Ahh, repression:
A self-proclaimed “ex-gay” blogger who wrote extensively for the Christian Post about “coming out of the homosexual lifestyle” was recently discovered seeking the companionship of other men on the popular gay geosocial networking app Grindr.
In a lengthy missive penned for the Post last year, Matt Moore discussed his ongoing struggles with homosexual urges following his “conversion experience.”
***Though the fact that the Grindr profile used the same photo of Moore found on his Christian Post page left room for equivocation, Moore himself quickly confirmed to Jones that it was truly him on Grindr, and that he had once again strayed from the Righteous Path.
“Creating a grindr profile and talking to guys on it was major disobedience on my part,” he told Jones, “disobedience to Christ.”
How many people are out there torturing themselves like this?
Jeff Spender
I don’t know, but why would you make yourself miserable like that in a world that does a good enough job to make you miserable as is?
Christ on a crutch, people like that…I pity them.
schrodinger's cat
Far too many. Pretending to be what they are not. I am not just talking about gay people.
ruemara
Walking away was one of the best things I ever did for myself. I hope this guy finds some peace, because what he’s doing is toxic.
Ash Can
Shorter Matt Moore: “Shit, I didn’t think anyone would find out.”
salvage
What a sad man.
ranchandsyrup
Dennis: Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
King Arthur: Bloody peasant!
Dennis: Oh, what a giveaway! Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That’s what I’m on about! Did you see him repressing me? You saw him, Didn’t you?
srv
John, you must be torturing yourself on the drone “kill list” memo. Can’t you troll us with a Greenwaldian rant?
Roger Moore
I would feel a lot more sorry for this schmuck if he weren’t trying to drag other people into the same miserable situation.
Violet
That is just so sad. I wish churches and other repressive religious organizations (and organizations in general) would just let people be who they are. I guess if they did that, they’d be out of business.
anadromy
The shame cycle is erotic. Normally you have to pay good money to an experienced bondage professional for this level of delicious humiliation. This dude does it to himself, for free. Imagine how exhilarating his next “disobedience” will be.
themann1086
Maybe he gets off on disobeying his Dom? This ‘Christ’ fellow?
mouse tolliver
It’s not torture for most of these conserva-queens. The closeted lifestyle is a fetish. Anonymous hookups, the fear of getting caught, public sex with complete strangers — it all adds to the thrill. They’re like those stereotypical playboys from the 1960s who refuse to settle down. They don’t want respectable vanilla sex in a bedroom with their husband and an adopted Cambodian child sleeping in the next room. They want a glory hole in an airport bathroom like Larry Craig or Aaron Shock.
jayjaybear
@themann1086: Jesus. Large Mexican fellow. Met him once.
Suffern ACE
Dude, you have a cell phone. Just take shirtless/headless pic while standing by your bathroom sink like everybody else does.
Oh, wait. He probably wasn’t looking for that kind of advice.
Ben Grimm
I’m just going to leave this over here…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFo8NGO4nTA
General Stuck
It shant be long now.
Forum Transmitted Disease
There’s more than a little bit of self-hatred going on there. I can tell you this: my straightness isn’t a choice and you could no more make me “ex-straight” than you could make the President “ex-black” and furthermore, no one would dare to suggest that him or I should do such a thing. But somehow this is OK to do to gay folk.
So his self-hatred is justly deserved, I frankly think I hate him too. Promulgating the “ex-gay” bullshit is one of the crueler things I think a human being can do.
Ash Can
OK, John, this is off-topic, but if you haven’t seen it yet you should. The DoJ has slapped S&P with a $5 billion lawsuit for putting triple-A ratings on shit investments leading up to the 2008 economic collapse. The wheels of justice turn slowly indeed. (Now I just hope the DoJ wins the damned suit.)
Forum Transmitted Disease
@mouse tolliver: I used to work with one of these. A thoroughly shitty human being on every level, notwithstanding his bedroom antics.
DFH no.6
Offhand, I’d say a goodly number of Republican politicians, political operatives, and, well, Republican voters.
