This weekend in a church near Palm Springs, speaker after speaker from Focus on the Family will tell ministers and family members that gay people can “come out of a homosexual lifestyle” and live celibate.
Yes, they will trot out some married ex-gays to hint and suggest that gay people can miraculously become heterosexual but behind the token wives and children is the message that for the vast majority of gay people, Focus’ goal is a life of celibacy.
Hey, that’s not so bad, is it? It’s only eternal abstinence.
But when advising their own (i.e. heterosexuals), Focus on the Family has a very different approach. In an article titled Get Married, Young Man on the Focus website, they acknowledge that living celibate isn’t quite such a desireable life
As a single man in my early 20s… I was not fooling around or hooked on pornography, but I found sexual thoughts and attractive women to be a recurring distraction from my walk with God. Every few months it seemed that a platonic or professional relationship with an attractive non-Christian woman would develop alluring sexual potential. You don’t have to date a woman nowadays to get into compromising situations. A single man with strong sexual interests (and that’s most of us men) and available sexual encounters (and that’s most of us) is in frequent danger.
I’ve found that protection against sexual sin and the opportunity and the pleasure associated with monogamous sexual intimacy with the woman I love to be a very real benefit of marriage.
The writer, one Alex Chediak, continues on with a litany of joys that reside in marriage without the slightest thought that his organization also spares no expense to make certain that some readers cannot enjoy any of these delights.
Though the article is rife with irony when read by a gay man (“most singles aren’t gifted for lifelong celibacy”), it is in the paragraph I quote above in which I see demonstrated the cruelty and callousness of Focus on the Family and their campaign against the lives and freedoms of gay individuals.
They freely acknowledge that a single man with strong sexual interests and available sexual encounters is in frequent “danger”. And I this is no less true for gay Christian young men than it is for heterosexual Christian young men.
And Focus readily concedes that protection against sexual sin and the opportunity for pleasure associated with monogamous sexual intimacy is a very real benefit.
But should a young Christian gay man, or other gay man whose moral code requires marriage covenants for sexual intimacy, seek to partake of this recommended pleasure, Focus stands in the way to bar him from such joy. Should he belong to a fellowship of faith that would encourage him in a committed covenanted relationship, Focus is there with millions of dollars to fight against that relationship in every manner they can.
Then instead of joy and pleasure, marriage magically becomes about children and children alone. All joys and benefits are dismissed and ignored and Focus portrays marriage as about nothing more procreation.
But this is nothing but a smokescreen. Focus doesn’t really believe that marriage is only for children though this is what they claim over and over without hesitation or shame. Read the article, they believe nothing of the sort. Focus would bar such a young Christian man from marriage for one reason and one alone. Because he is gay.
So in the midst of all their “love the homosexual” and “hope for healing” that they will be proudly proclaiming to the Coachella Valley this weekend, remember this one thing: Focus believes that “God has wired most of us with a longing for the sexual and emotional intimacy of marriage” and says “get married, young man”.
But not you. Oh, no. For you, Focus offers a life of celibacy.
Those were my thoughts exactly as I read that article. Nicely put.
I’ve been a Christian for about 10 years. I’m also gay. Always have been, always will be. In a great, long-term, monogamous realtionship.
Am I going to hell? Nope. Nothing could convince me to believe differently, nor is it any “Christian’s” duty to try to dissuade me. Its not Christian at all to put stumbling blocks before the brethren.
People who determine that a certain type of person in a specific situation cannot be Christian are wrong, and very frankly, anti-Christs. Christ’s one commandment was to love one another. That’s it. Pretty simple to me.
Jokingly, I’ve always said, “If they can pray the gay out of me, I can beat the Christian out of them.”
Neither is going to happen.
The Focus on the Family quote always reminds me about what a friend of mine once said about abstaining from sex until marriage. He said that under those circumstances, marriage is less of a lifelong committment between two people who love each other, and more of a liscence for fightened kids to screw.
