Posted on 05/22/2019 8:27:37 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Men and women who once lived and identified as LGBT are set to proclaim how encountering Jesus transformed their lives for the second time in the nation's capital this weekend.
The Freedom March, founded by Jeffrey McCall, is diverse group of Christians who have left the active practice of homosexuality and transgenderism behind and are testifying to the power of the Holy Spirit who set them free from sexual sin and wounds of all kinds.
“I was transformed through the grace of Jesus and found that others have been as well. These marches are a way to ensure that others who have overcome are not feeling isolated and alone," McCall explained in a statement sent to The Christian Post. "There is an entire community of people that have made this transformation, and we are here to support them.”
The march will occur Saturday beginning at 1 p.m. at Sylvan Theatre, which is situated near the Washington Monument, where it was held last year
The purpose of the march, according to McCall, is to connect those who have left the LGBT life, reach out to the LGBTQ community in each city, and equip local churches that are seeking to know how to minister to LGBT-identified persons.
McCall noted that the march functions as a platform a to both bring people together and build community, and allow those who have been changed by Jesus to share their stories.
Luis Javier Ruiz, who is a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando 2016, spoke at last year's march and will do so again Saturday. He is instrumental in setting up an upcoming Freedom March next year in Orlando and emphasizes the centrality of knowing God.
“I’ve always said it’s not about gay to straight. It’s about lost to saved,” Ruiz remarked.
“Through the Freedom Marches, we want to spread messages of love and acceptance for people who have shed their LGBTQ identity and show others that we do exist. These marches are our platform to educate, encourage others and share in a community. We’ve had a great response from people, other community groups and churches.”
Fellow Pulse survivor Angel Colon will also be speaking at the march Saturday.
Vocalist and Freedom March worship leader Edward Byrd noted in a Tuesday email to CP that the greatest misunderstanding about those who have left the LGBT life behind is that they are self-loathing and are suppressing their sexual desires.
"They think we are not happy, they think we are unfulfilled when in all actuality we are living our best lives. Not saying it’s always easy but the real joy, peace and freedom we have is nothing I ever known before," Byrd said.
While this is the second such rally to occur in Washington, D.C., another Freedom March was held in Los Angeles in the fall. Similar gatherings are planned for St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 23 and in Orlando on Sept. 14.
The march comes amid intensifying debate in both Congress and in state legislatures across the country as they consider outlawing counseling options for those with unwanted same-sex attraction and gender confusion, known as "conversion therapy" bans, as well as adding "gender identity" as a protected category in civil rights law.
The whole notion of "conversion therapy" is misleading, Byrd told CP, "because the majority of us has never experienced conversion therapy; our experiences were encounters with the Holy Spirit that changed our lives."
"I had never even heard of conversion therapy. I’ve seen references of it in the past but didn’t come into the knowledge of what it really was until recently," he said.
"None of us were ever forced to change or put in a camp; it was a decision that we made to follow after Jesus and His love."
The gaystapo is 100% in favor of conversion therapy— as long as they’re the ones converting your kids to their lifestyle.
Jacobs syndrome (47,XYY)
Klinefelter syndrome (47, XXY)
Triple X syndrome (47, XXX)
Turner syndrome (45,X)
XXYY syndrome (48, XXYY)
And every one of those syndromes are considered birth defects, so what’s your point?
Jacobs syndrome (47,XYY) - Y chromosome present = Male
Klinefelter syndrome (47, XXY) - Y chromosome present = Male
Triple X syndrome (47, XXX) - No Y chromosome present = female
Turner syndrome (45,X) - No Y chromosome present = female
XXYY syndrome (48, XXYY) - Y chromosome present = Male
See how easy that was?
First thing is to pray for homosexuals to be convicted by the Holy Spirit of sin and come to repentance.
Second is to speak the truth in love as you enter into the public dialogue of this listening circle on homosexuality.
Proclaim Jesus Christ through the Scriptures.
People may not want to hear what God has to say, but we are commanded to proclaim His word to all people.
Tell homosexuals the hope of the gospel.
Their sin can be forgiven and their bondage to it can be broken.
Third is to personally minister.
Do not shy away from a person because you find out they are homosexual.
They need a true friend and you can be it.
However, keep in mind that a true friend helps a friend overcome sin.
