179. balk

“Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change… You have never been my enemy. I am very sorry that I have been yours.”

Dear Alan Chambers,

I read your funny little note today. Or it would be funny if it weren’t so deeply offensive to me and to every gay person you’ve helped murder, maim, mangle, dehumanize and abuse over the many years of your “ministry” as president of Exodus International.

Fortunately, I am not one of those “ex-gay” survivors (i.e., victims). I was never desperate enough to fully buy into the lie that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, or that my sexual orientation needed “curing.” Frankly, I’m not sure why this is when so many of my friends willingly subjected themselves to the brand of psychological terrorism your organization helped promote. They did this out of a desperate, last-ditch hope that it would make them acceptable enough for your so-called God, and for their families who ultimately failed in the duty to show them unconditional love.

Perhaps it was my parents’ instilling of critical thinking skills in me at an early age that never allowed me to fully accept their and my church’s teaching about homosexuality. There was a small but present voice in my mind (that, thanks to teachings about demons and “spiritual warfare,” I attributed to the Devil tempting me) that said, “This doesn’t make sense.”

And why should it? Why would we willingly choose a “lifestyle” that for too many of us results in the hostile rejection of our friends and family, being taunted, called names, beaten up (and too often brutally murdered), demonized and hated — all for simply loving a person of the same sex?

That’s right — straight people have relationships; faggots just want sex.

“… If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

I was never desperate or foolish enough to pursue so-called “reparative” therapy. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t spend the majority of my teen years in pained anguish over what I believed were filthy and repulsive sexual feelings, pleading with God almost every single night growing up to take those feelings away.

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t 25 years of my life that I’ll never get back because I believed the bullshit that God’s “design” for human beings was heterosexuality.

It doesn’t mean that my young adult life were desperately lonely and miserable as I watched my straight friends date, fall in love, and get married, something I thought wasn’t an option for me because our holy book said that marriage was between a man and a woman.

So forgive me if I find it infuriatingly laughable when you say that you’re not my enemy. You’re worse than my enemy. You’re a disgusting quisling, a self-loathing, self-hating collaborator against your own kind. You’ve ruined lives with your teachings. You’ve all but put the gun in the hand or kicked the chair out from under who knows how many innocent LGBT people who couldn’t live with the life you and others told them they had to live in order to get to Heaven — all because they were unfortunate enough to have been born different than 95% of the human population.

And for that you’re sorry? Like Steve Urkel lamenting, “Did I do that?”

The only good thing to came out of this nightmare for me is that I was well prepared for the realizations that (1) religion is nonsense, and (2) there is no God. For me, these conclusions were inevitable. I was never the kind of person who can blindly accept given propositions as fact. It would’ve been nice if these realizations could’ve come earlier, and with less grief and pain, but they are hard-won, and they are mine. And I’m building a new, happier, freer life for myself, without the lies and self-hatred that I was fed growing up.

It would’ve also been nice if I could have accepted my sexuality earlier, and in a family where I could’ve been accepted for who I am rather than who they believe I should be. But then, I wouldn’t be the unique, strong, dynamic and caring individual that I am today. It has been a long, difficult road to accepting myself, but I doubt that I’d appreciate the joy of love and relationships in the same way had I not known the despair and broken loneliness first.

However, I hold you personally responsible for the grief, loss and pain I suffered, in the full knowledge that you’re merely a part of the system that oppressed and subjugated you too. Yet you willingly participated in that oppression and subjugation by becoming an oppressor yourself. You taught millions of gay men and women to hate and loathe themselves, and to bury themselves alive in unfulfilling relationships with members of the opposite sex because the leaders of your church taught that this is “God’s will.”

So until you figure out a way to go back in time and prevent every person from going through the life of pain and misery you inflicted on them, there is no forgiveness for you, or your kind. All I hope is that you devote the rest of your sad life to dismantling the lies about LGBT people that you’ve promoted and fostered over the years.

But there is no forgiveness for you. There may be others who can find it in their hearts to do so, and good for them. But you will be my enemy until the day you die and leave this planet to those of us who want to build a more kind, peaceful and tolerant world.

 

164. pontificate

Just so everyone knows, I haven’t forgotten about the shootings in Newtown, CT. My thoughts are definitely with the families and friends of the victims. However, I wanted to share a somewhat related email I sent this morning to Sue Seul, assistant to the superintendent of the Anoka-Hennepin school district.

There’s been a petition going around on Change.org to Tom Heidemann and the Anoka County School Board to have Bryan Lindquist of the Parents Action League removed from his appointment to the district’s anti-bullying task force.

In March of 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center put the Parents Action League on their list of active anti-gay hate groups in the United States for promoting “damaging propaganda about the gay community” (see below). Incidentally, the PAL is affiliated with the Minnesota Family Council, the group that formed Minnesota for Marriage to campaign for the failed 2012 Minnesota Marriage Amendment.

ABC Newspapers, the local paper for that area, reported that Lindquist “has come under fire due to statements he’s made that indicate a belief that homosexuals can change their sexual orientation and that the district should distribute information about gay conversion or “reparative” therapy.”

On December 10, the nearly 2,500-signature petition was delivered to the District 11 school board. As recounted in an email sent last night by the petition organizer, Melissa Thompson, the board’s response was not only to reject the petition but also to “[remove] the public comment portion of the video and recorded agenda.” She also urged signers to write to Ms. Seul, which I did:

To: Sue Seul <sue.seul@anoka.k12.mn.us>
From: David Philip Norris

Ms. Suel,

I am writing to express my extreme displeasure at the decision of the Anoka-Hennepin school board to not remove Mr. Lindquist from the anti-bullying task force, and to censor the public comment portion of the meeting where supporters of his removal voiced their concerns and opinions.

As a member of the Parents Action League, a group classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of 27 active anti-gay hate groups in the United States, Bryan Lindquist is no ally to LGBT students in the Anoka-Hennepin district. This is a man who has been quoted calling homosexuality a “lifestyle choice” and a “sexual disorder” — a man tasked with protecting students (particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students) from bullying. This is also a school district with an unusually high number of suicides and suicide attempts, the majority of which are committed by LGBT students and students merely perceived as being gay or lesbian.

Mr. Lindquist was recently quoted as saying that “discussion of sexual orientation [should] take place in the homes with parents and not with a teacher in a classroom full of impressionable kids.” There is a difference between avoiding discussion of sexual orientation in the classroom and pretending like LGBT students don’t exist and therefore aren’t being bullied for being gay or lesbian. The school board should be enacting policies to protect ALL students, not just students Mr. Lindquist believes deserve not to be bullied.

Yours,
David Philip Norris

School Boardmember Mike Sullivan stated that “it’s critical to have opposing points of view.” Yet as Thompson was quoted in a KSTP News story, appointing Lindquist to this task force “would be like asking somebody from the [Klu Klux Klan] to sit on the committee that plans black history month.”

She has a good point. While it’s not right to exclude someone because of their religious beliefs, neither does it make sense to put a man who belongs to a group that actively promotes the idea that homosexuality results from “dysfunctional family relationships, experimentation with men or boys, incest, negative body image, peer labeling and harassment, temperament, exposure to pornography, not bonding correctly with your own gender parental figure, abandonment, early trauma such as sexual victimization, and media influences” in a position to protect those very students.

The implication here is the same made by opponents of same-sex marriage and LGBT rights: Why should we give them special rights when they choose to live a perverted lifestyle? The FAQ on PAL’s website states that “to date there is no genetic link to prove they are born that way.” Ironically, on the day that the Anoka school board rejected the petition to have Lindquist removed, results of a study by international researchers were published, who found that homosexuality seems to have epigenetic (rather than genetic) causes, suggesting that we really were born this way.

The only special rights here are the ones being demanded by bigots like Lindquist, the PAL, the Minnesota Family Council and its national affiliate Focus on the Family: to abuse LGBT people under the auspices of “freedom of religion.” These groups all have close ties with the Family Research Council, which has promoted and supported the passage of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, further reinforcing the notion that groups like PAL and people like Lindquist are in fundamental opposition to the human rights of LGBT people.

As we put the events in Newtown in perspective and try to learn from it, we must remember that making schools safer doesn’t just mean protecting students from outside threats. It means taking a look at internal threats as well.

159. disbosom

First of all, the eight-year-old in me finds the word “disbosom” so snortingly hilarious, but it’s precisely the reason why I love the Dictionary.com Word of the Day. It’s an eighteenth century word meaning to reveal, to confess, as in “baring your soul” or “the naked truth.” Words are a window into the sensibilities of another age, when they actually meant something to the people who used them. Today words seem little more than candy bar wrapping paper — disposable, cheap, trivial. I find particular awe in the opening words of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” While I no longer believe in the literal factualness of this idea, that God created everything, it’s still a beautiful image of creating through speech. It’s the dream of every writer to give his or her words life so that they may convey everything that can’t be expressed on paper.

Today I received a response to a comment I left on a blog several weeks ago during the national gay marriage debate that sprang up over the recent (and it turns out, successful) marriage equality initiatives. It was clear that this woman meant well and wanted me to know that God loves me, even though I don’t believe in him and am living a lifestyle that this God apparently thinks is an abomination.

She also pointed me to a blog entry written by a young man named Matt Moore who has been sharing his story of apparently finding Jesus on the floor of a gay club. (Or so she says. I’m skeptical about that claim.) One of his recent blog entries is entitled HIV/AIDS & The Hope Of The Gospel, in which he recounts a close call he had with contracting the virus. This apparently led him to conclude that being gay is a sin, and he claims to have “left the homosexual lifestyle,” which as we all know is code for going “ex-gay.” Whether that means attempting to change his orientation through therapy or “praying away” the gay, or turning to a celibate lifestyle is uncertain.

What I am certain of is that my heart is absolutely breaking for this young (and, if I may say so, very attractive) man. He’s had a hell of a time, and his story is rife with abuse and sadness. And this is precisely the kind of person that the Church preys on, exploiting the feelings of self-loathing programmed into them by society and promising deliverance, if not here then in the hereafter.

As an atheist, I don’t believe that there is anybody minding the store with a broom and dustpan at the ready to sweep up the mess and set everything right at the end of the day. I believe that, if we’re lucky, we have 70-80 years of existence on this planet, and then that’s it. There is no great reckoning. No big reward. No eternal punishment. We have one go at this life, so why waste it strapping yourself into a straight jacket to please the jackals who preach their toxic hatred from the pulpit?

I can understand how someone who fell into a lifestyle of promiscuous sex and drugs for a while would want to run from all of that. Many alcoholics pick up their entire lives to start over, leaving behind the environment and the people who enabled their addiction. But homosexuality is not an addiction. It’s an orientation, something deep in the wiring of the brain that leads some of us to seek out members of the same sex as mates. Unlike most animals, we’re capable of much more than just breeding. As primates, we’re highly complex social animals. We can form pair bonds, and build emotional and romantic connections with our partners. What conservatives like to describe as “homosexual behavior” is behavior we find among heterosexuals as well. But just because many homosexuals have engaged in that kind of party lifestyle doesn’t mean that all homosexuals do.

Most of the gay men I know are in committed relationships of some kind. The single gays I know are looking for committed relationships. With the introduction of more LGBT characters in movies and television, our community is moving from the fringes of an underground lifestyle to the mainstream. We don’t want a sling in the bedroom, or a dungeon in the basement. We want the house in the suburbs with the dog, the neighbors, the couch and the mortgage. That is to say, everything we associate with heterosexual marriage. Is this the gays trying to emulate the “straights”? I don’t think so.

Those things don’t just symbolize heterosexual marriage. They symbolize adult commitment, setting down roots with the person you love and care deeply for. Of course, those symbols are going to be different for each person. For example, I could never see myself as a suburban couple, with the Subaru jeep, picket fence and 2.8 kids. Maybe a dog. Jason and I don’t really see ourselves as a “planted” couple. We want to travel, live in foreign countries, study abroad, and see and learn as much as we can. But we want to do it together.

A few weeks ago I attended a wedding of a friend of mine. I know for a fact her now-husband has struggled with same-sex attraction. Another friend of mine there confirmed that many of the other guys there also struggle. It breaks my heart because I know what they believe their God is demanding of them, and I also know they have been conditioned to not see it as a burden. The author of the first epistle of Peter writes:

“But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.” (1 Peter 4:13)

They honestly believe overcoming their homosexual feelings is suffering for Christ. This is the evil humans do with religion.

As the character of Auntie Mame says in the stage play, “Life’s a banquet, and most poor bastards are starving to death.”