Gay Teens: A Debate

Great Debates
441

Good point, UnuMondo (my request for you to take a stand and your taking one simulposted, as it happens – sorry!).

I’d raise a couple of objections here, though – and I hope you’ll see them as questions requiring further analysis, not as an attempt to flame you outside the Pit.

  1. Catholicism teaches, I believe as authoritative church doctrine (correct me, UM, Tom~, beagledave, or other Catholic poster, if I’m in error here), that homosexuality as an orientation is “intrinsically disordered.” Can you see any way in which this can be fitted with a compassionate stance that does not sound condemnatory to gay teens (or indeed any gay people)? Likewise, the standard teaching of Christians of any stripe is “love the sinner, hate the sin” – but it seems to me that the effective stance of most (not all) Christians who espouse this standard as it is perceived by the sinners in question is “Hate the sin, and the sinner too while you’re at it.”

  2. How do those who interpret Scripture to say that all homosexual behavior under any circumstances is unacceptable behavior come to make the rules of what will be taught? Is this not intruding a faith-based standard into the school curriculum?

  3. The last time I looked, Catholicism made a major distinction between chastity – refraining from extramarital sex, to which it says all the faithful are called as a moral duty, and celibacy, a charism given to a few to abstain from all sex permanently in order to equip them for a special task for God. I was unaware that Catholicism taught that gay people are on a special mission for God, and therefore called to celibacy as opposed to chastity. (Though IMHO there is a particular task to which they are called – to be the embodiment of those rejected by secular society to whom good Christian people are to reach out in compassion and grace – a task at which the vast majority of us seem to be failing miserably.) – And, of course, the definition of “marriage” precludes them from legitimizing the love and commitment they feel towards their beloved in a way open to the rest of us.

I think the Pit thread I opened to gripe about the loss of Daryl and the way in which “Christian” attitudes contributed towards his suicide serves to show one spectacular example of how we fail in compassion and the showing of love towards a group who most need it.

I’d love to see you identify a practical way in which Christians can respond to the problems posed above without abnegating their moral stances (although IMHO the principal moral task of any Christian is to live out the call to love God and one’s fellow man as specified by Jesus, and that any stances on particular things thought to be sinful must somehow be subordinated to and fitted in that overarching command). I look forward to seeing your response.

442

I think you misunderstood the question.

The question is not, “What level of information and support in the public schools would not wound the delicate sensibilities of UnuMondo and his ilk?”

It is, “What information and support do we need to get into the public schools?”

And the need of children trumps your squeamishness. Homaranisto ja scius tion.

443

UnuMondo, your method is already in effect. And kids are dying because of it.

Maybe you’re okay with that.

I’m not.

444

Are you serious?

Let me see if I understand you correctly: You would support a law that would make it a crime for me to teach my children that homosexuality is wrong, abhorrent, and sinful?

445

Um, Crafter_Man, now that someone has risen to your bait, could you please take it to another thread? This one is entirely inappropriate to the discussion you have in mind.

446

I don’t think that most of the world population thinks that engaging in homosexual behavior is wrong. Last time I checked, it was the other way around. I don’t suppose you have a cite?

447

Sure. Didn’t mean to crash the party… :frowning:

448

Of course not. You have every right to fill your child’s head with nonsense and hate (and I have every right to feel very sorry for your innocent children.)

However, when you want to fill other people’s children with your hateful lies, that is another story. If you don’t want others telling your kids what to think, then please do not do the same. It’s none of your business.

And thank God you’re in the minority. Things will change.

449

Poly, even within the Catholic community there are many who will completely sidestep the issue of whether or not some sexuality is intrinsically disordered because to them there is a far greater issue: one which, however much I may disagree with many of their premises, I have to agree with both because it makes sense in print and because I have seen it brought into action.

