09:00 - START OF CLASS.
The Importance of History. 09:00 - Where did Adventism go wrong? They forgot history. "In reviewing our past history, having traveled over every step of advance to our present standing, I can say, Praise God! As I see what God has wrought, I am filled with astonishment and with confidence in Christ as leader. We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and his teaching in our past history." (The Review and Herald October 12, 1905 paragraph 22).
13:00 - The MC of 2018 was controversial over the 2 streams of information, telling us we needed to correctly understand external events, the media and journalism. At that time it was simple enough to just categorise them as CNN v Fox News.
17:00 - Our message from May 2020 - August 2021 was 90% history, 10% application. We cannot understand Adventism today without understanding the omega, or end of ancient Israel. We cannot understand the end of ancient Israel without understanding where they went wrong in the alpha, or beginning of ancient Israel. How can we understand their golden calf if we don't understand Pagan Egypt and their Apis Bull? We can't understand how Adventism imbibed Protestantism unless we understand Protestant history and where Protestantism and the Reformation went wrong. All these histories are connected.
20:45 - The Old Testament is not just some nice, pretty story about God working with humanity. It's about God leading a rebellious humanity. So we need to correctly look back at our history and recognise the ugly parts too.
23:00 - Their history included the history of paganism, and the way it interacted with their history.
24:00 - We need to look at external events too and see how they have interacted with Adventism.
Our Midnight Cry (2018) and Increase of Knowledge (2019). 27:00 - 2018 was the midnight cry. 2019 was the increase of knowledge on the Sunday Law, which began in March/April 2019 in the Brazil camp meeting. We looked at the battle of Ipsus and saw that Hilary Clinton should have won, placing a woman in the most powerful position on Earth for the first time in history. We saw how that was stolen from her.
29:15 - We looked at the 2015 vote on women's ordination in Adventism, when women should have been ordained. Also in 2015 was the external issue of gay civil marriage, which was a good, or correct event. We also compared and contrasted the king of the north with the king of the south, identifying them as polar opposites.
31:00 - August 2019 saw the study of Eden to Eden, comparing and contrasting racism and sexism.
Drawing The Line of Eden to Eden. 32:00 - The first issue, or curse, was of Eve was gender and sexism, and the curse of Ham and Canaan was racism. This resulted in institutionalising slavery. A curse is a prophetic statement of the inevitable results of the sin that just took place.
34:30 - We saw Abraham was a slave owner. Leviticus (especially 25:35-46) is the institutionalisation of slavery in the setting up of the ancient glorious land.
36:30 - Deuteronomy 22:5 is about gender roles, not clothing. Elder Parminder taught this verse in Uganda, 2020.
38:30 - Solomon and slavery. Next waymark, omega of ancient Israel, when now, Jew and gentile are treated the same. Now women can enter into covenant with God too.
39:30 - Galatians 3:28, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" utilises only a very narrow definition of gender. Adventists incorrectly try to use it to do away with male headship. Philemon and Ephesians 5 and 6 endorse headship and slavery.
41:00 - Cain is the 2nd sin, representing worship.
41:45 - Time of the End,1798. Using the chiasm, working backwards the issues are racism in Millerite history, worship in the 1888 history and gender and patriarchy in our history. What we understand about gender is derived from comparing and contrasting the first and third curses (gender and race).
43:15 - If you want to ignore Leviticus 25 on slavery, you are forced to ignore Deuteronomy 22 on gender roles. In the 1850s and 1860s, Ellen White throws all those "Thus Saith the Lord's" on slavery away without giving any explanation or reason.
The 2nd Line of Eden to Eden. 45:00 - Creation to Moses is approximately 2500 years. It took until the time of Moses for written language to develop so that Scripture could be written down.
46:15 - Then is the kingdom of Babylon, until Rome brings world peace, roads and shipping. Then the Protestant Reformation brought the printing press.
47:15 - Millerite history saw transport by rail and communication by telegraph. Then after the 1888 dispensation is our dispensation where we have the internet, or world wide web. So each key reform movement sees an external development that allows that light to be shared.
48:00 - The work of restoring mankind to Eden is very difficult for God. Adventism has a false idea that society, and God's people were once really good, but now both the church and the world have gone bad and will only get worse, then when it can't get any worse Christ will return. However, Elder Tess argues that Adam and Eve were created without knowing much at all, including much about the character of God. They sinned, the first children killed each other, and all without a Constitution, and it was the survival of the fittest. In fact it was so bad, the only solution was to destroy the world with a flood. So after 6000 years of progress and education now we can communicate better and understand the character of God better.
51:15 - When you get to the omega of ancient Israel, Jesus is asking the Jews, Why are you still stoning people? You were meant to progress!
52:00 - So above is a review of 2019, especially March to August, and 2020 especially since May. Understanding Protestantism and Adventism has a profound effect on how we see the present and the future. But we also need to correctly understand ancient Israel and the kingdoms during their time.
53:30 - Those external, superpower kingdoms were Assyria (Mesopotamia), Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. This covers the kingdoms during the writing of the Old Testament, and they interacted with God's people.
56:00 - We will look at these histories in this camp meeting because, just as we have to understand Protestant history to understand modern Adventism, we have to understand paganism as well.
57:30 - VIDEO FREEZES
The Line of the Priests and the Line of the Omega of Ancient Israel. 59:45 - 4BC = 1989. 27AD = 911. 1st Temple Cleansing = 2014. Triumphal Entry = Midnight Cry (2018). Cross = 2019. Pentecost = 2021 (formalisation and Panium).
1:01:30 - At the formalisation (= Pentecost) we still do not know the implications of the messages of 2016 (increase of knowledge) and 2018 (formalisaton). But during the formalisation we finally understand it in it's completeness.
1:02:45 - The 3 elements to this history are: 1. By Pentecost the disciples finally understand. 2. The theme of our history is gender. The test for race was the Millerites' history. The test for Sabbath was the 1888 dispensation, but our test, and our history is all about gender.
1:04:00 - Christ as a priest is not ready at the end of His 30 years. He has to be tested and trained in the wilderness. Then He needs Cana, which means our themes will be gender in the context of marriage. In Portugal in 2020, Elder Tess taught that in preparation for 1989 for the church and the world, there were 3 external movements; the Civil Rights Movement, Second Wave Feminism, and Stonewall (June 28, 1969) and the fight for LGBTQ rights, especially homosexuality.
1:09:00 - So in this formalisation now, we will need to look at LGBTQ rights. This was taught in Portugal 2020 and October 10th, 2020 for the French speaking world, as there is no new message in a harvest. So our formalisation now has to address gender, LGBTQ rights and marriage. In 2019 we were already tackling the subject of the external ruling on gay marriage and it's internal twin of women's ordination in 2015.
1:14:00 - Elder Tess will not be teaching on what makes someone homosexual. It is not a mental illness, nor an hormonal issue, nor a choice. Just as many are born heterosexaul, some are born homosexual. Those that disagree may require evidence, but Elder Tess will not be presenting any evidence here. We should by now understand LGBTQ is not a choice. It is problematic to try to prove the physical nature of homosexuality, in the same way as it is to prove the nature of heterosexuality. Nobody can as there is no known gene which makes you attracted to the opposite sex.
1:17:00 - People have already taught about the gendered brain and how much it has been misunderstood, twisted and manipulated in the past. So if you require an answer as to what makes people homosexual, you should require an answer as to what makes people heterosexual - and there is no scientific answer. There is no science that answers why or how people fall in love or experience physical attraction.
1:19:30 - Those that are experts on the subject, scientists etc. all agree that homosexuality is not a choice, and that is our perspective.
03:30 - START OF CLASS. 04:00 - Another reason we know the test today is not just gender, but gender and marriage, is because since 1888 the two institutions of Eden are being discussed. 1888 was the Sabbath and our dispensation is marriage.
05:45 - The curse of sexism specifically affected Eve's marriage, not disregarding it has affected married and unmarried women for thousands of years, headship was still a breakdown of the original marriage.
07:30 - Homosexuality has existed for a long time but the word "homosexual" was only introduced in 1868. There have been words which describe the sexual act but not the relationship. People were becoming more open, especially by the late 1920s. Homosexuals started to be more open with little fear of persecution, but that didn't last long. Persecution drove them into hiding in the 1930s.
10:15 - Then came WWII followed by the Cold War. Most of us are familiar with the persecution of homosexuals in the United States during the Cold War, especially the McCarthy era. Some were driven out of their jobs, often committing suicide. Some were entrapped by police.
11:45 - By June 1969 the homosexual community were very much on edge. Police raided the Stonewall Inn expecting it to be a typical raid, but the community felt they could take no more and some began to fight back. This started a series of protests and from 1969 onward a movement developed where they refused to quietly take the persecution and stigma.
13:00 - But our core subject is marriage, and gay marriage was not the issue or agenda in 1969. Same-sex marriage rarely attracted mainstream attention until the late 1980s. The New York Times said the question of same-sex marriage was, "all but dormant" until the late 1980s when, according to gay activists, "the AIDS epidemic... brought questions of inheritance and death benefits..." (1989)
14:45 - Once you know you are going to lose someone, the way you want to remember them after their death feels much more important. So when the AIDS epidemic began, it turned many homosexual people's thoughts to marriage, and they began to fight for that right. It still didn't receive mainstream attention or even attention from the homosexual community, until 1989, which acted as a turning point.
17:20 - So the fight for gay marriage began in 1989. A number of events in that year gave impetus to this movement. In 1989 Denmark was the first country in the world to allow registered partnerships.
19:00 - From the Time Magazine book released in 2009. Time released this book on the 20th anniversary of 1989 to try to illustrate how significant this year was.
20:00 - "It was Oct. 1, 1989, and, dressed in matching suits, Axel and Eigil Axgil had just become the first gay couple in the world to legalize their union. Today, that photograph hangs on the wall of 94-year-old Axel's cozy Copenhagen apartment, amid a crop of houseplants... His husband, Eigil, has been dead for 14 years, but Axel still remembers the wedding as if it were yesterday... More than anything, he remembers the crowd. "I'd never seen so many television cameras. There were journalists there from all over the world," he says. "It wasn't until that moment that we realized the historic significance of what we were doing."" The article continues to explain that Denmark was not particularly tolerant toward homosexuals. "When I came out, I lost my job as a bookkeeper. And my landlord kicked me out of my apartment," says [Axel].... "AIDS did two things... First, it made conservatives think that it might be good to support stable, monogamous relationships among gays. And second, it brought homosexuals into the public sphere. For the first time, politicians were actually meeting gay men and lesbian women, and realizing they weren't any different from straight people."" (TIME, 2009)
23:00 - So the first significant event to change things was in Denmark. It was not gay marriage, it was a registered partnership, which did not have all the rights of marriage, like the right to adopt children. Another event in 1989 was in the United States, on July 6th, in New York City. New York had rent controlled apartments after WWII. This meant that married couples had their rent capped, so they could not be charged more than a set limit. These rent controlled apartments were in high demand. So if the husband signed the lease, but he dies, the law stated that the widow could take over that lease and the rent still could not be increased past the legal limit. It meant the widow could not be thrown out of the apartment or charged a higher price.
25:30 - "New York's highest court ruled Thursday that a partner in a long-term homosexual relationship can take over the couple's rent-controlled apartment when the lover who signed the lease dies... In doing so, the court expanded the definition of a "family" as it applies to New York's rent-control laws... The decision marks the first time any top state court in the nation has recognized a gay couple to be the legal equivalent of a family, American Civil Liberties Union lawyer William Rubenstein said. "Today's decision is a ground-breaking victory for lesbians and gay men," Rubenstein said. "It marks the most important single step forward in American law toward legal recognition of lesbian and gay relationships." The case involves Miguel Braschi, 33, who wants to live in the desirable Manhattan apartment he shared for 11 years with Leslie Blanchard. The two men were considered a lifetime couple and spouses by their friends. Blanchard, the owner of a Manhattan beauty salon, died in September, 1986, leaving Braschi almost $5 million. Soon afterward, the landlord, Stahl Associates, attempted to evict Braschi on grounds that he had no right to continue living in the below-price apartment because he was not related to Blanchard by "blood, marriage or adoption."" 29:00 - The third event that made 1989 a turning point was an article by Andrew Sullivan, a gay journalist. He was conservative leaning but changed party affiliation around the Iraq war.
30:30 - "The gay movement has ducked this issue primarily out of fear of division. Much of the gay leadership clings to notions of gay life as essentially outsider, anti-bourgeois, radical. Marriage, for them, is co-optation into straight society. For the Stonewall generation, it is hard to see how this vision of conflict will ever fundamentally change. But for many other gays - my guess, a majority - while they don't deny the importance of rebellion 20 years ago and are grateful for what was done, there's now the sense of a new opportunity. A need to rebel has quietly ceded to a desire to belong." (Andrew Sullivan, 1989)
32:15 - We will probably soon have examples that show his point was correct. Many homosexuals in 1989 were opposed to gay marriage because they wanted to fight society and not be co-opted into it. This behaviour is typical of civil rights movements. There is a parallel fight within feminism. The women who fought through the Sexual Revolution and 2nd wave feminism, often conflict with today's feminists. The conflict is that the older feminists fought so hard against society under the Sexual Revolution to have their female sexuality recognised, that watching the "Me Too" generation say the Sexual Revolution was important and good, but it has also been used by men to perceive women as so sexually available that it has added to the fetishisation and sexualisation of women, and they see some of the results of that when they say, "Me Too". The older feminists say, "Do you not appreciate what we fought for?" and criticise the Me Too movement. This is something we have mentioned before - the different currents within feminism.
