Curbing homophobic bullying? Let's start with religions!

Comment

Comment by Little Name Atheist on July 18, 2009 at 10:20am

Cliff, there is a group for ex-Mormons here on Atheist Nexus. You might be able to find out if that is so by asking their. I don't know much about the Mormons, except they tend to travel in twos.

Comment by Andy Armitage on July 7, 2009 at 9:35am

Yeah, that's the one. I think the blog piece I wrote either says that or links to a story that does.

Comment by Little Name Atheist on July 7, 2009 at 9:21am

That's the minister involved with Soulforce, yes?

Comment by Andy Armitage on July 7, 2009 at 9:04am

Hi, Méabh. Yes, it's crazy, isn't it? They talk of "promoting" homosexuality as if one were standing on a street corner selling tickets to a gay orgy. They are obviously so afraid of even having it talked about in a neutral, let alone positive, light, lest someone suddenly see their scriptures and the risible prescriptions and proscriptions in them for the nonsense that they are, and start to use reason instead. I actually agree that people should be able to express an opinion, because I value freedom of expression, which means that, if a preacher wanted to say from his pulpit on a Sunday morning that he thought being gay was wrong because it says so in Leviticus and other places, then so be it. I may disagree with him and secretly want to strangle him, but he's not inciting violence. But within a classroom situation, when kids coming to terms with their sexuality are studying relationships, for the kid in the school up the road to be told one relationship is as good as another while the kid in this school (the Catholic school, say) is being told that he can love someone of the opposite sex but to love someone of the same sex is morally evil is just plain bad. I did a blog post some time ago about an American priest who said, "I can't tell you how many gay Catholic kids I've buried who killed themselves because they didn't believe God loved them." (You can see that here.)

Comment by Little Name Atheist on July 7, 2009 at 8:47am

I'm having a hard time getting my head around people thinking (or at least trying to get people to think) that somehow homosexuality would be promoted under the old code.

I don't understand how so many people can still be Catholic when the church preaches against their very being. I stopped being Catholic when I was a teenager.