Suppose you had the misfortune to live in another era and your parents were slaves. You are plotting a successful escape to freedom, when your mother tries to sweet talk you with one of society’s pearls of wisdom. “You were born a slave, son. You can’t change the way you were born.”

“You poor thing,” whispers a do-gooder. “You’ll never be anything different.”

“It’s perfectly normal to be oppressed,” adds another, helpfully.

“We’ve come such a long way,” says an activist slave. “We’ve made slavery legal. Slavery never hurt anyone.”

A religious hypocrite smiles sweetly, “God made you a slave.”

“I’m a slave and proud of it,” boasts another slave, who thinks he is cool. “Become a trendy, positive thinker like me. Tell yourself you enjoy being a slave. Sure, slavery kills a few people if masters don’t take precautions, but think of all the fun we have.”

If successful, such brainwashing can lessen a slave’s frustration. Do-gooders will pat themselves on the back for their wonderful work. Their efforts might make someone a happier slave, but instead of inspiring a person to break free and reach the heights he would otherwise achieve, it will keep him a groveling slave.

To say that God made someone gay is like saying God made someone an alcoholic. There is some evidence that people can have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, but all genetic weaknesses can be tracked back not to the perfection of God’s design, but to the tragic effects of human wickedness entering the human gene pool. Moreover, does God force anyone to drink alcohol? A person’s foolish indulgence entraps him. Closing his ears to reason, a potential alcoholic keeps drinking just because “everyone else is doing it,” and “it feels good.” After a string of wrong choices he finally becomes addicted. Even then, he can escape. Months – usually years – of a refusal to control himself when such control was relatively easy, end up making it a tough, but still winnable, battle to be free from slavery to alcohol.

I have great compassion for anyone facing that battle but I will not denigrate an alcoholic by condescendingly regarding him as a helpless victim of his genes or of tragic circumstances. Instead, I will believe in him and stand with him in his quest to be free. In fact, my empathy with such people is so strong that I have chosen from my childhood never to as much as sip anything intoxicating, lest my example adversely influence anyone whose metabolism or psychology cannot tolerate alcohol.

Whether an alcoholic chooses to continue his suicidal love affair with alcohol is his choice, but if he refuses to pay the price of freedom, it will sadden his Creator. To blame God for his addiction is nothing but a cowardly attempt to pass the buck. God not only wants him free, the Almighty will use his supernatural power to free anyone enslaved to habits he or she wants to be rid of, if only the person will let God intervene in his or her life. Note, however, the price of freedom for alcoholics is usually that they must abstain from all alcohol. They might rail that it is unfair that some people can drink in moderation and they cannot, but each of us has a cross to bear.

Likewise, people continually assaulted with homosexual lust are not hopeless slaves to their sexual drive. And like alcoholism, homosexuality is carried forward by little things – especially thoughts – that can be fairly easily resisted. It is only after repeatedly yielding to wrong thinking that it builds into a life-controlling force. We can’t stop thoughts from invading our mind, but it is our choice whether we heroically keep resisting the attack, continuously pushing wrong thoughts out of our mind, or whether we surrender to the enemy. The more we deliberately indulge in homosexual fantasies, the more their slimy tentacles grip our thought patterns until it becomes a life-controlling habit.