Gay? Ex-Gay? Person with SSA?

Declanna the kitten

As the blogger on this here blog, I feel the need to explain myself, to show why I have a unique perspective that may be helpful to some of my readers. But which word should I use?

Gay? Or Lesbian?

‘Gay’ is a slang term that originally referred to prostitution, but in modern, mainstream language, a person who has a predominant sexual or romantic attraction to persons of the same sex is a Gay person. Or even ‘a Gay!’ If the Gay person happens to have XX chromosomes and/or ‘identifies as a woman,’ she can be called a Gay woman or a Lesbian. (I personally prefer to use ‘Gay’ for both.)

Ex-Gay?

In some Christian circles, especially the Protestant ones, it doesn’t matter how many times I say I am Gay-but-chaste, they assume that ‘Gay’ means that I am sexually active with the same sex and thus actively committing sexual sins. If I had ‘really’ turned away from ‘that lifestyle,’ I would call myself ‘ex-gay.’ Or ex-Lesbian? The problem with that is that in mainstream use, ‘Gay’ does not have that meaning. People talk of old Hollywood stars as being ‘Gay,’ even though married to a person of the opposite sex, because they believe there is some slight clue that the person may have FELT Gay and had predominantly same-sex attractions, even if he is not known to have acted on those attractions. Christians ought not use terms like ‘Gay’ in a way that differs from the main stream, it only causes confusion.

I personally don’t like to call myself ‘ex-Gay’ because I think it seems to imply that I have somehow had my sexual orientation changed and that I like men now, and am looking to marry a man. I haven’t experienced that particular change and don’t think it helps others to let them think I have. 

Person with SSA?

Or Woman of Courage?

The Catholic Church has an official ministry for persons with homosexual orientation, which is called Courage International. Courage encourages us not to call ourselves ‘Gay’ or ‘Lesbian’ or ‘homosexual’ or even ‘ex-Gay,’ because using that kind of language puts that little difference at the center of our identity. We are urged to refer to ourselves as persons with Same-Sex Attraction (SSA) to show that this is not the core of our identity. 

I think this is a good idea. The LBGTxyz movement wants us to believe that we are ‘born that way’ and can never change, even so far as exercising self-control and not sexually sinning. But in reality, the ‘Gay gene’ has never been discovered and the human genome has been explored enough that we can be fairly sure that no such gene exists. We are not stuck like this forever. We can change, in varying ways, with God’s help.

I am a person with same-sex attraction, but I am also a cat-lover, a published poet, the owner of a brand-new used truck, a Walking Dead fan, a person with Asperger Syndrome, a Catholic Christian, a speaker of English, German and Esperanto, a polka-lover, a fan of authors Mercedes Lackey, Declan Finn, and Marina Fontaine, a Republican, a person who needs to clean her garage…. No one factor says everything about me. 

My Mission

Even before I became a Catholic after many years as a Neopagan, I wasn’t sure about the Gay marriage thing. Why change a central institution of human life, and why impose a heterosexual pattern on people who aren’t heterosexual. I mean, isn’t that heterosexist? 

When I realized that Christianity was indeed true and that I was called to become a Catholic, I had a hard time with the Gay issue— not that I personally was not willing to give up my alleged future Gay fun for the sake of Christ, but I didn’t want to ‘impose’ that interpretation on others.

While I was studying the Catholic faith in RCIA, the pastor of my parish church gave me his paperback copy of the Catholic catechism. And, coincidentally, that catechism had a bookmark in place in the very passages which dealt with the issue of homosexuality (in a compassionate way.) I was able to reconcile my concerns and be faithful to what the Church teaches. (After all, each of us Christians is called to ‘take up the cross’ which may mean literal martyrdom—what’s giving up a little Gay sex compared to that?)

I realized that I had a need to speak out. People needed to know that persons with SSA were not a monolithic voting block who all wanted the exact same thing. I started a Facebook page: We Support Traditional Marriage— And We’re Gay to help reach out. This was back when starting a Facebook page was a thing worth doing. 

I’ve been lucky on Facebook so far. Even though my readership on the page is down, Facebook has never taken my page down (yet) or suspended or banned my personal account. But I felt the need to expand my reach for security reasons. Facebook is not a friend of conservatives, and doesn’t seem to realize that the complaints against discrimination against conservatives is not met by promising to remove the ‘fake news’ by which they probably mean conservative posts.

I want to reach out to other people with SSA to show that we CAN be Christians and be faithful to Christian teaching. I want to show family members of people with SSA that they shouldn’t give up hope for their family member. And I want to illustrate the value, to the conservative and pro-marriage community, of NOT being mean to ‘them gays with their sick, twisted lifestyle.’ We are all sinners, according to the Bible, and God probably means for us to be repenting of our own personal sins rather than mocking other people’s supposed sins. 

My Hope

We conservatives have a problem. We are misrepresented as haters and as mean, cruel people, and therefore many social media feel justified in being very unfair to us. One way we can help is for as many of us as possible to blog, and use social media, and pass things along that might otherwise be censored out of existence. I am active on Twitter, for example, and follow a lot of conservative accounts. Many of my Twitter friends have had problems with being suspended or banned— but most of the rest remain out there tweeting. Also, some of the banned friends have just started up new accounts. 

We have to fight. We can see from current events that the progressives are not getting tamer but more extreme. They want to institute gun bans by calling them common-sense gun safety, push high-carb vegetarian (‘vegan, plant-based’) diets on people who know better to ‘fight climate change,’ and claim that every Republican of every color is as bad as a KKK member— even though historically it’s only been Democrats who were allowed to join the KKK.

My Request (Is anyone still reading this?)

I would really like it if you would either follow my blog (on Bloglovin’? By email?)  and some of my social media accounts, or find some other conservative blogs and social media accounts to follow. It doesn’t have to be me, particularly. And, just maybe, start a conservative blog or social media account of your own. It’s better for us to light a million social media candles than to just curse the progressive darkness….