“People who portray gay adults as godless, hedonistic, Christian-bashers are not working with the facts”, says evangelical pollster George Barna, founder of the research firm, The Barna Group. Reporting in July on a nationwide survey of 9,232 Americans over the last two years, Barna states: “A substantial majority of gays cite their faith as a central facet of their life, consider themselves to be Christian, and claim to have some type of meaningful personal commitment to Jesus Christ active in [their] life today.”
“Mental health professionals should avoid telling clients that they can change their sexual orientation through therapy or other treatments.” This is the conclusion of the American Psychological Association’s 130-page report on 83 published studies of attempted sexual reorientation since 1960. The report’s research took two years and the APA general council adopted its resolution by a vote of 125 to 4.
Judith Glassgold, chair of the task force, says that, “secular therapists have to recognize that some people will choose their faith over their sexuality”, but she warns: “There’s no evidence to say that change therapies work.” She notes: “These vulnerable people [who seek sexual reorientation through “reparative” therapy and “ex-gay” groups] are tempted to try them, and when they don’t work, they feel doubly terrified. You should be honest with people and say, ‘This is not likely to change your sexual orientation, but we can help explore what options you have’ ” e.g., celibacy.
The “ex-gay” Exodus movement’s head, Alan Chambers, admits that the “ex-gay” effort is a “hard road” and says he still struggles with homosexual temptations. Nonetheless, he faults the report’s conclusion that reorientation efforts don’t work. And a former Exodus board director, currently Focus on the Family’s gender issues analyst, Jeff Johnson, also objects to the report: “There are a lot of people out there who haven’t just changed their sexual identity and behavior, but their attractions have changed! I’m one of those people!” That’s what his predecessor used to say – before being found in a gay bar while in Washington, DC on “ex-gay” business. Soberly, Grove City College teacher Warren Throckmorton, formerly more inclined to efforts at sexual reorientation, calls the APA report “balanced and thoughtful”.
“I don’t have any advice for others who struggle the way I did.” This is Ted Haggard’s straightforward reply to a question in the August issue of the Pentecostal Charisma magazine: “What do you say now to people who struggle with gay feelings?”
“CHANGE IS POSSIBLE!” The capital letters on his website says so. Christopher Yuan promises to “tell my story of God bringing me out of homosexuality into a life of purity and obedience.”
Yuan used to sell drugs (Ecstasy, crystal meth, marijuana, etc.) in Atlanta’s gay bars. He says he lived a fast-lane lifestyle of money, “multiple anonymous partners” and “many failed gay relationships”. Arrested and convicted of drug dealing, he spent several years in prison. It was there he learned he was HIV positive and became a Christian. A prison chaplain told him the Bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality and gave him a book to explain this. But Yuan refused to finish reading even the first chapter. “Completely delivered” from drug addiction, he was released from prison and went to Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College.
He recounts this in his website’s video testimony – at Willow Creek Church, at an Exodus conference, and at other venues, where his parents sometime join him on stage. He’s always been close to his mother, who says his revealing he was gay was worse than if they’d been told he was dead.
But in his testimony, he never says he’s been delivered from his same-sex attraction. He says God doesn’t say he must be heterosexual. His “identity”, he says, should be in Christ and not in his sexuality. “The ultimate issue is not whether I’m attracted to male or female”, but a matter of “purity and holiness.”
“I was at blame.” Flirting with you “was the stupidest and biggest mistake of my life.” Dwan Prince, victim of a brutal antigay beating that left him partially paralyzed in 2005 has conveyed this to Steven Pomie, convicted of the assault and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Witnesses testified that, when asked why he kept kicking the unconscious victim, Pomie shot back: “Yo, … the nigger’s a faggot”.
Gay City News gives featured front-page coverage (August 6-19, 2009) the apology. (In 2008 an appellate court reversed the conviction and ordered that Pomie, now 26, be retried on the lesser charge of assault in the second degree.)
Prince, now 31, attends a Bible study and says: “I am looking to change my life these days. I am looking for a female who I can marry and have my sperm washed and have children.” (He is HIV-positive.) “I must try to live by the Bible. I must try to live by God’s law.” He tells Pomie that he wants him released from prison “as soon as possible [so] we can hang out … and you can find me a female I can love and can love me.”