Excellent job Timothy, you’ve really highlighted the hypocrisy of “Focus on the family” by putting those two contradictory messages side by side. It takes callous, hateful, lying people to push this double standard and have the audacity to say it has anything to do with love.
I have a problem with the word celibacy as it does not fully connote the emotional situation that is demanded upon a person; but rather speaks only to sexual concerns.
And sex is just that Focus on the Family and the mainline Christian religions seek to make homosexuality about. In my time my parish priest and, later, Courage promoted celibacy to me as a noble pursuit to ameliorate my need fo intimacy with another. At times that need caused me to try to reach out towards women. But what I found there for myself was only my need, my obsession for affection and not that which allowed for me that real complement of which my Church speaks.
But do you think FotF would even consider what I have to relate to them? No, it’s not in their theological outlook. And that isn’t going to change. The Catholic Church said in 2003 (Considerations…. Unions Between Homosexual Persons):
….the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil. …. clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation ….
They are never going to listen, understand, cooperate… whatever, because they see GLBT people as doing evil or worse yet demonically possessed. Is it any wonder that links to this site and others like it are removed from comments or that no trackbacks are given. There is no freedom of speech for them in this matter, there is only a debate with evil. They do not see your form of Christianity as truth, but bereft of the guidance of the holy spirit.
I have a problem with it also, because there has never been an ethic for the homosexual person in any Abrahamic religion, other than “don’t do that!” Without any such ethic in consideration of all human persons, how is any faith true?
Very nice post, Timothy. I’d also like to say that “celibacy” that Focus and so many others requires is quit different and more demanding for gay people.
Celibacy for a straight single person allows for cuddling, hugging, kissing, hand holding, etc. with the person someone is attracted to. Celibacy for a gay person allows for no such things.
It’s always been amazing to me how few people realize what they are requiring when they talk about celibacy for gay people, especially when they seem to understand how difficult the quest for celibacy can be when it actually affects them personally.
It’s always been amazing to me how few people realize what they are requiring when they talk about celibacy for gay people, especially when they seem to understand how difficult the quest for celibacy can be when it actually affects them personally.
It’s the same self-absorbed assumption that enables them to proclaim that gay people aren’t discriminated against because they have same the right to get married to opposite-sex partners as straight people – namely, if heterosexual marriage (or any other thing you want to insert here) was a good thing for me, then anyone that it doesn’t work for must have done something wrong.
Celibacy for a straight single person allows for cuddling, hugging, kissing, hand holding, etc. with the person someone is attracted to. Celibacy for a gay person allows for no such things.
It’s always been amazing to me how few people realize what they are requiring when they talk about celibacy for gay people, especially when they seem to understand how difficult the quest for celibacy can be when it actually affects them personally.
Thank you for pointing that out Brady. When I was trying the “ex-gay” thing, I went 6 years celibate as you describe it – no personal contact outside of a few hugs and kisses with family members/close friends when saying hello or goodbye. When I finally dropped that idea and came out, I found that the celibate time actually helped me not become a sex-crazed stereotypical gay man (not that I was pure as snow, either, to be honest, but I was discriminating in my taste). Because I had gone so long without sex, I knew I didn’t “need” it all the time.
But I did find that the intimacy, including holding hands, kissing, hugging, was something I craved. I still remember the first time I held hands with a boyfriend at a movie – the experience of touching someone without shame or guilt was electrifying, and in some ways more satisfying than the best sex.
It is truly cruel to demand that people deprive themselves not only of sexual intimacy, but all physical intimacy.
This absolute celibacy, which some religions prescribe on its gay members, only results in the most basic human condition to atrophy. It will only produce psychologically scared individuals: asexual zombies. What professor of any religion would sanction that?
The need for personal intimacy is vital. It is not for any religion to deny its benefits to anyone.
