Attracted To Men, Pastor Feels Called To Marriage With A Woman

[dude]

Attracted To Men, Pastor Feels Called To Marriage With A Woman

[Chris James]

I feel sorry for the woman who has to deal with this man's mental illness. Denial of his feelings cannot be conquered by religion.

[Merkin]

A generation or two late to the party, this man is just expressing what was the norm for many gay men living before Stonewall if they wanted to occupy an acceptable role in their communities.

[Nigel Gordon]

I have seen too many of these type of marriage, they were common back in the 1960s, nearly got into one myself. For some it worked, but they were in the minority. For most it ended up in disaster with a lot of people getting hurt, the man, the woman and worse still the children. What is worse many of these men feel threatened by children who turn out to be gay and take a very negative attitude to their sexual orientation.

[DesDownunder]

My experience, and this is entirely anecdotal, is that at least somewhere between 35 - 50% of men have felt, or are attracted to other men. Societal pressure from family, employment, and religion have convinced these men to subjugate their feelings, or to resort to clandestine casual meetings with other men. Denial of their attraction is all too common, and often precipitates violent reactions in the home and the work place.

Sufficient work has been done by the psychiatric professionals to indicate that homophobia is, in itself, a mental illness brought on by the denial of one's true sexual orientation.

When this denial is combined with religious indoctrination that condemns homosexuality then the resulting psychosis can be very obnoxious and traumatic for all concerned.

When we add Kinsey's scale of sexual orientation as well as the fluidity of sexual expression itself, we can perhaps see that there is much work to be done in the acceptance of human sexual relationships and their expression. As Jamessavik (I believe) once said, "Darwin's work is never finished."

However, anthropologically, we might also consider that in addition to greed, tribal squabbles over land and water rights, we won't see true peace on the planet whilst we do not accept our attraction; whilst we do not allow ourselves the freedom to physically express our love for each other. Religion of course cannot be permitted to dictate the conditions of that love, but that is another subject of mammoth proportions and problems.