Conservatives Clamoring For Christianity

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/08/10/wolraich.perry.christian/index.html

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/16/my-take-5-biblical-passages-for-bachmann-and-perry/

Since the Iowa straw poll recently finished, the popularity of Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul in the eyes of many Republicans cannot be denied. Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman and newcomer Rick Perry all placed relatively low in comparison, though Gov. Perry was less enthusiastic than Paul or Bachmann in campaigning prior to this Republican popularity contest of sorts. I’m not surprised at the standings, such as 3^rd place’s Tim Pawlenty, from the same state as Bachmann (Missouri) and apparently nearly as insistent with his religious fervor. The most important theme for the various conservatives clamoring for a nomination, excluding the more reserved Mormon candidates Romney and Huntsman, was the strong Christian convictions of the candidates. Everyone from Ron Paul, generally not speaking much about his personal beliefs, to Michelle Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty, in the vein of Rick Perry, who all spoke strongly about changing the country back to its Christian roots (imaginary as they might be). The importance of the religious beliefs of these various Republican candidates can’t be stressed enough, but is it possible they’re trying too hard?

Rick Perry is the most obvious candidate that missed the forest for the trees. Trying to look like a devout believer in Jesus and God by organizing a “private” prayer rally for Christians (mostly evangelicals) to try to solve the nation’s woes doesn’t get around what more politically minded people observe about his poor track record in Texas. His reelections may have been due merely to appealing to evangelicals in his state more than trying to solve real issues. He apparently doesn’t have much of a solution to droughts or economic issues in this country; he just thinks praying to God or bringing together a group of Christians in a stadium will make things better; like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. It’s no wonder he got in the bottom percentile of the 

Ames Straw Poll, since he had to write himself in.

Michele Bachmann, on the other hand, is a sort of balance between Rick Perry and Ron Paul (hey, same initials, too, lol). She does speak openly in part about her Christian beliefs, but she also tries to focus on policy issues and advocate change towards her own political goals, ideology and agenda. What that agenda is I’m not certain of, but I am not comfortable in the slightest with having her as a Republican nominee, since she seems to base these political ideas on her Christianity almost primarily. Unfortunately, at this rate, she’s neck and neck with Ron Paul, who’s commonly a black sheep amongst the Republican Party. Bachmann may yet get the nomination, which means Ron Paul, assuming he gets a nomination from the Libertarian Party, which I believe he did last election cycle, would be a third party to balance what appears to be a future conflict of Obama and Bachmann. Though if the race for Democratic nomination before 2008 was any indication of America’s trust in female candidates, Bachmann may only barely have enough popularity to get nominated by the GOP, but then lose to America’s inevitable sexism and resilient intelligence in the face of the bigotry Bachmann has espoused before, particularly towards gay people. Of course, she’s hardly a step away from Sarah Palin, so that won’t help either, since she might’ve been partly why McCain lost.

Ron Paul is a nice conservative in every sense of the term. He’s for small government, fiscal responsibility, pro life (I didn’t say I agreed with everything he espouses, did I?) and he’s clearly more moderated in his expression of religious beliefs. He’s been very consistent in not speaking about his Christianity, but he has felt compelled in rare incidents to speak about his Christianity. I can respect the man for being truthful and up front about his religion when he sees it as a prudent decision. He also sees that, for the most part, there’s little reason to use your Christian beliefs to pull in votes, since those votes might be less than sincere in terms of policy agreement and the like. Just voting for someone because they share your beliefs or worldview in one sense is indicates that you don’t take politics seriously in any form. It’d be no different than me looking for an atheist presidential candidate and putting all my money into their campaign. It’d be a lost cause from the beginning because of America’s persistent discrimination and stigma against atheism in general. Not to mention the candidate could be a more centrist and populist sort of politician, so I’d be wasting my money all the more on a candidate that wouldn’t be as effective, in my opinion. So I’d rather go with a Christian man who I disagree with in terms of spiritual convictions, but I can agree with in principle about political convictions.

All in all, these candidates all seem to be relatively certain in their Christian beliefs, though there is an obvious age gap between Perry and Bachmann on the one hand and Paul on the other of about 20 odd years, but John McCain ran for president and got the GOP nomination and he was in his early 70s, so age is rarely a factor, though people allegedly would still trust a Mormon over a septuagenarian. This doesn’t necessarily boost any chances Romney or Huntsman have of being nominated, since policy wise they’re either flip flopping in the case of Romney or more controversial than even Ron Paul in Huntsman’s case, since it’s usually Democrats who support civil unions. My prediction is still Bachmann just for sheer popularity she’s had, plus the precedent Ron Paul has set of not gaining enough prestige in the GOP to warrant their nomination. But at least he’s consistent, so I’d rather vote for him and swing things towards a Democrat who has a bit more sense or willingness to negotiate (Obama) than ever vote for a Republican who I cannot agree with in any conceivable sense on basic policies and would be so stubborn she’d choose to destroy any hopes of bipartisanship before even compromising slightly. It’s choosing the lesser of two evils; voting for a minority candidate and hoping to change percentiles slightly or voting for someone you think is preferable to what you think is a better political practice of sorts. People will vote however they will, though, so it’s a matter of motivation to enter the fray as opposed to willingness to tow the party line your parents have. So until next time Namaste and aloha.

