Mother Chooses Gay Daughter Over Evangelical Church

All too often I find myself writing about parents who have rejected their LGBT children and instead clung to the brainwashing of their evangelical churches and the cherry picking of selected passages form myths handed down from uneducated Bronze Age herders - the true authors of the so-called Old Testament.  But sometimes parents, such as my own, make the right choice and stand by their LGBT and choose to reject the bigotry and embrace of ignorance that sadly defines a large portion of Christianity - and Islam for that matter.   A piece in The Advocate looks at one mother - and her husband as well - who when given the choice, chose their child and walked away from an anti-gay church.  Now, she works with other parents to help them make the choice to accept their LGBT child and to move on to a loving form of Christianity.   One doesn't choose to be gay, but one does have the choice in what kind of religious indoctrination they will embrace. Stated another way, sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic whereas continuing in a toxic religious tradition is 100% a matter of choice.  Check out her website here.  Here are article excerpts:

Susan Cottrell, mother, pastor, and founder of FreedHearts.org, recently released a TED talk where she shared the difficult choice she made when her daughter came out. "One day the phone rang and everything changed," Cottrell said in her speech. Her 20-year-old daughter, Annie, called her from college and said, "Mom, I've got something to tell you. I'm attracted to girls. I think I'm bisexual. I prayed about it, Mom. I resisted, but it won't go away." Cottrell admitted that her total acceptance for Annie didn't come immediately. 

After 20 years in an evangelical church, the mother of five "believed that being gay was somehow wrong." . . . . But she knew their family would never be the same in the church again. The advice from her Bible study peers was clear: "Homosexuality is a sin and we can't accept it."

So she had a choice to make. And in a tearful moment onstage she said, " I realized I was being asked to choose between the two most important parts of my life: my child and my church. I chose my child." And the audience stood and applauded.
 After leaving the church and losing the support of half her family, Cottrell found her heart opened to a new mission. "God was telling me to serve the gay community," she explained. Since that remarkable moment, Susan and her husband, Rob, also a pastor, have created a blossoming community of parents and LGBTQ children, that all started with a simple blog.
 Their work has helped over 3,000 people choose to love their children and has kept families together by reconciling their faith issues. "As pastors, Rob and I represent the voice of God, and it’s a voice of love," she said in her speech, countering the hateful messages often spewed by those who claim to represent Jesus Christ. The Cottrells have led support groups, officiated same-sex weddings, offered free mom and dad hugs at Pride parades, and connected LGBTQ folks with parents who love them, even when their birth parents won't.
 Cottrell is very aware of the lifesaving change that can come from choosing your child. She quoted a report that showed 57 percent of transgender youth without parental support attempt suicide. However, with parental support that number drops to 4 percent. "Fifty-seven percent to 4 percent — that’s the power of a parent’s love!" Cottrell commented,

By the end of the speech, she had shed tears and so had the crowd. The impact was visible on faces in the audience when she said, "LGBTQ people come up to us and melt into our arms. Many have not had parental encouragement in years." She and Rob tell everyone, "You're worthy. You matter. You belong." She affirmed that “real love accepts people as they are with room for who they may become.” And she reminded us that choosing love is always the right choice.

A New Scientific Theory On Why Some People Are Gay

While the hate merchants of the Christian Right and the snake oil merchants of the reparative therapy crowd continue to fraudulently claim that homosexuality is a "choice" and that sexual orientation can be "changed," a new scientific study further supports the biological basis for homosexuality.  The gay haters can claim whatever they want to further their political agenda and/or line their own pockets by fleecing the gullible, but this scientific study further indicates that their mantra is nothing more than delusional religious based bullshit.  An article in U. S. News looks at the findings.  Here are some excerpts (some of the comments to the article underscore the rank ignorance and hate filled nature of many self-anointed "godly Christians"):

A group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuals get that trait from their opposite-sex parents: A lesbian will almost always get the trait from her father, while a gay man will get the trait from his mother

The hereditary link of homosexuality has long been established, but scientists knew it was not a strictly genetic link, because there are many pairs of identical twins who have differing sexualities. Scientists from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis say homosexuality seems to have an epigenetic, not a genetic link.

Long thought to have some sort of hereditary link, a group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuality is linked to epi-marks — extra layers of information that control how certain genes are expressed. These epi-marks are usually, but not always, "erased" between generations. In homosexuals, these epi-marks aren't erased — they're passed from father-to-daughter or mother-to-son, explains William Rice, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California Santa Barbara and lead author of the study.

Rice and his team created a mathematical model that explains why homosexuality is passed through epi-marks, not genetics. Evolutionarily speaking, if homosexuality was solely a genetic trait, scientists would expect the trait to eventually disappear because homosexuals wouldn't be expected to reproduce. But because these epi-marks provide an evolutionary advantage for the parents of homosexuals: They protect fathers of homosexuals from underexposure to testosterone and mothers of homosexuals from overexposure to testosterone while they are in gestation.

