I am not offended without reason, and I stated my reason in my first post on this issue.
And NO… gays on this board generally do not refer to their lives as a lifestyle. I challenge you to provide cites that you are correct nd that I am not.
It is not just MY problem but one endemic to the inherent perception that people like you have of gay people.
A quick quiz for ThatGuyWithPants:
Prohibition was ended because it was causing more harm than good.
Was that a good thing, or a bad thing?
You said yourself it nearly drove yourself to suicide. You answered your own question. Do all gays have that responce? no. I answered what you wanted to hear: a physical reaction to a sin. There doesnt always have to be one. Its the spiritual damage that is important, not the physical.
Prohibition is to complex of a subject to just flippantly throw out answers. in an ideal world, it was great. Right now, anything legal that goes on that is a sin is directly responcible on the people who allow it to happen. You cant always stop something, but if you dont even try, you are just as bad as the people doing wrong. The effort made to stop drinking was an excelent decision. The lack of easing the society into prohibition and not maintaining it wassnt the smartest thing the government could have done. I say its a bad thing because our government is doing absolututely nothing to regulate it. Its a good thing because other people were being harmed in the process, and the end of it stopped it. but alteast when prohibition was going on, the blood wassnt on the governments hands. People who chose/choose to do evil do it on their own.
While all gay men and lesbians do not feel suicidal during and after the coming out period, many do, and suicide is the leading cause of death for young gays and lesbians.
With all the societal pressure to be straight, not to mention, all the judgement and criticism that comes from those who feel they have all the answers, suicide is prevalent.
It is not a physical reaction to a sin. It is a response to pressure, fear, and hopelessness.
and?
And?
Your response is AND?
I see a pitting in your near future.
And the attitude of churches which persist in persecuting us.
What nearly drove me to suicide wasn’t being gay; it was the way gays are treated in this society. So, to make sure that nobody else has to go through that, I’m working to change the way society treats gays. It’s a compassion thing.
I wouldn’t expect you to understand.
Can you explain what “gay in the boblical sense” is?
Don’t let him get you pissed off, Mockingbird. It’s a common practice for this kind of argument; the fundies keep poking you until you hit back, and then claim martyrdom status. It’s a tactic which is also in favor among kindegarteners; keep picking on someone until they smack you, and then go yelling for Mommy.
Meanwhile, my tactic is usually to just keep asking reasonable questions, and watch the answers get more abstruse and bizarre and evasive and morally questionable. It’s fun to watch them try and argue rationally for something that’s so morally repugnant.
MrVisible I can offically say you are the most hypocritical person I have ever met after that last post. If someone wants to pit me, then fine. All it is going to do is prove my point that you arent off nearly as bad as you claim to be. Say whatever you want, I refuse to even open this thread up anymore. Somebody has to be the bigger man in this situation, and it obviously isnt going to be you.
guess you’ll have to ask “Bob” 
Now that’s funny.
ThatGuyWithPants is pissed off because I advised someone not to pit him.
I sure am glad he’s not fighting on our side.
Moving this religious debate to Great Debates.
Mr Visible, may I commend you for the way you have conducted yourself in this thread? You knew it was a hot-button question, I’m sure, and you have dealt with it in a way that I think is admirably restrained and courteous.
That said, I want to go on record – once again – as stating that not every Christian denomination takes the anti-gay stance that some (at present, I’d venture to guess unfortunately a majority) do. Many of us listen, and attempt to show our caring in real, practical ways, and not in the “love the sinner/hate the sin” metaphor that has been so abused.
One quick response to the question of the OP is that IMHO it is possible but very, very difficult to accomplish. I’ve known a few people who in my opinion take the so-called “Biblical stance against homosexuality” and couple it with true brotherly treatment of individual gay people. Unfortunately, the most obvious example that I could cite with references, I’m told by Homebrew that he did not perceive the man’s attitude as at all loving – and I must give deference to him as a gay man in how he perceives the man’s treatment of gay people. But I think that even he would concede that the man is giving living out that policy his best shot, in good faith.
However, I want to address the entire issue of “homosexuality=sin” on which the debate that has broken out has been founded.