35:45 - The refinement of the message as we look back at the Sexual Revolution at its positives and its negatives, and our view of the Me Too movement. That is an external fight. So the same, parallel thing is happening when it comes to gay rights.
36:30 - In the next paragraph Sullivan talks about the complications of domestic partnerships and why marriage is better. "As it has become more acceptable for gay people to acknowledge their loves publicly, more and more have committed themselves to one another for life in full view of their families and their friends... Those conservatives who deplore promiscuity among some homosexuals should be among the first to support it." (Ibid.)
37:30 - Whenever you drive people underground it is going to create an unhealthy culture. This is when people talk about the gay culture. We have to realise what develops when you drive people underground.
38:00 - His last argument, "The argument that gay marriage would subtly undermine the unique legitimacy of straight marriage is based upon a fallacy... Gay marriage could only delegitimize straight marriage if it were a real alternative to it, and this is clearly not true. To put it bluntly, there's precious little evidence that straights could be persuaded by any law to have sex with - let alone marry - someone of their own sex. The only possible effect of this sort would be to persuade gay men and women who force themselves into heterosexual marriage (often at appalling cost to themselves and their families) to find a focus for their family instincts in a more personally positive environment. But this is clearly a plus, not a minus: Gay marriage could both avoid a lot of tortured families and create the possibility for many happier ones. It is not, in short, a denial of family values. It's an extension of them." (Ibid.)
40:00 - Sullivan then argues that a civilised society does not persecute minorities, and, "Given the fact that we already allow legal gay relationships, what possible social goal is advanced by framing the law to encourage these relationships to be unfaithful, undeveloped, and insecure?" (Ibid.) So, as he states, he is making a conservative argument, and it was considered a turning point argument.
41:20 - One more event in the US was September 1989, the State Bar Association of California urged recognition of marriage between homosexuals even before gay rights activists adopted the issue.
42:30 - Now to East Germany. By 1989 Germany has been divided for 41 years. Homosexuals were persecuted by the Secret Police. One person, Matthias Freihof, no longer wanted to be homosexual in secret. One of the last films made by the East German State Film Studio was called, "Coming Out". So even under that environment the East German Film Studio produced this movie with Matthias Freihof as the lead actor. It was also his personal coming out.
44:35 - It premiered on November 9th of 1989. So after 41 years of separation the first gay themed film they make came out on November 9 of 1989, a short distance from the Berlin Wall. It received such praise they played the premiere twice.
45:35 - So as they sat watching this premiere over the hours of midnight they had no idea what was taking place down the road. As they came out of that premiere they saw through the windows, the cars and the people and Matthias Freihof tells the story of walking down to the border between East and West Germany.
46:25 - It's scene also was a historical event and a turning point. Even separately to the timing of the double premiere. So you see in 1989 the fight begins. But what did we understand from the document, "How The Constitution Became Christian"? What inevitably is going to happen? There's going to be a backlash. There's going to be a fight. It became a fight in 1991. 48:00 - "The Georgia Attorney General has withdrawn a job offer to a lawyer after learning that she planned a wedding ceremony with her lesbian lover. State law bans sexual relations between people of the same sex, and the Attorney General, Michael J. Bowers, had successfully defended that law five years ago before the United States Supreme Court. Georgia law also does not recognize homosexual marriage." (1991)
49:05 - So they defended, and kept a law on their books that made it illegal to be a practicing homosexual in Georgia. But the threat really begins in 1990 when it really heats up in Hawaii. On December 17, 1990 three same-sex couples applied for marriage licenses at the Hawaii Department of Health and of course were denied, and probably anticipated being denied. So they initiated a lawsuit May 1st of 1991 and this lawsuit went all the way up to the Supreme Court of Hawaii. It was known as Baehr v. Lewin, when they ended up suing the state of Hawaii for the legal right to marry.
51:15 - This desire for gay marriage was not uniform through the homosexual community. Lambda is a legal defense and education fund, an American civil rights organisation that focuses on LGBTQ cases. But Lambda refused to represent them in court because they doubted whether taking the issue to court was a wise strategy and they debated the importance of marriage itself.
53:00 - So others took up the cause, and in 1993 the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled. It was considered the first major judicial victory for same-sex marriage activists, but in reality it wasn't much of a victory. The Supreme Court looked at the rules which were based on racial classifications, acknowledged that all their past rules on racial classifications were unconstitutional, and they compared and contrasted that with the the laws on the state books regarding same-sex marriage, and they considered that that position was also discriminatory, but they didn't actually rule for same-sex marriage.
55:15 - They said Hawaii's current laws and state constitution do not prohibit it, so Hawaii needed to consider what kind of defense they wanted to make, because your arguments and defense against these 3 couples are unsatisfactory
56:05 - So they didn't fully rule in favor of the couple, and this terrified just about every other state in the US because Hawaii, having been dangerously close to legalising same-sex marriage, makes everything complicated. If you're a man and a woman in Arkansas, and you have family in California you might decide to fly to California and get married. Then when you fly back to Arkansas the state of Arkansas has to recognise your marriage. So if Hawaii legalised gay marriage and a homosexual couple from Arkansas decide to fly to Hawaii and get married, what is Arkansas required to do? So that's panic number 1.
58:05 - Panic number 2. If Hawaii recognises this couple as married, what about the federal government? Because there are a lot of things that the federal government is responsible for and not the state. If you're a member of the armed forces and you fly to Afghanistan and fight, and you die in Afghanistan, it's the federal government that needs to notify your family, your husband or wife. So it's said that there's hundreds, maybe thousands of ways the federal government interacts with a couple's marriage, not the state.
59:30 - So everyone's watching Hawaii from 1991 to 1993, and it didn't end up going that well for opponents of same-sex marriage.
60:00 - So when there is a group threat, what do you do? You mobilise! You define the Constitution and the law, in ways that protect you from the good threat. When would you expect that response to be formalised? In 1996 they've mobilised, they've formed their counter arguments.
61:15 - "Georgia representative Bob Barr, then a Republican, authored the defense of marriage act and introduced it in the House of Representatives on May 7, 1996. Senator Don Nichols of Oklahoma then introduced the bill in the Senate." (1996)
61:50 - This is what is known as DOMA. "The 1996 Republican party platform endorsed DOMA. The Democratic party platform that year, did not mention DOMA or same- sex marriage at all. The bill moved through Congress on a legislative fast track and met with overwhelming approval in both Houses of the Republican-controlled Congress, on July 12, 1996 with only 65 Democrats and then representative Bernie Sanders, who was an independent, and representative Steve Gunderson who was a Republican in opposition." (1996)
63:15 - So it's authored by a Republican, it's introduced by a Republican, passes through a Republican-controlled House, through a Republican-controlled Senate, but who is president? A Democrat.
64:10 - "He had just flown across the country after an exhausting campaign day in Oregon and South Dakota, landing at the White House after dark. But President Bill Clinton still had more business before bed. He picked up a pen and scrawled out his name, turning a bill into law. It was 10 minutes before 1 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21, 1996, and there were no cameras, no ceremony. The witching-hour timing bespoke both political calculation and personal angst. With his signature, federal law now defined marriage as the union of a man and woman. Mr. Clinton considered it a gay-baiting measure, but was unwilling to risk re-election by vetoing it." (2013)
65:45 - It's understood that if he had vetoed it, it still would have gone through, because he had so little support in Washington by that time. But by vetoing it, he still would have sent a message, but what did we learn about the Whig party? What do you do in an election year? The end - winning the election - justifies the means; compromise.
66:35 - "For nearly 17 years since, that middle-of-the-night moment has haunted Mr. Clinton, the source of tension with friends, advisers and gay rights supporters. He tried to explain, defend, and justify. He asked for understanding. Then he inched away from it bit-by-bit. Finally this month, 2013, he disavowed the defense of marriage act entirely, urging that the law be overturned by the Supreme Court. Rarely has a former President declared that an action he took in office violated the constitution." (Ibid.)
67:45 - So historically, Bill Clinton had quite a number of homosexual friends, and he'd been seen relative to his time as progressive and supportive of the community. But early in his presidency he tried to open up the military to gays and lesbians, and politically that had had a negative impact for him.
68:35 - So by 1996 he's afraid of the consequences if he vetoes DOMA. "The bill passed with overwhelming margins - enough to override a veto." So his veto wouldn't have mattered as far as passing the law is concerned. "He had hoped to avoid calling attention to it with his post-midnight signature. Mike McCurry, the press secretary, got a call at home asking if they should wait until morning to announce it." Quoting his press secretary, "His posture was quite frankly driven by the political realities of an election year in 1996." (Ibid.)
70:00 - Some gay supporters were outraged. They did feel betrayed. That wasn't his only compromise to win that election. The other act that he signed is the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. That act on immigration has negatively affected the southern border for the decades since.
71:25 - Explanation of DOMA - DOMA is a really short bill - only two pages, and consists of three sections. The first section consists of nothing more than the name, just an explanation of the name. So it's fairly meaningless as far as the impact of the law is concerned.
72:15 - Section two says that no state has to acknowledge a same-sex marriage that was performed in another state. This is a response to Hawaii. So if Hawaii was to legalise same-sex marriage, Arkansas would not recognise any of those couples as married, once they stepped foot in Arkansas.
73:15 - So this protected the states. Section three - The federal government does not recognise as married, any gay couple legally married by a state that allows it. So one section was to protect the states, the other was to protect the federal government. The federal government recognises that marriage only exists between a man and a woman, and it's an action to defend marriage due to the recent events. It's a legal response to the group threat.
75:00 - Review. In the first presentation I wanted to explain why we're discussing this subject. Remind us of some of our history, particularly how we have understood these three issues; racism, worship, and gender. As they become testing points for God's people, post 1798. Recognising that we must understand the external events, and the institutions of Eden. Threading our way marks we went back to 1989, recognising it as a turning point where gay marriage became a possibility - an external subject in mainstream media. A key subject occurred on the night of November 9, just by the Berlin Wall.
76:55 - Denmark, the first country in the world to legally recognise those relationships. The arguments by one journalist that were astounding for the time, gained a lot of traction. The events in California and New York City. The event in New York City being called, probably the most important single step forward in American law towards legal recognition for same-sex people.
78:00 - The fight heating up in the state of Hawaii galvanised national attention, and frightened the rest of the United States in 1993. Then in a counter-attack, it was formalised in 1996 with DOMA, signed by a compromising democrat, that stopped states from having to recognise same-sex marriages from another state, and had the federal government state that marriage only existed between a man and a woman.
3. Gay Marriage: The Fight Continues (26-08-2021).
06:30 - START OF CLASS - We have discussed the importance of history and the reasons that we needed to look at the subject of gay marriage. We're going to look at gay marriage but spend most of our time looking at history. We discussed the problem with Adventism, not just that they use wrong methodology, but also that they don't have a correct understanding of history to apply methodology to, whether that's biblical, Millerite, or any time in between or after. And liberal Adventism, without a refined methodology, or correct understanding of history, makes similar mistakes. It's a uniform problem. Then when we come to the gospel, the applications should make logical sense.
09:40 - Review 18:25 - 1989 saw the first country in the world, Denmark, to legalise registered partnerships, or civil partnerships. 2001 was the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage, the Netherlands - even before it got to the Netherlands, the first gay marriages of modern times occurred in Canada, on 14th January. It just took two years for that to be upheld in court.
20:00 - So in 2003 they had been the first legal, same-sex marriages but it was the Netherlands that legalised it in 2001. And while some countries are legalising gay marriage, Arkansas finally decided to decriminalise homosexuality itself. So up until 2001, it was illegal to be a homosexual in Arkansas - so it's progress!
21:03 - Arkansas continually comes up in prophecy. A.T. Jones said the Sunday laws would start in the state of Arkansas. In 2004, which is a minor way mark, Massachusetts became the first US state and the sixth jurisdiction in the world to legalise same-sex marriage.
22:18 - So this is the first US state to legalise same-sex marriage. Other cities in other states started to hand out marriage licenses, especially in California, but the state hadn't legalised it, so without getting into the complicated legalities, it was just war. The states knew they couldn't control what another state did, but now DOMA wasn't enough, now they were afraid of it spreading to their state, because finally one of 50 states had taken the step. So by late 2004, 11 states amended their Constitutions, defining marriage as the union between one man and one woman.
