More Blaming Their Victims by the Christianists

One of the favorite memes of the Christianists is that LGBT individuals have purportedly more mental health issues and, if one believes the Christianist hate merchants, unstable relationships and promiscuity issues. Never mind that to the extent theses claims are true, much of the causation traces directly back to the Christianists who strive virtually daily to make our lives Hell and denigrate our humanity. As a piece in Huffington Post notes, just recently the conservative, religious website LifeSiteNews in response to Newsweek's recent cover story on sex addiction: "[H]omosexuals are known for having superficial, short-term relationships and hundreds of lifetime sex partners..." Meanwhile, of course, it's the evangelical Christians who have the highest divorce rate in the country. Here are highlights from the Huffington Post article that ties LGBT dysfunction directly back to the poison that the Christianists continue to sow:

Support for gay marriage is on the rise. Every new survey shows greater tolerance and greater acceptance of the fact that homosexuality is a personally integral and relational truth that warrants equal rights.

With this support, we also see the rise of greater diversity in gay culture depicted by the media. Certainly the suburban gay parent is a fairly recent standard prototype in the collective consciousness that has gained traction from popular fiction, namely Modern Family and The Kids Are All Right, and from real-life celebrity parents like Rosie O'Donnell and Neil Patrick Harris.

The suburban gay parent does much to humanize the prevailing stereotype that depicts lesbians and gay men solely as promiscuous and unstable, propagated just last month by the conservative, religious website LifeSiteNews . . . .

I have to wonder about the degree to which any so-called "deviant" lifestyle traits displayed by LGBT people are ultimately an inherent psychological reaction to institutionalized homophobia at every level.

Let's take this trip. First, there's the closet, this toxic idea that it's not OK to be gay, compelling LGBT children to hide their truth. Gay kids live in silence for fear of the repercussions of disclosure, which can include rejection, abandonment, and bullying to the point of suicide. Gay bullying is perpetrated by peers, parents, teachers, community leaders, and world leaders.

While many minorities suffer oppression, from disenfranchisement to outright discrimination to persecution, few minorities additionally experience such extreme degrees of intimidated relational repression during formative years as the LGBT community.

One of the roots of sex addiction is an inability to cope with trauma and shame, feelings that LGBT people may struggle with as a community more so than their non-LGBT counterparts. However, gay sex addiction is no different from straight sex addiction.

Still, there can be impenetrable denial on the part of the gay sex addict, who often equates promiscuity with personal empowerment, a self-avowed lifestyle choice that expresses hard-won gay rights. Likewise, sex addiction treatment via professionals or 12-step support can appear as a moralistic judgment against LGBT freedoms . . . .