Posted March 24, 2026
The Dow surged 631 points yesterday after President Trump said the US and Iran have held “very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.” In response, the president postponed strikes on Iranian power plants for a five-day period.
However, I’m following a different story today that I believe to be enormously significant as well. I have not seen it widely reported, which points to my point.
According to the Los Angeles Times, West Hollywood’s city council has unanimously approved advancing what the article calls a “registry of multi-partner domestic relationships.” The writer explains that West Hollywood is now “the latest of a few cities in the US to pursue legal protection for groups of more than two adults living in a single household who are romantically or otherwise committed to each other.”
Advocates claim that such protections are needed for a broad group of people, such as immigrant households that depend on extended family members for child care and support. Multigenerational families living together would be another example.
And of course, the ordinance is intended to “protect” polyamorous households where multiple sexual partners live together.
Even though I strongly disagree with polyamory on biblical, moral, and practical grounds, I understand that our secularized culture does not typically legislate morality with regard to such consensual behavior. For example, though 90 percent of Americans consider “married people having an affair” to be “morally wrong,” adultery is not illegal in the US.
But here’s the part of the article that could easily be overlooked: the West Hollywood city council also “outlawed discrimination against polyamorous people and others in nontraditional family structures” and has added “family or relationship structure as a protected class in the city alongside race, religion, gender, and other categories.” The anti-discrimination law will go into effect in mid-April.
Will it mean a church or ministry would be forced to hire someone in a polyamorous relationship? What about Christians operating a business? What about believers who use their influence to defend biblical morality in this context?
Would today’s article be illegal in West Hollywood?
For several years, I have spotlighted the four-stage strategy employed by LGBTQ advocates in our society: normalize immoral behavior through popular media, legalize such behavior, stigmatize those who disagree as “homophobic” and otherwise dangerous, and criminalize such opposition. Today’s discussion is one example of the fourth stage.
Jane Goodall, the famed British primatologist and animal rights activist, once warned:
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
However, as a strong advocate for LGBTQ causes, she meant her warning in precisely the opposite way that I am endorsing it today.
It is human nature to focus on issues that seem most relevant to us personally. This “fight-or-flight response” is our natural, automatic reaction to stress or danger. Whether you attribute it to evolutionary development or God’s design (I choose the latter), you can understand the need to evaluate all experiences, including this article, through a prism of personal relevance.
Consequently, unless you live in West Hollywood or in the few cities in Massachusetts or on the West Coast where polyamory “protections” have been enacted, this threat to religious liberty can seem remote and thus less relevant to you.
But that’s only because we tend to overlook how this strategy works. Statutes deemed legal in small towns can then be advanced to major cities. What starts in one part of the country can advance to others. And when such actions rise to the level of federal civil rights, they can supersede states’ rights (as occurred in 1973 when Roe v. Wade overturned abortion prohibitions in at least thirty-one states).
Consequently, moral apathy is indeed “the greatest danger to our future.” Consider three reasons.
The first is legal, as we have seen.
When Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, the response by evangelicals would likely have been much stronger if we had foreseen that the US Supreme Court would discover this “right” in the Constitution a decade later and impose it on the entire country. Why should we think the same cannot happen with polyamory?
The second is personal.
Because Satan hates us, he will never tempt us to commit sin that will pay more than it costs us. He loves to turn down the moral lights in our cultural room so gradually that our eyes adjust and we find ourselves in the dark without complaint. And he knows that sin we tolerate in others often metastasizes into sin we commit personally.
This is why God’s word warns: “Desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:15). Because Satan always seeks to “steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10), “death” and nothing less is his ultimate goal. And moral apathy is one of his most effective means to this end.
The third is collective.
Because God is holy (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8), he must judge unconfessed sin. His word is clear: “I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity” (Isaiah 13:11). He therefore warns us, “Repent and turn from all your transgressions, lest iniquity be your ruin” (Ezekiel 18:30).
Our Father deals with us as gently as he can or as harshly as he must. The more society chooses moral apathy, the more we force him to choose the latter. This is why “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34).
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed:
Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “Is it popular?” But conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.
Where do you need to take such a position today?
“The world won’t be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” —Albert Einstein
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