After a tumultuous end to business in the last session involving the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, the current Ninth Parliament of Uganda continues to organize itself for business. Last week, committees were formed and rules or order are being devised. Jockeying for power and influence occupy the efforts of those in the ruling party and those in the opposition.
Lawmaking is probably a month away but one legislator is predicting that a re-introduced Anti-Homosexuality Bill will be law within two months. Otto Odonga, a member of the committee which Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee in the 8th and now again in the 9th Parliament told me via Skype that he expects David Bahati to reintroduce the bill as soon as possible. He predicted that the bill will come to the floor of Parliament as soon as rules allow.
“It will be expedited this time around and passed within one, maybe two months time,” the MP said. Odonga also told me that Stephen Tashobya, the chair of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee, was re-appointed to that same post in the new Parliament. While Bahati will need to start from scratch on the bill, the committee will be able to use the report issued last session as a basis for their work this time around. That report called for minimal changes and retained the death penalty for certain offenses. Odonga said the bill has wide support in the Parliament.
As a follow up on a prior story, Odonga also said that David Bahati was selected to be the coordinator of the Parliamentary Prayer Fellowship.
Category: Religion and sexuality
Al Mohler and Exodus: Agree or disagree?
As noted last week, Southern Baptist Seminary’s President Rev. Albert Mohler recently told a reporter that evangelicals have “lied about the nature of homosexuality” and reinforced his sentiments at the recent Southern Baptist Convention conference. I think it is going to take awhile for Rev. Al Mohler’s words about evangelicals and homosexuality to sink in – even for those who say they agree with him.
In this Baptist Press article, Exodus International President, Alan Chambers, came to Rev. Mohler’s defense against critics who say Mohler is going soft on gays, saying
“I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and I am eternally grateful for what I learned there — the truth that I learned and the biblical foundation that I have,” Chambers said. “But there was no way that I was ever going to tell anybody in my church growing up that I struggled with these things. I am very thankful to say that that has changed [in that church]…. But we’ve still all got to do better.”
Alan correctly identifies his church as a problem. Although he doesn’t say exactly why, he is clear that he could not be open about his situation in his church. Apparently, they would not have handled it in a loving, accepting way. Chambers then says, we need to do better. I agree and I think one great example of that is a recent post – of all places – on the Exodus blog.
In a June 21 post, Matthew Walker says:
I felt like killing myself as a teen not because of the church, but because of a very real spiritual enemy that was trying to destroy me anyway that he could. His whispers and lies twisted the Bible into a condemnation of me, not of the sin that was overtaking me.
Sounds to me like this man attended a church like Alan’s. However, Walker seems to think that his church was just fine, even though he was bothered enough to consider suicide. Reading this article, I am confused. Is Walker’s narrative an illustration of the church getting it right, or is this the kind of church that kept Alan silent and struggling?
Walker’s entire article, to me, seems like an illustration of just the kind of approach that Mohler critiques. Mohler wants evangelicals to be honest about homosexuality. Instead Walker stereotypes gays as miserable, and in denial about why they are gay.
I was honest with myself about how homosexuality developed in my life. Many gay men and women use the act of “coming out” as a great dismissal of the developmental history that shaped their gay identity. Genetics becomes the great enabler that keeps many bound to a life of destruction.
According to Walker’s narrative, gays have been crafted by some kind of knowable “developmental history” which they repress via coming out. Genetic research is not scientific inquiry but a devious means of keeping gays in denial.
In 2007, Rev. Mohler wrote that evangelicals should be prepared to acknowledge that biological factors may operate in forming same-sex attraction. By taking seriously biological factors, is Mohler facing facts honestly as he calls evangelicals to do? Or is he improperly enabling gays as described by Exodus’ Mr. Walker?
I am glad that Rev. Mohler voiced his views about evangelicals and honesty when it comes to sexual orientation. I have been raising these issues for several years now, but it takes someone of Mohler’s stature to keep the conversation going. Despite Mohler’s influential position, his views are not universally accepted in SBC circles. Furthermore, it appears to me that even those who generally agree with Mohler need to work out, practically speaking, what that agreement means.
Roots of reparative therapy – Philip Wylie and megaloid momworship
For WWII and post war mom blamers such as Edward Strecker and Philip Wylie, moms were not just responsible for individual immaturity in their sons, they were, by extension, the ruination of democracy. Strecker (who referred to this book by Wylie in his book) made that case very directly in his book, Their Mothers’ Sons, which I reviewed briefly Monday and Tuesday.
