Comments on: Oprah Winfrey discusses sexual identity with Ted & Gayle Haggard

By: Ann

Ann — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:48:47 +0000

I am aware of individuals having sex with people they are not attached to in any way or want to be attached to in any way – the sex satiates a temporary impulse and then is not thought about in any kind of positive way afterward, sometimes causing self loathing or repulsion. I am not sure if this is what happened to Ted Haggard but it is a possibility.

By: Mary

Mary — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:30:11 +0000

It would benefit everyone.

By: PianoManKugie

PianoManKugie — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:02:22 +0000

I had not considered that the X might even be being considered to be added (sorry, bad english). Imagine…two supposedly opposing sides having more in common than not! Both sides would be leading by example together that diversity works both ways. It would be fascinating to see how it would all work out. What would gay acceptance of so called ex-gays do for greater straight acceptance of gays, if anything at all? Could it possibly be in a gay person’s best self interest to accept ex-gays? Hmmmm……..

By: Mary

Mary — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:33:33 +0000

Funny thing is outside of this forum I don’t refer to myself as ex gay. I am just Mary who used to be gay and now isn’t. Most people get that. Gays do not. I think my very liberal mom is even beginning to get that idea. My straight friends wonder if I could ever be with a woman again and I always say “Well – yeah under the right circumstances I suppose.” But they get the idea that that part of my life is over. It is what it is or was and now things are different. I do think it is different for women than men.
The courtesy of the gay community only extends so far as you share the exact same beliefs as do they. Sort of like the conservative christian world of yester year. Same monster – different name. You know how the finger wagging looks. Only the gays are wagging their fingers at us and saying “You’re still one of us!: Like they won’t let us go or something. I’d like to join the group and all, but they need to add the X.

By: Eddy

Eddy — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:37:57 +0000

Carole, Mary–
Good points by both of you. But, of course I’d say that, since I agree. LOL. I wasn’t rying to start a debate about what we call it here…I was trying to show the emptiness of past assertions :”You know, if only they wouldn’t call themselves ex-gay and mislead people. If only they weren’t political. If only they simply wanted to live their life as they believed without cramming it down peoples’ throats…then I’d have no trouble with them.” So here’s Ted rejecting the label. Humbled and crushed not on any political warpath. Not being over assertive at all…just wants to figure out the best way to live his life. LOL. But do people have ‘no trouble’ with that as they asserted previously? Far from it.
Ted rejects labels but that’s okay, Jayhuck has one for him. (If you take the label ‘ex-gay’, they are against you…but, if you don’t take it, they have one of their own design ready for you.)
LOL. Good luck with that ‘X”‘ on the end of GLBT. I dreamed of that possibility back some 30 years ago. I was actually referring people who didn’t share my beliefs to the local MCC or Wingspan but then I learned, that even when they had a client who believed essentially as we did, they did not extend the same courtesy. Not only would they not refer but they’d discourage people who had heard about us and wanted to check us out.

By: Mary

Mary — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:02:47 +0000

Carole,
Totally agree. Doesn’t matter what we (ex-gays for lack of a better word or phrase) say or do, gays just want us to stop being who we are. They may say “Oh no. That’s not it. We just want you to tell the truth.” But everytime we tell the truth they say that isn’t the truth enough. And if we really get down to to it – that we don’t want to live the way they live, or label the way they label themselves, or assign anyother term, phrase or ideology – then gays are not happy. The only “truth” gays want to hear from ex gays is their own gay “truth” – and I personally just cannot do that because it would be the truth to me. It seems that anything I say about internal changes, outwardly changes etc… get twisted, turned, skewed through some gay lense that there seems no way to make progress in the conversation.
As a liberal, who supports gay rights and gay people, I am appalled at the lack of tolerance and diversity being expressed by the gay community (as a whole) towards those who are different in opinons and lifestyles. I remember when back in my day as a young gay activist all we were asking for was tolerance – not agreement, not hatred, not all of those things that happen to those who are different – just a place in the world. Now all of that seems to be what I am asking for as an ex gay. Funny – how the tide has turned and gays are still yelling “Unfair!” I turthfully think that that whole GLBTQ community ought to add X to their letters because those of us who are X gay have more in common with them than those who have never been down the road.
GLBTQX!!!

By: PianoManKugie

PianoManKugie — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:16:27 +0000

Carole, I think you’ve summarized it quite well.
Is this not all about whether there is a God, and if so, if God’s image is male/authority/respect and female/power/love, and if so, are we created in God’s image, and if so, if God prefers human physical sexual intimacy to reflect his supernatural spiritual image, even if the world is fallen and even if the image here is far from perfect, and if so, if God nonetheless blesses and approves of human physical sexual intimacy which doesn’t reflect his image of God coming into humans but instead reflects an image of God coming into himself, if the physical reality of sex does in fact reflect or mirror a spiritual reality? Yes, a lot of IF’s there.

