I don’t know but, like many, I suspect that shame, rather than faith, has been the most common motivator for people who reject their sexuality. On the one hand it can work in tandem with religious proscriptions. On the other, it’s operative even in people of little or no faith. Overall, I think we’re moving to a place where the shame and stigma applied to homosexuality is decreasing. Less shame means more people ‘coming out’ and fewer than ‘leaving homosexuality’, whether or not that’s a desirable result in any particular view.

I expect this predicament has motivated recent comments from Harvey, Cushman, and the like. They want to prevent that outcome. In that light, the shame, since it is in some perverse way congruent with the dissemination of their values, may seem reasonable and not altogether objectionable. In effect, they want to reject the bullying while keeping the shame.

Moreover, modern Americans are fundamentally rational people. Many find it difficult to rationalize scriptural abhorrence of homosexuality with the idea that homosexuality may be inborn — or with images of people made happy or healthy by their same-sex relationships. It’s easier to subscribe to other theories about its origin — and to stereotypes of sick, self-destructive, secretly (and naturally) self-hating homosexuals — than it is to live with the apparent complexities or contradictions.

What do you say to that? Well, the end of shaming SSA persons should be a good thing in everyone’s eyes. Most obviously, for the pain and despair that it alleviates. Secondly, while shame might motivate people to reject homosexuality, it goes about it in the wrong way and should not be treated as a substitute for or ally of genuine faith.

Lastly there are people who are perfectly happy and healthy with their sexuality and even those that find some accord between it and their faith. It isn’t necessary to agree with such people’s beliefs to accept their existence. (I assume the hypothetical audience of this address already accepts those that reject homosexuality.)

“I think you err in only seeing those examples which support your contention and ignoring those which do not.”

I don’t ignore them, it’s just that there are so few counter-examples. In fact, your Prop 8 examples of Mormon and Catholic funding support my position, not yours.

Although these sects are deemed heretical by conservative evangelicals, that is a dispute over the details of their respective superstitions, what is diplomatically called a “theological” dispute, but which might best be analogized to two mental patients arguing over which one is truly Napoleon Bonaparte. As a political matter, and as it relates the question at hand (i.e., whether there are “a lot of decent, caring” Christians out there claimed by Ken) it is largely irrelevant. Whether Protestant, Catholic, or Mormon, you will find among them armies large enough to station volunteers in every precinct in the entire state of California in order to eliminate gay marriage from the curriculum, but you couldn’t find even an army of one to prevent the slow-motion elimination of gay human being.

I take your stat on Lou Engle, although it is likely that the crowds diminish in an off-year where there is no gay threat to eviscerate at the ballot box, as there was in 2008. It is also true that these braying mobs sometimes feel that they need to switch to different events in order to maintain the same level of excited hate. It is hard to generate the necessary emotional response when the audience has seen and heard a particular individual many times. This is basically what happened with Promise Keepers in the 1990s. Whether it is because it is an off-year or because the mob is moving on to the next showman, all of these folks comprising these mobs are still around and are still part of American Christendom. As for the dwindling “mainline” denominations, which are largely impotent politically, ask some of your mainline friends whether you will be cast into a lake of fire or not. Yes or no. And listen to what they say.

@ Ken:

“that is correct, however, I was proposing other possibilities, not claiming there was only one, and using that one (unproven) case to malign all christians.”

– I know what you were doing. The point is that rational people operate based on what is known or what is likely. They come to preliminary conclusions, subject to change upon receipt of additional information. Your point is that we can’t make any judgment because you can invent scenarios for which there is no evidence and for which there is nothing from which to infer a probability. Using that logic, we would have to withhold judgment as to whether these kids committed suicide at all. We can’t conclude anything because, hey, maybe they were wacked by radical gays or OJ or the mafia.

“And likely many non-christians as well. However, I do not hold people to different standards based solely on their religion as you seem to be doing.”

You do hold people to different standards based on their religion because religion itself sets a moral standard. If there was a cold-hearted, indifferent atheist who watched Asher thrown down a flight of stairs and did nothing, then I condemn him. But that atheist doesn’t claim to have access to a divinely ordained moral system, nor does he attempt to use his moral system to hound people like Asher. Nor has that atheist, in contrast to a Christian, claimed that he models his actions after a personal Lord and Savior, a man who famously intervened and saved a woman from a lynching.

These Christians who likely accounted for something like 90 percent of the onlookers based on the demographics of the community, are obligated to conform their lives to Christ. And yet here, when faced with a situation right out of New Testament, they do the opposite of what their supposed Lord and Savior did.

It wasn’t a failure of only some or even a majority of Christians at these schools. It was a comprehensive 100 percent failure to follow an obviously applicable and very direct teaching of Jesus Christ. So that is why I say that, whatever Jesus might have actually taught and whatever “Christian” may have once meant, it doesn’t refer to “decent and caring” people, as you put it, in America today.

Yet another reason why Christianity in the US is best seen as an anti-social political ideology, not a noble religion.

I can’t agree. I know too many counter-examples. If you added a whole pile of caveats, yes. But this is an over-generalisation that I feel goes well beyond the bounds of accuracy.

