A good chunk of my opinions have changed over the last few years; I grew up in a very religious and conservative family and mirrored those viewpoints until the second half of high school. I'll focus on the one where it all started.
I had never felt a disgust for LGBTQ people as it is sometimes seen in religious folk in the media, but to me it always seemed simple: it's wrong so they should just stop doing it, the way you'd encourage someone to stop stealing or stop eating McDonald's every day.
Near the end of my junior year of high school my boyfriend, R, came out as being gay. This forced me to acknowledge that here was someone I cared about and knew to be a good and reasonable person that was saying that this was what he is, he can't help it, and it's simply part of him.
It had been pretty obvious for awhile that R wasn't happy being in a relationship with me and was upset about something, it just wasn't clear what was going on. Then I imagined him suffering like that for the rest of his life: finding a wife, having to pretend in front of her, and not having someone he could confide in and be honest about his sexuality with. It was at that point that I realized I couldn't look him in the eye and tell him to simply "choose" to be straight.
Just as life changing was the aftermath from those around us, particularly the people I'd looked up to in the church. Our youth pastor, who had always been friendly to our little gaggle that went to church together, didn't even want to hear about R or how he was doing. My dad calmly asked me how many men R had sex with (which is insulting on several levels). I saw what it is like to be turned on by a church, how a group that had been so welcoming and friendly flipped and became aggressive.
Then I started noticing other things too - why were all the women relegated to either working with children or music? Why did everyone talk, dress, and act exactly the same, and anyone that was an outlier either eventually caved to fit the mold or became essentially an outcast? Why were we supposed to support laws that imposed our religious beliefs on others that might not hold the same beliefs? And I couldn't quite articulate this until Stuff Christian Culture Likes pointed it out, but why was there an emphasis on doing things rather than relationship?
This didn't all directly lead me to the beliefs I hold now, but it started the ball rolling. About a year and a half later I stood out on a busy street corner with R in our small, conservative town holding "No on Proposition 8" signs (this wanted to outlaw gay marriage in California. It passed, with lots of funding from Utah, but if I remember correctly has now been overturned and is entering the appeals process) which outed me as a political liberal to my family. Another three years later in 2011, I came out as agnostic to my friends, and eventually my family.
That's a really touching post. I'm so glad you wrote about it. I had a similar experience a long time ago, it was when I was first learning about different sexualities, I was conflicted constantly, people in my life would impose different sides and opinions on me expecting me to take their outlook and then media never helped me figure anything out. I eventually had to evaluate on what I saw and make my own choices about what I believed.
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