What is the general term for nurturing and mutually caring for someone? What are most all the lyrics and the music written about? Why do we spend hours in the gym? If we have furnaces why do we need fireplaces? (Hint: primarily to cuddle by). What is it when you walk off the plane to be greeted with a smile and a pair of sparkling eyes which translates into “I missed you”? What is that framed picture of someone special on your desk for?
Answer: Love. Try to deny me of it. How dare a religion say celibacy is an option? It’s not an option when it sacrifices so much.
The demand of celibacy for gays and lesbians is abhorrent. It is an unreasonable expectation and is at its heart a very cruel thing to impose on anyone, let alone a group of people who are already estranged from larger society. Homo sapiens are social creatures and we know from psychological studies that we need to have physical contact (i.e., touches, hugs, kisses, etc.) in order to thrive.
It is in our nature as human beings to form deep emotional bonds with others. These bonds are as varied as the relationships we have in our lives, but the bond we form with our “mate” is unique and very important to our emotional well-being.
It’s always been amazing to me how few people realize what they are requiring when they talk about celibacy for gay people…
They don’t know what they’re asking, because they can’t see the people for the homosexuals. I had a guy I was arguing with years ago on Usenet, tell me straight up he didn’t think gay lovers loved as deeply or as meaningfully as heterosexual lovers. WTF??? I’m just as human as he is, and yet the instant I tell him I’m gay suddenly I’m not capable of the breadth and depth of feeling he is.
That’s the payoff for decades and decades of relentless dehumanization of homosexual people. Of course they’d never ask another heterosexual to endure lifetime celibacy. But we’re different. We’re not fully human. We’re homosexuals. We don’t experience life the way they do. Every week we have dozens, if not hundreds of, as George Will once put it, brief, barren assignations. We don’t know the awe and wonder and life affirming joys of love and human intimacy, we just rut. And the sex we do have is mere genital stimulation. We hook up, we get off, and we go find the next partner. All they think they’re asking us to do, is refrain from a disgusting habit.
The science fiction writer Orson Scott Card, well known for his anti-gay bigotry, wrote a column just after the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage in that state, in which he declared in part…
And there it is, for everyone to see. However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… He cannot bring himself to acknowledge a bond may in fact exist, let alone a deep and meaningful one, but only and grudgingly that “homosexual lovers” may think they have one. There is the bedrock, from which everything else flows…
When I was seventeen years old I was wandering the halls of my old high school one morning, walking from one class to another, daydreaming probably, and then out of nowhere I laid eyes on the guy who that instant become my first high school crush, and later my first high school love. It’s such an old human story…that first teenage romance. There’s probably still a mark somewhere on the floor of that old hallway where my seventeen year old jaw hit it. He smiled at me as he walked past me that morning. I’m fifty-three years old now, and I can close my eyes and Still see that smile. And it Still has the power to lift me.
I’m sure most heterosexuals remember their first teenage romance fondly. I feel inordinately lucky as a gay man to be able to remember mine fondly too, considering it was 1971. But try to explain that to someone yapping at me about how I should be celibate, and I might as well be talking to a brick wall. They Know beyond any means of persuasion otherwise, that could not have experienced what they did when I fell in love that first time. I am but a mere child playing dress up in my parent’s clothes…throwing a tantrum because I can’t have my way…stealing from heterosexuals and gaining nothing for myself because I am not capable of real adult human feelings. I am a homosexual, and homosexuals just don’t feel those things. This is how prejudice works. This is how bigots think. And more and more these days I’m becoming convinced that it’s a kind of sociopathy.
For them to understand the magnitude of what it is they’re trying to take away from us, they first have to recognize that we experience love and sex and all the tender joys of human intimacy like they do. And all we have to do to make that happen is just get them past their prejudices and conceits. But that’s a bit like saying all you have to do to get to Mars is make the voyage.
