Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#566 Jack and Tom Hampson Heading into 2025: Drones, The Government, Trump Winning a Lawsuit, the Gender Wars
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How well do we really know the forces shaping our world today?" Join us for an engaging conversation with my good friend, Tom Hampson, as we question the narratives dominating our headlines. From unidentified drones to media accountability, we shed light on the growing skepticism surrounding government actions and the implications of misinformation. Witness the challenging discourse on gender ideology in schools and explore Van Jones' unexpected nod to Donald Trump's political acumen. We venture into the impact of questioning societal norms and the urgent call to uphold traditional values amidst rapidly evolving cultural landscapes.
Book References:
The Secret Thoughts of an unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterfield
Gay Girl, Good God by Jackie Hill Perry
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I'm with my good friend, tom Hampson, crime invited an investigator, crime fighter. Thomas, how are you? I'm good. How about you? I'm doing awesome, thank you. Over the weekend looking at a lot, of, a lot of crazy stuff, trying to put it all in context from drones flying over. We still don't know what the drones are no, they shot one down, though I guess I did. We shoot one down, or did somebody shot one down.
Speaker 1:I think.
Speaker 2:I think that's what's going to happen. You know, vigilantes are going to just get out there and start shooting drones, right? I think that's what's going to happen.
Speaker 1:They traced them back to some some island off the coast and they caught two people and one of them got away. So that's the last I heard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, the one thing we know is we can't trust the government in any of this stuff anymore. I did see which interested me and I was glad to see it was the defamation suit that Trump won over ABC News for $16 million. When George Stephanopoulos is it Stephanopoulos, how do you say his name, stephanopoulos, stephanopoulos? Yeah, when George, you know, kept referring back to juries and judges that had convicted Trump of rape, and he said it over and over again, right, and you know it was a lie huh, it was a total lie.
Speaker 1:It's not true, and I don't think they really care about the $16 million they had to pay, because their purpose in saying that in the first place was to try to take votes away from Trump during the election time. Yeah, take votes away from from trump during the during the election time. Yeah, so it was really trying to to slander him and hope that people wouldn't vote for him yeah, and so you heard this over and over again, one thing after another on the news.
Speaker 2:I think you know when we start to talk, tom, and when you and I talk about what's going on with kids in schools and doing our Stolen Innocence presentations, you know we start to talk about these gender ideologies. You know the craziest ones. We've got the LBGTQIASS+. You know it just keeps on going. But you know the most insane ones obviously are the trans. You know telling kids and really detrimental to you know their health, mental health, physical health. I mean, these poor kids got to suffer through this stuff that a man can be a woman. You and I just did a radio show last night on that. But the other thing is this Q right, and I don't know if people realize it's the querying of society of attacking anything that's normal in our country, in our culture. And we see governments around the world doing this and nobody was trying harder than the Biden administration when they came in pushing this trans-affirming care on our kids, promoting Richard Levine, who calls himself Rachel, as the head of HHS and pushing this down into our school systems and stuff this attack on the children. And I want to talk a little bit about this today, but before I do, I saw this thing from Van Jones. So Van Jones is a communist, a lover of Obama. He was the head, I think, of the Democratic Party for a little while. Dan Jones is a communist, a lover of Obama. He was the head, I think, of the Democratic Party for a little while and he was on an interview, tom, and he finally just breaks down and this other progressive ally of his is saying how stupid people are for voting for Donald Trump and how could this happen? And you could see him getting nervous in this interview, in this clip, and he finally says look, listen. So everybody keeps saying this. You have a framework in your mind that how can Donald Trump, how can Donald Trump, how can Donald Trump be so smart? Huh, guys, can we just cut it out? Donald Trump is not an idiot that you guys were all saying before. Let me just be very clear. Donald Trump is smarter than me, smarter than you, smarter than all the critics and everybody that's been talking about him. He said you know how we know Because he has the White House, the Senate about him. He said you know how we know because he has the white house, the senate, the house, the supreme court, the popular vote, a massive media echoes ecosystem bigger than the mainstream media built around him and for him, and a political fervor and a political movement around him. And his best. Buddy is the richest person in the history of the world and the most relevant kennedy is with him.