24:10 - Arkansas was one of them, and two more states did it in 2005. Eight more in 2006. So now they're not just happy with DOMA, now all the states are changing their Constitutions because that was one of the problems with Hawaii. The Supreme Court of Hawaii said, your Constitution isn't clear enough on this issue. So the other states not only enacted DOMA, they also, from 2004 went in and started changing their Constitutions.
25:50 - 2012 saw a significant, singular event. 2012 was an election year, which means both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention were held in 2012. For the first time, both political parties stated their position clearly. The Republican party had already stated their position, but the Democrat party had not. "The Republican National Convention approved a platform that asserts the right of the federal government and each state to deny legal recognition to same-sex marriages and endorsed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. 27:35 - The Democratic National Convention adopted a political platform that supported marriage equality for the first time in its history and opposed all constitutional amendments that would exclude same-sex couples from marriage." It shouldn't surprise us that this is two opposing views of the Constitution. A war over the Constitution. The Republican party is saying, DOMA is not enough, the changes to the state Constitutions are not enough, we need to make the Constitution of the United States Christian, and ban same-sex marriage in the Constitution.
29:00 - The Democrat party says for the first time in their history, that they supported same-sex marriage and would fight any Republican attempt to change the Constitution. So both armies stake their ground. That seems to be a type of formalisation.
30:00 - On September 15, 2009, three Democratic members of Congress introduced legislation, fighting to abolish DOMA, and they would establish it by introducing a new act. In 2009 the Democrat party starts to fight DOMA. They've put together legislation called The Respect For Marriage Act. This is an attempt to repeal DOMA by replacing it with, instead of a defense of marriage, a respect for marriage. It had 91 original co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and among them was quite a number of legislators who had voted for DOMA at the time, including Bill Clinton.
32:01 - So he's now fighting to take down his own act, the Respect For Marriage Act was never passed.
32:22 - 2009 - Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer were two lesbian women living in New York City. They'd lived as a couple in New York City by this time, for 44 years. They had been engaged for 40 of those years - almost half a century. And then in Canada in May of 2007 they got married, and after a 44-year relationship in 2009 Thea passed away.
34:05 - The American Civil Liberties Union website, "Ordinarily, whether a couple is married for federal purposes depends on whether they are considered married in their state. New York recognized Edith and Thea's marriage, but because of a federal law called the "Defense of Marriage Act," or DOMA, the federal government refuses to treat married same-sex couples, like Edith and Thea, the same way as other married couples. When Thea died, the federal government refused to recognize their marriage and taxed Edith's inheritance from Thea as though they were strangers." (April, 2014) So the state of New York recognised their marriage, but because of DOMA section 3, the federal government did not, and the taxing of the states comes through the federal government. So after a 44-year relationship and a 40-year engagement, Thea Spyer left her inheritance to her wife Edith, but the federal government said you're not married. So as though they were strangers, Edith was supposed to pay taxes on that inheritance, and it was a significant inheritance.
36:50 - So in 2009 Thea Spyer died. In 2012 Edith Windsor took the federal government to court. It had been to court, now she takes it to the Supreme Court, and this became Windsor v. USA. The Supreme Court accepts the case in 2012 but it's in 2013 that they decide on the case.
38:10 - "DOMA, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, bars the federal government from recognizing or providing federal benefits for same-sex couples married in states where such unions are legal. There are more than 1,000 such federal benefits and preferences. The case before the court was illustrative. Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer, whose 2007 marriage was recognized by the state of New York, were together for 44 years. But when Spyer died, Windsor was required to pay $363,000 in federal estate taxes that she would not have owed if her spouse had been of the opposite sex. "If Thea was Theo, I would not have had to pay that," Windsor told NPR in March. "Now, that's just a terrible injustice... I think it's a mistake that has to get corrected." (2013)
40:10 - In 2012 it was taken up by the Supreme Court and they passed down their ruling in June of 2013. A five to four majority in the Supreme Court ruled that section three of DOMA was unconstitutional. From 2013 the federal government has been forced to recognize same-sex marriage in the states in which it was legal." Section three of DOMA was unenforceable from 2013, but you'll notice this is a five to four decision. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was known for her dissent, but you should read the venom in the conservative dissent. The liberal members and RBG essentially dragged Judge Scalia kicking and screaming. So this was not a happy conservative action.
42:05 - 2014 The Boston Globe, December 23 of 2014, titled, "2014 Was a Pivotal Year For Same-Sex Marriage". While we focus on 2015, I think we forget about 2013, and maybe we're not aware of the significance of 2014. "A year ago, only about a third of Americans lived in states that permitted same-sex marriage. Today, nearly 65 percent of Americans do, making 2014 perhaps the biggest turning point in the history of same-sex marriage in the United States. The change wasn't driven by a bevy of new laws or a big Supreme Court decision. Instead, it was a slow-burning sequence of consistent lower court rulings - combined with the Supreme Court's decision not to intervene. Massachusetts was the first state to allow same-sex marriage. In the 10 years since, same-sex marriage has spread to 34 other states, including 18 new states just this year. 44:25 - States that continue to ban the practice tend to be concentrated in the South and the Midwest." (The Boston Globe, "2014 Was a Pivotal Year For Same-Sex Marriage") So at the end of 2013, only about 33 percent of Americans lived in a state that legalised same-sex marriage. By the end of 2014 that was about 65%. It almost doubled from 2004 to the end of 2013. 17 states had legalised same-sex marriage in 2014. One year alone, 18 states legalise same-sex marriage, and this was not a Supreme Court case. This was all the lower courts. "In a streak of victories in federal courts - and especially in the appellate courts that make law for whole regions of the country - various statewide bans on same-sex marriage were declared unconstitutional. 46:40 - At first, many of those rulings were put on hold, which is not uncommon. Sometimes, lower courts want to hit the pause button and let the Supreme Court weigh in before implementing big social changes. But in October, the Supreme Court decided not to intervene - they didn't say why, but it may be because there was no dispute for them to resolve. The pro-marriage side had won every case." (Ibid.) So all the lower courts were declaring these bans unconstitutional, but instead of enacting their decision, they'll say, we'll just put this decision on hold until the Supreme Court gives its opinion, because I'm just a lower court and this is a massive social change, so we need to know what the Supreme Court thinks.
49:00 - The Supreme Court looks over at the lower courts and every single lower court had come to the same conclusion - that same-sex marriage bans were unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court says if there's no disagreement why do i need to intervene? Do what you want, you're not fighting. You all agree with each other. So when the Supreme Court refuses to intervene, all of those decisions go into force, but then after they've already done that, right towards the end of 2014, "Shortly after the Supreme Court decided not to review those earlier cases, a disagreement finally occurred. The sixth circuit - which covers Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee - became the first appeals court to uphold a state ban on same-sex marriage." (Ibid.)
51:00 - The article then explains how the Supreme Court may now want to intervene because now there's an argument the lower courts are coming to different conclusions and now those supporting same-sex marriage are pushing the Supreme Court to intervene, particularly because they know 2013 was decided by a five to four liberal majority (although all five of them were not really true liberals). They know that with just one change in the Supreme Court, and they could lose this window of opportunity. So by the end of 2014 everyone's on the edge of their seats, waiting to see what the Supreme Court is going to do. "As pivotal as 2014 has been in the history of gay marriage, 2015 may be definitive." 52:44 - If the Supreme Court rules in favor of gay marriage, the United States would join the growing ranks of countries that have embraced it. Alternatively, a Supreme Court ruling against gay marriage would force the issue back to the states, potentially leading to a dramatic retrenchment in the number of same sex couples who are able to marry." (Ibid.) So there's a number of things all happening at once. You've had Edith Windsor take the United States to the Supreme Court and win in 2013. You've had a few years of the Democrat party trying to repeal DOMA with another, alternative marriage act. You have section three of DOMA already repealed, essentially. All the lower courts are repealing same-sex marriage laws in their states, and this takes us to 2015.
55:13 - There was a homosexual couple who wanted to get married, but same-sex marriage was not legal in the state that they belonged to. This couple was John Arthur and Jim Obergefell. John Arthur and Obergefell met in the early 1990s. It was, they often joked, love at third sight. First time they met, not interested. Second time, not interested. Third time they met they were inseparable. So by this time period they'd been together for about 20 years, but there was one problem in 2013. When Jim Obergefell lent over and said, "Let's get married", John Arthur was dying. There was no way they would be able to drive him in a car, to another state where gay marriage was legal, because it wasn't legal in their state. There's no way they would be able to put him on a regular flight either.
58:15 - So family and friends came together and raised money to pay for a medical flight. I think it was about $13,000 to get a medical flight to another state. They flew to the tarmac of Baltimore Washington International Marshall Airport.
59:35 - They married in the plane and then flew back. "There was no honeymoon, of course. And a few days after they wed, an old neighbor mentioned their situation to Al Gerhardstein, a local civil rights attorney. "I knew right away they had a problem," Gerhardstein said. "And I knew they probably weren't thinking about it. Who thinks about a death certificate after getting married?" (2015). See how many of these changes are especially fought over, when one partner is going to lose another or has lost another.
61:10 - So the problem was, in their state same-sex marriage was not legal. So they might have got married in a plane on a tarmac, in another state, but when they flew back to their own state, and a few months later John Arthur passed away, what name goes on the death certificate? Because John Arthur had wanted to take Jim Obergefell's name. A neighbor contacts a civil rights attorney and Johnny says, now there's a problem. So they went to court, they won the first ruling. So their state of Ohio appealed to a higher court and he lost in the higher court. So Obergefell says, "That's fine. I'm going to the Supreme Court". Now it was not the only case that was not just him versus the Supreme Court. There were many cases similar to his, that the Supreme Court was considering all lumped together in one. And they didn't name this court case after him because they just liked him. It's a complicated process how that name gets to be chosen. He didn't even want it chosen. It's not a choice, but because of how they must be decided it became Obergefell versus Hodges. Really it's Obergefell versus the state of Ohio, but Hodges was the representative of the state. So he took it to the Supreme Court.
64:45 - "...he keeps reminding himself about what his fight is really about - the death certificate, the title of spouse - even as he feels the growing pressure of a monumental civil rights moment. "It's hard to put into words," Obergefell said, "how to grasp that our decision to stand up and say, "This isn't right," is going to affect so many people."" (Ibid.) We know what that 2015 court decision was - 26th of June 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell versus Hodges, that the 14th amendment requires all US state laws to recognise same-sex marriages. This left section two of DOMA as superseded and unenforceable. The Respect For Marriage Act was never passed, because in the end, it never needed to be, because in 2013, one lesbian couple, Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer, the surviving spouse, took down section three of DOMA.
67:15 - In 2015 one homosexual couple Jim Obergefell and John Arthur took down section two of DOMA. And while it might exist on the books, it's now superseded and unenforceable. 2013 and 2015. A lesbian couple, a homosexual couple, both in committed relationships, one for about 20 years, one for about 44 years, both committed. John Arthur asked Jim Obergefell to remarry after he died. He still says he can't do it. These two couples, in 2013 and 2015, took down section 2 and section 3. As we said, section one has no meaning, and from 2015 gay marriage became legal in the United States for every single state. The Supreme Court stepped in and decided.
69:50 - Do we think the conservatives were happy? You know what they thought in 2013? They were quite expressive. But in 2014, as all of this is happening beneath their feet, and Steve Bannon and other Republicans are stoking flames about a culture war, they can see it's a war they're losing. So by the time you get into 2015 and 2016, what do you expect, except for Donald Trump? Why do you think they don't care in whatever form their saviour comes? Because they have had defeat, after defeat, after defeat.
71:20 - When we see Trump's introduction in 2015, and then we trace 2016 to the January 6 insurrection and what is happening right now, this is just internal civil war. Remember revolutions and one side afraid of losing? So what do you have to do? Mobilise against a good threat. Remember when it came to Millerite history? Why did it lead to a civil war? Because despite the fact that the good parties were full of compromises, slave states and slave holders began to feel more and more isolated, and few people even in the north recognised the depth of feeling. Everything we've seen from 2015 to 2016 to now has just been a response to this fight.
73:45 - Why are so many conservatives in the United States not getting vaccinated? Why won't Fox News and the Republican party just tell people to get vaccinated? It's not just conspiracy theories, there's something much deeper. This is why logic itself isn't going to make a difference, even if they were forced to see those vaccines as as positive, life-saving. Have you ever had an argument with someone and they can see that you're right and they're wrong? Rather than admit it they just get so irritated they keep moving the argument. It becomes childish. Really it becomes self-harm. If I can't win on on this point, I'm going to dig my heels in on every single other point.
75:45 - Conservatives hesitancy to take the vaccine is as much connected to this as it is to conspiracy theories, because when you're losing a war and it hurts, when you're losing an argument, you dig your heels into the ground. Like a child in a supermarket who can't get what it wants. They just lie on their back and say, "Well I'm not going anywhere! Even if it's good for me!" This is the resistance and the difficulty with working with the Republican party now.
77:00 - They are not dumb people. They are not incapable of logic. But they are going to make every Democratic advancement as difficult as possible, because we don't realise how much they were hurt when they kept losing.
