Personally, after 25+ years of listening to the experiences of my friends who are homosexual, gay christians, and reading theological and other documents etc, I have made up my mind that the NT prohibition on homosexual behaviour does still apply to everyone who wishes to be a christian disciple.

However, especially in liberal sexualised western society, there is the need for understanding and compassion towards people who experience this, and for the clear assertion that this is just one sinful sexual behaviour/desire among many - and that all of us are sinners.

Hopefully the listening process can be completed by Lambeth 2008 and the communion can also make it's mind up - and move on !

But it won't 'make its mind up', because those of us who believe in social justice and a progressive Christianity will not accept any decision for bigotry and exclusion.

So, there needs to be a split.

I hope this listening process will include ex-homosexuals and celibate homsexuals. I'm sure they have alot to add.

I don't believe there is such a think as an 'ex-gay', although there are repressed gays.

I'm also perfectly happy for anyone to be celibate, as long as they don't then prescribe that state as compulsory, to those of us who do not agree with their reasons for being so.

Well given the probable range of views and applications of those views about LGBTQ life, using the likely variety of current approaches; I am more and more starting to think that instead of trying to get believers to agree to think less diversely, we need at minimum to aim at two sorts of outcomes.

One, I hope we can more or less get together about the human rights of LGBTQ folks throughout the world. If we can consolidate a more level playing field across various cultures and patterns of political democracy, with basic human rights as the widely espoused standards, we should be accomplishing much of great, positive value for all people, regardless. It tends to cost lots of money to hunt down and imprison queer folks. It brutalizes even the heterosexual majority to have to hunt down and assassinate the queers. I hope as the current century goes along, we all might agree to do better as to human rights.

For myself,I really don't care all that much what some conservative believer, Christian or Muslim or whatever other world religion (for that matter), thinks I am doing immorally when I go out on a date with a boyfriend. Whoever those folks are, they surely have a right to autonomy and privacy inside their own heads and hearts. Funny thing is, they don't pay the freight in their own daily lives for all their negative baggage about faggots. I am not, however, interested in their thoughts as a privileged religious or philosophical foundation for abridging my equal rights to: (1) safety in my person, (2) freedoms of conscience and association and expression, (3) equal opportunities for employment based on my skills and capacities, (4) equal rights to minimally decent housing or healthcare or public accommodations, and so forth.

Two, I deeply desire to be free as a person of spirit and faith from having my intentional and conscientious occupation of a variety of positive frames for LGBTQ living so constantly meddled with, by religious people who still occupy ancient negative views. Almost no extant good and positive part of my real life as a queer guy in this century is comprehended in the ancient, negative Christian frames for MIS-construing who I am, what I do, and the status I have as a variant human being who happens to belong to several statistical minorities at the same time.

Just because conservative religious folks conscientiously decide that they are going to play safe with all bets (for their own soul's sakes), by affirming the nasty and ill-tempered nonsense about LGBTQ folks that good Christian believers have preached for way too long, does not mean that I shall be content with that certainty setting the agenda for my own queer living. I can do way better with life than anything so far announced in the conservative Christian agenda for me has been able to describe.

My life as a queer guy is simply not going to be narrowed to always responding to the self-serving and unhesitatingly negative frames of the conservative religious agenda for dealing with the so-called problem of homosexuality. Item: I decline to be changed into any sort of straight guy. (It ain't gonna happen, anyhoo.) Item: I decline to regard my potentials for sex, love, relationship, or a whole typical range of human intimacies as any more innately negative than would be the case if I were heterosexual. I affirm that my individual sexuality simply falls within the overall human spectrums, and resist all attempts to demean me by making me a sub-human threat to either masculinity or heterosexuality. Just because these uncanny fears appear to run deep and ancient does not make them true. Item: I knowingly and intentionally and conscientiously accept the current century's challenge for me to adventure into positive LGBTQ living. I depend in this adventure on a continuing freedom to further inquire, discern and live according to the new alternatives for current positive change and innovation.

I can see how for a certain sort of conservative straight person (who already holds full title to all cultural and church privileges owing to their majority sexual orientation), anything other than the status quo in church and society is too risky to chance. So what? I am not so entitled according to the conservative Christian ideologies.

I am alternatively blessed as a queer guy in this century: (1) by the floods of new information arising in the many sciences; (2) by the vivid emergence of liberal and progressive views in Christian life which retain full access to scripture or reason or tradition without being enslaved by turning any of these lovely witnesses to God, completely into God; (3) by the historically recent surprise emergence of the idea of sexual orientation which appears to have been overlooked by all previous human societies; (4) by a whole related family of newer frames for construing society, human nature, and sexuality (including equality, human rights, democracy, inquiry, empirical investigation, ethics, competence, and diversity); and by how all of these pathways to innovation interact so as to make possible the astounding adventure of my queer life in this century.

The ancient negative Christian frames confine me to airless dungeons where I can only construe my sexual orientation as the sort of damage, lack, bondage, and suffering which the various negative theories so relentlessly posit for me. These negative circles of belief and heavy toxic attribution may nicely serve established heterosexual privileges of a certain cultural sort, but so what? I never had any of those majority privileges to begin with.

Indeed, as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, I actually would feel that if I had been given such high and automatic entitlements at the expense of my brother or sister, I should either forgo those privileges or seek to share them as equally as possible. That is what loving my neighbor seems to me.

To be gay is not mainly about my failure to be attracted to women, but about my good and right and positive attraction to men. I thank God for my current opportunity to occupy a frame where I can view my own sexual orientation as the given equal to whatever I might have been, had I been heterosexual. If scripture is at all right about my alleged poverty, compared to the cultural riches waiting for exclusively straight folks, then I am actually blessed to be so impoverished, because I am that much less likely to have my high cultural privileges as an dominant, exclusively straight man come in between me and God/Jesus as I discern how best to live. I enjoy the relative blessing of not having to hear God say to me, Dearest you must give up dominating the people you love as their better.

To be gay is a rich part of animal and human variety. The more we inquire empirically, the wider and deeper and richer our legacy gets. Being gay is a gift, more or less ethically neutral in itself; but carrying within precious seeds of possibility for ethics and spirit, for competence and love in my living as an LGBTQ person.

Yes, the thumping drums of sin, sin, sin, sin which are pounded so relentlessly by so many conservative religious people bang on; but what is that to me? I have met Jesus who tells me to embark on a lifelong pilgrimage towards loving God with all my being, and towards loving my neighbor as myself. All the negative truths are lies that I had to repent of, not helps, not inevitabilities. Nothing in this amazing journey means I am required, now in this century, to occupy the mistaken, ancient negative frames that are so beloved of so many conservative Christian believers. Those beliefs play as little role in my positive living as would the conviction that the earth was flat, or that the sun revolved around the earth, instead of vice versa. Just because my frames and views are much the newer of the options is not prima facie evidence that the choices I am making are ethically wrong, or empirically unfounded.

MM wrote: "I don't believe there is such a think as an 'ex-gay', although there are repressed gays."

Mike - well, you would refuse to believe that, wouldn't you !

Daniel wrote: "For myself,I really don't care all that much what some conservative believer, Christian or Muslim or whatever other world religion (for that matter), thinks I am doing immorally when I go out on a date with a boyfriend."

Daniel, it's not just us conservatives who think that sex outside a life-long monogamous relationship is immoral; according to ECUSA's presentation to the ACC on Tuesdays, they think that promiscuity is sinful too.

So, unless they were being less than truthful, even liberal ECUSA would say one should abstain from sex unless you have a life-partner...

Cruising of bars is not permitted ?

Daniel, you hero! RIGHT ON!!!