1. The Bible being a really bad thing to base any discussion of gay sexual orientation on notwithstanding given that it was written long before homosexuality as a construct was defined and that it was written by people so ignorant about even heterosexual human sexuality that they didn't understand that there are ova involved in human sexual reproduction, what you read as a Bible is hardly reliable to begin with as a document enough to base any understanding of what even people in that time understood in context. The Bible as you know it, after all, is so cherry-picked and revised and politicizedly transformed a document as to be inherently unreliable for this sort of discussion.
Even the passage you quote is suspect, written long after Christ's death and mixed up in the Peter/Marian conflicts of the time in which it was written. I understand your point but your use of it is two-faced in its unstated lauding of your own sexual orientation as good and condemning of mine as sinful while wrapping yourself in a false mantle of kindness by saying that it's okay to be that ugly to someone else because we're all sinners.
The Bible, such as it is, condemns three things in this regard: 1) temple prostitution in an attempt to make a beleaguered little tribe separate religiously from those in their midst and thus removed from the power of the local priests and priestesses and more likely to survive as a unit; 2) sex for any purpose save reproduction -- they were tiny in number and needed to make babies to survive; and 3) Greek-style homosexual behavior where ostensibly heterosexual men leave their wives and, presumably, their natural heterosexuality behind to go romp in athletic-intellectual sexual freedom with each other.
The Bible also says you're supposed to treat anyone who violates those things as abominations -- meaning that you're supposed to execute them by various unpleasant means -- and it's not limited to the Old Testament, either, which means that that exhortation to violence supercedes or at least must be given equal weight to the Sermon on the Mount -- at least for you Christians where the third Greek sort of sexual expression is concerned. (Types one and two are Old Testament and are fully covered by the Sermon on the Mount's discussion on the relative value of O.T. law.) In short, what that means for you Christians is that, if you find heterosexual people of the Kinsey zero variety (people whose sexual orientation is exclusively heterosexual but are having homosexual sex), you're commanded to off them by certain Biblically prescribed means while at the same time loving the person you kill. How you square that with current civil laws regarding murder and Christ's orders to you regarding Caesar's law I'll leave for you to figure out.
2. Being gay is not a lifestyle. A lifestyle is how you live and the hundreds of millions of gay people on this earth just don't live alike enough for that word to apply. Lifestyle in this context is a trivializing, insulting word (and you, being a nice Christian lady wouldn't want to do that, now would you?!?) in that it describes things people do, not what people are at the core of their being. It was popularized by the religious political extremist spin machine to reinforce their lies about the fundamental nature of human sexual orientation as changeable behavior. Even the often clueless about gay people (and unintentionally heterosexist) Dr. Phil understands the basics of this one -- that human sexual orientation is deeply rooted enough in a person's psyche to be too likely to be harmful to try to change and that it's definitionally not about behavior at all.
That's right, it has absolutely nothing to do with behavior and is solely about desire and attraction at the emotional, affectional, and sexual levels. After all, even a nun who lives as a celibate person all her life and has no sexual behavior whatsoever still has a sexual orientation.
It also is defined in terms of what's predominant, not necessarily exclusive in terms of a person's emotional, affectional, and sexual response. Think about a line segment from zero to six that's divided in equal thirds (0-2, 2-4, and 4-6). Zero is defined as 'so heterosexual you have no homosexual desire', six is 'so homosexual you have no heterosexual desire', and three is that point equally balanced between the two. Those three points are what we usually think of when we say "heterosexual", "homosexual", and "bisexual" but, in reality, they're just one point in each third of the line segment that is heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. In other words, if the old linguistics truism that humans have a word for every concept is compared to the reality that we only have words that we traditionally use to define three points on a line segment that has at least six points (and, if truth be known, an infinity of points), we as a species have not been thinking enough about our sexual orientation to be properly conversant about it!
It also means that heterosexual really doesn't just include point zero. It also includes all the points from there to point two, which includes lots of homosexual desire that just isn't predominant. Likewise, homosexual isn't just point six but is everything from points 4 thru 6, which includes an increasing amount of nonpredominant heterosexual desire as you approach point 4, and points 2 to 4 include that pivotal, equally balanced point 3 but also some desire that's a little more to the het side or gay side without being predominantly het or gay.
An interesting part of that on the practical side is that behavior and desire do not, as our celibate nun showed us, have to coincide. People can behave contrary to what their predominant sexual orientation is and often do for a variety of reasons -- some good, some not. You see it alot for people in the homosexual group where there's a great deal of pressure to be het. You see it sometimes where a person has a strong feeling about monogamy, isn't a zero or a six, and falls in love with someone who isn't reflective of their predominant desire. Loving relationships encompass lots more than sexual orientation, after all, and, if someone's libido is not terribly strong and/or the other things their off-predominant-sexuality loved one offers are critically important, people can have very satisfying lifelong relationships that even include a satisfying sexual component to them but are opposite to their sexual orientation.
But those people are not the norm and to demand that all gay people live outside their predominant sexual orientation or be celibate is cruel. For a religious sect to do so defines that religious sect as cruel, too.
But, back to the word "lifestyle". It was easy for that religious political extremist spin machine to get people to use it because so many of us are so immature about things sexual that even using appropriate terminology makes us queasy or uneasy. We'd rather say "lifestyle" than say anything that has the word "sexual" in it, even if it's a grossly inaccurate euphemism suitable only for things that are changeable and choice-based like whether you tend more to backyard barbecues than dining in 5-star restaurants, if you're more likely to go to NASCAR races than the opera, or live spartanly rather than in a clutter of things.
3. What's to agree or disagree with about homosexuality? To say one disagrees with homosexuality is the equivalent of saying you disagree with the moon. Both are simple facts of life. They exist. They've existed. They will exist until they don't anymore -- either because the moon is destroyed or humans are, respectively. When you hear us say, "Get over it!", it's this kind of "I disagree with homosexuality" jousting at windmills that we're talking about.
Gay people are not the ones who hold the power in the equation, though. We're the minority. We can only try to help you see the disconnects between your desires to be good people and how you treat us -- and, right now, the disconnects are still pretty big.
4. One of those is the "love the sinner, hate the sin" nonsense. You cannot hate our essence without hating us. You're fooling yourself if you think you can. And you're fooling yourself if you think you're not hurting us when you try to, too. We're not stupid. We know what you think of us. We're not fooled by this one bit. And it hurts. It hurts alot.
It's double-speak that fuels the hatred and the violence -- and it's the worst kind that grabs the soul's need to be loved like an abusive parent telling a child the abuse is the result of love. It's why gay teens kill themselves at extremely disproportionately high rates, why gay people fall victim to substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors at a disproportionately high rate, and why hate criminals feel justified in thinking we're lesser beings ripe for their rage.
You may not be one of those criminals you condemn but you're the platform from which they operate. You'd like to think you're not but you are.
(Original Air Date: 10/19/05) Sexual orientation used to be something kept hidden from family and co-workers, but now more and more people are "coming out" and finding acceptance. Anjela says her mother and sister don't support her sexual orientation, and feel she can't be Christian and gay at the same time. Can they reconcile this touchy issue? Then, two men debate whether a person can go from gay to straight, and parents of a 4-year-old boy fear their son's desire to play with dolls and wear heels means he'll grow up to be gay. Are they overreacting to his wishes to be a princess instead of a prince? Talk about gender and gay issues here.