4. Gender and Sex in Ancient Greece (26-08-2021).
02:00 - START OF CLASS - Review - The fight for gay marriage first became a mainstream popular fight in 1989, but was not immediately a popular fight even among the gay community. So I gave one example of that. The civil rights organisation that is meant to represent LGBT people, when three couples begun to sue the state of Hawaii in 1991. LAMBDA refused to assist or represent them so that's how much the gay community itself has changed since pre-1989 to 2015. It's been a radical transformation. Even so in 1991, it was white, male, heterosexuals who took up their case and fought for them.
04:07 - I say that to illustrate how much has changed in the last 32 years. Even when we come to 2010, gay marriage is an issue in the United Kingdom. In the UK in 1989, a charity was set up called, "The Stonewall Charity" and today they are the largest, LGBT lobbying group in Europe. So in 2010 people are fighting for gay marriage in the UK, and the head of "The Stonewall Charity" goes public and says, "We have not given a position on gay marriage and we won't now". History is complicated.
06:00 - There's never just one neat story line and good guys and bad guys. The Stonewall Charity ended up changing their tune because of the amount of angry responses to that statement, but this is how much has changed since 1989. We traced it through 1989, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2004, 2009 and 2012. And as we would expect, then it comes to a crisis point. 2014 is the midpoint, and the turning point year in it's own right, but also a midpoint between two major Supreme Court decisions that dismantled what had been put into place in 1996. A lesbian couple, and a gay couple.
08:10 - From 2015 forward, the fight has been largely won by the gay marriage side. This [photo] is the wedding of Jim Obergefell and John Arthur, shortly before John passed away. Their state's failure to recognise their marriage, was a catalyst in his involvement in that 2015 Supreme Court decision. So that is the history of homosexual and lesbian rights from 1989 to 2015.
10:08 - And without going to details I hope we can understand why the conservative right has become so vitriolic since then. This is not the only thing that has bruised them, but it is a major one.
10:40 - END OF REVIEW. I want us to go back into ancient history. We understand now our immediate history, but we need to put it into context. How significant is it? We won't really see the significance unless we go back and see what has existed before.
12:30 - When we wanted to understand Adventism, where did we look? Protestantism. You have to understand the context. What is being imbibed. So most of the time period from May 2020 to now, we're going back and looking at the history of Protestantism. I don't want to go to Protestantism. I want to go to Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. I know other people have looked into history, whether it's ancient pagan nations or indigenous populations.
14:08 - And individuals I'm sure have come to their own conclusions. My concern is that I could very easily, in this series, just end up disagreeing with absolutely everyone. I'm hoping that what I present makes logical sense. I do fear that media literacy is still an issue this movement can struggle with, and when you go back and look at history, it's not just the Religious Right that can manipulate history to suit themselves. The left can do that as well. So I'm going to go particularly through three pagan nations - Egypt, Greece, and Rome - starting with Greece.
16:30 - Greece was known for same-sex relationships. When we look at history, first of all we need to find the best sources, but also we can't just believe what suits us. If we don't like it, we don't like it. The facts remain. So there's a number of difficulties in going into this history, and I want to list them all to begin with. Things that are going to distract us as we look through history.
17:58 - The first one is that what we'll be covering is a new subject, because we're going to be discussing sex, and many people in the movement are still uncomfortable with us discussing sex. I don't really understand why an Adventist believes that God has things to say on every facet of your life, but the one decision that can have the most wide range of consequences, you think He has nothing to say, or if He does, you'd prefer it written so you can go and read it somewhere private. So everyone's heard Elder Parminder's series on relationships, and you know that he has discussed this topic - many aspects of it. We'll be discussing relationships, but particularly sex.
20:05 - As you might imagine, historical societies never wanted to talk about sex. So historical societies would meet and talk about ancient Greece, but they would just pretend sex was not part of it. That attitude did not change until the late 1970s. So it's not a new subject for us. This is a new subject externally, only being really discussed in historical societies since about 1978, when a book was published called, "Greek Homosexuality". It opened up that discussion in mainstream societies. So by the time you get to the 1980s, they're finally starting to address this topic, but as you might imagine, everyone comes to that topic hoping to see what they want to see. Making arguments that fit their present day desires, for what they want to see in present day society.
22:20 - So that's the difficulty with it being a new subject, and a sensitive subject. One of the reasons I've not shared many articles about this subject, on the "Media Boadcast" is that it is almost impossible to find a source that isn't touched by bias. The issue is foreign language when we try and understand ancient civilizations like Greece. We're dealing with an ancient language, and then it all gets into Latin. So when you go back to their language, they had no word that meant, or that was a replacement for our modern word, "homosexual".
24:05 - They had no equivalent. So when you go to a liberal article and they quote Plato, and he's going to say that homosexual relationships are positive, you know that's not what he's saying in a modern day context. He is not using the modern term for homosexual and he could not be using their equivalent, because they had none. So there's issue with translation. The third issue is bias. They don't quote Plato towards the end of his life, when he said that the same-sex relationships they did have, were essentially an abomination, because he changed his positions over the course of his life.
25:55 - So bias becomes an issue. Referring to The Sacred Band of Thebes, "3000 years ago in ancient Greece, being gay or lesbian was not a crime. In fact in certain situations the Greeks even encouraged homosexual relationships." That's just wrong. We can't go into a confusing area of history and make it what we want, because that tiny phrase in certain situations, frankly that tiny qualifier, is not big enough to fix how much they've twisted the history. Most liberal sources will take their biases to Greek history, as well as conservative ones. The fourth issue is male perspective. It's all written from a male perspective.
28:02 - So if you want to know what a woman's experience was, or what a woman thought in ancient Greece and Rome, generally you're not going to find anything. When they see men describe or illustrate a woman's sexual experience, much like male directors of movies today, they don't end up illustrating a true female experience. They can see this even in those societies when they're illustrating women having sex. One thing that people have trouble with, is that a woman can have pleasure without being penetrated. They didn't like that fact. So their sexism shows even in their art.
30:05 - The other issue is contradictions. Any society has a variety of experiences and perspectives. Less back then than now, I would suggest because even more so back then, you belonged to the state. But still today, some of the people who will be left the most famous, do not represent the lives of normal society. So there's the danger of pulling out one case and thinking that somehow is a representative of general society. We're covering a time period of hundreds, even thousands of years. When you go from Mesopotamia, Assyria, to the end of Pagan Rome.
32:05 - All of them have famous legends or famous people that may look out of the ordinary. What we want to see is the positions of their government and general society. In the first decade of the 1900s, two women in Spain who got married and then fled, are not representative of general society in 1905 Spain. The conservative faction of the Catholic Church reveres two women to a much higher extent than the liberal - Lucia and Mary. But what is the experience of normal conservative Catholic women, compared to a liberal Catholic women? Does the conservatives' worship of female goddesses, and prophetesses, make them view ordinary women better?
34:15 - Just like Papal Rome, same with Pagan Rome. Doesn't matter if a society has goddesses. That doesn't mean that women in their societies are treated particularly well. So we have to watch out for seeming contradictions and look to general society as much as we can. The last difficulty is the limitations of presenting with this format. We can't read a lot, and it's similar to how difficult it was to teach parts of Protestantism, and I ended up just stating things as fact, because this perspective had either been gleaned from many different sources, or from the audio of a 30-hour book.
36:02 - This is a more difficult subject than the history of Protestantism, and once I started to come to what is my position on this subject, I found there were almost no sources that I could agree with even 80 percent. In fact in my notes, there's one source where I have one sentence, because I couldn't stand anything but one sentence, but they worded the one sentence nicely, so I saved it. So I know this is a subject where people have many different positions, then when a secular author discusses this, and then brings in the Bible, they make a terrible mess.
38:00 - Ancient Greece. Quoting Aristotle, I have three quotes. He says, "The female is as it were a deformed male." He says, "The relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior." And, "To ruler, to ruled. The male, unless constituted in some respect contrary to nature, is by nature more expert at leading, than the female. And the elder and complete than the younger and incomplete." 40:03 - So Aristotle is known for his sexism, but he's by no means alone. Some of their writers, philosophers and poets had even worse views. Some, like Plato, had better views, but even Plato, if you see him comprehensively, was still quite sexist. So they see the male as vastly superior to the female. They talk about reason over emotion. The intellect, but especially the body. This is where we need to take ourselves from modern day society and plant ourselves in Greek society, and put our modern-day brain to one side for the moment. This is a time of hot war and Olympic Games. Muscle, power, and skill is embodied in the masculine.
42:18 - We could think of women as being revered for being able to birth children, but remember, many of them did not think that a woman contributed anything to to the offspring. This is where the idea of a seed comes from. You plant your seed, and everything's in that seed to become an oak. They see sperm as the seed. In fact, when one man killed his mother, one of their poets argued that he couldn't be convicted of killing a blood relative because his mother never contributed to him. So a mother could not be a blood relative!
44:13 - She was the soil that grew the seed. There was at times a popular view that a woman's period was sperm, but because she was deformed she couldn't keep sperm alive, and it would exit her body with blood. So not very good views of women. Their worship of the physical form was concentrated heavily on the masculine. The Greek ideal of beauty was embodied most perfectly in the male youth. We have to understand it in that way. Our mindset in the 21st century is different. If you were to ask a lot of people today, what is the human embodiment of perfect beauty?
46:08 - The accepted, secular answer is Beyonce. She's the queen. She embodies perfect beauty. But back then, true, perfect beauty was masculine, not feminine, because of the construct of their whole society and mindset. It was similar for the Romans. The embodiment of perfection was the male youth, and they revered that beauty. Youth for them being about 13 to late 20s. Puberty to 20s. How their society operated generally was with the practice of pederasty.
48:00 - "The ideal pederastic relationship in ancient Greece involved an erastes (an older male, usually in his mid- to late-20s) and an eromenos (a younger male who has passed puberty, usually no older than 18". So we're discussing how society generally operated for the Greeks. They would develop relationships between an older male and a young male. Before subscribing morality to anything, we should put ourselves back in their mindset. The erastes was the teacher. The eromenos was the student. While there was a form of sex involved, there was the physical, this is a teacher-student relationship.
50:00 - The teacher is expected to take on a young Greek male and teach him how to be a good Greek warrior, a good Greek politician, or a good Greek citizen. The teacher is mid to late twenties. The student just had to have passed puberty. There is a grey area. It wasn't always strictly this. So depending on the source, I'll say 13 to 18/21. Pretty much as soon as they could see his body, his height, and any beard develop, then he would no longer be seen as a student. Now he was an adult man. They trace this social construct back to Crete. There isn't universal agreement of where it came from, but they believe about 700 B.C.
52:00 - Really coming out of a Greek, male dominated culture - social culture. So a male dominated culture, and delayed marriage for aristocrats. The common practice of having male conferences. The prevalence of the social exclusion of women. Both art and literary references show that the eromenos was at least a teen, ages ranging from about 13 to 20. In unusual cases it could be lasting up until 30, but that was unusual. The most settled age range is about 15 to 17. The erastes teacher would see a young boy that he liked, and he would start to pursue this young man, offering him gifts and praise.
54:07 - He would need to convince the young man, or child really. It was meant to be a mentorship program, but there was also a sexual component and a relationship. They could stay in a friendship for the rest of their lives. This is one of the reasons that people start tying, what they would say is homosexuality, to pedophilia. Because they look at this with a modern definition and it's nothing more than pedophilia.
56:00 - "The age-range when boys entered into such relationships was consonant with that of Greek girls given in marriage, often to adult husbands many years their senior. Boys, however, usually had to be courted and were free to choose their mate, while marriages for girls were arranged for economic and political advantage at the discretion of father and suitor." So if you want to tie this to pedophilia, you would equally have to tie their heterosexual marriages to pedophilia. Except in their heterosexual marriages, the girls were generally not even given a choice. So the link people try to make to so-called homosexuality, and pedophilia is a lie. It doesn't hold water.
58:05 - "Examining Greek Pederastic Relationships. The power dynamics involved in such a relationship, with the erastes always in control, ensured that the erastes kept his dignity as a fully-functioning member of Greek society, while the eromenos grew up under the tutelage of such a man and as such could become a great citizen when he reached adulthood... Ideal pederastic couples were ones whose relationship directly benefitted their Greek society." So the older would teach the younger about politics, military and society. "The evidence for the ideal pederastic relationship being the most common in Greece is overwhelming..." 60:06 - But remember contradictions. There are standout cases of people breaking that model. So you know about The Sacred Band of Thebes. The liberal will say, "Look at that beautiful group of 150 gay couples." I would argue this is not today's Jim Obergefell and John Arthur, because these couples could not be composed of equals. For every couple in The Sacred Band of Thebes, one would have to be an older teacher and one would have to be a younger student. Now they were likely closer in age than 13 and 30, because this student is fighting in a war.
