“For this reason, God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise, also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due” (Romans 1:26-27).
The inevitable course of ungodliness and unrighteousness is enunciated quite succinctly in Romans 1:18-32. When American history is placed beside it, one can easily trace the degeneration of a nation whose founding fathers sought to construct a nation upon solid Biblical principles. Described in verses 18-25 are the first three powerful spiritual plagues inflicted on America: Modernism, Humanism, and the “ME generation”/Sexual Revolution (see last three blogs).
Spiritual uncleanness degenerates into vile affections/passions (vv. 26-27), which in the 1970s in America came with the Homosexual Movement. At first, “Gay Pride” advocates said that all they wanted was tolerance for their vile (i.e., dishonorable, reproachful, shameful) and unnatural (i.e., “against the inborn nature”) practices. But by June 26, 2015 in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, homosexual “marriage” was legally permissible and legally protected. By September 3, 2015 Kim Davis was serving a jail sentence in Kentucky because of her refusal to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple.
As the example of Sodom and Gomorrah unceasingly testifies (Jude 7), vile passions are a sure path to historical oblivion and divine vengeance.
