Category: sexual orientation

Interviews with Joseph Nicolosi

Here is a three part interview with Joseph Nicolosi, who discusses his views of homosexuality and his approach to therapy.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
I don’t agree with the basic theory but I wanted to provide the links for those of us who study the various approaches. When I study an approach, I like to have the current information, and these appear to be very recent.
Let’s have an open forum on this…

Jay's got hope

Stuff’s changing in the sexual identity world. Early in 2008, Wendy Gritter talks up some new directions and all along the way College Jay has been waxing eloquent about his journey. He has a post that I am linking to because it illustrates a fresh, clear Evangelical perspective on sexual identity development.
Here is a bit to get you started:

I like Wendy Gritter, and I like New Direction. She’s a sweet and Christ-focused woman and I think New Direction is one of the most Christ-centered ministries for people that deal with same-sex attraction. I was upset when I read her recent blog post about a colleague that has been claiming New Direction “doesn’t offer hope anymore.”
Now, I’m not going to refute that statement here. Ms. Gritter has already done extremely well with that in the linked post, and I highly suggest you read it. I will offer my own personal story, though. I’ve never been involved with New Direction (sadly, I’m not Canadian), and the only contact I’ve had with Ms. Gritter is through comments on her blog. However, I think out of all these types of ministries, New Direction’s philosopy most closely resembles my own, and even I have been accused, in a round-about way, of not having enough hope.
Usually when someone makes that kind of snarky remark about hope, what they mean to say is that I’m not falling over myself in an effort to be straight. I’m comfortable and happy as I am. I’m not comfortable with my sins or my temptations, mind you, but at the same time I’m not stressed about how I dress, or how I talk, or how I express my emotions, or whether or not a pretty young woman turns my head. The way some of the ex-gay ministries talk, you’d think that a “normal” heterosexual existence with a dog, yard, and three kids was a Biblical mandate.

Now go read the rest and send some love toward Mr. Jay.

Should we be culture warriors? Thoughts on church and state

Sally Kern, with help from my friend and colleague at Grove City College, T. David Gordon provides today’s open forum discussion.
Mrs. Kern is in the news today about a speech she gave in Norman, OK about her entrance into government and her role as a “culture warrior.” She says:

“I started praying about whether or not the Lord wanted me to run,” Kern said. “And the more I prayed, the more I felt He did.”
Kern said she expected to “run, lose and just be a much better government teacher.”
“But lo and behold I won,” she said. “And so here I am, and I’m not the typical legislator. The Lord showed me right off the bat that I’m not supposed to be. As a matter of fact, my Lord made it very clear to me that I am a cultural warrior. And you know I tried to say ‘no’ to that, too, ’cause that’s pretty hard. But, anyway, that’s where I am.”

I cannot discern however, what Mrs. Kern believes government should do. On one hand, she talks about preserving the founders reliance on “one true religion” and on the other she indicates that

“Government cannot force people to change, and yet we see that’s what government is doing,” she said. “Every time government passes another law, they are taking away some of our freedoms.”

I do agree that government cannot force people to change, but I am unclear how government is making people change. If homosexuals pursuing the democratic process to elect legislators and pass laws is more threatening than terrorism, then what would winning the culture war against homosexuality look like? I have a clearer picture in my mind about winning over a foreign aggressor would look like. But if homosexuals are using the democratic process (elections, laws, courts) to pursue their interests, then how will the Christian culture warriors win? What will victory look like?
I fear that many colleagues on the religious right want the coercive power of the state to enforce a particular view of morality, one that comports with their understanding of Christianity. I might like others to believe like me but I surely think it is futile to seek the state to bring it about. Closer to the therapy world, where I usually labor, I do not believe that counselors should use the coercive power of the counseling relationship to attempt to inculcate religious fruit. We can provide information but the results are not in our hands.
On this point, last school year, Religion prof at GCC, T. David Gordon presented a paper titled, “Religious Arguments for Separating Church and State” at our annual Center for Vision and Values conference. I was edified by this presentation and link to it here. A couple of excerpts gives the tone and direction of the paper:

In the so-called “culture wars” of the late twentieth century, one commonly hears allegations that the separation of church and state reflects and promotes a “secularist” agenda. It is certainly true that most secularists (such as Paul Kurtz, in the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II) wish to separate church and state. However, many religious individuals and societies favor such separation also; therefore it is misleading to refer to separation of church and state as a secular or secularist idea. The purpose of this brief survey is to list some of the religious arguments that have been presented in favor of separation, so that religious people may consider those arguments as “friendly” to their faith-commitments, rather than hostile to them.