First, the straight Christians taking one side in it need to realize that “being gay” is for gay people first and foremost a definition of their sexual orientation. Just as I did not choose to find girls attractive when I was 10 or 11, but discovered that I did, it’s my distinct impression that gay men/women do not choose to find other men/women attractive, but discover it about themselves. And the best evidence to date indicates that it is impossible for one to change one’s sexual orientation in one fell swoop. (I’m going to ask that we accept that as a given – ignoring the idea that God can work miracles, that a few bisexual people have “turned themselves straight,” and that it is possible to condition oneself over a long period of time to change one’s taste in many things, and sexuality may indeed be one of them – but the bottom line is that it is not possible to “repent of being gay” in any practical sense.)
Granted that engaging in any sex act, for any of us, is indeed a choice, it is the fulfillment of a bodily need. And human beings are so constructed as to fall in love and desire to spend the rest of their lives with people to whom they feel sexual attraction. I could type a URL more or less at random and stand a fairly good chance of producing a valid cite for that last statement.
Now, we’re told by conservative Christians that God in Scripture calls committing acts of gay sex sinful. And they found this on a couple of passages in Leviticus and Paul’s letters, along with a passing allusion to it as sinful in the very brief book of Jude.
But I want to conduct a thought experiment with everybody reading this thread, and I beg your indulgence in working through it with me.
Okay, conceive of a group of people convinced of the total reality of God and of the truth of the Bible. Therefore, they diligently study the Bible to find out His will. In it, human writers inspired by Him list a variety of actions which He has forgiven, and His demands that people forsake these actions, which are termed sins, repent of them, and turn to Him instead. And that He has graciously provided a way to be forgiven of those sins, which they gladly undertake in true repentance.
Accordingly, they decide to do so. They study diligently what He has said is sinful, identify what are temptations to commit those sins and consider them forbidden too as inducements to sin, and eschew all such behavior. They set up teachers from among them to help make it clear that these things are sinful, and try to withdraw from the mass of society that is not so moved as to turn to God and repent of their sins, since too much exposure to the rest of society constitutes temptation. But they continue to try to reach the rest of society and lead them to repentance and the eschewing of sinful activities.
Although the government is not terribly prone to listening to them, to the extent possible they attempt to make it illegal to commit the actions they consider sinful. In this they are only partially successful.
Okay, this sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? But I was describing First Century Judea and Galilee, and the people who loved God that much were the Pharisees.
Much of the Gospels show Jesus coming down on the Pharisees like a duck on a junebug. Rather than acknowledging the utter impossibility of living perfectly and their consequent sin, they’re trying to codify a set of rules which define what actions are “sins” and seeing themselves as righteous when they avoid those particular actions. And He says that the only way to live is to humbly admit your own sinfulness and to accept God’s unconditional forgiveness, because He is a God of love.
And to give a guideline of how one must live, he gives the two Old Testament commandments that He says summarize all the others, and give a guideline to how to live: “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.”
That means, don’t judge. Don’t try to identify other people’s sins. The Holy Spirit convicts a person of sin; we cannot and should not try to.
Loving another as oneself means treating them with dignity and respect, trying to make their road through life easier, not harder. It means showing compassion and understanding. It means using as much empathy as one has to grasp how another person feels. And it means listening to what another person tells you.
If when I reached puberty, I’d been told that it was evil and hateful to have any interest in girls, that I was loathsome for doing so, that I could stop it if I tried hard enough, that it was a sin against something holy to actually want to marry one and have sex with her, well, then, I’d have been as depressed, self-hating, and suicidal as a gay teen is. Owing to truly lousy parenting in this regard, something very close to this was what I was taught, and I survived by locking all my feelings tightly inside me – something I was healed of by the grace of God, the love of my wife, and the merciful intervention of God in bringing my foster son into my life, and the wisdom He endowed him with. So I’m speaking from flat out experience on that one. I’ve been there; I know how it feels. And I will not tolerate another human being having to go through that through any self-righteous prattle from anybody.