Bruce, I’ve had the good fortune to be bisexual which means I’ve loved women and am now in love with a man. Speaking from experience my love for my man is every bit as deep and meaningful as the love I had for the women in my life, its most certainly not a case of playing dressup in my parents shoes. Knowing this, Orson Scott Card and the fellow you argued with on usenet, and the like, couldn’t seem more foolish and ignorant.
Very stimulating post.
There are two prominent ideas around religious practice which may broaden our discussion:
Religious practice which is protean (picking and chosing what we practice based upon a variety of critera, including personal experiences) vs. constrictive (conforming our behavior to the demands of a denomination or creed which is nonnegotiable).
FOTF is an example of constrictive in multiple areas, not just gay celebacy.
I think these two labels imply pathology in one and adaptibility and flexibility in the other and I am not sure that is entirely fair. It appears that even fundamentalist practice (constrictive) has a number of positive outcomes (see Pergament, 2003).
Bracing for response.
And you should be braced, David. No, really.
As is expected here: who is Pergament, and in what ways did he suggest fundamentalist practice has a number of positive practices?
People aren’t mind-readers of Pergament, let alone of yours.
Simple name-dropping is discouraged, unless the topic and person is well established. Please bring the point you are attempting to raise, forward.
Otherwise we risk people wasting their time attempting to guess what it is you are claiming, and possibly guessing wrong.
One point you did make is able to be discussed: at the very least, even constrictive fundamentalism is chosen in our societies. So it too is about picking and chosing, albeit driven by many aspects of the personality that are not chosen.
At least it was last time I checked. Or has James Dobson and allies finally staged their long awaited political coup, and make constrictive funadmentalism… compulsory???
I agree with David that religious practice can be assessed as constrictive vs. subjective, among many other analytical approaches —
But FOTF is not constrictive. FOTF is disloyal to the Bible as a whole, and it especially is disloyal to the Gospels. It is loyal to politically correct fragments of the Bible — Leviticus, letters by Paul — that suit FOTF’s cultural, political, and financial biases.
For example, the Bible is absolutely clear about sins of excessive wealth, pride, egotism, idolatry, blasphemy, lying, inhospitality to one’s neighbors and foreigners, and nonjudgment of others. But FOTF has discarded Biblical morality on these counts. Indeed, it regularly commits many of these sins without an ounce of remorse.
Sadly, FOTF has picked-and-chosen a politically correct and distorted set of Bible passages relating to sexuality; declared that to be the entirety of morality; violated the remainder of Christian morality; and replaced the traditional apostolic creed with an arrogant, authoritarian warrior creed.
Other than Orthodox Jews, I can’t think of a single religious body in America (or probably the west) that isn’t protean in doctrine. And even they have given up on the grain and animal sacrifices.
All modern religion is a hodge-podge of literal interpretations and exceptions to the rules. No one at all in the west (really, no one) follows all scripture literally.
It is only in application of that picked-and-chosen set of beliefs that a denomination is either protean or constrictive. Either they say “you must obey the rules as we have interpreted them historically (someone else’s protean applications)” or “here’s what we think. pick what works for you”.
Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages to both.
Maybe now would be the time to mention that DogEmperor at Talk2Action has been researching the way Focus fudges its tax exempt status while politically spreading its culture war. Scroll to the comments on https://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/9/14/154754/829 to take whatever action you may feel led.
It’s unnatural and impossible the standards called for from gay people.
It’s placing gay folks in the position of not expecting to be or act as a human being would and MUST.
You all are so right, to not even have physical intimacy, not just sexual intimacy is cruel.
Beyond cruel…and all this literally at the risk of violence in some places.
Even not being able to be forthright and honest about one’s orientation is as well.
Us human JUST AREN’T that way. Period.
We require contact and gentle touch for our physical health as well as emotional health.
From the time we are newborns, until we age and die.
We require communication (that’s why we have the gift of speech). We require all this as we do air, food and water.
We require numbers, socializing, tribes and family.