How many “a goodly number” actually represents is impossible to say, but it’s not insignificant.
At my small company I work with two individuals who I know fall under the “self-torturing, pretending not to be gay Republican voter” category.
And one of my fascist nephews is in the same boat. His SS She-Wolf of a mother (think of the blond character Angela Martin in The Office, only older and nastier) will have 7 times 70 shit-fits when (if, I guess — but he’s away at college now, so…) he finally comes out. She’s in oblivious denial; everyone else in the family knows.
dance around in your bones
It would be sad if it weren’t so pitiful and enabling of all the other Xianist closet-dwelling deniers. Own your sexuality!
I still feel sorry for the guy though, because I am a DFH from way back in the day. Empathy, I have it.
Zifnab25
Torturing yourself is what you do on your own time. This asshole felt the need to scam and torture others with his “cure-the-gay” fantasy.
John M. Burt
@Ash Can: My most sincere congratulations to the DoJ, the Attorney General and the President.
burnspbesq
@Ash Can:
But they turn.
ETA: Interesting to see that the case was filed in the Central District of California. Wonder what’s up with that.
Also interesting to see that Floyd Abrams is representing S&P. That may be a preview of the defense, as Abrams is known primarily as a First Amendment specialist.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Ash Can: Moody’s is next.
Look for retaliatory downgrades of US debt from all the debt rating companies.
My only objection is the amount ought to be five trillion, not billion, but I’ll take it.
burnspbesq
Link to a copy of the complaint.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2013/February/13-ag-156.html
Higgs Boson's Mate
Brothers and Sisters, we’d all do well to heed the Sermon on Brokeback Mountain wherein our Lord and Savior spoke thus;
“Neither pitcher nor catcher shalt thou be for heaven hates fags”
Seriously, it’s been a while since I read the New Testament, but I don’t recall JC saying anything about homosexuality. The Old Testament, yes, yes indeed.
japa21
@burnspbesq: Yes they do. All those people squawking that nothing was happening and that people should have been trhown in jail immediately, etc. etc. don’t realize how much time it takes to gather evidence, build a case to present and all the fun stuff.
To get any prosecution is very hard, simply because of all the layers of protection these companies and people have.
And I guarantee, this will get little press durign the trial simply because it is way too hard for most media people to understand.
burnspbesq
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
You might have some difficulty proving five trillion in damages. You might also have some difficulty collecting if you won.
For my part, I’m pleased that the settlement negotiations broke down because DOJ insisted on an admission of wrongdoing.
Bubblegum Tate
@Ash Can:
Wingnut Barometer is pissed about that lawsuit, whining: “let’s ignore Jamie Gorelick’s, Franklin Raines, Barney Franks, Fannie’s and Freddie’s involvement and go after S&P. Makes perfect sense.”
burnspbesq
@japa21:
Game’s not over until the statute of limitation runs out. Wish more people would remember that.
Teejay
“Do’in anything we like to”
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@burnspbesq: I was intrigued by that as well. But, I was pleasantly surprised that the DOJ insisted on an admission!
I wish people understood that prosecutions don’t just magically appear, without evidence collection in order to, you know prove guilt. That idea won’t go away, but it should.
Comrade Dread
I don’t really have a problem with someone trying to restrain his sexual conduct. Abstinence is a perfectly fine choice if you are able to do it.
Of course, if you’re not and you fail to live up to your ideal, it’s important to reassess that choice in prayer and fasting and above all be honest with yourself and others and not condemn yourself or spiral into a cycle of guilt and shame. God doesn’t want us to crucify ourselves and crawl around feeling miserable every day.
And as the Good Book says, you definitely shouldn’t go around trying to remove the speck from other people’s eyes while you have a 2×4 stuck in yours.
Ted & Hellen
JC didn’t utter one recorded word about butt sex.
I’ll take that as an endorsement.
Gex
I’m in my 40’s and I had hoped that mine was the last generation that would be torturing ourselves like this. Sadly, I know at least two gay guys in their late 20’s in denial who have wives and children involved in this insanity.
