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For those seeking Truth being involved as a gay in BA may be a helpful avenue to a deeper relationship with Christ, as it has been for those who started seeking God in a "gay" church and then finally surrender to Jesus as Lord. God can and does USE things, but that does not mean a stamp of His blessing on it. I just see Him longing for us and His love draws us out of darkness. What an amazing God!
Anyway...
I am glad you had a good experience and that you were able to establish a good friendship.
You just a sweetie :-)
Again, more tomorrow.
And about that "sweetie" thing... I don't know about all that ... ::: laugh :::
Yet, when I hear the words 'bridge' and 'divide' today in the context of the Church and homosexuality, I think of it as more of a evangelistic outreach to a population of people who have either never been churched or have been burned badly by the church. This is why The Marin Foundation has found much success (its book 'Love is an Orientation' is a must read). Ministries like Exodus have a specific and valuable niche in that they help believing Christians with ssa live out their lives according to their values. However, Exodus has little opportunity to minister to a secular gay person -especially since it has allowed its public image (even in Christian circles) to be dominated by two polarizing issues: orientation change and socially conservative culture war politics. (Granted, I don't necessarily think its fair that Exodus has been reduced to these two areas, but I do find that reputation to be an accurate one.)
On the other hand, the message of The Marin Foundation may be a bit confusing to the kid from a Christian family trying to deal with his ssa (a kid perfectly suited to Exodus, mind you) but is exactly what the gay community needs to hear -that God loves them and that his people will walk alongside them without condition; that God is much more concerned about individual people than he is about silly marriage amendments and that the good news of Christ is about so much more than sexuality.
So while I like your river analogy I think it works best in the context of friendships and other informal relationships. I know it works that way in mine. When it comes to the huge divide between the church and the gay community, however, I think more intentional forms of outreach are in order. I think this metaphorical 'divide' is getting bigger and the onus is on the Church to put down its proverbial "stones" and actually engage relationally with the LGBT community.
David – while you’re right, this post does not fit the intended ethos of the synchroblog, I do understand its honesty.
In all of the information communications prior to the synchroblog we did try to deconstruct the notion that this is just a gap between Christian and gay ….. but referenced multiple gaps – certainly many among those who adhere to Christian faith as well as diversity of perspective among lgbtq folks. We also pointed to gay Christians, a diverse group as well, and that this isn’t about just two monolithic groups.
At the end of the day, I am grateful that the majority of posts contributed for the synchroblog were thoughtful, grace-filled, humble and hopeful. I am encouraged, particularly by the number of pastors and straight Christians who expressed openness and a teachable spirit.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Gotta agree, and this is one of the hardest things for me as I deal with, “Christians” or rather church goers who assume I’m a godless sinner. I recently had a discussion with a young man who apparently took a year of Bible College and felt a need to find out why I know the Bible doesn’t take issue with me being gay or being in a relationship with another man. After the whole thing he felt a need to say he disagreed. I asked him with what part? The whole thing. Apparently all the research, soul searching, etc was simply disagreeable. He may have never picked up a book on the subject, might not even have a gay friend, might have never even prayed once about it… but he was sure that I wasn’t someone to be trusted even though I’m sure if he thought I was straight and it was another subject he would have loved all the research and word studies and soul searching I’d done.
Sadly gay people are handicapped when they try and talk to a Church who have already made up their minds.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Wendy, as I said, I understand you not linking to the post. But I would like to ask, does Randy Thomas’ post “fit the intended ethos of the synchroblog?”
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
[Randy Thomas ] just doesn’t get it.
Oh, David R… he gets it.
His whole life has been about “getting it”. And, as a consequence, sadly not therefore “having it”. Steve S, as always, invites everyone to explore this further.
On the Happy-LifeAchievements scale Randy would be in the bottom left corner. Thankfully he’s invented a third axis for life; one on which he’s (naturally) always off-scale. Always 11.
Personally we’re glad he’s not still hanging around gay bars. There’s no point to ruining other people’s lives; other than what he already is doing, of course, as part of Exodus.
Are we the only ones who notice Exodus people are needy to the point of being emotionally and socially crippled? And, yet, we’re expected to tip-toe around and treat their disgusting opinions as if they had any merit.
Who the hell would want a bridge to them?
Seriously. To what place will that bridge go?
AntiGayIsGoodLand: a place I don’t care to visit even if it was a quick trip over a bridge.
We spend our life in “YeahThey’reGayYawnLand”. It, like everything else in life, is right outside our front door.