There will be toleration of sin as you work with the person, but there is never acceptance of sin.
Fourth is to portray hope.
1 Corinthians 6 tells of many sins that once characterized the Corinthian Christians including homosexuality and other sexual perversions, but they were washed, sanctified and justified in the Lord Jesus Christ.
At one point in time our lives where characterized by our sin, but after Christ comes into our lives we are characterized by Him.
Our particular sins may have been different than the homosexuals, but we were in the same state.
Dead in our trespasses and sin until God in by His grace saved us.
There is hope by faith in Jesus Christ.
That is the message we are to give both in word and by our lives.
Having worked in the arts for 40 years, I have seen many people, both men and women, who were living that life and finally worked through it and left it in the past. It is ludicrous to accept the left’s ideology that absolutely all people experiencing same-sex attraction are stuck with it, helpless to deal with it in case it was a result of abuse, neglect, misinformation, co-morbid self-hate or self-abuse such as drug addiction, or just plain youthful rebellion. Whatever percentage those people are, they should not be denied therapy.
If you’re a guy, do you get turned on by another guy’s hairy back? Whether you do or not is a matter of physiology, not choice. They used to put erection-monitoring gizmos on suspected molesters of children, then show them kiddie porn. The physiology would either acquit of convict the suspect.
If people can be trained out of physilogy they can be trained into it. So I guess there’s a chance I could be converted away from loving girls to loving boys, but that’s not the way to bet.
Transformation = Repentance. No repentance = No transformation.
I read somewhere and wish I could find a link (I have a relative with brain injury and also volunteered at a VA hospital) that post-mortem brain studies have shown enlargement in the brain in broad areas of special interest, for example as a violinist having enlargement in the area of the brain controlling music aptitude.
This has led me to speculate that behaviors, once learned, are difficult to unlearn; but adverse operant conditoning methods have been tried, similar to the ones you alluded to in your post, such as showing test subjects same-sex porn and if they have a penile response, zapping them. If it works, certainly the media is not going to say so; and there are a lot of problems with how to design and replicate any such study, or how women may differ as test subjects. And now, academia is forbidden from venturing outside the progfascist narrative.
Unlearning slowly is a matter of will and belief in a higher power over one's actions than animal impulse. Presumably the less-used portion of the brain would wither over time. As a former smoker, I can say definitively that after many years, I no longer want a cigarette. In fact, I can't even imagine it.
Nevertheless, until society has humane and verified ways of delivering and monitoring individualized cures for pedophilia, I am in favor of life imprisonment for anyone age of 16-25 and the death penalty for anyone over the age of 25 convicted of any vaginal, anal or oral penetrative acts upon any pre-pubescent child for the purpose of sexual gratification. This should be without the possiblity of parole if there was violence, significant physical injury or moral injury (such as rape or coerced sex by a person in power like a teacher, coach, government official or religious leader).
I'm also in favor of strict laws directing that any practices relating to the penetrative medical exams of children must be subject to close legal scrutiny, which must apply to outside venues like sports teams as well as to medical facilties.
It will be a long wait, but so far, nothing has changed my mind about it.
It is also my speculation that tough measures to eliminate child sex abuse from society would create a marked reduction in the numbers of same-sex-attracted persons in the subsequent adult population. Most people tend to live up to what is expected of them, both positively and negatively. Society is doing no favors by attempting to mainstream sexually confused behaviors.
Unlearning slowly is a matter of will and belief in a higher power over one’s actions than animal impulse.
I think you are conflating all brain function with intellect. That is not the case. Will and, for want of a better word, spirit—these are transcendent functions that go beyond logic and reason.
Unlearning slowly is a matter of self-calming of a person’s reactions/responses to specific stimuli. It takes time, even years; so some of the beneficial side effects are a growth of patience and self-encouragement to avoid or endure tough situations. The person wanting to change learns to shift gears mentally, not to treat every hard-on as a critical emergency demanding response. As time goes on, abstinence from the “undesired desires” becomes learned in place of the impulse to seek gratification.
Will is part of intellect and ‘spirit’ remains undefined.
Remember, the arrow goes both ways. If anyone can, over time, change physiological sexual responses from gay to straight, they are be able to go the opposite way. I don’t believe any amount of self-calming can make me respond to some guy’s hairy back. Not only would I never want to, but I don’t think it’s possible.