An authoritarian culture that has machismo and daddy issues will keep this going longer than it should.
Gravenstone
Related to the post title, I remember shortly after HS getting together with a bunch of friends. One picked up a copy of Cruising because, hey it’s got Al Pacino in it.
Yeah, imagine the reaction of a bunch of mid-80’s midwestern farm boys to that one.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Of course, The Onioncovered this “ex-gay” crap some time ago.
Ash Can
@burnspbesq:
@japa21:
That’s what I’d say when Cole would fume about why nobody had been thrown in jail yet. I sympathized with him, to be sure — if anyone came out of that clusterfuck looking like complete shitheels to everyone involved, it was the ratings agencies. But it took five years for the crooks at Enron to get sent up the river, and there was no reason to expect things to happen overnight in an even (much) bigger financial trainwreck. (Furthermore, I’d also like to think that the fact that the DoJ is bringing a suit at all indicates that the folks at Justice think they have a decent shot at winning.)
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
Sounds like a good guess. Their best bet is probably the claim that their ratings are just opinions, and what other people do with them isn’t their fault.
Cassidy
@Gravenstone: “Dear Penthouse…”
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
I think part of the desire for rapid prosecution is the idea that we needed to lock these guys up before they could do any more damage.
Jim Faith
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Another Onion article –
‘Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?’
http://www.theonion.com/articles/why-do-all-these-homosexuals-keep-sucking-my-cock,11150/
burnspbesq
@Ash Can:
There need to be structural reforms in the ratings process. It’s hard to imagine a more obvious conflict of interest than ratings agencies being paid by issuers. Not sure that the legislation needed to fix that has any chance of getting through the House.
drkrick
@Ted & Hellen: JC operated in an environment where folks were very much not OK with the butt sex, and didn’t see any need to correct them about it. On the other hand, he didn’t seem to be a big fan of the stoning and persecution approach to that sort of thing either. Given the amount of stuff he was willing to correct them on, I wouldn’t read silence as an endorsement.
This isn’t meant to say I agree with that. Just that those who claim to care ought to be honest about what Jesus’ silence on the subject probably meant.
Ohmmade
As long as there is money to be made people will fake anything.
With my last employer I pretended their work was great and I enjoyed working there, when really, fuck those people and their product.
Ash Can
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Let’s hope so. It’s bad enough that the banks and financial firms were getting, ahem, overly creative with financial instruments, but they were doing it in large part because the ratings agencies were telling them they were fine. S&P et al. have no fucking excuse for what they did.
Ohmmade
As long as there is money to be made people will fake anything.
With my last employer I pretended their work was great and I enjoyed working there, when really, screw those people and their product.
Ohmmade
As long as there is money to be made people will fake anything.
With my last employer I pretended their work was great and I enjoyed working there, when really, screw those people and their product.
AuroraD
Of course it’s sad that this asshole is suffering from his own self-hatred, but IMHO it’s a lot worse that he can earn Big Bucks from wingnut welfare, while real gay people, and straight people, and trans people, etc., can’t earn ANYTHING because no jobs in the real world.
Another Halocene Human
http://www.myinstants.com/instant/the-simpsons-nelsons-ha-ha/
Paul in KY
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: It’s all in Romans. Letter by Apostle Paul. That’s pretty much where it comes from (leaving aside some Old Testament stuff).
Modern Protestantism could be called ‘Paulism’ IMO.
Ash Can
@Roger Moore:
That makes sense, but I do wonder how well that would play given the metric shit-tons of precedence of the entire financial industry basing its operations on what the ratings agencies say, over many years.
Heliopause
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
JC didn’t specifically mention homosexuality but did endorse the Law, so by implication endorsed the ban on homosexual practice. Both Jesus and Paul condemned “fornication”, which is a slippery word but usually interpreted as any sex taking place outside a marriage.
liberal
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
I was thinking of posting that, but wasn’t sure I could find it as it’s relatively old.
Christ Almighty, do I ever love that particular Onion piece.
