Dear Beloved Daughter,
Perhaps most of what I will say here has already been said, but then again I'm writing it on this blog site, so obviously I mean the audience to be bigger than just the two of us, although I have intentionally buried the article in such a way that only a person looking for it would find it. It is a way for me to work out my own thoughts and feelings on the subject in such a way that I can share it as the years go on. Why would I want to share it? Well, because it seems to me clear that men who affirm the kinds of things I affirm will increasingly be ostracized for those beliefs in liberal societies. Some of what you read here is a kind of defense. Some of what you and others will see here is a father's heart, and not merely an argument about things like human sexuality and the moral issues related to it. So here goes:
You came out to Amy and me in August of this year (2024). You obviously knew going into this that Amy and I are devout Christians still doggedly, and to many people foolishly, holding to a--what shall we call it--historically Biblical Protestant/Reformed understanding of the Bible and its contents. We hold the Bible to be authoritative, even after centuries of attack or modification by progressive Christians today. And it is still obvious that the undisputed winner of the conflict over marriage within the churches is the man and woman monogamous marriage ideal. Perhaps the most elegant spokesman for this in my career as a teacher was Douglas Wilson. He talked about how marriage is not some arbitrary thing, but was instituted by God at creation, so that the differences between men and women, or their diversity, could be brought together in unity, which creates yet more diversity. Their lovemaking is life-producing. The children are literally "in" them, undifferentiated, but then over time children grow into and express their uniqueness. Parents lead children to a point of individuation, and then those children choose to love and honor the parents, leading to a higher and more mature unity. They are trained up in love, and then leave their parents to be joined together with their own spouse and recreate the same pattern, creating still more unity and diversity. It is a pattern of creation modeled after God's own Triune nature of unity and diversity and I believe it to be stunningly elegant.
As a former teacher of Christian ethics and philosophy, I fully understand all the modern/postmodern attempts to reformulate the Bible's teaching on homosexuality. And I reject them, for many good reasons. But you claim to have read the various articles I've written on this topic in this blog, and I believe you. What exactly did you expect to be our response to "coming out?" We were loving, patient, calm, but also stated that this revelation is grievous to us, and offered a few reasons which I will reiterate later in this letter. But in our day and age, any response other than unqualified adulation is deemed hateful. Then you decided to move out of our home because our response wasn't supportive enough. I want to say again what I said that night: we don't reject you! We want you to continue to have a relationship with us, but apparently our worldview and its moral strictures on this topic are enough reason for you to reject our home and any influence or relationship we might have with you. You say we can get together here and there and that will be the same as living with us, but I know you aren't that naive.
I ask you, all who are trying to understand my response, to use your imaginations a bit. Use these scenarios to help:
You are a committed communist and your child tells you he or she wants to work as a stock broker. You'll love her but have some disagreements.
You are a wild eyed naturalist and your child chooses to become a petroleum engineer and drives a Suburban (and not the electric one). You'll love her but won't be able to stop dropping hints about how great Prius' are.
You are a vociferous advocate for trans rights and your child goes on and on about how funny Dave Chappelle is. You'll love her but won't laugh.
You are a mormon and your child wants to marry an atheist. You'll love her but probably have to agonizingly disfellowship her.
You are an Orthodox Jew and your child wants to marry an atheist. You'll love her but ask what is so bad about her childhood friend Bernie?
You are a liberal and your child wears a "Make America Great Again" hat. You'll love her but probably ask for the hat to come off... for dinner and all.
Some of these are smaller departures than others, but what do you do when your child departs from your worldview, and almost entirely? Because, please understand, the issue is not simply an issue with homosexuality. It is the entire substructure of presuppositions that lead someone to not merely struggle with homosexuality, but to embrace and celebrate it, and condemn anyone who dares to voice the slightest critique.
Surrounding you, my daughter, is a sycophantic chorus of praise from everywhere for coming out at age 16. We alone said, "In our love for you we can tolerate this." Far too tepid to remain in your good graces I'm afraid.
