SubscribeAt the table, we drink coffee and share a salad. "You're not wearing your wedding ring."Not wearing your wedding ring while away from your spouse has a smell to it. And there is a subtext to that first part that bothers me. Marriage is "tough." Tough to stay faithful?
He looks down at his hand, then back at me. "Well, you know, marriage is tough."
-----big snip------
He heads back to Victoria. In a few days, he'll fly home to his wife and child, where his public life presides, his inner life remains a secret.
People who have strong desires that are contradicted by their moral beliefs have a decision to make regarding which one is more important to them: their beliefs or their desires. But when those are the two things between which the choice must be made, it is just as stupid to say that their beliefs are the problem as it is to say that their desires are the problem.I believe people who wear white shoes/pants after labor day should be bludgeoned with payphone handsets. But, I can't do it because murder is wrong. The belief isn't the problem?
-JekPorkins
"The lure of unwanted same-sex desires is much like the sirens’ song once heard by Odysseus. It is strong in its call, and works strongly against the will....Those who hear the sirens’ song of same-sex desires must be warned to resist with every fiber of their being. They must hear the story of Odysseus. They must understand that to choose to surrender is to choose to dash the ship of one's life on the sharp, jagged rocks of the homosexual lifestyle."
-- Ken Ervin, Concerned Women For America (CWFA), "Personal Responsibility, Temptation and Homosexual Desires"
“If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one’s own personal amusement, and all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get- and that is what homosexuality seems to be-then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist. The evidence is that men do a better job on men and women on women, if all you are looking for is orgasm.” So powerful is the allure of gays, Cameron believes, that if society approves that gay people, more and more heterosexuals will be inexorably drawn into homosexuality. “I’m convinced that lesbians are particularly good seducers,” says Cameron. “People in homosexuality are incredibly evangelical,” he adds, sounding evangelical himself. “It’s pure sexuality. It’s almost like pure heroin. It’s such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. And they’ll take enormous risks, do anything.” He says that for married men and women, gay sex would be irresistible. “Martial sex tends toward the boring end,” he points out. “Generally, it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does.” [source]
Sometimes I wonder if evangelicals really believe that gay men can go straight. If they don't think Chad Allen can play straight convincingly for 108 minutes, do they honestly imagine that gay men who aren't actors can play straight for a lifetime? And if anyone reading this believes that gay men can actually become ex-gay men, I have just one question for you: Would you want your daughter to marry one?
Evangelical Christians seem sincere in their desire to help build healthy, lasting marriages. Well, if that's their goal, encouraging gay men to enter into straight marriages is a peculiar strategy. Every straight marriage that includes a gay husband is one Web-browser-history check away from an ugly divorce.
If anything, supporters of traditional marriage should want gay men out of the heterosexual marriage market entirely. And the best way to do that is to see that we're safely married off — to each other, not to your daughters. Let gay actors like Chad Allen only play it straight in the movies.
"Today, with so many Biblical literalists around, we have to fuss about what Scripture actually says, but in the early centuries after Christ’s death such questions were less important, because most people couldn’t read. The four Gospels, for the most part, are collections of oral traditions. Once they were written down, they served as a guide for preaching, but only as a guide. Preachers embroidered upon them freely, and artists—indeed, everyone—made their own adjustments....The literal word of God? Or, the evolution of a collection of religious myths and parables written down after years of oral telling akin to the 'Gilgamesh' for the Babylonians', the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' for the Greeks; 'The Aeneid' for the Romans?
As [English scholar Marina] Warner shows, many of the details of the Nativity so familiar to us from paintings and hymns and school pageants—'the hay and the snow and the smell of animals’ warm bodies' —are not in the New Testament. People made them up; they wanted a better story....
Europe, once it was converted to Christianity, was not content to have all those holy people in the Bible confine their activities—or, more important, their relics—to the Middle East."
[Optimus] How in the fuck can one outside of a consentual relationship be harmed by it?Your example is not one that demonstrates how someone outside of a consensual relationship is harmed. The wife is not an outsider, and the husband has not obtained consent.
[JP] Well, Optimus, a good example of this would be when a married man has a consensual sexual relationship with someone other than his wife, and his wife is hurt because of it.
i'm sorry, dgaicun. Are you saying that all gay men who are married to women look at gay internet porn?No, Dan Savage was saying it, and he was intentionally using stereotypes as shorthand.
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posted by five fresh fish at 8:32 AM on February 15, 2006