Pulse Anniversary: the Catholic Church Continues to Harm Gays

Within the last week I wrote a post about the phenomenon of LGBT individuals supporting anti-LGBT Republican candidates who push an agenda diametrically oppose to LGBT equality and equal human dignity itself.  A similar bizarre phenomenon can be observed with members of the LGBT community who remain members of the Roman Catholic Church, or worse yet actively support the Church and its anti-gay hierarchy financially.  Having been raised Catholic and having spent 37 years to "pray away the gay," I know first hand the ability of the Church to screw one up psychologically and to instill unlimited amounts of self-hate and internalized homophobia.  But I grew up in a pre-Internet age when homosexuality was classified as a form of mental illness. Today, there is so much access to accurate information that never existed when I was a youth or even college age.  And then there is the sex abuse scandal that revealed the utter moral bankruptcy of the Church hierarchy. Thus, I am continually amazed at those who remain in a church that condemns them and denigrates them, especially when alternatives such as the Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America are readily available.  Meanwhile, as a piece in the National Catholic Reporter sets forth, the Catholic Church continues to wound LGBT individuals and harm lives.  Here are excerpts: 

When Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 48 others inside a prominent gay night club in Orlando, Florida, a year ago this week, the city's Catholic bishop, John G. Noonan, denounced what he called a "massive assault on the dignity of human life." The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops lamented the "unspeakable violence." The Vatican's press office released a statement decrying "such terrible and absurd violence." Among these sincere expressions of grief, not one recognized the fact that this assault on human dignity and this horrific crime had targeted gay people specifically.

The first step in what will be a slow healing process is for Catholic leaders to acknowledge the church plays a role in wounding LGBT people by using dehumanizing language.

While the Catechism of the Catholic Church rejects violence and "unjust discrimination" against LGBT people, it also calls homosexuality an "inclination" that is "objectively disordered." Before he was elected Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger led the Vatican's chief doctrine office for more than two decades. In a 1986 "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," Ratzinger described homosexuality as a "tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil." Seventeen years later, he wrote that growing recognition of same-sex civil unions legitimized the "approval of deviant behavior." Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, even celebrated a public exorcism in 2013 to protest the Catholic governor's signing a same-sex marriage law.

Dehumanizing language has consequences. "It doesn't reflect that our experiences as gay and lesbian persons are a gift, something that brings us closer to other people and to God," said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, an organization that works to build bridges between LGBT Catholics and the church. "People are alienated by this language and feel rejected. It ends conversations rather than begins conversations." San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy, . . . . he called that terminology "very destructive language that I think we should not use pastorally." He explained that "in Catholic moral theology it is a philosophical term that is automatically misunderstood in our society as a psychological judgment."

For a pope, the way that Francis speaks about gays and lesbians is nothing short of revolutionary. "A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality," the pope said in a 2013 interview. "I replied with another question: 'Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person? We must always consider the person."

But these expressions are the exception, and not the rule. Over the past decade, at least 50 LGBT Catholics have been fired or forced to resign positions in Catholic schools after public disclosures of same-sex relationships. Students and families rally behind these teachers and administrators, who are often beloved leaders and role models with years of experience. While in most cases the school has a legal right to act, the firings leave Catholic institutions that want to teach students about mercy and justice looking blithely indifferent to those values. Contracts or "loyalty oaths" that some Catholic teachers are required to sign are often hyper-focused on sexuality. This disproportionate focus on sex and sexuality as the defining marker of Catholic identity is problematic. It eclipses the church's expansive social justice teachings that are rooted in the Gospel's focus on people who are poor, excluded and marginalized by the powerful. . . . . These firings tear apart communities that are filled with faithful people. The church is sending a contradictory message. We're told we are made in the image and likeness of God, but these kind of firings say that isn't true."

According to research, a majority of Catholics support same-sex marriage. Many church leaders usually interpret this evidence to assume there has simply been a failure to effectively teach and reach the faithful. Doubling down with the same message, however, has cost the church. Research shows that the growing number of Americans — especially Millennials in their 20s and early 30s — who no longer identify with any religion are especially turned off by what they consider to be unjust positions toward LGBT people. Those raised Catholic, according to data from Public Religion Research Institute, are more likely than those raised in any other religion to cite negative religious treatment of gay and lesbian people as one of the primary reasons they left the church.

If they want to retain the next generation of Catholics — including LGBT people and their allies — Catholic leaders should listen more closely and learn from the experiences of gay and transgender people. When more than 100 bishops and other Catholic leaders met in February for a conference organized by the National Catholic Bioethics Center, one of the top items on the agenda focused on how increased calls for transgender rights will impact Catholic hospitals, schools and parishes.

If Catholic bishops really want a church that listens, heals and goes to the margins as Pope Francis does, it's far past time to build a culture of encounter with the LGBT community. I recently met a Catholic deacon from St. Petersburg, Florida, who had a wake-up call after his son transitioned to a transgender woman. "I was blissfully ignorant of all things LGBT until it came to my family," Ray Dever told participants at a conference, "LGBT Catholics in the Age of Pope Francis." The Catholic father and others like him have a lot to teach bishops and priests who have rarely if ever sat down with a gay or transgender person. "There are so many families who reject their LGBT kids and that's tragic, especially when that is done in the name of faith," Dever said. "I'm no expert, but what these families need to hear is God created these kids just the way they are and that God loves them."

As I have noted previously, I left the Catholic Church and my best advise to LGBT Catholics is to walk away.  If you need/want a liturgical church,  I highly recommend the  Episcopal Church  or Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  As for the Catholic Church, history has shown two things are what really forces the Church to reform: rapidly falling membership numbers and falling revenues. Rather than staying and "working for reform from within", walk away and urge as many family members and friends to do likewise.  That will bring the most rapid reform and an end to anti-gay animus. 

