File Under "No Sh*t"

Here's something quite unsurprising, given what everyone knows (except those blinded by faith-based hatred):

Last week, John Smid, the former director of Love in Action, the country’s oldest and largest ex-gay ministry, acknowledged on his blog that, contrary to the claims of the movement he represented for decades, gay people cannot become straight. “I’ve never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual,” he wrote. He himself certainly has not. “I would consider myself homosexual and yet in a marriage with a woman,” he explained. He loves his wife and has no plans to leave her, but wrote, “this doesn’t change the fact that I am who I am and she is who she is.”

The problem for certain literalist Christians is that accepting that sexual preference is not a choice means believing that god creates homosexuals. Which -- the horror! -- would also mean they deserve welcoming as worthies. So the pattern repeats, endlessly, whether it in the form of homophobia, climate change denial, creationism: when obvious reality threatens chosen belief, they -- quite amazingly -- reject that reality. If my religion demanded that I reject chlorophyl as the explanation for why grass is green and when leaves turn color, I'd drop that religion like Leon Lett does footballs.

It seems such a no-brainer.