There’s a reason pedophiles are said to be incurable. If response is malleable, why aren’t pedophiles being cured?
As time goes on, abstinence from the “undesired desires” becomes learned in place of the impulse to seek gratification.
But gratification is. The attempt to eliminate gratification leads to the problems such as pedophilic ‘celibate’ clergy. Gratification is part of human nature which means there are consequences to its smothering.
The issue is not the thing one seeks; the issue is the self and learning self-control, regardless of the thing desired. It’s not as if there aren’t many other things to take the place of the thing being smothered. It’s not an either-or proposition.
I still have an addictive personality even after giving up smoking decades ago and extinguishing that desire; it moves on to other things, such as food, video games, or indulging an annoying friend’s intrusive phone calls that really cut into my time; and when I recognize my susceptibility to a bad habit becoming a problem once again, I set my learned techniques in motion to deal with it again.
People can change, but not overnight and not without effort. It’s enough for some of us, like the guy in the story, to recognize that the desire may never go away, but the ability to manage it—and extinguish acting on it—has grown stronger and stronger.
Because adult-child sex is still a crime on the books. Therefore, historically, people who knew they had extinguished these behaviors within themselves just went about their business and didn't talk about it. Nobody is going to step forward and admit to a crime he had not been caught and prosecuted for. And those who were prosecuted and jailed and then participated in cure "research" had by that time accumulated many other co-morbid conditions stemming from incarceration, family disgrace, social shunning, etc.
These days, with the rise of social media and doxxing, people are starting to talk about this formerly taboo homosexual identification and might as well be open about it, since social blackmail is so very possible over social media. Support groups for those formerly practicing homosexual behaviors are viciously attacked by the progfascists, who don't want anyone to know recovery is possible. But pedophilia, despite the determined efforts and propaganda of its fans, is still a crime, and therefore still a long way from being recognized as something one can recover from. So classical scientific approaches such as double-blind studies aren't possible, because there isn't a level playing field between the various degrees and mindset of offenders.
I can't say one way or the other if pedophilia can be extinguished in an individual; all I can say is that if someone has such an incident in their long-dead past, such as between an older adolescent and a younger adolescent, crucifying this person in the media who has led an otherwise issue-free life for decades ever since is ghoulish fun for the progfascists—the same people who would rush to the jailhouse with candles and protest signs if the state were preparing to execute a violent child rapist with multiple, horribly injured victims.
We're a long way from having a reliable model of which types of offenders actually can recover, and where the legal line in the sand should be.
That's why I still favor life sentences for youngish child rape offenders and death penalty for mature, intimidating or violent child rape offenders. Because boo-hoo, this behavior is so toxic not only to its victims but also to society that it must be stamped out.
The reason I favor life imprisonment for youthful non-violent offenders (such as casual seducers and foolers-around) is that someday a reliable brain-centered technology may indeed be developed, and some offenders may be rehabilitated to rejoin society without danger of reoffense.
Until then, nuke the really bad ones and lock the milder pervs away.
People can change
Perhaps it doesn’t (I don’t really know!) but there is no gay gene!
It may not involve a gay gene, but if gay gene is shorthand for being born that way, then that’s fine. Homosexuality is no more of a choice that deciding to be straight. It’s in the physiology. A hundred years ago, why would anybody choose to be a member of a despised, ostracized group with illegal pastimes?
I will grant you environment can effect development which can effect us biochemically - physiology which will have a play on later behavior. Sociopathy has a wide spectrum of behaviors from irritating to cold stone killer.
The conversion therapy controversy is due to severely conflicted individuals not doing the work and then blaming the therapy, or parents forcing teenagers to go, whereupon Democrats have passed laws banning it for all persons, even motivated ones. This is true of alcohol and drug addiction as well, but you don't see it being banned because the person "identifies" as an alcoholic. And the media do not interview people who have successfully put their addiction behind them. Nor do many of them wish to come forward and become targets -- but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Basically, the Beatles had it right: "The love you take is equal to the love you make", or something like that. Nothing comes free to adults. There is a price to anything you want in life, and a person has to be willing. You can have most things you want if you are willing to pay the price.
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