“Next Fall” is a bittersweet off-Broadway play about an improbable four-year gay relationship between a devoutly evangelical Christian and an older, cynical atheist. Gay playwright Geoffrey Nauffts, who grew up in a secular home with negative views on religion, says he’s come to respect several evangelical Christian actors who’ve become his friends. He tells The New York Times: “It’s an eye-opening experience to see individuals as human beings, not as monsters. It’s really easy to write off people with any kind of religious belief, especially if they’re fervent.”
“I’m flattered, and I think it’s hilarious.” That’s what “American Idol” Kris Allen told People.com, responding to news that runner-up Adam Lambert, now totally “out of the closet”, has had a crush on him. Lambert told Rolling Stone: “Kris was the one guy that I found attractive in the whole group on the show – nice, nonchalant, pretty and totally my type – except that he has a wife.”
The easy-going Allen, who is worship leader of Chi Alpha, a campus ministry of the Assembly of God at the University of Central Arkansas and at New Life megachurch, is described by Chi Alpha’s director as “a guy who takes a lot of things in stride. God gave Kris a heart for compassion and empathy and to reach out to others.”
Gay-marriage opponent Ruben Diaz says, of Liza Minnelli’s drag queen ballad: “It touched me, something touched me.” Veteran gay-activist attorney Christopher Lynn had taken his good friend, State Senator and Pentecostal preacher Diaz, to see Minnelli on Broadway. During her rendition of “What Makes a Man a Man”, Lynn noticed that Diaz was choked up and in tears. Asked to defend his friendship with Diaz, Lynn, who helped found the Stonewall Democratic Club, explains: “He’s my friend and I love him,” but homosexuality is “a moral issue with [him]. He refuses to vote for something that he feels would imperil his soul. … Rather than vilify people like Diaz, you have to appreciate the total human being.” Diaz, who has two gay brothers, says: “I have a problem with gay marriage. I don’t have a problem with gays.”
This story was reported in New York Magazine in June.
In July, a Christianity Today Poll on gay marriage found that 44 percent of online responders want to “continue to fight vigorously and politically against legalizing gay marriage” while 11 percent “support initiatives that would legalize gay marriage”. Twenty-five percent support “work[ing] non-politically, quietly to change hearts and minds on the issue” and 14 percent say: “Ignore the issue and focus on the church’s main mission.” The number of responders was 1,407.
“Six of the eight states where 50 percent or more of the public supports gay marriage are the states with the highest proportion of Catholics.” This is noted by Mark Silk, head of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College (Hartford, CT).
Talk of gay issues in the Reformed Church in America will continue. But after often heated dialogue for the past three years, the RCA has decided the discussing will now be more “off center stage”, as dialogue coordinator John Stapert puts it.
The Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church have both proposed adoption of the Belhar Confession. Delegates to their general synods met this summer and voted to recommend adoption of the Confession, drafted in 1982 as a theological confrontation and renouncing of the sin of racism in South Africa. Adoption would signal the denominations’ continued commitment to justice.
Some delegates, however, worry that in adopting the Belhar as an additional doctrinal standard, it might one day be used to affirm homosexual relations.
Fort Worth’s historic Broadway Baptist Church has been kicked out of the Southern Baptist Convention for allowing two homosexuals to serve on committees. According to a Broadway spokesperson: “Our doors are open to all people, including homosexuals, without affirming their behavior.” Though, as a Baptist church, the congregation is autonomous, affiliation with the SBC can be severed by a vote of the national organization. The church remains in the Texas state Baptist convention.
A lesbian couple gave a testimony during Mississippi’s Annual United Methodist Conference this summer. At this, many conservatives were outraged and demanded an apology. According to Rev. Ginger Holland, leader of the Mississippi Fellowship of United Methodist Evangelicals, disgust over the lesbians’ testimony brought 200 new members into the antigay Fellowship. Said Rev. Giles Lindley: “This issue shows that these sort of things are best discussed in small groups,” and added: “When it gets to be a public conversation, people’s politics, egos, their other agendas, become involved.”