That issue is accepting people. Showing them God’s love as those Catholics best see fit to do according to each person. It isn’t an “Our strategy for dealing with non-heterosexuals [though more often they say homosexuals and leave out another group] is to preach the words of Leviticus to them” but “how can we reach this particular person?” They get to know that particular individual. I guess the best comparison I can make is to teaching; the most effective form is that which is most effective to each individual student. Mass-production-type teaching will work for some, to be sure, but it will not do as well as individualized instruction. Some of what I have seen churches do with their ministry toward any minority is to make it both voluntary (IE they aren’t going to strap you down, but they make it known that people are available to talk and such) and on a more personal level. Or at least that’s something I was seeing a lot of shortly before I left the Catholic Church (for entirely different reasons).

FWIW, I was taught that chastity is also “excessive” sexual activity even within the bounds of a marriage. This is (TMI warning possibly) why my father, being a monk, being a member of the Catholic Church, can take a vow of chastity and still have a physical relationship with my mother that includes sexual intercourse (and that is as FAR AS I AM GOING TO GO DOWN THAT LINE OF THOUGHT THANK YOU VERY MUCH!)

UnoMondo, there are very few differences I see between race and sexuality with respect to the aptness of Dr. King’s speech and my adaptation of it. Mine does not completely follow his, but then it would have taken a much longer time than it took to write mine (around an hour, as is the case for most things where I just sit and things come out basically as you all saw) had I gone looking for the sort of symbolism that in his case was in his face every morning. So instead of, for example, putting three in one place, I put two in another and one in a third. If you look at the text of his speech, for example, he used one-liners, so to speak, when referring to spreading the message so that it would saturate this country. I took a different approach; one that I felt better suited the tone and direction of what I was writing.

It was not intended, for what it may be worth, as a teary-eyed “I have a dream” melodrama. If I had written such I expect I would have (quite rightly) been flamed. If you believe it to be a melodrama I suggest you take a look at the sort of things we non-heterosexuals and our allies have had to endure. I was making no aggrandization when I talked about people like me being killed, being beaten, being denied housing or employment or anything else. I was not going for a dramatic effect when I predicted (accurately, IMO, but only time will tell) the role our opposition will serve eventually; it has been the case historically and it will be the case here. You can take that to the bank.

You will notice that my message was not one of “Love us or leave us”. I was very careful to include the sort of forgiveness aspect that good Christians emphasize in their daily lives and the kind bad Christians talk about only when it is convenient to them. I would dearly love to have those who focus their life’s work on the denigration and marginalization of people just like me. I think they would be helpful to our cause if for no other reason than their followers would most likely follow suit.

And just in case your heart was hardered, I will say it again, and this time know that when I close my eyes and envision an America with liberty and justice for all, you are in it and so am I.

So will Poly.

So will Homebrew.

So will Mr Visible.

So will matt, because the US and Canada share many beautiful things. This is one of them.

I do not believe alone. I do not dream alone. I do not fight alone, I do not yearn alone. Everything I do for this cause is, and must be, for everyone else who is fighting with me. For if I am free but my brother is not, where is the joy in that? Liberty and Justice for all.

And in the wake of news such as Daryl’s death, I do not cry alone. He was not the first; he will probably, against the best efforts of many and due to the worst efforts of some, not be the last. He is still in my dream, in Poly’s, in matt’s, and in all those who seek what has been denied.

I have said it before, I say it now and I will say it until the words in the document that first freed us are realized by all American citizens:

You can join us and fight with us, sharing our pain and our triumph. You can fight against us and watch your side lessen as more people realize that, as good always triumphs, in the end, over evil, they must join good. Or you can remain neutral, you can ignore us and wait for the houses of justice, of truth and of freedom to be given to us. Do not despair, though; as it has been abused, so will we take great pains to purify it.

Make no mistake. We will win. The only question I have is this: will this country be better because of your fight?

450

I agree with Poly’s statement

And I admire the tenacity and dignity of iampunha posts.

But there some significant differences, esp to the topic at hand.

MLK’ s parent’s weren’t white. He didn’t grow up in a with family or community who said you better turn out white. He didn’t have people telling him that being white or black was a choice and not something you’re born with.