Alt-Right Gays Mock Blacks and the Transgender at NYC Confab

I left the Republican Party years ago before I publicly "came out" when it became crystal clear that (i) being gay and being Republican were inherently incompatible, (ii) being a Republican was incompatible with supporting constitutional rights for all citizens, and (iii) being a Republican and being a truly moral person were likewise incompatible. Things have only gotten worse over the intervening years.  Indeed, in my view, being gay and a Republican in the age of Trump is akin to being a 1930's German Jew and actively supporting the Nazi Party.  I truly do not grasp what would motivate one to want to remain a Republican other than some sort of lingering internalized homophobia and/or religious brainwashing. Some friends will no doubt take offense at this assessment , but seriously, they need to take a look in a mirror and ask themselves WTF are they doing.  A gathering of gay "conservatives" at a Republican gathering in New York City underscored the ugliness and moral failings of these "gay Republicans. Both BuzzFeed and The Daily Beast have pieces that look at the general misogyny that marked the event.  Here are excerpts from BuzzFeed:

A forum at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City on Thursday night was billed as an "all-star" collection of activists in the "new gay movement in the Republican Party." And indeed, panelists inside the tony brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side were among the country’s most notable conservative gay-rights activists.

But rather than detail how they were building a new movement — or discuss their influence in the nascent Trump administration — the gay men on stage spent most of two hours ridiculing the left while peppering their speeches with cheap cracks about transgender people.

They mocked President Obama’s LGBT liaison as "the most unattractive tranny," joked that Caitlyn Jenner hadn't had "the operation," and said Obama-era rules to protect transgender students were “horrifying.”

People of color and women fared little better with the all-white, five-member panel. One claimed the gender wage gap was "a total fucking myth," while another opined that black people don't face oppression because they aren't enslaved. Then he laughed about adopted Asian babies.

This week, nearly 100 days into Trump’s term, these gay Republican activists had a chance to assess their success.  Or they could make fun of people.

To illustrate the left’s knee-jerk histrionics over Trump, Lucian Wintrich, who led a project during the campaign called Twinks for Trump, blasted Obama's LGBT liaison — a transgender woman named Raffi Freedman-Gurspan.

“Begrudgingly, I’ll say ‘she,’” said Wintrich, implying that he didn’t consider her a woman. He went on to call her “the most unattractive tranny," a line that cast the packed room of Republicans into guffaws under golden chandeliers and star-spangled bunting.

BuzzFeed News followed up with [Fred] Karger about whether anti-transgender slurs and comments from other panelists would actually entice young voters to the party.  Karger said he’d tuned out those comments.

Sadly, such behavior is the norm for the Republican Party base: greed and inhumanity, if no outright hatred towards others are pillars of today's GOP.  In my view, no one moral and decent - much less LGBT - can be a Republican.  

Anti-Gay Catholic Activist Michael Voris Confesses Gay Past

Having been raised Roman Catholic, in my view few things screw one up more emotionally and psychologically - especially if one is LGBT.  When I first came out, it took a year and a half seeing a psychologist who was also a Presbyterian minister to make the initial step of letting go all of the damage done to me by my Catholic upbringing.  Even after that, it took more counseling to finally find self-acceptance.  Sadly, some never overcome the poison from their psychologically twisted Catholic upbringing (other denominations - e.g., Southern Baptists - can likewise mess one up in a major way).  Worse yet, others find that by clinging to such batshitery, they can make a living and seemingly care nothing about the harm that they do to others by peddling misogyny.  The "ex-gays for pay" crowd are but one example of this phenomenon.  Blogger friend Joe Jervis reports on another psychologically afflicted individual who seemingly cannot let go of the poison of his Catholic upbringing: Michael Voris of Church Militant, an ultra-right wing Catholic site.  It turns out that Voris is gay - despite protestations that he has returned to the Church - and has unloaded a lot of bullshit about his past.  Here are some highlights:

Thanks in part to pressure from virulently anti-gay and comically bewigged Catholic activist Michael Voris, last week the Catholic Church fired its news service editor for tweeting against North Carolina’s hate law. Yesterday Voris posted a video on his website, Church Militant, in which he confesses that for most his thirties, he lived a sexually sinful life of “live-in relationships with homosexual men.” Voris claims that he makes this revelation because the New York Archdiocese has been plotting to out him over his past. From the transcript for the video:

I will now reveal that for most of my years in my thirties, confused about my own sexuality, I lived a life of live-in relationships with homosexual men. From the outside, I lived the lifestyle and contributed to scandal in addition to the sexual sins. On the inside, I was deeply conflicted about all of it. In a large portion of my twenties, I also had frequent sexual liaisons with both adult men and adult women. These are the sins of my past life in this area which are all now publicly admitted and owned by me. That was before my reversion to the Faith.

I had great pain to overcome from childhood and my youth and instead of recommending myself to God in my youth, I gave in to the flesh and died spiritually. I shudder every time I think what would now be my lot had I died in a traffic accident or something. I gave up myself — my masculinity, my identity, my self-understanding, my own dignity as a baptized Catholic.

The sad truth is that Voris has not overcome the pain and damage of his childhood and youth.  If he had, he would not be wallowing in the anti-sex batshitery that is the Church's stock in trade.  Joe continues with this:

Back in 2010 I posted several times about Voris, his attacks on President Obama, on LGBT rights, and his call for a “benevolent Catholic dictatorship in the United States.”  These posts prompted a JMG reader to write and tell me that he’d once been close friends with Voris, who, according to the reader, had been a producer at the CBS affiliate in Detroit.

From the reader’s email: “It really pains me to see Mike spitting this vitriol into the public, and it also pains me to see a guy who was once a deep and close friend be the subject of ridicule and derision. But I also recognize that he’s brought this upon himself. Until he can face his own demons, he’ll only be able to demonize that which scares him.”

During my 2010 exchange of emails with the above-quoted JMG reader, he asked that he not be named should I report on his account of Voris’ past. As I was unable to independently confirm that Voris had, as Voris himself now puts it, once lived a sexually sinful life, I decided against outing him based on an anonymous claim. That issue, obviously, is now moot. At this writing, nearly 1400 Church Militant commenters have effusively praised Voris for his revelation.