And so you cut us out of your life, and with the full blessing of your twin sister and your mother.
But why does this grieve us? Why is it difficult for a Christian parent to have a child tell him this and then respond in the way she has? I thought I would go through some of the emotional and intellectual difficulty I"m having with this:
1. What will become of the legacy of Christian belief in my family? It is looking more and more likely that I will be the last Christian in my family. You twins once asked me what I would think if you chose not to be Christians. I told you only that it would, "break my heart." Christian belief is by no means some default position, but don't parents want to pass on their most cherished values to their children? I believe that in Christ is hope and meaning and joy and grace beyond measure. I want my children to understand mercy and forgiveness, and I can't see them understanding it anywhere else than in the Christian belief system. Appeasement or accommodation, simply adjusting to the behaviors of others, is not even in the remote ballpark of forgiveness.
I also wanted to be able to speak of the deep things with my children, but now I will be like so many at family get togethers where religion and politics are off limits. We will engage in that small talk that can fill perhaps one evening, the trivial pablum of every day life, and that grieves me. It grieves me at least partially because the least interesting thing about me is my life. The ideas I love to think about might have some interest, to the extent that I've pondered truth for so long in my life, but my life is boringly wonderful.
2. Will that beautiful branch of the Sutherland family tree be the last? Obviously, lesbian women can choose various non-traditional medical means to have children, but surely it is less likely that I will ever see a grandchild from you, my daughter. Am I allowed to grieve that? Am I allowed to mourn the loss of the picture in my mind of children laughing and playing, and parents honoring grandparents with the gift of a caring for a new generation?
3. Is this something to be proud of, a choice, or is it something you were born with? You are among the ranks of the "Pride" community now. I'll grant that this point is more of a philosophical concern, but why pride? If there are two moral positions and you choose the superior one over the inferior one, then one could be proud of that choice, but no homosexual activist claims homosexuality is in itself superior to heterosexuality, nor do most claim it is a choice. If this is a characteristic you are simply born with, like eye color, then why be proud of it? I suppose one could be proud that one has blue eyes, but is it really so praiseworthy as to march in the streets? Perhaps one is proud of the courage it takes to come out. But really is it that difficult when a full 20% of Gen Z claims to be LGBTQ, and the only persecution you get for it today is having to read all the praise you receive on instagram?
4. Is this even true? Are you influenced towards this through social contagion or is it a real statement of your deepest affections? I have read a good amount on this topic and know that female sexuality is far more complicated than male sexuality. There is a great deal more bisexuality, or plasticity, for example, among females. Therefore, it is plain that many women "choose" to be gay, and many do so because they are wary of men. I mentioned in the last paragraph that the number of people identifying as LGBTQ has skyrocketed. Why? Are we sure that no cultural influence is involved?
Currently, you, my daughter, are utterly surrounded by gay and trans students and teachers. Each of these people, and your phone algorithms, are no doubt a significant influence in your life towards various outcomes. To what extent can you even know how much these people in your life have led you to this? It grieves me to think that you are being powerfully deceived about what constitutes a good and noble and fruitful life.
And another thing on the nature/nurture question. You have an identical twin sister whose environment has been identical to yours. If you are born with your sexual orientation, in the sense that it is hereditary, then can we expect her to be gay too? If your sexual orientation is not genetic but deeply imprinted by your childhood environment, can we expect her to be gay on those grounds? In other words, if genetics or childhood environment cause someone to be gay, and thus it isn't really chosen, then obviously both of you will be gay, correct? Or if your sister doesn't become gay, then what can be concluded? I'm genuinely perplexed on this question.
5. Moral confusion. You came out. Our response was tolerance and not praise for what we deem to be a moral issue within our belief system; which is surely an overly analytical triviality to you. But we affirmed you and your place in our hearts and our home. You then likely interpreted our response as rejection, but in fact you are the one who has created "boundaries" that amount to walls. I don't want this to lead to the moral confusion we see a lot in our day and age. Someone says something that you disagree with. You dispassionately state the disagreement. That person is offended and cuts you off entirely. When she explains it to friends or relatives, she characterizes the exchange as you rejecting her.
