Some years ago I counseled with a young man who had graduated from severe drug addiction and after kicking the habit had fallen into an actively homosexual life. Of course, I expressed my concern for his eternal welfare, about which he obviously was also concerned. He would scarcely have spent the time with me discussing his views of salvation and its relationship to his immoral practices, if he hadn't been concerned. After some discussion about homosexuality, the argument that carried the day for him was the "civil rights" argument, namely that since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had set in motion the civil rights movement people have finally realized that discrimination based on "sexual orientation" was a violation of civil rights. And while I think this argument is false on face of it and demeaning to the true meaning of a colorblind society, as Dr. King conceived it, it still is worth asking what it might mean that the governance of sexual activity is a matter of civil law.

This is saying that civil law ought to give me permission to do whatever I please. Unfortunately, this is also taken to mean that God ought to concur with this particular civil law. In contrast to this, Christians need to state categorically that what is legal may well be immoral. There is a higher standard than the willy-nilly created law of any community or particular country. But beyond that, it must also be stated that civil freedom is a legalistic freedom, that is, a freedom created by the boundaries of the civil law. Worldly opinion says that homosexual acts are good and right. What happens when worldly opinion says the opposite? What happens when worldly opinion limits your partners to one at a time, or to humans only, or (to take an opposite example) considers chastity and abstinence as unworthy of full humanity or just simply to be impossible? These are all extreme boundaries, but they are boundaries nonetheless. The point is that our freedom in the civil realm has to do with very real and specific legal prohibitions and commands; civil "do's and don'ts" so to speak. But these are only boundaries over against society and are not necessarily proper reflections of the divine will for humans. Therefore, what humans call civil or earthly freedom is simply another kind of legalism, because it creates the requirements and prohibitions that apply to our earthly life in relation to other humans as human beings.