We can all breathe easy now
posted by Law Fairy @ 12:44 PM
17 comments
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
About Me
- Name: Law Fairy
- Location: Los Angeles, California, United States
Either taking over the world a little bit more every day, or slowly losing myself to my happy delusions. Either way, I win.
17 Comments:
He's cured in much the same way Burton Quim was.
This guy is a putz. Of course he is a heterosexual. He has 2 grown kids and a wife if I recall. I feel bad for his wife. Congratulations, this guy is a complete loser.
Norbiz, I LOVE the Mr. Show.
knights, I disagree. I feel bad for the guy. He clearly has homosexual inclinations (he could be bi, he could be gay -- but having sex with men is kind of outside of the definition of "heterosexual"... if you're a man who has sex with men, whatever you are, you ain't hetero) and feels constrained by dogma. He has to pretend to be someone he's not, which causes him and his family indescribable pain. This situation is a product of our (society's) own hatred and ignorance. I feel bad for all of them.
I don't feel bad for him at all. He was married and he turned his back on his wife and kids. If you were gay all along then don't get married and have kids.
He lied to his family and was somewhat of a con artist towards his wife. He is a despicable loser and I don't feel sorry for him. When you get married; you ask the other person to sacrifice a lot. Then this guy turns around and spits in her face.
He is a loser. Period.
"If you were gay all along then don't get married and have kids."
Yeah. Because it's so easy to admit to yourself that you're gay when you live in a city that would've killed Matthew Shepard if the Wyomingites hadn't already taken care of it for them.
This kind of simplistic doublethink is precisely why progress is so fucking slow. It's about as useful as saying "don't smoke!" to a tobacco addict, without offering anything remotely helpful in terms of alleviating that person's suffering/withdrawal/etc. It's useless and it's a slap in the face to anyone who actually struggles with real life problems. Believe it or not, life is not an after-school special and the answers are not so simple.
What progress. Lying to people? He knew he was gay and shouldn't have married his wife. If his family didn't like him then he could move out and start his own life with a gay partner. I don't think we are killing gay people left and right.
knights, GAH.
He wouldn't have felt the need to lie to anyone if society didn't treat him as a hell-bound freak just for being attracted to men. Letting people be who they are? That'd be progress.
Wagging your finger at a victim of repression? Simplistic and counter-productive.
constrained by dogma?
not sure how to respond to that.
i have a belief that gay relations are outside of the creative order. i've had this since before i was christian.
there is nothing wrong with having this belief if sincerly held.
maybe, if i choose to supress any gay fantasies i have, does that make me wrong if i am following my faith?
i dont consider it 'being someone i am not', but instead, attempting to be someone i prefer to be.
i dont know what conversation he may have had with his wife in private, but i would also think that in a good loving union, such forbidden fantasies can be discused as issues to be resolved between the two of them.
marriage requires sexual/erotic honesty to be solid. as one should be able to confide likes and dislikes in the bedroom, also potential erotic pitfalls should also be discussed so as to be properly dealt with within the relationship.
cured?
he may honestly think he is. maybe he doesnt have the fantasies any more(right now). but, i tend to belief some parts of our erotic side are awefully hard to repress forever.
gino, to be clear, I'm most definitely NOT suggesting that all men are gay. But any man who wants to have sex with men is certainly not one hundred percent hetero. So in Ted Haggard's case, yes, he was and is pretending to be something he's not. And I genuinely feel sad for the poor guy.
I obviously disagree with that whole "creative order" silliness, but neither you nor I will suddenly change our minds from arguing about it here.
I disagree that there's nothing wrong with sincerely holding the belief. I, too, used to sincerely hold this belief and it was homophobic of me. That doesn't mean I was a bad person, necessarily; but I had some wrong-headed and harmful ideas. Holding the belief that being gay is somehow "abnormal" (as though what passes for "normal" sexual desire in our society, much of which is quite harmful to women, is somehow superior :P) hurts gay people and, ultimately, ANYONE who is a little bit different or divergent from the heteronormative standard. Including, say, guys who use hair gel (oh NOES!!!), particularly if they live in, say, South Carolina.
"So in Ted Haggard's case, yes, he was and is pretending to be something he's not."
i'm not willing to judge him that harshly. until i know his heart, i will assume he is attempting to be what he morally wants to be, instead of pretending something he is not.
like you, i ache for the guy. and his family.
i dont consider my view of the creative order as silly at all. just biologically observant.
i guess i would need some explanation as to what you think is viewed as societally normal desore before i accept your view that its harmful to women.
although i support a man's right to use moderate to minimal levels of hair gel,say, maybe only on date night to impress shallow women, hairspray is just totally out of the question... and should be a major taboo. (especially on men who hold bibles in front of TV cameras.)
i confess: in my younger not-as-suave-as-i-thought-i-was days, i experimented with minimal levels of gel. but, this was the early 80s, and was the best way to keep the hair out of my eyes.
and i was cured of these unnatural temtations quite early on, and, i'm proud to say, without relapse. :)
Two words on that one:
My. Ass.
i'm not willing to judge him that harshly.
lol, gino. You assume this is a harsh judgment. It isn't. Saying someone is gay is not a judgment or an insult. Indeed, what's insulting is THINKING it's a judgment or insult. So when I say he's gay, I'm not being mean. I'm stating a likely fact and pointing out that OTHERS in the world have conspired to make him miserable. And that's really sad.
