Bryan Fischer
The left is schizoid on sexuality
By Bryan Fischer
Follow me on Twitter: @BryanJFischer, on Facebook at "Focal Point"
Host of "Focal Point" on AFR Talk, 1-3pm CT, M-F www.afr.net
The left is hopelessly schizoid on the issue of sexuality. Those on the left celebrate changes in gender but want to criminalize those who help others make changes in sexual orientation.
This is illustrated by two stories currently in the news. One is, of course, the celebrated gender "change" in Bruce Jenner, who now claims to be a woman even though he is still a man in every single solitary cell of his body, and will be until the day he dies.
He has been lionized by the media, celebrated as a hero (or, heroine, as the case may be) and granted an award by ESPN for courage. He has sold a record number of magazines as the cover boy on Vanity Fair.
The second story involves a small, cash-poor non-profit organization dedicated to helping people change their sexual orientation from gay to straight.
The group is JONAH, which stands for "Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing." They have been dragged into court by the uber-rich Southern Poverty Law Center and charged with consumer fraud.
Since in the SPLC's twisted view, people are "born that way," changing one's sexual orientation is impossible and therefore anybody who offers to help you try must be guilty of a crime.
There is now a concerted effort underway to squash all conversion therapy everywhere in the United States. Three states, Oregon, California, and New Jersey, along with Washington D.C., have banned such therapy for minors, and a bill has been introduced in Congress that will ban reparative therapy for anybody of any age everywhere.
Even The Atlantic, which wants the folks at JONAH punished and bankrupted and put out of business forever, admits that "the roots of sexual orientation...have proved devilishly difficult to uncover clinically...nobody really knows how people become gay or straight."
Wrote the American Psychological Association in 2009, "Enduring change to an individual's sexual orientation is uncommon." Well, "uncommon" is hardly the same as "impossible." The APA's own report on sexual orientation change says that "for some, sexual-orientation identity is fluid or has an indefinite outcome." If it's "fluid," then logic dictates that change can take place from gay to straight as well as from straight to gay.
So even the APA admits in its own words that reparative therapy can be successful. Nicholas Cummings, a former APA president and chief psychologist for Kaiser Permanente, said he saw 18,000 gay patients over the course of his practice, and "hundreds" changed their sexual orientation.
So on the one hand, the left breathlessly celebrates a highly publicized change in gender. But on the other, they want to criminalize any effort to effect a change in sexual orientation.
This is grossly hypocritical at best and evil at worst.
The Bible's take on transgenderism is not subtle, according to Deuteronomy 22:5. "A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God."
The Hebrew word translated "abomination" means something which is "loathsome and abhorrent," something from which we instinctively recoil. This is exactly the reaction that right-thinking people had when seeing a flashy, air-brushed photograph of a man wearing women's undergarments on the cover of a fashion magazine.
The left celebrates that kind of change, the kind of change that takes a man from the cover of a Wheaties box to the cover of Vanity Fair. This despite the fact that such a change is obviously artificial and contrived, requiring no less than 10 facial surgeries to soften and feminize the man's face.
So for the left, a phony change from male to female is a positive breakthrough of historic proportions, but a change from gay to straight is a dastardly thing that must be squashed like a little tiny bug. The left has its own catalogue of what it considers abominations, and reparative therapy is right at the top of its list.
As Isaiah put it so eloquently (Isaiah 5:20), "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter."
To quote the apostle James (3:10), "My brothers, these things should not be."
(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)
© Bryan Fischer
June 5, 2015
Follow me on Twitter: @BryanJFischer, on Facebook at "Focal Point"
Host of "Focal Point" on AFR Talk, 1-3pm CT, M-F www.afr.net
The left is hopelessly schizoid on the issue of sexuality. Those on the left celebrate changes in gender but want to criminalize those who help others make changes in sexual orientation.
This is illustrated by two stories currently in the news. One is, of course, the celebrated gender "change" in Bruce Jenner, who now claims to be a woman even though he is still a man in every single solitary cell of his body, and will be until the day he dies.
He has been lionized by the media, celebrated as a hero (or, heroine, as the case may be) and granted an award by ESPN for courage. He has sold a record number of magazines as the cover boy on Vanity Fair.
The second story involves a small, cash-poor non-profit organization dedicated to helping people change their sexual orientation from gay to straight.
The group is JONAH, which stands for "Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing." They have been dragged into court by the uber-rich Southern Poverty Law Center and charged with consumer fraud.
Since in the SPLC's twisted view, people are "born that way," changing one's sexual orientation is impossible and therefore anybody who offers to help you try must be guilty of a crime.
There is now a concerted effort underway to squash all conversion therapy everywhere in the United States. Three states, Oregon, California, and New Jersey, along with Washington D.C., have banned such therapy for minors, and a bill has been introduced in Congress that will ban reparative therapy for anybody of any age everywhere.
Even The Atlantic, which wants the folks at JONAH punished and bankrupted and put out of business forever, admits that "the roots of sexual orientation...have proved devilishly difficult to uncover clinically...nobody really knows how people become gay or straight."
Wrote the American Psychological Association in 2009, "Enduring change to an individual's sexual orientation is uncommon." Well, "uncommon" is hardly the same as "impossible." The APA's own report on sexual orientation change says that "for some, sexual-orientation identity is fluid or has an indefinite outcome." If it's "fluid," then logic dictates that change can take place from gay to straight as well as from straight to gay.
So even the APA admits in its own words that reparative therapy can be successful. Nicholas Cummings, a former APA president and chief psychologist for Kaiser Permanente, said he saw 18,000 gay patients over the course of his practice, and "hundreds" changed their sexual orientation.
So on the one hand, the left breathlessly celebrates a highly publicized change in gender. But on the other, they want to criminalize any effort to effect a change in sexual orientation.
This is grossly hypocritical at best and evil at worst.
The Bible's take on transgenderism is not subtle, according to Deuteronomy 22:5. "A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God."
The Hebrew word translated "abomination" means something which is "loathsome and abhorrent," something from which we instinctively recoil. This is exactly the reaction that right-thinking people had when seeing a flashy, air-brushed photograph of a man wearing women's undergarments on the cover of a fashion magazine.
The left celebrates that kind of change, the kind of change that takes a man from the cover of a Wheaties box to the cover of Vanity Fair. This despite the fact that such a change is obviously artificial and contrived, requiring no less than 10 facial surgeries to soften and feminize the man's face.
So for the left, a phony change from male to female is a positive breakthrough of historic proportions, but a change from gay to straight is a dastardly thing that must be squashed like a little tiny bug. The left has its own catalogue of what it considers abominations, and reparative therapy is right at the top of its list.
As Isaiah put it so eloquently (Isaiah 5:20), "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter."
To quote the apostle James (3:10), "My brothers, these things should not be."
(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)
© Bryan Fischer
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
