From Radical Lesbian to Redeemed Christian

In 1999, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was a tenured English professor at Syracuse University, a skeptic of all things Christianity, and in a committed lesbian relationship. Her academic specialty was Queer Theory, a postmodern form of gay and lesbian studies.

Today Butterfield is a mother of four, a homemaker, and wife of a Presbyterian pastor named Kent. They live in Durham, North Carolina.

She is an unlikely convert. And in this episode of the Authors on the Line podcast, Butterfield shares the story of her conversion from a radical lesbian to a redeemed Christian. It's a story involving a pastor, a pretty ordinary local church, and a Bible.

“I tried to toss the Bible and all of its teachings in the trash — I really tried,” she says. 

“But I kept reading it, reading it not just for pleasure, but reading it because I was engaged in a research program trying to refute the religious right from a lesbian feminist perspective. . . . After my second or third, maybe fourth, pass through the entire Bible something started to happen. The Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. And it absolutely overflowed into my world. I really fought against it. And then one Sunday morning, no different from any other Sunday morning, I rose from the bed of my lesbian lover, and an hour later I sat in a church pew. I went there very conspicuous of the fact that I didn’t fit in. But I really had to confront this God.”

And she did.     Continue at Tony Reinke

Americans Have No Idea How Few Gay People There Are

One in ten. It's the name of the group that puts on the Reel Affirmations gay and lesbian film festival in Washington, D.C., each year. It's the percent popularized by the Kinsey Report as the size of the gay male population. And it's among the most common figures pointed to in popular culture as an estimate of how many people are gay or lesbian. 

But what percentage of the population is actually gay or lesbian? With the debate over same-sex marriage again an emerging fault line in American political life, the answer comes as a surprise: A lower number than you might think -- and a much, much, much lower one than most Americans believe. 

In surveys conducted in 2002 and 2011, pollsters at Gallup found that members of the American public massively overestimated how many people are gay or lesbian. In 2002, a quarter of those surveyed guessed upwards of a quarter of Americans were gay or lesbian (or "homosexual," the third option given). By 2011, that misperception had only grown, with more than a third of those surveyed now guessing that more than 25 percent of Americans are gay or lesbian. Women and young adults were most likely to provide high estimates, approximating that 30 percent of the population is gay. Overall, "U.S. adults, on average, estimate that 25 percent of Americans are gay or lesbian," Gallup found. Only 4 percent of all those surveyed in 2011 and about 8 percent of those surveyed in 2002 correctly guessed that fewer than 5 percent of Americans identify as gay or lesbian.  Continue at TheAtlantic

Kids of Lesbians More Likely To Be Gay

The Baptist Press reports on some recent studies about children of lesbian parents. The bottom line is this:

The research shows that 64 percent of children raised in lesbian households consider having homosexual relationships, compared to 17 percent raised by heterosexual parents.

The article goes on to show that males differ from females in their response to being raised by same-sex parents. Here’s an excerpt:

According to a study published late last year in the Archive of Sexual Behavior, girls raised by lesbian mothers are seven times more likely to consider a same-sex encounter, and twice as likely to identify as lesbian or bisexual than those raised by heterosexual parents. They are also seven times more likely to use “the “morning after” pill.

“We already know that girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to be sexually adventurous, and it has a lot to do with being fatherless,” Stanton explained. “Two lesbians can be the most loving moms in the world, but they can’t give a girl the kind of positive attention and other-gendered affirmation she needs from a dad.”

While girls raised by lesbians tend to be much more sexually experimental than their peers, boys tend to be more sexually reticent.  Continue at Denny Burk

United Methodist Church Hops In Bed With Buddha

The Atheistic Logic of LGBT Sexuality