The Equality Act, Gay Christians, and Conversion Therapy with Robert Oscar Lopez

Conversations That Matter

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00:02

This is a pre -show warning if you have children in the car or in the home, you may want to put them in another area or maybe wait to listen to this.

00:11

It is a fascinating conversation and a very important one, but if you have children who have not had the talk, so to speak, yet, you may not want them listening.

00:20

We're going to be using some terminology which just wouldn't be for their ears. It is an honor for me to interview

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Robert Oscar Lopez. I've known him a short period of time, a few months, but he has impressed me, especially with his bravery, but his experience, he's just articulate, and I think you're going to be blessed and helped through this conversation that we have.

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Without further ado, Robert Oscar Lopez. Welcome to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I'm happy to have with me on the program today,

00:55

Robert Oscar Lopez. Should I say Dr. Robert Oscar Lopez? You can call me whatever you want.

01:02

And you are, part of me is tempted to just say you're the bravest man in the SBC. I'm sure you would not want probably that title, but talking about the things you're talking about, being as vocal as you are about them, and there are such important topics.

01:17

I don't know, I just think you're brave for doing this. So why don't you give me a little bit of your background, your story, give me like the 30 -second version, and then

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I want to talk to you about the Equality Act, and then a really hot -button topic, which is same -sex attracted

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Christianity. Right. So, yeah, who are you? What's your story?

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Well, I am a professor of humanities, and I came into the

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Southern Baptist Church 10 years ago. The part of my story that I think tends to interest people is the fact that I was raised in the gay community.

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My mom was gay, so she was with the same woman from my infancy until my mother died when

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I was 19. And I was inducted, if you will, into the world of homosexuality at the age of 13.

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And I basically lived a gay lifestyle until the age of 28, when

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I met my wife, and we've been together for 21 years, or 20 years.

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And so because of the fact that I had an experience with gay parenting, even though it was a primordial experience of that back in the 70s and 80s, and because of the fact that I was in the gay lifestyle and then got out of it,

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I tend to have just a life story and a perspective that a lot of people are interested in and a lot of people hate hearing.

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So that's kind of where I'm coming from. I do approach this also as a scholar.

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I got degrees in English, political science, and classics. So I have a broad cross -cultural and cross -historical perspective on the origins of our concepts of sexuality and how people have usually discussed these things in the past.

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Absolutely fascinating. Now, you have been pretty vocal about this Equality Act, which did pass the

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House of Representatives. Was it last week or the week before? It passed, I think it's already going on two weeks now.

03:16

Okay. So yeah, two weeks ago. And I read that today just to make sure that I understood what was being, what you were opposing and what others are promoting.

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And frankly, it's, I mean, I wasn't overly surprised, but it was scary to read that.

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So I, you know, rather than me talking about it, I'd like to hear what are your objections to the Equality Act?

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Why should Christians especially be concerned with this? Well, it really concerns everybody, but Christians have a special stake in it because one provision of the act actually eliminates

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Christians' ability to use the law from the 1990s, the Religious Freedom and Rights Act.

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But the overall, the bill, it spans 12 sections and it's like the

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Green New Deal that Ocasio -Cortez tried to push through Congress and everybody voted it down. The difference here is that this actually has universal support among the

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Democrats and even a lot of support among Republicans. What this law does first is it opens with a section on findings.

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And what this does is it states a bunch of assertions and implies that by passing the law, we as a country are agreeing to acknowledge these things as fact, as undisputed truth.

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And of course, most of the things in the findings section are absolutely disputed. The idea that there is such a thing as a homosexual orientation, the idea that people can't change, the idea that gay people have suffered as much historical discrimination as black people have, the idea that any time that you do anything that disputes the ideology of the homosexual lobby, the trans lobby, the pro -choice lobby, or any of these things, you are engaging in sex discrimination and that this is the proper purview for the government to regulate it.

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So the findings section is really bad because it's Orwellian. It basically is saying, this is reality.

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This is the way things ought to be, so we're going to make it this way by just forcing everyone to believe things that we know are not true.

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At the very least, they're all disputable, but some of the things in there are just patently untrue.

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Then it goes on to define all of these aspects of the 1964

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Civil Rights Act, which was passed to address what had happened to African Americans in the

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Jim Crow South, and it updates it, number one, by equating African Americans' racial identity with all of these sexual identities.

