Hmm sorry I should learn to explain myself better. I am one of those people who starts a conversation mid-sentence and somehow expects everyone else to keep up.

I was using ‘affirm’ in the sense that Kit uses the word because we had a conversation about this recently and it was in my head. Let me rephrase. I am aware of the fact that in the here and now I am attracted to women. But I wish I wasn’t. Does that make more sense? I don’t want to be attracted to women because I believe that it is not God’s best for me. This means that I do not approve of lesbian relationships for myself or for other people. This does not mean I am in denial, I am not claiming to be straight and if anyone asks I will tell them I am attracted to women. To you it seems ‘accept’ is synonomous with ‘approve’ when really they are different things. To accept something is to recognize its existence and not live in denial of it. To approve of something is to affirm or promote it, to agree with it or celebrate it.

I did not choose to be attracted to women, so I can’t help that. For me being attracted to women is like having a cold, its something you have not something you are. I have this attraction but it is separate from me, I don’t identify with it. (This is all purely theoretical, every time I complain about my attraction I am identifying with it, but this is the way I have come to believe I ought to see it). My identity is as a child of God, the way that He made me and I am not convinced he made me gay. While the environmental and social causations leave a lot to be desired I refuse to believe that God made me with something sinful like this already inside me so there must be some external factor. In this sense I can look at homosexuality as a condition and not an identity. That is why I can differentiate between who I am as a child of God and what I do as a sinful human being.

I understand where you are coming from, my own father recently came out (or maybe not so recently now, it still seems so) and we have the same argument. Say for example I am an alcoholic. I know that this condition is not my identity and I am still able to objectively recognize that drinking copious amounts of alcohol is harmful without contradicting myself. The same is true for my view on homosexuality, I am attracted to women but I realize that it is not God’s best for me and I must not engage in or promote that condition.

If you remember back to my previous posts which you have obviously be ardently reading I differentiate between homo-erotic behavior and homosexuality. I don’t believe that homosexuality is God’s best but it is not sinful in and of itself if it is not combined with homo-erotic behavior. Like William said, you can recognize someone as attractive, that is passive and can not be helped but if you act on that attraction through lusting etc then that is an active decision on your part and is a sin.*

*Note that the last four words are mine and not William’s.

Ah don’t go all postmodern on me now! 😆 You obviously made the choices you have to move away from a more conservative mindset to a progressive one because you believe its right, otherwise you wouldn’t have done it in the first place. And that naturally means you believe I am wrong.

The beauty is we can both think we are right and still get along 😉

I think my situation might be a little different to yours because I am not married so I have no reason to pretend. I think alot of the jubilation that is accociated with coming out is the idea that you don’t have to pretend or be in denial any more. You are free to be honest about how you feel and thats very liberating and healthy. One of my pet ideals is to be honest and thats probably why I took your comment about me being in denial so badly because I have really worked hard to be accepted as a member of Christ’s church while still remaining honest with God, myself and other people. The Chruch likes to pretend as well and many people would much rarther see the ex-gay up on the pulpit than the honest struggler…

Do they make a patch? 😆

I KNOW this is the frequently dumb-assed counter-argument used by conservative Christians and I KNOW that I will get my ass kicked to timbuktu for saying it but, politically, if you extend the line of marriage to include more than a heterosexual couple over the age of 18 then who’s to say where that line ends? People could be petitioning to marry animals or instititionalise peadophilia through marrying underage, polgymy could be reinstituted because who’s to say you should only have one partner?

There is one thing that you fail to see. A gay marriage is a marriage of two consenting, equal parties. Paedophilia and Bestiality is not. To compare them is offensive. Polygamy is a different topic. Personally I’m not opposed to. If it was good enough for people in the Old Testament why not?

Even if it is seriously difficult, does the difficulty justify one person treating another as a sex object? I am not talking about a relationship, I am talking about seeing a stranger on the street and fantasising about them, reducing them to body parts.