Christians Changing Gears on Changing Gays

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/18/amid-bachmann-controversy-many-christians-cool-to-conversion-therapy-for-gays/

While Michele and Marcus Bachmann seem to have an approach to homosexuality that, at least in part, includes the troubling practice of reparative therapy, forcing gay people to change their sexual orientation through various means that hope to work a miracle, not all Christians, thankfully, regard homosexuality as something that can just be turned off like a light switch. Southern Baptist President Albert Mohler admits in part that sexual attraction is something much deeper than our conscious minds and has to be approached with more nuance than the attitude that permeated the 80s and 90s of trying to pray away the gay, “turn it off” or just change it outright. The trend of opinion towards the use of “change therapy” has other evidence. Focus on the Family stopped funding a group that says that people “unhappy with the same-sex attractions” can be cured. Also, there was a study this year by the Public Religion Research Institute that suggested people in later generations, like my own, are more accepting of gay marriage and associated rights, even if the trend of moral opposition to abortion is similar to previous generations in coexistence with abortions’ legality. Even Exodus International, a group notorious for their practice of reparative therapy in the news, has changed their tone, partly in response, no doubt, to the evidence that homosexuality may be, for the most part, innate, but even if it isn’t, as well as the bullying and pressure many gay teens feel pushing many of them to commit suicide without intervention and support. Christianity is certainly trying to shift its practice to becoming gay friendly, but how successful can it be?

One of the biggest factors to this shift in public relations on homosexuality and its permissibility might have to do with slight declines in church attendance, particularly with fundamentalist or evangelical circles. The combination of young people that disagree strongly with the strong condemnation against homosexuality; suggesting that people who practice it should be treated like lepers; along with many gay Christians or Christians unsure about their sexuality also leaving for fear of persecution makes for an unlikely survival beyond the present generations of churchgoers. All the more “liberal” churches draw in new membership in the gap that’s being made between younger members as well as gay members and thinning the flock of more conservative churches. It’s not necessarily that either of these groups moving on to other churches completely disagrees with the Bible’s position on homosexuality as something disapproved by God in some sense. Both younger generations and Christians who just happen to be gay might still believe it is wrong, but it is the particularly antagonistic strategy many churches still use that feels isolating and therefore pushes attendance down. So instead, preaching about Jesus’ love of even homosexuals is emphasized more, even if there is also the insistence that homosexuality is a sin. In that way, the idea appears to be to draw the people in with acceptance, which would then apparently slowly wear away their resistance to the “truth” that the church still teaches in terms of homosexuality.

There’s also a new approach in psychology that Christians are trying to use, which has a more therapeutic angle to solving the “problem”. It’s called congruence paradigm and tries to harmonize one’s religious beliefs and one’s sexuality. If one believes homosexuality is sinful and is gay themselves, then celibacy can be a solution to the dissonance if the person wishes to do so. If they are bisexual and struggle with homosexuality as a problem, then the solution may be to focus on heterosexual desires instead. There are some issues I see with this, since even if you can’t change someone’s mind about such a thing as the morality of homosexuality, not everyone can do celibacy, for instance. But since the amount of solutions for homosexuality apart from acceptance of it and acting on it in some sense are so limited, the congruence paradigm won’t work as effectively with many patients, since celibacy would remove what is an intrinsic and natural part of the human condition from one’s life. If one is a monastic of one type or another, it’s a different thing entirely to take a vow of celibacy in terms of homosexuality. But laypeople aren’t expected to take things nearly as strongly in terms of devotional practices as monks, so this practice has holes in it even if we just limited it to strictly homosexual people.

If nothing else, the change of attitude at least acknowledges that there are better ways to approach homosexuality from a Christian perspective than the stereotype of hoping God will cure people of their homosexuality. Even if the reparative therapy is still believed by some groups to be a good practice, many people are both shying away from and outright rejecting the efficacy of this method. Accepting homosexuals as people with problems like the rest of us, in terms of the Christian perspective that everyone is “sinful” is already a much better way to encourage engagement and to create a community of mutual support. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Bachmann Backslides on Background

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/12/whats-going-on-at-the-bachmann-clinic/

Michele Bachmann (already a problem for me to remember how to spell) has been fairly prominent in the news, even before she started her campaign for the Republican nomination. Her appeal in the Iowa straw poll (in August, apparently), can’t be denied either. I don’t see eye to eye on any of her positions, but I’m more concerned about the business she’s been running with her husband, of which I only recently became aware of. In the last five years, there’ve been allegations that they use controversial reparative therapy to try to change homosexual people and make them heterosexual. The term “reparative therapy” is somewhat wide ranging, but in the case of Bachmann and Associates, there’s an explicit Christian element to it that smacks of the same sort of nonsense you hear about in the vein of “praying the gay away” for instance. Bachmann and her husband insist the allegations are false, but there seems to be evidence to the contrary.