We need no bridge. But perhaps ‘they’ do, now. Why collaborate? What is the point?
Just asking
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
We should all stop and consider the good people at GCN. Unless I’m mistaken the Side A and Side B participants get along, fellowship, even like each other. No bridges necessary. Compare & contrast GCN with the “dialog” at Synchroblog.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
The one defining aspect of exgay “Christianity” is its narcissism.
“Since we ruined our lives living openly, it means everyone ruins their lives living openly and freely gay. And now that we’re not gay, we’re going to do everything we can, legally and religiously, to destroy your relationships just to prove they don’t work.”
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
exgays constantly say that we gays are not satisfied with tolerance, we demand society accept us. Seems to me, that is what the exgays spend their time doing. They cater and bow to the James Dobsons, Pat Robertsons, etc. of the church but let me tell you, the day the ex-gay cash cow dries up for Focus on the Family and the 700 Club Exodus and its umbrella ministries will be left out in the rain. and the cold.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
In his comments on the post I mentioned above, Randy makes a statement concerning Matt 7:3 which must be the theological equivalent to fingernails on chalkboard:What if the person telling you “your wrong” actually has taken care of their own stuff and stands in righteousness to call you on your speck? Are you over focusing on their assumed log as an excuse to hold on to your speck?Sure Randy, I’m sure that’s the idea Jesus wanted to convey. You have it so together that you are now free to tell everyone else what God wants them to do.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Leave it to Randy to make the Bible say the opposite of what it says.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Anonymity here isn’t intentional — this is Mike Airhart from B.A., Soulforce, XGW, and TWO.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
I guess I’ll speak here about why I don’t use the same name as I did at Bridges Across. It’s actually kind of relevant. Forgive me for running off at the keyboard. This is why I just can’t.
Well, I was going to change my name from “Wiggins” to “Lukash” and tried getting myself used to it by using it online. Then I decided against it and reverted to my original name for everything. And then…
Five and a half years ago, on a magickal New Year’s Eve, the girl who loved me despite everything from the time she was 17 and I was 18 became my wife. We went to Massachusetts specifically to make it legal. We weren’t going to change our names. We didn’t want to change our perceived ethnicity. Anyway, we wore matching engagement as well as wedding rings.
Four years ago, our marriage was yanked out from under us. We lived in New York, not Massachusetts. Our marriage had no legal standing in the state of New York. Massachusetts had a law saying that a marriage couldn’t be contracted there that wasn’t legal in a couple’s home state. So like many other couples, we were legally divorced through no fault of our own.
We were angry! We were really angry when we read and saw Religious Right commentators talk about this like it was a *good* thing. They *smiled*. That’s what galled me, they smiled. They couldn’t even bring themselves to understand how badly couples like us hurt. L’Ailee (my wife doesn’t want me using her first name) compared it to the way she doesn’t want to think about how the turkey in her sandwich was once a living bird. Except that our forced legal divorce didn’t even have the utility to the right-wingers that a turkey sandwich does to her. All they had was the pain of fellow adult citizens whom they didn’t even know.
L’Ailee used to wear a large silver crucifix every day even though she is an atheist (and acknowledged herself as such after 9/11–that’s another story.) She wore it to bed and in the shower. She only took it off for martial arts classes (after it hit her in the face a few times) and polishing laboriously with Q-Tips. It was one of her Russian family’s few treasures that had survived the Bolshevik Revolution. Her grandmother gave it to her. For her, it was a symbol of survival, not religion, though she never took offense when someone thought the obvious and assumed it was a Christian thing.
The night we learned we were legally divorced, L’Ailee ripped it off and stared at it for a few seconds. “I can’t wear this anymore,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to think I am one of *them*.” The cold contempt in that word “them” spoke such volumes. She wrapped it in a scarf and put it in her jewelry box. It has lived there since.
The next day, we decided that we were still married, no matter what any judge or any activist said. We brainstormed ways to declare ourselves married as noisily as any activist dared to proclaim themselves fit to vote on our right to do so. We hit upon our names. We needed to share one, obviously. So we went with hyphenation, in the same order. We pestered all our friends about the order it should be in, and we played Rock Paper Scissors for it all the way to the clerk’s window. It was the clerk who settled it, saying that “Wiggins-Lunacharsky” sounded better.
We felt good. We felt right. We felt like it had been a long time coming. Even when people kept wanting to call me “Mrs. Lunacharsky,” I felt great about it. It was a middle finger to the relatives who voted against our right to marry in my home state of Florida, for one thing. (And I’d wanted to marry at the Daytona International Speedway before the Daytona 500, which falls close to Valentine’s Day, from the time I was a little girl. L’Ailee would’ve so done it.)
