They agree that it’s okay to lie in order to advance your goals? They agree that it’s proper behavior for a preacher to lie in order to advance his goals? Okay.
The failure rate actually IS 100%, and the reason to care is the same as the reason to care if someone who has no medical training at all advertises himself as a surgeon and starts trying to cut out appendices. Whining that the victims “volunteered” is just fucking retarded. It isn’t about what people “want to piut themselves through,” moron, it’s about WARNING those people so that they don’t become victims. The reason it matters is because it’s fucking quackery and the practitiooners are butchers.
And no, you DON’T know anyone who has ever stopped being gay. At absolute best, you know somebody self-loathing enough not to be active in their orientation, but the attraction still exists. Even those people are probably still cruising the rest stops, though.
It doesn’t do Obama any good politically with evangelicals to pick an Episcopalian or UCC minister. By picking Warren, who’s really popular and a best selling author and speaker in the evangelical community, he’s telling them that he’s sympathetic to their concerns, that he’s willing to find common cause with them on issues like global poverty and environmentalism, and that they don’t neccesarily have to support Republicans or be hard right conservatives.
If the tradeoff he has to make for that is pissing off some gay activists, it’s not really a hard choice for him to make.
I’ve stated many times in this thread that I’m dubious that there is any political benefit to be gained from this, but if Obama can pull it off, go for it.
What my objection here was to buttonjockey’s simplistic statement that Christianity is the majority in this country. It’s a meaningless statement, given the wide range of Christian beliefs.
Unless people in this thread are claiming that most Christians approve of Warren’s sleazy and unethical behavior and lying (not just his viewpoints, but his behavior). If that’s the case, then my estimation of Christians has taken a hit. I know many fine Christians who think sleazy and unethical behavior and lying is wrong and try to avoid it (but are human like the rest of us). I don’t know any Christians personally who go around defending sleazy and unethical behavior and lying. But it seems posters in this thread are claiming that it’s a standard part of Christian philosophy which the majority of Christians adhere to, which is unfortunate, but so be it.
You’re misunderstanding. People in this thead are saying that a lot of people agree with Rick Warren that gays shouldn’t be allowed to get married. They’re not saying that they support unethical behavior or lying. I think you’re taking this way more personally than you should.
No, I’m just tired of people characterizing Warren as someone who simply has an opposing viewpoint to gay marriage, and those mean ol’ liberals can’t stand it when anyone simply disagrees with them. And that’s what this whole “Christians are a majority” thing is trying to do. It’s trying to gloss over his behavior and keep reducing it to a simple viewpoint opposition.
I dunno. Maybe because I care about other people, and don’t like seeing them suffer? Is this a trick question?
Well, no, it’s not 100%. More like 97% or so, last time I checked. Which, I think raises some genuine questions about that last 3%, but since you have to rely on self-reporting for this sort of thing, I guess we have to take those 3% at their word. Still, a program that makes 3% of it’s participants “better,” and 97% of them more unhappy - well, I think that it’s fair to put out warnings about these sorts of programs, and about the people who run them.
And I think you’re wrong about wether these people are asking my advice. A whole hell of a lot of them, after they go through these programs, and don’t find any change in themselves, really do need to hear that it’s not their fault they couldn’t be “cured,” and that there’s nothing wrong with them being who they are. This applies in particular to the large number of teenagers who are forcibly enrolled in these programs by their parents.
Well, best of luck to your friends, but I won’t be surprised if a year from now, they’re gay “again.” Particularly the one who needed outside help to stop being gay.
You’ll have to help me out with that one. How are they similar?
So shut up and get off this message board, then. You have no explicit freedom to post here. You do have guaranteed freedom of speech and of the press, but this is an Internet message board, you know, streams of electrons organized into bits and bytes that convey messages – you’re not speaking, and there’s no printing press involved whatsoever. Assuming your First Amendment rights extend here is one of those emanations and penumbras legislated in by extremist activist judges.
