Posted on 07/28/2009 6:42:39 PM PDT by Maelstorm
For years Greg Quinlan juggled a double life, going to church, entering Bible College, chasing gay sex.
The tension nearly killed him, he said.
“I was torn,” he said. “I had to either come out of the closet or commit suicide. I was more afraid of facing God.”
So he dropped his faith and lived as an openly gay man who learned to lobby on behalf of gay and lesbian issues through his volunteer work for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). He was particularly enamored with the group’s black-tie fundraisers. The group, he said, was a refreshingly professional organization that seemed a world removed from the often-raucous scenes in gay bars.
“The women were in skirts and the men weren’t,” he said.
As a lobbyist, Quinlan said he liked to research “the enemy” and began to monitor evangelical television to keep abreast of their twisted moves to protect pro-family values. During one program, the host featured the testimonies of several former gays who had successfully left the lifestyle.
“I would have two wars raging inside of me,” he said. “I would wonder, ‘Oh, God, is it true? Can I get out of this?’”
Nearly two decades later, Quinlan is still campaigning, but his message is vastly different.
“The gay lifestyle is shallow, lust-filled and immature,” he said during a visit to San Diego for the National Education Association’s convention.
Now a member of the Ex-Gay Educators’ Caucus, Quinlan is pushing for access to teachers in an effort to balance the union’s push for pro-homosexual issues, including same-sex marriage and gay-friendly curriculum. He and other Ex-Gay caucus members did so by working a booth at the NEA’s exhibit hall, a right they had to sue for several years back.
“What the HRC taught me to do,” he said, “I’m now doing for the Lord.”
As an HRC volunteer in the late ’80s, Quinlan said group members focused on moving their agenda forward by concentrating on several key arenas including establishing gay-affirming curriculum, seeking to allow homosexuals to openly serve in the U.S. military, legalizing gay-marriage and re-educating education.
Quinlan said numerous initiatives—targeting sex-ed and science curriculum, while also implementing protections designed at preventing bullying—have made great inroads in the public schools.
“One area where they have won, have had tremendous success, is in education,” he said, adding that each generation of students becomes more and more accepting of homosexuality. “We are in a demographic nightmare.”
Understanding nightmares Growing up as a young man with an abusive “Archie Bunker-type” father, Quinlan first found solace in his faith, describing a strong spiritual conversion at age 9.
“It was the real deal,” he said. “I felt the weight lift off of my shoulders.”
Instead of life improving at home, the father’s abuse toward him worsened. Eventually he filled his desperate need for affection at the hands of a young teen boy who introduced him to sex. Quinlan said he became a willing molestation victim.
“I was getting something I wasn’t getting at home, I was getting something I wasn’t getting at school, and I was getting something I wasn’t getting at church,” he said. “I was getting attention, I was getting affirmation, I was getting affection. Someone was touching me without hitting me. Someone was talking to me without screaming.”
Through the help of Christian spiritual leaders, Quinlan returned to his faith and began working on the issues of bitterness and unforgiveness that perverted his relationship with his father.
“That’s when the same-sex attractions faded,” he said. “That was the enemy’s hook in me.”
It was not, he said, an overnight healing and he held to the promises of Romans 12 by trying to renew his mind.
“There is pleasure in sin, for a season,” he said. “I had spent a long time contaminating it.”
Today he works with Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays and is a consultant for the New Jersey Family Policy Council.
While he bemoans the closed platform of the NEA, Quinlan places much of the blame for homosexuality advances in the public school system right at the feet of believing Christians.
“We’ve allowed this to happen,” he said. “There are so many Secret Service Christians who need to come out of the closet, but we also need to know how to argue and debate persuasively. This conspiracy and its wheel have been around for decades.”
Why do you wish not to acknowledge the fact that molestation and abuse do in many cases play a role in gender identity and homosexuality? Why such denial when there is so much evidence to the contrary?
Most certainly there is a conspiracy and it isn’t that they don’t make it into the mainstream media it is that they don’t make it into the mainstream conservative media that bothers me. I don’t expect the left to make our arguments for us but when the right isn’t even brave enough to debate any longer except on vacuous grounds in defense of marriage all the while allowing schools to be taken over with identity politics it makes me wonder who the real enemy is. Gay activism is no better than global warming. The premises behind both are just as flawed. The difference is that one doesn’t involve sex.
Christians and conservatives who are silent is why the most vulnerable kids are being left to be taken in by a horrid lifestyle but it is to be expected because it isn’t just homosexuality, it is permissive sexuality in general, it is the idea of egotist wish fulfillment trumping all other values. It is a father who has great heterosexual sex with his wife and two wonderful boys but is indulged to believe that some how he isn’t complete till he can dress like a girl and have his penis reconstructed. It is crazy by even a secular standard but the silence continues. Just as the people remained cowardly in the face of the increasing slavery of a government grown too big. Will anyone stand up to slay the dragon?
I pray it isn’t too late.
What do these ‘believing Christians’ believe in?
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Money? Convenience? Who knows?
If you know of a “Christian” teacher who still has a job in the government schools, then they are cooperating with evil. If they had stood up against the godless evil, they would have been fired already.
It is never too late. We may or may not win but we can never surrender.
“I was torn,” he said.
Hey, that's kinda funny.
So you've noticed it too? It's no wonder: The right has been made "Gun Shy", so to speak.
The left has beat them down on morality issues for so long, by labeling conservatives as "intolerant religious idiots", that we're afraid to say anything, lest we prove them correct.
I for one am not deterred no matter what they say.
I don’t deny that for some individuals, some pretty bad things, and their responses to them, played a role in their sexual life as adults and how they feel and believe about that life.
On the other hand, the preponderance of the majorities that went through similar experiences and did not obtain the same type of sexual life, says that there is more to it than just those experiences.
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