Considering the tragedy of what happened to Daryl, we should be considering what can be done to help parents do the right thing. The focus of this thread isn’t trying to get gays hired at homophobic law firms or the right to health care for their SO, its about how to protect gay teens in crisis who often have no where else to turn. I think the crisis can be prevented in the first place by a caring and loving family.

If iampunha dream becomes reality then this would be solved, but one of the steps between here and there IMO, will be many parents who adopt the attitude of 'We love and support you, but this is what we believe" over “we no longer have a son”.

451

I would hope, someday, that if a child of mine told me he or she was gay, my response would be something like, “You are? Fine. Now go do your homework.”

Because I think it should be such a non-issue. I mean, of all the things your kids could tell you-he’s on drugs, he’s sick, he’s dying, he’s in a gang, molested, being abused, a girl could say she’s pregnant, he could say he got a girl pregnant, or that he’s a Browns fan. :wink:
All he says is he’s attracted to individuals with the same genitalia as he. And they kick him out over THAT?

452

Guin, I hope someday it can come to that. But if, when I told my parents I was bisexual, they had said “Okay, fine. Now take out the trash” I’m not sure I would have reacted well at all. Mainly that’s because I anguished over telling them for months. Had they just said “okay whatever” it would be like saying “this thing that’s important enough that you prepared this long and obviously looked worried about when you started … we don’t care.” I understand what you mean, but perhaps taking it from the perspective of the one who’s had to do all the exploration, all the nights staying up late trying to figure out if it’s “just that one guy who’s hot” or if you’re going to have times where you see a man and say “good GOD I would lick him until my tongue fell off”. It’s a difficult thing to do in almost every situation.

It matters to me. If nothing else, parents need to understand that in many cases their support is vital. Considering that some teens come out to their parents when they (kids) are still fleshing out so many aspects of who they are, it’s crushing to think your parents don’t care about you, regardless the topic.

453

There are many steps on the path, to be sure. If my post looked more idealistic than envisionistic, that is perhaps because seeing the goal line gives you an idea of what fights need to be fought to get there. I know I have specific things in mind to do, as do those who joined this cause long before I did. And the things I have in mind to do are things we are all doing, or well ought to be.

I am hoping to have a shortened (you try delivering that post of mine as a speech in 6 minutes. It would not be effective. Some of it needs to be slow and sure. It was four pages in Word and my last speech for that class was two pages, font size 16, double spaced. It lasted 3 minutes) version of it prepared for my speech class, as I’m thinking of making part of it into a persuasive essay. I just hope I can summon the courage to do so. I know there are straight supremacists in that class. I think it is reasonable to say that giving that speech will tie me with the group I am hoping to form, which may cause violence both to me and those around me.

No, but he did grow up with the ever-present reminder that to all too many people, being black was as good as being inferior. the Supreme Court has held that opinion before, and state governments have legislated to that effect in the past. My own state still had, on the books, a law making it a crime to “mix races” in marriage. I think that law was finally struck down in 1987, but regardless of whatever argument someone will probably bring up whenever this is brought up, it was there. It’s a point some people will make in debate about civil rights “Oh, it’s illegal, so it must be bad and we should keep it that way because that’s what made this country great”.

Black people are still and were in King’s day hurt for who they are. Today and back then that was the case and that was a large part of my point. It isn’t right and it needs to stop. And it will stop.

Nitpicks notwithstanding (adultery and such things), love being a crime is about as absurd a concept as eating being a crime. They are both intrinsic human ideas, and to legislate against love merely because someone is XX or XY is patently absurd. We don’t have laws against people eating squid, do we? Some of us would find it revolting, some of us would have an aversion to it, some of us wouldn’t especially care either way and I know some of us quite like it. Yet there are no laws against the eating of squid (sealife welfare, of course, but nothing prohibiting the consumption of squid). So why the laws against same-gender sexual relations, or same-gender civil union? Absent the religious aspect that’s really all a marriage is: a civil union. A contract. Come to think of it, I’m rather surprised the issue of DOMA going against one’s freedom as a major to willfully enter into a contract hasn’t come up. Or, at least, I’ve yet to see it.

