Don’t Come Fly With Me: On the NBA’s Action Against North Carolina

We take care to make clear that our opposition to sin is not opposition to fellow sinners. We love all people. We know they bear limitless dignity and worth. But we do not support falsehood.

The NBA just pulled the 2017 All-Star game from Charlotte, North Carolina. It did so because of HB2, a legislative bill that requires citizens to use the restroom that corresponds with their birth sex. This bill has been presented in public as discriminatory toward the LGBT community. To his serious credit, North Carolina governor Pat McRory has stood his ground on the issue.

The NBA’s action represents an epochal cultural moment. This is the largest move yet made by an apparently pro-LGBT business, in this case the NBA, to penalize a public institution due to a conflict over gender policy. The city of Charlotte and the state of North Carolina will no doubt lose millions of dollars over this decision. It’s remarkable that this is happening, given that we have witnessed punitive action taken against bakers and florists who made their own decisions regarding their conscience and LGBT issues. In those cases, the public applauded the silencing of conscience; here, it cheers the exercise of conscience. How deeply ironic.

Whatever the niceties of these different situations, here’s the key takeaway: if you do not follow the dictates of the LGBT movement, get ready to kneel. Either the state will get you, in the case of Baronelle Stutzman or the Kleins, or pro-LGBT businesses will take action against you (for proof of the former, see ADF’s terrific resources, particularly under “Creative Professionals”).

Christians and cultural cobelligerents cannot miss that we’re witnessing a moral revolution. Regarding HB2, we are not actually debating public safety. Public safety and decency points in just one way: in order to protect citizens, and especially children, we should not remake gender, embrace transgender identity, and allow both sexes in single-sex restrooms. It is not punitive to require people to use the bathroom corresponding with their God-given sex. It is right and commonsensical. There is nothing discriminatory about this.

The leaders of the LGBT movement knows that the way to advance movements in the modern era is to adopt the language of justice and to claim discrimination. But the moral revolution unfolding in America is not about granting equal rights and making society more fair. It is about cultural change. Bet on this: there will be consequences for those who dare to defy this change.

Christians are right, totally right, to stand against the moral revolution in their communities. We should not privilege LGBT identity. We should not grant the movement special public rights. We love all people, including people who claim membership in the LGBT movement, and we actually have more reason to love them than any other group. We know who made them—God—and what they were made for—a life of happiness chartered by the Word (Gen. 1:26-27). If any person of any type is sinned against or harmed, we rise to defend and care for them. But “intolerance” and harm does not flow from upholding the divine design of the family and the human person. In truth, it is intolerant and wrong, deeply wrong, to remake these God-created realities.

In twisted times like these, the church created by the gospel of grace must stand for what its right. We want our neighbor to flourish and benefit from a virtuous public-square (see Matthew 22:34-40). The more virtue there is in a country or community, the better. Everyone reaps a personal harvest from goodness and truth. But when these things ebb away or are stamped out, everyone suffers. People do not thrive. They do not receive the common-grace benefits we want them to have.

This is why the church speaks up on these issues. When a culture approves of what God forbids—or levels sanctions against those who stand for wisdom and truth—the church cannot be silent and passive. Homosexuality and gender-fluidity are sinful, not virtuous (see Rom. 1:18-32; 1 Cor. 11:1-16). We cannot support the normalization of sin. Though all the world stands against us, we must oppose it.

We take care to make clear that our opposition to sin is not opposition to fellow sinners. We love all people. We know they bear limitless dignity and worth. But we do not support falsehood. The NBA is politicizing the family and the human person. God has created the family; he has created manhood and womanhood. It is wrong to try and redefine these things; it is blasphemy against God, and harmful to human people made in the image of God. The NBA should stick to basketball, and leave the adjudication of policy and law to other institutions.

We’re going to witness much more of this in days ahead. Big business will be bringing tremendous pressure to bear on those who resist the LGBT movement. Good things, avocations people of all types enjoy like professional basketball, will be hijacked to promote anti-wisdom. Our common ground in culture is eroding due to the encroachment of politics into all areas of life. In such times, Christians need to dig in and speak truth. We do not do so angrily, with a red face, shouting at those who seek to overturn God’s wisdom. We do not do so to “take back America,” as if this country was ever Israel. We do so to glorify our Lord and to love our neighbor. We cannot support the normalization of sin. We know that doing so will bring tremendous harm, and no thriving, to image-bearers just like us, little though they know it.

We must respectfully and humbly resist the moral revolution of our time. We do so by engaging all aspects of civic life, speaking up for what is right and good, without apology or hesitation. But we do something still more potent, something that is deeply subversive, something that the secular order cannot do: we pray for those who oppose us. In Christian love, we welcome to our local churches those who resist us. We ask God to bring good out of evil, and conversions out of hostility. After all, if God has saved sinners such as us, the worst of the lot, he can save anyone.