I’m a Gay Man Who Married a Straight Woman

When religion makes a promise reality can’t keep.

—

“My eyes opened around 2:00 A.M. to the sound of a crowd screaming in the background. I had fallen asleep on the sofa and was, once again, being awakened by a late-night airing of The Jerry Springer Show. No sooner did I regain consciousness than depression wrapped itself around my psyche like a tight-fitting shoe. I let out a barely audible sigh. Sleep often eluded me; insomnia was now as much a part of my routine as brushing my teeth. I slept when I could.

“I hated the Jerry Springer show, but changing the channel required too much effort. “What are you going to tell our son?!” the distraught guest screamed at her husband, a transgendered cowboy who was on the show to come out to his wife and introduce his Harley-riding boyfriend. “Our son’s only ten,” she said, her voice growing quieter and more desperate. How could someone do that to his kid? I thought. And why on national TV? As I watched her bury her head in her hands, shaking with sobs, a tear formed in the corner of my own eye and slowly drifted over the bridge of my nose. With my own divorce imminent, my emotions were raw.

“It had only been a couple of months since my wife told me our marriage was over. We had been married for six and a half years and, though our marriage was rocky from the start, I never expected to be in this situation. I made a commitment for life. In addition, the thought of not seeing my daughters every day, putting them to bed at night and waking them up in the morning, was more than I could bear. I was devastated.

“Another roar from the raucous Springer crowd brought my attention back to the television. The husband’s cocky attitude made me angry. I didn’t know if the story was real, but my heart ached for his little boy just the same. This man projected the self-centered callousness I saw in my wife. I hated him. I hated her. I mustered the strength to find the remote and press the power button. The screen went dark.”

Excerpt from: Going Gay My Journey from Evangelical Christian Minister to Self-acceptance, Love, Life, and Meaning (CK Publishing, 2014)

We were young, in love, and believed that, with God on our side, the whole world had been laid out before us.

Like most couples, my wife and I, full of hope and promise, walked down the aisle of the church where we married. We were both dedicated, Evangelical Christians. I was in the ministry at the time. We were young, in love, and believed that, with God on our side, the whole world had been laid out before us.

But I was gay.

People frequently ask if my wife knew I was gay when she married me. The answer is a bit more complicated than a simple yes or no. I had gone through an ex-gay ministry, the most famous one in the country in fact, and was working for them when we got married. My wife and I believed I had been “healed” of my homosexuality, or was at least in the process of being healed. Our faith taught us to trust, pray and believe that God could do miraculous things.

It wasn’t too long into the marriage before we both began to sense something was wrong. There was an invisible wall that separated us emotionally. I wanted to believe it wasn’t there and denied it vehemently when she brought it up. We prayed harder. I had sufficiently suppressed my sexuality in the years leading up to the marriage. I believed my lack of sexual attraction meant God was healing me. What it really meant was that I had learned to subdue it to the point that I felt almost no sexual attractions at all. This gave me a sense of satisfaction, feeling as though my spirituality was higher than my carnal self. At the same time, I only felt half-alive.

I controlled practically everything around me, from how I dressed to how my house looked, to what I wanted others to perceive about me. It was exhausting. I detracted from intimacy by causing an argument, making a joke, or claiming to be too tired. The latter was mostly true since I put so much energy into pretending. In those rare times we had sex, it was more like building a fence than building a relationship. I was proud of the fact that I got through it, all the while hoping she didn’t notice how uncomfortable I felt.

♦◊♦

The emotional strain grew worse and the friendship that once held us together began to come undone.

By the time we were pregnant with our first child, the relationship had nearly reached a breaking point. Divorce, however, wasn’t an option because of our Christian commitment. We prayed harder. We read our Bibles. We faithfully attended church, Bible studies and Christian fellowship. The emotional strain grew worse and the friendship that once held us together began to come undone.

Nearly as miraculous as the virgin birth itself, she was pregnant again. We knew exactly when it happened, in a moment – a brief moment – of truce. The pressures of life weighed on us as we both became disillusioned with church. The lack of answers and spiritual guidance for our troubles left us blaming each other. I hated her.