That King didn’t have to come out to his family is of little relevance here, IMHO. What is important is that his life was difficult because of something he could not (and if he could I very much doubt would have) change; a facet of his being tied to a large part of who he was, to be sure. But that’s not all he was. He isn’t “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Persecuted Black Man”. He was a father, he was a son, he was a husband, he was a man. And in this country that is exactly opposite the common perception of many people; they see gay people (somehow among all the pride parades they always miss us bisexuals;)) as promiscuous, flaming queens who are all about converting your son to The Gay Agenda, etc etc etc ad nauseam. They’re gay, and that’s all they are. Gay Gayerson and Dick Assrammer are their poster child for why gay couples should not be recognized in this country. Nevermind that, however much you might wish the opposite, they serve in pretty much every function this country has. They have been your soldiers, your teachers, your government officials, your accountants, your lawyers, your entertainers. They have stayed late, gone in early, worked holidays. They have done the high-brow work and the menial work.

And for this they—we—are effectively regulated to second-class citizen? No. I don’t think so. In fact, I know otherwise. In that picture of America, however ideal it may be for John Q. Homophobe, you’re missing a key part of the entire reason this country fought that great war two hundred and twenty-nine years ago:

Freedom.

454

Well… some of us are promiscuous, flaming queens; I don’t see why we’re an argument against gay rights, and never have. That’s one of the things we should put the lie to. Even if it were possible to be “gay and that’s all they are,” I don’t see why they shouldn’t get human rights.

To me the argument is much simpler: we get human rights not for being nice, but for being human. Freedom of consensual sexual choice is a human right.

455

And thus we come to the major ideological rift within the bloc of gay men who pretty much agree we still have to fight for our rights (as opposed to the “post-gay” yuppie crowd who think we already have all of them). “We’re exactly like you except for the equipment of the people we sleep with” vs. “it doesn’t matter whether we’re exactly like you or not…we’re human”. The former think the latter are trying to undermine all of their efforts toward equality, and the latter think the former would gladly feed them to the wolves if it would make it easier to get said equality.

My opinion on it is that if the only people whose rights we’re fighting for are the ones who fit most comfortably into Middle America’s mold, why are we even bothering to fight?

456

Nitpicky clarification: It was struck down in 1967 in the ironically named [Richard Perry] Loving [et ux.] v. Virginia (388 US 1) by a unanimous SCOTUS decision. The last full paragraph of the quite short decision, just before the order to reverse the lower court decision, is worth reading:

Ah, but what if they were intelligent giant squid? :smiley:
Matt, I want to go on record as being the last one who would want to argue against what you said, but I think you need to take into account the number of people (many on this board) who believe that “if you do something I wouldn’t do, you need to be stopped, because it’s ‘wrong’ to do that.” That’s why every single time this issue comes up, it devolves into a fight about somebody’s reading of the Bible, or the rights of parents to tell their children of their religious beliefs that “homosexuality is sinful” and all the related phenomena. In particular, marriage is something vitally important to this mindset – that their love for their spouse is something sacred and blessed by God, who clearly (in their minds) doesn’t accept one man masturbating while his partner sodomizes him as being anything similar to their penis-in-vagina sex – and that this carries to the entire relationship, because you don’t want to marry Potter because you love him and want to spend the rest of your life together with him, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, so long as you both shall live, as their God-given love led them to do, but rather it’s just a way to desecrate their holy marriages by extending it to somehow legitimize your sex life. And the idea that someone might consider promiscuous sex to be amoral, not a matter for moral judgment at all, rather than immoral – or maybe even the quite moral thing to do in a given situation – is scandalous to them.

I’m not talking about what’s your human right here; I’m talking about people’s conceptions, and the need to rally a majority to your POV. It’s coming; make no mistake about that – but you don’t need to wait until you’re my age in order to be free to marry the person you love. And the college-age kid at Duke who feels as you do is facing a prison term every time he makes love to another man.

