I say No. What say You?

I say No. What say You? August 3, 2015

Is gay celibacy a new version of conversion therapy? By Brandon Ambrosino:

Jones is a blogger for Spiritual Friendship, a site devoted to exploring gay celibacy, a issue of increasing interest in Christian circles.

Last fall, The Washington Post reported that gay celibates were “emerging from the shadows.” Gay Christians, it seemed, had found a new way to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation. It also gave the somewhat misleading impression that there was this new group of gay Christians doing something that hadn’t been tried before.

However, if you strip away the culturally-sensitive language, is there any substantial difference between this new movement and earlier versions of ex-gay therapy? Is gay celibacy really just Ex-Gay 2.0? Is it the same “Love the gay/hate the gay sex” we’ve been hearing for decades, only with gentler language and bloggers?…

Wesley Hill, celibate Gay Christian and author of Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian, wrote about Rodgers’s decision in an op-ed in The Washington Post. Hill, an editor of the Spiritual Friendship blog, took particular issue with Rodgers’s claim that gay-celibacy advocates, regardless of how compassionately they “frame” their message, end up contributing to “feelings of shame and alienation for gay Christians.”

While he agrees with Rodgers’s point that Christian communities can sometimes be “straight up homophobic,” he disagrees that “such tragedies are the result of the traditional Christian teaching on marriage and sex in and of itself.” That is, there is nothing about preaching celibacy to gay people that is necessarily alienating to them, says Hill. Indeed, he argues, choosing celibacy can bring a gay person honor. …

If you believe that homosexuality is a sin, then the logical conclusion of that belief is that gay people are obligated to abstain from that sin. No amount of theological or linguistic gymnastics can get around that. This is what Rodgers was getting at.

You can see, then, why Rodgers and others feel that this message is painful for LGBT people, regardless of how compassionately it’s been framed. It obligates them to lifelong singlehood. (As some have ever so generously noted, gay and lesbian people are permitted to marry partners of the opposite sex if they wish. But even while acknowledging that this is certainly possible, the argument seems perplexing, if not downright absurd.)

So is gay celibacy the new Ex-Gay?


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