Now, what God seems to have a grudge against as regards human sexuality is the gratification of lust – and let me point out that this is a specialized, theological use of the term. It’s not equivalent to “sexual desire” – it means the perversion of sexual desire to self-gratification through the objectification of another as a sex object, not a person with whom to share one’s life together, including a healthy sex life. I base this on reading carefully what his commandments on sex do and do not say – and they don’t prohibit desire; in fact, he called it “good” at the end of Genesis 1, and inspired the Song of Songs in celebration of it. He has a problem with us using other people as objects rather than people as much as ourselves – “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Which has led me to the conclusion that two gay people committing to each other in a loving covenanted relationship intended to be lifelong is no more sinful than a man and a woman marrying. Gobear and his partner, Mr Visible and his, a very sweet Lesbian lady I know in real life and her partner, and another one I know from these boards (and who is probably reading this) and her partner – they’re no more sinners than I am. (No less, either – none of us perfectly love as we’re commanded to! But God understands that and forgives it. We’re doing our best.)
Let me note that “the homosexual lifestyle” is a traditional catchphrase to class all gay people into one group. It has no more meaning than “the Christian lifestyle” or “the Republican lifestyle” or “the atheist lifestyle,” as if Sister Mary Elizabeth of the Community of Perpetual Adoration and Deacon Jones of the Foursquare Baptist church live the same sort of lives, or John Corrado or Scylla live the same lives as Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft, or Gaudere and David B have identical lives. With the definite article, it’s a prejudicial term. “Gay lifestyles” could mean a variety of things, but “the gay lifestyle” is an attempt to dump all gay people into the promiscuous, clubgoing, camp category – and it’s as insulting as calling every Christian a hate-filled Fundamentalist, just because some of them are, in each case.
MrVisible
Kalhoun
I think that your statements that you are prohibited from expressing your love are not completely accurate. When you “care about him, listen to him, play with him, commisserate and share and goof around with him, when we share our lives and our feelings and our happiness,” I think that everyone in this thread would agree that that is not a sin. It’s odd how much love and sex are treated as synonymous, when they are quite different. If you think that having sex with whomever you want is a basic right that can’t possibly be sinful, then go ahead and make that argument. But the idea you can’t express love for someone without having sex with them is silly, and may very well be part of the reason people oppose homosexuality.
Polycarp
While I agree that the term has acquired pejorative connotations, I don’t think that it is accurate to say that it is nothing more than a vehicle for bigotry. It is quite common someone to say that homosexuality is sinful, and for someone else to reply that it is not a choice, so therefore it can not be sinful. In this, the latter person shows themselves to be discussing the homosexual orientation, rather than homosexual activities. In using the term “homosexual lifestyle”, a person is attempting to make it clear that they are not simply referring to the orientation, but to behavior and choices that result from it. Unfortunately, people also use the term “homosexual lifestyle” to refer to anything from anonymous hook-ups in sex clubs to same-sex child molestation. Homosexuals, and people sympathetic to their cause, have therefore come to see the term as an effort to attribute every act by any homosexual to every homosexual. While it is indeed used that way by some people, blaming one person who uses the terms for how someone else uses the term seems a bit reminiscent of the very thing that you are condemning. If you have a better term to make it clear that one is not simply discussing orientation, I suggest that you present it and try to convince others to use it.
When is it every necessary or relevant for anyone to refer to a “homosexual lifestyle”?
In debates such as this one, I would imagine.
And why’s that?
Why doesn’t “lifestyle” ever come up in any other debate with a qualifier like “homosexual”?
“Lifestyle” comes up in monogamy/polyamory debates too, with a qualifier. And I’ve seen it occasionally in religious ones, though not as often.
Me, I live with a man to whom I am life-committed, with whom I share resources and a certain amount of socialisation time. My lifestyle looks a lot like the lifestyle of a culture that could be called “cohabiting twentysomethings”, I suspect. So I have a cohabiting twentysomethings lifestyle. And I have it if I’m a woman, and I have the same lifestyle if I’m a man.
The problem with the usage of the word “lifestyle” is that it’s frequently not referring to the actual manner of living of an individual, group, or culture; it’s most often, in my experience, used to clump together large groups of people of widely varying actual lifestyles on the basis of an adjective whose relevance and manifestation are neither uniform nor universal.