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And then it basically expands the definitions that were set forth in the Civil Rights Act to include, for instance, public accommodations, originally was referring to things like checking into a hotel room or going to a restaurant to eat.

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These were things that would interfere with your ability to survive and to flourish as a community if they were denied to you.

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Well, they expand that to include everything that deals with recreation, amusement, every gathering.

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It's not just businesses, but it's also, as the law says, private actors, and it affects non -profit, public charities as much as it affects private corporations and volunteer associations and just basic social relationships.

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So everything from sitting on a park bench, joking with your friends, which would count as a gathering for the purpose of amusement, to having a support group for survivors of sexual assault, all of those things would be regulated by this law.

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And so it would give the Department of Justice at the federal level the ability to investigate, to surveil people, to impose policies on people, and to penalize them, either financially or with actual criminal proceedings, if they violate the terms of it.

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So then from there, that's bad enough, but then it goes on to include a whole bunch of things like adoption, foster care.

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There's provisions in the bill that really seem to point towards child and protection services interfering with your ability to raise your family.

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They redefine desegregation so that all of the efforts that they made to desegregate white and black populations, they're saying that they're going to desegregate by sexual orientation and gender identity.

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So this goes even beyond what we've been hearing a lot about with transgender people going to the opposite sex bathrooms.

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This basically means eventually that we're going to abolish girls' restrooms and boys' restrooms.

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We're going to abolish all those things because essentially the law is saying that that is equivalent to making blacks and whites change or disrobe or go to the bathroom in different locations.

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So this is a huge, huge law. It is totalitarian because it really regulates a lot about speech.

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It regulates a lot about the right of association, certainly the right of free exercise of religion. It's going to affect every single workplace and the scope of what you can discipline your workers for in the workplace is going to be enormous because any job, for instance, let's say

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I run a fish cannery. And that's my job is to can sardines.

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The guy at the very lowest rung of the hierarchy, let's say the man, the janitor who cleans up after we're done canning, if he holds any attitudes that are anti -gay or anti -trans or sexist, and he expresses any of those, even if it's off site at home on Facebook, on Twitter, and somebody files a complaint,

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I have to discipline him or else I'm not fulfilling the obligations of this act.

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So it's huge. It will affect everybody. And the fact that it got this far in terms of it has passed in the

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House of Representatives, and it has 46 sponsors, last time I checked, in the

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Senate, which means, but for a couple people who are holding out in the Senate, this could easily pass through the

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Senate. And because we have Donald Trump, I'm hoping that he would have the good sense to veto it, that most people are saying he would, but this sort of is a clarion call to show you that elections have consequences, that we're in a very dangerous situation.

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And if we had a different president, or if we had a slightly different ratio in the

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Senate, this law could actually come into being. And this would be, I mean, for Christians, it would be doomsday, because there would be no more

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Christian colleges, there would be no more any of that, because every single one of them would immediately be sued or shut down based on their violations of this law.

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Now this raises a bunch of questions in my mind. The first one, though, is, what do you say to someone who says,

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Robert, you're crazy? It's not going to do all those things. And I agree with you. I read it, and I thought, this is going to transform and fundamentally remake the way society functions.

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But what about someone who just says, you're not going to find anything in the bill that says that churches have to accept homosexual clergy, or some of the more extreme things that we're concerned about?

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How do you address that? What would you say to them? I would tell them to read through the bill, because the bill clearly is very specific.

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It names the departments at the federal level that would be responsible for enforcing this law. So it names the

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Department of Education, it names the Department of Justice. And they would not empower those agencies to enforce these kinds of rules unless they intended to use them.

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And to date, there is no law that they have not used. There's no lawsuit that they have not filed, if they had the chance to.

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They have been really tireless in terms of pursuing people that oppose them, even when it's a question of people just expressing their opinions.

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They have brought people up on charges of harassment, discrimination. They even get people on retaliation.

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For instance, if I'm a gay person who works at a company, and I throw a temper tantrum, and I scream, and I throw things around because I say that somebody called me a slur, and then you do an investigation, and you find out that they never called me that slur, they'll still get you on retaliation if you complain about the fact that I threw a temper tantrum.

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And that's what happens to me at Cal State Northridge. We have real -life examples of all of these kinds of lawsuits playing out.

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So I have no reason to believe, and nobody who has any grip of recent history would have any reason to believe that these provisions are not going to be available.

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Yeah. Some of the extreme things that I just, off the top of my head, noticed in the bill.