61:55 - But regardless of how that band constructed their army, there had to be a hierarchical difference. There was a sexual relationship in the vast majority of cases, there was a physical component. "The ancient Greeks did not conceive of sexual orientation as a social identifier as modern Western societies have done. Greek society did not distinguish sexual desire or behavior by the gender of the participants, but rather by the role that each participant played in the sex act, that of active penetrator or passive penetrated. This active/passive polarization corresponded with dominant and submissive social roles: the active (penetrative) role was associated with masculinity, higher social status, and adulthood, while the passive role was associated with femininity, lower social status, and youth. 64:25 - Given the importance in Greek society of cultivating the masculinity of the adult male and the perceived feminizing effect of being the passive partner, relations between adult men of comparable social status were considered highly problematic, and usually associated with social stigma." So what they couldn't tolerate was a John Arthur and a Jim Obergefell, because remember, they worship masculinity, and one of those men would have to be a female. And what are women? Nothing good. "This stigma, however, was reserved for only the passive partner in the relationship." 66:00 - So if you had two equal males, and they had sex, both of them do not receive the censure, or the stigma of society. The person who was the dominant party, or the one who penetrated, still retains all of his masculinity. Society does not condemn him. They're fine with him, because sex for them is not attached to the gender of the participants, but they have gendered the act. I hope that makes sense. They would look at a male penetrating, or being dominant to another male as fine - just as masculine. The stigma is reserved for anyone approaching the female. "According to contemporary opinion, Greek males who engaged in passive anal sex after reaching the age of manhood - at which point they were expected to take the reverse role in pederastic relationships and become the active and dominant member - thereby were feminized or "made a woman" of themselves. 68:00 - There is ample evidence in the theater of Aristophanes that derides these passive men and gives a glimpse of the type of biting social opprobrium and shame heaped upon them by their society." So liberals today, look back at Greek society and try and draw out examples of a society that tolerated same-sex relationships. Conservatives look back and try and link pedophilia to it, and I would argue both are wrong. I would argue that Greek society did not tolerate same-sex relationships among equals.
69:50 - If you're a typical, especially a middle or higher class ranked Greek male, from puberty, you become a student of a Greek man. An adult who will train you. You'll be courted by him. You may have a number of suitors and you will end up choosing one. There's evidence that the fathers of these boys would hope that they were really pretty and handsome, so they would attract a better teacher. They'd become an eromenos student. This was mostly education but there was a, supposed to be restrained, but still existent, sexual relationship. Around 18 to 21 you reach adulthood and this relationship has to end.
72:00 - You cannot stay in a physical relationship with your teacher because you're now an adult, and he's an adult. Now you're equals and to continue any physical relationship would mean one of them would be seen as feminised. So certainly the education stops, and certainly any physical relationship stops too. From roughly 21 to 30 this person then becomes erastes and finds another young boy. He has a physical relationship with him and trains him into adulthood. Then that relationship has to end, and at about 30 they marry a girl of 13 and up, 13-16, who is not generally given much of a choice.
73:55 - Tomorrow I want to expand this simple explanation further and look at the similarities and differences to this, that existed in Rome and Egypt. But the point I'm making, if you want to see the significance of what society began to accept in 1989, it was not that society finally looked back at that good Greek civilization and learned something. Because if John Arthur met Jim Obergefell in a bar, that relationship would have been no more tolerated in Greece than in conservative American society today. Because this is not a homosexual or gay relationship.
5. Patriarchy and Homophobia within Paganism (27-08-2021).
04:50 - If you haven't already, please watch Daniel's presentation earlier.
06:00 - START OF CLASS We come to the reform line of the priests we understand it consists of four dispensations; plowing, early rain, latter rain, harvest; 1989, 2001, 2014, 2019, 2021. Within every dispensation there is an Increase of Knowledge and a Formalisation. Our Increase of Knowledge was an internal message combined with an external event. The internal message was the Apis Bull. It's interesting that the Apis Bull takes us back to paganism which is our subject for this camp meeting, connecting with an external event, the death of George Floyd - counter revolution.
08:32 - We're in the Formalisation now, this camp meeting marking the internal Formalisation of the Message. The Taliban have taken over Afghanistan twice now. Connects to the 1979-1989 Afghanistan war. The Taliban began to form after 1989. When did they take Afghanistan? 1996. A short time ago they took it for the second time.
10:00 - At the beginning of our reform line, in the plowing, at the Formalisation of the Message, the Taliban took Afghanistan, and the Taliban and their associates, we can trace all the way from 1979, through our reform line. Through 2001, 2014, 2019. We come over to our harvest and they retook Afghanistan. They took [the capital] in a day. What day did they take the capital and sat in the seat of the president? They entered and then took the capital on the 15th of August. What is the 15th of August a symbol of? Formalisation of the message. I take no joy in the progress of the Taliban any more than the events on September 11, 2001.
12:00 - But we have to say the prophetic fit. That God is showing us where we stand in history through an understanding of parables and reform lines. We've had the event for the Increase of Knowledge of the harvest, which coincided with the opening up of a message. Through this time we've also seen the rise of the Taliban as the US began to withdraw, and on the 15th of August, which symbolises the Exeter camp meeting, they took Kabul. So we recognise that we are in the Formalisation of the Message. As the disciples in the upper room started to understand the implications to the parables of Christ, the implications of using parable methodology combined with correctly understanding history. We spent most of the last 14 or 15 months demonstrating that to understand Adventism we have to understand the history of Protestantism.
14:10 - What we are recognising now is if we want to understand ancient Israel, we have to understand the history of paganism, and the mindset of paganism. Misunderstanding history is as destructive as using the wrong methodology. We need to understand ancient Israel because if we come to the subject of gay marriage, no one's going to give you an Ellen White quote. They're going to give you a Bible verse. So if we want to understand Adventism we have to understand Protestantism, and if we're going to understand Genesis to Revelation, we have to understand paganism. So in the first presentation we explained why gay and lesbian marriage is a subject we need to discuss.
16:05 - In the second and third presentations we showed how it is a key theme of our reform line at every important way mark. We understood 2014 again as the midpoint. Everything turning on that year, and the year before, and the year after. When a lesbian couple and then a gay couple dismantled DOMA, which set up the scene for a war with conservativism in 2016. We all know how that went. Then at the beginning of the fourth presentation we asked the question, Is this significant? In 6000 years of history, are these external events significant? Is what the United States has done, just a return to some old Greek way of living?
18:10 - Is this, as many conservatives believe, just the immorality of pagan Rome, or is something quite different, without precedent, taking place. So we've gone back to that history. We're focusing most of our attention on Greece. We discussed the obstacles to understanding the sexuality in pagan nations. Only since about 1978 has the world externally been willing to discuss ancient sexuality. The issue with how foreign languages can be translated to suit people's particular narrative. The issue that since 1978 to now, all of those people are approaching this history with a bias.
20:05 - The fact that pretty much all of our ancient history is written by a man, from a male perspective. The fact that these ancient societies might not have been as diverse as our own, but still had diversity of opinions. And the fact that it took us about a year to go through 200 years of Protestant history, and we're meant to go through a couple thousand years of pagan history in four presentations. But the lesson that I particularly want us to take from it is not really a complex one, because there are differences between Egypt, Greece and Rome, but there's really one common way of thinking that encompasses all of them.
22:00 - Looking at Greece we had to recognise that they think differently than we do now. When we discuss modern relationships it's thankfully easy to do that without focusing on sex, but because of the way that they viewed marriage and sex back then, it's impossible to go back without discussing it in detail. This also applies to ancient Israel. if you're getting married in a traditional ceremony back in the history of ancient Israel, the husband and wife would go through the ceremony and then they would go to a set up room and consummate their marriage (have sex). And all their family and friends would hang around the room excited, knowing what was happening on the other side of the wall. We would be horrified if that happened to us today, but they weren't really married until this whole ceremony, including the night, had taken place.
24:15 - One of the issues with even the word "homosexuality" today, is that there's still this idea that it's all about sex, and it's really not. When you see an elderly husband and wife that have loved each other for 50 years, their bond is not based on just some type of sexual relationship. It's something I'm not sure if humanity is in a place to even fully explain or express what happens between two people. And I don't know how to say it except to say, a spiritual level.
25:40 - By the time John Arthur's health started to fail, you know that after 40 years went Thea Spyer's health started to fail, that relationship is not sex-based. Jim Obergefell will not have another partner or husband because he still goes to bed every night and wants to tell John Arthur about his day. It's not a bond that is sex-based. Neither is the attraction. When a man and a woman are attracted to one another, we know when that is done right it is not purely physical. There is a deeper bond that cannot be fully explained. Not suggesting it doesn't take work. There was a gang of women going around at one point in time, and they would attack a man.
28:00 - I think their motivation was stealing sperm. I don't really understand why, but they would forcefully masturbate him. Now he's just been kidnapped. Does he want to have an erection and masturbate? No, but for a lot of people, just with touch it's not possible to to remain in full control. That doesn't mean there's that level of emotion or connection between the participants. So when you see these examples in Greek society, they thought so differently to us in how they gendered the act, that doesn't compare it to homosexuality today. Their society, their culture, viewed relationships and sex differently.
30:00 - Quoting from Ruth Mazo Karras, professor of history at the University of Minnesota, and author of a number of books focusing on issues of gender and sexuality. She normally focuses on medieval Europe, but here she's gone back into particularly Greece. This is titled, "Active/Passive, Acts/Passions: Greek and Roman Sexualities, published by Oxford University Press. She begins by explaining how this topic opened up externally in 1978, and what a difficult topic it has been, with people forming whole theories based upon the interpretation of a couple of words.
32:02 - and fight for those theories vehmenently. "The reasons are not far to seek: scholars' approaches to issues of gender and sexuality often have real-world political antecedents or ramifications, which they see no reason to hide." (Ibid.)She says almost everyone agrees on two things. The first is that these ancient societies viewed sexuality differently to us. The second thing practically everyone agrees on is, their view of the active and the passive. "...that the ancient world, both Greek and Roman, categorized sexual behaviors or identities not by the gender of the participants but by the sexual role each played." 34:10 - "Both moderate and strong social constructionists have tended to agree that gender roles, masculine or feminine, active or passive, were more important than object choice in the ancient world. Key to the distinction of gender roles was the concept that men are active and women are passive, or that men are penetrators and women are penetrated. Thus anyone who is penetrated, or is in other ways passive..." (not just penetration, passive itself) "...is gendered feminine, and anyone who penetrates is masculine. For the Romans, to penetrate other men could be a sign of masculinity. Women who penetrate and men who are penetrated are seen not primarily as sexual deviants but as gender transgressors." (Ibid.) And if when you gender transgress you become female, deformed, inferior, ruled, led, young or incomplete, that's not a good thing.
36:00 - When a man did that, they had names for him. This was an area where people form passionate theories on the definition of two words. I believe there are two versions, because it existed for both Greeks and Romans. It's a really derogatory term, an awful term if you lived back then; kinaidos and cinaedus (Ibid.). There is evidence that these terms weren't just kept for men who slept submissively with other men, but if they seemed in anyway effeminate, or even immoral with women, with their definition of immorality, which is not ours. But there is evidence that these terms could also be translated today in some contexts, with a six-letter F word, that has been used against homosexuals.
38:05 - So their view of two men in a relationship as equals was not good. "This way of understanding sex as something someone does to someone else seems fairly common in ancient Mediterranean culture, although is a long way from modern understandings of homosexuality as related to the gender of object choice, not the gender of act performed. The idea that is only the passive man or active woman who is perverted, not the man who penetrates another man or the woman who is penetrated by another woman, certainly survived well into this entry." (Ibid.) So what she is saying is that there are remnants of this type of thinking in society today, and she connects that to the idea held among the North American public - that gay men are effeminate and lesbians are masculine.
40:00 - Much of that is is not true. It's formed through a social construct. There's a really good youtube video where they take these two men, they're interviewed and you see them interact in daily life. Then it asks, Which one is gay, which one is heterosexual? So one was homosexual, one was heterosexual. I'm avoiding using the terms gay and straight because I don't think that's a nice way to put it. I'll say homosexual, heterosexual. What they were doing, is showing the one that had this high-pitched voice, who seemed more effeminate, was actually the one who was heterosexual. He was married with children, and the other man with with the deep voice and the muscles was homosexual. They explained how this idea that gay men are effeminate, and lesbians are masculine, is a social construct, at least to a degree.
42:20 - I'm not suggesting people aren't being themselves, but there's a social construct and a discriminatory idea behind that view, and she's linking that back to most of Earth's history, when gender was seen in the act, not in the person themselves. "The fact that there is more than one way of understanding homosexual behavior in contemporary culture, should remind us that the ancients did not have a unitary view of it either. Attitudes varied from archaic to classical Greece to Rome and varied too within a given polis." (Ibid.) But as I said at the beginning there's always variations, but we're discussing what was legally tolerated.
44:15 - I don't really care about what one of their gods did. In general, if John Arthur was gay in the 1950s, he lost his job, when he committed to a relationship with someone who was of the same gender. How would that have been tolerated in ancient Greece? We've just discussed what same-sex relations they did have, through the practice of pederasty. So when you're a 13 year old male, you'll be courted by a much older man. He's primarily your teacher. When you reach adulthood - height, beard - the relationship must end. Any type of sexual relationship for sure ended there. You have to go find a young boy and then at about 30 you have to marry a woman.
