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<h2 style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.exgaywatch.com/wp/2005/07/antigays-repent/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.exgaywatch.com/wp/2005/07/antigays-repent/
</a></h2><br><br><h2>Anti-gays Repent, but Moral Tunnel Vision Persists
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<p>Some anti-gay Christians are uncomfortable thinking about the world in tangible, rational, measurable, logical terms.</p>
<p>These individuals indeed, whole denominations may be more
comfortable reducing the world to primeval "curses and blessings"
superstitions and ghosts.</p>
<p>Douglas Jones and Douglas Wilson present themselves as two such individuals. In <a href="http://www.credenda.org/issues/16-2memorandum.php" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">Owning the Curse: Rethinking Same-Sex Marriage
</a>, Jones and Wilson reduce readers' moral vision to the following flawed, unidimensional assumptions. Wilson, a Calvinist, earns
<a href="http://www.worldmagblog.com/blog/archives/015763.html" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">praise</a> from Marvin Olasky.</p>
<p>The authors' assertions are in italics below, followed by my response.<br>
<br>
<em>Homosexuality is a judgment from God.</em> Citing just a single
sentence of the Bible, the authors assert that homosexuality (which
they do not define) is God's end-times infliction upon a society that
He has abandoned. In order to justify this assumption, the authors:</p>
<ul><li>misappropriate and exaggerate an isolated Bible verse;</li><li>ignore the simple fact that homosexuality has always been
widespread but brutally and hatefully suppressed by authoritarian
societies in which individual freedom does not exist;</li><li>perceive that homosexuality is God's punishment for the "normal idolatries" of <em>the authors' religious community</em> but they decline to name the idolatries of which they are guilty.
</li></ul>
<p><em>Homosexuality is primarily a judgment against the Church.</em>
Well-disguised victimology here: The church is being righteously
victimized by an angry God, and homosexuals lower than a plague of
locusts in the authors' scheme of things are God's passive-aggressive
way of lashing out in vengeance.</p>
<p><em>Curses are removed by our repentance, not denunciations of "them."</em>
This assertion should make Exodus officials squirm on two counts: Alan
Chambers' claim that saved Christians like himself do not qualify as
sinners, and more broadly the ex-gay political leadership's false
assertion that, unlike gay people, ex-gay activists are repentant of
their sins. (Quite the opposite: Many gay individuals, like many
heterosexuals, possess a broad perspective on the scope and depth of
right and wrong while activists affiliated with the religious right
trivialize morality by reducing it to a mud-slinging fight over
abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality.)</p>
<p>While this effort by the authors to assume some moral responsibility
is noteworthy, the writers unfortunately veer into anti-secularist
bigotry, falsely equating secularism (freedom of religion) with
agnosticism.</p>
<p><em>We should, therefore, "own" homosexual sin.</em> One cannot own what one does not understand, and the authors clearly do not understand homosexuality:</p>
<p><em>Homosexuality is about resentment.</em> "At its root,
homosexuality is a love of sameness rather than difference." This is
sheer, unsubstantiated bigotry. "We understand that homosexuality is a
deep longing for communion with the masculine, a longing that has been
trampled by neglectful or abusive fathering." Sexist pseudo-Freudian
rubbish. The authors complain about secularism one moment, then indulge
in a 19th-century atheist's prejudices the next.</p>
<p><em>Christian fathers are a primary cause of the curse of homosexuality.</em> This is an adolescent blame game.</p>
<p><em>Homosexuality will only pass when Christian fatherhood is pleasing to God.</em>
The authors speak only vaguely about fathers' "refusal to live
self-sacrificially." They fail to define exactly what forms of
fatherhood would be pleasing.</p>
<p><em>Our repentance lives under a curse.</em> On the surface, this
may sound like more pre-Christian superstition, reminiscent not of true
Christianity, but of witches and goblins. But the authors seem to be
saying that anti-gay Christians must repent rather than fight an
opposing category of sinners.</p>
<p><em>Our repentance must defy all attempts to make our repentance illegal.</em>
I sense a trace of paranoia and scapegoating here a denial of ample
evidence that conservative Christians have sought to make being gay
illegal through discrimination and sodomy laws, while the U.S.
tolerance movement has made no comparable effort to discriminate
against or imprison people <em>because of their Christianity</em>.
(While many anti-gay activists have sought to silence, fire or imprison
people merely because they are same-sex-attracted, a mere fringe of
militant pro-gay activists has sought to silence people not because
the targets are Christian, but because they use taxpayer-subsidized
venues to air anti-gay religious propaganda that are deemed incendiary
by the would-be silencers.)</p>
<p><em>We must have reformation in the Church.</em> This is political
correctness by another name. Which isn't a bad thing, necessarily
sometimes political correctness of the left or right is really just an
expectation by some that others will conform to common decency and good
manners. But please spare me any self-congratulatory talk about
"reformation" if political correctness is an unsuitable description,
then please try "power grab": The authors position themselves as the
sole arbiters of worship that is "false and corrupt" and then demand
that the entire nation "submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ."</p>
<p><em>Side issues about science:</em> The authors declare genetics irrelevant, and I agree but for very different reasons. </p>
<p><em>Language:</em> Having failed to define sodomy, the authors
eschew left-right rhetoric but resort to an even sluttier reduction of
morality: Faithfulness vs. sodomy as if sodomy (whatever it is) were
the only sin. To their credit, the authors acknowledge gay-baiting
(whatever that is) as a sin but then return to their superstitious
assumption that a "homosexual lifestyle" exists and that gay people of
faith are at odds with faith and virtue how so, the authors do not
bother to explain. Among their superstitions, the authors falsely
assert, "Homosexuals say they are 'queer'," "they are miserable
." </p>
<p><em>The destruction of our civil order:</em> The authors conclude by
returning to their atheist 19th-century father-bashing. In doing so,
they ignore the damage potentially done by the religious right to civil
order.</p>
</div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><br><br>Juanita Flores<br>Advocate for the Truth from Jesus