Stories

Stories... They're accounts of our experiences, or made up tales to convey a message or entertainment. Generally they can contain bits of both fact and fiction. I read the following quote a week or two ago, and it got me thinking...

I see so many heterosexual marriages where the people go to church religiously but they’re mean to each other and they don’t treat their kids right. How often do you hear people complaining about gay marriages and tsk-tsking when the gay couple adopts a kid? It doesn’t matter to them that the family is very happy; they’ve broken a covenant with God, some people say. Well, to me, if there’s love and respect in a marriage, that’s the covenant with God. What goes on in the bedroom is another story and I don’t want to pass judgment on anyone else’s story. I hate to remember that once I was one of those other kind of people—the kind that judges gays, blacks, other types of different poorly. It makes me deeply ashamed that I was ever like that.

- Michael Groover, Paula Deen’s husband, My Delicious Life with Paula Deen

I'm deeply ashamed as well, because I was one of those people to.

We humans seem to use stories as a way of justifying our actions and feelings as well. When it came to homosexuality, my story was that it was some kind of weakness given to us by a 'loving' Heavenly Father, with him knowing full well that we could over come it.

I'm not gay by any stretch of the imagination, although I must admit that I can definitely appreciate a finely groomed and well toned male body. But the idea that a 'loving' God would give someone the same feelings which I experience when viewing a female body, and do that as a way of 'testing' them just baffles my mind now.

An aquaintence of mine told another story some weeks ago... He think homosexuality happens when a person views so much porn that they become immune to the sight of naked members of the opposite sex, and the only way for them to get their jollies is by engaging in perverse sexual acts, by which he meant, homosexual sexual acts.

First of all... You could line up the 100 most beautiful women in the world, and I could ogle them and have sex with them (well 99 of them at least... Mrs Koda would likely refuse at that point) for days on end. Let me recover a little, and I guarantee you that even a moderately cute lady would still turn my head, whereas, I might be tempted to high five Neil Patrick Harris, but that would be as far as I would be tempted to go with him.

Second, this is just the same old ignorant thinking that homosexuality is purely about sex. It isn't. It is based something far more meaningful than that, but that may be a topic for another post.

Finally, the biggest story out there right now, seems to be fear based.

Homosexuality, and the acceptance of it is somehow going to destroy our civilization. Our religions will be targeted, our freedoms will be taken away and a whole host of other atrocities befall us, if we acknowledge that perhaps some people feels differently from the way we do.

At the end of the day though, they're just stories designed to try and make the bigots feel better about themselves. Hey, it even worked on me for a while.