46:10 - She shows how two historians have discussed this, and said that even though this was popular among the elites, that among the mass of the Athenian people, the mass of the lower class people condemned both active and passive partners. So for much of the lower classes it didn't even matter if you're the active male. There was an abundance of social stigma, and you see this debate of, tolerate it or see it as an abomination, just in the writings of Plato. "The mainstream of majority view of a given culture whether that of today or antiquity is created in large part by a dominant masculine discourse." 48:00 - "Yet the kinaidos clearly was understood as someone who enjoyed being anally penetrated, whether or not this was the core of his identity. Even if it were the immoderacy of his desire rather than his passive role that was important, he was still fundamentally a gender transgressor, feminine in that immoderacy. The kinaidos comes in for far more censure than a man with an immoderate desire to penetrate although the latter also can meet with disapproval" (Ibid.) So how would a general society treat the people of today, who would have wanted to be a Thea Spyer or a John Arthur? Because you go back into these cultures, into ancient civilizations, and sex was everywhere, but what's the issue? Every single time it must work off this construct - male role v female role.
50:00 - Female in brackets because it's not that she's a woman. It might be a man. Frankly it might be an animal, just as long as it's not the god they worshipped - masculinity. So why could underage people by today's standard be penetrated or play a submissive role? Two reasons: 1. They were often not penetrated. They would do other things. Sex between the thighs or masturbation, but the key point is the age, and what does Aristotle say about the young? Young comes under the title female. Formed, deformed; not fully formed, still has development; superior, inferior;
52:00 - ruler, ruled; leader, led; older, younger. There's a reason that he connects the female with young, and that's the only reason that they tolerated those same-sex relationships, because up until he had a little stubble on his chin, he is female. As soon as he becomes male then, you do not want to be associated with female. Which means, as people say today, "Be a man", or "Man up". She discusses Rome for a moment. Kinaidos was the word used by Greece, while cinaedus was the slur used by Rome. She says, "Most of what survives about 'cinaedus' is the vilification, which shows us how intensely, at least one segment of Roman society equated masculinity with penetrative, sexual behavior." (Ibid.)
54:10 - She touches on women. She quotes a second century A.D. historian who placed female-female intercourse in his category of dreams about unnatural sexual acts, and distinguished between dreams of being the active and passive partner. She's quoting a modern person, "...suggests that these acts, a lesbian, sexual act, was perceived as unnatural because they failed to recreate patterns of social dominance. They perpetuated the penetrator, penetrated dichotomy, without that dichotomy corresponding to positions in the social hierarchy, as it was usually assumed today." (Ibid.)
56:15 - So it was even harder with women, because they really couldn't recreate that sexual hierarchy.
57:00 - ROME."Latin lacks words that would precisely translate homosexual or heterosexual the primary dichotomy of ancient Rome's sexuality was active, dominant, masculine, passive, submissive, feminine. Roman society was patriarchal and the freeborn, male citizen possessed political liberty and the right to rule both himself and his household. The conquest mentality shaped same-sex relations." 58:00 - "Roman men were free to enjoy sex with other males without a perceived loss of masculinity or social status, as long as they took the dominant or penetrative role. Acceptable male partners were slaves, former slaves, prostitutes, or entertainers." So the similarity between Greek and Roman society, is they think the same way. They see men and women very similarly. The worship of masculinity, and the patriarchal model is consistent. Now the difference, Roman society did not have pederasty. This is Greek. So a Roman man was happy to have sex with anyone or anything.
60:10 - The only thing that mattered, that gendered you a true man, was the role you played. But because they did not have pederasty, no free, male citizen was an option. I know there's exceptions where people broke through the normal status quo, where someone homosexual by today's definition, did have committed relationships, but in general society if you just wanted to have sex and were still attracted to masculine beauty - and I want to make the point, that is not homosexuality, that is not being gay as it's understood today. They always worshipped the male body.
62:00 - And having that kind of a variety of sexual partners was just normal. That's not how we understand being gay or lesbian today. But if you were a Roman and you wanted a committed relationship, if you were a John Arthur and you saw a Jim Obergerfell at the other side of the room, unless one of those is a slave, prostitute or entertainer, and you're happy just to have a sexual relationship on the side, then that relationship was not tolerated in ancient Rome. The morality of the behaviour depended on the social standing of the partner, not the gender of the partner.
64:20 - You see a change in the art here, between Greece and Rome. Inh Greece people make it sound like there's a lot of vases and carvings showing these same-sex relationships. But when you put that in the context of the thousands of carvings that they actually have access to, it isn't that many. But there still are a significant amount of illustrations of these relationships and the sex act. When it comes to how they are illustrated in Greece, they would illustrate erastes (the teacher) with the eromenos (the student) as both naked.
66:05 - The erasted (teacher) would have an erection, clearly sexually excited. The eromenos (student), practically never. He's always seen with this blank expression staring off into the distance, and without an erection. The reason being that in a few short years, this student will become a man, and it would have seemed improper if it appeared that he was in any way enjoying the sexual side of that relationship. Now this causes a fight between historians where some say this was just abuse and this student is just traumatised, and others say what is carved cannot have been real life. There must have been cases where the student was participating or enjoying the act.
68:03 - But what it does show you, is how society viewed them. That even here, this submissive, because he will be a male one day, cannot be seen to be deriving pleasure from the acts. Now when you come to Rome it's different. In many of their illustrations you can see both parties sexually excited in that sex act. The reason for that, is that the submissive, when it came to those Roman relationships, would never attain the level of a free, male citizen. So you didn't have to try and preserve them for some later date, when they really are properly masculine. For Greece, the submissive youth would one day be expected to fight for and lead the country,
70:00 - with a normal or high social status. In Rome, the submissive did not have that hope. So the Romans did not mind illustrating the submissive as deriving sexual pleasure. Now we come to Constantine. This part gets really interesting because this mindset did not change. When we see Constantine bring in his so-called Christian laws, it was based on what they already approved of in Roman society. "Nevertheless, the concept of sexuality behind the laws did not change. The added interpretation by Constantine specified a crime which consisted of a male of high status, being forced or coerced into an act in which he played the passive sexual role, and consequently moved outside of his gender role."What I would really like to dismantle, is the idea that paganism was progressive and Christianity came in and ruined everything. 72:35 - These quotes are from the African Human Rights Law Journal, "The Influence of Roman Laws Regarding Same-Sex Acts on Homophobia in Africa" by Susan Haskin. She's a lecturer at the Department of Ancient Languages in the University of Pretoria, South Africa. "A law was published in 438 and is recorded in the Theodosian Code 97678. This law refers to the disgraceful custom some men have of acting in a passive role, like a woman, during sexual intercourse. In both cases, a man taking the passive role, that of the woman, in sexual intercourse, is the object of this law rather than all men engaging in same-sex acts. Considering that these edicts do not institute a new crime but instead encourage the enforcement of the existing laws on same-sex acts." - laws they already had.
75:05 - Essentially Rome is the same as Greece but without the pederasty. Both are heavily based on sexism, on the idea of a passive role, and this is the mindset that dominates the pagan world, from Egypt up and through the time of Constantine. You still see it today, with how gay and lesbian people are viewed. 76:10 - Which is based on this idea, between the masculinity of penetration, all that comes connected with that. Which I would suggest is just Apis Bull mentality. This is just the pagan Apis Bull worship of masculinity, and what ancient Israel couldn't recognise in Christ when He didn't operate with that mindset. EGYPT. I don't have much to say about Egypt. It's a complicated history but I want to discuss the Kahun Papyri. 78:05 - It was discovered in 1889. You would find it at the University College of London. It's one of the largest collections of papyri ever found and it's dated to c.1825 B.C. We've seen the mindset that existed under pagan Rome, even under Constantine, and we're going back nearly 2,000 years. It contains something called, The Osiris Myth. There are many stories about these two people throughout ancient Egyptian literature. That is Seth and Horus, but I just want to refer to one of these stories, the one found in this papyrus.
80:05 - Seth is the uncle, Horus is the nephew, and of course this is all myth. It's not a true story, because they talk about their gods and incantations, but it is a view into the way they thought. So it reads kind of like a Disney fairy tale, where there's this wicked uncle, and a fight between them over the throne of Egypt. The nephew is popular and the uncle is unpopular. So the uncle becomes really jealous and he tries to chase Horus away or even kill him. When he fails to drive his nephew away, he decides to just humiliate him until he is banned from Egypt.
82:00 - So the uncle, Seth wants the throne, he's jealous. seth decides the way to get rid of the nephew, Horus, is to humiliate him and have him banned from the country. So Seth hosts a party. He gets Horus as drunk as he can and then he takes his nephew to bed, and tries to penetrate Horus, but Horus was not as drunk as he thought. Instead he moves his body and catches the semen in his hand, but Seth didn't know that. He thought his plan was successful and he had penetrated Horus. Then Horus runs to his mother and says, "Do you know what my uncle just tried to do last night!" She gets really angry and gives her nephew a plan. She says, "Go masturbate and put your semen into Seth's food." Now they move to the gods. So Seth eats his food which contains the semen of his nephew. He drags his nephew before the court of the gods. What he's essentially accusing his nephew of, is playing the passive partner in a sexual act.
84:55 - So the gods call the semen to exit the body as evidence to see if this was true, and when they do that, semen leaves the body of the uncle but not the nephew. Seth is embarrassed and flees. So in their mind, did it matter that both took part in the sexual act? Seth is not gay. He wants his nephew killed, or at least banished. Everyone knows it doesn't matter if they both took part in the act. What matters is who was the submissive.
86:20 - Who was unfortunate enough to be gendered as female. Can we see how sexist this is? That there is nothing worse that could happen for these male citizens, than to be considered to be gendered as female. No one particularly cared about sex itself. Prostitution was everywhere. Whatever you do, do not be female. This is the sexism that ruled the ancient world. There's clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia known as the Summa Alu, and they list tens of thousands of omens for various actions.
88:00 - If you do this thing, then good will come to you. If you do this other thing then bad will come to you. "One such section deals with sexual acts eventually touching upon homosexuality". I'll stop there because I'll disagree again with an error in the source. This is not homosexuality. Not as we know it today. "If a man copulates with his equal from the rear, this ancient Babylonian text teaches he becomes the leader among his peers and brothers. One can conclude from this, that this act, especially from the dominant perspective, is fundamentally empowering. 90:00 - This is how many, especially those who want to conclude that ancient Mesopotamia had a positive view of homosexuality, read the law. However the fact that it was empowering for the giving partner is the key point, for there must then be a reverse effect. From both our ancient Egyptian myths and our Mesopotamian omens, a fuller picture. One of degradation for the receiving partner, begins to emerge." So if true men are equals and one is considered to have played the dominant role in sex, he becomes superior and the leader of all the other men. But then the opposite must be true. If a man is considered to apply the submissive role, he becomes degraded and lower in status than the other men. So if you want to rule, what do you do?
91:55 - This date is not exact to the year, or probably even the decade, but it's a close enough estimate. They know the generation. To what date does Ussher place the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? 1897 B.C. Neither date are exact. I'm content to hold to the idea that we're talking about the same generation. This isn't even trying to take the idea of Greece, let alone Constantine, and put it on Sodom and Gomorrah. This is Egypt and Mesopotamia in the same generation. This mindset of sex as being a patriarchal act, this extremely misogynistic view of women and the ideas of submission, can be traced with consistency through Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and pagan Rome, with legacy issues today.
94:25 - By the time we get to recent histoy, what were women fighting for in the Sexual Revolution? Dismantling this same mindset that has remained intrinsically connected to the act of sex. And this is not the mindset of Christianity, introduced by Christianity. This is consistent classic paganism. None of it is understanding or tolerating equal gay or lesbian relationships. None of it is from a principle of equality or human rights.
96:05 - Not considering Adventism, not considering this movement, just tracing the external, what happened to the United States that made 2015 possible? We'll look at that tomorrow.
6. Is The Glorious Land Pagan? (28-08-2021).
05:15 - START OF CLASS. So I've been covering ancient history. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to understanding pagan history and sexuality there, is this issue of bias. People with differing views go back to
06:00 - this history to try and demonstrate evidence for their worldview. So someone will go back and say, "See homosexuality has been around forever! Proof, look at all this male-male sex in Greece. Another side will say, "Modern America! So pagan! Look at the immorality of pagan Rome illustrated in the west today!". I would like to suggest that both arguments are equally incorrect. Both are manipulating ancient history to defend their preferred worldview. Distorting history to fit a present-day argument.
08:00 - Question: I'm still speaking about men, not women, because it's so much easier to see in paganism, because women were so trapped in these societies, but the arguments equally apply to women. If a man has sexual encounters with other men does that make him a homosexual? Does that mean he must be gay? So all of these Greek men were gay? I would argue no. My defense is the following. In the 1950s is it culturally acceptable to be homosexual? No they would lose their jobs, they would lose their families. It was like just being a leper cast out of society.
