In the interests of dispelling ignorance, may I urge IzzyR to rent Trembling Before G_d? However he may feel about homosexuality, to say that there is any group that does not contain gay people is silly. I am reminded of the time the Korean Minister of Health said that AIDS could never be a problem in South Korea because there were no gay Koreans.
In any event, I am leaving the argumentation to more able folks like Lissener. Prejudice is irrational, and so rationality has no sway over it. There is no argument I can advance that would show Shodan, Svt4Him and IzzyR that I and other gay folks are as deserving of protection of the law as they.
Along the lines of the religious repercussions gays face, I don’t understand why a good Christian (or Jew or Muslim or whatever) would worship a god that is so full of hate that it would ask you to throw your own child away. Now there may be those of you who would say they don’t do that, but the fact is they don’t accept gay children as they are, and they tell you that they are sinners who will burn in hell (or in some religions, should be killed).
How could this be interpreted as a loving god? And how could you choose a vengeful god over your own kid? I’d really like to hear someone answer this one. How do you choose that god over your child? Or don’t you?
OK, lissener, I’ve started four or five times to compose a response to your OP question.
I keep finding that I need more information to answer this.
How old is “adolescent”? Is he/she 13? 15? 18? It makes a pretty big difference. An older teen is going to be given a lot more responsibility and allowed a lot more freedom than a 13 year old.
When you say that my son or daughter believes they’re gay, are you making any assumptions about what they intend to do about it? Do they accept the sexual values of their parents or reject them? I think that you mean to imply that by coming out of the closet, they are announcing that they don’t believe there is anything wrong with homosexual sex, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Can I answer with how I would respond if my son said “Dad, I think I’m gay, I want to start dating other boys, and I think it’s perfectly natural and I don’t see anything wrong with it.” That’s what I think you want a response to. I don’t think you are imagining my son saying, “Dad, I think I’m gay, so I’m going to devote myself to celibacy until when and if Christ heals me of these desires.” But, like I said, I want to answer your real question.
So, if you can narrow your scenario just a bit, I’ll try to give you an honest response.
I doubt you would be accused of hijacking this thread, but I do have to ask what law you are referring to? Law to life free of fear of being hurt? I agree. Free of being discriminated against? Again, I agree. There is no law that protects me that shouldn’t protect you, and I really don’t know where this statement comes from.
I would be interested in where you thought you got this myself.
This is what I meant by reacting to things you are yourself making up, and attributing them to your opponents. If you can come up with a post where I said I didn’t think you should be subject to the protection of the law, I would like to see it. Unless you practicing the fine old art of “making shit up” because you don’t like the real answers you are getting.
I think you need to stuff that straw man a little fuller before it will stand on its own.
lissener I need to ask if you’ve ever heard of ‘plurium interrogationum’, as your thread, as well as most I’ve seen by you, is a casebook example of it. Not only that, but how do you define ‘shifting the burden of proof’ as gobear made the statement. Or can this also be classified as the fallacy of accident, not to mention ‘red herring’. I tend to think that these posts shouldn’t be in great debate, but MPSIMS, as there is no debate here at all.
I was 11 when I came out. I deal with “youth” from 13 to 22 at Seattle’s Lambert House.
“Dad, I think I’m gay.” Assuming that you’d focus on the “I think” part, let’s FF to a couple years later and he’s now unquestionably gay; he’s all the way out to himself and maybe a couple close friends, and now he wants you to remain in his life despite this unexpected development.
Oh my god Shodan, I am shaking with rage. I have basically come to write off almost everything you say because I cannot fathom how to get through to you that you ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO ENGAGE WHAT I ACTUALLY SAY, and instead INSIST on clinging to your DISHONEST twisting of it. You are the most egregious offender of this bullshit, and here you lecture someone ELSE on it?
Unless you are willing to honestly go back over your own behavior in this regard, or withdraw this bullshit from gobear, you will be the very first doper in my nearly five years here that I will put in my ignore file.
I have never witnessed such dishonesty in this forum in my entire experience at the Dope.
