Glenn Beck veered disastrously off-course on the Bill O’Reilly program two weeks ago when he said that same-sex marriage is not “a threat to the country.”

Glenn, Glenn, wake up and smell the arsenic, my friend.

It’s a threat to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and worst, represents a clear and present danger to children. What were you thinking?

If same-sex marriage becomes the legal norm, the freedom of your church, the Mormon Church, to publicly declare its affirmation of natural marriage will suddenly become a punishable offense.

Pastors from your “Black-Robed Regiment” who teach the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition will be hauled into court for committing hate crimes, as Pastor Ake Green was in Sweden. He was nearly convicted by the Supreme Court of Sweden for daring to preach a biblical view of sex and marriage from his own pulpit inside the four walls of his own church. Glenn, Glenn, Glenn: from his own pulpit inside the four walls of his own church. The Bible is now hate speech in Sweden, and will be in America. Wake up and smell the napalm, buddy.

A 74-year-old grandmother was dragged off to jail in Philadelphia for standing on a public sidewalk and quietly declaring the truth about homosexuality. She was facing 47 years in prison until cooler heads prevailed.

A student at Augusta State University has just been thrown out of the school’s counseling program - with the approval of a federal judge, no less - because she believes that homosexual relationships are unnatural. Her opportunity to pursue the career of her choice in a helping profession has now been shot to pieces. What about her, Glenn? You are giving aid and comfort to those who are destroying her vocational future because they want people to be able to use the rectum for sex without criticism.

Glenn, Glenn, Glenn: if special rights are given to people just because they want to use the alimentary canal for sexual purposes, no social conservative will be able to criticize homosexual behavior on biblical or moral grounds without running the risk of legal punishment.

Goodbye freedom of speech and goodbye freedom of religion. You, Glenn, will have aided and abetted those who are out to destroy two of the inalienable rights God has given to men, and you don’t think that’s a threat to this country? Wake up and smell the toxins, my friend.

We must choose between the homosexual agenda and religious liberty, because it is impossible to have both. Every advance of the homosexual agenda comes at the expense of our first liberty, the very first right enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the right to freedom of religious expression. You have chosen the side of suppression and tyranny over the light of liberty.

You announced the formation of a new “Black-Robed Regiment” to call this nation out of spiritual darkness. At the “Divine Destiny” event, you  rebuked the churches in American for having “grown soft,” and rightly declared that they need “backbone and spine” in order to respond to the people who are “begging for right and wrong.”

But you just told Bill O’Reilly that losing our way on a fundamental issue of “right and wrong” - marriage and the family - does not represent a threat to our country because we have “bigger fish to fry.”  What exactly is this “Black-Robed Regiment” going to say on human sexuality, if you have disarmed them before they’ve fired their first salvo in the battle for the heart and soul of our culture?

Perhaps worse, you seem cavalier about the devastating impact homosexual marriage will have on children, who will be adopted willy-nilly into homes missing either a mother or a father. I know how much you love your own children. How can you not see that you are failing to extend that same love to children who have suffered some kind of trauma already - which is why they are available for adoption - and are about to suffer another?

Glenn, Glenn, Glenn: what about vulnerable children who are deliberately being stuck in households headed by people who engage in unnatural sexual behavior and in households where they are going to grow up missing either the love of a mother or a father or both? Your laissez-faire view of marriage consigns such children to a deprived childhood. Do you not care about that? Do you not believe the state has a legitimate interest in their welfare? How can children suffer such damage without harm to our republic and its values?

Catholic Charities in Massachusetts, which for decades worked to put hard-to-place children in loving, stable, two-parent homes was forced out of business by Gov. Mitt Romney and his minions because they politely refused to adopt children into homosexual households.

Now the last Catholic adoption agency in the UK, which had been offering adoption services for a century, has just been forced to close its doors for the same reason. They were told that their religious views were not an adequate basis for reserving adoptions for heterosexual married couples.

Never mind that they weren’t trying to prevent anybody else from doing homosexual adoptions. No, though they were willing to allow others to exercise choice in the matter, the favor was not returned. Who suffers? Little children, Glenn, little children. Where is your compassion for “the least of these?”

It’s not too late to issue a mea culpa and come back into the light and be a vigorous advocate once again for the truth about marriage and the family. You have done a noble thing in calling this country back to God through your “Divine Destiny” evening at the Kennedy Center and your “Restoring Honor” event at the Lincoln Memorial.

You have done a noble thing on your radio and television programs by repeatedly calling us back to our founding history and to our foundational values as a country.

But Glenn, our “Divine Destiny” as a nation does not include societal approval for people who want to use the anus for sex. The “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” don’t endorse such behavior. And neither should you. 

(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)