Speaker at Upcoming SBC Annual Meeting Says the Bible Doesn't Tell Her to be Straight and She's Not Responsible for Her Same Sex Desires
You may have been following the controversy surrounding one of the speakers at an approved ladies’ event at the upcoming 2023 Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting. She made headlines after we published a clip of her comparing same-sex marriage to a legitimate marriage and applying 1 Corinthians 7 to this egregious sin.
In 2019, during a student conference (see clip here), Gilson remarked during a sermon that gay married couples who come to Christ can stay together because God hates divorce. Speaking on the topic of homosexuals coming to Christ, after a bit of build-up, Gilson said, “It’s not like if someone in a same-sex marriage comes to know the Lord, it’s like, ‘Okay, what we’ve got to deal with first is your same-sex marriage’…”
“I’ve known some couples where one person came to Christ and to honor the Lord, he needed to be celibate [remaining married] and his husband decided to leave him. Paul talks about this reality in 1 Corinthians 7, sometimes if a spouse comes to know the Lord, the other spouse can’t abide it leaves and that person is free,” Gilson continued.
Gilson then went on to lament the “divorce” of gay couples who are “married” saying, “God hates divorce, he does. It breaks that image of marriage just as surely as anything else.”
Since then, Gilson put out a statement stating that she has always believed in a biblical sexual ethic and would not directly address the comments in the clip. An ally of Gilson, Rebecca McLaughlin, also came to Gilson’s defense, refusing to address Gilson’s comments in the clip and instead deflecting.
To be clear, Gilson was never accused of teaching that homosexuality isn’t sinful, what she is accused of was twisting the Scriptures to treat homosexual marriage as an actual marriage and then applying the logic from Scripture that even though “God hates divorce,” he allows for it in certain circumstances. Of course, that’s absurd and it doesn’t apply—yet Gilson has refused to deal with her words.
Now, in a newly surfaced videos, Gilson is heard watering down the sinfulness of all aspects of homosexuality, and instead treating homosexual desires as an ailment, a result of the fall, that people are not responsible for. In the clip, she states that “there's nothing in the Bible telling me I have to be straight," and then she says she's not responsible for, nor is there anything she can do, about her same-sex attractions.
Below is the clip