Answering the Sodomites: We All Live Downstream

by Stuart DiNenno

A common plea of the sodomites to Christians is: “What we do in private doesn’t effect you. Why can’t you just live your life your way and be tolerant of our way?”

The answer to this question is the same one sometimes given by those who are questioned about limiting the use of poisonous substances on private land, which is “because we all live downstream.” What we do as private individuals on our own property can eventually effect many other people. If we repeatedly and unnecessarily spray excessive amounts of chemicals on our lawns or crops when those chemicals are known to be hazardous to humans and not quickly broken down in the environment, then we are acting irresponsibly and doing harm by polluting the natural world in which we live. Those chemicals will seep into the ground water, or the storm sewer system, or the creek behind the house and eventually end up in the water supply from which our neighbors drink, and so our individual actions on our own private property ultimately can be harmful to many others, and the more such behavior is tolerated or promoted, the more people practice it and the more harm it does to us all, even if only a small minority of the population ever excessively abuses such poisonous substances.

The same is true of grievous sins such as sodomy. Committed privately only by a small minority they may appear, at first glance, to be harmless to those who eschew them but eventually they effect everyone “because we all live downstream.” Sodomy is a sin against God and it cannot be committed or tolerated without awful consequences. It is quite obviously a filthy and unnatural act. It is one that spreads disease, it is a reproductive dead end, it creates unstable relationships based on mere sexual gratification around which families cannot be built, and it is an act in direct rebellion against God’s created order and explicit prohibition which can only foster more rebellion against Him. For all these reasons it is both personally and socially destructive. It would be bad enough if it could be kept “in the closet” but as we have already seen, the more it is tolerated the more it proliferates and the more it proliferates the more its practitioners seek to force acceptance of it on the rest of us and work to punish those who will not accept it. It is a cult of death that seeks to forcibly make converts of us all.

Evil such as this is a deadly poison that pollutes all of us. Any society that tolerates it, much less promotes it, is on its way to extinction.