Jeff Smokler was married for almost two decades and the father of four children. However, one day he decided to divorce his wife, abandon his children, and start sleeping with other men because he wanted to:
A woman has shared her heartbreak after her husband of 17 years told her he is gay.
Jill and Jeff Smokler, both 39, have three children, aged nine, 11 and 13, recently made the agonizing decision to separate after 23 years together.
The couple, from Baltimore, Maryland, plan to divorce after Jeff’s suppressed sexuality made their marriage untenable and left him suffering from depression.
‘It wasn’t easy. Nothing about this experience has been easy. But we are best friends, he is literally my favorite person in the world to be around, so even before kids, I didn’t want to split up.
‘When he clearly had turned a corner and realized this wasn’t a phase or a tiny sliver of who he is, I knew it was time to move on,’ Jill told Daily Mail Online.She said her lowest point came when she saw that divorce was becoming inevitable.
‘The last several months of knowing the separation was imminent but still living together was pretty brutal,’ she said.
Jill said they were ‘completely honest’ with their children who were upset but understanding. (source)
There is a lot to this story. Four things come to mind.
The Destruction of Sodom by John Martin (1852)
First is the Bible. The Bible says it and we have been saying it for a long time, but if you are a Christian, the line on homosexuality is clear. If you cease to persist in the practice of homosexual acts, you are rejecting God’s mercy and setting yourself up for judgment. Sodom and Gomorrah was not destroyed merely just for their sins, but as a model for all time to demonstrate the fruit of what this sin leads to. Not only that, but as we have pointed out, the Saints and Church Fathers conclude that is was Jesus, Love and Mercy itself, who went to Sodom and executed divine justice on account of this sin.
God is Love, and because God is love He hates sin and homosexual acts (sodomy) is a sin. This is a consistent teaching of the Catholic Church throughout the centuries, and many saints have spoken about it. In the words of St. Bernardine of Siena:
No sin in the world grips the soul as the accursed sodomy; this sin has always been detested by all those who live according to God.… Deviant passion is close to madness; this vice disturbs the intellect, destroys elevation and generosity of soul, brings the mind down from great thoughts to the lowliest, makes the person slothful, irascible, obstinate and obdurate, servile and soft and incapable of anything; furthermore, agitated by an insatiable craving for pleasure, the person follows not reason but frenzy.… They become blind and, when their thoughts should soar to high and great things, they are broken down and reduced to vile and useless and putrid things, which could never make them happy…. Just as people participate in the glory of God in different degrees, so also in hell some suffer more than others. He who lived with this vice of sodomy suffers more than another, for this is the greatest sin.” (St. Bernardine of Siena, Sermon XXXIX in Prediche volgari, pp. 896-897, 915.)
That is enough right there to make a man ponder.
Second, is the explanation that these parents have to give and the affects on the children. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Excuse the pictures below, but just take a good look at them for a minute:
Had enough? This is just the very, very tame stuff. The reality is far worse and disgusting. You can look more into that if you want to.
I post these photos because, just like how one has to see the abomination that abortion is in order to believe it, so must one also see the abomination of homosexuality in order to comprehend the truly vile thing that it is.
I’m not even going to discuss how serial murderers, child rapists, and pedophiles are disproportionately homosexual. Forget that. Rather, what are his children going to think once they realize that their father abandoned them so he could spend the rest of his life having sex with other men, and likely large numbers of other men? What are the effects this is going to have on the children? On each other? On how they relate to their family and society? Just like with suicide, the consequences of a man’s actions extend far beyond himself.
Third, is how this action is a reflection of how truth in society has become something wholly subjective. The LGBT movement is, philosophically speaking, a movement aimed at convincing people to accept the false idea that they can redefine the nature of things as they are by fiat. One only needs to look at the curious case of Joshua Norton, also known as “Emperor Norton,” to understand this.
Joshua Norton, known as “Emperor Norton”
Joshua Norton was lived in the San Francisco area during the 19th century. Born in England to Jewish parents and growing up in South Africa, Mr. Norton had delusions of grandeur later in life but was harmless to the general public- he most likely had some form of mental illness or if not, was a very creative individual for his time. After becoming homeless in the year 1858 and reduced to poverty on the streets of San Francisco, he declared himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, and he spent the rest of his life marching around the city issuing decrees, citations, pardons, and even paying with his own made-up currency (which local businesses accepted graciously, understanding his condition). He was known and protected by everybody in San Francisco, and even though he died poor and homeless, over 30,000 people came to his funeral and they bought him his own special grave.
Emperor Norton was a harmless man, and while he never was an emperor or anything associated with it, but the people humored it while understanding the actual truth of who he was. The LGBT movement is similar to that in the sense that the natural law- that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that homosexual behavior is non-genitive except in the spread of disease- has never changed, but the people of the society live under the illusion that they are able to or have changed it when they really have not. However, this is not a case of dealing with something like a silly delusional man marching around a city in an emperor’s costume. It even goes beyond public health and sanity, since homosexual behavior is directly linked to the spread of horrible diseases. It even goes beyond the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is about the acceptance of license.
