You and others on this board say that people with homosexual desires (orientation) are automatically guilty of committing homosexual acts. That is pure nonsense and what makes fundamentalists Baptists often look so foolish. I understand more and more why Baptists are shrinking in numbers.
Of course a person with homosexual desires can live a life of chastity and obedience to the Lord without ever committing a homosexual act. Most evangelical & Catholic Christians are smart enough to figure that out without too much trouble.
If you become a Christian and discover that you cannot “pray the gay away,” although some well meaning Christians may have suggested that you can do exactly that, what do you do then?
You can come to the conclusion that Christianity must be false since the kind of change you were expecting didn’t take place, and sticking around for some of the changes God might consider far more important doesn’t seem too worthwhile in light of your present disappointment. You can give up and you can go back.
You could also decide that, since your heterosexual arousal factor remains stuck on zero, well, God must have made you this way and the liberals are right after all. Who knew? You don’t have to abandon “Christianity,” you just need to find the right kind. The kind that suits you. Try to rein it in a bit and things will be fine.
Or you can recognize that your sexual orientation, past, present, and future, has precious little to do with it, no matter how it got that way, and no matter what you can or cannot do about it now. It will occur to you that the God who has called you to faith and repentance is also eager to provide you with the graces necessary for the daily struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil, just like He does with everyone else who is so chosen.
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As far as raparative therapy. Too much made of it but sometimes seems to have some effect. But such a transformation does not take place because God has a keen interest in helping them to swap out one form of lust for another. It is not on a par with going from the fire back into the frying pan. I believe it happens because He has issued to them a vocational calling to become the husbands and wives, and the mothers and fathers, they were meant to be all along. He will not settle for anything less. I think it is also because, in keeping with His Providence, that kind of healing remains a possibility in their lives.
God is very much in the business of making people whole and He’s quite good at it. He can handle cancer, diabetes, withered limbs, issues of blood, AIDS - you name it. But Joni Eareckson Tada is still a quadriplegic, and not because she did anything wrong. We might also notice that, while the lame can be made to walk, and the blind made to see, the spontaneous regeneration of missing limbs is . . . a bit rare. Who gets credit for that?
The thought of becoming a “eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake” may not cause your face to light up right away when it dawns on you that the other alternatives simply aren’t open to you. (Then again, it might!) But if you are being called to a life of chastity and obedience by God Himself, you will come to learn that this is not simply “Plan B” for His red-headed stepchildren whose birthdays He can’t always remember. It is rather a glorious thing, and precisely what He has in mind for you.
The Church cannot offer the world a semi-Pelagian “gospel” of petit bourgeois respectability, one in which all you really have to do is believe most of the right things and behave yourself. And, above all else, be normal. She cannot say to the sexual profligate: “Go straighten yourself out, then get back to us.” That might take awhile.
She must open her arms, and her doors, to all the repentant sinners to whom God has issued an invitation to come inside. Since He appears to have no interest in doing so, she ought not try to apply a “one size fits all” method in helping those sinners go on to become new creatures in Christ. She will want to let Him take care of the details and not get in His way. Thats this Catholics opinion.
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