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Originally Posted by DRob4JC
Are you really still trying to equate homosexual behavior with being black?
Is homosexuality even sin to you?
I never disputed people born with a predisposition to homosexuality - all people have a predisposition to all types of sin at birth. You need to read my posts properly instead of having your own agenda.
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When did you CHOOSE to be heterosexual? I mean, like was there a time in your life when you said, "Ya know, I don't want all the grief and heartache and verbal abuse, the sometimes being the victim of beatings or murder that comes with being a homosexual, so I'm going to be a heterosexual!???"
No gay person CHOSE to be gay. In fact quite a few have tried to "ungay" themselves through all the false 'reparative' therapy fundamentalists say will work. Except it hasn't. The guy who INVENTED the whole reparative therapy concept has apologized to homosexuals for trying to "convert" them.
Quote:
I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.
Robert Spitzer. M.D.
Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry,
Columbia University
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EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Robert Spitzer Apologizes to Gay Community for Infamous ‘Ex-Gay’ Study | Truth Wins Out
Gay people are gay BECAUSE GOD MADE THEM THAT WAY. It's only fundamentalists who are the way they are because THEY have chosen a lesser path. At the very best a fundamentalist is the most immature kind of Christian, because almost without exception they concentrate on the "big three" of fundamentalism:
1. The bible is inerrant and infallible about everything. (Jesus Himself whispered the words in the authors' ears).
2. Abortion is evil in every sense (but only doctors, not the mothers taking their unborn children to a clinic, should go to jail).
3. Homosexuals are all hateful, want "special" privileges (like getting served in a bakery or even a restaurant [kinda like black people wanted in the fifties and sixties], and not getting fired simply because God made them with a different sexual orientation.
What fundamentalists who have CHOSEN to make themselves superior to others rarely do with the Bible is read the heart of the law. They understand the "letter" of the law.
The activist Jesus is largely ignored by fundamentalist Christianity. Mel Gibson's movie
Passion of the Christ features his bloody death while his fiery speeches about justice and mercy ended up on the cutting room floor. Not one scene was left to explain why the religious and political leaders conspired to silence Him. Jesus was sentenced to death because He condemned their misuse of wealth, confronted their abuse of power, and called them to do justice, love mercy, and seek truth. His values conflicted with their values and it cost Him his life.
Today fundamentalist Christians have turned His death into a simple formula for "getting saved." And doing justice and loving mercy have been boiled down to leading a neighbor in "the sinner's prayer" or distributing pamphlets (tracts) with pictures illustrating hellfires and escape routes. Fundamentalists have left the Good News and have set our nation awash with what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German preacher and theologian who stood against Hitler in Germany, called "cheap grace." Cheap grace is self-congratulatory. Cheap grace looks for those "worthy" of being saved. Cheap grace turns its back on the very people Jesus rubbed shoulders with every single day.
The "Christian" leaders of the fundamentalist U.S. are drowning in wealth while demeaning "lesser" homosexual people, and they, in some cases use the same wording as both white supremacists used against your own race and as Hitler used against Jews. Why can't preaching Good News to the poor include taking a stand against the billions spent on the military to use at least part of those funds to provide food, clothing, housing, and medicines for those in need?
The difference between you as a black and MLK Jr. is that MLK Jr. had a dream for ALL people, not just Christians or Jews, not just whites or blacks, but everyone. The minute you fall into the muddy trap of demeaning some people in order to lift yourself up (because that is what you do) you are NO DIFFERENT than those white police officers who charged Karen Harrick with obstructing traffic during a demonstration against discrimination in 1969 because "she was lying on the sidewalk while she was being clubbed by police." ---And no, it WASN'T because she was black, it was because she was a lesbian. (Donn Teal,
The Gay Militants: How Gay Liberation Began in America, 1969-1971 [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971] p.55
Like the white Mississippi state police officer told my high school class in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1963-- "We came upon a little old lady who had been driving her Cadillac down a country road and hit two Nigras walking on the side of the road. When we arrived at the scene, one man was lying partially through her windshield and the other was twenty yards down the road in a ditch. She was crying. We tried to console her and told her we would get the one who was partially in her car for breaking and entering and the one down the road in the ditch for leaving the scene of an accident." (He told that as a "joke" to a high school auditorium of 1500 white students).
That's the same kind of perversion that fundamentalists of any color perpetuate on homosexuals. Whether you see yourself as the same as that police officer, I can assure you that Jesus Christ does. Dr. King defined Jesus' call to love as
agape love, "Understanding, redeeming good will for all men [and women],
a willingness to go to any length to restore community. (Martin Luther King, Jr. "An Experiment in Love, in
A Testament of Hope, pp.16-17)
King also wrote "We have inherited...a great "World House, in which
we have to live together....a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace." (James Melvin Washington, ed.,
Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986], p.16)
I was in Dallas, Texas in the early nineties when a rash of murders of gay men took place. In 1993 Nicholas Ray West was murdered in Tyler, Texas. He was a 23 year old Southern Baptist singer who was kidnapped, tortured, and executed in a gravel pit because he was gay (thirty years earlier it might have been because someone was black).
In January 1994 the body of another gay Texan, Michael Benishek was found in San Antonio. The coroner wasn't able to tell if Michael had been killed by the sever blow to his head with a blunt instrument or if he had bled out from the knife slash across his throat.
In February, 1994, Tommy Musick, a 48 year old gay hairstylist in Midland, Texas was shot four times in the back of the head. The jury found 18 year old Ramsey Harrell guilty of murder but sentenced him to just twelve years in prison. According to local pastor Billy Cawley, "The jury allowed Harrell to have the lesser charge because of their prejudice against gay people. Tommy Musick got no justice. This sends a clear message that if you kill a gay person in West Texas, you will not be punished."
In April 1994 a 16 year old San Antonio youth took a rifle out of his truck and shot and killed another gay man, 26 year old John A. Burwell. The teenage killer dragged Burwell's body to his pickup, drove to a nearby creek and dumped the corpse off a bridge forty feet above the water to lay on rocks until found.
In June 1994 Paul Quintanilla, a young gay man, was found murdered in a field near Dallas. He had been stabbed a dozen times and his throat and genitals had been slashed.
Near the end of that year the
New York Times reported that 60 percent of the murders involving gay or lesbian victims were called "overkill" because they involved four or more gunshot or stab wounds, repeated use of blunt objects, or the use of more than one killing method. "The bias related slayings of gays and lesbians,' said the
Times, are often gratuitously violent and many go unsolved."
The language I hear used by fundamentalists about gays and lesbians is the SAME language I heard them use about your race. The violence I've read about being used on them over the last twenty-five years is the same violence I read about being used on blacks in Mississippi and Alabama when I was a teenager. I even heard some of the same language from some of my own family members.
I stood against them, and I'll stand against you. I loved them and I'll love you, but I will never yield to the ugliness of spirit I saw then and I see now coming from the mouths of fundamentalists. Religious fundamentalist are cursed with the urge to purge--someone, somewhere, always.
God proved through Jesus' life, death, and resurrection that God loves outcasts best. When you stand with the outcasts, you stand with Jesus, and when you despise the outcast, you despise Jesus as well.
Knowing the Bible by heart isn't nearly as important as knowing the heart in the Bible.
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