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It blames transgender people committing suicide on discrimination without proving anything.

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It just says that. It just blames that it's haters. It's bigots that are making them do this.

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It's just a mess. Well, and it - It would ban conversion therapy as well, which I think, if you ban that,

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Christian counseling goes with that. Right. Right. So I've cut you off, though. Go ahead.

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Yeah, no. I was going to mention exactly that. It actually argues that sexual orientation is unchangeable, and that's preposterous.

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Even the LGBT acronym itself denies that, because they include B, which is bisexual.

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Even many of the people who are behind the LGBT movement, like Lisa Diamond, a lot of researchers, everyone, even from Alfred Kinsey, going all the way back there, they acknowledge that people fluctuate.

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I mean, there's all different kinds of social interactions that cause arousal. Some people are attracted to the same sex, but don't want to actually have sexual activities with them, et cetera, et cetera.

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There's friendship. There's a brotherly kind of love. It's such a broad spectrum, and for them to reduce all that to basically sexual activity, and then to say that it's unchangeable, and that it's a crime to try to suggest that somebody change, or to help them change if they say they want to, these are all totalitarian tactics, and this is a bad bill.

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No, I agree completely with you. This is the next logical question. You're a Southern Baptist.

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I know Russell Moore hasn't had the greatest history in the minds of some of us conservatives on this issue.

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He would go to, I remember he said he would go to a homosexual wedding reception, but not the wedding. And so he's kind of, shall we say,

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I don't know if we can rely on him to be consistent with his Christian ethic on this, but I would hope, as extreme of a bill as this is, that the

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ERLC, in the Southern Baptist Convention, would be fighting this tooth and nail. Are they?

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Are you aware of the ERLC fighting this, or other Christian conservative organizations?

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Is there any kind of opposition, because I haven't really heard of much. They have. So I do want to point out that this bill was so bad,

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I almost feel as though this is proof that the Lord is faithful, because by passing this bill and having unanimous democratic support, it really has stirred up a lot of Christians who maybe wouldn't have fought this that aggressively.

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I know that the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission did sign on, along with a lot of other

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Christian and conservative groups, in opposing this bill. Now, people might pick bones with how aggressively they're fighting it, but I do have to say that they are opposing it.

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And that's a testament to how bad this bill is. This is a bill that, even if there are many people in the

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Christian conservative side that I have publicly criticized, like PragerU or Ben Shapiro, you know, people who

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I would dispute things with, even the Log Cabin Republicans or Martina Navratilova, I mean, people have come out against this bill from all quarters.

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A lot of lesbian groups are against the bill. A lot of women, obviously, are opposed to the bill because of the safety to women's health.

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There are a lot of liberals who are against it because of the freedom of speech restrictions. So this is a situation where I think a lot of those people who someone might feel inclined to complain about the beauty of this bill being so bad is that it really has brought a lot of those people at least to the same table.

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Excellent. Yeah, that is really a good thing to hear. And again,

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I didn't research, you know, who's against it, who's for it. So I'm glad you're keeping tabs on this. I wanted to ask you, switching gears here, a related topic.

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So same -sex attracted Christianity, if I'm, I don't know if I'm giving it the right name. Some people just call it gay

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Christianity. But this idea that you can have an orientation, homosexual orientation, and you can be a

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Christian and churches should accommodate you and you should live with that for the rest of your life perhaps and not engage in physical sex, but just have this orientation and this attraction that that's okay.

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So this idea that that's okay, that that's fine, permissible. This is really just overnight, it seems like.

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I mean, I'm still spinning over how fast this has made inroads, but even people that I know personally have been, in my opinion, taken in by this.

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And it's usually testimonies. There's books out there of people who said that they experienced this attraction and who are you to tell them that that's not natural.

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And I was hoping you could address this because you've had, you know, you have some experience, I guess, in this area and you're married, you have kids now.

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Right. You know, what advice would you give to pastors when addressing this? You know,

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I'd like to just hear your thoughts on it. Well, there are a couple of things.

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This can go in many directions. I don't agree with the same sex attracted movement for Christianity.

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Number one, because there is no gay identity. There is no gay sexual orientation. The first time that homosexual was coined as a term was in Germany in 1869.

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This was after Darwin published The Origin of Species and Chapter 7 of The Origin of Species was about instinct.

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And because Darwin's theories looked so much at sexual selection, because that was how genes were passed from one generation to the next, there was a lot of interest in thinking that a wide range of behaviors, including sex, was instinctual, okay?