Of course I know too many examples supporting your thesis too. Not just the Conservative Christian Political groups, but the small-town small-minded Phelps-lites.

But “best seen”? No. That does too many Christians a grave injustice. I cannot let that pass. How can I claim justice for myself when I don’t give it to others? How can I request tolerance, if I don’t tolerate others?

I’m not even Gay you know. Put in with them by others, but not of them or part of them. Many Gay people are rabidly transphobic, and a great many ignorant about or just plain prejudiced against Intersexed and Trans people. But should I stop fighting against the injustices done to them just for that? Not without being a hypocrite.

So why should I treat Christians any differently? I apply the same standards.

“1st, how do you know how many christian’s witnessed the bullying? Further how do you know none of them “felt any compunction to do anything”? Maybe some of the other students wanted to help but where afraid to? Maybe some just didn’t know what they should do? Maybe some actually tried but were rebuffed by the adults?”

Maybe they were all rendered silent and impotent by Lord Voldemort. There’s as much evidence for my theory as there is for yours. That is to say, none.

Now I acknowledge that we need more information about the inhuman conduct of the people who run these schools and allowed a slow-motion lynching of their students to take place before their eyes. If it turns out that there was some brave Christian who actually remembered the Mary Magdalene story and who actually remembered that Christians are to model their lives after Chrst, and if that brave Christian did indeed speak up or maybe try to help Asher or Billy when they were sprawled out on the floor, then I’ll amend my post. But there isn’t any evidence of that now and I don’t care to follow Tony Perkins and you in the apparent Christian tradition of making things up.

What we can say with some confidence is that many Christians or those being reared by and as Christians witnessed these lynchings. They took place over months and years. The abuse took place in hallways and classrooms and on crowded sidewalks at recess and at 3:00. It defies common sense to imagine that this conduct was not known by a large swath of the student population. And we know from the victims’ parents that the school knew, because the parents complained.

Now in Texas and Indiana, Christians are 90-95 percent of the population. In California, it is less, but still a very large majority. So unless all of these schools were uniquely situated in a Hindu or Buddhist enclave, it is fair to say that Christians account for a very substantial portion of the population of students, staff, and parents who went about their normal routine while children were abused. And as far as we know, not one of these loving Christians lifted a finger to help the “sinner” that they purport to love so much. (BTW, in fairness, I am not including the Tyler Clementi suicide in the above statement, since his torment took place over a short period of time and was known only to a very small number of people who may not be Christian.)

“But I also realize that simply because the extremists scream the loudest, doesn’t mean they represent all christians. And there are a lot of decent caring people who are christian that aren’t represented by these extreme views. Something I think you need to learn David.”

Did you read what I wrote? I didn’t say that TP represents all Christians because he is the most shrill or because he screams the loudest. Objective markers indicate that his worldview reigns among Christians. A few examples:

– Lou Engel, who thinks that gays are possessed by demons, regularly fills up sports arenas with fanatical followers.

– Tony Perkins brings in tens of millions of dollars and is welcome in churches and on Christian broadcasts throughout the US.

– When Christians were called upon to pass Prop 8 supposedly to protect schoolkids from having to hear about gay people, they quickly came up with $38 million and, according to the Prop 8 campaign, provided 100,000 volunteers on Election Day 2008.

– CBN and Focus on the Family have revenue in the nine-figures and millions of donors and supporters. Pat Robertson once boasted the Christian Coalition’s mailing list was bigger than that of the RNC and the DNC combined, and he was uncharacteristically truthful. The 700 Club, now in its 49th year of operations, continues to be popular on Christian TV. Pat Robertson continues as the beloved elder statesman/host, despite his blaming gays for 9/11, despite his calling down natural disasters on various cities and towns in the US that have adapted pro-gay policies, and despite his having entered into for-profit business partnerships with not one but 2 African dictators who were among the most corrupt and the among the worst human rights violators in Africa, and possibly the world.

If, as you say, there are “a lot of decent, caring” Christians out there, why aren’t they filling up sport arenas and establishing universities and drawing nine-figure revenues, and dominating Christian TV and radio? They don’t do these things because they can’t. There aren’t enough “decent and caring” Christians around to do it. Just as there weren’t enough, or indeed any, decent and caring Christians to protect 4 isolated kids being driven to despair. 100,000 to pass a ballot proposition, but not one person to protect a kid, or even try.

I could go on, but I hope you get the idea. TP and his crowd are not the true face of American Christianity because they are loud or because they say so. They hold that distinction because the vast majority of Christians support them, or don’t care enough to oppose them.

Step into the actual shoes of both those who experience SSA and those who identify as LGBTQ and you will find that the source of bullying largely comes from secular sources. I am NOT defending evangelicals – as if we are not to blame. Rather, I am suggesting it is all the more critical that we stop believing the lie that EVERYONE is supporting gay teens. It simply is not true.

Sadly, bullying is not the only pressure these kids are under. Repression traps a lot of them in fear, isolation and hopelessness. Of course some repress due to a fear of bullying, but most that I encounter repress for a whole host of religious and relational fears. By the time a kid caught in this kind of deep repression gets bullied (or outed), no wonder they turn to suicide. It literally crushes them.

Warren, you are doing an awesome job. Keep it up.

Bill