Non of us can keep so deeply on the quiet. Non communicating our concerns and questions burdens us heavily too. Thus the confession booth and confidantes and gossip.
Indeed, those who are asexual, loner and non social ARE THE ANOMALY and not normal.
This is why solitary confinement in prisons is an ultimate punishment.
So requiring this of gay people is not only unrealistic and mean, it’s not even healthy for all of society.
There are a myriad of other ways humanity survives besides by procreation.
I really hate it when Exodus bogus social scientists act like it’s right and preferred that they say such idiot stuff to gay and straight people alike, then sit back in denial when their own theories and beliefs are proven to be the problem and not the solution.
I don’t agree that this is hypocrisy. I think it’s mean-spirited and wrong, and as a gay man, I find it deplorable. But it’s not hypocrisy.
I asked a devout Christian once about just this double standard — why is it so much easier, I asked him, for straight people to be saved? He had a ready answer: God intends life to be harder for some and easier for others. Your life, he said, will be harder. That’s just how life is, and that’s how God intended it.
Now clearly, this view has Biblical support; the God of the Bible routinely decrees that certain people will suffer more than others. Do we, as humans, find this just? Certainly not. But then, my friend reminded me, it is a sin to presume to judge God.
At that point, I became very glad I wasn’t a Christian.
I meant to say it’s unnatural the demands made OF gay people.
Well of course they know how unreasonable it is to demand lifelong celibacy. There’s no way to sell it to anybody-that’s why they try to sell gays on the “You can, and should change” idea instead. It’s a classic bait-and-switch.
Jason said “I don’t agree that this is hypocrisy…Now clearly, this view has Biblical support; the God of the Bible routinely decrees that certain people will suffer more than others.”.
Jason, if those Christians also say they believe that this “god” loves all equally then it truly is hypocrisy.
Catching up: It was Pergament (2002) not (2003) I believe.
Pergament, Kenneth (1997) The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice. New York: Guilford Press.
Pergament, Kenneth (2002) The Bitter and the Sweet: an Evaluation of the Costs and Benefits of Religiousness. Psychological Inquiry, 13, 168-181.
Pargament, K. and Mahoney, A. (2005) Spirituality: Discovering and Conserving the Sacred. In C.R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez (Ed.) Handbook of Positive Psychology (645-659). New York, NY. Oxford University Press.
These articles do not discuss the constrictive vs. protean religiousness I described above, but the (2002) talks about costs and benefits and that even some fundamentalist religions have important benefits.
Five basic benefits posted as follows:
1. Some forms of Religion are more helpful than others. Well-being has been linked to religion that is internalized, intrinsic with secure God relationship and negatively with imposed, unexamined and tenuous God relationship.
2. There are advantages and disadvantages to fundamentalism.
3. Religion particularly helpful for the Socially Marginalized (A specialized study for gays and lesbians is warranted here).
4. Religious Beliefs are especially helpful in highly stressful situations.
5. Efficacy of religion is tied to the degree to which it is well integrated into the person’s life.
Hope this helps.
I would like to suggest caution before this thread goes much further into bashing the nebulous “Christian” over a conflation of opinions we may have heard here or there. The subject is Focus’ duplicitous use of their own interpretations of scripture concerning marriage. We aren’t going to solve matters of faith here, but we can hold FOTF accountable for speaking out of both sides of their collective mouth.
We know that elsewhere on this site we have documented that Focus has similarly dispensed hypocritical advice to a woman that was asked by a man (fitting the ex-gay template) to marry her.
https://exgaywatch.com/blog/archives/2006/04/focus_to_girlfr.html
So this is particularly cruel and odious!
Thanks David B. — you prob. gathered we had guessed the who and what :), but the outline you gave is a much more helpful way of doing it. (esp. for those without a copy of the original etc).
I recall a big long, diputed, thread here that ended with something along the lines of” “Oh, Fred Smith??? No, I was taking about the paper by Joan Smith. Oh, pffft!”