Soon, there was nothing attractive about her at all and I felt my marriage – the unspoken golden promise of ex-gay ministry – was an albatross that kept me from finding God. But I was trapped. With divorce out of the picture, I prayed God would take her home. I could make it as a single dad with two daughters, but I couldn’t bring myself to divorce her. That would be a sin.

Still, I wasn’t prepared when she took the initiative and divorced me. I reeled from the pain of failure, wondering how a just God could allow me to go through so much turmoil in one life. Wasn’t fighting the sinfulness of homosexuality enough? Now divorce? Where was the Christian promise of abundant life Jesus talked about? Why didn’t the magic formula of Bible reading, prayer, fasting, worship and fellowship work? I was an ordained minister, of all things. If anyone knew how it worked, it was me.

For six years following my divorce, I sat mostly in silence, isolating myself from the rest of the world. I frequently stared out of the large pane glass window in the back of my house, trying to figure out what happened. Faith and sexuality had been neatly compartmentalized to keep me from going insane. Now they were merging into one. Questioning my beliefs felt blasphemous. They were the very foundation on which I made decisions, lived, breathed and raised my children. I simply could not be wrong about them. The Bible could not be wrong.

♦◊♦

It’s been 12 years since my divorce. My ex-wife and I have jointly worked together and raised our children, even spending holidays and birthdays together. Our beliefs are drastically different than they used to be. It’s difficult to go through decades of inner turmoil and come out completely unscathed. Most of what I once believed about Christianity, I now see as nothing more than religious fervor, organized into murky factions of the same basic ideology. We call these denominations. There are 34,000 of them. Which one is “right” is anybody’s guess. I no longer care. I don’t think God does either.

I believe that God is bigger than the minute details that too frequently occupy our thoughts.

The Evangelical Christian Church’s idea that God can change people from gay to straight is misguided at best and malicious at worse. Men, women and children have been sold the promise that people can and should change their sexual orientation, based on interpretations of canonized texts. When it doesn’t work, the person wasn’t trying hard enough, didn’t have enough faith, was never a Christian in the first place, didn’t do it right, didn’t do it long enough, didn’t have the right counseling, and on and on goes the list. It all boils down to religion making a promise reality can’t keep.

I believe that God is bigger than the minute details that too frequently occupy our thoughts. When I let go, I discovered life was never meant to be an uphill battle. Rather than simply trying to survive I can focus on helping others. That seems more Christian to me, and lines up perfectly with reality.

#BornPerfect

– See more at: http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/im-gay-man-married-a-straight-women-try/#sthash.qAd1cMDW.0antuymM.dpuf

Op-ed: LGBT Kids In The Bible Belt Need Our Help Why the south needs more shelters for LGBT youth.

Op-ed: LGBT Kids In The Bible Belt Need Our Help

Why the south needs more shelters for LGBT youth.

BY Joanne Spataro for The Advocate

October 27 2013 11:00 PM ET

I first stepped into my local LGBT youth assistance agency, Time Out Youth, in the fall of 2012. At the time, the non-profit organization had seen a 419 percent increase in homeless LGBT young people in need of temporary shelter in Charlotte, N.C.  I was there to write a story about why this was happening.

I talked with one 23-year-old, partially deaf, transgender man who told me how a staff member found him sleeping in his car and helped him find a place to stay through their host home program. He had to temporarily stay at the Vanlandingham Estate near the TOY office because there is no emergency shelter equipped to fairly accomodate LGBT people in Charlotte.

It’s not even just a problem in my hometown. There are barely any emergency LGBT shelter options in the entire Bible Belt. Per CenterLink, an online database of LGBT centers across the United States, only North Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee provide some kind of emergency services for LGBT youth, even if it is not in the form of a stand-alone shelter. Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky do not even have LGBT centers.

There are no local statistics about the number of homeless LGBT youth in the Carolinas. Typically, surveyors do not ask the sexual orientation of homeless populations in North Carolina. Homeless LGBT youth, which makes up 20-40 percent of the general homeless population in the United States, are still an invisible population in my state. If you consider that San Francisco just started collecting demographic information about the sexual orientation of homeless people for the first time this year, who knows when North Carolina will start compiling that data?

