Would you call homophobia "a fear of homosexuals"? I mean, in the literal sense -- does it truly mean "fear" or does it really mean "disgust" and "hate"? I'm starting to lean toward the logical answer: fear. It's where hatred is born. Hatred is stemmed from fear. Some people fear the unknown, some people fear what they haven't truly witnessed or encountered in real life and some just fear that they may "catch the disease" if exposed. A gentleman named brought up a few questions for me to answer.
Here is the answer from the gentleman regarding homosexuality from my previous post on Facebook that you can
read here and my original article on my blog which you can
read here.
"They have convinced the public that it is something you are born with. Have you any "proof" of that? What if it begins at age 1-4 in the Psyche? It was listed as a psychological disorder less that 30 years ago and then "changed". Was it changed due to new studies or proof? No, scientific findings were changed under nothing more than political pressure. And they are still suppressing facts and data about death and decease and illnesses that are the result of that life style. If your thing is that you ALWAYS ask questions, what about questioning the information the media is feeding you?"
Let me first ask you this: if being gay was a choice for me, then was being straight a choice for you? Taken from this
article, it suggests this, "Studies suggests that conditions in the womb also influence sexual orientation.
For instance, the more older male siblings a man has, the greater chance he will be gay.
Scientists say the phenomenon cannot be explained by the youngest boy being babied and mollycoddled or other differences in the way they are brought up.
It is thought that carrying a male baby in the womb triggers an immune response in the mother, creating antibodies that attack part of the unborn child's brain linked to sexual orientation.
This response gets stronger the more boys a woman carries, raising the odds of homosexuality.
Exposure to hormones in the womb is also likely to be important and some argue that upbringing plays a role in sexuality."
I've never seen so many people with "psychological disorders" function so well in life. In fact, psychological disorders does not discriminate between heterosexuals and homosexuals. And is a psychological disorder to be mocked? Of course not because many Americans suffer from anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, ADHD,
and so on and so on. Or you can just believe that the media is feeding you these "disorders" in order to gain your business so you can run out and get the next new big antidepressant available. I will say that many gays, lesbians and transgender people go through a lot of psychological problems due to the way they have been treated. If you are constantly told that you're crazy for being gay or transgender or that you're "not normal" and in worst case scenarios, I have seen parents throwing their own children out into the street because they were gay -- I bet that would get anyone's psyche a bit disorderly. How many kids are being bullied for being gay?
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| Sharing needles spreads disease. |
As far as "death an decease and illness" (did you mean disease?) are a result of being gay or lesbian -- have you even looked at the amount of HIV among the heterosexuals and poor living communities have? What about drug addicts who share needles and babies being born innocently to AIDS? I read an
article that stated, "HIV is not a gay disease. Nope. All of us are at risk in getting HIV from unsafe sex or other modes of blood to blood contact, like sharing needles. Television talk shows and all those fundamentalist/conservative/family values groups are chock full of flaky, clueless lightweights who made up their minds twenty years ago that HIV is a product of the so-called 'gay lifestyle' and it's God's wrath on homosexuals. These poor creatures are so invested in this myth that they are incapable of hearing the truth. They continue to spew their self-righteous, delusional feculence to the detriment of all humanity. They are, in fact, shameless, insidious prevaricators driven solely by their irrational loathing and fear of homosexuality.
The truth is that 16,000 people worldwide are infected with HIV every single day (World Health Organization). They are not all gay. In the United States, HIV infection rates have held steady at 40,000 per year, but recent preliminary data suggests those rates are on the rise. They are not all gay. African-American and Hispanic women together represent less than one-fourth of all U.S. women, but account for more than three-fourths (76%) of AIDS cases among women in this country (CDC Update, 6/98). Women now account for 43% of all HIV infected people over the age of 15 (New York Times, 11/98). In just over a decade, the proportion of all AIDS cases reported among adult and adolescent women tripled, from 7% in 1985 to 22% in 1997 (CDC Update, 6/98).
Further, more than 30 million people around the world are living with HIV or AIDS, and by the year 2000 that figure will reach 40 million (UNAIDS/World Health Organization, 12/97). They are not all gay. AIDS now kills more people worldwide than any other infection, including malaria and tuberculosis."
