First Presentation to a Religious Group – Seminar or Sermon?

The only way to get me to go to church is for a protest like last Sunday's Freedom To Marry Protest 2011 at Holy Name Cathedral as a member of Chicago’s Gay Liberation Network.  And now for the first time, just this past Friday, I addressed a religious group: the Changing Conversations program of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. The presentation (Myth and Science of Sexuality – Disordered or Just Different) was the same talk that I gave to the Ethical Humanists on October 10th 2011 except for one new PowerPoint slide shown below.

The slide is entitled: Protest at “Holy Shame” Cathedral by the “Intrinsically Disordered.” Photos I took during the Freedom To Marry Protest 2011 were used to prepare the collage in the new slide. The slide shows Gay Liberation Network members and supporters, the new blue-shirted “reparative therapy” Catholic bigots who want to give “love” rather than civil rights (GoFirst Ministries), and an out and proud young gay man who spoke to these bigots about the horrors he suffered during four years of “reparative therapy” (lower right photo). Read the story here.

Catholic teaching insists gay and lesbian people are “intrinsically disordered.” The science in my presentation shows that LGBTI people are natural variants and that the cause of our distress is not intrinsic, but extrinsic – due to the cultural prejudice and discrimination stemming primarily from religious ideology.

I added this sarcastically-titled slide to emphasize the damage that organized religion with its implicit Adam and Eve binary-gendered restrictions has done to LGBTI people. I can only wonder if medicine would have ever pathologized LGBTI people if not for the religiously-inspired prejudice that the medical doctors unconsciously entrenched in their respective specialties.

So I wasn’t preaching to the choir this time. As I reminded these churchgoers during the talk, Presbyterians are still among the religious groups that discriminate against LGBTI people. The nonreligious humanists I’ve spoken to in the past do not discriminate against LGBTI people and many actively support LGBTI rights. The science I presented makes it clear that religious anti-LGBTI discrimination is not justified by the facts. The best I can say about these religious “good guys” is:
• They are followers, not leaders, doing “too little, too late” in the LGBTI human rights struggle
• They have been too reluctant to confront the anti-LGBTI bigots in their own and other religious groups
• They share guilt for LGBTI suffering as they continue to enjoy the perks of their religious affiliation, and
• They have a moral imperative to repent and make reparations for their sins against LGBTI people.

Now, if all religious people made such reparations, that would be true "reparative therapy" for LGBTI people that is long overdue.

British Prime Minister Issues Posthumous Apology To Alan Turing

Alan Turing pioneered computer science, broke the Nazi Enigma code and changed the course of world history.  But he was also gay.  He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated to “cure” his homosexuality, and took his own life at only 41.

As stated in my August 17th post, there is a campaign in the United Kingdom to recognize Alan Turing as a genius and a hero and to apologize for the horrific discrimination he endured as a British citizen because he was gay.  This petition has been signed by many thousands of British citizens.  Now as the list of petitioners continues to grow, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has issued a posthumous apology to Alan Turing.  Below is the text of this apology.

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown

See The Alan Turing Home Page for a wealth of information about this great genius and Geoffrey Wansell's article for a good synopsis of this unsung World War II hero's life story .

Alan Turing - Gay Genius Who Changed the Course of History Was Hounded to His Death

Alan Turing, “father of computer science,” mathematician, philosopher, visionary and hero who helped win World War II by breaking the Nazi code, has been a major and positive force in shaping our modern life and the future; yet few people know of his enormous and rightful place in history. Why? Because Alan Turing was a homosexual (androphilic) man and he died young by suicide. Now there is a campaign in the United Kingdom to recognize Alan Turing as a genius and a hero and to apologize for the horrific discrimination he endured as a British citizen because he was gay and that no doubt contributed to his suicide.

But Alan Turing deserves to be celebrated around the planet, not just in the United Kingdom. Alan Turing’s accomplishments as a scientist, great thinker, and military hero have benefited all of humanity; thus he is a global hero and should be known and celebrated around the world. Over the years that I have been in American academia, I have observed to my dismay that many computer science students don’t know anything about Alan Turing. This is like a physics student not knowing about Isaac Newton! American students should be taught about Alan Turing in their computer science, math, philosophy and history classes. And they should be taught how Alan Turing died and how all humanity has lost so much due to prejudice.

We will never know what other incredible achievements Alan Turing would have given the world had he been celebrated rather than persecuted for being gay. The same innate brain difference that made Alan Turing a gay man may well have been a factor leading to his genius. We suffer when we punish diversity. The world destroyed a genius and a hero. The whole world lost. Homophobia is a cultural disorder!

Proposition 8

The insanity of prejudice!

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/c0cf508ff8/prop-8-the-musical-starring-jack-black-john-c-reilly-and-many-more-from-fod-team-jack-black-craig-robinson-john-c-reilly-and-rashida-jones