“Exit from Homosexuality” by Andrew Comiskey, Pastoral Renewal, June 1988.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Pastoral Renewal is promoted “for Christians who want more than quick fixes”, who want “practical answers for tough pastoral questions”. On homosexuality, what its readers settle for is just such a quick fix dressed up as a practical answer. How else would they mistake such a run-around and impasse for an exit? For several years now, the publishers of this Charismatic monthly have put a wet right finger to the reactionary wind and printed what their readers want to read on homosexuality. It’s all been done for the sake of “decency”, of course, for G. K. Chesterton was right: “A real liar does not tell wanton and unnecessary lies. He tells nice and necessary lies”. And what, to many Christians, is nice and necessary is to get rid of homosexuality, or at least to appear to do so, at any cost to homosexuals, common sense and credulity itself.
With reference to his own homosexuality, Comiskey (Director of the “ex-gay” group called Desert Stream) claims an “experience of healing in Christ”. But after a decade of such healing experience he admits he still has homosexual “temptations” and that he still has “a different response to men visually than a man who has never struggled with homosexuality”. He admits that in the “ex-gay” healing experience “there is something that seems a little different” from the experience of heterosexual men and that homosexual desire “doesn’t go away overnight”. But these caveats are easily missed by readers bent on hearing what they think they need to hear. He disclaims a cheap “name it, claim it” approach, though undercurrents of Positive Confession (i.e., that saying something brings it into existence) may lurk beneath his surface argument. But his approach does seem to be more in the mode of Humpty Dumpty, using words in an arbitrary way when “it’s very provoking to be called an egg!” For example, in spite of continuing homosexual desires, Comiskey says: “We teach people to set aside the false sexual labeling of themselves” as homosexuals. H says that that involves “letting go of false pictures, false images”. He insists: “I don’t think that even someone acting out [sic] homosexually should define himself as ‘a homosexual’.” When the editors ask specifically if his goal is “to help people become heterosexual”, Comiskey replies that “the first goal is to help people stop acting out [sic] homosexual desires”. But a further goal is that “we want to see people come to a place of loving the same sex intimately but not erotically”. Yet he himself admits to looking at men in a different way from the way heterosexual men look at other men. Isn’t that something “a little different” precisely the visually stimulating erotic experience? Besides, homosexuals as such have no problem relating in a non-erotic way to most persons of the same sex. The erotic experience is an involuntary response toward only some other same sex persons. The same is true of heterosexuals’ relating to members of the other sex. Comiskey’s careless thinking is evidence also in his discussion of homosexual etiology in which he asserts that homosexuals “are at odds with their own gender”, that “the opposite sex is seen as controlling or abusive” while there are “resistances to heterosexuality”, and that “narcissism” is involved. There is plenty of rigorous research literature that refutes his notions. Unfortunately, Comiskey’s early efforts to deal with his homosexuality took place in a sex-negative society and in what he calls “the homosexual subculture” – as though there is but one. He says he met many “broken” people there: “I got a sense of underlying desperation in all of us”. Sadly, that’s believable. But such is not every homosexual’s experience and it certainly doesn’t have to be any homosexual’s inevitable experience.
There is in all of this a squeamish theology that is both merely superficially sanitary and fundamentally unbiblical. After all, unlike the moral philosophers of ancient Rome, the Apostle Paul did not uphold sexual self-control as a virtue. To Paul, it was one of God’s gifts given to some and not to others in a world system coming to a close. As a “virtue”, it is what Augustine ridicules when he sees a sick self-will in matters sexual: “This is by no means a healthy state due to nature, but an illness due to guilt”.
Trying to rob others of the only opportunity they have for a responsible sexual intimacy to which they can actually commit themselves is that selfishness which, in the words of George MacDonald, “consists in taking the bliss from another”. On one level it might seem that the aim of Desert Stream is to try to “love the sinner while hating the sin”. But when it comes to sexuality, such studied innocence is a pious violence that disregards the fact that the person, the orientation, and the reasonable expression of the orientation are alive in the unity of a warm human being and cannot be dissected into cold and objective categories without destroying that human being. As Charles Kingsley keenly observed, people “have found it more difficult than they fancied … to hate the sin and love the sinner, and so they have begun to persecute; and finding brute force, or at least the chicane of law, far more easy than either convincing their opponents or allowing themselves to be convinced by them, they have fined, imprisoned, tortured, burnt, exterminated, and like the Roman conquerors of old, ‘made a desert and called that peace’.” Comiskey might object that it is a desert he found and a stream he made and called it peace. But a stream does not always refresh. It can be a death-dealing torrent that beats down the home of the one who builds on a weak foundation, as in one of Jesus’ parables.