There are a handful of options and partnerships in Charlotte for the LGBT youth who need help, although they are not always ideal. TOY offers temporary home services in the form of a host home program for young people over 18. Volunteers can host a young person based on a set criteria the youth must meet to enter and stay in the program. If there is no shelter space available, those between the ages of 11 and 20, can go to The Relatives, a shelter for all homeless youth with strong ties to TOY. If that is not available, local 24-hour French Bakery Amelie’s buys the youth a coffee, drops them off at 9 p.m., and picks them up at 8 a.m. the next morning to go back to the TOY offices to figure out the next step.

Some youth congregate at the Men’s Shelter of Charlotte. TOY executive director Rodney Tucker says LGBT youth band together there to avoid physical and verbal harassment in the shelter. For transgender individuals of color, particularly those whose legal gender markers are male but present as female, the Men’s Shelter is one of the few emergency housing options. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey, put together by the National Black Justice Coalition and National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, found that black transgender people, especially those whose gender marker is male when they present as female, have difficult experiences at emergency shelters. From the homeless individuals that tried to access the shelters, 40 percent were denied access altogether, 61 percent experienced harassment and 32 percent were physical assaulted at the shelter.

In the end, wouldn’t it be better if there were more stand-alone shelters to help the LGBT young people who simply need to feel welcomed and safe?

One of the rare stand-alone shelters for homeless LGBT people in the South is Lost-n-Found. Rick Westbrook founded it two years ago. To put it in context, a 2012 report estimated there were 900 LGBT homeless youth in Atlanta, but since the shelter’s opening, he’s helped 253 LGBT young people.

Westbrook’s community-funded  shelter houses six LGBT young people at one time. He says 50 percent of the LGBT people who come through the doors are lesbians and lesbian couples. Sixty percent of the homeless LGBT people he serves are African-American. He attributes the high number of African-American LGBT youth to the pressure in conservative churches to remain closeted.

A pending federal bill, if enacted, could add LGBT protections to the Reconnecting Homeless Youth Act. Representatives Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore, Wisconsin Democrats, introduced this bill to Congress on August 1. It would require all shelters that receive federal grants to obtain competency skills on how to serve LGBT youth and for the federal government to gather data about homeless LGBT youth. The bill has been waiting for consideration by a House committee since September. While it’s a great stride, it would not help Lost-n-Found and Time Out Youth, and other LGBT emergency shelter services or housing programs, that don’t receive federal funding.

I deeply support the addition of more emergency LGBT shelter services in the Bible Belt. I now volunteer at TOY, where I teach creative writing classes to the youth. I want to be there for them in any way I can until the day we get better emergency services in our state and surrounding area. I was lucky to be born to open-minded, loving parents who accepted me. They fed, clothed and housed me so I could graduate from college and start a career. I want the same human dignity for every young member of our community.

JOANNE SPATARO is a writer based in North Carolina.

Distorted Love: The Toll of Our Christian Theology on the LGBT Community

John Pavlovitz for Huffington Post
Love doesn’t always look like love.

When I published this blog post two weeks ago, I was prepared for some people to applaud it, and for others to condemn it. That’s what happens whenever you put an opinion out there.

I was fully prepared for the waves of both support and hostility that accompany any vantage point on anything, especially a controversial topic like sexuality.

What I was not prepared for in any way were the literally hundreds and hundreds of people who have reached out to me personally to thank me for bringing some healing and hope to their families. Parents, children, siblings, and adults have confided in me (some for the first time anywhere), telling of the pain, and bullying, and shunning they’re received from churches, pastors, and church members — from professed followers of Jesus.

Scores of people from all over the world have shared with me their devastating stories of exclusion and isolation, of unanswered prayers to change, of destructive conversion therapies, of repeated suicide attempts, and of being actively and passively driven from faith by people of faith.

Church, this is the reality of our theology on homosexuality.

This is the cost of our religion to the LGBT community. More accurately, it’s the cost of our religion to LGBT human beings. This is the painful collateral damage that comes when we see principles and ignore people; when we refuse to give them the dignity they deserve.

