'Keep the Church of England safe': Professor Robert 'Bobby' Oscar Lopez's General Synod speech

Professor Robert 'Bobby' Oscar Lopez, a professor at the Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary, spoke at a fringe meeting during General Synod on the dangerous consequences of Jayne Ozanne's motion to ban therapy for those seeking help for unwanted same-sex attraction. Professor Lopez, who was raised by his mother and same-sex partner, left a homosexual lifestyle when he was 28 and now regularly speaks out in defence of the biblical model of marriage and family.

Please note that this article contains some explicit content. 

My name is Robert Oscar Lopez. I am a professor at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and I bring a message:

Keep the Church of England safe.

The resolution GS 2070A, put forward by Jayne Ozanne of Oxford, would bring disaster upon millions in the Anglican Union. It asks the church to endorse a disputable statement from January 2017 by secular medical guilds. I would like to point out obvious deficiencies:

1.      The Church of England is a religious body devoted to the gospel of Jesus Christ. John 8:31 reads: "If you continue in My word, you really are My disciples. You will know the truth and the truth will set you free… for all who sin are slaves to their sin." In Luke 16:17 Jesus says, "if is easier for heaven & earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the law to drop out."

The UK Council for Psychotherapy offers a skeletal mission statement that makes no reference to God, Jesus Christ, the divine realm, personal morality, spirituality, or holiness. The mission reads:

We will:

The UKCP might think that "high-quality" therapists should teach HIV+ people that they shouldn't damage their self-esteem by telling partners they're infected, or they might fight to improve access to post-abortion counseling.

Secular professionals might perceive things as high-quality, protective, robust, excellent, or just, which no Christian church should ever be part of. Maybe "peer review" as a concept has a place in medicine, but one cannot argue for that model to supersede the countless passages in Scripture that warn against sodomy.

The medical profession was responsible for the grisly therapies that have been so remembered in history, such as electroshock. The APA's decided to de-pathologize homosexuality in the 1970s. But why was this needed? That body took the lead in casting homosexuals as perverts needing "robust" cures to protect the public, based on peer-reviewed science, since its founding in 1892. So the APA was wrong for 80 years about homosexuality, and now after 44 years of being "right," we are to trust them when their peer decision process leads them to bold untested demands?

We can't go by blind hope. While we wait for the medical profession to figure out a temperate way to discuss sexuality, millions like me need religious groups like COE to be a safe space to bear witness to what happened to us in the gay subculture.

We hear about gay people who struggled and felt suicidal because homophobic Christians abused them? Therere many personal narratives of people who struggled and felt suicidal because of mean behavior coming from people who identified as gay. Consider this:

·         A survey found 27% of women and 16% of men were sexually abused. While gays make up about 1.5% of the population, 40% of the molestations were between an adult and underaged person of the same sex.

·         As stigma decreased more of these molesters were now openly identified as gay. Also the organized gay lobby threw its weight overwhelmingly behind (1) the hypersexualization of children through curriculum forced on kids as young as four years old, (2) a fight for "children's sexual rights," (3) moves to lower the age of consent and de-stigmatize "intergenerational intimacy," and (4) let's not forget the ban on conversion therapy.

·         Most gay activists believe children are sexual enough to have a sexual orientation to be preserved. Gay activists and gay culture entertain sexual ideations about children and are often involved in trying to suggest sexual ideations to children, based on their misperception that the children to whom they speak are "detectable" as gay already.

·         Law enforcement groups define "grooming" as doing just this. Aside from accounts of actual molestation there is the also dangerous practice of pressuring, coercing, or grooming children to identify as gay and experiment with gay sex based on an adult's improper interest in the child's sex life.

·         Even if there's no trauma or coercion involved in the young person's decision to identify as gay, problems within the gay culture are rampant. While we have examples of well-adjusted gays, many who come out as gay will be stuck with particularly troubled dating networks. Please note that none of these crises can be entirely or even principally attributed to homophobia from outsiders.

·         Depression

·         Anxiety

·         Eating Disorders

·         Alcoholism

·         Drug Addiction

·         Compulsive Sex

·         Sexual Violence

·         Emotional Abuse/Divorce

·         Steroid Abuse

·         Overeating (Lesbians)

·         Domestic Violence

·         Pornography Addiction

·         Sex Work

·         Suicide

·         Racism

·         Conflicts with peers/risk-taking behavior

·         Weapons

·         Infertility

·         Sexually Transmitted Diseases

So the good news is you don't have to walk around with the knowledge that a professional organization you've never heard of defines sex you like as a sin. The bad news is that to get the sex you like you drastically increase the dramatic problems you have to deal with, and you will find yourself increasingly at odds with the gospel of Jesus Christ, who said that porneia, or sexual impurities, defiled us along with slander, blasphemies, murder, and adultery.

