Canadians Struggling With Homosexuality

Many Canadians continue to view homosexuality as immoral, according to a new poll conducted for CanWest by Ipsos Reid.
As the Regina Leader-Post reported, 54 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that “homosexuality is morally acceptable.” That degree of acceptance ranged from a high of 69 per cent in Quebec to a low of 47 per cent in Saskatchewan.
Regina resident Duncan Campbell, a homosexual, thinks that these findings indicate that homosexuals still face a lot of intolerance and oppression.
“It really gives us an opportunity to look at ourselves and decide, as a province and as a larger community, what we think is important – and as a larger community, if what we think is important is intolerance and oppression, then we’re in trouble,” he told the Leader-Post.
London-based columnist Miles Douglas, himself a gay man, recently commented on the familiar struggles of homosexuals. He wrote in The Spectator that some gay males are acknowledging their “inner demons” as the source of the issues plaguing the lifestyle, such as depression, anxiety, alcohol and drug dependency, and suicide. This goes against a common perception that “residual prejudice” is the primary cause.
“For at a time when the mainstream is more welcoming than ever before, the ethos underlying gay life still militates strongly against integration. While demanding equality, it stresses separateness, holding up the idea of the gay community as part ghetto, part laager, a defensive subculture demanding our loyalty on quasi-ethnic grounds.”
Douglas also dismissed as a “simplistic narrative” the claim of the gay movement that their problems “do not arise from within ourselves, or from the choices we make, but from oppression by heterosexual society and anything perceived as traditional values.
“The result,” he argued, “is a male homosexual culture that is unable to address its own shortcomings. . . . In an age of equal rights, we have become our own victims, devoured by the movement we created.”
Melissa Fryrear, a gender issues analyst at Focus on the Family USA, spoke from experience when she described the need for hope for people struggling with homosexuality.
“Having personally lived homosexually for a decade, one of the most disheartening things looking back is that I never heard a message of hope . . . from the gay community or the Christian community,” Fryrear told Today’s Family News.” “In other words, I never heard the truth that homosexuality could be overcome.”
Fryrear believes her message that change is possible needs to be proclaimed and heard, rather than stifled out of fear or intimidation.
“The gay community was invested in hiding the truth and the Christian community was too intimidated to proclaim it. That is a tragedy. So my message today, along with thousands of other former homosexuals, is: Yes, if you are a gay man or lesbian and you ever become dissatisfied living homosexually, there is hope; homosexuality is something that can be overcome. There is hope.
from Novopress