Category: Religious standards

St. Paul on Marriage — Radical Conversion

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

When I was going through the whole business of suspecting DH was gay, I was in a conservative evangelical church that probably would have been very supportive had I not been under the very mistaken idea that I was obligated to stay in the marriage and to protect him, no matter what. That idea of protecting DH was what kept me from seeking help at the time.

But as I’ve read comments from other women, it’s become clear that many of them have been in churches that are not supportive of women married to gay men, or men with SSA (same-sex attraction). The whole idea of submission from Ephesians 5 gets tossed around and used to bully women into staying in insupportable marriages.

But — and this is extremely important! — I don’t think St. Paul ever intended to beat anyone over the head with his Epistle. But I also think he couldn’t foresee a time in which we live, when women have unprecedented rights and privileges and his words would seem oppressive.

Paul was writing to a people who had lived their whole lives in the self-indulgent, even depraved culture of the Roman Empire. Shaped and informed by Greek paganism, although Roman women had some rights, they were still very much under the rule of fathers, then husbands, and the rights they did possess were so connected with their father’s family that I’m really not sure what the point of their being able to inherit or make a will actually might have been. And if she were a slave, she had no rights whatsoever.

Marriage was monogamous, but not a matter of love; most often it was an arrangement between families. Men married in order to establish legitimacy of offspring, to secure a legitimate heir, or for some personal (economic or political) advantage.

Paul, on the other hand, was an elite Jew, highly educated and quite privileged. In Judaism, marriage could occur for love, as demonstrated by many of the biblical narratives (Isaac and Rebekkah, Jacob and Rachel, et al.). The Song of Songs is a highly romantic celebration of erotic love as an analogy of spiritual love (which does not diminish its importance as a marriage celebration).  This was the culture Paul was teaching his Gentile converts to Christianity:  Christianity was Jewish in its moral and social values, its ethos. It was a massive paradigm shift for the formerly-pagan converts.

So when Paul tells wives to submit to their husbands as to Christ, he’s not subjugating them to men.  Society had already done that. What he was telling them was to view their dependence and their legal subjugation in a new and nobler perspective. By serving their husbands as they would Christ, these Ephesian women were given an opportunity to elevate their homes and their relationships with their husbands to a new dignity and importance. And, in the process, to elevate their own status in the home as analogous to the Church itself. Paul goes into this comparison in some detail in ch. 5, vv. 23-24.

But it’s the men who faced the greater challenge. They were instructed to completely change the way they regard their wives:  no longer as property, nor as a status bearer, nor as an object for sex and procreation, but as part of themselves, part of their own bodies!

To love them.

And, even more radically, to love with the same kind of total self-sacrificing self-donation that Our Lord demonstrated when He gave Himself for the Church.

The Greco-Roman culture was depraved. Sexual license and depravity were normal behaviors. From Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, we get a glimpse “Neither . . . sodomists . . . will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And such were some of you!” (I Cor. 6:9-11) [Yeah, ex-gays.  I totally get that!] That’s how complete  and radical the paradigm shift for these converts was.

So Paul is telling men to love their wives, rather than objectifying them. To honor them as part of themselves. To be willing to die for them.

We ex-wives of gay men have been objectified. We have been exploited, and in many ways abused. This abuse is not a Christian experience of marriage, but more of a reversion to a pagan model.

It really is better than we’ve known.

Positive activism

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

In an arena where sentimentality masquerades for “love,” and “God just wants everybody to be happy,” we who have lived under the shadow of the rainbow – the shadow of our husbands’ homosexuality – can speak truth with love and with insight and with a power few other people possess.

We know the destructiveness of homosexuality on families.

We know the destructiveness of homosexuality in the character and personality of our loved one.

Love compels us to speak out: Homosexuality is a destructive lifestyle choice. It is physically violent, it is marked by emotional violence; it is a perversion – literally, “the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended” – of the love and fruitfulness of life that God created man and woman to live in.

It is not out of a selfish desire for vindication but of a deep and Christ-centered love that protects us from giving in and playing along with the game that says our husbands have the right to be happy, no matter what.

We know better.

Which came first? The chicken or the egg? or, is homosexuality a mental illness?

~ Laura Lowder ~ 8 Comments

1970 – 1973 was a busy season for the devil and his minions. In 1970, in Texas, the case was filed which would become known as Roe v. Wade, and in San Francisco, the assault on the American Psychiatric Association was begun.  By 1973, Roe v. Wade was established as law by a liberal judiciary, and the APA had caved in and removed homosexuality from its DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

I won’t recount the history of that tragic decision, which is available in multiple locations online and in hard print, but I will point out the obvious (after all, my Ex-, the Fairie Prince, used to complain that I have a bad habit of overstating the obvious, so this is in honor of him):  homosexuality was not declassified because of medical investigation and scientific inquiry, but because of political pressure by militant homosexuals –

And because of weakness within the APA, itself. I learned over the weekend that part of the weakness was a large number of closet homosexuals within the APA, including the president-elect.

