How one Christian responded to the "It Gets Better" project

Did you come here hoping this was one of those times a Christian defies negative stereotypes and welcomes gays with open arms?

Well, sorry to disappoint you.

A couple days ago I mentioned Dan Savage’s wonderful It Gets Better project, which aims to reach suicidal gay teens via YouTube since many can’t get help anywhere else. I can hardly watch the videos without getting choked up. But here’s a video this Christian decided to upload as a response, named the Lot Project:

A partial transcript for those who are too enraged to watch to completion:

“Billy Lucus, who hanged himself, obviously because he was gay, and unable to endure the guilt that the words of others prompted in him. This was indeed a tragedy, but not anywhere near the tragedy that Billy will discover in eternity when he faces the wrath of God upon rebellious and unrepentant sinners. Then, he will realize that his sin could not be atoned for by his own death, and he will realize that people like Dan Savage who encourage sin are deceivers. He will see them for what they are, the blind leading the blind. And he will realize that he has fallen into that ditch that the blind leading the blind inevitably fall into: that’s eternal destruction and misery. Sadly, it’s too late for Billy. For those who are viewing this video, however, their remains the opportunity of turning from sin to the obedience of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Now, before someone jumps in here screaming about how I’m a horrible person for assuming all Christians are this hateful, delusional, and ignorant – save your breath. I know. Plenty of Christians are wonderful people, pro-gay rights, and even gay themselves. This by no means represents every single Christian on the planet.

But you know what? If you want us to think those good, loving, caring Christians outnumber the awful ones, maybe you should put forth just a *tad* bit more effort in making that obvious, since this version of Christianity seems pretty common to me.

And no, hollering that this man isn’t a “true” Christian doesn’t help your argument.

Next item on the gay agenda

Oh Indiana. And to think this happened in one of our biggest, most liberal (relatively) cities.

This is what they were after: a mulitcolored cupcake to celebrate “National Coming Out Day” next month; a rainbow confection to honor the diversity on the campus of IUPUI. But the student who had the order placed at Just Cookies was told no. […]

“Look around, we don’t have cupcakes,” said owner Lilly Stockton.

Stockton said she talked to someone who did ask for rainbow cookies but couldn’t accommodate the order.

Stockton: “I don’t have enough colors to do that.”

Reporter: “Not enough colors, not because you didn’t like what they stood for?”

Stockton: “She didn’t tell me what it was for.”

Oh, wait, that sounds like a reasonable excuse. I’m sure other people from the store would back her up.

Then we talked to her husband David, who gradually made it clear that there was an earlier order… and yes, the customer was refused.

“I explained we’re a family-run business, we have two young, impressionable daughters and we thought maybe it was best not to do that,” said co-owner David Stockton.

Nevermind.

To quote one of my fellow grad students: “First cupcakes, then THE WORLD!”

Who knew gays were like CO2?

Looks like Global Warming is in need of a scientific update:

Clerics in the South Pacific have fingered the key cause of climate change – homosexuals.

The revelation came at a conference at the University of the South Pacific considering the implications of Climate Change and Creativity.

Academics were apparently thrown off their consideration of “Arts in the Age of Global Warming” and “Ecology in Poetry / Poetry in Ecology” by reports of Church Ministers who maintained that climate change in Samoa are clearly attributable to to homosexuals.

Come on, that’s preposterous. How in the world do gays cause climate change? I mean…

…wait a second.

GBLT.

Global Bolstering of Lavalike Temperatures.

Oh my god.

An ingenious plan, gay agenda. An ingenious plan.

Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better Project”

Last week an Indiana teen committed suicide thanks to merciless anti-gay bullying at his school. It stings that it’s from my home state, but it hurts more that this isn’t shocking. Gay teens are four times more likely to commit suicide, especially if they don’t live in urban areas. Which is why Dan Savage thought of this wonderful project:

I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren’t allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don’t bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

So here’s what you can do, GBVWS: Make a video. Tell them it gets better. […]

Today we have the power to give these kids hope. We have the tools to reach out to them and tell our stories and let them know that it does get better. Online support groups are great, GLSEN does amazing work, the Trevor Project is invaluable. But many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. They can’t imagine a future for themselves. So let’s show them what our lives are like. Let’s show them what the future may hold in store for them.

I faced a lot of anti-gay teasing in middle school and high school even though I was straight. Because, dontcha know, anyone who’s friends with gay people must themselves be gay. I can’t imagine how bad it would have been if I actually was a lesbian, or if I hadn’t had boyfriends. Not to mention the fact that our principal fought tooth an nail against us forming a Gay Straight Alliance my senior year. Heaven forbid we form a safe community for harassed students.