1400 psychologically and emotionally damaged commenters who, like Voris, cannot let go of the brainwashing they received growing up.  I would further add this: does Voris believe this crap or has he cynically decided that embracing such dysfunction is an easy way to make money?

Bart Ehrman - The Abnormality of a Conservative Christian Upbringing/Education

I have read and enjoyed a number of biblical historian Bart Ehrman's books which place legitimate history and archaeological evidence over the blind acceptance of the Bible as the "revealed word of God."  It goes without saying that Ehrman is not too popular in Christofascists circles where logic, reason, and true historical inquiry are frowned upon if not outright condemned.  One thing that makes Ehrman interesting is that before he went on to graduate school, he attended Moody Bible Institute which, like so many "Christian" colleges pushed students to embrace ignorance and avoid living in objective reality at all costs.  Ehrman has a post on his blog that looks at the stunted world of Moody Bible College and what is being done even today at such institutions that have no right to be called institutions of learning.  Here are some post highlights:

I do need to spend this final post on the original thread to explain in very brief order what I am resentful about when it comes to my education as a 17-21 year old at Moody.   There are three things, all of which I could expand at length, but since I want to move on to other things, I will make just a few comments on each.

The first has to do with social life.   Moody was a highly regimented environment.  There were all sorts of rules involving social behavior.   Some of these rules were draconian.  here was no chance of having a normal young adulthood there, and I’ve long resented the fact that I missed out on lots of things that are normal, healthy, and important for full social and emotional integration into society.

There could be no drinking (even a beer: drinking age in the country at the time was 18), no drugs, no smoking.  These parts were obvious.  We were also not allowed to dance, to go to movies, or to play cards.  (Seriously: cards are of the devil.)  We were not allowed to have sexual relations of any kind.  Those were reserved for marriage. . . . . By no sexual relations, I not only mean no sexual intercourse.  I mean no sexual contact of any kind, including touching and kissing. 

Second thing: my education.  Or lack of it.  I’ve already mentioned that I was and still am grateful for the massive inundation that I received in the Bible.  I do not say “biblical studies” because there was in fact very, very little scholarship involved.  There was mastery of the Bible.  And of what very conservative evangelical scholars said about the theology of the Bible.   But in terms of academics, there was not much more. These were the years where I should have been, and where I so desperately now wish that I had been, studying in the great disciplines of the humanities and social sciences and hard sciences. . . .

I *should* have been studying the basics of chemistry, biology, and physics.  I had none of that.   I am hugely ignorant as a result.   In addition, I obviously never had courses in cultural anthropology, sociology, or psychology.

I was young and ignorant and was directed there by an older man whom I trusted, when – as I now know — I shouldn’t have trusted him further than I could throw him.   I was passionate for learning about the Bible, and so that’s what I threw myself into.  But how desperately now do I wish I had spent these formative years of my life reading great literature, learning modern languages, studying in depth the Greek and Latin classics, being trained in history, and on and on and on.

The third reason for my resentment is related, and is in a sense the flip side of the coin.   . . . . I am highly resentful of the approach to education taken at Moody.  It was three years of indoctrination.  It was not three years of learning how to think, how to analyze, and to assess, how to evaluate, how to come to one’s own views, how to reason to a conclusion.  It was three years of learning the right answers.   Right answers from within a very narrow and stifling ideological/theological perspective. These right answers were the key to eternal life and earthly happiness.  We simply had to learn the answers and … we would have the answers.   How stupid.  How ignorant.  How mind-numbing.   How mind-killing.   It is not simply that we were not taught how to think or encouraged to think.  We were actively *discouraged* from coming up with our own views, establishing our own perspectives, deriving our own conclusions.  Doing such things was seen as dangerous. 

I did not start learning how to think until I left Moody, and then it took me much longer to learn how to think than normal intelligent human beings take, since I had to drop so much baggage that I had been burdened with.   And this was emotionally difficult, because Moody not only loaded me up with baggage, but the people loading the baggage insisted that the only way to have a happy life and blessed afterlife was to carry that baggage all the way to the end of the road. I don’t feel I started to become fully human until I realized that they were completely wrong, and that their approach to education was, in fact, sinister. 

What Ehrman describes is what is precisely what happens at "christian" schools and colleges and universities - think Regent University of Liberty University among others - every day.   It's not an education but rather indoctrination and brainwashing.  Why such schools and institutions are given accreditation is mind boggling.  Meanwhile children and youth who are forced to attend such institutions are being subjected to a form of child and psychological abuse.  Such places need to lose accreditation sooner as opposed to later.

Sexual Orientation Obsession Disorder - Is it Different than Homophobia?

Just last night I noted how the Christofascists hysteria over gays and gay rights strikes me as a form of mental illness.  Then this morning I came across an article that would seem to explain the behavior of folks like Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli, Tony Perkins, and much of the Catholic Church hierarchy: Sexual Orientation Obsession Disorder.   In short, we may be seeing something more than plain old homophobia at work.  What is Sexual Orientation Obsession Disorder?  It is an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that revolves around the fear of being—or being perceived as—gay.  How does one convince himself/herself that they are not really gay?  By being as stridently anti-gay as possible, although in the cases of Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli,my personal bet is that they ARE gay and struggle because they cannot let go of the psychological damage they suffered being raised Catholic, something I know about first hand.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at a new study (subscription required) that looks at Sexual Orientation Obsession Disorder.   Here are highlights:

“Simon” is not gay but he used to spend several hours a day worrying that he might be.  His fear of being gay led him to avoid physical contact with other men at work, where he dodged one-on-one meetings with men, and at home, where he avoided attending his children’s sporting events so that he wouldn’t have to interact with coaches and dads.

Simon suffered from a sexual orientation obsession, a fairly common but under-examined manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that revolves around the fear of being—or being perceived as—gay.

Simon’s case study is the focus of a 2011 article co-authored by Dr. Monnica T. Williams, a clinical psychologist and the leading expert on sexual orientation-themed OCD (SO-OCD). In a new study published in the April issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, Dr. Williams sheds even more light on this confusing and often debilitating mental disorder.

