Overcomer wrote:
Dear Aaron:
Here's the problem with simply listing the recorded homosexual relationships of ancient times -- the fact that people engaged in them doesn't make it right. It simply shows that people have been engaging in the sin for a long time. I can also list lots of examples of adultery, pedophilia, bestiality, incest, etc. tolerated in the Roman Empire. Does the fact that people engaged in them make them right, too?
I know that parents will often decide that homosexuality is all right based on the fact that they have a child who says he is gay. That means they are accepting it on the basis of emotion rather than fact. Instead of helping their children break free of the stronghold, they encourage it. In doing so, they are actually doing their children a great disservice instead of helping them.
Here is a site devoted to helping parents of ex-gays and gays who want to leave the lifestyle:
http://www.pfox.org/about-us/what-we-do/
Note what they say about themselves:
Founded in May 1998, PFOX was created specifically to be an alternative to the misinformed gay family groups which insist that parents can only prove their love for their gay child if they support gay rights and affirm their child's self-proclaimed gay identity.
Love means helping one's child to realize the best life possible, not simply condoning the life they think they need to live without criticism. It may feel right to a homosexual man to desire men. But it also feels right to a pedophile to molest children and an adulterer to cheat on his wife. We cannot base our morality on feelings. They are too unreliable. Make no mistake about it: Sin can totally blind us and make us think that it's perfectly good and right when it is the worst thing for us.
There are numerous secular reports on how unhealthy the homosexual lifestyle is, how homosexuals have shorter life spans, are more likely to commit suicide, are more likely to be in an abusive relationship and are more likely to have multiple partners with relationships being far more transient than heterosexual ones. Check out the CDC material on it, for example.
Here is more information from the site I noted above:
http://www.pfox.org/ex-gays/
Please check out the video on that page from Dennis Jernigan who left homosexuality behind thanks to the freeing power of Jesus Christ. Anybody can follow in his footsteps and be freed from the lifestyle. The fact that there are so many ex-gays in the world prove this.
You know, it boils down to the same thing for every single human being who has ever lived: We all have to decide which means more to us -- God or our sins. The homosexual who says he must remain a homosexual is choosing his sin over God. That's his privilege. What is galling is the idea that we must all not just accept it, but celebrate it. Nobody who honestly and sincerely wants to please God could ever do that.
Dear overcomer, are you aware that gay people marrying each other is no different a 'lifestyle' than heterosexual people marrying each other? Each is a beautiful and loving thing of commitment.
Are you aware that the ex-gay therapy movement has been totally discredited as dangerous, false, and extremely harmful? I highly suggest you read the following report:
9 Ex-Leaders of the Gay Conversion Therapy Movement Apologize
http://time.com/3065495/9-ex-leaders-of ... apologize/
Are you aware that the type of teachings you espouse and that certain U.S. evangelical leaders and groups espouse are directly responsible for instigating the following persecution and brutal murders, as observed by this Anglican priest?
Op-Ed- 'How anti-gay Christians evangelize hate abroad', by Kapya Kaoma. Reverend Kaoma is an Anglican priest and the senior religion and sexuality researcher at Political Research Associates in Boston. He wrote the reports "Colonizing African Values" and "Globalizing the Culture Wars."
If you live in the United States, it's easy to be lulled into thinking that the battle for broader civil rights for gay people is nearly over. The last few years have brought important victories in courts, legislatures and at the ballot box, and momentum is firmly on the side of increased equality.
That's not true, however, in other parts of the world. The hateful vitriol that has fueled U.S. culture wars for so long is now being exported, and some of our most ardent culture warriors are finding a far more receptive audience abroad.
The people of Uganda, Nigeria, Russia and elsewhere are leading their own struggles for human rights. Their fight is difficult enough without campaigns of vilification designed by American preachers who distort the meaning of the Gospels to justify the criminalization , and even murder, of innocents.
In nations such as these, an insidious homophobia engineered in America is taking root. I have seen this hate being spread with my own eyes.
People who are gay, or suspected of being gay are being rounded up, beaten, imprisoned, murdered, and even burned alive in public by ‘Christian’ mobs who have learned such hatred from well-known right-wing evangelical preachers and pastors in the U.S., who have exported such teachings abroad.
In March 2009, while in Kampala, Uganda, researching reports of U.S. right-wing evangelical involvement in attacks on LGBTQ equality and reproductive justice, I was invited to a three-day conference on homosexuality hosted by the Family Life Network, which is based in New York. The keynote speaker was Scott Lively from Springfield, Mass., who introduced himself as a leading expert on the "international homosexual agenda." I filmed Lively over the course of two days as he instructed religious and political leaders about how gays were coming to Uganda from the West to "recruit children into homosexuality."
Some of his assertions would have been laughable had he not been so deadly serious. He claimed that a gay clique that included Adolf Hitler was behind the Holocaust, and he insinuated that gay people fueled the Rwandan genocide.
In the United States, Lively is widely dismissed as an anti-gay firebrand and Holocaust revisionist. But in Uganda, he was presented — and accepted — as a leading international authority.
The public persecution of LGBTQ people violently escalated after Lively's conference, with one local newspaper publishing the pictures and addresses of activists under the headline, "Hang Them."
Lively was also invited to private briefings with political and religious leaders, and to address the Ugandan parliament during his 2009 visit. The next month, Ugandan lawmaker David Bahati unveiled his Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which in its original form called for the death penalty as punishment for a new crime of "aggravated homosexuality."
In recent years, millions of dollars have been funneled from anti-LGBTQ evangelical conservatives to Uganda, funding local pastors and training them to adopt and mirror the culture-war language of the U.S. Christian right. Bahati and a notorious anti-gay pastor, Martin Ssempa, were personally mentored by U.S. religious conservatives. And powerful right-wing Christian organizations such as the Family Research Council lobbied Congress to change a resolution denouncing the Uganda legislation.
Other prominent right-wing evangelicals have also made Uganda appearances, including California's Rick Warren and Lou Engle, who founded TheCall ministry. They met with politicians, hosted rallies and public meetings, and used their influence and credibility to contribute to a culture war in Uganda much more intense and explosive than anything seen in the United States; Lively himself described the work as a "nuclear bomb" in Uganda.
In December, the Ugandan parliament finally passed the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, and last month President Yoweri Museveni signed it into law. The death penalty provision was removed, but the law includes life sentences for homosexual "repeat offenders" and criminalizes advocacy on behalf of LGBTQ Ugandans.
Uganda has deservedly received widespread attention, but it's not the only country with a culture war that carries the fingerprints of U.S. campaigners. Nigeria has passed a bill almost identical to Uganda's, and Cameroon and Zambia are enthusiastically imprisoning LGBTQ people.
And let's not forget Russia. In 2007, Lively traveled throughout Russia to, as he put it, bring a warning about the "homosexual political movement." He urged Russians, among other things, "to criminalize the public advocacy of homosexuality." Last year, President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law that criminalizes distribution of "gay propaganda" to minors, including any material that "equates the social value of traditional and nontraditional sexual relations." In Russia, because of this law, gay people are being beaten and even murdered now, with no response from the authorities.