"These epi-marks protect fathers and mothers from excess or underexposure to testosterone — when they carry over to opposite-sex offspring, it can cause the masculinization of females or the feminization of males," Rice says, which can lead to a child becoming gay. Rice notes that these markers are "highly variable" and that only strong epi-marks will result in a homosexual offspring.

"Most mainstream biologists have shied away from studying it because of the social stigma," he says. "It's been swept under the rug, people are still stuck on this idea that it's unnatural. Well there are many examples of homosexuality in nature, it's very common." Homosexual behavior has been observed in black swans, penguins, sheep, and other animals, he says.

The bottom line is that the knuckle draggers need to face the fact that God/nature makes some of us gay despite the ignorant writings of Neolithic nomads who were utterly ignorant of science and biology.   Clinging to Bible inerrancy is like shouting from the roof top that one is either a cretin or suffers from severe psychological disorder. 

When Gay Marriage Gets Personal: Opening Closed Minds

Andrew Sullivan and others have argued that same sex marriage is actually a conservative value and is something that ought to be supported by anyone who truly seeks to increase societal stability and values.  As we all know, of course, the Christofascists and their allies in other fundamentalist religions care nothing about societal stability but seek only to inflict their typically fear and hate based religious dogma on all often so that they can avoid confrontation with issues and individuals who threaten their ignorance embracing, serious thought avoiding house of cards world views.  As I have said before, I believe that gays particularly terrify the Christofascists because if the Bible passages the haters so love to quote are wrong about us, then they have confront the issue of what else in the Bible is not true.  It becomes a domino effect as their whole artificial world collapses and, heaven forbid, they have to make decisions and moral judgments on their own.  A piece in Huffington Post written by a conservative Jewish writer who attended a nephew's same sex marriage ceremony shows how by being ourselves and living our lives openly we can open minds and breakdown barriers.  Here are some excerpts:

Setting out for our nephew's wedding, my wife and I weren't quite sure what to expect. Since the two grooms had met at the memorably named Cincinnati Queer Guerilla Bar, our excitement contained an undeniable undercurrent of uneasiness.

Gay marriage is once again a high-profile public issue. .  .  .  . Yet entwined though it may be in legislation and lawsuits, gay marriage, like its heterosexual counterpart, is primarily a personal issue. The union of our nephew, Benjamin, and his beloved, Jacob, in a Reform Jewish ceremony in Cincinnati satisfied only religious law, not Ohio's. But on a personal level, the ceremony and the whole weekend showcased precisely the kind of values all of us who believe in stable, monogamous relationships should want to defend.

Which, I admit, isn't how I always felt.   As a religiously serious Jew, I'm well aware of the explicit biblical condemnation of homosexual sex acts. Still, loyalty to Leviticus wasn't the only reason for my initial opposition to gay marriage. Like many others, I believed that marriage in a legal and religious context was inextricably linked to procreation.

Well, sort of. Not only don't we ban infertile couples from marrying or cast out those who don't want to have children, we have also as a society accepted surrogate birth, single parenthood and a host of other technological and social arrangements that have nothing to do with "togetherness" by the biological father and mother. When you think about it, what remains illegal for homosexuals is not parenthood, but the obligations and protections for them and their children that accompany a legally binding commitment.

That, and the ability to have the state recognize a commitment to the whole panoply of family values we as a society claim to uphold. The celebration of those values by Benjamin and Jacob is what shone though the entire weekend.

That love, and the desire to build a family around it, is what motivated Ben, 29, and Jacob, 25, to get formally married rather than live together as do so many of their gay and straight peers. And they deliberately did so in a religious ceremony in the city where they both had roots.

It's nice to believe that traditional nuclear families like the one my wife and I were raised in and in which we raised our kids are the best possible arrangement. But whether you pull out your Bible, pop on your TV or peer around the dining room table, it's impossible to escape the reality that any kind of family arrangement can be terrific or toxic. (Cain and Abel, anyone?) Gay or straight, religious or secular, some people are mensches and some are not.

It turns out my wife and I didn't go to a "gay wedding"; we went to a wedding. It was filled with "voices of joy and gladness," in the traditional Jewish phrase, "the voice of the groom and the voice of..." well, the other groom. We hope that Ben and Jacob's union will soon be legally recognized, but what we want most is what we wish for all newlyweds among friends and family. We hope they continue to reflect the values of their upbringing yet surpass in every way their parents' generation. By doing so, they'll make all of us, including their kids, very proud.

Love, commitment and honoring another human being - why do the Christianist fear this so much other than the fact that it challenges their misplaced trust and allegiance to Neolithic age writings that have been blindly handed down all too often with no questions asked.  As science and knowledge progress further the knuckle draggers are going to be increasingly confronted with the fact that their "sincerely held religious beliefs" simply are not true.  Expect more hate and nastiness from the godly set as that happens.