For Dr. Williams, SO-OCD presents a unique clinical challenge because it can easily be mistaken for internalized homophobia, in which someone who is actually lesbian, gay, or bisexual suffers personal and social anxiety over his or her sexual orientation. Those who suffer from SO-OCD, by contrast, do not take pleasure in homosexual thoughts but nonetheless have an obsessive need to reassure themselves that they do not find them pleasurable.

These reassurances can take the form of time-consuming “checking” rituals that SO-OCD sufferers use to verify their true sexual orientation. In Dr. Williams’s clinical experience, these rituals include mentally picturing homosexual acts and checking for sexual stimulation, asking a loved one to verbally verify one’s heterosexuality, or looking at homosexual imagery to ensure that it does not induce arousal.
Some male sufferers of SO-OCD may even be so hounded by obsessive thoughts that they become “desperate to find out if they would enjoy a homosexual experience,” causing them to seek out unwanted—and ultimately upsetting—same-sex encounters.

Those who experience internalized homophobia or other forms of anxiety over being lesbian, gay, or bisexual, on the other hand, would not experience the activities in these rituals as inherently distressing. In her practice, for instance, Dr. Williams once encountered a middle-aged man who was concerned he might have SO-OCD due to “ongoing doubts about whether he should leave his wife and move to Miami to start a new life as an openly gay man.”

[A]s Dr. Williams and her co-authors point out, an individual with SO-OCD “may or may not have negative feelings toward LGBT individuals” on a sociopolitical or interpersonal level.

SO-OCD is a mental disorder, not a pathological form of bigotry. SO-OCD sufferers have a lot more in common with Jack Nicholson avoiding cracks in the sidewalk in As Good as It Gets than they do with the Westboro Baptist Church. SO-OCD also occurs with surprising frequency given how scant the research is on the subject.

For those who receive treatment, however, this distress can be alleviated using proven therapeutic techniques. As Dr. Williams notes in her team’s 2011 study of Simon, treatment for SO-OCD “follows the same structure as any other form of OCD”: expose the patient to his or her fears and interrupt the rituals that accompany them.

[F]or Simon, it alleviated his symptoms by allowing him to unmask and dismiss his fears. His depression cleared away and his quality of life score rose dramatically post-treatment.  But Simon’s success story aside, Dr. Williams and her co-authors remain concerned that the larger population of SO-OCD sufferers do not have access to this knowledge or these treatments.

For a potentially debilitating form of mental illness that can so easily be confused with internalized homophobia or outright bigotry, some clarity does seem to be in order.

It is nice to know that I was perhaps correct when I call out some of the GOP politicians and "family values" group leaders as crazy - they are mentally ill. 

The Danger and Sadness of Sexual Shame

I've referenced before a book a friend gave to the husband and me as a wedding gift titled "The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies" that traces the prevalence and acceptance of homosexuality in societies around the globe until the arrival of Christian missionaries.  Thereafter, sexual neurosis and shame of things sexual became the norm in most instances after the missionaries had planted their poison.  While, things are changing, for far too many people, the shame and neurosis continues.  Especially among the evangelical crowd that has the highest incidence of porn use even as its members going around feigning piety and robing themselves in religiosity.  As Salon reports, a new documentary of evangelicals addicted to porn shows the damage done by the shame that is part and parcel of far right Christian sexual mores.  Here are highlights:

[T]he documentary “Heart of the Matter,” which shows, in its own words, “what it is like to be Christian and addicted to pornography and sex.” Well, here’s the top-line summary: shame. Deep, cavernous, as in Grand Canyon-size, sexual shame.

The entire film takes place on a barren white stage with interview subjects seated on stools, ready for their confessions. One man says of his porn-watching, “I’d feel some relief and then immediately thereafter a deeper level of shame, a deeper level of guilt, a deeper level of self-loathing.” Says a younger man who appears in the documentary with his mom, who caught him looking at porn: “You just start feeling like a pervert. You start feeling like an alien inside your own house.” Well, yeah, I probably would have felt like a pervert too if my parents had gone nuclear when discovering my adolescent porn-browsing history.

The documentary frequently speaks about porn in the language of addiction. Wives talk of husbands “relapsing,” one man even says of himself, “I slipped into relapse seeing a pornographic movie.” Dan Gray, co-founder of Lifestar Network, a ministry devoted to healing “compulsive sexual behavior,” says, “Much like a young person who turns to alcohol or marijuana to manage their stress or their anger or some of their loneliness, they will turn to sexual behavior in order to create the same kinds of dependency on the internal drugs.”

The documentary frequently speaks about porn in the language of addiction. Wives talk of husbands “relapsing,” one man even says of himself, “I slipped into relapse seeing a pornographic movie.” Dan Gray, co-founder of Lifestar Network, a ministry devoted to healing “compulsive sexual behavior,” says, “Much like a young person who turns to alcohol or marijuana to manage their stress or their anger or some of their loneliness, they will turn to sexual behavior in order to create the same kinds of dependency on the internal drugs.” 

My heathen’s takeaway from the film was that, yes, people can have very unhealthy relationships to both pornography and sex. But there’s one thing that’s more toxic than even that, and that’s sexual shame.

Personally, my analysis is that these folks resort to porn because they are in bad marriages and stuck with sexually frigid spouses - think Betty Bowers, America's best Christian, or The Family Foundation's Victoria Cobb.  The result?  No sexual outlets and/or remaining trapped in dead end marriages even as religious brainwashing continues to keep them conflicted in shame sex which is a normal part of humanity.

