I am going to start by saying their letter makes my heart glad and soothes my soul. Not because I needed their or anyone’s validation to freely be who I am as a bisexual woman in a same-sex relationship, but because I always rejoice when people drop beliefs that invalidate others.
Here is a snippet from their letter:
We once believed that there was something morally wrong and psychologically “broken” about being LGBT. We know better now. We once believed that sexual orientation or gender identity were somehow chosen or could be changed. We know better now. We once thought it was impossible to embrace our sexual orientation or sexual identity as an intrinsic, healthy part of who we are and who we were created to be. We know better now. Looking back, we were just believing (and sometimes teaching) what we had been taught—that our identity needed mending. We grew up being told that being LGBT was disordered, sick, mentally ill, sinful, and displeasing to God. We grew up being told that loving, same-sex relationships were shallow, lust-driven, deceived, disordered, and impossible….
We admonish parents to love and accept your LGBT children as they are. We beseech the church to accept, embrace, and affirm LGBT persons with full equality and inclusion.
This is personal, so I am going to be blunt: I have family members who still believe these things. Some of those family members have made it clear that if my partner and I marry, they will not attend our wedding due to these beliefs of theirs. They have been tolerant to the extent that they have been nothing but polite towards my partner and me. They respect our humanity and tolerate our relationship. But their tolerance ends at recognizing our relationship as anything but “not God’s best”. While I do not need their approval to live my life without shame, their insistence on holding onto those beliefs while professing to love me hurts me deeply. So seeing these people who have worked for years to try to get people to change their sexual orientation and gender identities repent of those beliefs and publicly say, “We were wrong and now understand we have harmed others by holding onto those beliefs,”…I don’t even know what words to use here. “Joy” doesn’t seem strong enough. “It makes me happy” feels trite.
I’ll admit I hope my family will eventually repent of their hurtful beliefs and truly celebrate, not merely tolerate, my almost six-year committed relationship with my partner. I am not holding my breath waiting for that to happen; I have a responsibility to myself and my partner to continue to live our life together with or without my family’s full support. But I can’t help but hope that just as these ex-gay leaders, who meant well and thought they were doing God’s will, realized their mistake and changed their stance, more and more people, including my own biological family, will soon do the same.
Read their letter in its entirety. It’s a beautiful testimony of repentance, of publicly owning the harm they have done to others in the past, and of encouraging others not to make the same mistakes they have made.