Let me put it this way. I get worked up when people suggest that my country is wrong to allow people to marry who they want and to serve in whatever careers they want (including the army). I get worked up when laws are proposed to curtail the rights of same-sex couples to get married. I get worked up when people identifying as gay are barred from serving in the army, or are denied employment protection, or any other right. I get worked up when people are physically or emotionally harmed because of the gender of the people they’re attracted to. I get worked up when people spout homophobic nonsense. I get worked up when people with homophobic beliefs get appointed or elected to influential positions.
I get worked up when people who don’t know me assume nasty things about me.
I don’t get worked up when a politician I generally approve of makes a concession in order to more easily further his agenda, which I believe includes increasing gay rights.
Do you know that you are just mimicking a weak **Der Trihs **argument with this one?
Warren has never advocated for violence against gays and does not appear to be against gays outside of the marriage issue. Has he railed against gays in general? You are comparing him to the leader of a large hate group that killed and lynched and chased blacks outs of town and burnt black churches and etc.
Do you really think Warren = Dukes?
This is a silly ass little outdated religious portion of a very long event. As **buttonjockey308 **pointed out Obama is apparently appointing an openly gay Presidential Cabinet member. On a scale of things, you doth protest too much and thank you for painting everyone of us that disagree with you with that brush you just used.
Warren runs an ex-gay ministry out of Saddleback. He advocates “ex-gay” therapy. He counsels homosexuals to “simply live a heterosexual lifestyle”. There is more here than opposition to same-sex marriage.
Drop the Love Bomb on him. Get together a bunch of gay celebrities and stars - Mellissa Etheridge, Tom Cruise, so on and so forth - and hold a giant fundraiser for one of Rick Warren’s hunger projects. Send Barney Frank along to his Saddleback Church with a whopping big ass check for feeding African babies. Say “You don’t love us, we don’t love you, but Jesus loves us both, and we all love feeding hungry children. Our differences are trivial, and people of good will can find a way to work it out.”
That’s what I would do if I were Maximum Leader of the Gay Rights Movement. Couple flaws in my plan, of course, first off, when I lead, nobody follows. And there’s that other thing. Oh, well.
Since what I actually said was “the thing to do with liars and hypocrites is marginalize them,” you’d be summarizing my point accurately if it was fair to say that people who agree with Warren are liars and hypocrites.
Are you sure you want to defend that position? That’s pretty extreme.
So what. I don’t get it. If there are homosexuals who don’t like acting homosexual and need some help with it who are we to oppose it ? Couldn’t we just call it sex therapy?
There are men who don’t want to be men.
There are women who don’t want to be women.
We have no problem helping them out do we ?
I realize I’m pushing the envelope here, but if happy gays are threatened by unhappy gays, and those who try to help them out I have to ask why.
The only people who are threatened by “ex-gay” ministries are the poor souls who are tricked into joining them. The bottom line is that they simply don’t work. They have a stratospherically high failure rate, and almost everyone who went through the process and came out the other side still queer reports that the experience left them miserable, guilt-ridden, and depressed. These programs don’t help people: they actively cause harm. They’re also dishonest, in that they promise to deliver something that the people who run them know will not work.
I’ll also add that support for ex-gay ministries is distinct from support for transexuals in that supporting the right of someone to change their gender isn’t contingent on disparaging the original gender.
Yes, but please can we see a cite about this from a major News source? I don’t trust wiki but I have never heard of this connected to Warren. NPR did not mention it the other day.
How about a cite from their own literature? Celebrate Recovery is a religious version of 12-step programs that was begun at Saddleback and has spread to a LOT of other churches. The link is a PDF file of their Same-Sex Attraction group brochure.
Because it doesn’t work. It’s never worked. No professional psych association will sanction the ex-gay therapy. It does. not. work. It’s false hope that preys on the most vulnerable. And it’s disgusting.
There is a recognized psychological disorder that involves unhappiness with your sexual orientation. The sanctioned medical therapy for that disorder is counseling to help the patient achieve an outlook that accepts his/her own orientation. Because it is not changeable.
Celebrate Recovery originated and is run from Saddleback by Rick Warren and his fellow pastor. That is where all of the materials come from. It’s where the counselor training can be purchased. It’s the headquarters of the whole program.
So? What does Christians being in the majority have to do with Rick Warren?
See, there are these things called denominations. And those denominations have a wide range of beliefs. So much so, that they even call themselves by different names. For example, one of the denominations calls itself Episcopalian. And another calls itself the UCC. Crazy, right? And get this, you can actually find other Christians in the United States who aren’t Rick Warren! You might want to take a comparative religion class, because it’s chock full of wacky facts like this.
Well, here’s one of the churches that has an ex-gay “Celebrate Recovery” program (it’s the bottom one, the “Men’s Sexual Integrity” one):
Maybe some clarification is in order. Saddleback Church, the church of which Rick Warren is senior pastor, has developed a Christian twelve-step program (technically, an 8 step program) called “Celebrate Recovery”. It’s trademarked the name, and it markets the program to other churches. A church can buy the training material (the guides, the special bible, the journals, etc) from Saddleback Church and set up Celebrate Recovery groups of their own, and so long as they follow the guidelines, can call itself an official “Celebrate Recovery” group, get itself entered into the database, and so on. So, there are hundreds of these Celebrate Recovery groups across the country, most dealing with drug and alcohol addiction, but there are some that deal with codependency and relationship issues, and some that deal with sexual identity issues like sexual orientation.
Yeah, well, this pretty much describes a large chunk of the self-help section in the library, too. The question still remains: if some people want to put themselves through it, who is anyone the hell business is it of anyone else’s?
Even you don’t claim that the failure rate is 100%, so obviously some people do find what they are looking for at these places. It’s not neccesarily what I’d recommend to someone who asked my advice … but that’s kind of the point; they aren’t asking me. Or you.
I personally know two people who have “stopped being gay” or “left the lifestyle” or whatever you wanna say; one of them was “healed” by a Christian program. So far as I know, they are happier now than they were before.
I’m always struck by how “nobody ever stops being gay” sounds so similar to “nobody is born that way.”
“Acting homosexual?” What does that mean. Homosexuality is not an “act.” Sexual orientation is defined by attraction, not behavior. The notion that the orientation itself can be changed runs contrary to all scientific evidence and attempts to “cure” homosexuality are not only futile, but are actually contradicted as dangerous and emotionally damaging by psychiatric professionals.
Because it’s physically possible. Altering sexual orientation is not (and neither is altering gender identity, for that matter).
Nobody is threatened by “unhappy gays.” ALL gays are threatened by the ignorant belief that sexual orientation can be changed, and anyone who undergoes this kind of pseudo “treatment” is at risk of severe emotional damage (especially if they’re teenagers).
Bottom line, dawg. It isn’t science, it isn’t medicine. It isn’t therapy. It doesn’t work, and it isn’t harmless.
You might want to take a look at newspapers, which are chock full of wacky facts such as numerous election results indicating that most Christians, and most Americans, agree with Rick Warren on gay marriage.