In this age where “coming out” as homosexual is cheered and turning straight jeered, Hollywood has long been at the forefront of pushing the pink front. Thus is the recently released film I Am Michael an eyebrow-raising anomaly, portraying the true story of a homosexuality activist who left his former ways, married, and became a Christian minister.
Debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in February 2015 but not released for distribution until late January, the movie features A-list actors James Franco, Emma Roberts, and Daryl Hannah. It tells the story of Michael Glatze, who went from opining that Christian fundamentalists should burn in Hell to the business of keeping people out of it.
Glatze’s story was originally told by ex-partner in homosexuality activism Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the 2011 New York Times Magazine piece “My Ex-Gay Friend.” Mentioning that he and Glatze worked together for 12 years at homosexual-themed magazine XY, he wrote:
Though only a year removed from Dartmouth when he arrived at XY, Michael had seemingly read every gay book ever written. While I was busy trying to secure a boyfriend, he was busy contemplating queer theory, marching in gay rights rallies and urging young people to celebrate (not just accept) their same-sex attractions.… “Christian fundamentalists should burn in hell!” he told me once, slamming his fist on his desk. I had never met anyone so sure of himself.
… A lot had happened in the decade since we last saw each other: he and [ex-“boyfriend”] Ben started a new gay magazine (Young Gay America, or Y.G.A.); they traveled the country for a documentary about gay teenagers; and Michael was fast becoming the leading voice for gay youth until the day, in July 2007, when he announced that he was no longer gay.
Glatze then went on to relate his transformation, crediting God for it and writing that “‘coming out’ from under the influence of the homosexual mindset was the most liberating, beautiful and astonishing thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”
Also perhaps astonishing is that the experience of watching I Am Michael was not a bad one for Glatze; he stated that it portrayed his story fairly, he was happy with it and that viewing it provided “healing.”
Nonetheless, the work is “not a neat and tidy, once-I-was lost-and-now-I’m-found film,” as WND puts it. Rather, “The story is told through the lens of a homosexual director [Justin Kelly] who apparently is trying to sort out how a man attracted to men, and who was such a fierce defender of ‘gay rights,’ could become the very thing he expressly once despised: a ‘fundamentalist’ minister,” as WND further informs.
Moreover, American Thinker tells us that the film clearly isn’t “meant for the family, containing nudity, unwholesome situations, and even a ‘threesome’ scene.” Not surprisingly, the work also has gotten mixed reviews. Yet all this is secondary, as more interesting than the movie is the matter of leaving homosexuality itself.
Also not surprising is that Glatze has been attacked by homosexuality activists, who’ve spewed venom and openly hoped that his 2013 marriage to wife Rebekah would fail. An example is Truth Wins Out’s Wayne Besen, who hissed that one “can’t be an official ‘ex-gay’ rock star until wedding bells ring”; he then wrote that “this happened for publicity hound Michael Glatze, who married his prop, er bride, Rebekah,” whom Besen called a “victim.”
This reaction was predictable. The world’s Glatzes serve as living, breathing, witnessing refutations of the fallacy that’s now central to the homosexual agenda: the “born that way” argument. (More on this in a moment.)
And many such living refutations exist. I’ve written about and corresponded with Robert Oscar Lopez, an ex-college professor who was raised by two lesbians, got involved in homosexuality himself but then found faith and freedom and is now married. Then there are the cases cited by American Thinker, about which you can read here.
These are the individuals who famous (and infamous), openly homosexual commentator Milo Yiannopoulos spoke of when stating (video below) that there are many “people who you will never hear about because the media doesn’t want to report on them, who say, ‘Yeah, it [leaving homosexuality] transformed my life; I’ve got a wife and I’ve got kids, and I’m happy now and I wasn’t before.’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgoyQevEhhQ
Making his comments at a 2016 Bucknell University event, Yiannopoulos also asserted that homosexuality is largely nurture, calling the “gay gene” theory a “big lie” that the homosexual lobby conjured up to justify their agenda. He explained the thinking: If homosexuality is inborn, like being black, then how can anyone say it’s wrong?
First note that while the whole human genome has been mapped out, no “homosexual gene” has been found. In addition, however, scientists have determined that environment can influence gene expression; thus, we aren’t just the sum total of our DNA.
Moreover, all the studies purporting to have found differences between the brains of homosexual and straight men — and other studies indicating that intrauterine hormonal anomalies can influence such things — have been flawed to, at best, non-definitive. Yet an even more important point in this debate is universally missed.
As far as a thing’s normality and rightness or wrongness go, its status as inborn is irrelevant.
Our world is rife with innate abnormality, from spina bifida to cleft palate to Huntington’s chorea to Down syndrome and beyond. “Inborn” is not synonymous with “normal.”
Even more to the point, the same researchers claiming homosexuality is genetic also generally say psychopaths are born and not made. Question: If a person has naturally induced homicidal feelings, does this mean it’s okay for him to kill?
Some may counter that murder hurts others. Putting aside whether or not engaging in homosexual behavior with another also does so, the point here is that this amounts to a change in the applied principle. It has gone from “Innateness equals rightness” to “Harmlessness equals rightness.”
Then, if “alcoholism” has a genetic basis — as some researchers also claim — does this mean drunkenness is okay for people thus afflicted? The truth is that genetics doesn’t determine morality.
In fact, the “born that way” theorists are tacitly proposing the replacement of morality with biological determinism. This is dangerous because any behavior dictated by naturally occurring feelings could then be legitimized.
This elimination of morality places us at our animal nature’s mercy, yet morality’s whole purpose is to tame that nature. In the animal world we witness innately induced rape, theft, cruelty, sport killing (e.g., among chimpanzees), and even cannibalism. Do we really want to make biological determinism our guiding spirit?
So whatever we seek to justify, it mustn’t be done based on a biological-determinism argument. Yet so much today is thus justified — though, strangely enough, only when the behavior happens to be politically correct. Consequently, homosexuality is called inborn while sex roles are labeled learned, despite our having found, it is rumored, a rather profound genetic difference between men and women.
Of course, that the “born that way” argument can work at all is a testimonial to something that certainly may have a genetic basis in man: irrationality.