I’d much rather be Mrs. Lunacharsky than someone who gave the right-wingers my very life for a trophy on their wall. I was very proud when I signed the first checks and forms. Whatever else I was, I wasn’t defeated, and I wasn’t at all inclined to reach out to the people who’d worked so hard to set us back and celebrated our heartbreak.
This past week, we and other same-sex couples just now won our right to use our married names on our passports. The people who celebrated three years ago are upset that someone is acknowledging couples like us for what we are. Let them be upset. Nobody’s taking anything away from them but their perceived superiority.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Yeah, if you wanna build bridges, use someone who see’s gays as people, not vile sinners who should just choose to ‘identify’ as straight.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Jayelle, thank you for sharing that. I felt sad and glad all at the same time while reading it. I hope you both can soon have officially recognized what already obviously exists between you.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Thank you, David. It is official again. We were able to make it so very close to our anniversary last year–thank you, Governors Patrick and Paterson. We just took a train into Massachusetts, changed into pretty but not formal dresses, and took the train back home. But we still haven’t forgiven or forgotten the activists in Massachusetts and elsewhere who worked so hard to put couples like us in legal limbo.
I am glad the point was visible in that ramble I posted. We didn’t feel any desire to “straighten up” and marry men thanks to that legal divorce, which ex-gay activists supported. (And I’m bi and have loved men.) We didn’t feel grateful that so many people had loved us enough to protect us from ourselves. We instead grew angry and drew closer. We felt that we’d overcome so many issues to even get to the point where we could successfully marry, and now we had to deal with people whose literal full-time job was to make us legal strangers to each other? It became us against the world. We had to remind ourselves that we didn’t hate every Christian quite frequently. We aren’t quite so seething angry now that we’re legal again, but we’re fine with staying on our side of “the gap.”
It’s not just online. We’ve even decided that this December, we’re going to avoid Christmas with my relatives in Florida, some of whom are quite homophobic and are getting increasingly vocal about it, and go to Pittsburgh and Detroit to watch our favorite hockey teams in their own venues instead. (The other fans will be more open to our holding hands in front of them, at least.) It may be that we’re getting jaded and bitchy and uninterested in bridging. We prefer to think that we deserve to use our time and money in a way that allows us to enjoy each other and the life we’re building together. That last sentence alone, I know, will sound hopelessly, radically inflammatory to many ex-gays and their supporters.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Jayelle- i hope you will make clear to those relatives why you are not ocming to visit them.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
I do hope that we haven’t given Randy the power to derail the entire effort by making our participation subject to his.
That being said, I want to comment on what was said above about how Randy sees gay v. Christian.
One of the phrases that you often hear from Exodus is that “the opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality, it’s holiness”. When we look closely at this – and at the way in which Randy writes – we see that he believes this literally.
For Randy – and perhaps others in the ex-gay movement – holiness is found in not-being-gay. In fact, that is the definition of holiness in their lives. If gay temptation gets too close, holiness is retreating and the way to get holiness back is to fight against homosexuality.
They say that they have identity in Christ, and yet the subject of their obsession is not-being-gay. If you spend two much time there, eventually not-being-gay becomes your god, what you worship, your identity, your reason for being.
And I think Randy is there. He worships not-being-gay, calling this strange religion “Christian”, though I see no gospel there. And therefore it is quite logical to him that the opposite of gay is Christian. Because being the opposite of gay is what he worships, is unattainable, is a higher power, is what he believes would fulfill him – it is a distant but compelling diety.
Sadly, in worshiping not-being-gay, Randy has errected a false idol, a god that cannot hear or see him, an all-consuming all-demanding god of his own creation, and as a consequence he has no room in his life for a compassionate Christ.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Hi, Timothy,
I don’t think folks here are giving Randy Thomas that power — Wendy Gritter is giving him the power.
I wish her effort well, but she will have to begin to police it and ferret out the intentional saboteurs.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch
Debbie from Throckmorton’s site asked me to read the sychroblog participation and I did. It took a long time.
But I put in the effort.
I DO put every effort into listening, observing, giving things another chance.
After all, I came here questioning and wanting VERY much for ex gays to tell me, to give me their experience and I made myself available at every opportunity.
I found XGW in that quest. But ex gays was where I first started. I’ve been hearing the same religious messages regarding homosexuality my whole life too. I was raised in a church. Confirmed Episcopalian having passed all my Biblical study requirements.