Comrade Dread
@Gex: I think it’s also that the church tends to emphasize personal purity and conformity rather than personal sacrifice of our time and resources to focus on helping the hurting, the vulnerable, the needy, and the poor.
If being a Christian is just about not doing no-nos and feeling really bad when I do, then it’s far less of an obligation on my life than opening myself up to others and sharing my life with them.
It’s obligation-free Christianity. Feeling good and righteous about myself without all of that messy ‘dealing with other people and actually giving a damn about them.’
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
It’s not so much who is paying them as it is who is choosing them. When you let the issuer shop around for a rating agency, there’s an implicit quid pro quo: the rater will keep getting business if and only if they keep giving favorable ratings. You could get rid of that by having rating agencies randomly assigned to each issue, so there’s no way they can affect their future chances of getting business by giving their client an undeservedly favorable rating.
liberal
@Jim Faith:
One line I really love from that one:
liberal
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
I’m skeptical it would take them 5 years or so to collect evidence, to put it mildly.
NCSteve
I’m not really in a place to know whether this dude deserves pity for being mentally enslaved to the sexually obsessed neo-medievalism that characterizes both fundementalist Protestantism and Catholicism or contempt for taking extreme measures to stay embedded in what has devolved from the norm into a fetish lifestyle thing.
But I couldn’t help but notice that he sure did seem to go out of his way to ensure he got caught.
liberal
@Roger Moore:
IIRC that would improve things, but it’s not a bulletproof solution.
Roger Moore
@Ash Can:
Looking at the link burnspbesq provided above, it looks as if the core of the complaint is that they were lying about being independent evaluators of the securities they were rating. As long as the government can prove that they were rating according to what the issuers wanted rather than what their own models suggested- which the complaint alleges- then that argument ought to hold up.
liberal
@Ash Can:
They have the same excuse all the other players did—heads they win, tails they don’t lose.
Calouste
In more positive news on the gay front, the Gay marriage bill has passed the UK House of Commons 400-175, so they should have it there probably in about 2015 (the Lords are expected to hold things up a bit).
Forum Transmitted Disease
@liberal: It didn’t. They’ve been in settlement talks for years. Talks finally broke down over admission of guilt, and so it’s going to trial.
Another Halocene Human
@Gex: I guess their parents are partially to blame? But I have a hard time understanding how, unless they were pushed into marriage very early (some families do this), someone raised in a much more tolerant era could be such a steaming bag of dicks as to go so far as to marry someone and have kids to live a lie. Now you’ve involved several people who are all going to be hurt.
I really don’t have much sympathy. GROW THE FUCK UP. Part of becoming an adult involves realizing that sometimes you have to hurt someone’s feelings a little bit in order not to hurt them a lot later. And maybe even more important (but more tricky) is learning how to take care of yourself. But the first part ought to be sufficient to not marry a person to be your beard unwittingly.
At least in the 1940s the poor dears entering “lavender marriages” knew PIZACKLY what they were signing up for.
greenergood
@Heliopause:
‘Both Jesus and Paul condemned “fornication”, which is a slippery word but usually interpreted as any sex taking place outside a marriage.’
Well then, way-hey! (as we say here in Brit-land) cause Parliament’s just passed a bill permitting gay men and lesbians to marry, so no more worry about slippery fornication! Whew!! Now just Scotland and N. Ireland – Scotland will probably follow toot sweet (hopefully), but to quote N Ireland’s immortal backs-to-the-wall phraseology (all political incorrectness intended): NO SURRENDER!
Citizen Alan
@Paul in KY:
I can’t remember who said it, but I’ve always been partial to the following explanation.
Catholicism is the victory of Peter’s teachings over those of Paul.
Protestantism is the victory of Paul’s teachings over those of Peter.
Evangelicalism is the victory of Paul’s teachings over those of Jesus.
Roger Moore
@liberal:
I don’t think there’s a bulletproof solution to preventing deliberate fraud. Removing some of the incentive to commit the fraud would be a good start. Backing that up with prosecutions of people who commit it anyway is an obvious next step.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Paul in KY: A good number of American Christians follow Paul, not Jesus.
btom89
All the people who mentioned that Jesus said nothing about homosexuality is right. Not only that but even people screw up the old testament when it comes to that topic as well.