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So it was really only when he published that and people started trying to apply that to human sexual behavior that people believed that there was a separate classification of human beings who experienced this from birth on, that it was somehow biologically inherited.

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There's no cultural history, going all the way back to antiquity, that really points to the fact that people are born this way and that they can't change and that it's part of their identity.

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And ironically, when that term came up, homosexual, in the 19th century, it was used largely by people who wanted to classify homosexuals as criminals or as people who were sick.

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So the current gay movement, which came up with this idea of sexual orientation and has rallied around it because it's a really effective way of saying, look, we have this constituency and we are entitled to their votes and their money and we can go and bargain with politicians based on saying,

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I can deliver you this many votes because this is the gay community and it's a distinct class of people, right?

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All of that came from a movement to classify them as criminals and as mentally insane.

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So I think from the very beginning, the idea of a same -sex attracted Christianity, it comes from the world.

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There's certainly nothing, absolutely nothing in scripture that says that this is your identity.

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So once you peel away the fact, once you reject the idea that gay is what people are and you just accept the fact that gay describes events, it describes activities, it describes behaviors or thoughts that come and go, then all of this falls apart.

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Because why are you saying I'm writing as a same -sex attracted Christian? You know, there's nothing, you're just a

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Christian. You know, you're the same as everybody else. And there's no reason why the church needs to bend over backward in order to accommodate them.

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You know, they just need to look at each and every person who comes to their church who is struggling with this. You need to look at that person as a

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God -designed heterosexual because all of us, whether we're male or female, are heterosexual because our biological realities is that our sex organs are made to couple with the opposite sex.

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So you just need to sort of help them work through what they're going through. Now, if somebody says, look,

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I just can't get out of it. I just keep on thinking of being with the opposite sex, then that sounds like an obsession or it's a fixation.

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And even if they were to jump into gay identity and gay activity and they were just going to throw themselves into the gay community, they wouldn't be happy anyway because they're not attracted to a single person.

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They're attracted to a category. You see what I'm saying? So the whole thing, it's just a false conception.

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It's a destructively false conception. And the church should not play into it because you're taking on the terminology and the vocabulary of the world.

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And scripture is clear that all of us were created male or female. And Genesis explains why that is.

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He says, that is why a man leaves the home of his mother and father and leaves to his wife and becomes one flesh.

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And Jesus Christ adds to that in Matthew 19. And he says, what the Lord has brought together, let no man tear asunder.

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So we're not supposed to tear apart the diagram of male and female being together.

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So I think the pastors who deal with people who come in and say, I've tried and tried and tried and I can't stop doing it.

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I think that it's important to develop a relationship with those people and to gradually get them to open up and talk about what's really going on.

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So when someone says, I feel attracted to men and I can't stop feeling that way.

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I would generally ask them, okay, are you watching porn? Are you self -pleasuring?

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I mean, let's just use frank words. Are you masturbating and fantasizing about it a lot? What are you doing?

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Are you going to gay places? Are you going to gay websites? Are you going to things that are constantly reinforcing this attraction?

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Let's just sort of schedule your day so that you don't do those things and your mind can be focused on other things.

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Paul gives us that solution in Philippians 4 when he says, you should think on things that are excellent, noble, and true.

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You don't think on things that ultimately point towards what the Bible describes as an abomination.

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That was excellent. I think of 1 Corinthians 6 .11. And to me, that should just be the end of the discussion.

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Such were some of you. You're not that anymore. You're a Christian. But the retort that I often get is that someone who's born that way, again, what you talked about, this

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Darwinian idea that sexuality is fixed, I guess, that that doesn't just go away when someone's a

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Christian. Yeah, they're not participating in the acts, which is the biblical category, but then they insert this new category that's foreign to scripture that you have this orientation.

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And it's very appealing. And one of the things that's interesting to me is we're talking about this

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Equality Act, and it would ban conversion therapy on a federal level. And many

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Christian organizations and Christians, pastors, even though they might be against the

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Equality Act, they take the same side as the Equality Act in saying conversion therapy is wrong and bad.

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Yeah, right. It's amazing to me to see that. 10 years ago, I would have thought you were crazy if you said that pastors would be on the same side as the

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Democratic Party, conservative pastors, or what we perceive as conservative.

