New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees has faced some tough opponents on the field, but now he’s staring down one of the toughest — the LGBT lobby and its media allies — simply for encouraging kids to take their Bibles to school for a day.
Brees, a professing Christian, recorded a 22-second video for Focus on the Family’s Bring Your Bible to School Day campaign, which encourages Christian public-school students to take their Bibles to school on October 3.
“Hey, guys,” Brees says in the video. “Drew Brees here. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is 2 Corinthians 5:7: ‘For we live by faith, not by sight.’ So I want to encourage you to live out your faith on Bring Your Bible to School Day and share God’s love with friends. You’re not alone.”
For those few seconds of asking kids to take their Bibles to school, Brees has come under fire from the LGBT crowd. “The criticism levied at Brees in the aftermath appeared to have little to do with the message, but with the organization it was tied to,” observed USA Today. “A link at the bottom of the video directs viewers to bringyourbible.org, a website published by Focus on the Family,” a Christian organization that, in keeping with the Bible and the historic faith, believes homosexual behavior to be sinful and urges Christians who are tempted by same-sex desire to live chastely.
USA Today’s headline, in fact, exemplifies this trend: “Saints QB Drew Brees defends himself after appearing in video produced by anti-LGBTQ group.” Likewise, Newsweek titled their piece “Drew Brees, New Orleans Saints Quarterback, Records Video Produced by Anti-Gay Group Focus on the Family.” Out magazine chose “NFL Quarterback Appears in Commercial for Anti-Gay Extremists” for their headline, and Big Easy magazine settled on “Drew Brees Records Video for Anti-LGBT Religious Organization.”
The unapologetically left-wing Big Easy tweeted twice about the subject, once claiming that Focus on the Family is “a strong promoter of the dangerous ‘conversion therapy’ practice” and later introducing the hashtag #SaintsDontHate because of Brees’ “commercial for an anti-LGBTQ group.”
Not everyone took to Twitter to bash Brees, however.
Representative Jim Banks (R-Ind.), for example, tweeted, “The relentless assault on Christians must stop.”
“It’s disgraceful that Drew Brees’s encouragement to kids to share God’s love with their friends is turned into hate-mongering by the Left,” he told the Daily Caller.
New England Patriots tight end Benjamin Watson tweeted: “Have done plenty of work with [Focus on the Family] and will continue to. No problem speaking up for my friends when they are being slandered.”
Brees didn’t remain silent, either. According to USA Today, he “strongly defended himself” Thursday. In a video posted on Twitter, he said the allegations against him are “completely untrue,” and in an open discussion with reporters, he pointed out that the headlines about him have been “not … very fair.”
Things got a little iffy, however, when Brees took up the matter of Focus on the Family’s stance on LGBT issues. “I was not aware any of the things [others] said about them lobbying for anti-gay [causes] … any type of messaging or inequality or any type of hate type related stuff I was not aware of that at all,” he said. “Because I know that there are, unfortunately, Christian organizations out there that are involved in that kind of thing and to me that is totally against what being a Christian is all about. Being a Christian is love, it’s forgiveness, it’s respecting all, it’s accepting all.”
It is also about upholding biblical teaching, which means, yes, accepting all people but also discouraging them from sinning — and there is no question that the Bible defines homosexual conduct as a sin. Being a Christian additionally means opposing movements, such as the LGBT lobby, that both encourage people to sin and punish those who disagree with them.
Brees did nothing wrong, and much right, in recording his video for Bring Your Bible to School Day. But his haste to distance himself from Focus on the Family because of its opposition to the LGBT movement suggests the quarterback’s faith may be in danger of being sacked by the forces of sexual libertinism.
Photo of Drew Brees: AP Images