Might is Right, a highly influential book of the late 19th century that taught that morality comes from one’s own whims and not from objective truth. It is actually an ideal book for the LGBT movement since the entire movement is rooted in the ideas of this book.
People rightly call homosexual activists “militant” because they are. It is a well-documented fact that a disproportinate number of LGBT activist, as evidenced on camera, are very aggressive, unforgiving, and militant in their approach to forcing people accept their lifestyle choices and will use any and all means available to do so as well as suppress any dissident from people who disagree. The talk of “love makes a family” in nonsense, acting merely as a cover for their real philosophy, which is an authoritarianism backed by their self-asserted opinions which they hold as dogma. They are an example of the “might makes right” philosophy, and as such believe that by forcing other people to accept their opinions and by getting a majority to agree, they can re-define truth to suit their interests, thus saying that truth does not come from God, but is articulated by human caprice yet must be held, practiced, and propagated with the same dogmatic rigidity as though it were revealed from God.
This reductionist attitude towards absolute truth and the simultaneous willingness of Americans to hold beliefs they regard as truth as though they were absolute was noted by a 2016 Barna Group report entitled The End of Absolutes- America’s New Moral Code. In short, the licencious attitude has taken hold of American Christianity, reducing it to little more than a means of self-verification for what one already believes instead of calling men to be greater than what they are:
Two-thirds of American adults either believe moral truth is relative to circumstances (44%) or have not given it much thought (21%). About one-third, on the other hand, believes moral truth is absolute (35%). Millennials are more likely than other age cohorts to say moral truth is relative—in fact, half of them say so (51%), compared to 44 percent of Gen-Xers, 41 percent of Boomers and 39 percent of Elders. Among the generations, Boomers are most likely to say moral truth is absolute (42%), while Elders are more likely than other age groups to admit they have never thought about it (28%).
…
“There is a tremendous amount of individualism in today’s society, and that’s reflected in the church too. Millions of Christians have grafted New Age dogma onto their spiritual person. When we peel back the layers, we find that many Christians are using the way of Jesus to pursue the way of self. . . . While we wring our hands about secularism spreading through culture, a majority of churchgoing Christians have embraced corrupt, me-centered theology. (source)
This brings me to the fourth and final point, which is that as always, the movement is beyond one of propagating license, for spreading license for the sake of licensiousness serves no purpose itself unless it is aimed to a greater end. This is because license is a vacuum- it has no substance backing it because it is the absence of of defined truth in the place where the used to be truth. Yet nature abhors a vacuum because it is a lack of equilibrium. If there is a “hole” in something, be it a society, a thought process, or even a physical object, something is going to attempt to fill that hole. It may do a bad job, it may not fit well, it might be destructive, but if there is an created absence then something is going to try to replace what was lost, and this is why the LGBT movement is so important, for if a man can be convinced that he is able to redefine the most basic, biological, unchangeable of concepts, then it will not be hard to get him to redefine who God is away from something other than the true God.
Adam and Eve. This is ultimately what the movement promises, which is the ability to play God when the reality is that God was, is, and always will be in control.
But returning to the man in this article who left his wife to sleep with other men, what makes this story so disturbing is that he is helping to facilitate all of these beliefs and ends by his actions. One might say “well, he is just one person,” and that is true, but a large sum is the combination of many smaller sums. No, he alone cannot “change” everything, but his actions are part of advancing that same change. Likewise, the realm of people that he will affect is in a direct, numerical sense very small, but it has ongoing affects that will manifest in the behaviors, speech and beliefs that his wife, children, friends, neighbors, and anybody who comes into contact with them will experience on account of this incident. This is why it does not matter what the reason was for his actions, but what matters is the actions itself. For the purpose of his actions, it is irrelevant that (for whatever reason) he had sexual feelings about other men. What matters is what he did. It’s the difference between feeling like wanting to murder somebody and then actually murdering somebody. The former is not a crime punishable in court. The latter is a crime that will get any man locked away in prison for a long time.
So yes, what happened here with this man and his wife is not just sad, but it is also dangerous and a manifestation of what many people- people considered “normal” and “average”- think about what the nature of truth and right and wrong it. They do not see it in terms of absolute truth, but of subjective beliefs to whatever their current sentiments are, and yet all the while they do not know it but they are being deceived into merely exchanging one set of values for another in what is the preparation for their enslavement. This incident is just one of many more that is happening worldwide right now.
There is an old saying- “when the students are ready, the teacher appears.” Just as when Christ came into the world the world was ready to accept him because the people were prepared, so will the antichrist appear once the world is ready to accept him. It should be no surprise too that events may seem to be “speeding up,” because as all growth and change is exponential, it inherently speeds up the closer it gets towards its end.
So be ready, but ready to stand for Christ in a world that, drop by drop and act by act is turning against Him and will test the Faith and will of anybody who calls himself a Christian…