Speaker 2:This dude is a phenomenon. He says he hates doing this. He's just on a roll, though, Tom. He's getting it out of his system. He's the most powerful human on earth and in our lifetime. He says and we're supposed to be saying how does this guy do it? We look like a bunch of idiots. And so my point to bring up the querying Tom is I think we finally had it. Querying again is a Marxist and it's insanity. It's totally against the Bible. But the Marxists took this. Throw God out and let's turn the society, culture, anything that's normal, let's turn it upside down, right. And don't you think that at the end of the day, people just say no, no, you know I'm a normal person. I like marriage and the family. You know I like having my children. I like having grandchildren. I don't like to see them shown pornography in school. I don't like this trans-affirming care pushed down on them. I don't like abortions and finally people are starting to stand up and get a voice, tom, for the first time in a long time.
Speaker 1:Well, for a long time, I think people have kind of went along with the lies that have been spread, because there's that old saying that a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. But really, in today's world, the lie becomes infused in the culture before you can even respond to it, before you even know what's happening, and so that's what happened with this whole LGBT culture that we've created in this country is so this is the norm, that it's part of the norm, that's a normal part of the sexual continuum of people, and I think what's happened is that people have begun to wake up to see that they have been fooled, and people do not like to be lied to, and they don't like to be fooled and they react pretty aggressively to it. And I think that's what we're seeing now is an aggressive reaction to these lies that have been fed to people for years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know we're to blame for a lot of that, tom, because we all sat down, we all gave it to the government, we all forgot that the government's just made up of people and if people don't have their, their, their moral base, their moral foundation which is what we've lost in this country and the people that did have it just were quiet, going along, having their families working hard, building their businesses up, thinking the government had their backs, and then found out that it was a total lie. Now, now, people identified this a long time ago and have been trying to voice their opinion, but they were such a minority and getting canceled, and we find that more every day that these people are getting canceled, one after another. The lies, finally. I think, tom, just got so bad that people couldn't be quiet anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the mistake was that they wouldn't bridge too far with the whole transgender thing. Mistake was that they wouldn't bridge too far with the whole transgender thing. People can buy that maybe somebody was born gay or they were, you know, born with, you know, binary or whatever, non-binary or whatever they might say. But when you try to feed people the idea that a person was born in the wrong body, you know that's just. People just can't accept that for the most part. So I think that's what's happened. They said wait a minute, they've lied to us about this and they're starting to look and see what else they've lied to them about. And now they're discovering that they've lied about many things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you go on, when you go on. Thank goodness you know Elon got X right.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, when you go on. Thank goodness you know, elon got X right.
Speaker 2:When you go on X, it's amazing. Tucker Carlson said you know he brought up the $16 million per Trump. And then he said you know, talk about lies. In 2020, the media insisted that Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful in nature, despite the carnage, and we found out they weren't. During the West's COVID recovery, americans received constant press assurances that the vaccines were definitely unequivocally, without a shadow of a doubt, safe and effective. That was a lie. Naturally, the vaccinated people began testing positive for the virus they were supposedly protected against. And then this one remember when Biden said this is a disease of the unvaccinated Right, yeah, right. And we found out that was a lie. Right, the Nord Stream pipeline explosion we blamed it on Russia and said they did it themselves. We found out that was a lie. The Ukraine setup right was a lie. I mean one thing after another. I mean you can't make this stuff up.
