Good News: Kathy Baldock Works To Bridge The Canyon

Last week I posted about an NYT poll I’d seen that said, sometimes, by just talking about LGBT issues to people who might at first glance seem anti-LGBT, we can change their minds; that by just being out and open and our true selves, we can show people their fear and ignorance and intolerance is unnecessary [see that post HERE]

Well, Kath Baldock seems to be a prime example of that and talks about that very idea in her new book, Walking the Bridgeless Canyon. In it, she shares the story of coming into her home one day with her husband as the phone was ringing. Her husband answered and, as she listened to his side of the conversation, she understood that one of his friends had just died of what was then called “The Gay Cancer;” AIDS. And she remembers feeling dispassionate and judgmental; she thought that the way you contracted that cancer was through having gay sex, so death was, as she saw it, “foreseeable” and could therefore be avoided if gay men just stopped having sex. For her it was very black and white: stop being gay and you won’t die.

Shortly thereafter, Kathy went though her own upheaval, a divorce and a new life, though she says her faith, and her beliefs, never changed. But she started to walk, both physically and spiritually, as a result of the changes in her life, and it was while walking that things really began to change for her.

Along the canyon trail that she hiked regularly, Kathy passed the same woman every day walking in the opposite direction; Kathy sensed that this woman was very different than herself; she thought this woman was a lesbian. Out of the blue, Kathy asked the other woman if they could walk together, and as they did, Kathy came to realize that she no longer needed to “save a soul,” that she could just ‘be’ and that some of those souls she thought needed to be saved, did not need it at all.

The walk became an everyday thing with Kathy and her new friend Netto. Through Netto, Kathy met more LGBT community members, and she began to see that those gay faces were just the same as her; and she began to listen … Netto told Kathy that she could never feel safe in the places Kathy frequented, with the people Kathy knew:

“Look Kathy, you don’t understand. In this society, I’m the lowest of the low. I am a Native American. I am a woman of color. I have a Hispanic last name. I am lesbian. Not even God loves me.”

Those last words hit Kathy the hardest. She had broken through the powerful truth that happens when regressive Christian dogma meets an actual living breathing LGBT person — the dogma falls apart.

And so, over the course of the next several years, Kathy wrote Walking the Bridgeless Canyon and began to bring together her LGBT friends and her Christian faith. Her book shares stories of Christians who were led to challenge their prejudices after they got to know The Gays; her book is a kind of history of the culture of the LGBT movement, the political and religious evolutions, the scientific facts of being gay, and of what the Bible really says about homosexuality, which, in reality, is really nothing at all.

One of Kathy’s key objectives is to fling open the closed gates of Christianity and make it accessible to those LGBT people who want it, and make it friendly again to those LGBT people who have endured its abuses.

And because of her own journey, because of that one day when she asked a fellow hiker if they could walk together, Kathy has created ways for Christians to respect their LGBT neighbors, one of which is recognizing that the LGBT person may already have a “journey with Jesus,” and does not need to be saved; she wants Christians to realize that LGBT people need to be respected and heard, and not simply dismissed with a wave of the hand and a, “You couldn’t have been ‘born gay’.”

Today Kathy Baldock is still working to make Christians understand that there is nothing to fear from The Gays, that we are all a lot more alike than we are different, and she has taken on some of the more vehemently anti-gay “preachers” and speakers, like Michael Brown, Robert Gagnon, Anne Paulk, and Scott Lively.

In fact, she recently smuggled a gay man into the church lead by “Pastor” Steven Anderson, who believes gay people should be executed; Anderson had recently declared that there would never be a gay person in his church and yet, courtesy of Kathy Baldock, that statement is just another of Anderson’s lies. Kathy believes that the hold pastors like Anderson have on American Christianity is not a good one:

“Unfortunately the list of Christians with literal, fear-inspired theology seems endless. Aside from the ugly street screamers, I’ve personally experienced interaction/meeting many who, in their zeal, are convinced they are flawless in their biblical interpretations and speak for God while doing significant damage to the emotional, physical and spiritual well-being of the LGBT community.”

Today, Kathy Baldock, who once believed that a gay cancer was your own fault, works to fight against gay reparative therapies. She realizes now that being gay is just another way of being, and she is proving the point, that when people who have some sort of anti-gay bias actually meet a gay person, many times — not all the time, I am no Pollyanna — their views change. But they will never change if we don’t come out; they’ll never change is we sit in silence; they’ll never change if we don’t talk.

Talking is the way Kathy Baldock hopes we can bridge that canyon.

via LGBTQ Nation

After Their Son's Death, Rob and Linda Robertson Hope To Change Church Views On Homosexuality

Rob and Linda Robertson thought of themselves as Good Christians, and found themselves tested when, at age 12, their son Ryan told them he was gay. Oh, they told him they loved him, but they also told him that he had to change, and entered him into reparative therapy, made him meet regularly with their pastor, put him in Bible study and church youth groups because they believed, as they’d been taught through their church, that homosexuality is a sin and that its wrong.

But nothing changed; six years and nothing changed. Except that Ryan, at age eighteen was still gay, and more miserable than ever. He cut off from his parents and his faith, and started taking drugs, and in 2009, he died of an overdose.

Now, too late for their own child, Rob and Linda Robertson have come to the conclusions that they were “wrongly taught.” Rob Robertson says the church, through its programs of reparative therapies, and its emphasis on homosexuality being wrong and curable, have made a “horrible, horrible mistake.”

But they chose to stay with their faith, though they switched to a non-denominational church, and began working to inspire other Christians with gay children to do the same. The Robertson’s no longer want the church to try and change gay children, they want the churches to change and become more understanding, more tolerant, and more, for lack of a better word, Christ-like.