Apparently love does hurt — really, really badly.

The most common defense I’ve heard over the past 14 days from Christians who believe that being gay is both chosen and sinful has been some variation of the supposedly well-meaning “Well, we’re just loving people by being honest with them by giving them the truth. Telling people the truth is loving them.”

Really?

The truth?

Are you sure you want the truth?

(I so want to quote Jack Nicholson right now).

I have a crammed, bursting inbox of “truth” for you if you’re interested in reading, Church.

It’s full of vile profanity, and utter contempt, and crude jokes, and physical violence, and white-hot fear. It’s packed with school-hallway harassment, and city-street beatdowns, and church shunning, and workplace hazing, and brutal self-harm, and all sorts of perpetual, personal terrorism.

And none of it looks a thing like love to me.

It certainly doesn’t look like love to the sweet, 12-year-old middle-school girl in your church who’s been told repeatedly that she’s an abomination, that God already despises her.

It doesn’t look like love to the devastated parents who have watched their son hang himself because he was assured by his Christian schoolmates that he’s better dead than gay.

It doesn’t look like love to the devoted, faithful Christian schoolteacher who has lost her life-long career for no other reason than her relationship status.

It doesn’t look like love to the 60-year-old Christian man who has prayed his whole life to be “fixed” though God has refused to, yet he is still an outcast in his family of faith.

It doesn’t look like love to the gay couple having their heads smashed in by professed “Christian” strangers while walking down the street.

It doesn’t look like love to the family of a transgender high-school junior who can’t find a church family that will welcome them or include them or acknowledge them.

And I’m totally comfortable believing that it doesn’t look like love to Jesus either.

The real problem with so much Christian theology toward the LGBT community is that it seemingly works fine from a distance, for someone firing off scripture passages or religious phrases; it just often falls apart for them when trying to translate it to actual human lives and within authentic, caring relationships.

When you have the guts and the decency and the compassion to crawl out from behind computer keyboards and plasma screens, from radio-show phone calls and bullhorn shouting, you end up standing face-to-face with beautiful, wounded, scarred people with real stories, and you realize something’s wrong here.

Something’s badly broken.

This is not what Christ’s love looks like.

Jesus’ love, even if it came with hard words, somehow always seemed and felt like love. People were seen. They were heard. They were touched. They were left with more dignity than when they started. I’m not sure LGBT people can say the same about their encounters with most Christians.

Can they say it about you?

So many believers want to make this all about sin, about the theology regarding homosexuality that they’re claiming to be defending, but it really isn’t. Regardless of where you stand theologically as a Christian, this is about treating all people like they are made by God and in the image of God.

Jesus’ command to love God and love others as we would desire to be loved — that is theology too. In fact, He said it was the greatest portion of it, our most pressing personal moral responsibility. You wanna argue against that? Argue with Jesus.

Church, the blood and the bruises of the LGBT community are on your hands and mine as believers, as long we allow any Christian to dehumanize them in the name of loving them.

However we want to frame it or justify it, the net result of our religion to so many gay people is that entire families are being torn apart, sent to the shadows, and horribly mistreated in the name of Jesus. Real flesh-and-blood people are going through uninvited, individual Hell every day at the hands of people who claim Christ. The church’s treatment of the LGBT community people has been downright sinful, and it’s killing our testimony to the world.

We’re making it virtually impossible for gay people to exist in our churches, and then feeling justified in damning them for walking away from God when they leave. The truth is that so often they aren’t turning away from God; they’re just removing themselves from harm’s way.

We are losing credibility to those outside organized Christianity, not because we’re “condoning sin” but because when the rubber meets the road, we really don’t know how to “love the sinner” in any way that remotely resembles Jesus, and our “God is love” platitudes ring hollow.

Church, this is our legacy that we are building in these days to the LGBT community and those who love them, and I assure you it’s not a legacy of love.

I don’t know what the answer is for you, and I can’t tell you how your theology gets expressed in the trenches of real people’s lives. I only know that we as Christ’s church can do better, regardless of our theological stance. We have to do better.

This is where our faith is proven to be made of Jesus-stuff or not.