Sorry for the "silly" comment -- that was uncalled for. I think you're a billion percent wrong on this count, but I shouldn't have called it "silly."
As for hair gel, etc.... I assume you're joking there :)
Roonie, yup.
LF:no,no...
its not the 'gay' judgement i'm opposing. i really, honestly, dont care if he is or isnt.
i'm just assuming he sees himself(gay tendencies) as having flaws, and is attempting to overcome them.
it would hypocritical if he believed gay was ok, and then preached it was not, while living a gay closet life.
if he belives as he preaches, gay temptations are bad, and attempts, honestly, to overcome his own, i offer more charity of judgement.
i'm not giving him a green light. i'm just not, at this point,willing to inflict condemnation on his personhood.
i'm no friend of fundamentalism, but many of my friends are fundies.
'silly' is ok with me.
i have a thick online skin, and whatever happens in discussion doesnt bother me. i been 'personally' insulted by the brightest, and also by some real dumbasses. water off a duck.
i intentionally seek out a diversity of nice folks to communicate with. most bloggers dont. they like to have an 'amen' chorus around them. for me, there is so much more to humanity than those who are just like me. not all quality folks are like me.and not all those like me are quality,either.
(i'm only offended if i think i can get some traction out it. we are all actors, arent we?)
ROONIE: sorry about your ass. was it my hair gel confession that hurt so much?
Geez, I'm sorry I've missed this fray. I've been super busy. Dang. LF, you rock! I especially like the way you called out Gino for claiming that saying Haggard -- who admitted he paid for sex with a man -- is, at a minimum, not 100% heterosexual is harsh judgment. LOL!
This whole saga would be hilarious if it wasn't sad and tragic. People live their whole lives torturing themselves, allowing themselves to be tortured by others, because of the belief that simply being who they are is offensive to God, or, "outside of the creative order," which is really just a vaguer but no less hurtful way of marginalizing someone's humanity. I mean, people STRUGGLE with this. Anxiety over sexual orientation is one of the leading causes of suicide, because people fight and fight and fight and they just can't be who the world tells them they have to be, so, feeling worthless, unloved and unlovable, they kick off.
And now fucking Haggard makes a COMPLETE MOCKERY of people's sincere struggle to come to terms with faith and sexual orientation by claiming in just three short weeks (!!!!) he's "cured."
This is WHY people kill themselves. They're told that not only is it possible to change sexual orientation, it's easy! And when for them it turns out to be neither, they give in to shame and despair.
If Pastor Ted is sincere about pursuing a degree in psychology, then I hope he does it at an acredited academic institution and learns what science has to say on the subject, and then I hope he finds the courage to finally confront this issue for himself and find acceptance.
Because for now the only people he's fooling are the ones who desperately want to be fooled.
PS, hmmm...I'm thinking about blogging on this subject at some point, so I reserve the right to quote myself later.
I especially like the way you called out Gino for claiming that saying Haggard -- who admitted he paid for sex with a man -- is, at a minimum, not 100% heterosexual is harsh judgment. LOL!
On second thought, I am not at all sure this is a complete sentence. It's certainly not a good one. My apologies.
"I especially like the way you called out Gino for claiming that saying Haggard -- who admitted he paid for sex with a man -- is, at a minimum, not 100% heterosexual is harsh judgment. LOL!"
what the hell you talkin bout?
i never said haggard was 100%, or part of a % of anything.
and i dont post under another fake name.
gino, to the extent you're criticizing his hypocrisy, I agree. And as Andy notes, it does a huge disservice to LGBT folks to pretend this is something you go into seclusion about for three weeks, and then emerge "CURED"!!
But I'm still not sure what you mean about "condemnation on his personhood." I'm not saying we should condemn his personhood; to the contrary, I think that's what many in his church are doing. Many of my friends are also fundies. I still disagree with them on a whole heck of a lot.
As for offense, I generally don't offend easily either. I get pissed off a lot, but the two are very different.
Andy, agreed agreed agreed. I hope he learns a lot about himself in the pscyhology courses -- and applies it in a healthy and responsible manner. Very very few people are beyond help or redemption. And I understood the meaning of the sentence :) (gino, he meant that you had said or at least implied that my saying Haggard isn't 100% hetero was a judgment)
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