Speaker 2:And so finally people are waking up, tom, and finding out that this pedophilia that we've been talking about all these years, that's going on with the world elites, that that was true. The child sex trafficking that you've been talking about forever is true and worse than people thought, that children really are getting harmed by this culture today and giving in to all these gender ideologies. This is good versus evil, you know. You and I have a biblical worldview on this, but let's just talk about some of the things that are harming kids today. I read Sarah Kane once in a while. She writes for Crisis Magazine. She says we're seeing the emergence of homosexual couples acquiring children for the explicit purpose of pedophilia and then sharing such children within organized pockets, and this is getting to be more and more.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the things that really bothers me, tom, is that in a state like Illinois, because of this LBGTQ tolerance stuff, we basically put these Catholic nuns, sisters, out of business who were working so hard to find foster care for children, adoption agencies for children, and have been pushed out of Illinois. We gave this to the bureaucrats now and the government and of course, they're going to fall asleep on the wheel. In general, I'm not saying that there aren't any good people that are trying to do their best but they're overworked, they're overburdened. Nobody ever really replaced some of the Christian organizations that went out of business that really understood the children and understood the families and got to know them over the years, followed up on them. Now those they're no more. So what sarah kane brings up is she says this the children who are up for adoption represent one of the most vulnerable demographics in any country, relying on the government and various bureaucratic agencies for the entirety of their welfare. The way they're treated is less reflection of our societal values, for it reveals our true priorities.
Speaker 2:We get this pushback from the Russians who some years ago said that they weren't going to allow adoption of children in the United States anymore because they allegedly allegedly, they said because of the mishandling of child abuse cases, and we all said that's baloney, right. And then they have a new anti-LBGTQ legislation in Russia and we condemn that and just saying, look, we have to keep the kids in safe environments and stuff. You probably know all that, tom, but finally it comes down to these cases are coming out and maybe you could speak to this. You know you've written some articles about this, about you know homosexual men in relationships, who are also pedophiles, that are bringing children into their homes for the explicit purpose of having, you know, using them sexually.
Speaker 1:It's really some sick stuff, tom. Well, yeah, there have been a number of cases like that. There was one, you know. I've talked about that network called boylovernet that several years ago was busted internationally.
Speaker 1:It was an international organization, that it was a website in on the dark web and officers in Europe discovered this network. They sent leads all over the country and they wound up building criminal cases against 184 people out of 70,000. Just 184 were convicted. Two of them that were convicted in that operation involved two guys out of Australia that had adopted a child from Russia, paid $8,000 to get the child and raised him from the very early ages, starting at two years old. They sexualized the relationship with his child. They took videos. They took the kid all over the world to engage in sexual activity with other people, presumably for money. At the time when they were arrested, they were already making arrangements to get another child out of Malaysia and they were planning to spend $100,000 to buy that child. So there must be a lot of money in this and the boylovernet.
Speaker 1:While there was 70,000 people, there's thousands of organizations like that, thousands of websites like that that these people belong to and that they exchange kids. So, although it's still an anomaly, it's a minority of people that are involved in this kind of activity. It's a huge operation. It's a huge operation and the ones involving children that are being raised to sell for sexual activity. I haven't run across any heterosexual couples that are doing that in the same way that homosexual couples have, although certainly there's heterosexual couples that engage in child abuse and organized child abuse with their own children but it seems to be a greater problem among the LGBT community, and the LGBT community, rather than speaking out against it, tries to hide it and mocks anybody that says that there's a problem with the gay adoptions yeah, and, and we have to all stand up and start watching for this don't we right you know, just like you know when, when moms start to stand up at school boards, you start to see them censored.
Speaker 2:Fbi was called. You could see how the protection of all of this real nefarious activity is even within our government and this stuff's going on and people are being protected.
Speaker 1:Eleven you know, just I'd like to speak to that. Ten percent of kids that are in public schools wind up being victims of educator sexual misconduct Several years ago in California. Of course, the adoption industry today is fueled by. This is part and parcel to the foster care system, and in California several years ago they discovered that there were 3,000 homes that were licensed foster care providers where there was a registered sex offender at that home, and so the care and concern of the government to try to make sure that children are being taken care of in the best possible manner is obviously not there. These kids are not being protected.