Notre Dame to Gays: Live a Life of Celibacy

The University of Notre Dame - to some the flagship Catholic University in America -  holds itself out as a first class university of higher learning and advanced education.  But when it comes to issues of sexual orientation, the University is sadly on the same level as ignorant nomadic herders from the Bronze Age or at best the early Iron Age.  Why?  Because this supposed bastion of education subscribes to the anti-same sex physical intimacy batshitery of Leviticus which was based on (i) the ignorant belief that a male's sperm was limited in quantity and had to be saved for procreation and (ii) hostility towards the goddess worship of the Canaanites which involved ritual homosexuality.  Twenty-six hundred years or more after ignorant scribes compiled Leviticus, Notre Dame is counseling gays that they need to live a life of celibacy rather than embrace the sexuality that their creator gave them.  All so that neurotic, sexually obsessed, bitter old men in dresses in Rome and the mentally/emotionally challenged in the Catholic laity can feel superior and good about themselves.  Religion News Service reports on the idiocy and homophobia transpiring at Notre Dame.  Here are highlights:

Last weekend, The Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame hosted Gay In Christ, a day and a half colloquium intended to offer “an appropriate pastoral strategy for Catholic parishes” to “self-identified gay members.” The academic conference featured straight, gay, and lesbian speakers presenting on various topics concerning same-sex attraction and gender identity. The celibate gay and lesbian presenters were affiliated with Spiritual Friendship, a blog space started by Ron Belgau and Wesley Hill to discuss Christ-centered responses to LGBT Christians while remaining true to their beliefs in a traditional Christian sexual ethic

The presenters emphasized a significant shift in the Catholic framing of LGBT individuals. In the past, Catholicism has framed homosexuality in terms of “same-sex attractions”—refusing to acknowledge a gay identity. The queer presenters shifted that language by identifying as gay and lesbian while still upholding a traditional Catholic sexual ethic. A nod to more accurate verbiage is major progress considering that the only narrative the Catholic Church has officially sponsored has been of those who adhere to “SSA” or “same-sex attracted” language

Some tension arose when a member of Courage—who seemed to only attend the very first night specifically for Ron Belgau’s presentation—vocally pushed back at the idea that Courage’s twelve step program to help overcome homosexual desires was not effective or even “Catholic enough.” The group encourages members to avoid identifying as gay or lesbian, which is perhaps why they weren’t involved in the conference. Yet the shift in language was necessary in order for the conference to discuss LGBT people as more than just sexual acts

A concern was vocalized towards the end of the conference, which really shows how Christianity as a whole is having the LGBT conversation– that we were reducing LGBT people to sex. While the conference presenters stressed the importance of seeing LGBT people as individuals with experiences with gifts they could offer the church, the statements always seemed to come with a catch — “as long as they don’t have sex.” 

It's sad that LGBT individuals (especially the seemingly self-loathing presenters) continue to cling to the religious brainwashing of their youth.  It's even more sad that a supposed top university clings to ignorance and homophobia rather than admit that the Bible to which it clings is just flat out wrong on many issues, gay sex among them.  Again, my advice to gays who were raised Catholic: walk away and find a new church!

Working to Protect Others from "Ex-Gay" Harm

Despite the unanimous positions of every legitimate medical and mental health association in America that "ex-gay" or "reparative therapy" doesn't work and, in fact, is harmful, the Christian right continues to market the myth that gays can "change" and become heterosexual.  To me, it is part of the incessant campaign of lies disseminated by the "godly folk" who in my experience are perhaps the most dishonest people one will ever meet.  If the lies further their theocratic agenda, then they give themselves a pass from the strictures of the Commandment against lying and bearing false witness. Anything to avoid facing the reality that their world view is based on myths and fairy tales.  Thankfully, some who have fallen victim to the "ex-gay" myth are admitting that the "ministries" are bogus and speaking out.  One such individual is Tim Rymel who once worked for the charlatan organization "Love in Action."  Think Progress looks at the message that Rymel is seeking to broadcast.  Here are excerpts:

“The religious right continues to tout, ‘We have thousands of ex-gay people,’ and they don’t exist. The thousands do not exist.”

Earlier this year, a group of former ex-gay leaders — individuals who made a career at some point in their lives promoting or administering ex-gay therapy — published an open letter decrying all forms of sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE). “It is our firm belief,” they wrote, “that it is much more productive to support, counsel, and mentor LGBT individuals to embrace who they are in order to live happy, well-adjusted lives.” The letter helped launch the National Center for Lesbian Rights’ BornPerfect campaign, which calls for more laws protecting people from the harms of reparative therapy.

Among the signatories was Tim Rymel, who at one point in his life was an evangelical Christian minister and a vocal advocate for ex-gay therapy, offering his own personal testimony to support his cause.
Rymel now identifies as gay and is working against the harms of ex-gay therapy. He details his journey of self-acceptance in a new book called Going Gay, and he spoke with ThinkProgress about what he learned along the way and what he’s now trying to teach others about homosexuality and Christianity.

He’s been writing about his journey out of ex-gay therapy to correct “20 years of silence.” He said it took that long to come to terms with what had happened — including not only coming (back) out, but also divorcing his wife and the mother of his two children. In turn, he’s mostly been hearing from others who’ve gone through a similar process. “The audience seems to be the middle aged — late 40s, early 50s — people who are saying, ‘That was my experience,’ or, ‘That’s what happened to me in the church.’”

Still though, Rymel is committed to having these important conversations with his detractors.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Rymel’s story is the juxtaposition he draws between his understanding of his own sexual orientation and the very different process of understanding who gay people are culturally.  . . . “When you come from that [church] environment and you step into the gay community, there is no place that you feel more insecure,” he recalled, . .

He unequivocally now says, “I feel bad about the message we gave out. We were wrong. I was wrong.” And he also wants people to know that he takes responsibility for the harm he might have perpetuated, adding, “I certainly apologize to people who have been affected by my words or what we have done in the past. I hope that they’re able to pick up and move on and pull their lives back together as we have tried to do.”

Rymel opposes any ex-gay therapy for minors: “I have no qualms about saying that’s wrong and that that needs to be stopped,” because he worries about “a parent forcing a child into something that is ultimately going to harm them.” Laws have already passed in New Jersey and California protecting young people from being enrolled in the treatment, and conservatives’ attempts to challenge those laws have failed.

“There is no such thing as ex-gay,” Rymel now asserts, but he acknowledges that beliefs don’t change so easily. He hopes that conservatives can they see themselves in his story: “I was one of you… I was as far right as you can get as a Republican, so I completely understand religious liberties, I completely understand where you’re coming from and faith and all of those things, but this doesn’t work.