“Parents don’t have anyone on their journey to reconcile their faith and their love for their child. They either reject their child and hold onto their faith, or they reject their faith and hold onto their child. Rob and I think you can do both: be fully affirming of your faith and fully hold onto your child.” — Linda Robertson

And they know they have a tough road ahead of them; Evangelicals tend to dismiss fellow believers who accept same-sex relationships as no longer being “real” Christians, but the Robertson’s, and other parents of gay children, have begun seeking one another out online and through faith-oriented organizations for the LGBT community, like the Gay Christian Network, The Reformation Project and The Marin Foundation.

Linda Robertson, who blogs about Ryan at JustBecauseHeBreathes, also created a private Facebook page she started for evangelical mothers of gays that has more than 300 members. And others are also following …

• James Brownson — whose own son came out as gay — is a New Testament scholar at Western Theological Seminary and recently published the book “Bible, Gender, Sexuality,” advocating a re-examination of what Scripture says about same-sex relationships.
• Chester Wenger, a retired Mennonite pastor, lost his clergy credentials after officiating at his son’s marriage to another man. Wenger, in a statement urging the church to accept gays and lesbians, told of the pain his family experienced when a church leader excommunicated his son three decades ago without any discussion with Wenger and his wife.
• The Reverend Danny Cortez, pastor of New Heart Community Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in California, was already moving toward recognizing same-sex relationships when his son came out.  And, when Cortez announced his changed outlook to his congregation, they voted to keep him; sadly the national denomination cut ties with the church.
• In the United Methodist Church, two ministers with gay sons drew national attention for separately presiding at their children’s same-sex weddings despite a church prohibition against doing so: the Reverend Thomas Ogletree was not disciplined by the church, but the Reverend Frank Schaefer went through several church court hearings, ultimately winning his case and keeping his clergy credentials.

The good news is that support for these so-called “reparative therapies” is falling; Alan Chambers, the leader of Exodus International, a ministry that tried to “help” Christians repress same-sex attraction, has apologized for the suffering the group caused and then shut the ministry down.

Sadly, though, while some strides have been made, Linda Robertson says some of the mothers who contact her through her Facebook page aren’t ready to completely accept their gay sons and daughters, and instead still believe that sexual orientation can be changed. Still others are moving away from the traditional evangelical view of how parents should respond when their children come out.

“I got a lot of emails from parents who said, ‘I don’t know one other parent of a gay child. I feel like in my community, I don’t have permission to love my child,’ They have a lot of questions. But then they’re going back to their churches and speaking to their pastors, speaking to their elders and speaking to their friends, saying, ‘We have a gay child. We love them and we don’t want to kick them out. How do we go forward?’” — Linda Robertson

I feel for parents like the Robertson’s, so coerced into believing their children are somehow wrong, or less than, or even deviant, by their faith. I feel for those parents who try and force their children to change their orientation, and do it so stridently, and so rabidly, that their children either completely cut them out of their lives, or take their own lives to end the suffering of thinking their parents don’t love them.

I am not a fan of organized religion, for those very reasons, but if there can be a rebirth of sorts, within the churches, and without the churches, by people of faith who choose to believe that God created us all in Hs … or Her … image, and that we are all worthy of loving who we love and being loved by our families, then this is a good thing.

Too bad Ryan had to die before his parents could see what harm religion can do, and before they realized that they, not their son, needed to change.

via LGBTQNation

Photo Credit: Elaine Thompson, AP

From The Delusional File

At the sparsely-attended March for Marriage march in Washington last week, National Organization for Marriage [NOM] president and Delusional-in-Chief, Brian Brown really took to some word-twisting, er, paraphrasing, er, plagiarizing,, er, stealing, when he said:

"We know that some day, whether it's one year, ten years, twenty years, or decades from now, people will look back at this time and remember those of us who stood up for the truth."

I’m pondering what the ‘truth’ might be? That Brown is a secretly self-loathing gay man who has created this behemoth of bigotry to keep his little secret?

Or … he’s just delusional.

Not to be outdone, however, Gary Bauer, a former failed presidential candidate from the party of WTF, as well as president and Delusional-in-Chief of the Family Research Council, spoke at the Road to Majority summit today about President Obama's "secular" political agenda. He said Obama is "obsessed with this [gay rights agenda]" and he has threatened to drop aid to "third-world countries...if they don't adopt his views", like imposing sanctions on Uganda for human rights abuses, but it was when he said this that he crossed the line from crazy to downright delusional:

"He's repealed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' for homosexuals and replaced it with 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' for Christians! … If Obama succeeds in turning us into a secular, humanist nation, ripping us out of our Judeo-Christian roots, then the country, the republic will be destroyed."

God will smite us all, where, maybe I guess just the Christians, because Obama, and let us not forget, the majority of Americans now, believe in marriage equality. meanwhile i'm still trying to find the Christians who are being told not to talk about being Christian.

And lastly we have Jeremy Schwab, the ‘ex-gay’ Texas Republican delegate behind the party’s “Reparative Therapy” plank, who is speaking out — because the crazies love to be heard — saying he’s surprised with all the media coverage of the issue:

"There are counselors out there who help us overcome same-sex attraction by finding need fulfillment in other ways in our lives and by addressing emotional wounds, and that has reduced the same-sex attraction significantly."

Schwab says he was way gay for twelve years, but learned to suppress, he uses the word reduce, his homosexual attractions though prayer, counseling and emotional healing but he’s not fond of calling it reparative therapy because it isn’t about “repairing” anyone who’s broken.

It’s just brainwashing someone, though prayer and counseling and emotional healing, to think they are something that they are not. Jeremy Schwab is not an ‘ex’ gay; he’s a self-loathing gay man who is so afraid of living his truth that he’s chosen the path of the lie.

Or of the delusion.