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So that was just excellent, though, what you just shared. I think you're absolutely right on that. Well, I think what happened with conversion therapy is if you look at the whole smorgasbord of everything that the

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LGBT lobby wants, I mean, everything from transgender bathrooms to free medication for AIDS, the whole spectrum, they're willing sometimes to sacrifice one or two things.

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But there are two things that the gay community absolutely will not give up.

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One of which is the idea that you can't change. They want that to be protected because that is what guarantees them all kinds of beneficial statistics.

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They get numbers. They get constituents. They get people who patronize their businesses. That's the key to their power is having what

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I would call a captive constituency. And in order to build that captive constituency, they really engaged in a 30 -year plan of massive propaganda to convince people in schools and in churches that people can't change.

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So what ends up happening is pastors really just kind of want to get past the gay issue.

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They don't want to get dragged down into it. They want to look good. They also want to feel good. But they don't really want to get into the meat of this issue.

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So what they'll often do is they'll sit down with some gay activist who's far beyond them in terms of strategy and tactics and all of this propaganda.

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And the pastor will say, okay, look, my line is marriage. I will never, ever publicly say from the pulpit that two men can get married.

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And the gay activist will say, okay, that's fine. We can respect that just as long as you agree with us that conversion therapy is bad.

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And so what ends up happening is in all of these grand bargains that happen with the gay activists and conservatives or Christians, conversion therapy was always the one bargaining chip that people left to the gay community.

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And it was almost prearranged that way. That was almost contrived so that the gays would always get the ban on conversion therapy.

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But the problem is, is if you agree with the idea of banning conversion therapy, you're basically surrendering all of those people who were manipulated and groomed and molested and pressured into homosexuality.

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Because the worst thing in the world, and this happens in a lot of conservative Christian churches, you have a young man who is 14 or 15.

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Maybe he was a little bit effeminate. He got made fun of in school. He was a target for predators. People preyed on him.

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They pressured him. They manipulated him. They molested him. Now they're convincing him that he's gay. He goes to church.

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And instead of saying, okay, let me heal you. Let's go and try to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

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And we're going to restore you to normalcy. The church actually tells them, yeah, you clearly really are gay.

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So we're just going to get you to accept that. So they end up reinforcing all of the abuse that the gay community perpetrated on them.

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And that's what's so sad about the conversion therapy bans within the church. And I was at the synod of the

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Anglican church in July of 2017 in York, England, when they banned conversion therapy.

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And with it, they even banned people praying to try to get someone delivered. You can't say anything that implies that homosexuality is a sin.

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They essentially banned certain parts of the Bible. And then after that, at the same meeting, they also instituted a transgender liturgy.

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So it kind of all came together. That's amazing. What would you say to, you know, there's a bunch of guys out there, like the

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Revoice crowd, like Gregory Coles or Wesley Hill, or I don't know if Justin Lee, I guess, would maybe fit into this.

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Matthew Vines is a little more on the liberal side. These guys who, they believe it's a fixed orientation.

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You can't change. And some of them have these compelling, well, some people think they're compelling, these stories of trying to change.

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I mean, in Gregory Cole's case, I think he started by looking at pornography that was heterosexual and admits that wasn't the best way.

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Then he tried praying and he tried all sorts of things and nothing works.

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You live this lifestyle and you are married with children now.

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What would you say to them if they came to you and said, all right, I've tried everything. What do we do now? We want to change.

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Which I've gotten this question from homosexual men before. We want to change. Tell me.

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The first thing I would say is you've got to get outside of your head. I think that a lot of those writers that you just mentioned,

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I want to show respect to them because they're children of God. And I do think that they are trying to pursue a

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Christian life, but they're very narcissistic. I mean, they write entire books about things that are going on in their head.

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And quite honestly, that's not the most important thing in life. God puts you on this earth. You have a calling.

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You have a vocation. You have things that you need to do. Think of the parable of the talents. He gives you a certain number of talents, of gifts, and you have to share them with the world.

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You can't do that if you're just waking up every day and analyzing yourself and analyzing, what do I feel?

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What do I think? And of course, it's going to be like when you're driving along a road and it's a narrow ledge, a cliff, and you're scared of hitting the guardrail and you're looking at the guardrail so much that what happens?

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You drive towards the guardrail. You've got to get outside of your head. It's a question of narcissistic self -obsession, and they've got to break free of that.

