THE HUMILITY THAT CAN COME THROUGH BEING GAY

'For many high achieving, self-controlled, virtuous and dutiful homosexuals, the gay thing is the first thing that made them admit that they couldn't order their lives through willpower alone.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.113.

A BENEFIT TO BEING GAY

'Though I believe it is sinful to be queer, it has at least saved me from becoming a pillar of the Establishment.'

WH Auden in Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.110.

SOMETHING TO AIM AT

'My hope is that twenty or thirty years down the line, I will be listening to some young whippersnapper who will say, with no idea that she's saying anything unusual, "Oh, I was raised Christian - so of course I've never doubted that God loved gay people.'"

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness: A Gay Christian's Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God's Extravagant Love, p.xxi.

DESIRES NOT A MATTER FOR BLAME

'It is perfectly possible to think of desires as no matter for blame, and yet be persuaded that their literal enactment cannot be their true fulfillment.'

Oliver O'Donovan, A Conversation Waiting to Begin, p.113.

INTERPRETING DESIRE

'Sexual desire in particular is notoriously difficult to interpret; the biblical story of Ammon and Tamar (cf. 1 Sam 13) is just one of many ancient warnings of how obscure its tendency might be. It is characteristically surrounded by fantasy, and fantasies are never literal indicators of what the desire is really all about, but are symbolic revealer-concealers of an otherwise inarticulate sense of need. But the point holds also for many kinds of desire - let us say, the desire for a quiet retirement to a cottage in the countryside, or the desire to own a faster racecar. We cannot take any of them at their face value. "It wasn't what I really wanted!" is the familiar complaint of a disappointed literalism. To all desire its appropriate self-questioning: what what wider, broader good does this desire serve? How does it spring out of our strengths, and how does it spring out of our weaknesses? Where in relation to this desire does true fulfillment lie?'

Oliver O'Donovan, A Conversation Waiting to Begin: the churches and the gay controversy, p.112.

THE RIGHT LONGINGS BEHIND OUR WRONG DESIRES

'What is bent when I experience that internal pull to homoeroticism? Well, actually, quite a lot about me is bent. My sexuality may be the least of my issues. But when considering homoerotic temptation, what else is going on? Certainly, this is not less than the temptation of indwelling sin; it is more than that. That's always how sin works.

What good thing has been bent? What is going on?

For one thing, we're dealing with a legitimate God-given human human longing for community. Yes, this longing has become sexualized in ways that distort God's creational design. But it is a legitimate longing nonetheless. It might be a longing for healthy intimacy - to know and be known. It might be a longing for acceptance, a need to feel wanted. Our longings for intimacy, community, and friendship, our longings to be loved and accepted, our recognition of human beauty - these are not evils. The longing for nurture, inclusion, and affirmation are not evils. The longing to matter to someone, to be unique and special to them, the longing for family - don't you dare call these sin. They are core human needs we all share as image bearers of God. We all long to be delighted in. We all long for companionship. We all long to be seen inside and out. These longings are good longings placed there by God.

God does not call us to put these to death,. These are not sin. They are part of how he created us as human beings designed for relationship. These are good longings that inborn sin bends in spiritually unhealthy directions. Sin over desires the good, to our own damage. That's how sin works - by blending the good. That's true for all of us.'

Greg Johnson, Still Time to Care: What we can learn from the church's failed attempt to cure homosexuality, p.137.

THE BIBLE COMMANDS SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIPS

'People sometimes say the Bible condemns same sex relationships. It does not. The Bible commands same-sex relationships at a level if intimacy that Christians seldom reach. Jesus preached a gospel of radical intimacy: with him first and foremost, but through him also with each other.'

Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion, p.155.

HOW GENDER EFFECTS SAME-SEX SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS

'Men and women tend to conduct their relationships differently and exhibit different preferences in their relationships. When the partnership diverges from sexual complementarity - that is, a man and a woman in relationship - decidedly sex-typed preferences are consolidated, not moderated. It means that same-sex couple are ironically more subject to deep-rooted gendered patterns and habits, their stated egalitarian attitudes aside. There is nothing political about this; it is just the empirical reality, one that sexual economics make ready sense of. If the sexes were a simple social construction, utterly malleable, we should see very little distinction in how men and women pursue relationships, how they act within them, how they act apart from them, what they prioritize about them and how they conclude them. But we see all of that.'

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex, p.158. 

SUFFERING CAN PRODUCE EMPATHY

'The sense of an entailed disadvantage - the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centred, unloving nature into a Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.' 

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p.215. 

GOING WITH THE GRAIN OF CREATION

'Our lives are lived well only when they are lived on the terms of their creation, with God loving and us being loved, with God making and us being made, with God revealing and us understanding, with God commanding and us responding. Being a Christian means accepting the terms of creation, accepting God as our maker and redeemer, and growing day by day into an increasingly glorious creature in Christ, developing joy, experiencing love, maturing in peace. By the grace of Christ we experience the marvel of being made in the image of God. If we reject this way, the only alternative is to attempt the hopelessly fourth-rate, embarrassingly awkward imitation of God made in the image of men and women like us.' 

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.147. 

WHEN A SIN BECOMES A CULTURAL IDOL

'...when an ancient temptation or trial becomes an approved feature in the culture, a way of life that is expected and encouraged, Christians have a stumbling block put before them that is hard to recognise for what it is, for it has been made into a monument, gilded with bronze and bathed in decorative lights. It has become an object of veneration. But the plain fact is that it is right in the middle of the road of faith, obstructing discipleship. For all its fancy dress and honored position, it is still a stumbling box.'  

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.144. 