Angels, beings from another plane of existence, came to the cities of Sodom and Gommorah. Lot was the only one who let the angels into his home after the angels went from door to door, looking for kind and generous people. Soon after that, a mob came to his house and demanded they be put out to the mob for sexual purposes. What those sexual activities are, never were specified. Lot says no to the mob, and then….OFFERS HIS DAUGHTERS to the mob. Which they accept.
You see, the mob who took Lot’s daughters,…for sex…were all somehow gay. Not only that, but the total absence of description or explanation of any activities in that story that had sodomy turning out to be oral or anal action specifically baffles me.
as it turns out, a pope in the Catholic Church sometime later in the second millennium after Jesus’s birth defined sodomy as any sexual act that didn’t end up in natural conception. So that covers pretty much the majority of heterosexual activity as well as all homosexual activity.
Ash Can
@liberal: That’s an oversimplification. The entire financial industry really does (or, at least, did) rely quite heavily upon the ratings agencies to act as traffic lights for their activities. I know this firsthand; I worked in the business for 15 years myself. Even a rumor of an agency downgrade or upgrade was enough to move the price of a stock or bond significantly. Financial analysts wouldn’t touch lower-graded stocks with a ten-foot pole. Changes in ratings were enough to throw our entire department into crisis mode. The neutrality of the agencies and the comprehensiveness of their information and analysis was never questioned, if for no other reason than it was unfathomable to us that a behemoth such as S&P or Moody’s would choose to blow itself up like that. Well, surprise — so much for rational actors in the free market.
Calouste
@greenergood:
Apparently Scotland is ready to pass a same-sex marriage bill, and has been for some time, but put it on hold to wait for the bill to pass the UK parliament, to avoid complications that would arise. Considering that the differences between the existing registered partnerships and marriage are fairly small and mostly inconsequential, no one really had a problem with that.
Johnny Coelacanth
@Citizen Alan: Outstanding.
Closeted epistemic (formerly Lojasmo)
@drkrick:
Honesty isn’t T&H’s strong suit.
JoyfulA
@Violet: My church welcomes gays and, in fact, has a lesbian deacon and a gay ordained supply pastor. Only the conservative, right-wing churches worry about teh gay in this century.
gene108
@Roger Moore:
Nah.
There’s just a large contingent of liberals, who are just mad. This has built up, as the perception is society is ignoring – at society’s peril – liberal thinking.
They were mad during the Reagan-Bush, Sr. years, because most folks went along with Reagan’s agenda.
They were mad during the Clinton years because of NAFTA, welfare reform and whatever else there was to be outraged over.
Things really got ugly during the Bush, Jr. years, because right-wingers deemed liberals “enemies of the state”, with terms like “America hater”, because of opposition to the Iraq War.
Liberals would like to (figuratively) punch a bunch of folks in the face for what they feel those folks have done to screw up America. Wall Street types being in the vanguard of folks destroying America.
In lieu of punching them in the face, quick and speedy jail terms were an alternative folks could live with.
Keith G
@drkrick:
Not so much.
Anal sex like so many activities, had an official status and an unofficial one. In ancient Mediterranean cultures, strict public segregation of unmarried adolescents led to a variety of behaviors that required a great deal of unofficial and ad hoc passivity. Texts written by societal leaders proclaimed one thing while first-hand accounts from the street tell a different story.
El Cid
@btom89: According to the King James version, the masses of the city arrive demanding they have access to the handsome visitors for their preferred gratifications.
I’m just wondering if when Lot took his cattle and shepherds in the other direction from his best friend Abraham, so as to avoid the disputes which had been arising between the populations under the two major clan leaders, Sodom had some sort of reputation as the kind of place where masses of city inhabitants tended to show up at residences with foreign guests demanding to be able to rape them.
I’m kind of thinking that had I been lot and heard of such a city reputation, I’d head farther.
