Andrew Lansdown, ‘Writer and Editor’ for Life Ministries WA, has strong views about justice. Justice demands, for example, that animals which happen to kill human beings must be held morally responsible for their actions, and put to death:

God will not tolerate the killing of innocent human beings, whether the killers are humans or animals. He will hold them to account at the cost of their blood … (’Sympathy for a shark’, Salt Shakers Journal, Feb. 2001, 13)

Lansdown also advises his readers that engaging in prostitution is sufficiently ‘unjust’ a practice to attract dire penalties:

… Leviticus 21:9 declares, ‘If a priest’s daughter defiles herself by becoming a prostitute, she disgraces her father; she must be burned in the fire.’ Through prostitution a woman stains herself and shames her relatives. Such evil is repulsive to God and deserves severe punishment. (’A Biblical Perspective on Prostitution’, Salt Shakers Newsletter [SSN], Apr. 1998, 3)

For Lansdown, prostitution is so ‘unjust’ that its practitioners have forfeited any right to sympathy and deserve nothing but harsh penalties:

[Prostitutes] may indeed be victims of [sad upbringings, difficult circumstances etc.] [b]ut that is not true for all. And it is not an excuse for any. Neither past misery nor present poverty nor masculine lechery excuses the prostitute for her greed and debauchery. [ibid., 6]

As you may already have guessed, Lansdown is not a big fan of homosexual rights. He once accused some church supporters of such rights of having ‘tried to stretch a human skin over an unholy skull‘. (SSN, Oct. 1996, 16) (He likes these gothic touches e.g. men in brothels ‘may be alive physically, but they are spiritual zombies.’ [SSN, Apr. 1998, 7])

Lansdown is currently engaged in a drawn-out battle with other Christian right organisations over the issue of same-sex registrations (as distinct from civil unions). Essentially, Life Ministries WA lines up with Salt Shakers and Festival of Light Australia in opposing such registration schemes, which puts these bodies at odds with the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) and the Australian Evangelical Alliance, which favour them. Lansdown rejects the ACL’s claims that registration laws would lead to more ‘justice’ for homosexuals because this ignores ‘the injustice inherent in homosexual behaviour itself‘. Then he lets rip:

Consider the case of a young man from a Christian family who is enticed into a homosexual relationship. How is this just to the parents whose teaching and tears he spurns? How is it just to his brothers and sisters who for love of him make excuses for him and compromise or abandon the Christian view of homosexuality as both wilful and sinful?

How is it just to other young men who might be tempted to follow his example? How is it just even to the young man himself, to be closed off to life-giving intimacy with a woman by the indulgence of a dead-end perversion with a man? ( lifeministries.org.au/index.php?content_id=82, Sept. 2006)

I just wish that Andrew Lansdown might some day learn to display what someone has termed ‘the Christlike virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.’

Who wrote that? Actually, Andrew Lansdown wrote that, straight after his attack on homosexual rights.

Filed in: People, Sexuality