“Dr. King would be turning over in his grave right now.” That’s what Rev. Eric P. Lee, president and CEO of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says about the SCLC’s Atlanta headquarters’ threat to remove him because of his support for marriage equality. His own board and staff support Lee, who used to pastor what he describes as L.A.’s “very conservative” African-American Wesleyan Church. Lee says that his opposition to Proposition 8 “created tension in my life I had never experienced with black clergy. But it was clear to me that any time you deny one group of people the same right that other groups have that is a clear violation of civil rights and I have to speak up on that.”
“Marriage in the black community is nearly at the extinction level, and right behind it, Hispanic and white communities are following.” So, says Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr. of the mostly black Hope Christian Church, marriage equality should be opposed. As he puts it: “Everybody in the black community knows that our families are all torn up. I don’t think you have to be a rocket scientist to say [same-sex marriage] is not going to strengthen marriage.” After fighting marriage equality in California, this suburban Maryland bishop fought it in Washington, DC. In a protest against the DC recognition of same-sex marriage, Jackson conducted a heterosexual couple’s wedding.
But from research-based reasoning, noted social psychologist David G. Myers of Hope College counters the rhetoric against marriage equality: “Inviting gay couples to say ‘I do’ may actually help reverse the growing tendency of straight couples to say ‘We don’t’. And that would be a result that all of us marriage supporters would celebrate.”
Gerald Palmer is a rather unusual ally of gays and lesbians. That’s because he’s a heterosexual black man, married with three children, a Christian talk radio host, blogger, MSW social worker and an associate minister at Calvary Temple Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri – and his aim is, in his words, to be a “poster boy” for conciliation between LGBT people and the black church. His weekly talk radio show is heard on KGGN and on the Internet at blogtalkradio.com/word4thesoul. Minister Palmer says “enough is enough” with all the “ex-gay” claims, the black church’s mean-spirited defamation of lesbians and gay men, ignorance about AIDS and a rampant misuse of the Bible that demonstrates homophobia instead of Christian love.
“The orthodox are finished!” This was the reaction of antigay blogger David Virtue, following the Episcopalians’ overwhelming vote to consecrate more gay bishops. The vote, at the denomination’s convention in July, was more than two-thirds in favor of more gay bishops. Durham’s Anglican Bishop, N. T. Wright reacted: “In the slow-moving train crash of international Anglicanism, a decision taken in California has finally brought a large coach off the rails altogether.” He added that for Americans to say “ ‘we want to stay in [worldwide Anglicanism], but we insist on rewriting the rules’ is cynical double-think.”
Yet observers note that there was no concluding that “the orthodox are finished” and there was no serious threat of schism throughout the decades in which Episcopalians and other Anglicans have ordained bishops and priests who denied Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the atoning work of Christ.
Westminster Seminary church historian Carl R. Trueman considers homosexuality to be “at fundamental odds with the clear teaching of scripture” but he nonetheless acknowledges: “Given the long-standing existence within mainline churches of all manner of heresy, I have to confess to being as confused as many in the Gay movement over the evangelical histrionics surrounding the issue of the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality: if all manner of blasphemy is acceptable in the church, why make homosexuality the issue to fight over? Indeed, these days I find myself in the strange situation of having to agree with many of the gay critics of the stance of evangelicals in mainline denominations: the unique status evangelicals seem to have decided to accord to homosexuality makes it look to the wider world as if their motives are not those of consistent care for Christian orthodoxy but homophobia, pure and simple. Apparently, we can live with bishops who argue the case against Christ; but we must not tolerate those who argue the case for homosexuality.” He concludes: “The only big issue in this age, as in any age, is the reality of Jesus Christ.” To those who think the current debate over homosexuality is “the church’s do-or-die moment”, he advises: “Don’t buy the big issue as either the world or much of the current evangelical leadership in the mainlines tries to sell it to you: think biblically, with Christ at the center.”
They’re, quote: deplorable, mean-spirited, dreary, self-centered, intellectually stagnant, feckless, sordid, tyrannical, mindlessly evil hysterics and troglodytes associated with outright atrocities and led by a squid with amoral tentacles. Who are they? Gay activist Wayne Besen uses these terms for Episcopalians who refuse to ordain gay priests and bishops and are not “offering a new Christianity for the 21st Century.”
