Gay Rights vs Religious Freedom
Posted on Saturday, April 12, 2008 at 9:27 AM by Duncan Bouwer
Listen to this as a Podcast
It seems to have been commonly accepted now (due to the highly orchestrated and extremely successful efforts of the Gay Left) that reparative therapy for people with unwanted same-sex feelings is harmful. (click here for a search I did on Google. The results are mixed) I am not sure about that. There is anecdotal evidence both ways and much has been done to unearth any individuals who have undergone said therapy to prove that is not only doesn't work but also that it is harmful. I have personally been through the Living Waters course and since it is more of a discipleship course than anything else the only basis for it being potentially "harmful" in my view, is that the participant in question has come to question the Biblical basis for wanting to change and that is another question altogether.
I believe that the cognitive dissonance that is produced when people with unwanted same-sex attractions who are persuaded by (possibly well-meaning pro-gays) to feel that they are somehow being untrue to themselves when they act on their conviction that they need to change because they don't buy (for whatever reason) the pro-gay interpretation of the Bible, is in itself harmful. Religious freedom is a right and the right to pursue any course of action in order to be true to what one believes (as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else) is legitimate and shouldn't be frowned upon by anybody else. Any effort by anybody who is acting on whatever impulse, to dissuade them beyond making them aware of the alternatives, is repressive and needs to be recognised as such. Not everybody who has been through some form of reparative therapy has come out of it harmed and "secretly wanting to be gay but living a lie".
I am going to ignore the "research" and statistics and am going to focus on my own experience. Not only have I been through a Living Waters Course, but in the last two years have had in-depth councelling which was not aimed primarily at making me less gay. The councelling was as a result of a very destructive church experience that I had (churches are dangerous places as are gay political groups-- I have firsthand experience. Any groups is potentially a dangerous place and one needs to have eyes open since people are damaged and act that way) which needed in the first instance to be processed. As a result I got into some historical deep stuff that damaged me in ways that impacted my life profoundly. The upshot of it was that, because I have had unwanted same-sex attractions (and some had persisted into the recent past -- this is no secret. You can go to my Podcast and listen to me talk about why I still choose to live a straight and married lifestyle, while I occasionally experience gay unwanted same-sex attractions) we dealt with some of the roots of those (I know that in the minds of the pro-gay movement there is no nature-nurture debate but some of us have a contrary experience) and the result is that while I am far more at ease with myself I also have fewer and fewer attractions.
I have said in the very recent past in some posts that I don't believe that we should be trying to convince homosexuals they need to change because they will go to hell. I don't believe in eternal hell anymore and I don't believe that everybody should choose for anybody else FROM EITHER SIDE. I believe that it is fair that both sides should have the opportunity to state their case and the religious right have lost the right to assume they have a corner on the truth. The assumption of the moral high ground has now been take over by the pro-gay movement. They feel that they have some sort of obligation to inform which verges on the the religious fervour which they have sought to combat in ant-gay Christians. Well they don't. There is an obligation to INFORM but when it crosses a line and becomes coercion it enters the domain of repression. I have the right to want to change even if it were bad for me (which it has turned out not to be) and so does anybody else, no matter how misguided they might/might not be. I don't need the pro-gay movement to nanny me. The information out there has now gained a critical weight which obviates the need for pro-gays to decide for anybody what is good for them. Anything more than informing is self-righteous and offensive.
I detect an alarming trend: In the same way that religious anti-gay fundamentalists have traditionally thought that anybody who is opposed to them is somehow a threat, pro-gays seem to have adopted a similar stance and appear to believe that anybody who embodies an ExGay lifetyle constitutes a challenge that must be met or they will lose ground. This is a myth and any thinking person needs to nip this in the bud as it endangers all freedom of thought or speech and makes a mockery of any efforts to inform.
Edited on: Saturday, April 12, 2008 1:21 PM