“This is not radical social engineering,” said Pennsylvania State Rep. Dan Frankel. “This is something that is becoming routine, almost. And it’s being embraced in some of the most unlikely places.”

Mr. Frankel is right. He’s also dead wrong.

He was speaking of a controversial bill moving through Pennsylvania’s legislature that would guarantee homosexuals and transsexuals protection against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations. As he correctly said, such legal measures are becoming routine in the United States and are being embraced by an increasingly large swath of the nation.

But the notion that this doesn’t represent a radical re-engineering of American society is a lie.

This month, Iowa and Vermont joined Massachusetts and Connecticut in allowing same-sex “marriage.” Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual rights group, says these four states are among 12 nationwide that legally permit some form of same-sex partner recognition. New York and New Jersey are poised to take up the question soon.

In addition, 20 states and over 180 cities and counties across the country have passed legislation specifically banning discrimination against homosexuals and, in most cases, transsexuals. The morally and culturally transformative nature of these laws is only beginning to manifest itself. Last week, the Washington Post provided several recent examples of individuals and faith-based groups fighting legal battles for having resisted the cause—and losing.

• A Christian photographer was forced by the New Mexico Civil Rights Commission to pay $6,637 in attorney’s costs after she refused to photograph a gay couple’s commitment ceremony.• A psychologist in Georgia was fired after she declined for religious reasons to counsel a lesbian about her relationship.• Christian fertility doctors in California who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian patient were barred by the state supreme court from invoking their religious beliefs in refusing treatment.• A Christian student group was not recognized at a University of California law school because it denies membership to anyone practicing sex outside of traditional marriage.

These examples provide a glimpse at how rapidly the homosexual movement is progressing toward its goal: to be able to silence, with the full force of the law, anyone who objects to their immoral behavior. This cause is gaining steamroller momentum in not only the United States but also several other Western nations.

Those who take a stand against it are getting leveled. Legal analysts say religious groups that resist supporting homosexual rights could be punished by having to forfeit their tax exemptions. The Post also mentioned how any group opposing homosexuality can lose even when it wins. The Boy Scouts of America, for example, won the right in 2000 to ban openly homosexual Scout leaders. Since then, they have lost support from private charities and benefits from some governments. Right now courts are deciding a suit where the city of Philadelphia is demanding $200,000 yearly rent on a building the Scouts had formerly used for free.

The individuals and faith-based groups losing these suits claim that their “freedom of religion” is being sacrificed to ever-expanding anti-discrimination laws. In truth, the problem is far more pernicious than merely losing freedom of religion. It is nothing less than a revolutionary redefinition of the pillar institution in our society.

No civilization in history—not even those quite tolerant of homosexuality and transsexualism—has ever proposed redefining the concept of marriage.

Are any of the individuals so zealously promoting the gender confusion associated with these practices curious as to why?

The legal protections surrounding the marriage of a man and woman, and the children that emerge naturally from that union, are intended to safeguard family, the fundamental building block of civilization. The legal obstacles facing homosexual and other couples have been constructed expressly—in society after society throughout history—to discourage behavior that undermines social stability.

Evidence is plenteous showing the benefits of traditional marriage to both husband and wife, as well as society at large—and the high costs associated with its dissolution. Time and again, studies have shown the enormous advantages to children—in personal safety, academic performance, financial well-being, emotional stability, self-respect, and assimilation into law-abiding adult life, among other things—of growing up under the same roof with both biological parents. In other words, societal stability directly depends on the greatest number of children possible growing up in a home with both a father and a mother to whom they are biologically related.

Marriage is the most effective way of guaranteeing children grow up in this favorable environment. For the sake of our children and our society, we should be doing all we can to promote stable marriages—in the true sense of the term. (Read Why Marriage! Soon Obsolete? to understand the profound spiritual underpinnings of this wondrous institution.)

However, under an onslaught of no-fault divorce and other anti-family pressures, marriages are falling apart at alarming rates. In just the past few generations, every millennia-long tradition regarding marriage—all of which, it should be mentioned, were based on God-ordained laws—has been challenged: the respective roles of husband as guide and provider, and wife as helpmeet and homemaker; the importance of abstaining from sex outside of marriage; the authority of parents over their children. As these principles were contested, a negative cycle began. Rejection of these principles produced bad marriages and fueled the tendency to question the institution’s fundamental nature. The result was a general, misguided dissatisfaction with marriage itself and an inevitable lack of appreciation for and understanding of it. The current dispute over the very idea of marriage involving one man and one woman is a measure of just how deep this misunderstanding has grown.

The legitimization of homosexual unions—as the jewel in the crown of a host of initiatives aimed at drawing more and more people into the homosexual lifestyle—is moving 180 degrees opposite the family stability we desperately need to be encouraging. This promotion of personal license over the broader interests of society is a deadly error.

In this week’s Key of David program, Gerald Flurry speaks on the radical changes we are witnessing in mainstream attitudes toward sex. He shows how these changes were prophesied in, of all places, the New Testament epistle of Jude (click the link at right to watch an excerpt). Watch the program and, especially, read the booklet. It’s likely the strongest warning you will ever hear on this tremendously crucial subject.

Make no mistake: This is radical social engineering. We all need to understand exactly where it will lead.