If a cow ever got the chance...

There are some people you really don't want working in your AIDS hospice:

"I have spent more than four decades counseling young people in university ministries and recovery programs. A few years ago, I was confronted by a friend who was watching me struggle to assist AIDS hospice ministries. He said, "Don, we've got to find a way to stop this problem before it starts. If we don't, we're fighting a losing battle."

I was inspired by my friend's words. Never before had I thought about the prevention of homosexuality." (italics his, dropped jaw mine, story here if you really want)

I've been poking around various ex-gay websites today. For some reason I am obsessed with fundamentalist Christianity, and have been ever since the well-meaning parents forced me to endure what was basically an evangelical born-again "it's really cool to accept Jesus as your personal Savior-dude" confirmation process when I was 13. (This despite the fact that they themselves are reasonably liberal and free-thinking Christians--Methodists--and wouldn't have stood for the crap I was hearing for ten seconds if it had been them sitting there. I don't like to bitch about them on here because they were generally great parents, so I want to make it clear that this was one of their few major lapses in judgment.)

Anyway, I'm trying not to engage in mindless Christian-bashing--my mom would say that I am looking for ways to discredit Christianity by focusing on the evil fundamentalist contingent so I won't have to face up to the fact that I have a spiritual side. Something about a baby and some bathwater. Who knows, it could be true. But it really seems that one doesn't meet many of the nice Christians who go to church to see their friends and spend time thinking about how to reconcile the Christian patriarchy with feminism. You just get people like this chick who would appear to be evil personified.

Okay, it's not like 99.9 percent of the population don't think the ex-gay movement is a bunch of horseshit... but it bothers me because I think it's doing real damage to the people who actually are in contact with it. Like, one of their big victories has been to get resources for gay teenagers out of the public schools. My consolation is that someday John Paulk (the happily heterosexually converted head of Focus on the Family's "homosexual ministry"--before that he was a really cute drag queen; he was caught hitting on someone in a gay bar in September 2000, many years after he supposedly went straight) will wake up and realize that he's missed out on like fifty years of exciting dick action.

Still, it's really rotten. If there was a group that dealt with say, various "minority" races the way this bunch deals with homosexuality, they would be called the KKK and people would be trying to ban them all the time. Not that I'm advocating for censorship, I would just like to rid myself of the nagging feeling that many people who aren't wackos take this fundamentalist stuff seriously and think it's basically a sound idea.

Okay, this entry was a lot more logical and witty and incisive when I wrote it in my head on the train. I'll stop.

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