There’s plenty of that on the Internet already. Why bring it to Box Turtle? It would seem to exclude those in non-Abrahamic faith traditions. The “Mission Statement” doesn’t mention any exclusivity.

so she’s a nun?

Now we’re getting somewhere. I was hoping that my comments would lead to this. Perhaps Mr. Kincaid would like to open up a nice gay christian/conservative discussion about a “voluntary code” so we can explore this in more detail.

Obviously, Tushnet thinks it is perfectly reasonable to declare that gays should live loveless sexless lives in order to please HER. So the duty of the rest of us is to live our lives in a manner that provides HER with comfort and satisfaction (which presumably includes providing her with some validation of her views).

Personally, I think Tushnet is a loon, but in general I can coexist well with loons as long as THEIR pursuit of happiness doesn’t require control over MY life to provide THEM with fulfillment. But for millions of people, that’s the way it works, doesn’t it?

As for Tushnet, she’s advocating against our equality, so she’s already crossed the line into using the force of law. If she just wants to close up shop and tell other people to do that, fine. It’s rather ridiculous and sad but go for it.

This thread is probably dead, but I’ll leave you with one more cautionary tale about a gay catholic. It’s really sad to see a gay christian condemn the rest of us. This is another price we pay.

“As the hundred or so daily readers of eve-tushnet.blogspot.com, and a larger audience for her magazine writing, know by now, Ms. Tushnet can seem a paradox: fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate. She does not see herself as disordered; she does not struggle to be straight, but she insists that her religion forbids her a sex life.

“The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants,” Ms. Tushnet wrote in a 2007 essay for Commonweal. While gay sex should not be criminalized, she said, gay men and lesbians should abstain.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/us/05beliefs.html?hpw

It’s wonderful that some sects have embraced us as full members. I wonder, though, if they would still condemn as sinful the behavior of some gay men who “hook-up” online for sex. Where do those sects stand on that issue? Do you dare ask.

Uhh.. you do realize they would condemn that as sinful for heterosexuals to do also, right? WTF is the point of this? Your hook up habits have nothing to do with your orientation.

A little humor.
I think boredom was the x factor. Honestly. As a child, church bored me to tears. Stand up, sit down, kneel, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel. Pray, sing, etc, etc, etc. Why are we doing this? Why am I here? Why does that kid get to bring a book? That kid has toys! No fair! This guy is boring, he talks like he’s bored. People are singing like they’re bored, too. I think I owe Church some credit for my wonderful and active imagination. It was my only escape. The Catholic Mass became so predictable, no matter where we lived(we moved a lot) that I could do all the standing, and sitting, and kneeling while paying zero attention to content.

The older I get the more I lean toward believing that many choices we make may have some inevitability about them. Imagine that you could press an undo button and take yourself back to the moment of birth, or better yet, to the moment of conception. Then imagine that you go through your life journey again with every biological trait and external influence EXACTLY the same. Would your choices along the journey be different? The obvious big problem with this imaginary scenario is that if you make one different choice, everything necessarily changes moving forward.

But anyway, I think there is an enormous amount yet to be learned about the nature of choices. Going forward, I suspect that evidence will show movement in the direction of more things being viewed as non-choices, than vice-versa. We all seem to recognize that the combination of all our life experiences plus biology determine who we are, but at the moment of a decision we characterize it as a choice. But how much inevitability is there in that choice?

Religion (particularly fundamentalism) has certainly always lagged way behind in the acknowledgement of evidence concerning the reality of almost everything. Maybe that’s part of why fundamentalists cling to the notion that people choose to be homosexuals, although the more rational ones (if there is such a thing) have shifted the notion to mean the choice of acting in accordance with one’s orientation. But I’ve always suspected the fundamentalists chose to present the propaganda of homosexual choice because it is virtually required politically. But did the fundamentalists really choose, or is it just part of the hard-wiring compelling them to promote their beliefs by any means at their disposal?