In his book, Generation of Vipers, Philip Wylie aims his rhetorical gun at just about everyone; mother blaming was not his sole purpose. However, to best understand why mother blaming could take root so deeply in American culture, one needs to review Wylie’s chapter in Generation of Vipers, titled “Common Women.” I will give a few portions here.
Wylie apparently thought Freud cogent on matters of mother blame, writing:
Freud has made a fierce and wondrous catalogue of examples of mother-love-in-action which traces its origin to an incestuous perversion of a normal instinct. That description is, of course, sound. Unfortunately, Americans, who are the most prissy people on earth, have been unable to benefit from Freud’s wisdom because they can prove that they do not, by and large, sleep with their mothers. That is their interpretation of Freud. Moreover, no matter how many times they repeat the Scriptures, they cannot get the true sense of the passage about lusting in one’s heart–especially when they are mothers thinking about their sons, or vice versa. (p. 185)
Wylie thinks mothers and sons are just sickening, creepy close. Americans however, are behaviorally oriented, he says. Since American men are not actually sleeping with their mothers, they can excuse their stifling emotional closeness. Wylie says instead that it is the thought that counts — men are too concerned about their moms, to the point of worship. He continues:
Meanwhile, Megaloid momworship has got completely out of hand. Our land, subjectively mapped, would have more silver cords and apron strings crisscrossing it than railroads and telephone wires. Mom is everywhere and everything and damned near everybody, and from her depends all the rest of the U. S. Disguised as good old mom, dear old mom, sweet old mom, your loving mom, and so on, she is the bride at every funeral and the corpse at every wedding. Men live for her and die for her, dote upon her and whisper her name as they pass away, and I believe she has now achieved, in the hierarchy of miscellaneous articles, a spot next to the Bible and the Flag, being reckoned part of both in a way. She may therefore soon be granted by the House of Representatives the especial supreme and extraordinary right of sitting on top of both when she chooses, which, God knows, she does. At any rate, if no such bill is under consideration, the presentation of one would cause little debate among the solons. These sages take cracks at their native land and makes jokes about Holy Writ, but nobody among them–no great man or brave–from the first day of the first congressional meeting to the present ever stood in our halls of state and pronounced the one indubitably most-needed American verity: “Gentlemen, mom is a jerk.”
Mom is something new in the world of men. Hitherto, mom has been so busy raising a large family, keeping house, doing the chores, and fabricating everything in every home except the floor and the walls that she was rarely a problem to her family or to her equally busy friends, and never one to herself. Usually, until very recently, mom folded up and died of hard work somewhere in the middle of her life. Old ladies were scarce and those who managed to get old did so by making remarkable inner adjustments and by virtue of a fabulous horniness of body, so that they lent to old age not only dignity but metal. (pp. 185-186)
According to Wylie, moms stifle men and reduce them to compliant boys.
Mom had already shaken him out of that notion of being a surveyor in the Andes which had bloomed in him when he was nine years old, so there was nothing left to do, anyway, but to take a stockroom job in the hairpin factory and try to work up to the vice-presidency. Thus the women of America raped the men, not sexually, unfortunately, but morally, since neuters come hard by morals. I pass over the obvious reference to the deadliness of the female of the species, excepting only to note that perhaps, having a creative physical part in the universe, she falls more easily than man into the contraposite role of spiritual saboteur. (pp. 187-188)
Much of the chapter is a full on attack on what Wylie perceives to be the ways of mom, comparing her at various times to Hitler and Satan, with most societal evils laid to rest at her door. Along the way, Wylie returns to the greatest achievement of mom, emasculating sons.
“Her boy,” having been “protected” by her love, and carefully, even shudderingly, shielded from his logical development through his barbaric period, or childhood (so that he has either to become a barbarian as a man or else to spend most of his energy denying the barbarism that howls in his brain – an autonomous remnant of the youth he was forbidden), is cushioned against any major step in his progress toward maturity. Mom steals from the generation of women behind her (which she has, as a still further defense, also sterilized of integrity and courage) that part of her boy’s personality which should have become the love of a female contemporary. Mom transmutes it into sentimentality for herself. (pp. 195-196)
Wylie goes on to develop the concept of mom as barrier to manhood (I imagine Wylie is god at the Mankind Project). The close-binding-intimate (CBI mother) mom of Irving Bieber, direct influence on Nicolosi and NARTH is a psychiatric incarnation of Wylie’s momistic mom. As an aside, Bieber was described in saintly tones during my brief sojourn in the NARTH wilderness with presentation after presentation blaming smother mothers and inept, cranky dads for the “condition” of homosexuality. Wylie, predating Bieber, ridicules men but blames moms for his plight.
