- Candace Chellew-Hodges proposes a new framework for the debate over the Bible and homosexuality.
- The Malaysian National News Agency reports on a worrying moral decadence; its tentacles had engulfed the west, and it is now gripping the country with its ills and evil ways. “Womanly” males are to be monitored, while parents are warned children will be trapped by its clutches. Like a malignant cancer, this felony threatens to bring destruction and devastation to society, along with many diseases. Its name? They call it “Homosexual“.
- A gay Christian blogger offers a thoughtful response to Alan Chambers’ recent New Man eMagazine article.
- The Italian government was ordered to give 100,000 Euros to a gay man as compensation for having his Constitutional rights violated. During a medical exam for the military, he disclosed he was gay and they ordered he re-take his driving exam or have his license suspended on the grounds that he was afflicted with “sexual identity disturbance.” Even after passing the test, he was granted a license for only a year instead of the usual ten. The judges deciding the case ruled on the grounds that homosexuality could not be called a mental illness.
- Peterson Toscano responds to a man struggling with his sexual orientation.
- Insure.com’s CEO Robert Bland, all the while protesting to have “no agenda,” not only espouses Paul Cameron’s “research” on his website, he goes so far as to continually support and defend Cameron’s work. The infamous “gay mortality study” is used to justify the blanket statement the being a gay man makes you die sooner in what is supposed to be an impartial, informative article.
- Right on the heels of Sally Kern, Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart has produced his own comic book in which he fights homosexual “pedifiles” – many of whom are apparently eager to become Boy Scout leaders.
- A repeal of a Jim Crow-era law banning out of state marriages in Massachusetts has prompted MassResistance and Peter LaBarbera to react quite unfavorably, calling it a “recipe for chaos” and warning it would “cause havoc.”
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I just posted this on Peterson’s website:
Steve– here are a couple of thoughts for you. Maybe the problem isn’t your homosexuality at all. maybe the problem is that you don’t like yourself very much. To me, that is what Peterson is basically saying. When he started liking and valuing himself, all of the ex-gay rhetoric he had ingested began to lose its power.
Hating oneself is betraying oneself. If you do not love yourself, can you love anyone else? Can anyone else love you?
Read a book on basic psychology. Positive self-esteem is the basis of good mental health. Low self-esteem is the basis of poor mental health. Self-hatred is at the very bottom of the self-esteem scale, and only produces in yourself what hate produces in other people, especially, as the history of the world shows, if they have the power to enforce their hatred on the objects of their hatred. And you do have that power. And you can see what it is doing to you.
Do you think you’ll actually stop hating yourself if you become heterosexual? Your self-hatred is the problem, not your sexuality.
Since, as so many Christians seem to claim, homosexuality is a choice, why is it that you are not choosing something different? with G and acceptance on your side, what is stopping you? You are the creator and designer and power of your own life. So maybe it is you that is stopping you– not because you are weak and sinful, but because you are immensely powerful, and you will not do that ultimate damage to yourself and your relationship with G.
Maybe there is actually nothing wrong with you at all, so you can’t actually choose to not have anything wrong with you. (A bit like saying I’ll have a steak when you are at a vegetarian restaurant. You can even demand to see the manager–god– but you still won’t get a steak). Maybe the something wrong with you is actually the only thing that is right with you, but you’ve been very carefully taught to reject the best of yourself, and choose the worst of yourself, which is why it isn’t working for you.
As Christians are so wont to say, with all the irony and falsehood, I’m sure, unintentional… love the sinner, hate the sin. Can you not be a good Christian in this sense? “You must be carefully taught…to hate all the people your relatives hate” … You’ve been taught well, and you’re doing the haters work for them. You might also look at all the things the ex-gay people tell you about gay people, and realize that they are mostly lies. And if they lie to you about that, what else are they lying to you about?
I had a professor tell me once: “You never to something FOR someone else. You do it TO them. You do it FOR yourself.” It took me a long time to understand the truth of his observation, but true it is.
when someone tells you that you are dirty, sick, unclean, and especially, sinful and in need to salvation (which they offer, of course, at a price) it is the biggest mistake in the world to assume that 1) it’s true, and 2) that they are telling you for your benefit, and not for their own. The concept of sin, especially YOUR sin, becomes the expression of their will and their way of seeing the world, and if it is making you unhappy, or interfering with your life, then that is probably a good test of its truth value. Likewise, you pay the price with happiness in your life, while they reap the benefits– the validation and the “glory”.
Allegedly, without exception, every time homosexual practice is mentioned in Scripture, it is condemned, says your average bible-believer. Unless, of course, you realize that this is not a true statement. Jesus had nothing to say about homosexuality. NOTHING on a subject that is so goddam important to bible-believing Christians. you’d think if it was actually important, he might have mentioned it oh,say, ONCE!!!!!
The bible may or may not condemn some aspects of gay sex. It is amazing to me how unclear G manages to be on the subject, when he is so clear on so many other subjects. So coy: “abusers of themselves with mankind” (KJV of words we don’t know the meaning of, and which requires pages of exegesis to explain into a clear condemnation.)
If it were as important to G as it is to you, he would have said: “two men or two women together shall not have sex in and way, shape, or form. They will not be naked together and touching each others’ skin. They certainly will not be bumping nasties. Penis into vagina, that’s it. And you shouldn’t enjoy it too much.”
Now, that is clarity befitting the creator of the universe.
So Steve, stop going to the dry well known as ‘ex-gay’ and expect to get a drink of water. see a good therapist and learn to love yourself better.