This is where the love of God we like to preach about is either clearly seen or terribly distorted.

At religious liberty conference, pastors told to hold the line on gay relationships

At religious liberty conference, pastors told to hold the line on gay relationships

RACHEL ZOLL | Associated Press

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Christopher Yuan leads a prayer during the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission National Conference, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2014, in Nashville, Tenn. Southern Baptists organized the three-day event to strengthen the resolve of Christians preaching the increasingly unpopular view that gay relationships are sinful.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — More than a thousand evangelical pastors and others – gathered for a three-day conference to steel the resolve of Christians who preach that gay relationships are sinful – were asked a simple question: How many live in a state that recognizes same-sex marriage?

Hands rose all across the convention hall.

“This moral revolution is happening at warp speed,” said the Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “This is a real challenge to us on biblical authority.”

Speakers at the event said they understood they were on the losing end of the culture war on marriage. But they were prepared to be the voice of a moral minority because gay marriage is a “rejection of God’s law,” according to Mohler. He said evangelicals needed to have “a lot of agonizing conversations” about how to move forward.

The conference, called “The Gospel, Homosexuality and the Future of Marriage,” is taking place not only against the backdrop of expanding gay marriage, but also amid a small but vocal movement of evangelicals who publicly advocate greater acceptance of gays.Several of the advocates attended the conference and held behind-the-scenes meetings with evangelical leaders to seek common ground.

“My goal here is to meet as many people as I can who disagree with me and talk over coffee,” said Justin Lee, founder of the Gay Christian Network, during a break at the opening session Monday. His organization brings together Christians who differ over whether gays faithful to the Bible should remain celibate or can have same-sex relationships.

Southern Baptist leaders said they would be expressing their views in a way that was humble and compassionate, but rooted in the theological belief that marriage is only between a man and a woman. Each participant was given a bagful of books and pamphlets, with titles such as, “Love Into Light: The Gospel, The Homosexual and The Church,” and “Loving My (LGBT) Neighbor,” meant to help pastors articulate their stand against same-sex relationships.

Mohler, the most prominent Southern Baptist intellectual, said from the stage that he was wrong years ago when he said same-sex attraction could be changed.

The Rev. Russell Moore, director of the Southern Baptist’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which organized the conference, drew applause when he condemned anti-gay bullying and called on Christians to address the problem of homelessness for gay and lesbian youth as “a human dignity issue.” He said parents shouldn’t shun their gay children.

Rev. Russell Moore, left, director of the Southern Baptist’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, leads a discussion during the group’s national conference Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2014, in Nashville, Tenn. Southern Baptists organized the three-day event to strengthen the resolve of Christians preaching the increasingly unpopular view that gay relationships are sinful.

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“You’ve been given a mission of reconciliation,” Moore told the audience. “Jesus is not afraid to speak with truth, but Jesus is not shocked by people or disgusted by people.”

However, some speakers took a harder line. Erik Stanley of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the law firm defending Christian business owners and others who refuse to serve gay weddings, said it was a myth that the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, was a hate crime. He argued gays wanted “unfettered sexual liberty” while silencing all dissent.

Most of the morning sessions Tuesday featured Christians such as Rosaria Butterfield who had been attracted to members of the same-sex but say they were now married to someone of the opposite sex or had overcome their attractions.

Butterfield said evangelicals need to “repent of anti-gay rhetoric,” and befriend gays and lesbians instead of trying to “fix” them.(Moore said Southern Baptists do not support “reparative therapy” for gays based on psychological counseling and do not believe people can necessarily eliminate same-sex attraction. But he said the denomination believes Gospel teaching can help people live chastely while being attracted to people of the same gender.)

Matthew Vines, author of “God and the Gay Christian,” has drawn more than 800,000 views on YouTube for his lecture challenging the theology that drives evangelical opposition to same-gender relationships.

He said he was encouraged that some speakers have been “approaching the conversation with more respect and sensitivity than has often been the case in the past.” But he said their stand on gay relationships still “causes serious harm to LGBT people.”