The media did not encourage my gay lifestyle. In fact, it did quite the opposite, letting me know how different I was. I remember being as young as 4 years old watching a soap opera. I remember ogling the beautiful women that were on TV, never once glaring at the men. I was enthralled by them. I remember having little crushes on my female girlfriends as a child. I grew up in a Catholic Italian household, with three older straight sisters and parents who had been together since they were 14 years old! We lived up in the sticks and away from the urban areas where I didn't have many neighborhood friends to play with, so I wasn't brought up exposed to the gay and lesbian lifestyle, until I was 19 years old and met my first girlfriend in a college up in Delhi, NY. So nobody influenced me -- in fact, they discouraged it greatly.
No wonder children in school have it hard today. If you have parents that have the same mindset as this commenter, don't you think that would influence their behavior on how they treat their classmates who are gay, lesbian or transgender? Children learn from their parents. Monkey see, monkey do. So if Bobby calls some kid a faggot out on the playground, that's okay in his mind because mommy and daddy call them faggots. If Bobby's dad says that being gay is a psychological disorder, then the kid may end up calling the gay kid, "crazy", among a few other choice words. And it doesn't matter if Bobby's Christian parents tell him to treat others nicely -- Bobby doesn't see anything wrong with what he says to other gay kids because mommy and daddy say these things, therefore, it must be "OKAY".
Let me just remind you about a few incidents that have taken place this past decade or so.
Sergio Urrego, 16 years old committed suicide after being harassed for being gay. His mother said her nightmare began in May when a teacher at Gimnasio Castillo Campestre school in the Colombian capital Bogotá, saw a photo of Sergio kissing his boyfriend of a month and a half on his cellphone. After confiscating the phone, both boys were sent to the school psychologist.
The boyfriend was then forced by the school to tell his parents about his sexuality and was quickly withdrawn from the school.
The school refused to release Urrego’s academic results and blocked his transfer to another school. He was continuously suspended from classes, send on multiple visits to the psychologist and accused of sexual harassment.
Unable to cope with the betrayal and harassment at the hands of school administrators, Urrego sent his friends goodbye messages and then jumped from the Titán Plaza shopping center on the morning of August 4. He passed away three hours later at a local hospital.---
read more here.
Tyler Clementi was an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman who killed himself in September 2010 after discovering that his roommate had secretly used a webcam to stream Mr. Clementi’s romantic interlude with another man over the Internet.
The suicide of Mr. Clementi, who jumped off the George Washington Bridge, focused national attention on the victimization of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth. Public figures including Ellen DeGeneres and President Obama spoke out about the tragedy, and New Jersey legislators enacted the nation’s toughest law against bullying and harassment in January 2011. Rutgers also responded in several ways, among them a plan to introduce gender-neutral housing — co-ed dorm rooms for gay, lesbian and transgender students who request it — and training staff in suicide awareness. But prosecutors argued that his frequent messages mentioning Mr. Clementi’s sexuality proved that Mr. Ravi (his roommate) was upset about having a gay roommate from the minute he discovered it through a computer search several weeks before they arrived at Rutgers in fall 2010.
The star witness in the case was “M.B.,’' the young man whose date with Mr. Clementi was captured by Mr. Ravi’s webcam. The full name of M.B., who appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s, was withheld to protect his privacy.----
read more here.
A transgender 17-year-old named Leelah Alcorn committed suicide on December 28. In a suicide note posted, but since deleted, from her Tumblr, Leelah wrote that when she told her mom about being transgender, her mother “reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes.” Leelah wrote that she was subsequently taken to Christian therapists, who reinforced the notion that being transgender was “wrong.” In an interview with CNN, Leelah’s parents claim they were loving parents, and that they just wanted to do the best for their child. Her mother Carla said that she took Leelah, who she referred to as Josh, to a psychiatrist, who prescribed medication, and that her child was depressed but only talked to her once about being transgender.
If you know anything about the very real state of having gender dysphoria, you know that telling him or her it is wrong is one of the worst things in the world a transgender person can hear. It deepens the depression transgender people already seek help for because we suffer from having a body that does not match our mind. In addition, we deal with our rejection from society, with those who slam us for having this mental health condition in the first place, and those who don’t believe it’s a real thing.----
read more here.
