This is on open letter to the host of Living On The Edge, Chip Ingram, in response to his podcast sermon from Oct 15 and 16 of 2013.
Chip,
First let me say that I was under the impression that your church was one of the better ones in the area. I am sorry to say that is now suspect.
I was listening to you on the radio yesterday and I have to say I am absolutely shocked at the staggering amount of misinformation, falsehoods, and raw propaganda you spewed forth about LGBTQ people in your sermon: “Homosexuality: What Do You Say to a Gay Friend?, Part 1 From the series Culture Shock.”
You claim you want your church to be a place of love that accepts LGBTQ individuals and that you want to change your track record on that topic, but you can’t be a place of love and acceptance when you spread blatant falsehoods like these.
How wonderful it must be to live in a world where you don’t have to cite your sources and invent your own facts when you preach so-called “truth”. If you had worked in academia, you would have been thrown out on your butt long ago.
As I will soon demonstrate, it’s ironic that you started your sermon with an apology on behalf of christians to homosexuals.
I can safely say that you gave exactly ONE correct fact in your sermon. Yes. Only one. You said homosexuality is not genetic and that is correct (but it does have a biological cause and certainly is not a choice). Virtually every other claim, statistic, or other “fact” you offered was just laughably absurd! It seem the practice of fact checking is foreign to you.
Here are a few of the most blatant falsehoods from your sermon:
“40% of homosexual men have had between 1 and 500 partners.”
This doesn’t even pass the smell test! Does this mean that the other 60% are either virgins they are extra promiscuous and have had more than 500 partners? Where did you find this obvious work of fiction? Not from any credible scholarly source. I’ll wager a year’s salary on that.
“Less than 3% of homosexuals are over the age of 55 years old and only 1% die of natural causes.”
This would be a real shock to the Census Department and the Center for Disease Control considering there are more than 3 million LGBTQ senior citizens over the age of 65 in the US alone! When you do the math, this also contradicts your claim that LGBTQ people only make up a tiny fraction of the population.
“The anal wall is only one cell thick.”
Really now? Are you serious? If that was true, the first episode any one had of constipation or explosive diarrhea would rupture that wall and be lethal. In reality it is thousands of cells thick. According to The National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine average thickness of the rectal wall in a healthy person is about 15 mm.
“50% of all homosexual males have gonorrhea.”
Where did you discover this jewel? Care to wager a year’s salary on this one?
“There has never been, to date, a culture that has survived, a society that has survived when homosexuality became mainstream and accepted by all.”
Have you not heard of Canada, Britain, Spain, Germany, or the Czech Republic?? They all accept homosexuality by 80%, 76%, 88%, 87%, and 80% respectively according to a Pew Global Attitudes Project poll. http://www.pewglobal.
In truth, the least tolerant countries are ones I doubt you would want to live in! Pakistan, 87% opposed. Lebanon, 80% opposed. Russia, 74% opposed. Jordan, 97% opposed. Kenya, 90% opposed. All of these are very unstable countries that have had overturned government / societies in the last 30 years. So your claim that no societies survive when they openly accept homosexuality was not only wrong, you couldn’t have been farther from the truth if you tried!
You claim in part two of your sermon that “Once a homosexual, always a homosexual [is] [n]ot true.” As you may have already guessed, you are wrong again. In 2009 the American Psychological Association (you know, the experts) adopted a resolution, accompanied by a 138-page report, that repudiated ex-gay therapy. The report concluded that compelling evidence suggested that cases of individuals going from gay to straight were “rare” and that “many individuals continued to experience same-sex sexual attractions” after reparative therapy. The founder of Exodus International an ex-gay ministry, Michael Bussee, left the organization in 1979 with a fellow male ex-gay counselor because the two had fallen in love. Exodus International has even ceased operations this year issuing a statement which repudiated its aims and apologized for the harm their pursuit has caused to LGBTQ people. (http://wespeaklove.org/
Aren’t non-manufactured facts a pain when they don’t support your agenda? You owe the LGBTQ community another apology for spreading obvious propaganda. Any competent teenager with a basic education in biology would have red flags waving in their heads when listening to your sermon. What’s your excuse?
I was able to track down some of the “sources” for your sermon. Not a single one was a reputable source. Not one. If you tried that in a high school paper, you would have failed on that alone. Not only were your sources not reputable, large parts of your sermon were obviously plagiarized from, of all places, Freerepublic.com and other churches. Try that in a college paper and you would be expelled and rightfully so!
You should be ashamed of yourself. Honestly! Here we are in the middle of the Silicon Valley where free wi-fi can be found in any restaurant or on any street in Downtown San Jose and a few simple Google searches would have shown the plethora of error of your sermon. But instead you took the lazy route and did no research before you spewed this crap to the entire nation on the radio? What were you thinking?
You owe the entire LGBTQ community a public apology on your show and web site! In addition, you need to spend at least one day a week for the rest of the year undoing the disservice you did to your listeners (and damage they in turn will do to LGBTQ individuals when they confront them while propagating your falsehoods) by bringing on to your show an *actual* expert in LGBTQ studies. Not an “expert” from Focus on the Family, discredited psychologists like Paul Cameron, or bigots from NARTH, but a real expert. Greta Christina from Free Thought Blogs or Dr. Patti Hanlon-Baker from Stanford would be a good start. A sizable donation to the Southern Poverty Law Center would also be a good start.
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