WHEREAS, An increasing number of businesses, including corporate leaders such as IBM, AT&T, Sprint, Hewlett?Packard, Xerox, Time?Warner, Microsoft, Eastman Kodak, and Walt Disney, have established employee policies that recognize and extend employee benefits to a category of personal relationship called “domestic partner”; and
WHEREAS, The category called “domestic partner” is a strategy to promote acceptance of the idea that homosexual relationships are morally equivalent to heterosexual relationships involving a man and a woman bound together by the institution of marriage; and
WHEREAS, The provision of domestic partnership benefits is a way to promote the moral equivalence of homosexual relationships outside the political and legal system in states where established marriage and family laws do not recognize the legitimacy of homosexual marriage; and
WHEREAS, Providing domestic partnership benefits not only promotes the idea that homosexual relationships are morally legitimate but, at the same time, trivializes the meaning and sanctity of marriage; and
WHEREAS, God at creation made marriage a permanent union of one man with one woman (Gen. 1:28 and 2:24), and Jesus reaffirmed the origin of marriage in the order of creation and declared marriage to be a sacred, monogamous and life?long institution joining two persons of the opposite gender (Matt. 19:4?6); and
WHEREAS, God, the Creator and Judge of all, has ruled that homosexual conduct is always a gross moral and spiritual abomination for any person, whether male or female, under any circumstance, without exception (Lev. 18:22 and 20:13); and
WHEREAS, Businesses that recognize the moral legitimacy of homosexual relationships by extending benefits to domestic partners are, at the same time and by the same action, rejecting Gods true revelation regarding the sinfulness of homosexual conduct and the unique sanctity of heterosexual marriage;
BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED, That we, the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention, assembled in Dallas, Texas, June 17?19, 1997, oppose steadfastly the practice of extending employee benefits to domestic partnerships; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That we prayerfully affirm those individual business leaders and businesses that either resist pressures to recognize the moral equivalence of domestic partnerships, or that work to reverse policies that erase fundamental and morally critical distinctions between homosexual relationships and heterosexual marriage; and
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, That we call upon business leaders to treat employees living in homosexual relationships in a manner commensurate with the love of Jesus Christ who, though He recognized the value and dignity of individual sinners (Matt. 9:13), neither condoned nor excused the abnormality and immorality of their sin (John 8:11); rather He called them to repent, change and be restored (Luke 15:7,10,32) through the life?changing power of the indwelling Holy Spirit (Gal. 2:20; I Cor. 6:9?11).