And there are many,
many more gay and transgender suicides that have taken place that hasn't even hit the mainstream media. But my entire point of this post is -- if you love GOD with all your heart and all your soul, wouldn't you love others and treat them well since they are apart of God's creation? I have had Christians rattle off that I'm a "false prophet" trying to lie to people in order to "make them feel better about themselves". I'm not a prophet nor a preacher. I am someone who has faith in God and has a personal relationship with Him. I have studied the Bible for over 20 years and it has changed my life forever. And even though the Bible has a lot of discrepancies as far as the time it was written, the 400 years of silence before the New Testament as well as all the books being put together as one canon (The Bible) 360+ years later -- something somewhere has to be lost and I stand firm when I say that. I may have said that it was "written" 400 years later -- but what I meant was, the New Testament was put together nearly 400 years later after Jesus' death. Dead Christians (spiritually dead) will only learn through text and never read with spirit and discretion. Religious people are the worst kinds of people because they are never willing to ask questions, to learn more and to reach out spiritually for guidance. Instead, they read literature from 2,000 years ago that's been altered, translated and misinterpreted for centuries and pull that out as "TRUTH". They have no heart and are FEARFUL of going to hell. Fear is not of God.
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of sound mind. --1 Timothy 1:7
Anytime I am faced with a Christian that tells me how the Bible is against homosexuality, in the sense of any loving relationship -- mostly referring to the sexual aspects, I'm reminded about how frequently they use the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Genesis 19: 1-13 “Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction:”
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Basically, God says that He's going to destroy cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, if two angels cannot find any good people within the towns. Once the angels arrive, a kind man named Lot invites these angels into his home and entertains them. This angers the cities' men, and the men rallied outside of Lot's home, wishing to do "perverse actions" to these male angels. Moments later, the two cities are destroyed by fiery rain.
Many anti-gay Christian ministers use this passage to say that this is an example of God’s wrath against homosexuality -- as if the men of Sodom were all gay, and all trying to "be gay with" these male angels.
Historians and sociologists tell us that gang rape was a very common form of brutal humiliation of the subjects, in the ancient Western world. The Sodomite men did not come to Lot’s house to have monogamous, committed, loving relationships with the male angels residing there. They came to
rape these angels.
Also, MULTIPLE parts of the Bible (Luke 10: 10-13; Isaiah 19: 13-14; Jeremiah 23: 14; Ezekiel 16: 49; Zephaniah 2: 8-11) tell us that God despised the greed and their wickedness toward outsiders as their sin, not that fact that men wanted to “have sex” with men.
Even the word "homosexual" has been translated -- well more like convoluted into something entirely different. While newer translations used the word “homosexual,” what it comes down to is a tragic loss of translation of two key Greek words, “arsenokoitai” and “malakoi.” If most Biblical interpreters weren’t pacifists, there’d be all-out war between them on the meanings of these words. The explanation that I prefer comes from Biblical scholar D. B. Martin, that “arsenokoitai,” due to its context clues, has something to do with sexual exploitation, like prostitution, not sexual orientation, like homosexuality. You can read more about this
here if you wish.
The Bible, when used
to hate and bash in a fearful way, can be devastating to someone who just wants to live their own lives without judgments or ridicules. They want what everyone else wants: a loving relationship, perhaps a family and some peace knowing that they're OKAY, most of all, okay in God's eyes. Although I do rely on the Bible, it wouldn't hurt for other Christians to delve in a bit deeper to learn the truths or maybe a different spin to the stories told in the scriptures. It's more like playing a game of telephone -- the Bible first said a story about violent rape and 2,000 years later, it becomes one big gay pride orgy.
Not everyone was meant to reproduce. Not everyone was meant to live the way their parents had expected them to. God doesn't make mistakes. If you're gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, queer, questioning or other, just remember one thing: YOU ARE NOT A MISTAKE! God loves you AS IS! God formed you within your mother's womb. For most of the LGBT folks, they've known who they were before the age of 4 years old without outer influences. This is not a "psychological disorder" -- this is who you are. The psychological disorders come into play when you have so-called Christians verbally (or physically) abusing you. Who wouldn't have psychological issues if they're abused, especially by their parents and even the kids at school who were all taught to hate by their parents. Ignorance breeds fear. Fear creates a sense of hatred. Hatred can create violent behavior. And all that wrapped up into one box can create many more suicides for these beautiful people who have been beaten down by their fellow Christians. This is not about "saving people" -- this is about people's own fears against homosexuals and transgender people. This is about their own fears about being homosexuals themselves. Fear is an incredible emotion that I believe, the devil gives us. Remember, fear is NOT of God -- says so in the Bible. No other translations needed.
Rest well, my LGBT friends...
For more of Deb's articles, please visit: www.debrapasquella.com or join her on Facebook and Twitter. Check out her cooking blog for some of her famous recipes!
