British imperial power. Returning home, the young man ...

Christian comedian Brad Stine weighed in on the gay marriage debate with this insightful line:

"Guys want to marry guys? Cowards."

"If you must make a choice between heresy and schism, always choose heresy."

—Peter James Lee, one of 60 Episcopal bishops who voted to approve the appointment of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire