Learning to Stop "Praying Away the Gay"

CNN news anchor Don Lemon has a column on CNN that I missed when it first came out. I identify with what he talks about: learning to stop trying to "pray away the gay." I tried to pray myself straight for nearly four decades and never confided in anyone about the inner conflict that haunted me constantly. Sadly, I was raised in a religious tradition where the cultivation of self-hate and guilt is incessant and, as a result, mental gymnastics and denial became ever present. I truly believe that raising children in such a religious environment is a form of child abuse. Not that I hold any resentment towards my parents - given the time frame of my youth, most people had no clue as to how damaging things were for me and others like me. Today, we know differently, and more need to oppose the evil aspects of religion. Here are highlights from Lemon's column:
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By age four or five, I was too young to sexualize my infatuations but I knew that everyone else, including my family and friends, would think it was wrong. Perhaps it was the conversations I overheard from adults around my hometown of Port Allen, Louisiana, who'd mimic gay people, calling them "funny" or "sissy" or "fagots."
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Perhaps it was Sunday mornings at our Baptist church, where preachers taught that liking someone of the same sex was a direct and swift path to hell. And that if that person would just turn to the Lord and confess his sin, then God would change him back into the person He wanted him to be - a person who only had crushes on the opposite sex.
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All of which meant that, from a very early age, I began to think I was dirty and that I was going to hell. Can you imagine what that feels like for a kid who was just learning to read and perform basic arithmetic? It was awful. And talk about guilt - I was a Baptist attending Catholic school!
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I prayed the silent prayer for God to change me every chance I got until I started attending college in New York. That's when common sense began to take hold and I realized that no amount of prayer would change me into something that wasn't natural to me.
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So many of us, especially in the black community and in churches, tend to think that religious teachings happened word for word as they were written in Scripture. I think that's naïve, even dangerous. That type of thinking - or non-thinking - keeps many religious people enslaved to beliefs that they haven't truly stepped back from and examined. That type of thinking causes people who are otherwise good to shun and ostracize young gay people.
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Imagine if we had allowed Christian doctrines and teachings that supported slavery, segregation and the subjugation of women to pervade our society all the way up until the current moment. What kind of world would that be?
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I'm no longer the member of any church but I do believe in a higher power. It's time for us, especially black people, to stop trying to pray the gay away and to get on our knees and start praying that the discrimination of gay people ends.
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What we're doing to our young gay people now is child abuse. It's plain old bigotry and hatred. And if African-Americans don't know what that feels like in America, I don't know who does.