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One of the things that I tell a lot of the guys, because I do disciple quite a number of men who are trying to get out of this, is number one,

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I tell them you have to get a servant's mindset. You have to understand that your sexual identity is not going to be based on what you feel or what you want.

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It's going to be based on the joy that you give to someone else with your body. And the reality is that if you're a man, you cannot give the joy to a man that you can give to a woman because he doesn't have the parts that need your parts.

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Do you know what I'm saying? So ultimately, I think I try to get them to be involved in service projects like volunteer for a soup kitchen.

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Go work for free for someone whose work you really admire. Be an apprentice. Help somebody by babysitting.

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I know that's kind of controversial, but do something for other people. Lead a Bible study. Get outside of yourself so that if you can first understand that your identity is based on what you do for other people, then that will lead you down the road of really reshaping the way that you think about yourself.

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On a more practical level, I have five steps. I just try to break it down because people,

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I think, need really simple, practical ideas for how to actually do this.

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Because getting out of homosexuality, at least for the guys, is one of the hardest things you can do. Everyone's going to be against you.

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Feminists are going to be against you because all of a sudden now, you're going to want to go dating women and you're going to become part of the patriarchy.

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Christians are going to oppose you because you're dirty. They don't want you spoiling their dating pool.

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Gays are going to hate you because you're betraying them. Everyone's going to be against you. It's like trying to lose 400 pounds.

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So yeah, there are a lot of people who can't do it. There are a lot of people who are like, yeah, I want to lose 400 pounds, but I just can't do it.

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Okay, so here's my five steps. It goes basically from deciding. That's phase one.

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Phase two is leaving. Phase three is rebuilding. Phase four is dating.

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And then phase five is living out your married life. Okay, so phase one is you're in the gay community and you have to decide.

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You have to make up your mind. You have to really decide that this is not for you. This is not what's going to make you happy.

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That no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to get yourself to accept a homosexual lifestyle.

31:57

And you have to just let that soak in and come to the point where you realize that, okay, it's either

32:02

I get out of this community or I'm going to be miserable. And that's a pretty long phase in itself because often people who are in the gay community, they've been brainwashed for years.

32:11

So they have to actually decide to leave. Phase two is you've got to leave the gay community.

32:16

Often this means you have to schedule appointments with all of your gay friends and tell them, look, I can't talk to you anymore.

32:23

You know what I mean? Call me if there's an emergency, but I'm moving to somewhere else. Often you have to move to a new neighborhood.

32:29

You might have to switch your job. It's a pretty difficult process. And you have to cut off all pornography.

32:35

I think the mistake that Greg Coles made was he was watching straight pornography. All pornography is just going to reinforce the kind of sex that you had in the gay lifestyle, which was detached and self -focused.

32:47

So it doesn't matter whether there's women or men in it. It's still the same. You're feeding the same basic self -serving attitude.

32:53

Can I stop you just real quick? I know you're on this roll and I don't want you to keep going, but real quick. I know one of the things that,

33:00

I think it was Living Out had recommended, Tom Buck had done this thing on Living Out.

33:06

I don't know if you saw that. They wanted, I think it was like a 15 year old who's struggling with homosexuality, go make some intentional same -sex friendships with other homosexual men,

33:21

I guess. But just be friends and don't do anything and reinforce friendship. And you're saying the exact opposite of that.

33:27

The exact opposite. It's the worst advice ever. Worst advice ever. You have to avoid gay places, gay people, gay media.

33:34

I always tell them, number one, in phase two, you have to just get a new computer or else just totally change your service providers.

33:42

So you can't have access to any of the websites that you may have been spending time on. I think between phase two and phase three, which is rebuilding,

33:50

I think you also need to get on a daily Bible reading plan. You need to join a supportive church that's actually gonna support you in this.

33:57

You have to work out. I always say you have to exercise at least one hour a day, sweaty exercise.

34:03

And I can explain why the exercise is so important. It was very crucial for me to do the exercise.

34:09

I can explain that in a little bit. But you have to quit masturbating and you have to quit pornography. And that's the big one.

34:15

That's usually what messes everybody up. They can't quit the porn and they can't quit whacking off. And so it doesn't go anywhere.

34:22

Interesting. And so phase three is like, you're not trying to date women yet. You're not trying to think about women.

34:28

You're not trying to get turned on by women. You're building up your confidence. You're rebuilding your manhood and your masculinity so that you have confidence, you have perseverance.

34:37

You can deal with disappointments. You can deal with frustration because once you get into phase four and you start dating women, a lot of them are going to reject you.

