A Facebook friend left the following comment on my wall the other day:
"My girlfriend is an 'ex-miracle'. Her step family used to parade her around to their circle of churches and proclaimed to anyone that would listen that she was "HEALED" of being a lesbian. I have since been called (by these same family members) "SATANS PACKAGE". I have to wonder at their arrogance - they proclaim an all powerful God, and yet don’t trust him enough to create people as He sees fit. They feel that they need to spend their lives trying to 'fix' what He created so that we all fit into perfect Christian-shaped blocks to make THEM feel acceptable. If God wanted robots he would have created robots... a whole world full of happy-clappy, heterosexual, hymn singing, judgmental Pharisees."
Very true, very fitting and very well said.
The topic was the fallacious and facetious "ex-gay" movement which is spreading its own brand of lies and deceit around the world - and recently in South Africa as well - and it seems to me that this alone is deserving of the label "Satan's Package". They - the perpetrators and the willing and duped victims - of this deceitful scheme who claim that gay people can be made straight through no more than prayer, despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary - including the testimony of the entire psychological fraternity and the masses of people who have tried this "pray-away-the-gay" nonsense and fallen out along the side of the road and spent years trying to piece their shattered lives back together again - or become suicide statistics because of it.
But leave them be... let them make their false claims, for even the most ardent "ex-gays" know the truth – that they are still and always will be gay. That their claims to be "cured" of their sexual orientation and identity is a lie and that the only reason they claim to be "cured" is because they believe that being gay is somehow "wrong" and that they have simply capitulated before religious intolerance and fundamentalism. And that they too will one day fall out of that closet once again, this time never to return. And then they shall look back at the work their misguided hands have wrought - and the misery they have helped to bring unnecessarily to others like them. And with great sadness, they will look at their hands and see the blood that stains them.
And no, I'm not sure I will pity them on that day either.
As I have said many times before - the only true "ex-gay" is a dead gay. And the only true motive such a movement holds for "turning gay people straight" is religious intolerance. And the only "help" it offers gay people is to help itself by ridding the world of gay people by turning them into shattered wrecks and to neutralize them by either self-denial or suicide.
Last night my girlfriend pointed out another similar concept she found on the web to me - on a religious self-help website:
"Stop masturbation addiction using the bible."
Huh?
How? Do you strap it on to your nether regions?
Some folks use this cro- I mean, crutch to control their gambling or drug addictions, others to control their porn problems - and so to them it seems to make perfect sense in their all too limited knowledge and obvious ignorance that being gay is therefore no more than an addiction as well, which should obviously (duh) be treated as a controllable urge. I suppose these same folks would say that being left handed is also wrong and an "urge" that can be cured by prayer. It's a good thing I don't have a masturbation, gambling or porn addiction. Or a bible lol. Because if some idiot were to say such ignorant things to my face I doubt holding a bible would restrain my urge to thump them with it.
What does a person's sexuality have to do with them anyway? What harm does it do to anybody, and specifically to the gay or transgender person - or to anyone else? Aside from cryptic and idiotic claims about gay people being "pedophiles" or a so-called "threat to 'the family'" or "civilization" they cannot produce even one tiny shred of fact or evidence to back up such utter nonsense.
Personally, I would urge such people to "pray away the fundamentalism" or the "bigotry", or the "heterosexism", or even the "hypocrisy" - because such things truly are harmful - to everyone.
Which brings me to another thought provoking question - I'm an agnostic, but if I were also dyslexic - would I lie awake at night wondering if there is a dog?"
Christina Engela
South African Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (SA GLAAD)
Email:
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Website: http://www.saglaad.org