I personally support the freedom of people to make their own decisions in these matters based on their own moral values, with no laws constraining them save the obvious stuff (if two people marry, their property is or is not conmingled; if a spouse is incapable of giving consent for medical treatment, his/her spouse may/may not give that consent; etc.). Same for transgender problems, which are an additional question in the mix: Eve is one of the most interesting and feminine women I know, and I would have liked to have met her when she was a boy. :slight_smile:

But for folks like Crafter Man, it comes down to a question of what morality he personally holds, and whether the public is free to teach something different to his children. Personally I would be ashamed to say that I held, and wanted to pass on to my children, a religious belief that was used to justify beating and killing other people, and locking them up for years for what they do in private that harms no one – but I’m not the keeper of his conscience.

And it is people like him that you need to get the message across to. The “Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Pun” speech above probably went right past him; he probably has not thought once of Matthew Shepard since 1998; and Daryl is in his mind a case of a whiny teenager who couldn’t handle his parents trying to teach him the right way to behave, and so killed himself in spite. The pain and agony that many gay people go through, and the sheer day-to-day frustration of living with a set of rules that are heterocentric and make no provision for you, flies right past him and his with a whoosh.

Remember that I got there by a series of “God knocking me over the head with a sledgehammer” events – “falling in love” with my foster son, ending up sitting in the chair Matthew Shepard had sat in two weeks after his death and then reading in a memoir of his days in Raleigh by a friend that that was his favorite seat at that nightspot, reading that website by the 13-year-old where I first saw Dr. King’s speech modified to gay rights terms. And that I was willing to listen to what God was saying to me in those events.

Not everybody is. Not everybody can feel your pain. For many people if not most, it’s a case of “what are my rights? and if they’re not being tampered with, who cares about what somebody else claims.”

But the one thing that every gay and bisexual man and woman has in common besides sexual orientation is the ability to “think outside the box” – you had to develop it to survive. Use it. Go inside the minds of your opponents, and see what matters to them. Then address those issues on their terms, and prove your point to them that way. Don’t demand they see your POV; they’re often incapable of it, because they haven’t had to develop that skill. See theirs, and then change it.

457

Yes, many people believe that there is a gay agenda to convert people (and FWIW there was a lesbian group which claimed it was doing it - seemingly jokingly, but it didn’t help public opinion). However, plenty of people also recognise that you can’t convert people to an inborn orientation. These people continue to oppose the homosexual message not because it puts their sons or daughters at risk of “turning gay”, but because it puts society at risk by making an abominable behavior something to be accepted.

I would compare it to a campaign to make shoplifting acceptable. It may not make your children go down to the local 7-Eleven and stuff their pockets, but it wears away the moral fabric of society. Pretty bad comparison, I know, but I’m trying to say that some people oppose making homosexual behaviour acceptable because they honestly believe it is damaging to society.

Not all people who oppose your message are ignorant in the way you cite above.

UnuMondo

458

Unu Mondo, that is a truly bizarre analogy. Are you personally advocating that POV, or attempting to interpret your understanding of how others’ POVs conceive of it?

But, considering you have decided to post to this thread, how about answering my questions a page or two back? It’s not IMHO here, it’s Great Debates – we engage each other in discussion, not merely wander in and throw off a one-liner or two and leave.

459

There were many, many people who thought allowing women to vote would be damaging to society.

There were many, many people who thought allowing people of different skin colors to marry would be damaging to society.

There were many, many people who thought allowing a Catholic to be president would be damaging to society.

They were wrong. As are those who think allowing homosexual marriage will be damaging to society.

460

No, they may have been right, if their particular moral worldview turns out to be the correct one. People who oppose acceptance of homosexual behaviour believe that it will indeed damage society, and thus we have the moral obligation to do what we can to impede acceptance of homosexual behaviour. And all the gays and gay allies on the board who pull out the red herring* “Don’t you care about teens???” need to realise that some people consider it important to protect society as a whole.

UnuMondo

  • Red herring because if a person commits suicide they and they alone are responsible. Blaming suicide on some aspect of society is a slippery slope.