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Former UK Liberal Democratic Party leader Tim Farron

LONDON, England, January 18, 2018, (LifeSiteNews) – A former leading British politician voiced his “regret” last week at having said in 2017 that homosexual sex was not sinful, betraying his Christian beliefs.

Tim Farron, an evangelical Christian, resigned as the leader of the Liberal Democrat Party in 2017 after months of journalists and politicians demanding to know his beliefs about homosexual sex. Farron finally responded to a question in Parliament as to whether or not he thought homosexuality was a sin with “I do not.” In April 2017, he told the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC), “I don’t believe gay sex is a sin.”

But he did.

Farron told interviewers at Premier Christian Radio that he had found himself in a situation in which “I either had to be compromising my faith, frankly, saying things I thought were not true, or be true to my faith and be in a situation where I sucked all the attention that ought to be going to me being the mouthpiece of the party, away from our main message.”

“I’m a committed Christian, but my job as leader of the Liberal Democrats (was) to get our message across,” he continued. “If you’re the chief executive of a bus company, and you spend all your time talking about the Gospel, and not looking at timetables and your staff, then you would probably get sacked. It felt to me as the main message carrier for the party, it was a little like having your main advertising hoarding permanently vandalized. So either I let the party down, or I compromise my faith.”

Farron didn’t want to do to either of those things, he told his interviewers, so he stepped down as party leader.

“When you’re a Christian, is that you have a very definite idea of what sin is,” he said. “And it is us falling short of the glory of God, and that is something we equally, all of us, share. So in one sense to be asked that question is to essentially persecute one group of human beings. Sin is something that we all, Jesus excepted, are guilty of. But if you’re not a Christian, what does sin mean? It’s to be accused of something. It’s to be condemnatory. So we’re talking different languages.”

Bible-believing Christians hold that God’s plan for human sexuality is ordered toward the creation of human life by a man and a woman made “one flesh” through marital union (Matthew 19:4-6). Thus, they believe that homosexual acts are serious sins against the dignity of the human person. Evangelical Christians in particular point to biblical passages that strongly warn against same-sex relations. In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul said that men who practiced active homosexuality, among others, would not inherit the Kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9-11). He wrote also to the Romans saying that same-sex sexual acts were against the natural order (Roman 1:26-28.)  

Farron said he could have explained the biblical teachings on sexuality, but he indicated that he didn’t think media would have given him more than 20 seconds to make his point, and it was “naive in the extreme” to think anyone was asking him about “those questions” because they were interested in theology.

He said society has reached a point where “we’re tolerant of everything, except for the things we don’t like. It’s not liberal.”

Farron’s Christian interviewers didn’t let the politician off the hook, however. Asked why he had stated that homosexual sex was not a sin, Farron said he felt pressured to do so. The Liberal Democrats had a good chance of doing well in the upcoming election, he explained, as the Conservatives seemed too arrogantly sure of getting a landslide victory and the Labour party was doing very badly in the polls. To Farron’s frustration, instead of focusing on Lib Dem policies, people kept asking him about his Christian beliefs.

“Foolishly and wrongly, (I) attempted to push it away by giving an answer that, frankly, was not right,” he said.

Farron resigned as party leader after the 2017 elections, saying, “To be a political leader — especially of a progressive, liberal party in 2017 — and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me.”

Farron was also the subject of speculation concerning his views on abortion. After the 2017 discovery of a 2007 interview in which the politician stated that abortion was wrong at any time, the then-leader denied his old beliefs.

““I am pro-choice,” Farron told the Guardian newspaper. “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal and that the limit should be set by science.”

Does Farron now regret that statement, too? Farron did not respond to our request for an interview by press time.