For FIVE years I tried to talk to someone ex gay, I even considered attending a program to have some inside observation. But that’s not allowed if you’re not seeking a conversion.
Well, I WAS seeking a conversion in a way. I was looking to see if the message of people like Randy, Debbie or Throckmorton would help me understand THEM.
And through all that effort, all I got was a stonewall and doubletalk.
Mostly because I asked a LOT of questions. I didn’t doubt anyone’s word, so much as a great deal of what they said conflicted or was contradictory. It’s like they grew tired of the five basic questions I kept at hand. Eventually I got the ‘you’re lucky I spent this five minutes with you, I’m SUCH a busy person’, responses.
They have a lot of pride and assurances in their advertising and when they are talking to someone who is insecure or doubtful of themselves or their gay loved one.
But the font of generous spiritual guidance shuts down after a few pointed questions.
Dr. T was VERY rude to me in the beginning, for no reason.
Which is why I have been less than respectful since.
I worked a LOT harder to just get some answers that didn’t sound like a used car pitch and the SAME pitch was coming at me over and over again, even from different people.
I was like, isn’t there a real, unique human being in there somewhere who can speak differently from the others?
After finding XGW there were real expressions and individuals under the posts. And I realized that these were some gay folks experienced with the life that had been pitched to me. Folks like Petersen, and of course, he’s a VERY smart and well articulated person.
He was very open to me, as have been just about all the regulars here.
After I put more and more information together very painstakingly and cross referenced everything, I finally realized what had been bugging me about how those professing ex gay lives.
Mostly that their prior experience as gay people was as predictably stereotypical as their pitch was predictable.
Even after speaking to Chad Thompson, reading his book and so on, real direct contact, the SAME conclusion came to me about him too: that these are people who ARE mostly self involved and invested in shifting the burden of being gay onto other gay people in the very way that makes it that much harder to give cred to what gay people can and have said about mutability.
Leaving out of course, the big dancing elephant of mitigating circumstances out of the discussion.
As I’ve mentioned before, this isn’t about ’silencing’ ex gays, but about how their message confuses and conflicts EVERYTHING and isn’t the newer message or alternative.
It’s the ONLY one that’s had a voice and power all along.
And they don’t appreciate that, whatsoever.
It is very weak of them to think that both can be reconciled while basic human and civil rights are denied gay people on condition of being and doing what ex gays advertise.
And some ex gay organizations outright engage in discriminatory political activism and nobody knows who Wendy Gritter is or cares, like they know who Rick Warren or Pat Robertson are.
The ex gay voice registers LOUD and CLEAR on the radar of EVERY anti gay person alive.
How ex gays can either pretend they have a significant message to send or make with regards to defending gay people is almost pathologically ridiculous.
You can’t defend what you yourself don’t want to be.
And although I understand why someone wouldn’t want to be gay, I don’t understand or forgive how the ex gay position keeps the yoke on the necks of gay people no matter WHAT their efforts.
I argued for over and hour with Dr. and he’s convinced, as are those people in that Bridgeport exorcism, that whichever way gay people get ungay, it’s going to be ungay and or else.
Their way or no way.
There is no appreciation of gay people. Period and ex gays continue to give power to the opposite side who is not conceding one bit.
Even if it damages the tenets of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
And a person who was gay looks GLARINGLY like someone who doesn’t appreciate being gay either.
So all the sincere, compassionate and heartfelt gestures from ex gays who don’t want gay people stripped of or denied equal rights are making EMPTY gestures.
Are carrying a broken and USELESS standard for gay people.
And no amount of FEELINGS for gay people that aren’t hostile will make any effort we’re talking about worth anything useful.
Has anyone ever seen a homeless person, obviously in a bad way and you try to give them some food you picked out or had leftover…and they refused it?
Well sometimes their attitude would seem like misplaced pride or ingratitude.
But sometimes I’ve seen charity disguised as an exploitation of someone’s bad situation.
Or certainly a meal offered with the sincerest feelings of generosity it’s assumed, should be met with thanks.
But sometimes those on the receiving end of such gestures can read the motive behind it. Or understand that such a gesture will never do or be enough.
This is that kind of thing. Some ex gays, especially the more prominent representatives of Exodus and so on ARE getting over on the situation of gay people.
It’s UGLY and nothing will pretty it up and make it what isn’t.
Ex gays can and are doing more harm than good, and are too self involved to care or admit it.
This comment was originally posted on Ex-Gay Watch