Just like believing that the Equal Protection Clause guarantees equality before the law unless there’s a reason tied to a vital governmental purpose for denying equality. (Bricker can explain this better.) In other words, you don’t get to call living with the woman you’re shacked with and banging “marriage” if you’re denying it to someone else without excellent reason to do so.
So shut your piehole about judges doing their job, making sure laws that overturn human rights get declared null and void, get off this message board, and go thank the Lord that you’re righteous and not like those other evil people.
Any response you post, other than acknowledging the truth of this post, will prove you a hypocrite.
Warren does appear to be directly connected to the dumbass Celebrate Recovery. This is worse than I first thought but I still think the comparisons to Klan leaders was silly.
I wonder if Obama could have found a less controversial member of the evangelicals that was still prominent.
My thanks to **Captain Amazing **for a clear and clarified link.
Jim
If only your first sentence were true! There’s another group severely threatened by them, whom the gay organizations largely marginalize for self-defense reasons: gay teens (under 18), who can be committed to them against their wills by their parents – especially if the parents are misled by Religious Right preachers pandering to homophobia.
Such as Rick Warren.
Well, “tricked or forced.” The point is, it’s the people who are in the programs who are threatened by them, not the people in this thread talking about how bad they are.
See link; posts from this thread. I named one but the article, coming from a different perspective than this thread of course, names several other conservative evangelicals I was actually impressed with.
Agreed.
I just don’t think it follows that therefore, nobody can ever change or want to.
Agreed that that’s a different issue than adults.
It’s been over ten years. He’s married with kids.
FWIW, the other was a runaway looking for love of any kind, anywhere, and got caught up in the bathhouse scene. IMO, he was never really gay to begin with; but for a couple years, he self-identified as gay, and then said he was “going straight.” Who am I to argue with his narrative?
Because they are both insisting what someone else’s internal life must be like, based on what the speaker “knows” to be true.
One guy says that homosexuality has to be a choice, because he can’t imagine someone who innately thinks and feels differently.
Another guy says that it’s impossible for someone’s sexual orientation to change, because he can’t imagine someone who innately thinks and feels differently.
Different sides of the issue, same mentality: your personal experience is not allowed to contradict my assumptions.
What’s “funny” (as in, fucking sick) is that apparently a homosexual has to go through one of these programs before they can even join the Saddleback church.
No gays allowed. Boy, that’s some inclusiveness for you. But at least, there are no blatant signs on the water fountains or pews that say “Straights Only.”
Sure, lots of people want to change. At best, very, very few people actually can change, and telling people that you can help them change something that they almost certainly will not be able to change is dishonest and cruel, particularly if you’re going to turn around and demonize them when they almost inevitably fail.
Well, then, I really, really hope he’s right about himself. One of the big problems with these programs is that they hurry “cured” people into creating families as quickly as possible, only to have those families torn apart when the “patient” can’t keep up the facade any longer and reverts to their true self. Ten years either means that he’s one of the extraordinarily rare people for whom the therapy worked, or that when he finally breaks down, it’s going to be epically ugly. For the sake of the wife and kids, I really hope it’s the former.
In cases like this, I wonder if his sexuality has really changed, or if he’s simply explored different parts of it at different times in his life, and settled on one part later on. In other words, does he not feel any attraction at all to guys any more, or does he feel the same attraction, but decided that the attraction that he’s also always felt for women is preferable, and decided to focus exclusively on that part of his sexuality?
Fair enough, but it is important to point out that the difference between the two viewpoints is that one has actual statistical evidence to back it up: for most people, sexual orientation is a constant, or at the very least, not something that can be changed at will. That’s why most ex-gay ministries are such utter failures - I think that most people who are capable of choosing their sexuality, don’t need therapy to do it. Someone who is attracted to men, but has powerful moral beliefs against same-sex relationships is never going to act on that attraction unless they literally have no other emotional recourse.