If you’re a GLBT adult, please consider uploading your own video and submitting it by emailing Dan (mail (at) savagelove (dot) net). This may be our best chance to reach kids who need to hear that life is worth living, yes, even if you’re gay.

Oh gay stereotypes

Thursday night: Gay Male Friend lets me sleep on his futon

Gay Male Friend: Okay, so here’s your futon, and I’ve put out two different blankets in case you get cold, and there are three pillows but let me know if you want more, and there’s a towel in the bathroom on the door you can use, and in the morning I’ll make breakfast!
Me: You don’t have to make me breakfast…
Gay Male Friend: I know I don’t have to, but I want to!

Morning rolls around…

Gay Male Friend: What do you want to drink? I have orange juice, apple juice, milk –
Me: Uh, apple juice would be great.
Gay Male Friend: Oh, and this is my awesome pancake recipe, I hope you like it.
Me: …You’re making pancakes from scratch?
Gay Male Friend: Of course!
Me: …None of my straight male friends are going to do this.

Friday night: Straight Male Friend 1 lets me sleep on couch

Straight Male Friend 1: So, uh, here’s the couch. Let me go get a blanket.
Me: Uh, do you possibly have a towel I could use in the morning?
Straight Male Friend 1: Oh, sure *gets one*
Me: *…tries not to think where the towel has been*
Straight Male Friend 1: I don’t have much to offer for breakfast. I live off a diet of rice and beans.
Me: *laughs*
Straight Male Friend 1: No, I’m serious.
Me: …

Saturday night: Straight Male Friend 2 lets me sleep on couch

Me: …Uh, so can I have a blanket?
Straight Male Friend 2: Oh, sure, yeah *gets one*. Okay, good night!
Me: …There’s no pillow… gah… *uses cushion from other couch as emergency pillow*

After this, explaining this trend to Gay Male Friend 2

Me: And Gay Male Friend 1 even made me pancakes!
Gay Male Friend 2: Wait, from a box or from scratch?
Me: From scratch!
Gay Male Friend 2: Oh, good, I make them from scratch too.
Me: Goddamnit, why are all the good ones gay?

Apple censors Lady Gaga’s pro-gay tweets

Apple has just come out with Ping, their new music social media network (aka a clone of Last.fm*). They decided to use Lady Gaga as their example on what following a celebrity page would look like.
The problem is when you compare it to here actual tweets and see which ones they conveniently cut out:
Oh Apple. Gambling and strip clubs make the cut, but not gay rights? Nope, chop those out with the references to hookers, manwhores, and gingers.

Seriously, if your motivation is to not show any political tweets, why not find a point in time where she made three non-political PG rated tweets in a row? …Okay, this is Lady Gaga we’re talking about, so maybe you could have just chosen some other famous singer. Instead you choose a PR disaster.

And just when I thought an iPhone was in my future. May have to reconsider an Android…

*Now you can spy on what music I listen to too, woo.

(Via violet blue (NSFW))

Niece of Martin Luther King Jr. compares gay marriage to “genocide”

What a shame that a relative of a great civil rights leader would be spouting such vitriol about gays. Dr. Alveda King was one of the speakers at the National Organization for Marriage rally that just took place in Atlanta. Not to be outdone by the other hateful nonsense being peddled there, Dr. King threw in her own two cents:

“It is statistically proven that the strongest institution that guarantees procreation and continuity of the generations is marriage between one man and one woman. I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to be extinct and none of us wants to be. We don’t want genocide, we don’t want to destroy the sacred institution of marriage.”

Because marriage is only about making babies. Which is why people have to take a fertility test before receiving their marriage license. And why marriages are required to end once a woman hits menopause. And why we poke holes in the condoms of couples who don’t want children.

You know what really guarantees procreation? Sex. Regardless if it occurs after you’ve signed some paperwork or not. If Dr. King is concerned about this, I’m sure she’ll quickly add how she’s all for unmarried couples having children, right? Or is she just worried that a small fraction of society showing their love for a partner of the same sex will magically turn every human being on the face of the planet gay?

Ironically, if she was really concerned with the extinction of Homo sapiens, she would be a bit more concerned about overpopulation and it’s potentially disastrous effects. You know, something gay people don’t usually contribute to.