The religious orientation of the center is enough of a potential red light, though not every group centered on Christianity insists on such unscientific practices. There was at least one undercover reporter that got answers to questions about whether you could change from being gay to straight through their practices that were pretty confident, though the person seemed to realize they needed to qualify that their knowledge was not expert level in any way. Another person who’s experienced the troubling aspects of the center’s approach to homosexuality is former patient Andrew Ramirez. He said that the practices involved prayer, reading Bible passages and mentoring with an “ex-lesbian” counselor. He was apparently told from the start that if the therapy worked, God would “perform a miracle” and make him straight. Of course, they were at least partially realistic in realizing that the therapy might not work. But what was their solution if that happened? Well, live a life of celibacy and never act on your homosexual desires, of course.

Many Christians have this sort of approach towards sexual ethics: the desires of sex themselves are not evil, since they lead in the “proper” situation to procreation and intimacy within marriage; not to mention claiming that sexual desires are evil would be tantamount to Christian Gnosticism, not only a heresy, but equated many times with harsh asceticism that most people can’t handle anyway. It’s the acting on those sexual attractions that seems to be the evil thing, even in a committed monogamous relationship for homosexuals, oddly enough. If you’re a married, or in some Christian circles, committed monogamous, straight couple, then sex is permitted on the grounds that it is both natural and ordained by God itself. But not if you’re homosexual, which seems to be the only distinguishable difference. The double standard irks me already on the face of it with this notion that homosexuals have no right to experience intimacy with a partner they are willing to commit to just because their union won’t produce children; as if the intimacy and fidelity that can come from a gay couple uniting in the sexual act is somehow worth less than a straight couple’s union.  The same problem of non procreation occurs in terms of infertile straight couples. Are they bad? Not according to this argument, since they could “miraculously” conceive. What’s stopping homosexual couples from experiencing miraculous conception even if they don’t have sex that is procreative in nature, I wonder? Just that God hates homosexual sex for some reason.

But Marcus Bachmann, Michele Bachmann’s husband, said something even more troubling to me in relation to homosexuality and also how his group approaches the issue. He speaks about it with the confidence that the bible says it is wholly bad, even if it was in a committed “Biblical” relationship where the two remained faithful to each other before God and humanity. Perhaps that’s the case, and I could accept that the Bible’s general position on homosexuality is disapproval. But he associates those who support and/or practice it as “barbarians”, saying that they need to be educated. He then takes the route of saying that just because people feel it or think it doesn’t mean that it’s right.  Firstly, homosexuality is hardly barbaric, unless he’s referring to the instances of homosexual rape that, historically, were used to demean the enemy. Rape, in any form, heterosexual or homosexual, is a bad thing and barbaric by nature, that much we might be able to agree on. But homosexual behavior is natural, even if it is a minority practice. Educating people might be admirable if you actually used facts and didn’t try to skew them in a way that makes gay people seem terrible. If you take particular studies and statistics, you can make homosexuals seem promiscuous and more likely to get AIDS or HIV, but one could easily do the same thing with straights if you don’t know proper statistics. I don’t claim to be an expert, but given enough time to look at the sources and samplings, there are usually swathes of area left for improvement with many of these anti-gay pedagogues who insist that homosexuals are ignorant and advocate just doing it like animals. I don’t think any gay person uses the argument that homosexual behavior is in nature to try to try to say that it is morally permissible to have homosexual relationships. There’s a name for that argument: appeal to nature. The obvious problem here is that things like murder, rape and sabotage all exist in nature with surprising commonality at times. Dolphins, ducks and chickadees do each of the 

mentioned “crimes” respectively and yet we don’t hold them accountable under any law.

The reason homosexuality isn’t harmful to society as a whole is that, like straight sex, done in the privacy of one’s own home and responsibly between consenting adults, harms no one else and happens so often, it could be going on next door as you’re reading this or at any location within your county or state at any conceivable time. Being gay might be a combination of inborn and acquired traits, but any practice suggesting you can forcefully change a thing developed early in pre pubescence (to an extent) is harmful on its face and the American Psychological Association is right to condemn such a thing. Bachmann and Associates insist they aren’t doing this and would allow people to be gay, but it’s that drawing people in with the promise of being saved by religious interventions from God that manipulates people’s feelings and pressures them implicitly to try to stop being gay. I say be who you are, particularly on something that’s biological and for the most part, inescapable. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.