I spent 37 years trying to "change" without success.  Much of those years was filled with self-hate and inner unhappiness I shared with no one.  "Ex-gay" therapy is soul killing and, given the impossibility of really changing, has the danger of convincing some that death is the only solution, hence my two suicide attempts as I tried to come to self-acceptance.  I survived the ordeal, but not everyone does, and these "ex-gay" advocates have blood on their hands in my view.

Straight Spouses - Victims of the Christofascists' "Ex-Gay" Myth

Image - JaySi/Shutterstock.com

I frequently attack the lies disseminated by Christofascists as they continue their war against gays by promoting the "choice myth" and "ex-gay myth."   Having tried unsuccessfully to "change" myself for 37 years, I know the damage these lies do to ones life.  And that doesn't even factor in the number of LGBT individuals who ultimately take their own lives when they finally concede that they cannot change.  But their are additional victims about whom the "godly folk" don't give a damn: straight spouses who marry well intentioned opposite sex gays who are trying to be what church and family tell them that they are supposed to be.  And then there are the children of these doomed marriages.  They too are apparently acceptable collateral damage to the Christofascists eager to keep funds flowing into their coffers and push their anti-gay political agenda.  A piece in Slate looks at the straight spouses who ultimately are the victims of not their closeted spouses but instead they vile propagandist who continue to claim that gays can "change" even though all of the legitimate experts hold that change is not possible.  Here are article highlights:

After 16 years of marriage to a woman who would eventually come out as lesbian, Tom Teague made a promise to himself on a balmy October night in 2003: He would dance with every straight woman at the bar. Given the particularities of that evening, the odds were in his favor.

Teague, a reserved software development manager with a mop of white hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, was one of anywhere between 80 and 100 attendees at the annual beachside gathering in Florida for members of the Straight Spouse Network. He had arrived fresh from the memorial service for his mother, who had died of pancreatic cancer days earlier. But he sought solace from more than just her death. SSN had been his lifeline since his wife came out as a lesbian that January. More than ever, he needed to be with people who could understand him.

It was a welcome change. For a long time, life had been filled with more misery than magic. But that’s what the closet—a place as real for straight spouses as it is for the sexually struggling gay men and women they marry—will do to you.

Straight spouses are largely absent from the national conversation about gay marriage and the modern family. Certainly, it’s easier to talk about two moms or two dads who have been together from the start than to talk about why Mom left Dad for another woman, or why Dad left Mom for another man. . . . . But we need to include straight spouses in that conversation, because as tolerance for LGBTQ people spreads throughout the culture, more closeted spouses will undoubtedly come out. While for them, the light beyond those doors can be liberating, for the straight partners stumbling out behind them, it can be quite harsh.

Teague and Cloud, meanwhile, are in the process of forming their own member-supported organization, Overcoming Coming Out. Teague says OCO will take a more holistic approach to the familial reverberations of LGBTQ people’s decision to come out than SSN, which is geared toward their straight spouses . . .

Economist and New York Times columnist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz estimates that roughly 5 percent of the 151.8 million men recorded in the 2010 U.S. census are primarily interested in other men—and that millions live some version of a closeted life, including marriages to straight women.

Coming out is never easy, but it’s incalculably more difficult for the gay men and women who have joined a heterosexual marriage for one reason or another. Sometimes, they come to an understanding—or acceptance—of their sexual orientation only later in life. Perhaps they have, to some degree, known all along but wanted more than anything to be heterosexual (or to be perceived that way), and to have the unequivocal legal right to marry and have children. Others simply caved to family or social pressures. Many gay men deeply love their wives, but as Gravallese points out, “Society and everything we were taught told us that love equals sexual attraction.” Of course, that’s not always the case.

In terms of the healing journey, [gay spouses] are way ahead of the game,” says psychotherapist Kimberly Brooks Mazella, who works with as many as 15 straight spouses, mostly women, at a time in her McLean, Virginia-based practice about 20 minutes outside of D.C. Straight spouses comprise about half of her practice.

Mazella has been treating straight spouses since 1987—the year she became one herself. At the time, she confronted many of the same questions that her patients do now. “Was I ever really loveable? Was he faking it the whole time? It just cuts to the core,” she says. “For me, it was just a couple of years. Had I been married for 30 or 40 years, I think those questions would cut even more deeply.”

When Mazella helps her patients move through the stages of grief, she acknowledges that it can be an emotional balancing act at times. ​“Straight spouses are often struggling with competing emotional experiences—their own feelings of grief and loss, anger at the gay spouse’s betrayal, and compassion for their partner’s own painful journey,” she says. Empathy for gay spouses is not unusual among the straight spouse community. Degrees vary based on personal experience, as in any divorce. But ask a straight spouse, any straight spouse, what awaits him or her on the other side of the closet door. The most common answer is a deep sense of isolation.

“I can’t really fault him,” Christine says. She lays out the circumstances, including his upbringing in a conservative church that shunned homosexuality. If faced with the same, she feels she might have retreated into the closet. Not everyone in Christine’s life would agree. Encountering people who have encouraged her to turn bitter against her husband only compounds an already difficult situation, she says. She may be angry, but she does not want to be bitter. She prefers to approach the end of their marriage as they began it—as a team.

As long time readers know, my divorce was very bitter.  While she has remarried and is hopefully happy, I doubt that my former wife will ever believe that (i) I did indeed love her and (ii) that I never meant to hurt her.  It sickens me that the Christofacists continue to peddle lies that will lead others to suffer the pain and hurts that both she and I experienced.  Their sole goal is to make money, slander gays - or avoid admitting that the myths in the Bible are flawed and in far too many cases flat out untrue.  I truly hold nothing but contempt for these very vile individuals who should be treated as social pariahs. Instead the GOP prostitutes itself to them and the media continues to give them wholly undeserved deference even as the continue to damage countless lives.