Speaker 1:It is a myth that we, as a culture, care about children. They give lip service to it, but the reality is that when you've got 10% of kids in public schools that are being mistreated, sexually mistreated by the teachers that we're hiring, and you've got thousands of foster care homes in California that's certainly spread across the country, care homes in California that's certainly spread across the country the same kind of inattentiveness of the people in California is present everywhere in the country. When you have that kind of lackadaisical and uncaring attitude, how can you say that we care about children?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you've talked about this so much. Right, we talk about consent and we're pushing this down to kids in schools. We've talked about this a lot with the comprehensive sex education, but we're literally grooming and desensitizing children to sexual activity in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, first grade, second grade. When we meet with young people, Tom, you know pornography is so prevalent today in these kids' lives. All these trans movements, you know it's producing, it's really you've got some mental health issues here. And one of the other things that I see over and over again now is this surrogacy and IVF being used for two men or two women in a gay or lesbian lifestyles. And so the question becomes there, Tom, I mean, is it basic, just morality that a child needs a mother and a father?
Speaker 1:Well, the research that proves that a child needs biological parents, that they're a mother and a father, has been suppressed.
Speaker 1:There's a number of researchers that have come out with this. It's common sense, for one thing, that a child needs a mother and a father, but there's an interesting, really interesting study that was just done, just came out not too long ago. Yeah, it has to do with the brains of men and women, which is pretty interesting. It shows I don't know if you can see this you see the blue and the red? Yeah, those are the brain, what they call brain fingerprints of men and women. The idea that men and women have the same kind of brain is just completely false. You can determine whether a person is a male or a female by looking at this the pattern of activity that goes on in the brain. And this is based on a biological difference, not based on some kind of desire that they might have. And so when you have the brains that are that much different, it's important for children to have the relationship with with both parents who are different, not with both parents who are the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hey, let me stop you there for a second. When you held up that piece of paper, did you hit your camera? Your camera went a little out of focus. Oh did it. Yeah, does it look like it's sitting up there okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's up there. Okay, what happened?
Speaker 2:to it Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's see. I don't know what happened there?
Speaker 2:it is there, it is there. It is there, it is yeah.
Speaker 1:I must have put it too close. It got confused. It has the automatic focus, yeah, and it's not seeing me. What happened there?
Speaker 2:And it didn't come back what happened to that piece of paper. So again, so that was the brain. So tell us a little bit more about that now. Well, so when we were designed to be raised by people that have different brains and different bodies okay.
Speaker 1:We were designed to be raised by people that have different brains and different bodies okay. And so when they try to say that it doesn't make any difference if you have two mommies or two daddies, well, that's just not true. Part of that was based on the idea that men and women are the same anyway. So what difference does it make if you have two men or two women? Well, these brain studies, these brain fingerprints, show that no, that's not true at all. The pattern of thinking in male and female is completely different, and you can determine it by doing these functional MRI studies of somebody. So somebody, a transgender person, can say well, hey, I'm really a man, I'm not a woman, or I'm a woman, not a man. Well, if you put them in one of these studies, their biology is going to show up, not their disordered thinking.
Speaker 1:And one of the issues that we have today is in what was it? 2013,? They declassified the gender identity disorder, becoming gender dysphoria. It became no longer a mental illness. But when you cannot recognize reality, what else is that is mentally ill, isn't it? How can you redefine that to be something other than mental illness? Yeah, the inability to recognize reality is a problem, and whatever you want to call it, it is a problem. That is not normal. That thinking has to be corrected.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so you can take this, tom, into exactly what we're talking about here, when you have two men or two women that are adopting children. Now, some of them, we find out and quite a few, unfortunately, more and more cases are coming out. You've written about it, about pedophilia, sexual abuse going on in the homes. But what I'm reading more and more, tom, are about those children, as they're growing up, that want to know who their mom was. I'm just reading right now 25 years ago, I was born from an egg donor and the sperm of a father, but she doesn't, she didn't know her mother, and so this has haunted her. She's 25 years old. She says, no, it is important to know who my mom is. You know they keep saying it. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it does matter to your point. You know we're human beings. It does matter if you know when you speak to kids that were, that are orphans and they're looking for you know, if they, they find out they were adopted and they're looking for their dads, they're looking for their moms. It does matter.
Speaker 1:Well, they're looking for the rest of their family too. Where's the they have? They have a family out there, that, a biological family that they don't know anything about.