Vines met privately with Mohler, who had written an e-book response to Vines, titled “God and the Gay Christian?” Both men said the meeting was a cordial discussion of Scripture and they planned to stay in touch. Separately, about two dozen Christian advocates for gay acceptance and evangelical leaders who participated in the conference also met privately Monday night. Participants agreed they would not comment afterward.

In an interview, Mohler said he expected to see some evangelical churches splitting off to accept gay relationships in years ahead. Evangelicals in the millennial generation, ages 18-33, are twice as likely as their elders to support same-sex marriage, according to a survey released in February by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Southern Baptists last month cut ties with a California congregation, New Heart Community Church, whose pastor accepted same-sex marriage after his son came out as gay. But Moore believes only a small minority of evangelicals will come to accept same-sex relationships as they struggle with expressing their opposition in the current climate.

“I’m not worried about churches in our tradition conforming to the culture. I’m worried about them not effectively engaging the culture,” Moore said in an interview. “We have to be able to speak with conviction about what we believe. We have to speak to people.”

LGBT Images from the Deep South

Images from the Deep South

October 20, 2014 | by Michael Key

Blade reporter Michael K. Lavers and I earlier this year pitched the idea of going to Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi to see what LGBT life is like in the South. Living in D.C., we wanted to see for ourselves just how different the experience was for our brothers and sisters who make their homes in places not known for LGBT inclusiveness. Our editor sent us out to gather stories and pictures. We had absolutely no idea what was in store for us. – See more at: http://www.washingtonblade.com/2014/10/20/pictures-from-the-south/#sthash.8XYo2fl8.dpuf

One man’s quest to undermine his cousin’s marriage to a transgender man

Follow breaking news @lgbtqnation

ROB WATSON
Dad, LGBT activist, businessman and blogger, evoL

Sunday, October 12, 2014

8 Comments

Nick, a transgender male, and his wife Jessica

Once upon a time there were two cousins, Jessica and Robby. They grew up together in the warm and wet Mississippi back lands. They swam, they fished and Jessica loved and respected her cousin. He gave her the sense of understanding family and loyalty.

That sense of family and loyalty was upended completely recently when Robby recently ran to the American Family Association — an entity defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “hate” organization — to get their help in humiliating and attacking Jessica’s marriage. Robby has never met Jessica’s husband.

Jessica and her husband, Nick, are legally married. Nick is a transgender male. A mutual friend introduced them a few years ago.

Jessica states:

“Nick has been my best friend since day one. We can always count on the other one during the hardest times in life. While he was in paramedic school, Nick felt my full encouragement through the whole way and I never gave up on his dream with him.  We stand by each other through every thing just as a husband and wife should. I know at the end of the day I can count on him and that’s what real romance looks like. Our love is the kind some people only dream about and I’m very lucky to be able to say I found that in this life with him.”

On the afternoon of September 23, Jessica got a private message from her cousin Robby out of the blue.

It said: “Jessica, I want you to know that I love you both as a person and as my family. You hand I practically grew up together, and I don’t want you to think that I am angry with you. But I have to tell you that what you and Nick are doing is wrong, and I am going to be doing all that I can to challenge it. I realize this might upset you, but I have to do what is right as difficult as it is going to be.”

Jessica had no idea what he meant about “challenging it,” but she was soon to find out.

That evening, Robby posted this to his Facebook wall: “Last week I learned of a same sex marriage that took place right here in the state of Mississippi. Two females, one of which is a family member of mine, applied for and was granted an official marriage license in Desoto county. One of the partners poses as a man and managed to obtain a driver’s license that legally identified her as a male. I would like to urge all Mississippians who are outraged to join me. This is a battle that has come to us and we cannot afford to lose traditional marriage.”Then he then gave the phone numbers of the attorney general, lieutenant governor and the governor.

Around midnight, Jessica received another private message from a woman she had never met.

“You need to see this video,” the message said. The video was her cousin Robby on a show with the AFA’s Bryan Fisher. Bryan Fisher is infamous for homophobic statements that include the encouragement of the kidnapping of children from LGBT families. They were making public Jessica and Nick’s names, implying that they were criminals, that their marriage was a fraud scheme and stating out and out lies as fact.