So. Is homosexuality or is it not a mental illness?

Frankly, given the history of civilizations in which same-sex activity is ubiquitous – and that means every civilization except the Judeo-Christian world – I’m not sure that diagnosis was quite honest. I find it hard to imagine cultural mental illnesses, national mental illnesses.

That does not mean that mental illness is excluded from the reality of homosexuality. Permit me to explain:

Psychiatry must be secularized, and as such it does not recognize the real issue behind homosexuality: that it is a very grave sin. What Catholics call a mortal sin.

Which means – if I may use this analogy – that homosexuality is like a bomb blast in the soul. Once one has yielded to the temptation and engaged in the act (and it is the act, not the temptation, which is a sin), then the damage is immediate and catastrophic, in the same sort of way that a bomb blast decimates a building or causes immediate and visible damage.

I observed in my ex-, and I’ve heard friends speak of their family members who’ve floated in and out of the lifestyle in the same way – that when he entered the lifestyle after we separated, his personality and character changed. He became more bitter, more sarcastic, more supercilious, haughtier. He became more insulting of me, of women in general, of his own mother (whom he’d not been very respectful of, before). An angry and defiant edge seemed to develop in him. He became deceitful, openly dishonest, and paranoid, and he even demonstrated an explosive temper that I’d not seen before.

In fact, I would go so far, based on basic observation, to suggest that in this case the egg (the orientation) definitely came first, and the chicken (the mental illness) followed.

I’ve heard parents, siblings, friends of homosexuals who’ve come out of the lifestyle off and on say that their loved ones underwent profound personality changes upon leaving and upon returning. “When he got out of that mess, he because like the son/brother/friend I’d always known. Then he fell back into it again, and all that ugliness came back, too.”

I believe that there are situations in which mental illness lurks in its potential, and that our life choices can control – to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the actual pathology involved – whether that illness develops or to what extent it does. I have come to the conclusion that choosing to be in the lifestyle opens doors for pathologies to develop and flourish that are suppressed when one is living in a wholesome and chaste environment.

In either case, one thing I think is certain: it is not in our best interests, as the straight ex-wife, to try to justify, excuse, or in any other way be complicit in our ex-spouses’ life choices. We can drown ourselves, that way. And we certainly cannot save them.

Attempts to legitimate Gay Marriage

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

Tomorrow, May 8, the Great State of North Carolina will be voting on a Constitutional Amendment which would secure for perpetuity the present law recognizing only the marriage between one man and one woman as the only recognized legal union in the State.

The wording of the proposed Amendment, in fact, says just that:

Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.

Opponents of the Amendment, however – promoted and financed by the homosexual community from across the nation – have engaged in a campaign of lies and manipulations, trying to play in ignorant and well-intentioned people by insisting this Amendment would hurt children and affect domestic violence law.

The truth of the matter is that the exact opposite is true. The defeat of this amendment will hurt children and women.

Here’s how it works: As soon as the Amendment could be defeated (tomorrow night), the homosexual lobby will be pushing Raleigh’s lawmakers to legally recognize gay marriage, as has happened already in – I believe it’s seven states at present, with several more in a legislative/judicial limbo. I will say that we will begin hearing rumblings of this almost immediately, and within two years it will be being debated in the State House, if not passed (the gay lobby won’t take “no” for an answer if they can find a loophole anywhere).

If the Amendment is passed by the voters, then you can expect legal challenge to begin immediately.

Now. If a State recognizes gay marriage, then they must also officially begin the process of legitimating homosexuality – and that means homosexual acts. We’re seeing this now, culturally, with lawsuits against private individuals refusing to provide goods and services to gay couples, like a photographer out in the Midwest (Indiana?) who is being sued for declining the privilege of taking photos at a gay wedding. Although it’s not in the U.S., the situation of the Christian B&B owners in England who are being sued for not renting a room to a gay couple is cautionary.

Right now in Canada, priests are being charged with hate speech crimes for preaching that homosexuality is a sin, and parochial schools are being warned that they may not teach Catholic moral theology to their students, in so far as teaching that homosexuality is wrong is concerned. It will be happening in the U.S. as the movement gains a stronger toehold – if we let it.

And that means that the State – Big Brother – will be sanctioning public works, such as public school education, to brainwash our children that homosexuality is equally legitimate with heterosexuality, and will be teaching homosexuality even as they now teach techniques for using condoms and performing oral sex (bet you didn’t know that was happening, did you? But it is.) It’s happening in Vermont, now.— Right now, in our public schools, kids are hearing, receiving, and being taught information that twenty years ago would have been considered “Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor” in most states’ court systems.

And there will be even stronger efforts to get States to lower the age of consent for statutory sex offenses, just as there is currently pressure by an organization called NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Assoc.) to declassify pedophilia and pederasty as a psychiatric disorder (see my upcoming post on the sabotage and hijacking of the American Psychiatric Association and the declassification of homosexuality as mental illness).