A. N. Wilson has returned to Christian faith after his 20-years in atheism. This British public intellectual and provocateur, whose biographies include Jesus, the Apostle Paul and C. S. Lewis, says atheism doesn’t deal with the complexities of human existence as deeply as Christianity does. He tells the New Statesman: “My atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness”. He now sees that “clever” atheist friends such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins simply don’t “get” life.
After reading two books “to enlighten me” on gay issues, Wilson says he’s revised his view of homosexuality. One book was Honor Moore’s The Bishop’s Daughter (about her late father, closeted but actively gay Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore) and the other book was openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson’s In the Eye of the Storm. Of Bishop Moore, Wilson says: “The ‘hypocrisy’ and the torment were almost certainly part of what made him such a powerful pastor, preacher and bishop.” Of Bishop Robinson, he says: “Instead of thinking that torment and concealment and self-criticism are part of life, he seems to believe that the Christian gospel means God accepting everyone as they are – with no suggestion of denying the self, and taking up the cross. … He raises the issue of ‘sexuality’ to a pinnacle of importance which makes it seem ridiculous. His book is that of an advanced egomaniac.”
“To a very large extent, I was stuck with love”, says author Reynolds Price. He’s discussing his homosexuality in a new autobiographical book, Ardent Spirits. He notes his lack of interest “in sex that had no substantial affectionate component.” Though in “looking back at my life from the age of 11 on …I can say truthfully that my sexual nature was as powerful as any I’ve encountered at close range”, he says that both distance from lovers and “the ceaseless demands of my work kept me mostly content.”
In an earlier book, Letter to a God Child: Concerning Faith, Price movingly recounted a vision at the Sea of Galilee and Jesus’ tenderly pronouncing him cured of cancer.
“The criminalization of Christianity!” That’s the prediction of Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries. He’s referring to President Obama’s memorandum for extending, to federal civil service employees’ domestic partners, long-term care insurance and sick leave provisions for the care of partners and children already granted to married couples. Knight warns that the “homosexual agenda” to extend health care to same-sex partners will lead to “repression and intolerance toward Christians and other traditionalists”.
According to a Hindu astrologer, “Even the animals don’t do it!” Sushil Kumar Kaushal, petitioning India’s Supreme Court to annul a Delhi High Court ruling decriminalizing homosexuality, predicts that, unless the ruling is overturned, people will be demanding “sex with the animals”. Catholic Cardinal Varkey Vithayathil, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, joins this astrologer in denouncing the New Delhi decision. He insists there must be no right for homosexuals, as there must be no right for serial killers or kleptomaniacs. He claims homosexuality “can be reversed by therapeutic methods”. Buddhist, Hare Krishna, Jain and Sikh leaders have joined the Hindu and Catholic leaders in passing resolutions denouncing the Delhi Court’s ruling as contrary to the culture of India and the will of the gods.
Haredim angrily attacked Israeli youths who were putting up posters lamenting the August 1 killing of a teenager and her counselor and the wounding of 13 teenagers at a Tel Aviv center for the support of gay youth. The haredim (“in awe” of God) are a sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews.
AND FINALLY:
Have you heard of little Pop? Pop is a child in Sweden who is going on 3 years old. Pop’s 24-year-old parents refuse to say whether Pop is a girl or a boy, contending that gender is only a “social construct”. As Pop’s mom puts it: “We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset. It’s cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their [sic] forehead.” So the parents don’t use personal pronouns in referring to Pop – though the terms “pop” or “papa” (English) and “pappa” (Swedish) surely bring to mind a male somebody. The parents buy both dresses and pants for Pop and they repeatedly change Pop’s hairstyle.
Canadian psychologist Susan Pinker, a specialist in sex differences, cautions: “Child-rearing should not be about providing opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual.” Besides, as she notes: “Ignoring children’s natures simply doesn’t work.” Another commentator is less polite: “This is a malignant case of narcissism expressing itself as child abuse: a willingness to sacrifice the well-being of one’s own child for the sake of ideological purity.”
Meanwhile, Swedish health authorities have ruled that gender-based abortion is not against the law. If the (socially constructed?) gender of your unborn child doesn’t please you, he or she may be literally deconstructed.