2.      Gay people's emotional problems drag many other people into their turbulent world. Large numbers of children are now being denied their mother & father and forced to grow up in gay homes. Anti-discrimination laws make many agencies fearful of being sued so they do not vet gay adoptions as closely as other adoptions. Note that Dan Savage, for instance, is a famous gay adopter who got custody of children then spoke publicly about he and his husband having threeway sex with at least nine other people. Who wants to be in that environment? Parents, friends, co-workers, and church brothers all have to deal with the tremendous aftermath of the Gay Disaster consuming so much of society.

Add up all these issues and you come to one clear and irrefutable conclusion: many cases will exist where people's decision to publicly identify as gay and pursue homosexual intercourse caused themselves deep pain or caused people around them deep pain. In this complex, unpredictable world, there will be countless instances where religious advisors need to have the freedom to marshal the power of Jesus Christ's gospel and tell someone who desires the same sex, "no. You must not do it."

Of these things I know a great deal. Let me tell you who I am.

I was born in 1971 to a lesbian who was in the process of divorcing my father. I was raised with no memory of my father in the house and did not have a stable relationship with him since he did not practice joint custody. My mother raised me while in a lifelong relationship with her female partner, another divorced woman with children. They remained together from the early 1970s until 1990, when my mother died at the age of 53. My mother was a psychiatrist and firmly committed liberation-theology Catholic. She created and headed her own clinic, where I worked in the office beginning from the age of about twelve. Assisting her with billing and session note transcription, I benefited from seeing an early glimpse into the challenges faced by people who called themselves homosexual and transvestites in the 1970s and 1980s. My mother had many books about homosexuality in our house growing up, which I read voraciously. She and her partner enjoyed friendships with eclectic intellectuals with radical religious views, all across the cities, including mystical Jews, Unitarians, atheists, semi-pagans, and many Marxist Catholics.

I became aware by age nine that I was growing up in a distinct subculture that people in the surrounding community dimly understood. There were looser boundaries and a greater comfort level with vulgarity. On the plus side, the gay community was witty, creative, festive, and sometimes less rigid. On the negative side, there was a crippling victimhood complex and lack of duty to protect the most vulnerable in their community. The fat, ugly, young, poor, awkward, shy, minority, and psychologically troubled people in the gay community, especially kids, were not protected from predators. When such people came forward with their pain, they were savagely shut down and undermined by people in the gay community. The gay community lacked mercy, kindness, gentleness.

I became curious about sexuality at a young age because I was around so much sexual content. At the age of 13, two older teenagers and I got drunk and had threeway sex. One of the boys had to be hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. I suddenly decided that I needed to double-down and build an identity as a gay male. I had sex during my teenage years with people I didn't know. Everyone told me I couldn't be bisexual even though that's what I came out as, because I found girls pretty. No, all the gay mentors around me assured me they knew what they were doing, and I should follow in their footsteps to come out as gay.

The sex was horrible. I realized you had to choose between anal or oral sex. Anal sex was incredibly unsanitary, painful, and awkward, and it was impossible for both the other man and me to complete the act in a rhythm that brought us closer together or felt mutually uplifting. Oral sex never felt like real sex and also didn't feel like it brought two men together. One reason that I never got HIV infected was that I hated anal sex so much I stuck to oral sex as much as I could—but I suffered from constant sore throats and infections in the ear, nose, and throat.

The unfulfilling and boring nature of gay sex exerts a destructive influence over all relationships in the community because the culture defines itself by a physical act that most gay men find shameful no matter how much they are told to celebrate it. Unlike heterosexual intercourse, gay sex doesn't bring men together in a pleasant, uplifting, ecstatic experience of connectedness. So gay male couples were more likely to stay together if they had sex with other people to replace fulfillment with novelty.

At the age of 28, I made love to a woman for the first time and it was such a euphoric amazing experience I felt almost frightened. I wanted to keep making love to her—and in fact I married her, the only woman I have only been with. We have been married for 16 years and have kids. I experienced gay life in the most affirming, supportive, celebratory climate imaginable—having had a gay parent, contact with gay-affirming clergy, schools that encouraged me to be gay, and life in NY and CA.

There are millions of men who were coaxed into experimenting with gay sex and then, like me, realized later on, "what on earth am I doing here? Why am I surrounded by so much drama, so much unhappiness, and yet everyone keeps telling me I have no choice, I am supposed to find joy this way, and I must never blaspheme against gay identity by coming out as 'straight'?"

The gay community attacks people who escape it with a ferocity that would frighten those of you with gentle hearts. I was assaulted, threatened, vandalized, defamed on the internet, and driven out of a tenured professorship in California—all by vicious, unhinged, absolutely unchristian forms of activism. And nobody is talking about this, even in the church.

There are many who will be casualties of this great gay wave. It will ebb and vanish eventually, since it is not based on truth, it makes people incredibly unhappy, and it inflicts grievous harm on the people it claims to be championing.

The church has a gospel that is more than sufficient to counsel people to choose Christ rather than a false dream. It is not enough to pass amendments that might mitigate or tweak Jayne Ozanne's resolution. Ms. Ozanne must hear loudly and unwaveringly that her mission is wrong. She needs prayer and a new direction. The resolution as written is more of the catastrophic brinksmanship that I've seen destroy millions of lives. Just say no.

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