Photo Credit: Porterville College

Joel Wiens, Ed.D., teaches Anatomy, Nutrition, Anatomy and Physiology, and Microbiology at Porterville College.  He is also faculty adviser for the One In Christ Club on the campus.

A posting by that club on the College’s website has caught the eye of local gay rights activists, and will be the focus of efforts to get the clearly false information removed.

The posting starts out:

Homosexuality, at its root, is not a sexual problem – it is a gender-identity problem.

Four gay myths
    1.  10% of the population is homosexual
    2.  A person can be born gay.
    3.  Once gay, always gay.
    4.  Homosexuality is normal in every way.

The very first line exposes the mindset of the post.  Homosexuality is not a “problem” that needs fixing.  The tract is entirely based on the assumption that being gay is not part of the normal range of human sexuality, and has been since the first humans walked the plains of Africa.  The assumptions that start off the post are simply false.  The rest is a typical religious tract, regurgitating nonsense “theories” about disengaged fathers, overbearing mothers, and broken people looking for acceptance with same sex relationships.  Of course, the implied theme is that LGBTQ people are simply misled, and Jesus can fix them.

The problem with this clearly uninformed content is that it is posted to the website of a public educational institution.  Local activists plan to confront, respectfully, the facilitator and the college administration on the issue.

After the jump, we’ll post the entire missive, in case it does get deleted before the college can officially be made aware of it’s existence.

Homosexuality

Homosexuality, at its root, is not a sexual problem – it is a gender-identity problem.

Four gay myths
1.  10% of the population is homosexual
2.  A person can be born gay.
3.  Once gay, always gay.
4.  Homosexuality is normal in every way.

Informed disapproval does not mean homophobia or intolerance.

A person’s faith tradition is a valid source of information in which to decide that homosexuality is immoral, or is lifestyle that is not what God intended, or simply a lifestyle which invites physical, mental, and spiritual conflict.

Male:  Dr. Joseph Nicolosi (Has treated over 1000 patients; President: National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality)

Masculine strivings.  Needs a disidentification from mother and identification with father.  “Dads – if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will.”  Dads – don’t humiliate your sons.  Gay men usually have had disengaged fathers while they were growing up.  This can cause him to reject his father (masculinity).  He will continue to search for the love and acceptance of a man.  He will search for “maleness”, but won’t find it in another gay.  “I am looking for a real man, but a real man is with a woman; and I don’t have a woman’s body.”  Unfortunately he will eroticize his need.  In essence, he doesn’t know how to be a man.

Same-sex behavior is an attempt to “repair” childhood emotional hurts.  Why Dr. Nicolosi has termed his therapy – reparative therapy.

The church should talk about homosexuality or our children will get their information from a school counselor or friends who believe in the four myths.  If a person believes in the four myths then there is no chance for change.

Careful about the research – McWhirter and Mattison, 1984 took 165 of the “best gay relationships” and measured sexual fidelity for five years.  After five years none of the relationships had maintained fidelity.  So they changed what fidelity means…to listening and trying to be understanding of the other partner as he explained his unfaithfulness.

A recent meta-analysis study showed over 500 articles linking homosexuality with pathology.  That means gays show increased tendency towards bad relationships, suicide, depression, sadomasochism, etc.

Attempts to identify homosexuality to genetic causes have been shown to be scientifically invalid, and the scientists that attempted such research (Hamer et al., 1996; Simon LeVay, 1991; Bailey & Pillard, 1991) have since recanted any connection.  Gays can change, solve their gender identity confusion, and return to heterosexuality.  Even Dr. Robert Spitzer (major influential player to get homosexuality removed from DSM) now acknowledges that.

Female:
Speaker: Janelle Hallman

Stages of an “ideal” life.

1. A baby girl needs warm attachment to mom and a corresponding sense of trust and well-being.
2. A girl in childhood needs involvement and emotional support from mom, a valuing dad and girl friends.
3. A female adolescent needs to fit in with other girls, begin to explore the realm of boys and to solidify her feminine identity.
4. An adult female needs intimacy and meaningfulness.

Different types of love are needed at each stage.

Missing blocks create deep confusion and chaos within a girl’s identity and outside relationships.

Sexualized relationships are often used to meet early emotional and relational needs.

The missing blocks:
1.  Missing, strained, or detached relationships with mom.
2.  Lack of protection or respect from boys and/or men.  (God the Father issue)
3.  Few if any close girl friends during childhood and adolescence
4.  Sense of emptiness instead of a solid sense of self and feminine identity.