My super secret spy mission to a Focus on the Family event

Friday night I embarked on a top secret mission with Hemant of Friendly Atheist (who has his thoughts on our adventure here). Hemant brought the event to my attention. Because I like him so much and I’m a bit of a masochist, I agreed to tag along. We headed to Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL for the Focus on the Family Celebrate Family Tour:If you’re not familiar with FotF, you should be tipped off by the fact that “Family” is in their name. I’ve ranted about them here before – about them calling Harry Potter witchcraft, spreading misinformation about gay parenting, and wasting money on misleading pro-life Super Bowl ads. I’m not exactly a fan of this conservative Christian organization, but I was willing to listen for a night out of curiosity and the desire for blog fodder.

Hemant and I had some fun hyping this up in our minds. …Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a spy mission since anyone could attend and when we signed up we used our real names. Yeah, awesome spies. But I still had the Mission Impossible theme song playing through my head, and we even made up aliases. I was his wife (woo, take that fangirls!) who was trying to show my heathen husband why Christianity was so awesome. We picked 3/14 as our anniversary because we’re nerds and that’s the only date we could remember.

We later discovered we were terrible spies because 1) A good Christian woman would have taken her husband’s last name, 2) We didn’t have wedding rings, and 3) I know diddly poop about acting like a Christian. I also tried to fit in by wearing my Sunday’s best, but I later realized the new Christian fashion is all about capris. Seriously, every woman there was wearing capris. I think this was just a ploy to get me into a skirt for the first time in years.

Proof for the skeptical. Also, yay Christ and his kingdom.

Hey, at least we were smart enough to take Hemant’s car. My Darwin Fish, Obama sticker, and Republicans for Voldemort sticker probably would have given us away.

Anyway.

I’m not going to spend time discussing certain Christian tropes that you hear all the time (“It’s not about you, it’s about God,” “God saved me from death! …but not from breaking my legs,” etc). 1) I’ve discussed them before, and 2) I can discuss them later – they’re not exactly specific to this particular event. So even though many things had me facepalming, I’ll save them.

The event had about 1,000 people in attendance. It opened with FotF President Jim Daly sharing some personal stories and explaining the different programs that FotF organizes. FotF is known for its rabid pro-life and anti-gay marriage stances, so I was impressed by how much good they actually are doing (or at least attempting to do). I wasn’t aware that FotF was so active in encouraging adoption* or providing marriage counseling (though we could debate how useful Christian counseling is over getting counseling from a psychologist…).

*(An aside on the adoption thing. Apparently one of the higher-up officials with the Colorado adoption agency, a Dr. Sharon (missed her last name), told FotF that “The best homes for these kids are Christian homes” and wished there were more of them. This may have been said in confidence, but wow. Kind of not a good thing if a government employee is viewing a certain religion as superior when deciding who gets to adopt children.)

I have to give them props for being aware of this problem – people not knowing about their good works. They mentioned it several times throughout the night, and stressed the idea that “If we want people to believe in Christianity’s message, we need to show them the actual good it’s doing.” Again, we could debate if that message is true or not, but I’m all for Christians being less hypocritical when it comes to being moral/doing good works.

Some of the stuff he said was definitely silly though. Apparently 9 year olds are never supposed to say “no” to their parents. Yep, train your children to be good little unthinking drones! Oh, and Nick at Night is horrible television for your child to be watching. That explains why I turned out the way I did. Thanks a lot, I Love Lucy.

The main part of the program was with Dr. Emerson Eggerichs of Love and Respect Ministries and his wife Sarah (…is it bad that this makes me think of the Ministry of Love from 1984?). They mostly discussed the following quote from Ephesians 5:22-33:

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything… 33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Of course, when I say “they,” I mean Emerson did almost all of the talking while Sarah just sat there and looked pretty. I’m not sure why she was even there, other than so they can say “Look, we’re progressive and including women in our discussions!” …Except not really.

Emerson’s main message was that this passage wasn’t about submission, but about the different ways men and women communicate. He claimed women desire to be loved, and men desire to be respected. This claim was “supported” by a poll FotF did of its members – not exactly a scientific study of all men and women. During conflict, when women feel unloved they respond with disrespect, and when men feel disrespected they respond by being unloving. This starts what he refers to as the “crazy cycle” where a fight will just escalate until, apparently, someone realizes the Bible is telling them to stop.

While I appreciate the attempt to say this isn’t about submission (but not some of his pot shots at feminists), it’s still just replacing one stereotype about men and women with another. Great, women don’t have to “submit” to men – but we’re hyper emotional beings that communicate completely differently. He even referred to women as having “Pink glasses, pink hearing aids, and pink megaphones.” Next time someone doesn’t understand me, I’ll try to put away the pink megaphone, I guess.

This part of the program got kind of old after a while – Emerson just basically repeated the same thing for an hour. But then we got to see the comedian Jeff Allen perform. He was actually really funny – we were a bit doubtful at the beginning what a “Christian comedian” would be like. Some of his jokes were about God or religion, but they were ones anyone would find amusing, even a couple of atheists.