A couple of comments on the “Can gay people change?” sidebar topic:
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There is no doubt in my mind that a bisexual can condition him/herself to focus exclusively on one aspect of his/her orientation. This covers two things: The people who say “I used to be gay and now I’m not” and the women who claim they chose to be Lesbians. In both cases, it’s a person with bisexual attractions focusing on one aspect of his/her attraction. “Successful ex-gays” who are now exclusively and happily heterosexual – are IMO actually bisexuals who considered themselves “gay” because of having same-sex attraction (drawing a dichotomy that is actually a spectrum) and who now have conditioned themselves to act and feel on their heterosexual attraction. Women coming out of abusive or otherwise disastrous heterosexual relationships and finding themselves attracted to other women (which they may hae been slightly before) and choosing to focus on this safer, more loving relationship.
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The “placebo effect” easily accounts for the roughly 1.5% success rate (averaging out the figures from the unbiased studies of ex-gays. In a large enough statistical universe, if you give someone a placebo and tell them they will be cured after taking it – a few of them will be. Mind over matter? Spontaneous remission? Who knows? By the same token, if you tell 200 guilt-ridden gay people that this program will cure them, about three of them will report it as having worked.
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Statistics on the effectiveness of ex-gay programs are all over the map, depending on who did the study and what their criteria are. The highest statistic I’ve seen is a 66% success rate, from a study conducted by one of the ministries of people who successfully completed the program, based on whether they “suffered a relapse” within six months. Got that? Only “successful graduates” – six months – study conducted by the ministry itself. And only a 66% success rate. Some studies claim NO successful conversions. The unbiased ones seem to be in a 0.5%-3.0% range.
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Based on my experiences arguing this on a large Christian message board, I’ve come to believe that there are some radical transformations, from Kinsey 5-6 to Kinsey 0-1. But (1) they’re VERY few in number and (2) the common characteristics are divine intervention – not a ‘reparative therapy’ program but effectively a conversion experience, coupled with substantial struggles after the divine intervention. You need not credit this; I do. But I see it as more akin to God calling Joan of Arc or Therse of Liseaux than a wholesale “you can quit being gay” thing – those He wants to have change, He calls; others are what they are, unchangeable by human (ncluding ex-gay ministry) effort alone.
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For others, if you want to believe something bad enough, you’ll convince yourself it’s true. That applies to orientation change as much as anything else. IMO, the question is whether someone’s happy being who they are.
Is your mind-reading/sexual-orientation-meter Vista compliant?
Does it take AA or AAA batteries?
What’s the range (in kilometers)?
It’s self consistent. They think people shouldn’t have homosexual sex…do you want them to admit members who reject that? A celibate gay person would probably be admitted as a member.
Anecdotal evidence of one:
Haggard exits restoration process early
Captain Amazing, sure it’s self-consistent. God forbid bigoted churches be hypocritical regarding His love and that crap.
I’ve been trying to ruminate on why this doesn’t bother me. The “Believers” (of any religion) who oppress the LGBT community and exercise control of that oppression within their church) already have their theological tentacles busily raping democracy in all sorts of other orifices such that myself and many people that I know (outside of the LGBT community and movement) are also oppressed.
I very much dislike that our democracy incorporates any religiosity-for-the-sake-of-pandering-to-the-religious-majority. When it comes to the religious arguments, I cannot fight that fight without being compelled to attack the entire Theological Industrial Complex.
On the other hand, my partner and I have succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of my partner’s large, conservative, German Catholic family in North Dakota. My mother-in-unlawful-sin lives a few blocks from the office of the woman who was the subject of the documentary Jesus Camp in Mandan, ND.
A connection like that of family is sometimes all that is needed to move mountains. Both for my partner’s family and for myself. I would normally not engage with devout Catholics in discussion of tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality. They would normally not knowingly hug and kiss and cry with homosexuals in times of grief, but we were brought together at the bedside of my partner’s dying father, and the rest just happened.
I am choosing to shrug this off so that I can concentrate on building more of those grass-roots connections with the people in my life.