Jerry Mitchell, seeking re-election for city council in Chattanooga, boldly stood against marriage in favor of gay theory in 2013, a vote overturned by voters in a pro-marriage plebiscite. (Photo Mitchellforcitycouncil.com)
“For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust, like the Gentiles, who do not know God.” — I Thessalonians 4:3-5
By David Tulis / AM 1240 Hot News Talk Radio
City council member Jerry Mitchell is seeking re-election in a north Chattanooga district.
His statements about his effort are as measured and solid as any political strategy adviser might pen.
“By continuing to focus on growing the economy,” he says, “improving public safety, education, infrastructure and government responsiveness, together we will produce the place our children and grandchildren will want to call home.”
However, Mr. Mitchell is the city council member who brought to the people of Chattanooga the so-called gay partner benefits in 2013. He had bought into rising shares of gay theory, equating the embraces of a married couple with that Jim-Joe act in which the superior gentleman inserts his organ of regeneration into the organ of excretion of the lesser gentlemen in the privacy of the master bedroom.
Not only is this position (on gay partner benefits) ludicrous and ridiculous, it violates the tenets of Holy Writ (Lev. 20:13) and common law. American law of the land views sodomy as a debilitating act and a sign of a sordid, unreliable character. In the colonies, buggery was a capital offense. In the Hebrew republic, homosexual acts were punishable by death in which witnesses and every neighbor had a hand in delivering a death blow.
Sodomy is the burning out of the man, Paul says. It is not so much, perhaps, something that God judges, as it is God’s judgment itself. The wicked “burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due” (Romans 1:27).
Rejection of Eros
Mr. Mitchell’s passing acquaintance with queer theory is a rejection of the normal relation between a husband and a wife. It partakes of anarchy and revolution. In God’s providence, these are encouraged by a defect in the practice of Christianity in Chattanooga, that form known for antinomianism.
Antinomianism has been standard fare in the Baptist church in the South in that it rejects the validity of God’s law and assumes discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments rather than continuity. The biblical position on the validity of God’s law is that it remains valid unless it is specifically relegated and replaced by Christ and the resurrection. Christ’s incarnation overturns, for example, the order of worship of the Old Testament church, eliminating blood sacrifices and many other rites pertaining solely to the children of Israel as a nation.
Mr. Mitchell rejects God’s law today if 2013 is any clue to his thinking. He also rejects Eros. Now Eros is most marvelously described by C.S. Lewis in his wonderful volume, The four Loves. Homosexual sex partakes of lust, not of Eros, Lewis suggests, despite what those liberated by gay theory claim about same-sex devotion and commitment.
Lewis discusses Eros without making moral judgments, by making a distinction between sexuality and Eros. He upholds the biblical explanation of sexual relations. In Eros, love desires the person and not just the act, the woman versus the pleasure, comfort or service that that person might provide, he says. Without Eros, sexual desire and action is about one’s self. Because Eros is preoccupied with the individual of one’s partner, at its height, even, it sees pleasure as a by-product, and not the principal point of the relationship. For a man prowling about for a sexual encounter, the last thing he wants is a woman, Lewis says. The woman is merely a “necessary piece of apparatus” with which he takes his own pleasure.
A man falling in love knows that the prospect of sexual relations lies ahead, Lewis says. “A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. She is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you ask him what he wanted, the true reply would often become , “to go on thinking of her.” His loves contemplative. And when at a later stage the explicitly sexual element awakes, he will not feel *** that this had all along been the root of the whole matter. He is more likely to feel that the incoming tide of Eros, having demolished many sand castles and made islands of many rocks, has now at last with a triumphant seventh wave flooded this part of his nature also — the little pool of ordinary sexuality which was there on his beach before the tide came in. Eros enters him like an Invader, taking over and reorganizing one by one the institutions of a conquered country. It may have taken over many others before it reaches the sex in him; and it will you’re going to have that too” (Page 134).
Lewis mentions Lucretius, the Roman poet who found that emotion and personal connection ruined his sexual enjoyment. Emotion and personal affection “spoiled the cool and critical receptivity of his palate,” Lewis says. The lover in Eros wants the beloved. The lover in sex wants it.
Mr. Mitchell in his vote favored the Eros-free sex in his defense of queer theory, which he says was expected of him by his constituents. Homosexual acts are self-interested, consumptive, non-reproductive, physiologically retromingent.
Christianity protects sexuality with a barrier, the 7th commandment against adultery to keep away from lovemaking all who are not married. The ban on adultery is a protection of the sexual act and the ground — the marital bed — upon which the human family is established. Capital come with fidelity in marriage, as J.D. Unwin revealed in his anthropological studies (Sex and Culture, 1934) after World War I. When people who are not married enjoy the blessings of sex without lifetime commitment and without promise, they make it impossible for a nation to advance economically.
Loose sexual mores & decline
See the work of sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (The Crisis of Our Age, 1941) or of R.J. Rushdoony (The Politics of Pornography, 1974) for the cultural results of widespread breaking of the bonds of marriage. Sir John Glubb in “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival” sees moral laxity and loss of religion as signs of terminal decline. ‡
In his support of gay benefits Jerry Mitchell partook of this offense against Eros and against God’s created order.
I am not sure if he has recanted his position or repented of it. As office-seeker, he has the chance of issuing an update to the media. Perhaps he is counting on short memories among the electorate, whose members include thousands of professors of the Lord Jesus who declined to make any public protest against the gay agenda on city-sponsored partner benefits, and who may still be unaware of the protracted warfare against God and government through Obergefell v. Hodges and state government’s capitulation to that opinion.
Sources
Paul Leach, “Jerry Mitchell announces Chattanooga City Council re-election,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, Oct. 19, 2016
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1960). 192 pp.
‡ “In due course, selfishness permeated the community, the coherence of which was weakened until disintegration was threatened. Then, as we have seen, came the period of pessimism with the accompanying spirit of frivolity and sensual indulgence, by-products of despair.”