10:00 - So those gay men in the 1950s, they fitted into what society expected of them. They married women, started families, had children. So they had a woman fall in love with them, proposed to her, stood at the altar, and married her. Had an erection had sex with her,
11:00 - raised children with her. In any of that timeline did those gay men become heterosexual? No, that's what is so sad about those marriages and that history. You look back at when they did that and there was always something missing from those marriages. So if it is possible for a gay man to act as a heterosexual to fit into society, to have sex with a woman and still be gay, it is possible for a Greek heterosexual man, when society tells him it is normal and expected, to do sexual acts with a young boy, he'll just go along with that. The gay man could become sexually aroused
13:00 - the heterosexual man can also. That's just how sex works for a lot of people. But as I said yesterday there's something missing. Those 1950 marriages were never complete. There was a deep soul need in the heart of those men that was never met, and it wasn't all about sex.
14:00 - The attractions and connections we form with people run so much deeper. So my point is, these Greek and Roman societies were not composed of all these homosexuals, by anything approaching the definition of what it means to be gay or lesbian today. A Roman man could dominate just about anyone or anything that he saw, be confident in his status of masculinity because he dominated, and then go home to his wife. In a cultural context - a set of rules, a Greek man could do the same. Just make sure you get married at 30.
16:00 - So you can continue that process of raising new little students to become new teachers. Now my argument is not that homosexuality did not exist. There is abundant evidence that it did. There were gay men and lesbian women through all of these histories. The question I wanted answered was, if they're so progressive, could anyone in those societies be an Edith Windsor and a Thea Spyer, or John Arthur and a Jim Obergefell? My response is no, because these societies were deeply homophobic and patriarchal.
18:00 - That despite their same-sex relationships in that precise cultural context, they were not progressive societies. If you fell in love with another person of the same gender, if you're a woman you don't have many options, if you're a man you'd better hope they're a slave or a prostitute. If they're a slave you can go to his owner and say, "Can I borrow him?" and the owner would say, "Sure!". But that is not a relationship. Everything is built upon the idea of power. Power and status, not relationship. You had to have the power as a man because the minute you slipped you became female, and that was seen as an extreme degradation.
20:00 - So we've illustrated that through a number of societies. What we wanted to do was go right back to early history. We talked about the Kahun Papyri and the Summa Alu. So we could go back and stretch that mindset beyond the history of Greece. We were able to go back as far as the same generation as Sodom and Gomorrah, to see that the evidence of the mindset in Greece and Rome, was not a just a unique and unpopular mindset, but of all of the things historians disagree on, almost all of them agree on this one thing.
22:05 - That the dominant mindset around sexuality for the ancient world was centered around power - the dominant and the submissive. So they went to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt to see the time of Sodom and Gomorrah. The uncle and the nephew, Seth and Horus, they were not in love, there wasn't some type of spark or attraction between them, the acts were culturally common, as enacting the ideas of dominance and power. It takes the idea of toxic masculinity to a whole new level.
24:00 - I would suggest if we can trace it from Rome back to the time of Sodom and Gomorrah, the idea that the world before the flood was full of practicing, gay and lesbian men and women, and that is why the flood came, is absolute insanity. Then we went to the time period of Assyria. "Like other Roman collections the Summa Alu developed over the course of several hundreds of years, around the middle of the seventh century B.C." So what we read about the Summa Alu was around 700 B.C.
26:00 - And that's when we read that the concept of pederasty was first beginning maybe in Crete. We didn't go into Babylon, I just made the claim it was the same. The little that I did review, it sounded even worse. Then we looked at Greece and Rome, and we continued with Rome all the way to Constantine. I think the last law we looked at was 438 A.D. So we've covered a time span from around 800 B.C. or 900 B.C. to almost 438 - 550 A.D.
27:55 - The dominant thought for that time period (almost two and a half thousand years), is that the sex act is a ritual of reenaction, of domination and submission. It doesn't matter who you have it with, as long as you are dominant. As long as no one can question your masculinity. Of course there's many variations through that. The Greek lower classes for example would would ridicule both. But note, none of these societies are considering gay marriage. It's not even a question. Some people will claim there's lots of evidence that they considered gay marriage.
30:00 - When you ask for the evidence they always start with Nero. I would argue that to prove something was tolerated culturally, Nero forcefully castrating a man to try and turn him into a woman and then marrying him, is not a good example. They'll go to another emperor who referred to one of his slaves as his husband. When they look at the responses of the common people to these things, society always responded with ridicule. They're not examples of the need or desire for a same-sex, committed marriage.
32:00 - I suggest we just have the continuation of a similar mindset today. That that thread of connecting sex with domination and submission is still here in our mindset. You can thread it all the way through paganism, right through to Constantine. So whenever you've done something wrong while you're driving, and you upset someone, have you ever had someone raise their middle finger to you? Why is that an insult? What's with the middle finger? The middle finger is the finger people would expect to use with penetration. But if sex is meant to be pleasurable why is that an insult? Much like the slur, "F you". Why is that an insult? To tell someone to go have sex? The issue with the F-word and the middle finger is it's essentially telling a person to be penetrated. Under the layers of the ignorance of society the same mindset and stigma is very much alive, the stigma around penetration,
35:55 - and the idea that that will put you in your proper place. The men of Sodom and Gomorrah didn't want to rape a woman, not because these men were gay, but because women already knew their place. It was these strangers waltzing into their city that needed to know their place, and we have the same mindset. Whether people realise it or not, when they raise the middle finger or they say "F you", and even with ignorance everyone knows what that middle finger means. Everyone knows that you would expect a woman to be the penetrated. So whether they connect the dots or not they're continuing the same sexism.
38:10 - That Greek thought of women as incomplete. Their view of women so degrading. I grew up in conservative Adventism. They'd often say modern society is so Greek. I would suggest it is. Not because of immorality, but because of the views of women and sexism.
40:00 - "So the question still remains, can modern America learn from the same-sex behavior and attitudes of ancient Greece and Rome. The short answer, no we can't. Though these ancient cultures were far more accepting of same-sex interaction than our modern American culture is, the fact remains that they both share similar ideas about how marriage should be, and there is no room in any of these cultures for the concept of gay marriage as anything more than a joke. As in ancient Rome witnessed by the reactions to the emperor Nero or a corruption of the sanctity of marriage as witnessed in modern America." ("Gay Marriage in Antiquity - How Far Have We Come?" Inquiries Journal). The nutshell of their argument is that it is the fight against gay marriage in the United States which is the same mindset you find in pagan cultures.
42:05 - Which is the argument we've been developing all along. I didn't want to distract from this theme by going into other cultures such as Thailand pre-colonialism, but if you're a woman then unfortunate enough to be in one of the harems, you would not want to be lesbian. If you were, you were dragged out and publicly lashed. A culture that recognises trans-women (people who are born with the biological sex of male and transition to their gender identity as female) what about all the people born with the biological sex of female?
44:05 - The other culture that we would discuss would be the North American Indians. I'm not suggesting that some tribes, some portions, didn't have a level of freedom, but when we had the message of understanding two streams of information, we can't use the same fast frame we took to conservative arguments and take them to liberal arguments. And memes are fast brain arguments. One such meme of an indigenous, native American reads, "Christian leaders stand on our soil and claim gay marriage has never occurred here. Over 130 tribes in every region of North America performed millions of same-sex marriages for hundreds of years. 45:53 - Their statements are both hateful and ignorant. Your homosexual was our two spirit people, and we considered them sacred." There is so much wrong with this picture and statement. Do not take the mistakes of past dispensations regarding true streams of information and how we process external knowledge, and use them to support liberal causes.
48:00 - People who do that with Greece damage their own argument, and they're wrong. And there is a lot wrong with this meme. Just like the Greeks they did not even conceptualise homosexual people or gay marriage. A two-spirit person was seen as a spiritual role. People did not get to choose freely for themselves. It was a tribal understanding and in most cases patriarchal. I'm not ignoring the pockets where there were matriarchal tribes, but you couldn't just be today's definition of a John Arthur. This ends up being nothing more than just a nicer looking cultural appropriation.
50:15 - The people who were two-spirited were chosen by the elders. They didn't reach an age and make a decision for themselves. If you're a member of the Sioux tribe and you're a woman and you were raped, your rapist would be expected to give your husband some money to pay him off. Then he could take you. I'm not meaning to denigrate indigenous cultures. I'm not willing to culturally appropriate with our modern western mindset.
51:55 - Also, whether it's politically correct or incorrect, I'm unwilling to justify sexism and abuse. I do not care whether it's modern Australia or indigenous Australia. I'm not ignoring the abuses perpetuated by the invaders of this country. We do not excuse the sexism, patriarchy, and abuse of any culture. You would be hard-pressed to find any culture that didn't operate off a deeply misogynistic, patriarchal mindset. So these ancient cultures are not even considering gay marriage.
53:55 - What changed after Stonewall in 1969? People have two views. Some will say, "Your American, western society is so much like pagan Rome." Jerry Falwell crying out like Jeremiah! "A hail of judgments are coming upon this country because it's immoral! Just like all these pagan countries that God swept away!" The Sexual Revolution and the movement for gay rights are two key instigators for this moral form. The Sexual Revolution and the movement for gay rights. They say, "This is why America is falling morally and will come under the judgment of God" and Walter Veith and Jerry Falwell agree.
56:05 - The other argument. I'm not addressing the movement or Adventism, my question is how has the secular world changed between Middle Kingdom Egypt and modern America? Because we always focus on the glorious land. I agree with the second argument, and that is that all of these societies operated on the following construct - male, superior, dominant, leader. Woman, but not just women, it's not just female. Remember it's anything womanised. So they will put men here if they play the part or act like a woman.
58:00 - Inferior, submissive, led. What changed between Middle Kingdom Egypt and modern America is Second Wave Feminism and the Sexual Revolution. The Sexual Revolution said, "You know what! We don't care if we're the ones that get penetrated, we are not passive sex objects. We are active! We have the ability to be active. We like sex too. It's not something you do to us, it's something that we do to you too. And they attacked this idea of the passive. This was the core or the crux of the Sexual Revolution, and they physically, violently fought, to take down this idea of the passive.
60:10 - Because it wasn't an argument just about sex. The Sexual Revolution was not all about sex, because as we've seen all week when you're passive it has a lot of connotations and expectations. It affects the way that you are perceived as an entire person. It was not just all these sexually active women just wanting to have sex. They wanted this thousands of years old idea of being penetrated, submissive, inferior, passive, done away. The second thing that dismantled this, particularly Second Wave Feminism but also feminism from the beginning.
62:00 - They just attacked the construct itself, and the entire way society constructed the ideas of power and leadership and dominance. The scale of the war regarding the Sexual Revolution and Second Wave Feminism is something that's never been seen, ever in world history. And when you destroyed the idea of passive, linked to submission and inferior, and when society placed the masculine in anything like a woman, or anything feminine, it dismantled the fundamental argument that all of these societies had.
63:50 - Until you dismantle this power imbalance, true homosexuality, equal rights, gay marriage, could never have been tolerated.This isn't an argument over Christianity. This is all just secular societies. But you can do the following, take paganism, papalism, Protestantism, if you wanted to link it with Christianity that would be the way to do it. But rather than blame God and Christianity, and think that pagan societies had equality figured out, you should trace it to it's source, and it's not Seth, it's Cain.
66:10 - So the minute you dismantled, for the first time in world history, this social construct, the earliest that external society did that, then 2013, 2014 and 2015 became inevitable. It was just a matter of time. I want to quote from the same author who wrote the 1989 article, Andrew Sullivan. In the New Republic, "The Conservative Argument For Gay Marriage". In his 2015 article after the Supreme Court case, he's going to remind us, and then quote from an article he wrote in 1996.
68:00 - He wrote this article in 1996 because of the attacks that were coming from the states on interracial marriage and gay rights. This 2015 article is titled, "It Is Accomplished", "We are not disordered, or sick, or defective, or evil. At least no more than our fellow humans in this veil of tears. We are born into family, we love, we marry, we take care of our children, we die. No civil institution is related to these deep human experiences more than civil marriage, and the exclusion of gay people from this institution was a statement of our core inferiority, not just as citizens but as human beings. It took courage to embrace this fact the way the Supreme Court did today. In that 1996 essay I analogized to the slow end to the state bans on interracial marriage. 71:00 - The process of integration..." [referring to the Civil Rights Movement] "...like today's process of coming out, introduced the minority to the majority and humanized them. Slowly white people came to look at interracial couples and see love, rather than sex, stability rather than breakdown, and black people came to see interracial couples not as a threat to their identity, but as a symbol of their humanity behind the falsifying carapace of race. It could happen again but it's not inevitable and it won't happen by itself and maybe sooner rather than later the people who insist upon the centrality of gay marriage to every American's equality, will come to seem less marginal, or trouble making, or cultural, or bent on ghettoizing themselves. They will seem merely like people who have been allowed to see the possibility of a larger human dignity and who cannot wait to achieve it. 73:18 - I think of the gay kids in the future, who when they figure out they are different, will never know the deep psychic wound my generation and everyone before mine lived through. The pain of knowing they could never be fully part of their own family, never be fully a citizen of their own country. I think more acutely of the decades and centuries... [it was in fact millennia] ...of human shame, and darkness, and waste, and terror, that defined gay people's lives for so long 74:10 - and I think of all those who supported this movement, who never lived to see this day, who died in the ashes from which this phoenix of a movement emerged. This momentous achievement is their victory too. For marriage, as Kennedy argued, endures past death." I wanted to add "millennia" because it's not something Christianity brought. It runs much deeper. 2015 was not a western society following pagan ideas. It was something unprecedented, a rejection of a pagan construct.