Another angle at this moral confusion notion is simply this: you haven't had sex with a girl yet! According to ethical systems like the Bible and even Aristotle, you are not "out" yet, at least not in any meaningful sense. You even acknowledged you could be dealing with conflicting desires. A blunt way to put this would be to say that you are not a homosexual unless you act like one. You may have desires or inclinations, but that doesn't count as homosexuality anymore than lust counts as adultery. This constitutes one of the major misinterpretations of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus appears to say that lust and hate are equal to adultery and murder, but that is not his point. He is only saying that desires move people to act, and so being proud one has not acted does not mean that the corrupt desire isn't there, but the two sins are not the same. Think of this in reverse. Is a good intention the same thing as a good act? Is it praiseworthy to want to do the good and not to do it? Can one call himself generous if he desires to give but never does give?
But of course Aristotle is uninterested almost entirely with motives. He cares only about actions. He would say that any person who claims to be X, but has never done the actions of X is self-deceived, or is only potentially X.
6. What will it mean for you to embrace Christianity, if you even come to do so? It would either require the hard road of repentance and faith; the path for all Christians. Or it would mean removing the cognitive dissonance by embracing a progressive version of the Christian belief system.
Recently I heard of a progressive argument that was intriguing. A conservative podcaster by the name of Andrew Klavan has a son who is gay, and his take is basically that homosexuality is simply too hard a burden to place on anyone without some monogamous means of expression. In other words, it is a kind of Pauline "thorn" that causes enormous suffering only to be removed in the final resurrection of the body.
In other words, to ask gay people to sacrifice human sexual companionship is too great of an ask on God's part. It's too great a burden to bear without some natural means of expression.
There is a fatal flaw in in, in my estimation. Pardon the logical reduction of this...
a. You are doing sin A.
b. You resist sin A, causing enormous suffering for you.
c. God, in his mercy, doesn't want you to suffer past a reasonable threshold.
d. That threshold is personalized to each individual, because each individual suffers differently.
e. Either you continue in this unbearable suffering, or do something worse, such as suicide or throwing yourself into some other compensating sin, or you renounce your faith.
f. Those options are worse than sin A.
g. God weighs the options and graciously allows an exception. You can practice sin A and remain a believer and cling to the hope of heaven, where you will be freed from sin A.
h. You are a "Christian," and habitually practice sin A.
I grant this is an inventive argument, which still holds that sin is sin while allowing for a kind of permissive mercy, and on the surface seems better than alternatives like apostasy, but there is a fatal flaw in it that seems obvious. Is it not possible that any sin can be placed into variable A, including some wild ones like pedophilia, bestiality, modern adultery (open marriages), pornography? Or even sins of disposition like rage, greed, pride, foolishness, narcissism? Why resist any sin when it gets truly difficult to the point of frustrating one's happiness? I think the alternatives are as they have always been. Either the Christian standard is true or its arbitrary. But of course if it's arbitrary, so are all others.
A final word: I love you, my sweet girl. I remember those years when you were a child and I was given what I now see as the great opportunity to be alone for large chunks of time with all three of my amazing girls. I have been a steady and loving father to you and your sisters. Of course, I have not been perfect, but I have been joyfully and lovingly present through all your 16 years of life. I have fed you many meals, taught you to read, ride a bike, camp in the back yard, and about the glories of creation in the National Parks of the western states. I was the source of much of your affection and joy at home, and you were mine. I played with you, encouraged you, held you when you were scared of thunder after we moved to Austin. We laughed and talked and sang on many a car ride to school, both in Bakersfield and Austin. I've always loved how close I felt we were.
I don't deserve what you and your sister have done here, and I can't believe it is you acting alone. I fear that voices in your life that are irrational, even vengeful, have led you to dishonor your father, but I also fear that such a choice will come with various unintended consequences. But I know if you search your heart, and remember who I am, and who we are as father and daughter, you will find your way back to me.
