How do they do it?

I mean, how can the leadership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) tell their kids with a straight face not to be sexually active outside of marriage when they’ve just voted last Saturday to no longer enforce the celibacy requirement for their unmarried staff—both straight and gay?

The ELCA and other pro-gay denominations have been ordaining gays for decades. That’s nothing new. What’s new is that now staff can openly have lovers while on the job and there will be no disciplinary action for violating the celibacy requirement.

The message to the kids is loud and clear: We can have sex with our boyfriends and girlfriends, but you can’t.

What hypocrisy.

This is what happens when sin and the Bible collide: either the Bible will change the sin or the sin will change the Bible.

In this case, it’s homosexual passion that’s changing the Bible.

Not only have they decided, essentially, to rewrite the Bible and declare homosexuality no longer a sin, but now they’ve gone beyond that to include fornication too. Adultery can’t be far behind.

Look for other liberal denominations to follow suit.

So, this means an unmarried youth pastor can openly discuss the sex life he has with his boyfriend without fear of losing his job, while at the same time supposedly providing spiritual leadership to teenagers and counseling them to “wait until marriage?”

Maybe Lutheran parents should be a little more concerned when their kids come home and say they want to be just like the youth pastor. Perhaps they should be a little more suspicious when their kids display a sudden new zeal to attend Lutheran youth camp.

Or, maybe they’re not concerned at all about their kids being sexually active with the church’s tacit permission.

Maybe they—like the entire denomination—have just given up on the whole “try-not-to-sin” thing.

Our kids are going to do it anyway … we can’t stop them … all we can do is be “responsible” and try to prevent them from getting AIDS or getting pregnant … what we really need to do is provide them condoms—just like we do with our adults.

Who needs moral purity when you can have such tolerance and understanding?

It used to be that girls were sometimes deterred from being sexually promiscuous in high school out of fear of getting a bad “reputation.”

Now an entire denomination has a well-deserved bad reputation.

I looked around on the official ELCA Web site for what they teach their children about sexuality. Here’s what I found on a page entitled, “Sexuality: Some Common Convictions.”

• Under “Responsible procreation and parenting” I found the following:

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