7. Cana (28-08-2021).
05:15 - START OF CLASS. In our last presentation we discussed what changed between 1897B.C., 438A.D., and the 1260 in Protestant America. What changed from all of that, to 2014? What changed was these movements that preceded 1989. They changed the male superior, female inferior construct, to one of equality.
06:30 - Not ignoring they're still fighting for it but the message, or the point, is just all laid out. We have spent most of this camp meeting demonstrating that this superior v inferiour construct, was the model that prevented gay marriage, and formed the backbone of homophobia for practically the whole of the ancient world. But we all know we're not here in this camp meeting to decide what America should have done in 2015.
07:45 - We're in this meeting to decide what this movement does in 2021. "Not since 1860, when the country's pulpits were full of preachers pronouncing on slavery, pro and con, has one of our basic social (and economic) institutions been so subject to biblical scrutiny." ("Gay Marriage Our Mutual Joy", Lisa Miller, Newsweek, 2008). The issue is, the fight over gender today, and over gay marriage from 2013-2015, was as much fought over biblical verses as was the Sunday Law fight in 1888. It becomes unavoidable, that Adventism and this movement both have to come to a position on how we view the LGBT community, and their rights to marry.
10:00 - Because that Millerite fight over racism was never just about external. People had to come to an internal position on how they believed God viewed black people, and therefore how they viewed black people. They had to come to a biblical position on how God viewed slavery. For the Millerites this was not just an external, political fight. It was a biblical fight. That parallel in our day is a biblical fight over gay marriage. Now I could just take the position that we don't just follow a "Thus Saith the Lord". But I'd like to look a little closer today.
12:15 - For any of you that want to fight against gay marriage, I'll give you all your weapons: Genesis 19:1-11, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, Judges 19:16-24, 1 Kings 14:24 and 15:12, 2 Kings 23:7. That's the Old Testament. If you were to go into a Protestant church today and they would be teaching against homosexuality, these are their Old Testament verses.
14:20 - They're all given between the time period from Egypt, to Assyria and to Babylon. Mostly earlier, but this is the time span of the Old Testament. Also spanning into Greece. Genesis 19 is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. We've already thoroughly investigated that story, and it is not an argument about gay marriage or the rights of homosexuals. Judges 19 I would suggest is the same situation as Genesis 19.
16:00 - It's the same situation so if Sodom and Gomorrah is not an argument, neither is Judges. 1 Kings 14 and 15 talks about people who are sodomites. If you look into those texts they're talking about male, pagan, temple prostitutes. So when those texts say that Israel drove them out of the land, first of all this is just pagan prostitution. It's not a John Arthur. Also have to connect it back to their mindset. Even for that pagan culture, this is not homosexuality. You're only left with Leviticus. None of the other texts are fit for purpose.
17:50 - If you understand the mindset of paganism around those verses, they all make perfect sense. What God was removing from his people was not gay marriage or homosexuality, because the pagans didn't tolerate that anyway. You're left with Leviticus 18:22 and just know that chapter 20 says essentially the same thing. "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." Now I could just say, if i wanted to be smart about it, in the same history Moses will say ignoring gender roles is an abomination, and you have all been convinced for two years now that you don't care what Deuteronomy says.
20:00 - You don't care that Deuteronomy says to break down gender roles and ignore the system of domination and submission is an abomination. I'd like to go one step beyond that and read two verses later. Leviticus 18:24, "Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you". So is He saying, "Don't do what Eddie Windsor and Thea Spyre are doing? Don't do what the United States is going to put into place three and a half thousand years later"? Or is He saying don't model your society after the way Egypt and Assyria operate? Which is a combination of sexist domination,
22:00 - (rather than gendered), and slavery. Isn't this a text saying don't abuse people. All of those slaves I'll let you have from the nation around you. All those men you don't get to rape. This is why we took so much time laying out the external context, because when He says, "Men don't have sex with men", homosexuality and marriage are not even in their minds. No Israelite is even thinking that way, because all they know is the mindset of the nations around them, which is domination and abuse. He's not saying, "Don't do what you're going to see in three and a half thousand years". He's saying, "Look outside your tent, men putting other men into the passive role,
24:05 - connected with a lot of abuse, not homosexuality and not gay marriage, and then going home to their wives." He's saying, "Don't do that". If you understand the historical context, how homophobic those nations outside their tents were, you don't have a single Old Testament text to fight in 2014-2015. So then all you have is New Testament. Your weapons: 1Timothy 1:9-11,
26:00 - Jude 1:7, Romans 1:18, 26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9. Now you're left with four passages from the New Testament: 1 Timothy talks about those who defile themselves with mankind. So in context, this is in the center of pagan Rome where men are allowed to have sex with male slaves, male prostitutes, former slaves, and entertainers,
28:10 - and 1 Timothy is saying, "Yeah don't do that". There's nothing in 1 Timothy that's talking about 2014. It's not talking about Windsor, or Spyre, or Arthur, or Obergefell. It's saying look outside your windows and see what the Romans are doing, which is this superior, inferior construct, and it's saying don't do that. Jude 7 all that does is reference Sodom and Gomorrah and we already dealt with Sodom and Gomorrah.
29:55 - So we're left with Paul, who told slaves to go back to, or submit to their master, and told women to submit to their husbands and to be quiet. So on every single argument we end up sitting down to a fight with Paul. In 1 Corinthians 6:9 and Romans 1 Paul talks about what is natural.
32:00 - That is where people really dig their heels in, because when he frames it like it's unnatural for a man to sleep with a man, that's the argument people cling to. But when you go to Ephesians 5:22, 23 Paul says, "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church..." He's made it natural, he's made it structural, and he's made it permanent. You all decided two years ago you didn't care what Paul framed as right, and normal, and permanent. The problem with Paul
34:00 - is while they might reject the sex outside of marriage, and the prostitution, and abuse that came with this model, when the woman was biologically a man, from Moses to Ellen White all of inspiration is still written under this male superior, female inferior construct. Two years ago you gave up that construct in favour of a construct of equality. You followed a parable that led you to a construct of equality. Maybe, just like the disciples, you didn't realise the implications of living in the time of the end, where God says, ignore Paul on slavery, racism, sexism and now homophobia. That's the power of living in the time of the end.
36:00 - Taking down slavery. Ignore Paul. Worship is operated differently, but when we come to gender, like racism and slavery, we ignore Paul. Worship has never been dispensational but has been controlled by the rules of progression, but racism and sexism have. When we dismantled the idea of a patriarchal system in a patriarchal world, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this movement was not following paganism, papalism, or Protestantism. In 2019 we gave into equality because the evidence is far too convincing. Everyone in this meeting gave into that, but perhaps you didn't realise the implications.
38:05 - That subject of gender is not just an issue of women. Gender encompasses the issues of LGBT rights. If it wasn't for the Time of Trouble we would probably be at an international camp meeting around now, because I want to be clear that when I am speaking I'm not just speaking as the leader of the movement on my own. Elder Parminder is here too. He got up very early in the morning to be here because this is not a stand I am taking. This is a stand that we are taking, and many people with us. This is the position that the movement is taking.
40:00 - That as the 1989 author said, LGBT people are not disordered, or sick, or defective, or evil. Even though for many of us they may be different, they should be welcome in this movement with understanding and with open arms. As leadership of the movement we want to affirm them. It's not a "love the sinner, hate the sin" situation here. How awful is that! When they know that that sinning is how they were born, and fundamentally who they are. Thinking that, would mean, that love is not love. Recognising that, as the 1999 author said,
42:00 - many have suffered a deep, psychic wound, through the ignorance and discrimination of society and Christianity, and perhaps this movement as well. But we love them and accept them as they are, including their identity when it comes to gender and sexuality, and believe that the 2015 ruling that gives them the right to civil marriage is not enough. They have the rights to a marriage in the eyes of God, and we would be more than happy to see that take place in this movement. The message is formalised! Is there a new message in the time of the harvest? No. You all agreed to this in 2018, and then you really agreed to it in 2019,
44:00 - because it was all about gender roles, two streams of information, understanding history, and progression. If members of the movement reject this, the acceptance of gay and lesbian marriage within this movement, marriage recognised in the eyes of God, if they see immorality in that, they never understood the parables of 2018, and never accepted it because it's the same message. The same biblical authors. the same methodology. You heard from my dear friend yesterday, Daniel. I want to talk about him for a moment.
46:00 - We know that in 1991 we understood reform lines, and in 1996 the articles for The Time of the End magazine. I've taught before that it went from easy to hard at the formalisation. The early rain was the 2520. A nice theory. Just like reform lines, it doesn't impact your life in any way until it was formalised in time setting. Then the latter rain was Acts 27 and the King of the South. It doesn't impact your life in any way until we get to 2018 and it's two streams of information and all that came with that. 2020 was the Apis Bull.
48:00 - but I want to expand on 2018. I said before that we've never predicted the formalisation of a message. I hadn't forgotten but I wasn't entirely accurate. Someone did predict the formalisation of the message in 2018 - that was Daniel. But I think more important than that was what happened on the date. He understood and we accepted that the solid date for the Midnight Cry was October 13. By October 13 I finished giving that message at the School of the Prophets. On October 13 I preached in France and introduced it there. It went from the land to the sea, and then next to Fiji, the islands of the sea.
50:00 - But in the Glorious Land on October 13th, FFA was not in the habit of allowing women to preach. But Lambert fellowship did have someone preach that day, and that was Daniel. He took the Midnight Cry and repeated it, and warned them all to accept. It had the work of three people; Elder Parminder - race (represented by the Civil Right Movement); myself - gender (rpresented by Second Wave Feminism); and from the Lambert pulpit, Daniel (represented by Stonewall). When Daniel told me he was gay he had to be! It fitted perfectly. They wouldn't have a woman preach so they had a homosexual, representing gender, and didn't even know it.
52:00 - God has His will done despite humanity. 2020, the Apis Bull was the Increase of Knowledge. We're in the formalisation now. What was the point of the Apis Bull? It was to ask, "Why did why did ancient Israel not recognise Christ?" The answer: cultural context. Go back to the ancient Glorious Land, go to Egypt, go to paganism, and see the inferior, superior model. This is their Pharaoh, this is the god they worship, and Christ did not come looking like this. He did not come looking like they're superior, expressing domination, and flaunting that Apis Bull masculinity.
54:00 - It was the paganism that they imbibed. As the Increase of Knowledge grew, we addressed the gender of God himself/herself. That your God is not gendered, and so we took a further battle ax to this superior, inferior model. I hope everyone can see the connection between the Apis Bull, the Increase of Knowledge and the Formalisation, between the Midnight Cry and the Apis Bull. Today's understanding was inevitable. It's the logical response to both, without being a new message, because none of this study this week is actually new. You've known all of this, all along. Just like the disciples, between the cross and when they go to work, they had all of the parables.
56:00 - You've had all of the lines and all of the methodology. But in that upper room it just clicks and the message is complete. Up until this point I have felt an incompleteness to this message. That doesn't mean there aren't more things to come, but we are weeks away from going to the world, starting with Adventism, and giving a message, and I would suggest that we have a completed package. Of course we will never stop learning, but this package is what Adventism needs. It's what the world needs. Back in 2018 people took what was taught and somehow thought we'd just dropped all our expectations of everything.
58:00 - The sanctity of marriage has not been diminished by the inclusion of those who are LGBT. It is an elevation of marriage. A proper understanding and restitution of that institution from Eden. This isn't introducing immorality into this movement. We aren't lowering the bar so they can get over it, making the expectations less somehow. The bar is fine where it is - sacred, a marriage between two people, a commitment. What we're saying is that they have an absolute right to it. There is nothing wrong with them, that the institution somehow lowers to meet them, because there's nothing wrong with them.
60:10 - The deep scars of living in a society that rejects you. I live as a woman and everyone knows I'm a woman. Everyone knows a black person, and can often tell an immigrant, but there are people all through this movement that have this treasured away in their hearts and essentially have been forced to live a lie. That's described by our 1989 author as causing deep wounds. I'm not trying to diagnose anyone but many may be fighting battles that do not appear on the surface. We should at every opportunity, ensure that they know they are as part of this movement, as whole in the eyes of God, as moral as you and I, that there might be a place of safety.