Speaker 2:When I see again and I know people listening can you know what? You don't have empathy and compassion for these two men who you know? I see the egg donor, the surrogate mother. She's in a hospital room next to these two guys and the baby is born. They clean up the baby, they wrap up. The baby is born. They clean up the baby, they wrap up the baby and then they take it from the mother and bring it to the next room where one of these men are in the hospital bed and they lay this baby on his chest to bond with this and you just go.
Speaker 2:You know, look at Tom. It's going to take me a long time to ever think that that's normal. Again, it gets back to this. Me a long time to ever think that that's normal. Huh, again, it gets back to this querying of everything that's normal. It's not normal to take a baby from a mother and bring it into another room and give it away. You know it's.
Speaker 2:Something is wrong and I hope we don't all lose our our moral conscience about this. Right, you know what you said in the beginning or just a little while ago. What's true, what's true, you know, what's true is that baby has a mother and a father, and what's true is that a mother and a father should be raising that child. It can't happen all the time. We know circumstances come up, but to produce a baby, to manufacture a child as a commodity for people to buy, and, and you know, and, and then you wonder how this gets out of hand, how the pedophiles end up with kids. Well, we're not policing this stuff, I'm right. We're just boom, boom, boom. Here you go. You know, as long as you can pay the money, you know. I mean, what's wrong with this picture, tom?
Speaker 1:well, you know, one of the things that you mentioned about, about this parenting thing, reminded me of this, of this case. It was just decided in new york, where it was a class action case that requires the insurance companies to pay for fertility treatments for lgbt couples previously it was just heterosexual couples and there is a quote here from one of the one of the couples that was involved in this suit says lgbtq plus folks are as deserving of becoming parents as anyone else on the planet. You know that puts the focus in the wrong place. The focus is on the parents rather than on the children. Parenting involves sacrificing for your children. You don't have children for your benefit. The children are for the child's benefit, for the benefit of the culture, for the benefits. It's an other focused kind of thinking that parents are supposed to have not saying.
Speaker 1:I have a right to be a parent.
Speaker 2:No you don't. And I think again when we're in discussions and they'll say well, jack, you know you have to be tolerant of these two men that are. They need a child, right, to complete their lives. And they totally again to the point we're making here they've totally forgot the compassion, the empathy for that child. Right, you know, it's like the child doesn't exist, tom, so this commodity doesn't even exist in their mind.
Speaker 2:To your point here, right, that this is something that's supposed to make. You know, getting back to exactly what you said, this is going to complete us, this is going to make us happy. We need to buy a child. And you know, when you get away from the biblical image of this, you know when we get away from, you know, created in the Imago Dei, in the image and likeness of God, and you go right from Genesis, chapter one, right, god created them in his image, in the divine image. He created them, male and female. He created them and he says go forth, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. And so there's only when you get back to what's true, what's good, what's beautiful, there's only one way that children come into the world that's with a mom and a dad.
Speaker 2:Tom, that's just the truth, that's the goodness of how we're created. That's beautiful, right, when you see that, and the beauty of families, the beauty of that self-sacrifice that you're talking about, where parents give up a lot right to have children.
Speaker 2:And now we've thrown it all out, it's called again. You know querying, you know querying our culture, taking everything that's normal and twisting it upside down. And I would just tell people out there, you know, don't be afraid to voice your, your, your, you know your own conscience, your own will on this, because what we found is that when we don't go out and act and speak about these things, then the vacuum is filled by all these ideologies well, people have to stand up for, for what's true, and they'd rather leave somebody else to to handle that yeah, I'd rather leave somebody else to handle it too, to tell you the truth, but at the end of the day, you, you realize, you look around, you realize that there ain't nobody left sometimes, right, so you have to do it, you know.