Internalized Homophobia Still Plagues Some in the LGBT Community

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When I came out in mid-life one of the biggest hurdles I faced was overcoming the homophobia I had internalized from my religious upbringing and the larger society.  Thankfully, by leaving the Roman Catholic Church and seeing two exceptional therapists, I was able to let go of the religious brainwashing and the associated self-hatred that went with it.  Many in the LGBT community, including some friends I know, however, have not been able to let go of their internalized homophobia.  These individuals continue to be plagued by religious based guilt, some refuse to enter into committed relationships, and others go out of their way to avoid being around other gays out of fear that their "secret" might be discovered.  It is a soul killing phenomenon.  A piece in the Dallas Voice looks at the issue.  Here are excerpts:

Scott and Alan agreed to interview with Dallas Voice on the condition of anonymity, and during three meetings, they discussed their secret relationship and Alan’s closeted status and internalized homophobia, which he denies harboring. The contact was made through a mutual acquaintance, a Marine Corps officer, who has known Alan for three years.

“I don’t think I had ever heard of internalized homophobia until now,” Alan said. “It’s not something I have, so I don’t agree that’s the problem. I’m not out simply because of my job. Coming out would probably ruin my career.”

An executive with a Dallas-based professional sports organization, 32-year-old Alan has never been to a gay bar, has never attended a social event with a same-sex date and will only do things publicly with Scott that won’t be interpreted as a couple’s thing.

“We can go to a sports bar and have a beer, but we can’t go for a walk together,” Scott said. “I live with a long list of rules.”

Mental health professionals who treat LGBT issues would stamp Alan with one of the signs of internalized homophobia, regardless of his thoughts about it. In Beyond The Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life, author Steven Seidman describes being in the closet as a “life-shaping pattern of concealment.” Seidman writes that the closet seems to be on the wane, but it’s not gone, and its profound effects, including shame and homophobia, linger.

“Alan doesn’t realize it, but he’s put me in the closet, too,” Scott said. “I can’t go on a date with him because no one can see us out together like that, but I can’t go on a date with anyone else, either, because I’m with Alan, which makes no sense. This isn’t the way I want to live. I don’t do well with concealment.”

Sociologists and mental health professionals who treat and write about internalized homophobia say gay men and lesbians often use the demands of their jobs as an excuse not to pursue romantic involvements. They believe it keeps them safe from the toils of dealing with who they are.

“Most of us are concerned at one time or another with feeling bad about being gay or lesbian,” said Candy Marcum, a community counselor and president of Stonewall Behavioral Health. “It has to do with incorporating messages that say it’s not good or it’s even bad to be gay or lesbian. Those messages come from our families, the church, friends and the media, and they can linger into adulthood.”

Internalized homophobia takes root in those messages and leads to being closeted and a profusion of other traits that ravage a person’s self-esteem, among them contempt for the more open members of the LGBT community.  

The issue also is complicated by the LGBT community’s many facets. Tension between gay men and lesbians sometimes surfaces, and there are individuals in both camps who are opposed to drag queens and trans people. In that regard, gays and lesbians are no different than the heterosexuals who burden the community with hate, counselors say.

“Internalized homophobia leads to gay-on-gay acts of meanness and rudeness,” Marcum said. “Those people tend to hurt other gays and lesbians.”

The development of a scale to measure that internalized homophobia, written about in the Oxford Journals, suggests four dimensions to the issue: public identification with being gay, perception of stigma associated with being gay, degree of “social comfort” with other gay men and beliefs regarding the religious or moral acceptability of homosexuality.

One high-profile woman can relate to both Scott and Alan. Edie Windsor, the plaintiff in the case that led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule parts of DOMA unconstitutional, spoke publicly shortly after the decision, explaining her own struggle to speak honestly about her marriage with colleagues.  “Internalized homophobia is a big bitch,” she said.

One additional thing I will note is that the longer that I have been totally out socially and professionally, the easier it has become to simply be who I am.  No excuses, not pretense.  If some do not like me, that's their loss.   But over all, I have found that most people could care less - this includes my Hindu and Muslim clients and some of the old money crowd at the yacht club we joined last February.

Quote of the Day: Dan Savage on Religion

Like gay activist Dan Savage, I was raised as a Roman Catholic and church and religion dominated a great deal of my years through high school and even after.   However, unlike Dan, it took me far longer to face my sexual orientation and to ultimately let go of much of the brainwashing I had under gone as a Catholic youth in the late 1950's and 1960's.  In a column in the New York Times, Dan Savage reviews a new book, "Does Jesus Really Love Me?," by Jeff Chu.    The book among other things profiles gays and lesbians who are struggling to reconcile their faiths with their sex orientation.  Some, like some of my personal friends remain tortured by the indoctrination they received as children and find themselves unable to move on and see their faith traditions for what they are: made made constructs with money, power and control as their ultimate motivating forces.  In this category I would definite include the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Russian Orthodox Church (while for centuries worked hand in glove witht he rulers of Imperial Russia), and many fundamentalist denominations. Yet others end up rejecting religion completely.  Sadly, Chu is less kind to these individuals that the tortured gays who do not walk away from toxic denominations.  In the Column, Savage also talks about his own evolution.  Here are highlights:

A great many of the stories Chu relates are grim — I eventually lost count of the number of suicide attempts — but there are moments of humor. Andrew Freeman decides to move to Sweden at 26 in a last-ditch effort to turn himself straight. “I thought if there’s ever a place to find a beautiful woman, it’s Sweden,” he tells Chu. “Then I got there and I thought . . . this isn’t helping anything. Sweden has beautiful men!” 

And there is hope in this book, too.  .   .  .  .  A few months later she reversed herself, asked for her son’s forgiveness and gave him her blessing to come out. “I love this denomination,” Eva Sullivan-Knoff tells Chu, “but I love my son more.” 

A million moments like this are playing out all over the country. Taken together, they’re building toward a cultural tipping point, and as a result, the marriage of Christianity and homophobia is increasingly harming the churches that espouse it. The damage done by religious bigots used to go one way: churches preached homophobia, gays and lesbians suffered. Increasingly, religious bigots are hurting themselves.

