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From the start, I appreciated John's honesty—as well as his not comparing me to a KKK member, which other opponents pull out of their bag of rhetorical tricks. John does not accuse me of being a bigot; I don't think he is a sex-crazed profligate. But we do get exasperated that the other fails to understand the brilliance of our own finely crafted arguments—proof that evidential apologetics has its shortcomings.

We also debate because we cannot wait to see what the next event will bring.

At a Florida university last spring, during our question-and-answer time, a young man stepped to the microphone and wondered aloud if I might be a closeted gay man and if all my excitement might be an effort to suppress reality. Later that evening, a man stood with veins bulging to denounce me as a reincarnation of Jim Crow hatred, concluding that my talk "was probably more persuasive in its original German."

For once, I was speechless. Where else could one be pegged as a closeted gay, neo-Nazi homophobe in a span of 20 minutes? At least I pigeonhole provocatively.

John, too, gets his share of cranky inquisitors, such as the woman who asked if he had ever heard of Sodom and Gomorrah—as if such recognition would clear up the matter and we could all head home early. John said he was quite familiar with the story and indicated this by asking why, if this incident were a lesson in sexual ethics, Lot settled the crisis by offering his two virgin daughters to the sex-crazed horde as a reasonable solution.

It's an interesting point that prompted me to ask our audience why many Christians, as well as Scripture-twisting revisionists, never address either the Creation narrative or Jesus' clear affirmation of that narrative in the Gospels. These pericopes show the centrality of male and female to the family anthropologically, sociologically, and theologically, teaching us that male and female bear the image of God in unique, essential ways. Humanity and the family need male and female to need each other.

But we also get thoughtful, difficult questions. One came at the University of Idaho from a confident woman sitting attentively the whole night with her partner. With no hint of malice or agenda, she asked, "Mr. Stanton, is there anything about my relationship with my partner, Susan, that you find praise-worthy?" I don't think she meant it as a gotcha question, but that is what it was, in the best sense. She was asking, "Is our relationship completely without virtue in your eyes?" My first thought: How does one answer this as both an uncompromising cultural warrior and a faithful Christian?

I clarified my opposition to all sexual relationships that are not between a husband and wife. But I also said that whenever one human denies herself for the good of another and dedicates herself to the other's value, that was a praiseworthy thing. True selflessness is an intrinsic good, whether the person is a lesbian, a gossip, or a tax-cheat. I concluded by explaining, as she might imagine, that I did not believe this substantive virtue redeemed homosexuality itself. Other factors mattered here, including the mysterious, profound otherness of male and female in the covenant of marriage and parenting. I then quietly wondered if this answer would be similar to how my colleagues would respond. I trust that it was.

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January 2009, Vol. 53, No. 1