Notably, this question is just as true if the story is classes as entirely mythical but repeated constantly in religious circumstances as if meaningful.
gene108
@Roger Moore:
I think ratings agencies should be handled like accounts doing audits.
If there’s detrimental reliance suffered by a third party from the auditors report, there’s a chance the auditor can go to jail and pay damages.
Despite the pressure of clients wanting to get clean audit reports, the downside to fudging things is high enough to keep the vast majority of accounting practices in-line.
EDIT: Also, state boards of accountancy review accountants and their audit practices periodically, to make sure they are following good procedures.
Maude
@burnspbesq:
Late to the thread, but I heard on Bloomberg that states are also going to go after S&P.
Thx for the link.
Heliopause
@greenergood:
Paul seems to say that marriage is between a man and a woman. See 1 Corinthians 7. In fact, this is the chapter in which Paul seems to be suggesting that sex is mostly a bad thing but if a husband and wife need to blow off a little steam, so be it.
Maude
@Roger Moore:
When I was reading about the mortgage securities market with the CDOs, most of the writers explaining it said that the ratings agencies didn’t understand the CDOs. THey were way behind the curve and yet gave good ratings to the mixed bundles of CDOs that were then insured for a lot more than they were worth.
Holy Hannah.
JoyfulA
@drkrick: The culture of Palestine in that era was Hellenic.
Hungry Joe
@Roger Moore:
Exactly. Just because someone is a tortured, repressed, desperately unhappy in-and-out-of-the-closet case doesn’t mean he isn’t at the same time a total jerk.
Another Halocene Human
@drkrick: Disagree. Paul wastes quite a few words on homosexuality, including the first references in the Bible to female homosexuality.
Why? Well, scholars think there is a difference in origin between the tradition the gospels come from and the background of the probable writer of most of the “authentic” Pauline letters. The gospels were pastiched, worked over material, a false post-72 biography narrative woven around 2nd or 1st century BCE religious thought, while Marcion was an Orthodox bishop addressing a congregation (with the bogus appeal to authority in Paul). And then you have the fact that at least one of the gospels, if not all of them, were specifically pitched towards gentiles rather than Hellenized Jews, gentiles who simply didn’t share the revulsion Jews had for homosexuality, as in the story of the Roman soldier and his slave boy who is healed by Jesus. In fact, it took centuries for Church authorities to effectively ban homosexuality, despite a number of attempts in that direction. The Western Church got their way in this in the early Middle Ages, the same time that they banned marriage for parish priests (a kind of bizarre development, considering the antecedents) and on the eve of the era of their greatest political, social, and economic power.
While I’m no biblical scholar, I don’t think the lack of reference to homosexuality is an elision or oversight. Homosexual behavior was a symbol, like Kosher food laws, for that which separated Jews and gentiles. In the more Jewish context of the gospels, Jesus is accused of having his disciples pick grain on the Sabbath. Jesus uses this as the occasion to challenge the legalistic interpretation of Sabbath prohibitions. (Apparently this passage was missing from the Calvinists’ Bible.///) Jesus also tells the story of the Good Samaritan not to say you should help people on roadsides but to challenge a sort of comfortable conception of who was within the moral circle and who was without it by virtue of their ethnicity. (And we know that because he says so.) Do you really see the same teacher who talks about dining with prostitutes and tax collectors (dregs and traitors) whipping up tribalistic anxiety (“we’re all going to get assimilated”) by ranting about all teh ghey sexxors that the gentiles were getting up to? Doesn’t fit.
Imagine the front preacher of Americans United going on the 700 Club to rant against ecumenical winter holiday displays–that’s about how much that fits.
General Stuck
@liberal:
Shut up moron.
Another Halocene Human
@Heliopause: Yes, but there’s a huge difference between “Jesus” and “Paul”. One takes a great risk saving a woman from being stoned for adultery and repeatedly calls for his followers to work on their own issues and cease to judge others, to reject self-righteousness, and to be skeptical of showy declarations of religious piety, while the other slams and shames his congregation for failing to live up to his standards, indeed, for wanting to have sex at all, even within the context of marriage
It’s enough to make you wonder about what Paul and Timothy had going on at the old tentmaking factory.
