The Spectator has an article depicting the ignorant-on-psychology approach that some conservatives spouse:
The LGBT rights movement — so the story goes — has split the Christian churches in two. On one side are the progressives, who believe that Christianity should accept gay people and recognise gay marriage. Lined up against them are the conservatives, who hold fast to the belief that being gay is sinful. It’s not entirely false, that story. There are just a vast number of Christians who don’t fit into it.
Ed Shaw is an evangelical pastor in Bristol and is gay — or, as he puts it, he ‘experiences same-sex attraction’. It’s a less misleading term, he tells me. ‘If I say to people in conversation, “I’m gay,” they tend to presume that I’ll be delighted if they match me up with their gay friend Barry.’ Which isn’t what he’s looking for: ‘I’d love to meet any of their friends, but I don’t want to be match-made with people because I’m not interested in that sort of relationship.’
Shaw is one of the founders of Living Out, a website written by gay people who are also traditionally minded Christians. As he points out, this is quite a large constituency. The ‘horror stories’ about churches rejecting LGBT people dominate media coverage, he says: Living Out exists partly to record more positive experiences.
Shaw’s is one of them. ‘As a pastor,’ he says, ‘I thought being open about my sexuality would be a disqualification for the job, and would mean that people would stop coming to me.’ Instead, they started calling on him more than ever. ‘Because they think, this guy finds life tough, it’s not easy for him, he might be able to help me. I think previously I thought the deal was, try and fake it as a perfect person, and then people will listen to you.’
When Shaw writes in praise of the ‘real elements of beauty’ in gay relationships, or laments how the C of E’s ‘hypocrisy’ has ‘hurt a lot of people’, he sounds like a liberal Anglican.
Notice that there is no more talk about how perverted and dysfunctional their homosexual desires are, it’s all “real elements of beauty”. Homosexuality is all about being BFFs! And why should such a guy find life “tough”? Anytime he says homosexuality has real elements of beauty, it appears he has men like Dan Hitchens drooling to hear more about how wonderful it all is. Maybe Hitchens would like to give him a long hug for all his suffering, you know, get real close to that suffering homo who will never think of going to treat his deformed mind. And when a male youth or adult needs to talk about a sensitive matter to Shaw, and he responds by a long, intense sexual stare, violating what would be a Pastor’s role, I’m sure Hitchens would just shrug and say, but he is a suffering homosexual, such a nice guy, who can blame him? We must embrace him, in fact, let me go embrace him one more time myself.
And that’s the people now in both these evangelical churches and the Catholic Church. I mean, the way things are going, the Catholic Church should just come out and put “gay sauna” signs on every of its churches.
Like another favorite of ignorant conservatives like Hitchens, whom he also mentions, Eve Tushnet, a “Catholic” pervert who’s doing everything she can to destroy the Catholic Church – from inside:
For Tushnet, the future became clearer when she asked where specifically God was calling her to love — which led to volunteering at a crisis pregnancy centre, and to a deepening of friendship. Tushnet sees this life as an expression of her sexuality, not a denial of it. ‘The desire for same-sex intimacy and love and the recognition of beauty in people of the same sex — these are inherently good things, and in many ways basic human needs.’ Some people find it possible, she says, ‘to take all of that energy and intensity of erotic love and let it flow into a relationship to women or to beauty or to God’. That kind of ‘sublimation’ has always made intuitive sense to her.
Who would have thought that only a few decades after GLAAD was created, it would merge with the Catholic Church? It’s harder and harder to tell them apart. This may be why “Dan Hitchens has just been appointed deputy editor of the Catholic Herald”. Or why approximately 80% of the sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church in the US were priests abusing males, and the majority were not kids, they were adolescents. We have people like Hitchens and Tushnet to thank for that – with their discourse and their lies and their embellishment of homosexuality. (It has been two years already since I wrote The new Pope, the Catholic Church, and homosexuality: a fish rots from the head down!)
Notice also that people like Hitchens and Tushnet never talk of violence, sexual harassment, abuse, or perversion. I even wonder how many of these farcical Christians even have any kind of healthy mind or feelings regarding sexuality left.
Their own perversions have supplanted any conscience of what is healthy. Once a healthy feeling becomes perverted and deformed, a person no longer has a guide, internally. From then on, being a pervert is their only experience of “normality”. This is why homosexuals are so much like pedophiles, zoophiles, and any other deformed human beings. Their sense of normality is based on their sick minds – they are not going to ever talk about how evil or harmful or how much violence they do in the world.
No wonder that when homosexual pigs (and their supporters) are in power, like they are in many of these churches and social spaces and public forums, people like me are never allowed to speak.
Last but not least, I know I’m not the only one, but sometimes, when I read such aberrant articles, I feel like the only person who realizes that these so-called Christian/Catholics interpret the Bible any way they want, and then say the Bible is the word of God – and so it must be true. It would be nice to tap on their shoulder and ask, ‘Haven’t you noticed that every century you have changed the discourse and every time you still proclaim your version is the “word of God”? Cute game, isn’t it?’
This is particularly true of this “we can’t turn away the gays because I love them so much and they’re so nice to me” crowd like Hitchens. “I must have them so near to me in my heart, because I’m such a good little Catholic. And tell me once again how beautiful homosexuality is, Shaw, how utterly nice homosexuals are. It makes me drool. I really want to know how another man would worship me, how he struggles with it, how he’d like to be best friends with me forever. It’s not an abomination at all – who could ever think that, Shaw? I’m just doing my Catholic duty to be good here.”