Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Growing up with two lesbian mothers: a child’s perspective

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A man raised by two lesbians tells his story in the latest Public Discourse. (H/T Brian)

Introduction:

The children of same-sex couples have a tough road ahead of them—I know, because I have been there. The last thing we should do is make them feel guilty if the strain gets to them and they feel strange.

Between 1973 and 1990, when my beloved mother passed away, she and her female romantic partner raised me. They had separate houses but spent nearly all their weekends together, with me, in a trailer tucked discreetly in an RV park 50 minutes away from the town where we lived. As the youngest of my mother’s biological children, I was the only child who experienced childhood without my father being around.

After my mother’s partner’s children had left for college, she moved into our house in town. I lived with both of them for the brief time before my mother died at the age of 53. I was 19. In other words, I was the only child who experienced life under “gay parenting” as that term is understood today.

Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s.

Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.

A striking snippet:

In terms of sexuality, gays who grew up in traditional households benefited from at least seeing some kind of functional courtship rituals around them. I had no clue how to make myself attractive to girls. When I stepped outside of my mothers’ trailer, I was immediately tagged as an outcast because of my girlish mannerisms, funny clothes, lisp, and outlandishness. Not surprisingly, I left high school as a virgin, never having had a girlfriend, instead having gone to four proms as a wisecracking sidekick to girls who just wanted someone to chip in for a limousine.

When I got to college, I set off everyone’s “gaydar” and the campus LGBT group quickly descended upon me to tell me it was 100-percent certain I must be a homosexual. When I came out as bisexual, they told everyone I was lying and just wasn’t ready to come out of the closet as gay yet. Frightened and traumatized by my mother’s death, I dropped out of college in 1990 and fell in with what can only be called the gay underworld. Terrible things happened to me there.

It was not until I was twenty-eight that I suddenly found myself in a relationship with a woman, through coincidences that shocked everyone who knew me and surprised even myself. I call myself bisexual because it would take several novels to explain how I ended up “straight” after almost thirty years as a gay man.

Click here for the rest. I blogged before about a study that found that gay parents are more likely to raise children who become gay.

Another good book that gives a first-person account is “Out From Under” by Dawn Stefanowicz.

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Commentary

Muslim leader of underage sex-trafficking gang gets 22-year sentence

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He’s definitely a Muslim, according to the UK Telegraph:

Taxi driver Shabir Ahmed, 59, was already serving a 19 year sentence from May for conspiracy, two rapes, aiding and abetting rape, sexual assault and sex trafficking. His domineering temper earned him the nickname “Daddy” by the white teenage victims.

The ringleader, who called the judge a ‘racist b——‘, was one of nine men jailed at Liverpool Crown Court for a total of 77 years for passing round the youngsters and plying them with drugs and drink.

[…]His victim, who cannot be named, revealed Ahmed once made her kneel on the floor in a pose called the ‘chicken’, with her arms threaded through her legs and touching her ears, before striking her on the back with a cricket bat.

The girl, now an adult, claims she was repeatedly raped over many years. He left her never wanting to have sex again or get married.

The girl said when she was first raped she was so young she needed to stand on a chair to reach a sink.

She said: “I remember reading about the time the Roald Dahl book ‘The BFG’, and it described a person screaming and no sound came out – it was like that.”

She said the “shame” meant she did not tell police until March last year when she heard Ahmed was being investigated over the grooming case.

The court heard during one rape attack she muttered under her breath :”sex maniac”. Ahmed giggled: “Yes, that’s what I am!”

Rachel Smith, prosecuting, told the jury of six men and six women, two of whom were Asian: “Ahmed was violent and controlling.”

Ahmed told the court he was a standard-bearer for “targeted and weakened British Muslims”, and claimed the police were anti-Muslim

He said of the Rochdale grooming trial: “We were all innocent. My only crime was to be Muslim. Not of the majority race.”

In May, Ahmed and his eight co-defendants were jailed for their role in a child-sex ring.

After that trial, Judge Gerald Clifton called him an “unpleasant and hypocritical bully” and told all the nine men they were driven by “lust and greed”, adding: “You treated the victims as worthless and beyond respect.”

Takeaway worker Kabeer Hassan, 25, was given a total of 12 years for rape and conspiracy. Taxi driver Abdul Aziz, 41, got 18 years for conspiracy and sex trafficking; Dad-of-five Abdul Rauf, 43, was jailed 12 years for conspiracy and sex trafficking; Mohammed Sajid, 35, got 12 years for rape, conspiracy, sex trafficking and sexual activity with a child.

Married Adil Khan, 42, was jailed for 18 years for conspiracy and sex trafficking. Taxi driver Mohammed Amin, 45, was caged for six years for conspiracy and sexual assault while cabbie Abdul Qayyum, 44, was jailed for five years for conspiracy. Hamid Safi, 22, was jailed for four years for conspiracy and sex trafficking.

Is this sort of child-rape compatible with Islam?

