christianity

Anti-gay adverts pulled from bus campaign in London

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News of Note: Anti-gay adverts pulled from bus campaign by Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has stopped a Christian advertising campaign by the “christian” group Core Issues Trust that promotes the idea that gay people can be converted to heterosexuality and whose leader, Mike Davidson, said “homoerotic behavior is sinful” and that “reparative therapy” will help queer people  “develop their heterosexual potential.”

In the US,  reparative therapy has been deemed “junk science” by the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association. And, this month, California is introducing a bill that would outlaw it for all children and require those over 18 must sign a severe consent form to obtain it.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t have a shortage of hate groups like Core Issues Trust and PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays) and they are clearly not limited to the United States.

As always, we need to identify and label religiously-motivated discrimination and not let it masquerade as anything else.

Creative Commons image by: Jon Bennett

Christian Groups Take Issue With Anti-Bullying Laws

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News of Note: Christian Groups Take Issue With Anti-Bullying Laws

Focus on the Family is planning to counter the “Day of Silence,” an annual event to protest LGBT bullying set for April 20, with its own “Day of Dialogue”. The evangelical organization’s aim is to muffle an effort that “crosses the line in a lot of ways beyond bullying into indoctrination, just promoting homosexuality and transgenderism.”

The group has been advocating an anti-anti-bullying message for years. When a California school adopted an anti-bullying rule that mentioned gays and lesbians in 2010, backlash ensued.

“The school introduced anti-bullying lessons, but really they’re teaching elementary school kids about gay marriage,” Candi Cushman, education analyst for Focus on the Family, told ABC. “We think parents should have the right to teach kids about it in their own way.”

Hate groups like Focus on the Family, including Family Research Council (FRC) and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX), have a sickness, a disease that continues to infect American schools, politics, and public opinion. They offer nothing more than religiously motivated intolerance and hate. How are such poisonous and miserable ideas able to spread? How and why are they able to relentlessly pursue the condemnation of their fellow Americans, even themselves?

As religious fundamentalists try to drag America back into the dark ages, they are only delaying the inevitable. Truth and reason can not be stopped. I feel some satisfaction knowing that these kids probably have internet access, that somehow they will learn that human sexuality is natural, inherent, and wonderful. While Focus on the Family tries to chain our future generations to the church, through sexual repression and self loathing, their religion will be inevitably remembered for what it is, a disease.

Creative Commons Image by: jglsongs

Most single Christians are having sex

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News of note: A recent study reveals most single Christians are having sex. We undress why.

Dr. Jenell Williams Paris, an anthropologist and the author of The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are, says the high rates of premarital sex are a call to the Church to live in reality.

“We need to talk to people as they really live in the world they really live in,” Paris says. “If rates of premarital sex are really that high, but we continue to talk as if the vast majority of people are virgins when they get married, weʼre out of touch. We need to address reality.”

And the reality is the numbers arenʼt going down. Of those 80 percent of Christians in the 18-29 age range who have had sex before marriage, 64 percent have done so within the last year and 42 percent are in a current sexual relationship.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of all pregnancies in America are unintended. And of those, 40 percent end in abortion. More than 1 million abortions occur in the United States each year. But perhaps the most disturbing statistic for the Church: 65 percent of the women obtaining abortions identify themselves as either Protestant or Catholic (37 percent Protestant and 28 percent Catholic). Thatʼs 650,000 abortions obtained by Christians every year.

Why do people still go on about abstinence when so few people intend on practicing it? I agree that the high rates of premarital sex is a call for “the church” to live in reality. It is also a call for these projected virtues to be questioned. Remaining chaste until marriage represses one’s sexuality and significantly limits experience. I’m suggesting that everyone starts being honest with themselves, because our actions are speaking louder than words. Let us know what you think.