Speaker 2:Thank goodness there are some voices standing up now. I think what happened finally to some people is there was just so many lies, so much destruction, and you get, why don't we vote for Trump? Because we like normal, we don't like to be lied to to our earlier point and this is a lie that a child doesn't need a mother and a father. It's just the way it is.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, they're redefining what's normal and people are rejecting the redefinition, and I hope that continues, because, for now, the left is going to take a step back, but they're not going to disappear. This is not the victory that we're looking for. This is a consistent, persistent battle that we have to be engaged in. What's happened right now is we've descended back into the way things were at Jesus's time, when children were just objects. They had no rights. People could treat them however they wanted to. Women were objects. We are returning to those kinds of outlooks and we have to stop that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and don't forget that men didn't. They keep thinking men had all this power. Well, there were a few men that had all this power.
Speaker 2:A lot of guys were sent into battle, were slaughtered themselves trying to protect their families and stuff. There was a lot of brutality going on. So all of this is a barbaric culture and this is what we're going into. You know, this is what we're going into. We see this even in the united states and in europe scandinavia where we've opened the borders and we've just allowed this, this, this different culture, to come in. We see, you know the not just to pick on Muslims, but we see what the Muslim culture is, so big in countries like Scandinavia now, where, you know, the rape of women has gone through the roof, where we see, I just saw recently some people in Italy or France were celebrating Christmas, and in Germany they were celebrating Christmas too and being attacked. The the Christians were being attacked because they were putting up a Christmas tree outside.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, yeah and and you, you realize that when you just open and flood your, your you know your borders with people that don't have your values, you no longer have a country, and this was purposely done too. This is querying the culture, again querying the country, my point being when you get away from the biblical roots of what it means to be a man, a woman, a family, and extend that out into your neighborhoods and into your country, you stand for something. You have an objective moral truth that you live by, something you have an objective moral truth that you live by. If you reject that, you know it's chaos, tom Chaos breaks out.
Speaker 1:It's just the way it goes. There's an objective truth. I don't see. I don't think people are rejecting the truth as much as they're not asserting it. And there's two they're waiting for somebody else to do it, and while as Christians, we're part of a community and the community has to stand together and stand for the truth to do it. And while as Christians, we're part of a community and the community has to stand together and stand for the truth and promote it and don't back down from it.
Speaker 1:One of the things I think of that the great Northfield Minnesota raid, when Jesse James and the younger gang went up there to try to rob this easy pickings bank in peaceful Northfield Minnesota. And they went up there and all the people in Northfield Minnesota said no, we're not taking that. And everybody pulled out their guns and fought back. The Christians have to fight back together rather than just stand there and wait for somebody else to do it else to do it. It's like where we think Gary Cooper is going to come, like in high noon, and face down these bad guys on his own. Well, gary Cooper did, and then he left the town. Yeah, then he left.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, you're right. But here's where I'll push back just a little bit. And you know this too when I go out and speak and I speak in Catholic churches mostly, when I go out and speak, and I speak in Catholic churches mostly, and when I go out and speak, that that so-called you know Christian Catholic congregation, there I'll get, I'll get half of those people pushing back against exactly what we're talking about here today, Tom, right, and so you know. I think there's more people out there. Look at Trump. Only one, he. He won it across the board, right, but not by a lot. You know, we don't know how much cheating was going on. There was some, but a lot less than there was this last, the election previous to this. But what that said was only, you know, sometimes by one, or 2%, 3%, and so that 46, 47, 48, sometimes 49% those people, tom, would push back on what we're talking about right now, and that's a lot of people.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, but when you go to the churches I've written about this too Even people who are committed Christians and go to church every week, 17% of them only 17% of them have a biblical worldview. It's because the people in the churches don't know what the Bible even says or teaches. 17% of them only 17% of them have a biblical worldview. It's because the people in the churches don't know what the Bible even says or teaches, and so one of the first things that people who are in the church have to do is start teaching the others who don't have a biblical worldview as to what the Bible says and how it's supposed to be applied, and that's the reason why you get pushback from people in the church, because they don't know what it says.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what happens is, you know, when you take let's talk just about, you know the gay community, right? And so what will happen is you know, in the Catholic Church, of course we'll say that it's a disorder, right, the same sex attraction is a disorder. Now, we're called to love that person, we're called to invite them into the congregation. We're called to love that person, to walk with that person, to look at them as a brother and a sister and a friend. But the problem today is, you know, we don't call it a disorder and we call the sexual, the perceived sexual, union of those two people not to be a disorder.