By: Christin

Christin — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:56:18 +0000

What a giant mistake to go on that show. Oprah is not a Christian in that she has a very broad and wide view on how you can get to heaven and does not see that Jesus is theonly way. She obviously has a really different slant on the whole area of homosexuality. It was all quite unhealthy and unwise for the Haggards to do this interview.

By: Evan

Evan — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:43:14 +0000

Eddy,
I understand that from a Christian point of view, a “sin orientation” includes any form of sexual desires. — You can correct me if I’m wrong. — What gender is someone attracted to is not an issue for Christianity, as long as homosexual behaviour is not pursued and marriage integrates men’s and women’s needs.
This way of seeing sexuality is at odds with how science sees it. First of all, because in the Christian view, there are two desirable outcomes: marriage or celibacy. Science does not impose any desirable outcome, because if it’s science proper then it doesn’t have any agenda or values to stick to. So what it does is look at the facts and say: some men are attracted to and aroused by women, others mostly by men. There’s no dictum here as to what it means: whether it’s sin or not, desirable or not — that’s nothing to concern scientists.
Secondly, what’s more important to them is to make sure that, based on facts, they can get the truth out in the open. The worst outcome for scientists is to study people who hide their sexual interest or who fake their reactions, for whatever reasons (including values or jocularity). This is called volunteer bias and it’s one of the reasons why self report is not so reliable in measuring sexual orientation. The best way to gauge one’s sexual orientation right now is to measure their physical signs of arousal (erections in men, vaginal blood flow in women). There is a great deal of debate how it’s best to do that, including what types of stimuli they should be exposed to. Should they be soft, hardcore, matched according to culture, sexual experience, gender, etc, etc, etc? Many researchers try using a variety of means to see how participants rate them and how they respond to them. Designing an experiment is sometimes a feat of art as much as it is of science. The optimum designs get the most reliable and most quoted results in the field.
Why did I explain this in so many words? Because what someone says about their sexuality speaks less than what they do. Sometimes the reverse is true. Whether their name is Haggard, Obama, Hasselhoff or Morrison, it doesn’t matter what they say they consider themselves. It matters what they did and do (and how they feel). As a matter of fact, if I were a scientist I would start from the assumption that they are lying and they are trying to hide their real nature. So I should come up with the best test to get the truth out despite their attempts to hide it. This is the way to do science and extricate the facts from people’s conscious attempts to shape them according to their bias. In this respect, sexuality comes from the inner side of a person that lies beyond their grasp, so no one can mold their primary sexual response (they can control their reactions and behaviour a bit.) But I’m not a scientist and don’t want to be one.
So Haggard can say many things and people can project many things onto what he says, according to what they consider desirable. But the facts will remain the same. He slept only with men outside his marriage and now claims to be “a heterosexual with issues.” Considering his past behaviours, there are strong reasons to doubt he is now more likely to tell the truth than he was before the scandal began. As I said in a previous message, it is more likely that he saw an opportunity in this context to re-launch his career and re-establish his credibility by saying what other people want to hear. His statements can be taken as those of a charismatic leader who says what people are afraid to say because of social pressures impinging on them, but secretely wished someone would say it. This is what Ted Haggard is most probably doing right now, by using his past sexual record of cheating his wife with men to emerge today, live on television, as a martyr of his own struggles, putting himself out there for others to join in the catharsis. Thus, he gets the best of both worlds: he had a gay old time until recently (he took drugs too, right?) and now can get back in the business of being a public persona of complex sexual identity.

By: carole

carole — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:01:27 +0000

In re-reading my comment , which is awaiting moderation, I see that one of my references was grammatically misleading so I wish to correct my language.
One paragraph reads:

One side seems not to understand that their internal message of “I must be true to myself and be who I am” stands in stark contrast to the message they are sending to others: -”Be who we want you to be, not who you want to be.”

The “one side” to which I am referring is the side who questions the use of the term “ex-gay” by those who self describe in that way.
My following paragraph begins as follows:

These people have told others that they don’t want to be homosexual, that they weren’t happy being homosexual, that they much prefer the persons they are today, whoever that is.

By “these people” I mean ex-gays. Unfortunately, my antecedent reference was incorrect so I hope this clears up any confusion about my references. It would not have been misleading had this second paragraph begun with “Some people have told others they don’t want to be homosexual, that they weren’t happy being homosexual, that they much prefer the persons they are today, whoever that is.”
I hope this clears up any confusion about to whom I was referring in each of these paragraphs.