{"id":5291,"date":"2011-11-22T21:02:30","date_gmt":"2011-11-23T02:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=5291"},"modified":"2011-11-23T10:11:50","modified_gmt":"2011-11-23T15:11:50","slug":"why-i-dont-give-a-good-goddamn-what-moms-side-of-the-family-thinks-about-the-fact-that-i-dont-go-to-church-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/5291","title":{"rendered":"Why I Don&#8217;t Give A Good Goddamn What Mom&#8217;s Side Of The Family Thinks About The Fact That I Don&#8217;t Go To Church Anymore&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/11\/21\/the-exceptional-majority-of-evangelicals\/\">Fred Clark<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Jacob, I honestly don&#8217;t know how to write it,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I know what I want to get across, but I can never find the right words.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Dan, you need to write it. Don&#8217;t give up. I&#8217;m telling you, it needs to be said.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>I paused. &ldquo;You don&#8217;t understand. It&#8217;s too heated a subject. It&#8217;s something people are very emotional and touchy about. I&#8217;d be lynched.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>My friend hesitated. &ldquo;Dan, you are the only friend I have that knows I&#8217;m gay. The only freaking one,&rdquo; he said.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;What do you mean? I know you&#8217;ve told other friends.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s when his voice cracked. He began crying.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Every single person I&#8217;ve told has ditched me. They just disappear. They stop calling. They remove me on Facebook. They&#8217;re just gone,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They can&#8217;t handle knowing and being friends with a gay person.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t know what to say. So I didn&#8217;t say anything.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;You don&#8217;t know what it&#8217;s like, man. You don&#8217;t know what it&#8217;s like to live here and be gay. You don&#8217;t know what it&#8217;s like to have freaking nobody. You don&#8217;t know what it&#8217;s like to have your own parents hate you and try and cover up your existence. I didn&#8217;t choose this. I didn&#8217;t want this. And I&#8217;m so tired of people hating me for it. I can&#8217;t take it anymore. I just can&#8217;t.&rdquo;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.danoah.com\/2011\/11\/im-christian-unless-youre-gay.html\">Go read the whole thing<\/a>.  \u00a0Happy Thanksgiving!<\/p>\n<p><em>[Update&#8230;]<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.danoah.com\/2011\/11\/powerful-responses-to-im-christian-unless-youre-gay-blog.html\/6\/\">A few responses to the above post<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Tonight I was going to kill myself. I had it all planned out. I had  all the items to do it sitting in my bedroom. I don&#8217;t know if I would  have done it but I sure was planning to. Ever since I \u00a0told my parents  and a few close friends that I was gay life has gotten worse and worse.  My parents who go to church twice a week have tried to force me to go to  this boot camp that&#8217;s made to force the gay out of you. They&#8217;ve told me  more times than I can count that as long as I&#8217;m gay I&#8217;m not their son  and that if I loved them or God at all I would do whatever it takes to  not be gay anymore. They&#8217;ve even talked to my only friends and they all  had a gay intervention for me and told me that they couldn&#8217;t be in my  life if I was going to keep saying that I was gay.I&#8217;ve never been with another guy. I&#8217;ve never told anyone else. All  I&#8217;ve ever done was finally get the guts to tell the people I was closest  to in my life that I was gay and they&#8217;ve all turned on me. This all  started about six months ago and I&#8217;ve never been so alone in my life.<\/p>\n<p>Anyways I just was on Facebook trying to decide if I should write a goodbye note and somebody posted a link to your <a href=\"http:\/\/www.danoah.com\/2011\/11\/im-christian-unless-youre-gay.html\">Christian\/gay post<\/a>.  The post was super good, but the comments are what kept me on your site  for hours. The love people who didn&#8217;t even know Jacob were showing gave  me hope I guess, and then somebody posted a video called it gets better  and I&#8217;ve never seen these videos but I watched it and then a bunch more  and for the first time I have hope that maybe it will get better I just  know now that it probably won&#8217;t get better for me here. But somewhere  maybe.<\/p>\n<p>So if you will, please tell your readers that they saved a life and  tell them thank you because I didn&#8217;t really want to die I just really  didn&#8217;t want to live with this anymore. I can&#8217;t wait to turn 18 and get  out of this place. Pray for me. I&#8217;m going to need it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Go read the others. \u00a0 Remember them the next time you hear someone say <em>Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Fred Clark&#8230; &ldquo;Jacob, I honestly don&#8217;t know how to write it,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I know what I want to get across, but I can never find the right words.&rdquo; &ldquo;Dan, you need to write it. Don&#8217;t give up. I&#8217;m telling you, it needs to be said.&rdquo; I paused. &ldquo;You don&#8217;t understand. It&#8217;s too heated [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[24,21,12],"class_list":["post-5291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thumping-my-pulpit","tag-gods-and-monsters","tag-the-abyss","tag-the-struggle-for-our-lives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}