Speaker 2:And we would say again in the Catholic tradition that that's a grave sin. Right, sodomy is a grave sin. And, look it, it's an unhealthy thing, it's not a good thing, there's no life that comes out of it. So we get back to what's true huh, what's true, what's good? And we say, well, no, it's a disordered attraction. Now, we all have disordered attractions. I think I got 10 disordered attractions right. We all have mine's not same sex attraction, but I've got other ones right. But for some it's just the sexual attractions that we accept, you know, I mean you know the other ones we say, well, yeah, you shouldn't lie, probably shouldn't steal, probably should honor your parents, but a little L-B-T-T-Q-I-double-S-plus, eh, you know that's okay. And we see what happened, tom, that you know. You add more and more and more letters to this. It gets more and more dysfunctional and at the end of the day, it's not just about letting my neighbor live his life. You know we stand up for children again. You know it's to protect kids. You know again.
Speaker 2:I have dinner with guys that have same-sex attraction.
Speaker 1:I talk to them.
Speaker 2:You know, my brother brought me back into the church. He was same-sex attraction. I talk to them. You know, my brother brought me back into the church. He was same-sex attracted. At the end of the day, it's not about hatred, but we have to speak the truth. You know, sexual union means a man and a woman. You know there's only one way that the two become one, become three. You know, in the image and likeness of God.
Speaker 1:Well, see what's happened in the LGBT community and the reason why they have this confusion is that part of the acceptance is supposed to include affirming that as a normal part of the sexual continuum, and I reject that. It's not a normal part of the sexual continuum. There is no sexual continuum. Sex is binary male or female and your attractions are supposed to conform with what you were designed for. And if they don't conform to what you were designed to be, then you need to change those desires. Now that doesn't mean that we have to hate people that don't have the correct desire. We're supposed to love them, but we're supposed to.
Speaker 1:In Curcio they have this saying make a friend, be a friend and bring that friend to Christ. And bringing them to Christ includes teaching them what it means to be a Christian, what it means to walk in God's will them what it means to be a Christian, what it means to walk in God's will. And part of that walk includes engaging in normal sexual activity, which is between a married man and his wife. That is the only appropriate way to engage.
Speaker 2:And look, I know people that have same-sex attractions, that are living chaste celibate lives in the image of God right, following Jesus Christ himself, who was a chaste celibate man who didn't get married. Sometimes those attractions don't go away, but at the end you're called to choose to live in a chaste, celibate life and you have to carry your cross.
Speaker 2:Look, everybody's carrying crosses. I don't know anybody that doesn't carry a cross. We're all a bunch of sinners. We're all in that church. We're all coming to redemption.
Speaker 2:But you know what's sad Tom is when we tell people with same-sex attractions or any other kind of thing that Christ does not have the power to heal them. That's being non-compassionate. That's being non-compassionate. That's lacking empathy to me. When people come into the church, they come in there most of the time because they want to change. They don't want me to tell them it's okay, just stay the way you are. Why would we do that? We know we're sinners, we know we're weak, we know we need grace, we know we need God and, at the end of the day, Jesus didn't come to manage our sins. He came with power and that power is to love us. Now, does that mean all same-sex attractions will go away? Look, these are individual things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But I know a lot of guys that are married now with families that thought they were hopeless and found out that they were far from hopeless, you know.
Speaker 1:Well, and there's a book that I'd recommend to anybody is the is a book by Rosaria Butterfield, who is a a lesbian activist and professor at Syracuse University. She actually taught gender studies and she wrote she she became friends with a Christian pastor who, over a period of two years, introduced her to Christ and she became convicted about her lifestyle and turned completely around, and so now she's married and has kids of her own, and the book is the Secret Life of Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterfield, and that would give anybody hope in their way that she attributes this relationship that she had with this pastor and how kind he was to her that helped her to see the truth and to experience it.
Speaker 2:While you're saying that, hold on one second. There's a bookshelf right to my right. I want to grab another book.