IDENTITY

'Imagine an Anglo-Saxon warrior in Britain in AD 800. He has two very strong inner impulses and feelings. One is aggression. He loves to smash and kill people when they show him disrespect. Living in a shame-and-honor culture with its warrior ethic, he will identify with that feeling. He will say to himself, That's me! That's who I am! I will express that! The other feeling he senses is same-sex attraction. To that he will say, That's not me. I will control and suppress that impulse. Now imagine a young man walking around Manhattan today. He has the same two inward impulses, both equally strong, both difficult to control. What will he say? He will look at the aggression and think, This is not who I want to be, and will seek deliverance in therapy and anger-management programs. He will look at his sexual desire, however, and conclude, This is who I am. 

What does this thought experiment show us? Primarily it reveals that we do not get our identity simply from within. Rather, we receive some interpretative moral grid, lay it down over our various feelings and impulses, and sift them through it. This grid helps us decide which feelings are "me" and should be expressed - and which are not and should not be. So this grid of interpretative beliefs - not an innate, unadulterated expression of our feelings - is what gives us our identity. Despite protests to the contrary, we instinctively know our inner depths are insufficient to guide us. We need some standard or rule from outside of us to help us sort out the warring impulses of our interior life. 

And where do our Anglo-Saxon warrior and our modern Manhattan man get their grids? From their cultures, their communities, their heroic stories. They are actually not simply "choosing to be themselves" - they are filtering their feelings, jettisoning some and embracing others. They are choosing to be the selves their cultures tell them they may be. In the end, an identity based independently on your inner feelings is impossible.' 

Timothy Keller, Preaching, p.136.

THE PLAUSIBILITY PROBLEM

'If prohibitions against same-sex relationships on the basis of biblical injunctions are to be sustained as part of Christian discipleship and are not to be viewed warily as the inscrutable commands of a distant deity, some effort has to be made to show what human good they serve. Why is this the way of love? What glimpses of human fulfillment does it point to? If perhaps it is for some wider good of society for which I as an individual may have to sacrifice myself, what is that wider good, and why does it demand this sacrifice? If it is for my good, what good might that be, or is it simply the satisfaction of knowing that I have lives in accordance with God's standards? And what purposes of the God of love might be behind God's standards? Even if it is dangerous to use the love command to short-circuit the detailed task of moral discernment, love is the sum of the law, and it does lay on us that constraint to begin to indicate what kind of human good is waited on by prohibiting same-sex relationships.' 

Robert Song, Covenant and Calling, p.78. 

HOMOSEXUALITY

'...to caress that body which is of one's own sex is to caress one's self, and thus is not an escape of the self but an imprisonment within it.' 

John Williams, Augustus, p. 304. 

SAME-SEX ATTRACTION

'...despite the speculations of some clinicians, the idea that it is healthy for an adolescent to identify with a sexuality has not been proved. Clinicians are fond of assuming that not adopting a label is unhealthy, that it may be an indication of possible psychological problems. An individual's reluctance to embrace a sexual identity, they say, suggests that the person is in denial, afraid to confront his or her sexual reality.  Yet how do we square this view with the overwhelming evidence - produced by these same clinicians - of alarmingly high levels of depression, substance abuse, dangerous sexual activities, and suicidality among these young people who self-identify as gay? Is it possible that self-identifying gay youth are more unhealthy that nonidentified same-sex attracted young adults? 

I believe this is entirely possible. Some gay teens come out "loud and proud" as an act of self-affirmation, and some nonidentified same-sex attracted young people, are in hiding for self-destructive reasons, But it is also true that some declare their sexuality as a cry for help from horrific circumstances and that others are psychologically healthy because they have base for self-definition other than sexuality that are more developmentally appropriate. 

Is it possible that our advice to same-sex attracted young people has been wrong, and that perhaps we should be encouraging not to identify as gay?'

Ritch C Savin-Williams, The New Gay Teenager, p.204. 

THE GAY COMMUNITY?

'...diversity is both the greatest treasure and the biggest hurdle in the field of what has come to be known as queer studies. In the current epoch of greater cultural visibility and political protection, any notion of the singularity of gayness should disappear. Yet the academy and government continue to allude to gays as a single entity. Gay lobbying and interest groups are just as guilty as this in their quest for political unity. The reality is that gay people are diverse and at times paradoxical in how they identify themselves, in their politics and political strategies, and in the degrees to which they assimilate or want to assimilate into mainstream culture.' 

Ritch C Savin-Williams, The New Gay Teenager, p.187. 

SAME-SEX ATTRACTION

'Sexual identity models are example number one of the tendency to treat all gay people as the same, as a "separate species." Not only are these models wrong for most individuals with a same-sex orientation, they are also harmful because they keep us from understanding the diverse and ever-changing lives of contemporary teenagers. They foster archaic, male-centric views of gay development.'

Ritch C Savin-Williams, The New Gay Teenager, p.178.

SAME-SEX ATTRACTION

'Descriptive terms, such as "same-sex attracted" and "homoerotic," name particular aspects of sexuality. They encourage discussion of a spectrum of sexualities rather than specific sexual categories. I also prefer them because of their neutrality and serviceability, their simplicity and naivete. An individual can be homoerotic in some sexual domains and not in others. Similarly, one can be little or greatly same-sex attracted, in varying degrees and in varying ways. Using descriptive terms for the behavior includes gay, lesbian, and bisexual young people as well as those who refuse or resist labels for sexual identity. It also includes a person's having one or many same-sex encounters. So, too, virgins who would like to be sexual and /or romantic relationship with others can be included. A teen with same-sex attractions can feel separate from straight and gay adult-centered worlds or feel part of them. Describing same-sex behavior, feelings, and attitudes carries neither positive nor negative qualities, although some teenagers would disagree with this assertion, given the negative views of homosexuality in their own world.' 

Ritch C Savin-Williams, The New Gay Teenager, p.8.