Website for those born ""this way""

[AcolyteLector]

cnn.com/2011/LIVING/03/09/born.this.way/index.html

This isn’t exactly news, but there wasn’t a forum for ‘non-news’, so here goes.

Note the part of the interview where the blog creator states his attention to spread his own attitude (in context, its hard to believe he’s talking about tolerance).

 

[dailey]

Hmmm, very interesting. There was a thread on here (can’t seem to find it) that talked about being “born” gay. I have a cousin who I knew was gay from the time he could walk/talk. Always gravitated towards girly-things, etc. Fast forward 20+ years, he is now a transexual.

At any rate, I always thought that God made people gay. In other words, it was their cross to bear in this life. I would be interested to know what the church say about this (whether God made someone gay)?

 

[Dale_M]

the article:

Kevin is depicted in the blog’s inaugural post as a cherubic 4-year-old posing before a baton recital. He says parents shouldn’t restrict their children to traditional roles.

“Children should be free to explore who they are and develop into wonderful, fantastic, artistic creatures - gay or straight,” Kevin says. “I would imagine that if we didn’t have society telling us that ‘boys can’t do this’ and ‘girls can’t do that’ that there’s no telling what sort of wonderful person we could become.”

Well, sure. However, the article seems to confuse gender stereotypes with sexual orientation. I think gender roles and sexual orientation are separate phenomena, even if they are sometimes expressed in similar manner.

Simply because a boy wants to partake of an activity which is stereotypically girlish doesn’t mean that he is gay. And parents shouldn’t panic about that conclusion, either.

 

[Prof_K]

Every one of God’s human creations was born with impulses to commit sinful acts. For many of us it is to do harm to others, or to dissassociate sexual relations from marriage. What wrong impulse we have matters little. What matters is that we are all called to resist temptation to commit sin. Thus the Church teaches us all, irrespective of our sexual orientation, to resist sin and the near occasions of sin. We are all called to chastity. Our vocations differ. Those called to married life, must be chaste outside their marriage and before their marriage. Those called to single life, are to remain chaste. What matters is not our calling, but how well we answer it.

A web site that encourages any form of sinful behavior, whether it is extramarital heterosexual behavior or homosexual behavior, would like be implictly condemned by Church teaching as encouraging sinful behavior. I don’t know enough about the proposed web site and can’t judge from the linked story the extent to which it will encourage sinful behavior. Thus I cannot answer the original question posed except in the broad generality.

 

[AcolyteLector]

I feel that most people in the secular world are going to look at this and say hooray, what a stride for ‘the movement’!

I can’t help but be skeptical of this man’s intentions, when he is projecting his [we assume] preferred sexual behavior onto pre-pubescent children.
Its funny how people overlook little things like that, when something they’re passionate about is on the upswing.

 

[AcolyteLector]

Well, sure. However, the article seems to confuse gender stereotypes with sexual orientation. I think gender roles and sexual orientation are separate phenomena, even if they are sometimes expressed in similar manner.

Simply because a boy wants to partake of an activity which is stereotypically girlish doesn’t mean that he is gay. And parents shouldn’t panic about that conclusion, either.

Its funny, because that’s a huge plank in the platform for LGBT and women’s studies types (or at least people concerned with those issues): the demand that we re-interpret masculinity/femininity/gender/&c.–though, of course, all of that is thrown to the wayside when homosexual man makes cute blog to play off recent Lady Gaga video.

 

[Nine_Two]

I’d have an easier time believing people were “born this way” if I didn’t keep hearing stories of men being happily married for years, or otherwise being completely heterosexual for years, before discovering they like other men sexually.

 

[grampben]

I think the mix of gender identity and sexual orientation confuses many gay and straight people. I know a let of gay people perfectly comfortable with being gay (and indeed insist they were born that way which I do not dispute) who are even more ‘straight’ or ‘masculine’ than myself!

 

[Sonic]

Hmmm, very interesting. There was a thread on here (can’t seem to find it) that talked about being “born” gay. I have a cousin who I knew was gay from the time he could walk/talk. Always gravitated towards girly-things, etc. Fast forward 20+ years, he is now a transexual.

At any rate, I always thought that God made people gay. In other words, it was their cross to bear in this life. I would be interested to know what the church say about this (whether God made someone gay)?

The term “Gay” is very controversial amongst people with gender-identity issues. Most of the people I know with gender identity issues don’t consider themselves “gay”. They associate the term “gay” with sexual preference issues and the politics behind it.