But while Chu is gentle with gay people who are working to reconcile their sexualities and their faiths — straining in some cases to do so — he is far less generous to those of us who are no longer believers. For gay people who’ve left organized religion, the condescension that creeps in around the edges of his narrative begins to feel like contempt.

Mr. Byers, as we learned on the previous page, gave up his parental rights after his wife divorced him; his wife’s second husband adopted his children, whom he hasn’t seen in more than a decade; his brother refuses to speak to him; and his parents think his lifestyle is despicable. Maybe such acts of emotional and spiritual violence, committed in the name of Christian beliefs, account for the sadness Chu detected. 

Chu worries that gay people like Mr. Byers have been “pushed out of the church.” That’s not true for all of us. My father was a Catholic deacon, my mother was a lay minister and I thought about becoming a priest. I was in church every Sunday for the first 15 years of my life. Now I spend my Sundays on my bike, on my snowboard or on my husband. I haven’t spent my post-Catholic decades in a sulk, wishing the church would come around on the issue of homosexuality so that I could start attending Mass again. I didn’t abandon my faith. I saw through it. The conflict between my faith and my sexuality set that process in motion, but the conclusions I reached at the end of that process — there are no gods, religion is man-made, faith can be a force for good or evil — improved my life. I’m grateful that my sexuality prompted me to think critically about faith. Pushed out? No. I walked out.

He captures the fractures and conflict at a moment when the issue of what to do with L.G.B.T. people is tearing Christian denominations apart. 

Like Savage, I wasn't thrown out of the Catholic Church.  I left and happily so - especially as the sex abuse coverage exploded in 2002.  By leaving Catholicism, I felt clean as opposed to those who remain and continue to bankroll the criminal conspiracy orchestrated from the Vatican.    If I do have any regrets, they focus on the lives of Catholic youths who continue to be warped and damaged by a church that is about everything but the true Gospel message of Christ.  It distresses me at times when I wonder how many of these young Catholics will see suicide as the only escape.  Unlike Dan Savage, I do not count myself an atheist.  I do believe that there is a high power or creator.  By I believe that this higher power bears little resemblance to the God fabricated by men seeking wealth, power and control of others.  Religion can be a force for good.  But if one tallies up the evil done over the centuries, I suspect the scales reveal that religion - especially fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam - are a net evil in the world.

Straight Spouses: The Collateral Damage of the Ex-Gay Myth - Continued

I looked at this subject a little over a week ago and also posted a similar version of the piece on The Bilerico Project.  Some of the comments and messages I received were less than kind and accused me of, among other things, hatred towards Christians.  I also received a great deal of negativity from bisexuals who blamed the Straight Spouse Network ("SSN") for leading to unnecessary divorces of straight/bisexual couples.  Not being bisexual, I cannot fully grasp what equal attraction to both genders is like, but it would in theory certainly make remaining married far more workable than a gay/straight couple situation.  No two marriages are the same and the decision of remaining together ultimately comes down to what the spouses in each marriage are willing to accept.  If the straight spouse demands total denial of the other spouse's sexual orientation, I frankly do not see staying married as a viable option and this type of situation certainly sets the stage for help from SSN for the straight spouse facing divorce. 

That said, in my view it the situation boils down to this: gays and bisexuals continue to marry straights in their quest to conform to societal and religious tradition expectations and they enter into these marriages facing vastly a increased likelihood of failure because of the mismatch of the individuals' sexual orientation.  That's the current reality.  And most of the motivation for marrying straight individuals traces back to prevailing religious beliefs that remain extremely anti-LGBT.  (The same anti-LGBT religious beliefs continue to fuel the discrimination, stigmatization and bigotry LGBT individuals continue to face especially in regressive states like Virginia.)  There simply is no way to give religion and Christians a pass on responsibility for this circumstance.  Take away anti-LGBT religious dogma and bigotry and the number of these "mixed marriages" would plummet.

As for the accusation that I hate and bear animus towards Christians, here's what I posted in a reply on the Bilerico piece I wrote:

I do not bear hatred towards all Chrstians as some would suggest. In fact, I contuinue to consider myself to be a loyal member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which I joined after I left the Roman Catholic Church after coming out 11 years ago. The ECLA has opposed anti-gay marriage initiatives in both Washington State and Minnesota. Sadly, many "good Christians" do nothing and allow the hate merchants like NOM and Family Reseach Council speak for them.

Yes, I DO have a problems with denominations and individuals who knowingly reject legitimate medical and mental health knowledge and cling to ignorance and who continue to demonize LGBT people. Too many lives are being needlessly damaged or destroyed.

Unlike Rio, my divorce was horrific - the divorce court judge who consideres himself an upstanding Christian crucified me for being gay - and my relationship with my former wife remains chilly. Since we have children together that will keep us forever connected, perhaps an uncomfortable truce might be an apt description of our relationship. If my post contained bitterness, its because I have experienced first hand what happens when a doomed gay/straight marriage falls apart. I've also seen first hand what happens to the children of such marriages. And all of this pain and misery derives from religious based bigotry. 

 Yes, some LGBT individuals "are devout Christians and have found embracing, fulfilling spiritual homes" to quote one commenter.  But that doesn't excuse religion and Christianity in particular for the damage still being done to LGBT people every single day.  I would further ask: where are these "embracing spiritual homes" when it comes to standing up to and openly condemning anti-gay denominations that continue to disseminate anti-gay hate and animus?   Most of the time they remain quiet and yield the field to the hate merchants. Oh, they may sign LGBT supportive letters that rarely see the light of day outside the LGBT media and blogosphere.  But we rarely see them on the network news and other outlets that have a massive viewership. 

I applaud the actions of the ELCA bishops in Minnesota and Washington State but the sade truth is that such actions are the exception to the rule.  Most LGBT embracing denominations contine to be afraid to speak out because they fear ruffling the feathers of the sizable minorities within their denominations who are not pleased with the national body's acceptance of LGBT church members and/or clergy.  And the result we see is equivalent to the "good Germans" who remained silent as the Nazis came to power and unleashed hatred on the world.  Silence ultimately renders one complicit in the evil done by others.