Meanwhile, there will be increased pressure against homeschooling – the last bastion of religious conservatism where traditional Christian moral values are being taught by curriculum and lived out within the family structure.

Because the Enemy’s #1 weapon to kidnap our kids’ souls is the breakdown of our families. If our kids don’t see, hear and experience a reasonably healthy heterosexual love through their parents’ examples (and even a toxic marriage has to be better than no heterosexual modeling at all!) and observe our Christian moral values as something normal, integral to daily life, and joy-filled, then they’re easy prey for the pseudo-authority of government institutions.

And that, in its final analysis, will provide a new generation of beautiful boys to serve as the prey of homosexual predators. Our sons.

Perspective – Part Two

~ Laura Lowder ~ 4 Comments

Even more important, however, than the basic physical offensiveness of homosexual acts, or of the contemptuous way in which the gay community treats the rest of us, is the spiritual component of homosexuality.

My husband and I were Baptists/evangelicals. When we were married, he was a faithful believer who spent the first part of his morning reading the Scriptures and praying. He was pro-life. He believed that homosexual acts were a sin and that people burdened with the cross of homosexual tendencies were obligated to live as celibates.

He no longer believes these things.

I became Roman Catholic ten years ago, which gives me a new and stronger vocabulary for discussing this stuff.

First, we have the issue of “natural law.” The Apostle Paul was alluding to it when he wrote to the Romans that even pagans have a law that is written on their hearts, that reveals right and truth even to people who haven’t heard the Gospel (Romans 1). Natural law also tells us that sexual relations which in nature result in procreation, must be of the sort that can result in new life if they are going to adhere to that Natural Law. Homosexual acts cannot result in procreation; therefore they violate natural law.

Then we have the historical cultural evidence. Dennis Prager, in Judaism, Homosexuality and Civilization, points out that Judaism arose out of a pagan ancient world – a world in which sexual license-to-depravity was the social norm. Remember all the Greek gods and their proclivities? The ancients just weren’t quite so sophisticated with their mythologies, but the cultures operated the same way: homosexuality, bestiality, incest, fetishism…  But out of this milieu arose a family, which became a tribe, which became a nation!… who said that they’d been formed and called by a God who commanded them to live for Him in ways which included restricting their sexual encounters to the framework of marriage: heterosexual monogamy.

So, not everyone followed the rules. Kings, for instance, like David and Solomon, were polygamous (and got into some serious trouble for it, too). But the rules themselves didn’t change. God prohibited all the ordinary events of the pagan world. The homosexuality He called “abomination,” but He also prohibited bestiality, incest, and the like.

And when the Christian Church was established, and, lo and behold! Gentiles were coming to know Jesus Christ! (and Gentiles were not “protestant jews,” they were pagans) it caused such an uproar that the first Council of the Church had to be held to figure out how to handle them. I mean, this was a MAJOR paradigm shift, from Roman/pagan to Christian! — and Peter and the rest of the Apostles put their heads together and agreed: the new converts to Christ did not have to be circumcised, the signification of the Old Covenant of Abraham; instead, they were to abstain from meat sacrificed to idols and from sexual immorality.

In other words, the new Christians didn’t have to have their bodies mutilated, but they did have to abandon the old paradigm and embrace a wholly new one – a paradigm of chastity.

It couldn’t have been easy. We know this because the earliest records of the Church demonstrate that private Confession (sacramental Confession) was followed up by public penance – and severe penances were placed in effect for the former pagans falling back into old habits. Severe fasting, separation from the Eucharist and from the community were some of the penances assigned to those who fell into the old ways.

There was vigorous discussion whether one could even be saved, whether penance was possible, who had fallen back into such grave sin after baptism.

Paul, again, wrote of this to the Corinthians. Now, the Corinthians were a particularly depraved group of people with a reputation so lewd that calling someone a “corinthian” was a serious insult. And Paul reminded them of what they had escaped, in I Corinthians 6:
{6:9} Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: Neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers:
{6:10} Nor the effeminate nor liers with mankind nor thieves nor covetous nor drunkards nor railers nor extortioners shall possess the kingdom of God.

And those are the very sorts of people the Corinthians had been – But Paul goes on to remind them:


{6:11} And such some of you were. But you are washed: but you are sanctified: but you are justified: in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God.

(emphasis mine) Get a load of it: the early Gentile converts to Christianity became…

Ex-gays!

Sure, societies have deviated from the norms throughout history. History is full of examples of kings and nobles who had a decided “thing” for young boys instead of for women. But the law of the Church and the expectations of society never changed.

So – Homosexuality is a very grave sin, perhaps the gravest of sins because of its association with paganism, with following after false gods. And because I believe in a coming Judgment, I worry and grieve far more for my husband’s immortal soul than I do for the abuses he’s placed his body under – or even the ravages to his character I’ve observed in the years since our divorce.

Yet those very character deviations stand out as evidences of the great spiritual damage he – and other homosexuals – are doing to themselves.

And this grieves me most of all.