The mealy look of men today is the result of momism and so the pinched and baffled fury in the eyes of womankind…we will first have to make the conquest of momism, which grew up from male default. (p. 197, 203)
In reparative drive theory for male homosexuality, the relationship with the father becomes more of a focus. Cultural and early psychiatric opinion focused on mom the usurper, but reparative therapy extends the fault lines to include the weak or aggressive but surely distant father who allows mom to conquer the triad of mother-son-father, with the son becoming the defensively detached pre-homosexual. The Strecker-Wylie-Nicolosi fix is simple and if you don’t understand why or how it works, trust them, they know.
Al Mohler says evangelicals have not told the truth about homosexuality; AFA's Bryan Fischer proves the point
Al Mohler, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told the Christian Science Monitor in March that Baptists have lied about homosexuality and practiced a “form of homophobia.”
Responding to questions about the CSM article, Mohler affirmed his belief that same-sex sexual behavior is sin, but then told the Associated Baptist Press:
“But we as evangelicals have a very sad history in dealing with this issue,” he continued. “We have told not the truth, but we have told about half the truth. We’ve told the biblical truth, and that’s important, but we haven’t applied it in the biblical way.”
“We have said to people that homosexuality is just a choice,” Mohler said. “It’s clear that it’s more than a choice. That doesn’t mean it’s any less sinful, but it does mean it’s not something people can just turn on and turn off. We are not a gospel people unless we understand that only the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ gives a homosexual person any hope of release from homosexuality.”
Rev. Mohler and I spoke together in 2008 at a meeting of Christian psychiatrists at the 2008 APA convention. He was saying the same things in that address and has consistently attempted to incorporate current research into his thinking about sexual orientation. Clearly, this stance has not changed his exegesis of Scripture, but he is calling evangelicals to stop at least some lying about gays.
On cue, however, is Bryan Fischer to quickly criticize Mohler for telling the truth. Fischer wrote:
On the whole, this was not a great week for the Southern Baptist Convention, as one of its leaders appeared to pander to the homosexual lobby and the convention itself pandered to lawbreakers, all in the space of two dizzying days.
Rev. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, urged attendees at the SBC’s annual convention to “repent” of what he called “a form of homophobia,” without saying exactly what kind of homophobia he was talking about.
Evidently, according to Rev. Mohler, if you don’t believe gays are born that way, you’re either a homophobe or right next to it. He told the delegates at the SBC that homosexuality is “more than a choice,” and that it apparently borders on something sinful to believe otherwise.
He did not elaborate on exactly what he meant by “more than a choice,” but what else could it mean but that he’s urging SBC’ers to accept the bogus claim that homosexuality is innate and that people can be homosexual from birth. Perhaps that’s not what he meant to say; if it wasn’t, then it’s important for him to clarify exactly what he did mean.
Mohler is pretty clear it seems to me. He is aware that research is not on the side of people who claim that being attracted to the same sex is a choice or some kind of easily reversible situation.
What a strange situation we have in the evangelical fold. One of our leading theologians speaks out on a issue of significance, and the culture warrior Bryan Fischer attacks him as he might an ideological opponent. Instead of considering the message, he attacks the messenger. I have experienced this myself and believe that the only orthodoxy that matters to the evangelical culture war complex (e.g., AFA, AFTAH, FRC, CWA, Liberty Counsel) is, “thou shalt demonize the gays.” All else is measured by this metric.
Many reading this blog will no doubt believe that Mohler does not go far enough and still promotes a harmful rhetoric. Others will understand that he is speaking to his constituents in language they understand which may help them come to a more honest, graceful place. I think Rev. Mohler can move a little further but, for now, I am glad Mohler is calling out the evangelical culture war complex and hope he continues to do so.
NARTH likes half of the NYT Magazine's coverage of sexual identity issues
NARTH is recommending the Glatze article but not the article by Mimi Swartz which addresses the APA position on sexual orientation change.
At least they tell readers
While the story is his own and does not necessarily represent a typical NARTH client his observations and thoughts are very interesting. They represent a perspective usually missing in the popular press on the subject of homosexuality.
Missing from the NARTH post is the perspective of the longer article of the two. Gotta go to the popular press for that.