The Times Online and PinkNews are reporting that UK students nationwide have joined an online protest (on Facebook) against a campus based Christian course — a course which encourages gay students to suppress their homosexuality. The course, entitled Pure, is being sponsored by the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) — self-identified as a UK student Evangelical organization.
Per the PinkNews article:
The Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) launched PURE earlier this year. It is believed to be the first of its kind in Britain and follows the controversial American programme, the Silver Ring Thing, where teenagers wear a silver ring to show they intend to remain virgins until they are married. (Links added.)
Too bad virginity pledges [like the Silver Ring Thing campaign’s] can’t be taken on faith. Excerpt:
…Harvard doctoral candidate Janet Rosenbaum published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Rosenbaum found that 53 percent of adolescents in a large, federally funded (U.S.) study who said they made a virginity pledge denied doing so a year later, often after they had become sexually active.
And per The Times article:
What Some of You Were by Christopher Keane is one of the texts recommended by the course. It tells the stories of “ex-gays” who have rejected the temptations of homosexuality in accordance with Christianity. It cites the case of Christopher, a “reformed homosexual”, who says: “I shudder to think what may have happened to me if I had gone to a counsellor (or to a church) who had not upheld the Scriptures and had affirmed me in my homosexuality. If that had happened I may well have been dead from AIDS now.”
The book also comments on the characteristics of gay relationships, claiming that lifelong, quasi-marital fidelity in homosexual partnerships is a myth, contradicted by the facts. “The truth is that gay relationships are characterized more by promiscuity than by fidelity.”(Links added.)
The book What Some of You Were makes the same kind of statements we read frequently — It seems that this is all Argument Ad Nauseam. Refuted arguments regarding AIDS,the characterization of gay relationships as “characterized more by promiscuity than by fidelity” … It seems that the goal is to repeat refuted, anti-gay statements often enough that the target audience will believe the statements without question. Those kind of “facts” are called factoids.
Thank goodness the student bodies at several UK universities are organizing to refute the “Pure” messages.
Here’s an interesting little piece of EXODUS history — it can help explain just HOW gay people can become straight. They do it by re-defining heterosexuality. This is from the “EXODUS Policy Statement” of January 1991 (when EXODUS was still headquartered in San Rafael):
“Homosexuality: the adult condition of having a preferential, emotional and erotic attraction to memeber’s of one’s own sex”.
(Not too bad, but get this…)
“Heterosexuality: the freedom to encounter the opposite sex as a needed counterpart, with interest, not fear or distaste, and to relate intimately, but non-erotically, with one’s own sex.”
My point is that you can make ANYONE straight by re-defining it.
It cites the case of Christopher, a “reformed homosexual”, who says: “I shudder to think what may have happened to me if I had gone to a counsellor (or to a church) who had not upheld the Scriptures and had affirmed me in my homosexuality. If that had happened I may well have been dead from AIDS now.”
So “Christopher” isn’t sure who exactly he went to, but whoever or whatever it was got the gay out of him. Uh huh.
Ah, seeing it in context I misread what he meant. Never mind 🙂
The concern about repeating widely refuted assertions is well taken. Repeating these assertions is about laying down the party line, “You will buy this because I/we are in charge. I you do not, I will punish you.”
As we speak, a very good friend of mine has a family situation with her niece.
The niece is HIV positive, and so is her 3 month old newborn.
The problem is, who she was infected by, and who she might have infected,
it’s likely involves over 25 people. And all these folks are straight.
And in the news, every day there are stories about whole massacres of family members by another.
Women and their children murdered by a boyfriend or husband.
There is horrible child abuse, one of the last a woman clubbed her boyfriend with their month old newborn, leaving the baby critically injured and brain damaged.
I’d have a HELL of a lot more respect for these family advocates if they spent their media and millions doing something about domestic violence and HIV/AIDS among straight people AND their children.
The more energy they expend bad mouthing gay men and women who want to marry and adopt children, or serve in the military,
Or in maintaining the fiction that gay men and women are more of a danger to children and society than heterosexuals are to their OWN children, how can anyone take them seriously?
How can anyone give them money, and yet DAILY there are examples of heterosexual violence against the weaker members of society.
Yesterday, there was a story out of Arleta, CA that a 20 something transient worker, raped the 79 year old woman he’d done odd jobs for.
He’s on the loose, and for all we know fled back over the border, never to be caught or he could easily return to commit more sex crimes.
The straight world is EVERYONE’S worst nightmare all the time, and the more sad stories I hear about domestic violence and heterosexuals abusing children in a thousand different ways, what gay people do as far as pathology is concerned pales in comparison.
I wonder how much time Warren Jeffs is gonna serve for the GENERATIONAL abuse within the powerful FLDS community he controlled?
See?
…he was old news fast.