I should say, he was really funny most of the time. At the end of his act he felt the need to lay the evangelizing on thick, and tell a serious story about how finding Christ saved his life, etc etc. It wasn’t lame because it was about Jesus or Christianity – I was eating up the rest of his skit. It just…wasn’t funny. His job was to be a comedian, so it just came off as totally awkward to get up on his soap box. It would have been equally awkward if a comedian started going off on how awesome atheism is without actually making any jokes.

Not to mention this was the one moment of the night someone decided to take pot shots at atheists. I made sure to take some quick notes on what I learned about myself:Yep, the whole atheists are depressed canard. It never gets old, does it?! Hemant and I decided we weren’t living up to our atheist standards, and we needed to angst and shoot up heroine more. Or something like that.

There were a couple of general things that struck me as odd, from the perspective of an outsider looking in:

1. Well, feeling like such an outsider. Even though no one knew Hemant and I were a couple of atheists (I promise we were respectful through the whole thing), I still felt out of place. As someone who was not brought up in a Christian household, there are just so many cultural things I don’t know about. Certain phrases or ideas seemed to elicit unanimous mumbled praise from the audience… usually the phrases that I found particularly silly or contemptible. And the way all heads instantaneously snapped down when a prayer started was just odd to someone who hasn’t been trained to do those mannerisms.

Not to mention the inside Christian jokes. Apparently Lutherans are very “cerebral”, and this titillated the audience. Anyone care to explain this in-joke to me?

2. FotF seems to think that any sign of interest is equivalent to winning over supporters. They’ll probably love this blog post if they find it. I don’t know if this is wishful thinking or purposeful spin, but it popped up a lot. For example, Daly made a comment how the former President of the National Organization for Women supported FotF’s right to have a pro-life Super Bowl ad. Daly quipped with a grin, “You know something’s going on,” referring to her support. Yeah, an understanding of freedom of speech is going on.

Another example of this is when they mentioned how 27 non-Christian Comcast staff members were helping them film one of their events. The staff mentioned they had never heard religion discussed that way before, and asked for more information. More information does not automatically mean you converted all of those people – but that’s how FotF framed it. I often ask for more information from religious people when I think they’re particularly wacky, not correct.

3. The Christian Veneer. I can’t get over this phenomena. Most of what FotF was saying throughout the night in terms of families and relationships with your spouse was fairly relatable and sane. It was the same sort of advice you’d hear from many secular self-help books like the typical Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus idea (as untrue as that may be).

…But then they had to go and slap Jesus all over it. Is it not enough to just love your spouse, respect their feelings, and compromise a little with them without having a Bible verse telling you to do it? Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists have the same problems and the same solutions. It’s not the Bible that’s giving you the answers – you’re just cherry picking things from the Bible that happen to fit your solution… after you’ve come to it.

4. They didn’t mention gay marriage at all. Hemant and I were both really disappointed. We figured with their fervent anti-gay marriage stance and the recent Prop 8 ruling that they’d be sure to say something. Nada. I guess it just wasn’t the topic of the night. But if anything, I’m now convinced we need more gay marriages because of this event. I mean, the whole thing was about how marital strife comes from men and women inherently communicating differently. If it was a man communicating with a man or a woman communicating with a woman, no problem, right?!

5. All the speakers seemed genuinely nice. This shouldn’t be shocking, but FotF has some platforms that are so nasty that it’s sometimes hard to separate the people from the ideas. I constantly have to remind myself that Christians go out of their way to evangelize and fight for their specific morals because they truly believe in them and care about people. It may be misguided and ultimately harmful, but they’re really doing it with good intentions. I’m sure any of the speakers would be great to chat with over tea… I just don’t want them making any sort of laws. Nor will I stop criticizing their viewpoints just because they’re trying to be nice – it just helps to know where these people are coming from when you do have to debate them.

I’m still no fan of FotF. While they’ve become a bit humanized to me, I still can’t support most of what their organization is doing. Adoption is awesome, but not when you only think heterosexual Christians make good homes. Marriage counseling is great, but not when you assume all other religions are doomed to have failed relationships. Continuing to perpetuate myths about atheists is…well, not so hot. And hell, one of their college programs focuses on teaching students about creationism and intelligent design – it was difficult for this evolutionary biologist to not start facepalming in the middle of the event.

You know, it would be nice if people from FotF would attend some of our godless events. Maybe we could become a bit more humanized, instead of representing depression and debauchery.

…As much as I do like debauchery.