“Identity from within or from the Mind of Christ” by Joshua Gielow, TruthXChange, April 17, 2020
“Died: Sy Rogers, Who Testified God Changed His Sexual Identity” by Daniel Silliman, Christianity Today, April 23, 2020
“Help and Hope for Pastors Battling Porn” by Chris Sicks, byFaith, April 17, 2020
(PDF version available here)
Rosaria Butterfield’s new video is touted by a Peter Jones associate. He’s a former youth pastor promoting a former lesbian. Whoa! For eight years, she taught women’s studies, was heavily involved with that era’s dogmatic feminist politics. She says she “adopted a lesbian identity” in a relationship with one of her research subjects. Back then, this was virtue signaling in social constructionist feminist circles. She later became a Christian and married a man, a pastor. Was she ever a lesbian by orientation? Women do experience more orientation fluidity than men do.
But her story is offered as evidence for claims that are now repudiated by those who led the now abandoned “ex-gay” movement. Chirlane McCray, wife of New York City’s Mayor Bill DeBlasio, is never mentioned by those who push the “ex-gay” claims. Yet she’s stated: “When I came to New York City, long ago, back in 1977, I identified as a lesbian”, and quite publicly, too. Again, back then, it was “cool”, and lots of “cool” feminist radicals were doing that.
But Gielow claims Butterfield “gives a brilliant analysis of how Christ delivers people caught in the practice [note: “practice”] of homosexuality, by putting to death the works of the flesh.” He calls for, “embracing God’s creational truth for his glory and our good.” Also, this phrase, “caught in the practice of”, ducks the fact that heterosexually oriented folks are such, not by choice, but just as involuntarily as a minority of men and women are involuntarily same-sex oriented, while more women than men are, indeed, rather bisexual.
Gielow’s mentor, Peter Jones, meets his own involuntary heterosexual needs with a wife he married in 1971. He’s ordained in the PCA denomination that forbids the same-sex oriented from meeting the needs he reserves for himself and other heterosexuals. The PCA ridicules even those who abstain from their involuntary same-sex orientation needs to commit to be celibate for life, while they self-identifying as “gay”. Jesus’ Golden Rule, a summing up both the Law and the Prophets, resolves this dispute biblically, if antigay folks were to take the Rule seriously.
The PCA refuses to let go of stereotypes of gays and Sodom. But, God, through Ezekiel, said: “Sodomites were arrogant and spoiled; they had everything they needed and refused to help the poor and needy.” (16:49) How do PCA leaders fail to see themselves in these old Sodomites?
Sy Rogers has died. He was a past president of the Exodus “ex-gay” hoax, founded in 1976 and defunct since 2013. CT’s report reflects Rogers’ ambivalence in phrasing the “change” he preached. “God Changed his Sexual Identity”, was Rogers’ own description, a far cry from both Exodus and CT headlines of yore, e.g.: “Homosexuals Can Change!”. Anyone can change his or her identity by simply saying so. But sexual orientation change was what CT and other pushers of “ex-gay” promises propagandized for decades, leading to dashed expectations and far worse.
Rogers was bullied in school: “I believed God didn’t love people like me. I wonder where I picked that up?” He sought transsexual-change until this was recognized as a failure at Johns Hopkins. CT notes he joined the Navy and was active in Honolulu’s gay scene, “spending his nights at the city’s clubs and discos, and also working on the streets as a prostitute.” He prayed desperately for God to change him, but says CT, “the transformation that happened to him in that moment was not primarily about his sexual orientation.” In his own words: “My need was for a Savior, not just a different sexuality. In that encounter, God did not say ‘Go be straight.’ He said, ‘Walk with me’.” But for years, as CT’s Silliman cites sources, “he was widely quoted as a profound example that it is possible to change your sexual orientation.” He married a woman but warned: “Marriage does not prove freedom from homosexuality. The goal is God, not going straight.” The “ex-gay” movement finally agreed, but not before it ruined countless lives.
Sicks, a PCA pastor, says: “Sexual brokenness is pervasive in both the world and the church.” And, sadly, that’s true. He adds that, “people in our congregations struggle with pornography, sexual addiction, same-sex attraction, and secret habits”. His combining the unchosen same-sex orientation with acts of choice involving porn is illogical and cruel.
He notes: “Many of our men, especially, are in deep denial about their problems.” Men, more than women, are sexually stimulated by sight, so, of course, they’re more into porn, and “burdened with guilt over their last sexual failure and one choice away from losing everything.” Sicks’ mentor, Harry Schaumburg, says that thousands of men struggling with sexual sin have attended his biblical-intensive counseling workshops,” and that, “More than half were pastors and missionaries.” Of course! They’re “biblically-intensive” workshops.
Schaumburg says, rightly, that, “as creatures made in the image of God, we still deeply desire intimacy that should take us beyond ourselves into meaningful connections, to commitments to one another, to self-giving relationships.” But, his PCA forbids this for the same-sex oriented.
Schaumburg blames gays and misreads the American Psychiatric Association’s elimination of homosexuality as a mental disorder. He says, “gay people started to voice complaint”. There were complaints, of course, plus plenty of clinical evidence for the APA’s revision. Arguments against porn are complaints, too, and they, too, are legitimate, and should be taken seriously.
In my half-century of psychotherapeutic practice, I’ve seen that the most effective remedy for porn use is the insight that, as in all fantasies, one always gets what one didn’t go after and none of what one tried to get that’s simply unavailable in any fantasy, e.g., in porn, i.e., a meaningful human connection. So, porn is a rotten deal. Tripping over one’s innate sense of being unsexy, one hides out with some superficial sexual stimulation from porn, for the performer of porn can’t reject the viewer. But porn reinforces this misuse of one’s sense of self, not to mention the misuse of the porn performer who’s abused by the deadly porn industry, often after having been abused earlier and tossed out by her or his family. Porn fails to give the intimate connection one truly needs. Since no one sees your own unsexy sense of yourself, you can stop hiding out inside your own fearful assumption that theydo see your “you”, and settle into a mutually affirming intimate partnership that addresses needs of both partners since each sees and desires in the other what the other doesn’t and cannot see. But, repeated orgasms with novelty porn reinforces an “incest taboo” into any marriage, thus interfering with the sexual intimacy available in marriage.