and regarding individual liberty:

For Protestant Christianity, the doctrine of the conscience plays a very important role.
Unlike the Baltimore Catechism of the Catholic Church, where conscience normally appears only in sections dealing with Penance or Confession, some Protestant confessions have an entire chapter devoted to it, such as the Westminster Confession’s chapter on “Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience.” Within this understanding, an action or belief is only morally approved when it is a sincere act, an act that accords with conscientious faith. The conscience is thus “free” from false authority to serve God, the true Authority. Any professed faith or outwardly religious act that is merely done to avoid civil penalties is not an act of any true moral worth. When the beliefs and practices of the church are prescribed by the State with its coercive powers, this does not promote true religion, but hypocrisy. For many Protestants, therefore, one of the best ways to preserve true liberty of the individual conscience is to leave that conscience entirely free, in religious matters, from considerations of civil consequences.

Some laws which coerce moral behavior are needed to protect us all from each other. I am very glad when going to my car at night at the mall that the threat of punishment from the state might prevent some would be attackers from carrying out the desires of their evil hearts. However, as T. David states so well, some (many, which ones?) matters of personal liberty should be off limits from the state.
With that background, I will turn it over to the forum. I encourage you to read Dr. Gordon’s well-crafted paper. What is the proper role of a Christian in governance? How are legislators to govern in a plural society? Given that Christians were so involved in the founding of the nation, why did they create such protections for pluralism of belief, including the ability to believe nothing and pursue happiness via that worldview? How do we best advance the mission of the church? In which vision of governance is personal and religious liberty best achieved?

Homosexuality and son-father estrangement

After posting the review of Bieber, I ran across a link to the following excerpt of a book by Michael Quinn which raises strong doubts about how poor father-son relationships could cause homosexuality.
He notes that fathers and sons in our culture have historically had “issues.”

For sixty years, various studies have demonstrated that a significant percentage, perhaps a majority, of American males have always felt estranged from the fathers who raised them. As early as 1928, Meyer F. Nimkoff found that 60 percent of the 1,336 males he studied (average age twenty-two) did not feel close enough to their fathers to confide in them, and the father-son relationship was distant in other significant ways. He concluded: “If sons withhold trust from their fathers, it appears they deny his leadership and limit association with him, also.”[3] Researchers have also noted that one-third to one-half of American teenage boys and adult men regard their fathers as “distant,” unaccepting, “cold or indifferent.” The psychiatrist Irving Bieber found that 37 percent of the heterosexual males he studied even said they “hated” their fathers, which was paralleled by a study that 21 percent of male heterosexuals at the University of Utah disliked their fathers.
As indirect evidence of this widespread father-son emotional dysfunction, studies of thousands of American adolescents since the 1930s have shown that only 5-22 percent of the young men “preferred” their fathers. In contrast, 34-76 percent of young men listed their mother as the preferred parent, even though the surveys also allowed sons to indicate equal preference or no preference. These statistics apply to young men in families without divorce. In addition, 82 percent of males in a 1978 study felt alienated from their fathers, while a 1985 study reported that only 8 percent of 500 male adolescents felt “loved” by their fathers.
Thus, claiming father-son emotional distance as the explanation for male homosexuality is similar to claiming that right-handedness causes homosexuality merely because most homosexuals are right-handed. The equation “abdicating fathers, homosexual sons” is a theory based on isolating homosexual experiences from human experiences generally. Typically, authors whose “reparative therapy of male homosexuality depends on “a failed relationship to father” do not acknowledge such well-known studies of father-son “failure” among American males generally. As the psychiatrist Richard Green, whose own research was originally based on the assumption of parental causation, has observed: “A gnawing question in these studies is what percent of heterosexuals answer all items [concerning father-son relationships] in the ‘homosexual direction’ and what percent of homosexuals answer all items in the ‘heterosexual direction’.” Because of such inconsistencies, Green returned to genetic or other biological determinants for homosexuality.

Quinn proposes that a son who is different in the gender sense might actually pull away from dad and not the other way around.

Another fallacy involves attaching great significance to the finding of many studies that homosexual men are “more likely” to describe their fathers as “distant, hostile, or rejecting” than heterosexual sons are. Such a pattern is unsurprising in a culture that has negative judgments about homosexuality. In other words, since both heterosexual and homosexual American males report unsatisfactory relationships with their fathers, the higher incidence of strain between homosexual sons and their fathers is more likely a result of the sons’ “homosexual tendencies” rather than the cause