The World: (Not So) Evil and Dangerous!

by Latebloomer

From hanging around with people such as Scott Lively in my fundamentalist Christian homeschooling community, I understood the danger that America was facing from the gay agenda. I believed that the gay lifestyle was depraved and corrupt and a sign of rebellion against God. I believed that God expected me to use political activism to stand up for righteousness and his design for the family. I believed that my “pro-family-values” activism was actually me being loving to the deceived people around me, people who were just taking the easy way out by accepting every type of lifestyle.

Then one day I accidentally met a gay person.

It was at my first real job, when I was 23 years old. My favorite manager, Chris, called the store one day while he was off-duty. He chatted with the on-duty manager Katie for a few minutes; when she hung up, she remarked to me, “He’s so funny! Why did he call me from a gay bar? haha!”

I was extremely confused. “Yeah, that’s weird,” I said, trying to process the information, “Why would he be at a gay bar?” Her jaw dropped, and she stared at me for a minute. Then she said slowly, “Um…..because he’s gay. Didn’t you know that?”

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Unwrapping the Onion: Part 5: The Beauty of Acceptance

by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

It was the end of 2010. I was starting to question the existence of God while my spouse was as Christian as ever. Sometimes I did not understand how he could keep believing in a God who had made him this way and then said that he couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t understand how it was god-honoring for a person to live their life “the way god wanted them too” while being miserable and secretly hoping that they would get into an accident somehow that would force the removal of the hormone producing organs that caused them so much mental anguish. The thought reminded me of some Quiverfull women I had encountered who in their exhaustion wished that a horrible labour and childbirth would cause a uterine rupture or something, nothing too drastic, but enough to cause the removal of their reproductive organs and the reassurance that they would be done having kids without ever having to “disobey” God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. But the idea of limiting children through artificial means to save their life or their sanity wasn’t acceptable? It was better to live life trying to glorify God with the lot he had given you? I used to think that people like that just had a bad attitude and needed to find a way to be happy with whatever God had decreed for them, now I was starting to wonder if they were just stuck in a sick system.

My spouse often asked if he should stop talking about transgender questions and issues. He worried that maybe this was too much for me and that he should just fight this alone. But I had seen how healing it was for me to talk about my own issues and to let my kids express their feelings, and I didn’t want him to have to go back to bottling it all up. So I encouraged him to continue processing as much as he needed too, and told him I would always be here to listen. Now instead of being distant or depressed on a regular basis he tried to talk about the overwhelming gender dysphoria, trying to sort out who he was and where he fit.

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Cult of Personality – Adventures in Recovery

by Calulu

A few weeks ago I took my daughter out for an celebratory lunch at her favorite Greek restaurant. She’s gotten acceptance letters from all of the colleges she’s applied to plus we really needed to touch base, take a time out together from the busy of our lives. Over sovlaki and hummus she started talking about what she would say to our former pastor Patrick if she ran into him again. She had run into him an few months ago and had been so surprised she’d just hurriedly muttered out pleasantries before leaving him as rapidly as a man with his pants on fire would run for the lawn sprinklers.

I had to ask her what she would say to Patrick if they were face to face. She blurted out something like “F**k you, motherf**ker and thanks for ruining my f**king childhood!” before laughing. We both laughed imaging the faces of those sycophants and hanger on-ers Patrick was always surrounded by if she let the F word fly.

That’s one big marker of a cult-like unhealthy church atmosphere, if everyone treats the pastor as if he is either the world’s most famous rockstar or the big toe of Jesus touching down on the earth to be adored. We saw that, participated in the pastor-pleasing behaviors too, perhaps not to the depth that many did but we did it as a family. It’s dangerous business for the most part. When everyone is busy kissing the rear end of the pastor or bowing down to his every whim and word it starts to look like a one man show with no real room for the Lord or anyone else. Plus the pastor starts to think he’s in control or assumes control. It also breeds unhealthy competition among the members all vying for the attention and favor of the pastor.