So…one can counsel – if one has same sex feelings, is that because she is a lesbian or was she just missing some “blocks”?

Sexual abuse amplifies existing deficits and abandonments.  It doesn’t cause lesbianism, but clinches the feeling that feminism is weak.  Dads need to affirm her girlhood, and not limit valued activities to just in-house, which may not be fun.

Speaker:  Melissa Fryrear (M.Div.,past executive director of CrossOver Ministries)
Variations of Lesbianism:
1.  Same-sex experimentation:  women who have “dabbled in same-sex experience(s) but
have not embraced homosexuality as an identity.
2. Emotional codependency: women who would never act out sexually, but have relied on another woman to gain an identity and a sense of well-being.
3. Generation y: younger women who think that bisexuality is in vogue or “cool.”
4. “Classic” Lesbianism: women who strive to fulfill emotional needs and sexual desires through other women, they embrace a lesbian identity.  Entering into lesbianism and the lesbian culture brings a sense of freedom, relief, pleasure, power, sisterhood and a level of intimacy.

Development of “classic” lesbianism
Mother-Daughter relationship (Types of Mothers)
1. Dispassionate Mother:  She is emotionally distant and “numb,” inability to communicate, talks “at” her daughter on a surface level instead of “with” her on a deep level.
2. Doormat Mother:  Although she may be kind, sincere, and ever-giving, she is perceived as downtrodden, weak, and ineffective.
3. Manipulative Mother:  Unable to express herself openly and honestly, she connives to get what she wants, critical of everybody but never face-to-face.
4. Domineering Mother:  She is dogmatic, determined and very opinionated – often to the exclusion of her daughter’s individuality and own self-expression.
5. My-Best-Friend Mother:  She lets her own needs control the relationship, looking to her daughter for nurture and care, makes her daughter her confidant.
6. Self-Consumed Mother:  Often young and immature and still needing nurture herself, she is incapable of caring for her own daughter’s needs.

As a result, the daughter is unable to form an emotionally connected relationship with her mother.  The daughter will progressively detach herself and close the door to anything further her mother may have to offer.

Father-Daughter Relationships (The Significance of His Role)
1. Unprotecting Father:  He is unable to foster for his daughter a sense of security and safekeeping.
2.  Inattentive Father:  As a representative of the opposite gender, he is unable to affirm his daughter in her feminine identity and fails to instill within her a sense of confidence in this identity.
3. Unadoring Father:  A father is meant to reflect back to his daughter her worth as a female; however, he can fail in this if he does not offer adoration and honor of her as a female.
4. Unsupportive Father:  His opinion of his daughter provides either affirmation or disapproval in a way that a mother cannot; lack of support and validation will impact her self-worth.

As a result, the daughter will develop an insecurity in her sense of worth.  She will also be inhibited from effectively relating to men.  She may build up her own sense of the masculine, sink into helplessness, self-pity, and depression or play the victim role to elicit pity, care and love. 

Husband-Wife Relationships
1. Indifferent Couple:  When together, they fail to show love, affection, and appreciation for and toward one another.
2. Critical Wife:  She disrespects and demeans her husband.
3. Selfish Husband:  He places his needs before his wife’s and is insensitive and uncaring toward her.
4. Minimizing Husband:  Spoken or implied, he communicates a message that degrades and devalues women or femininity.

As a result, the daughter may develop negative attitudes, for example, toward men and women in general, the role of husbands and wives or marriage as an institution.

The breakdown in the emotional bonding process between mother and daughter creates a same-sex love deficit in the daughter.  At puberty, this same-sex love deficit becomes sexualized.  Seeking out lesbian relationships, therefore, can be seen as un unconscious attempt to restore what was missing in the crucial relationship between the mother and daughter.  The breakdown in the affirmation process between father and daughter creates in her a lack of confidence in her feminine identity and an insecurity in her sense of worth as a female; it will also affect how she relates to men.

Anne Paulk’s study showed that some form of abuse was personally experienced by 91% of lesbians.

Agenda For Acceptance:

“The first order of business is desensitization of the American public concerning gays and gay rights.  To desensitize the public is to help it view homosexuality with indifference instead of with keen emotion.”  – The Overhauling of Straight America

“You can forget trying to persuade the masses that homosexuality is a good thing.  But if only you can get them to think that it is just another thing, with a shrug of their shoulders, then you battle for legal and social rights is virtually won.”  Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill, Guide magazine November 1987

Top Ten Strategies to promote gay agenda:  http://www.frc.org/get/is99f4.cfm

1. Promote victim status; exploit “safety” rhetoric.
2. Start with very young children
3. Discuss alternative “families”/Celebrate “diversity”.
4. Enact school nondiscrimination codes
5. Promote “coming out” and” GLBT pride”.
6. Encourage (and fund) pro-homosexuality student clubs.
7. Adopt homosexuality-affirming curricula.
8. Use openly homosexual teachers and “role models.”
9. Pro-homosexuality counseling fro troubled youth.
10. Equate opposition with hate, bigotry, and prejudice.

