God, Gays, and Uganda

by Cristian Asher · 2010-01-18 09:27:00 UTC
Topics:

Uganda has been considering legislation to imprison homosexuals and those who fail to report them. As Rachel Maddow has been covering for months, this bill has strong ties to the U.S. evangelical movement, most particularly that super-fringy part of it that claims to be able to “pray away the gay.”

This last part is something I can speak to. When I was 22, I experienced a born again conversion and spent the next seven years seeking to change my sexuality.

I’m not here to dive into the minutiae of the “cure the gay” movement or debunk its imbecilic philosophies. Suffice it to say that in my quest for straightness, I did everything I was told. I read Christian self-help books and studied the Bible for hours. I entered counseling and attended men’s group meetings. I prayed. I prayed for hours every single day, on my knees and sitting in my room and alone in my car. My sexuality did not change one iota. If anything, it became more undeniable as I worked out other lifelong issues.

Luckily for me, my early Christian training was to seek God personally, not just accept whatever the closest pastor said without question. I learned, as I did that, that much of organized Christianity has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ, and much of the Bible has nothing whatsoever to do with modern life. It's great literature and a fascinating document and all that, but do we really want to base our morality on the self-serving mythology of a particularly warlike tribe from the Bronze Age? I don't think so.

But I’m certainly not here to say no one should be a Christian, or even an evangelical. I believe in the value of religious practice, and that nearly any path that gets you there is valid.

What is not valid, obviously, is to criminalize anyone’s sexuality. My adventures in the world of super-conservative religion had a happy ending. Not so for our brothers and sisters in Uganda. Even now, there are new efforts to pass this hateful legislation, and the latest news is that its author may even be a guest at the National Prayer Breakfast next month.

Mass murderers for breakfast. How charming.

Photo credit: Blackwine

Cristian Asher is a writer and graphic designer from California, where he and his husband are one of California's 18,000 legally married same-sex couples.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Could Title IX Help Stop Anti-Gay Bullying?
NEXT STORY:
Bullied high schooler convinces MPAA to change ‘Bully’ rating to “PG-13”

COMMENTS (8)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.