I am absolutely not looking for a simple answer, Svt; I’m looking for exactly the opposite. I’m looking for an answer that indicates you have honestly examined all the implications and consequences. YOU insist on simplifying the answer; I have never asked you to do so.
Svt4Him, I acknowledged a page or so ago that you gave a weak answer, which I said I thought was incomplete and asked to you elaborate. You have, as of yet, declined to do so. Would you consider returning to the request for elaboration I posted earlier and responding to it? Or are you unable to differentiate myself from lissener (who I am not, despite our agreement on some issues)?
lissener, forgive if this qualifies as another hijack, and please feel free to simply tell me to try later. But your recent post brought up a question.
You said you “came out” at 11. But what exactly does that mean in terms of homosexuality? How, at 11, can you be sure of such a thing with out having engaged in a sex act? I’ve heard you and or KellyM I think say that homosexual orientation is not only about sex, sex, sex. But isn’t homosexual sex the defining difference between gay and not gay?
I’m struggling to understand what I would do if my child decided he was gay. I’m not a fundie, but I think I would be disapointed if he decided he was gay. I hope not from any homophobia, but simply from a change in the way I always invisioned his future. I’m not saying that such a disapointment would last very long, or that it would have any lasting repurcusions. Just that I would.
I’m struggling to understand, however, how a child under 16 could be sure about being gay.
Once, again, I don’t wish to hijack this thread (again) but I think the above questions are relevant.
pervert, I never said what you’re potentially attributing to me. However, I do think that the antihomosexual activist crowd’s preoccupation with how other people have sex is a large part of the problem.
Sex is certainly a significant part of my relationship with my girlfriend, but I’d still be a lesbian even if I had never had sex with another woman. The attraction would still be there, and the lack of attraction for men. You don’t have to have sex with someone to know you’re attracted to them. I would think that this would be bloody obvious, but apparently it is not.
I can certainly understand being unsettled, shocked, surprised, or confused by the announcement from one’s child that he or she is gay. Most people assume that their children will be straight, and this announcement upsets that assumption. I’m not going to call that assumption homophobic because it’s not: the vast majority of people are straight, after all. But disappointed? Being disappointed suggests that your child has failed to live up to your expectations, rather than met them in a different way than you expected. If this is because being gay is less favored in your eyes than being straight, then you’re homophobic.
So you want to know what I would tell my older son (let’s say 20) who know he’s gay, and has been for a while, but is just now coming out to me. And, to humor you, I’ll assume that he has rejected the values that his parents and church have taught him about sexuality.
I think this is unlikely for a couple of reasons, but possible, so I’ll compose and answer and try to post it tomorrow if my job cooperates.
Kalhoun-
You ask why religious people would worship a G-d so full of hate that they’d be asked to throw their own child away. But has anyone said that they believe that this is what is required of them? I may think my gay child should live celibate (just as I would if I had a straight child who never married), but that doesn’t mean I throw my child out on the street, disown them, or anything else implied by “throw my child away.” Hoping they live within a set of guidelines doesn’t mean I’m severing our relationship and never seeing them again; it just means that I have certain hopes as to how they will live.
Also, would everyone stop telling IzzyR to rent Trembling Before G-d? He’s already adressed it in an earlier post. He gets that there are gay people in the ultra-Orthodox community. That there are enough to make a movie doesn’t surprise him, he just doesn’t believe the percentage is that large. While I don’t agree with that particular statement, I do agree that just because enought people were sought out to be interviewed, that doesn’t make them a large part of the community automatically.
pervert, I had my first crush when I was seven. My awareness of my own heterosexuality was pretty good at that age; I don’t think that an awareness of homosexuality would be any more complicated to manage.
Of course not. Being gay isn’t tied to sex anymore than being straight is. It’s not like everyone starts out straight, and then some people have intercourse with someone of the same sex and, poof, they’re suddenly gay. People aren’t gay because they have homosexual sex; They have homosexual sex because they’re gay.
Well, when I was under 16 I knew that I was straight. It’s not that difficult, really. The fact that I consistantly had crushes on girls and not boys kind of gave it away. That, and the fact that I enjoyed sneaking a peek at Playboy with my friends, yet never once considered looking at any magazine with naked men.