“The principle behind this advice is simple:  Almost any behavior begins to look normal if you are exposed to enough of it at close quarters and among you acquaintances.”  – The Overhauling of Straight America

Close quarters – home and classroom

Among your acquaintances – parents and siblings, classmates

“In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector.” – The Overhauling of Straight America

More myths:

“Gay youth account for 30% of all teen suicides.”  Paul Gibson, “Gay Male and Lesbian Youth Suicide” paper.  This is not factual nor does it ask why.  We are left to assume it is because of the intolerance of others.  Gibson states that 3,000 gay youth commit suicide each year when the 1998 Statistical Abstract of United States says there were only 2,200 suicides among all youth.

Gibson uses the famous, but now discredited findings by Dr. Kinsey that 10 percent of the population is homosexual (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948, W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia).  A lot of his research came from prison populations.

“Project 10 is a dropout prevention program that offers emotional support, information and resources to young people who identify themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual, or who want accurate information about sexual orientation.” – taken from the Web site:  www.project10.org

Do gay activists just want tolerance?  NO:

“Being queer is more than setting up house, sleeping with a person of the same gender, and seeking state approval for doing so.  Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process transforming the very fabric of society.” – Paula Ettelbrick, former legal director of pro-gay Lambda Legal Defense Fund.

The church’s response by Joe Dallas (counselor, author, and international public speaker; past President of Exodus International-North America)

The church has a mandate to be controversial when controversy for the sake of truth is called for.

A response to the issue of homosexuality is required

The issue, then is HOW we respond.

When God’s people respond improperly, God calls them to Repentance and recommitment.

Three areas of repentance and recommitment need to be addressed as we respond to this crucial issue.

1.  The church must repent of her own immorality and recommit to a biblical standard of holiness.

• Like Samson, our vow of separation has been compromised.
• Our vow can be renewed when we practice vulnerability and authenticity in our churches.
• “Why can’t the body of Christ be more like a bar!”  (I can be transparent.  Oh, its just you, the regulars.)  ‘

2.  The church must repent of hostility toward homosexual people and recommit to bold love.

• Like Jonah, we too often preach judgment without mercy.
• Bold love seeks to serve without compromising.
• If our approach is service-oriented, we build credibility without compromising our moral position.  “Hate the sin, love the sinner”  so where is the evidence?

3.  The church must repent of being intimidated by the gay rights movement, and recommit to her prophetic role.

• “The church must be reminded that it is neither the master of the state nor the servant of the state; rather, it is the conscience of the state.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
• If the conscience of the state abdicates its function, there is no hope for the state.  The church is called to protect the fundamental freedoms in our culture of speech, conscience, and religion.
• In doing so, the church must boldly protest immorality in any form while simultaneously building a place of safety for those who respond to our message.

In every community, culture, country…the acceptance of pro-gay ideology always causes a decrease in freedoms of speech.  It silences other viewpoints.

• In 1994 the American Psychiatric Association Board of Trustees decide to try and alter the code of ethics to make it unethical (illegal) to treat homosexuals who wanted to leave the lifestyle, even when the gay patient asked for help.
• Focus on the Family must delete references to homosexuality in Canada to comply with the law.
• In Sweden, churches are not exempt from “disparaging” remarks about homosexuality.  Pastors can get a two-year prison sentence.
• Observe how the American media portrays people who believe that homosexuality is wrong – intolerant, buffoons, etc.

http://www.portervillecollege.edu/jwiens/OneInChristClub/LoveWonOut2004.htm
http://www.portervillecollege.edu/jwiens/
http://www.pc.cc.ca.us/jwiens/OneInChrist.htm
http://www.portervillecollege.edu/

QueerVisalia will keep an eye on this issue, and we’ll let you know what happens.  To our friends in Porterville, keep up the good work, we’re behind you all the way, and if we can help you in any way, just let us know! (you can reach me at jim@queerlandia.com)
Gay Porterville.com has more.

(Information: this post went up at about 2:30 pm, Tuesday, 8/9/2011)

UPDATE: 4:45 pm   Porterville College has already removed the page!