Roger Moore
@Another Halocene Human:
Just because they’re living in a more enlightened time doesn’t mean they personally are living in a very enlightened environment. Somebody who’s been raised by conservative Christians may very well believe the whole pray the gay away business and/or think that getting into a committed heterosexual relationship will somehow make their homosexual interests dry up. When everyone you know subscribes to that crap, you may wind up believing it too.
Another Halocene Human
@btom89: Proof that the medieval definition of “sodomy” is spurious in the Bible itself.
Jesus tells his followers to go out and preach the word but if a town refuses to receive them, to “shake the dust from [their] feet[….] it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city”.
The sin of Sodom was inhospitality towards strangers.
Another Halocene Human
@Heliopause: There’s no question of that with Paul (I’m sure the person you were responding to was snarking) as he is the author of one of the most colorful and disputed passages in the Bible from a GLBT perspective, where he uses all kinds of weird slang terms in a list of people who Are Very Much Not Getting The Paul Stamp Of Approval.
I have yet to see a sober scholarly accounting of what “arsenokoitai” is supposed to mean. Lots of delicious mudflinging, however.
El Cid
@Another Halocene Human:
Lot’s reaction is often taken to suggest what “inhospitality” the assembled masses were intent upon visiting on the visitors:
I’m not thinking he meant to offer up his virginal daughters to the crowd to do with “as is good in [their] eyes” for hospitable conversational purposes.
This cannot be placed in the category of simply being unfriendly to strangers. The story makes zero sense whatsoever if it’s taken to be about being generically “inhospitable to strangers”.
Heliopause
@Another Halocene Human:
Yes, Jesus does all those things in the story. He also endorses the Law. He also condemns “fornication”. He also slams and shames his disciples on several occasions for failing to live up to his standards. One of the big problems with the Jesus story is that it’s actually several stories woven into a narrative that is incoherent on many levels, which makes it an invitation to the reader to remember what one likes and dismiss what one doesn’t.
El Cid
@Heliopause: Also, it gets really, really tiresome to have to discuss some actual, current, important issue in the context of what an apparently notable local may or may not have said about religious matters rooted in a post-pastoralist tribal oral tradition in a tiny clan society in one area of a city state of the ancient Mediterranean a couple thousand years ago, because some people even today think he might have been a magic super-divine being whose words and examples we must follow to figure out stuff.
No, no, we can’t just figure these things out — we have to consider first how the long-dead magic guy from that Roman-conquered small city might have thought about the issue!
A moocher
@burnspbesq: the confession of wrongdoing, or rather the refusal to proffer one, seems to be the nub of it. They won’t ‘fess up, because that will open them to civil liability. Which they will probably have in plenty if they are convicted. So they are doubling down, as you people like to say. They either skate, or drown in their own puke.
(I was going to say, “or go down in flames” but that is way too glorious an ending for the corrupt, mendacious rat-bastards).
burnspbesq
@A moocher:
I’m not as current on developments in the law of res judicata and collateral estoppel as I probably should be, but I wouldn’t assume that beating DOJ means they are out of the woods with respect to investor claims.
Patricia Kayden
How many actual “ex-gay” men exist? I assume zero.
I recall an “ex-gay” man who was featured on Donahue decades ago. When I googled him recently, it turned out that his “conversion” was fake. Feel sorry for the woman he had with him on Donahue who is now his ex-wife.
Phoenix Woman
@anadromy: Did you notice his Grindr photo is one from his Xtian website?
He’s either too stupid to breathe or he set himself up, consciously or not, to get caught.
bad Jim
98 comments, and no one mentions Leslie?
“Life could be ecstasy, you & me & Leslie”
It was supposedly “endlessly”, but that’s not the way it was sung.
Ramalama
This reminds me of Rick Perlstein’s article “Why I am a Liberal”:
I just wish the whole pray away the gay thing would die more quickly.