Speaker 1:That's a great read on the same thing.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, sorry about that. So this one. So what's the name of the book that you just mentioned?
Speaker 1:The Secret Life of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterfield, okay.
Speaker 2:If you think about it, send me a link to that, okay, and here here's the other one. And this is probably backwards, this is right no, gay girl, good god good god.
Speaker 2:Did you read that, tom? I did, yeah, isn't that a good book? Yes, and that's jackie hill perry. This is one of the the the best reads I ever I I've ever read, and this is an easy read. This is fairly quick read but it tells about the same thing A young this is a black girl who was sexually abused, and that's happened so often to you know, to homosexual men and women, but I'm more familiar with men, even though I've read some of the books that women have written on this.
Speaker 2:They were sexually abused or the fathers were absent a lot of times, and so there's a lot of healing that has to go on, you know. So they're looking for a man in their life and then they sexualize that. So there's a lot of help that men can get. In the Catholic Church we have Encourage for parents and family and Courage for young men and young women with with same sex attractions. It's really a good program. But yeah, I would read this book. You can see how beautiful it is. So we're not picking on anybody here. So if you're getting ready to to to write a nasty text to, tom and I, when we meet people and we do all the time we always want to protect kids, protect children. There's, no, there's, there's nobody to me in my mind that has human heart, that doesn't want to protect children. And if and if you can't stand up for kids, then you know you have an issue yourself and I'll I'll be glad to talk to you about that well, and that's one of the things that they're doing.
Speaker 1:Is that the reason that this is important? For when? As it relates to children, if you tell children that that sexuality is on a continuum and and they feel isolated alone, they become vulnerable to being exploited by somebody, and and these groups like GLSEN provide they're like a Trojan horse that give these predators entree into schools and directly into the children and they recruit them into this lifestyle that is unhealthy for them and very often they can't ever escape from it because they become, you know, once they've gone down that other path, it's hard for them to come back. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2:And we meet them sometimes. Right, these kids have really been wounded and, just like Jackie Hill Perry that I just alluded to, with a gay girl, good God, you know these people have been hurt, tom.
Speaker 1:And that's why.
Speaker 2:I think we have to be really careful and we do have to have empathy and we do have to have compassion for the human person and we have to become friends. I'm not afraid to become a friend with someone that has issues with same-sex attraction. I mean, again, you know, I'm friends with guys that are alcoholics, I'm guys that were formerly addicted to porn. I'm friends with guys that had gambling addictions, I mean, but they have to be overcoming these things. If they don't want to try to overcome them, then they just get caught up in this downward spiral, you know. But the reality is Jesus Christ came with power and we're going somewhere, tom, aren't we? I mean, you know we're heading someplace.
Speaker 2:Quit trying to make everything sex, sex, sex. I mean, we have an over-sexualized culture. Everything comes down to sex. That's all people are talking about. I just say get over yourself for 15 minutes, come to church with me, let's pray for a little while, go into a relationship with Jesus Christ and for 15 minutes, can you forget about your label of same-sex attraction?
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, we're not our labels, tom, are we. We're sons and daughters of God. That's our true identity. Everything else is a label, everything else is an add-on. It can be twisted, it can be distorted by. Satan, doesn't have his own clay, he's not the creator. He can only twist and distort what God created good into all kinds of things. And we're vulnerable, tom, without grace brother, so we're not picking on anybody. In fact, I hope it's a message of hope that if you do hear this and you want to change, you know, if you want to overcome any kind of weakness at all, you know, step into scripture, step into prayer, step into a church with a good pastor and and and take it from there. Huh, right, all right, tom, anything else, because I know when you know that's. We only got a minute left here, but you talked about a couple of different things here and I think we hit most of them on things that we can do.
Speaker 1:Anything else that that you're thinking about today, I think we're Well there's many things, but I think the most important thing is for people to learn about the truth. Don't fall into the idea that what the news media and what the culture is saying that there is such a thing as being non-binary, there's such a thing as being transgender All these are not true. They need to educate themselves about the truth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, thank you, thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us today, thomas. Wonderful to see you, as usual. Goodbye everyone.