In Christianity, men aren’t allowed to have sex with anyone unless they are married to them. Marriage is for life, and you only get to marry one person. So you have two choices: a self-sacrificial lifelong marriage or lifelong chastity. If you had sex with someone you aren’t married to, then you’re not doing Christianity right.

I have female friends who are in other religions like Hinduism and Judaism and Buddhism and atheism. And my goal for those women (and the men, too!) is to get them into a relationship with God through the person and work of Jesus Christ.That is the goal that Christians have for people outside of their religion: to get them to freely love God because they are convinced that it is rational to do so. We are trying to change the other person’s mind. We use reasons and evidence to do that.

When I read the Bible, I find that there is a model and specification for dealing with non-Christians in the New Testament.

Here are some tips for dealing with non-Christians:

  • listen to their their concerns
  • find answers to their questions through study
  • write to them
  • give them books to read
  • give them lectures and debates to watch
  • do stuff for them to make their lives easier
  • don’t send mixed signals by getting romantic
  • try to share in their daily triumphs and defeats
  • protect them from threats and coercion
  • share food, water and shelter with them if they need it
  • just let them come along with me when I am doing stuff
  • etc.

When I think about how to get along with peaceful non-Christians, I think of the parable of the good Samaritan. Someone cannot consider your case for Christianity if they are sick or dying. If you want someone to listen to your reasons, you have to serve them first and earn the right to be heard. The book of James makes the same point – you have to take care of a person’s physical needs as a way of acting out your belief that they were made to know God. Even if the person isn’t willing to listen to you, you still have to treat them well, because this is how you imitate the love that God has for everyone.

I think that most of the women that these Muslims go after are fatherless, and that’s why they are so vulnerable. I am really at a loss to understand how anyone who claims to know God could look at a fatherless woman and see her as prey. Fatherless women are not prey – they are children of God made to know him, and made to achieve things for him. They are like the widows and orphans that the Bible is always encouraging us to take care of, because their condition of fatherlessness was not something they chose. They are victims. And we must treat them as victims, and heal them and build them up. The first thing I think of when I think of a fatherless woman is how to build her up so that she is in a good place to consider reasons and evidence that might persuade her to become a Christian.

I believe that everyone was made to know God in Christ, and that’s the basis for how I interact with people of different faiths. They all have value because God made them. They were all made to know God. They are not there for me to use and abuse. God would not be happy with me if I didn’t do everything possible to point them toward him and to help them along. That’s what he wants me to do with them.

Commentary

What is the “unforgiveable sin” in Mark 3 and Matthew 12?

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Take a look at these two puzzling passages from the New Testament.

Mark 3:28-29:

28 Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter,

29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.”

Matthew 12:30-32:

30 “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

31 And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.

32 Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

What can it mean?

Well, here’s a post by Dr. Paul Gould to shed some light on it.

Excerpt:

Taken in isolation, it is hard to make sense of this passage—how is it that all kinds of sins can be forgiven but one sin will not be forgiven? What is going on here? Well, here is a principle of sound biblical interpretation:

Principle #1: In order to correctly understand a passage, we must always look at it within its context.

And what is the passages context? The broader context can be found in Matthew 12:22-32. In this broader context we read of Jesus performing a miracle (he performs an exorcism and heals a blind and mute man), we read of the crowd’s amazement and wonderment over the identity of Jesus (“Could this be the Son of David?”), we find the slanderous (and murderous) charge of the Pharisees, and we find Jesus’ response to the Pharisees charge (both his reasoned response to their explicit charge that he drives out demons by Satan’s power as well as his warning to the Pharisees if they continue to attribute to Satan what is in fact the work of God’s Spirit).

After looking at this passage in context, we find that the “unforgivable sin” is (basically) attributing what is in fact the work of God’s Spirit to His ultimate enemy, Satan.

Fair enough, you say, but there are other problems passages that talk about the unforgivable sin—Hebrews 6, 1 John 5, and Hebrews 10 come to mind. What about those passages? Well, here is our second principle of biblical interpretation:

Principle #2: Always interpret unclear passages in light of the clear teachings of Scripture (as a whole).

And what is the clear teaching of Scripture related to sin and forgiveness? It is this:

Forgiveness of sins is a consequence of man’s repentance, and repentance is a consequence of the activity of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. So in the end, it seems that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is nothing more or less than the unrelenting rejection of His advances.

The only unforgiveable sin is the sin of deliberately rejecting God’s efforts to draw you into a saving relationship with him. What does this mean for you? It means that if you are a Christian and you believe the essentials of the faith, then you aren’t going to be able to lose your salvation by performing sinful actions. Sinful actions will damage you before you die, and you will lose rewards in the after-life, but you won’t be separated from God when you die.

By the way, I do believe in resistible grace, and therefore, I believe that humans are responsible for their choice to refuse God’s drawing them towards him. Many people think that once you are saved, you can’t lose your salvation, but I think that the Bible is very clear that you can, will all the warnings about apostasy and the parable of the seeds, etc. I also think that the Bible is very clear in teaching resistible grace.