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Unwrapping the Onion: Part 4: When It Doesn’t Add Up

by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

I had always been under the impression that LGBTQ people were a new phenomenon. That the population of gay and transgender people had really taken off during the modern age those “godless” sixties. And that before it had become “cool” to be gay, virtually no one was. But that wasn’t making sense anymore. Even today, being queer continues to unleash considerable bias and discrimination. Kids are still routinely getting kicked out of their homes for admitting they are gay or trans. I couldn’t see any benefit to coming out as LGBTQ unless that really was who that person was.

In my research I had begun to uncover stories of gay people throughout history, and not only that, transgender people were around too. Throughout history is a whole list of people who upon their deaths were discovered to have anatomy which did not conform with the gender they had publicly lived as. Some of these persons were quite famous such as Chevalier d’Eon, a French diplomat during the 18th century; but most of them were ordinary people who knew that the gender assigned at birth did not match them. Growing up I had read some stories about women who disguised themselves as men to serve in the military such as during the Civil War, but what I hadn’t picked up on then but discovered later is how many of them continued to live as men after the war ended. Without the help of any of the medical advances of today, these people transitioned to living authentic lives in the gender that they felt fit them. My research was starting to point towards gender variant people as being a part of the diversity of the human family whose source was from antiquity. The myth of transgender persons being new or a radical experiment of the psychological community didn’t add up.

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Where’s your shame, woman?!

Popular conservative Christian pastor says “America is over” because shameless women who have sex and vote are running wild and screwing everything up.

by Vyckie Garrison

Ever wonder what goes on inside the small minds of fundamentalist Christian men? Want to know how they justify their blatant anti-woman policies and practices? Are they for real? Do they even know how hateful and intolerably ignorant they sound?

Thanks to Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a conservative black pastor and up-and-coming Republican leader, there’s now a YouTube video which perfectly sums up the Religious Right’s core beliefs about women.

“One thing I know for sure, without a doubt, women cannot handle power,” says Peterson, in a 12-minute tirade posted to the “bondinfo” YouTube channel recently as a part of the Reverend’s “Exploring Your Destiny” video series.

“It is not in them to handle power in the right way,” he continues, “they don’t know what to do with it.” Really? That’s some blatant misogyny right there, folks.  Ah – but Rev. Peterson is just getting started …

“It’s not real power anyway … it’s all ego-building. Real, true power come [sic] from God, and God is the one that gave man the power and authority over the wife, and to spiritually guide the world in the right way to go.”

According to the website listed at the end of the video, “BOND, the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, is a nationally recognized nonprofit organization dedicated to ‘Rebuilding the Family By Rebuilding the Man.’ BOND was Founded by Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson who is also its President.”

Rev. Peterson has been busy lately making himself a reputation for strident religiously-motivated bigotry. In January, the Tea Party leader and author of “Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America,” caused a stir by suggesting that unemployed African Americans need to be sent “back to the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working.”

“I hope that once [black people] hear the truth, they will pull away from the Democratic Party and their godless leaders,” Peterson told the Huffington Post. “When you tell them the truth first, they become upset … They think if you’re black and conservative, you’re an Uncle Tom. Once you let them yell and scream and carry on — because they will carry on — and when they calm down, they understand.”

“Women are now degraded. Women have no shame,” Peterson laments in reference to Sandra Fluke’s courageous congressional committee testimony. “This woman’s sitting there testifying about … all the sex they having [sic] … and it’s really all about maintaining the freedom to kill babies in the womb.”

During his sermon, Rev. Peterson is wringing his hands as he explains how “all these women are into all this stuff [sex out of wedlock] with no shame – women would not have done that in the good old days.”

That’s right – it’s all about shameless women, whom Peterson says, do not realize they present themselves as sluts.

Apparently emboldened by the fact that none of the Christian women in his audience objected by hurtling heavy objects at his imbecilic head, Peterson continues, “It’s unfortunate that women are allow.., that men are so weak, they’ve been so intimidated that they allow these women to just run wild and screw up everything – including their souls, and their children.”

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