Click here to watch the Video

“The video makes it seem like we did all of this to pull one over on the state of Mississippi, and that’s nowhere close to the truth.” Jessica said.

“Mine is not an illegal marriage in any state, because it is not a same sex union at all. That is not legal in this state, and there is no ‘loop hole’ for that to be possible. Nick actually transitioned from female to male, and had his name and gender legally changed complete with birth certificate, social security card, drivers license, and all medical licenses. After all of that was completed we were able to apply for our marriage license and got married, the same as any other opposite gender couple.” Bryan Fisher characterizes Jessica and Nick as two lesbians, one of which had a hormone shot, and then fraudulently had records changed.

Nick’s process to his correct gender started before 2010. He had undergone full psychiatric exams in preparation. In 2010 he started a permanent hormone therapy program and had physiological operations in support of his transition.

Nick works as a paramedic saving lives and he has been seen as a true hero in his community. The AFA’s intrusion into his private life, and their dishonest portrayal has now caused him issues at work.

Jessica reports, “While he is out saving strangers lives, we have to worry about the safety of our family and his career. It takes teamwork from his fellow co-workers and since the videos and articles have come out, he has been treated like an outcast.”

Many that Nick worked with had only known of him as male, his actual gender. Now feel they have license to judge.

Jessica reached out to the popular Twitter site Stop-Homophobia. “Help us,” she asked, attaching a link to the AFA video. She began hearing from many people who have showered love and support. Those messages helped her deal with her feelings of betrayal and crisis over what family was supposed to be about.

“For me when I saw the video I felt it was one of the worst betrayals ever, to find out that someone made us out so horribly, and on top of it for it to come from a family member. The feelings we felt over this outrage, words can’t describe. We are being vilified for the same loving and commitment other married Mississippi couples share with each other. Our right to commit to each other for the rest of time is being portrayed as everything it’s not. The video want to portray us as deceivers who did all of this to pull one over on the state of Mississippi, and that’s nowhere close to the truth. The truth is our marriage is built out of the love we have for each other.”

“We are very grateful for the support and love that we have come across through this attempt to humiliate us,” Jessica states. “So much of our family have stepped up and let us know they are open minded and accepting and loving. The members of Nick’s family are powerful defenders of him as a man and a hero. Especially his dad, who has always been his biggest supporter. My family accepts Nick as the person for who he really is, especially my sister and most of them right here in Mississippi.”

This has given Jessica and Nick a new definition to, not the word “marriage,” but the word “family.”

Blood cousin Robby is not family. The “American Family Association” is not an association of families; it is an association of those who want to attack families that do not look exactly like a set of limited parameters. Those who see his life saving work but who cannot see Nick as he is, are not family. It is the people who love, support and celebrate him who are the true family, and Jessica and Nick are blessed to have many who have such qualifications in their lives.

“Nick taught me what marriage is,” Jessica commented. “Now someone I grew up with has caused me to re-look at what I thought being family meant. It does not mean blood and telling falsehoods to meet an agenda. It means love and honesty. I stand corrected, and we are now a stronger family as a result.”

Sharing DNA is no big deal. A person’s ability to look deep, push past their own pre-conceived notions to better understand a family member they love, and then stand up for them, that ability brings the greatest value in life. Some will learn they have that ability within themselves and stand proud. Others will make videos.

If I Have Gay Children: Four Promises From A Christian Pastor/Parent

john pavlovitz

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll have gay children.

I’m not sure if other parents think about this, but I do; quite often.

Maybe it’s because I have many gay people in my family and circle of friends. It’s in my genes and in my tribe.
Maybe it’s because, as a pastor of students, I’ve seen and heard the horror stories of gay Christian kids, from both inside and outside of the closet, trying to be part of the Church.
Maybe it’s because, as a Christian, I interact with so many people who find homosexuality to be the most repulsive thing imaginable, and who make that abundantly clear at every conceivable opportunity.

For whatever reason, it’s something that I ponder frequently. As a pastor and a parent, I wanted to make some promises to you, and to my two kids right now…

1) If I have gay children, you’ll all know it.

My children won’t…

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