34:48

You're going to get your heart broken. And that's actually what I think, I see a lot of personalities in men who are struck in the gay lifestyle that they don't want to deal with the kind of challenges to your selfhood that come with dating women.

35:03

Because, I mean, I'll be honest with you, women are more difficult. They're harder. They like to talk.

35:08

You have to listen to them a lot more. So when women complain about things, you don't, in a gay relationship, if the other guy is complaining, you're just like, whatever,

35:18

I don't care. You know what I mean? But you can't do that with a woman because you're the provider, you're the protector, and that's a lot of responsibility.

35:24

So you have to build up your confidence so that you can handle that and you can handle it when a girl says, no, I'm sorry,

35:30

I don't want to see you anymore. You know? Wow. So all of that is phase three. And then phase four,

35:35

I say, go out and have fun. Ask girls out on dates. See whether you like them. Girls are fun. If you have abstained from masturbation, if you haven't been watching pornography, if you've been exercising, if you've been rebuilding your confidence and all these things, then you're going to go on dates with girls.

35:51

You're not going to feel desperate or nervous. You're just going to have a good time. And then eventually, one of them, it'll click.

35:58

And we're Christians, so you don't have to rush into proving that you can sexually perform. Well, Robert, this is excellent advice for just a heterosexual.

36:04

I mean, it doesn't matter, right? It's just someone who shows up for pornography or just is afraid of that whole world of dating and stuff.

36:10

I mean, this is great. What about the exercise thing? I'm curious now because you... The exercise?

36:16

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Why is that important? Okay. A lot of gay men, this is... Maybe this applies to lesbians.

36:21

I don't know. But a lot of gay men have really, really painful experiences with athletics and with exercise.

36:29

You know, they were made... They were bad at sports. They got made fun of. And then on top of it, when they went to the gym, that was a place of a lot of insecurity and temptation.

36:37

So a lot of times they just didn't have the experience of working out. And when they did work out, it was always on a crash diet to get a decent body to go to the gym.

36:46

So it was part of the sexual marketing of themselves. But what I found that was so important with working out was when

36:56

I did an hour of sweaty exercise every day, my body became flooded with body memory of the soreness of working out.

37:04

And that, for me, flushed out all of the body memory of being with dudes.

37:11

Interesting. Yeah, because when you are engaged in tons and tons and tons of really bad gay sex, your body kind of remembers it.

37:18

Your body remembers, you know what I mean? And so you need an activity that replaces that with something else.

37:25

And also you have higher endorphins. It increases your confidence. You start to notice that you have a man's body.

37:31

You start to see your muscles grow. And you start to be in an environment with men that isn't just all sexual when you're at the gym.

37:39

I mean, I think you have to be careful. Like I would never go into the locker room and change in the locker room at a men's gym.

37:46

But you know what I mean? I think exercise also is a chance for you to deal with men and to see how other men deal with frustration or roadblocks or difficulties, how they overcome plateaus.

37:59

All of those things I think are good for a guy. Very, very important. So yeah, this is putting off and then putting on.

38:07

I mean, this is the scripture kind of gives this principle to us. And then you're kind of fleshing it out in these steps.

38:13

Is there anywhere that someone who's watching this can go to like a book you publish where they can get more detail on this?

38:20

Well, I took down all of my posts. I had like hundreds of posts on this. But I'm gonna be releasing a book this summer called

38:27

So Long Sodom where I go through the five steps. I originally was running my website just for the hundred or so guys who were doing it.

38:34

But I am gonna put it in book format to help guys.

38:40

But having that stuff hanging out there on the internet was getting a little bit nerve wracking because a lot of people were going there just to make fun of it or to sabotage it.

38:51

And I didn't wanna get... I just wanted to be able to take the time to put it into a book. But yeah, I will.

38:56

It's gonna be called So Long Sodom. We'll have to have you on again when that's coming out so we can talk about the book.

39:02

There's some other books I think that you've written as well, right? Well, if you're into literature, I wrote a book called

39:07

The Colorful Conservative about the origins of modern conservatism in early 19th century

39:14

American literature. I wrote a book called Jephthah's Daughters which was about all of the innocent casualties in the war for family equality.

39:23

I wrote that with about 16 other people. And then that got republished in the UK. I wrote Whacko's Thugs and Perverts which is a book about higher education.

39:32

That one came out in 2017. And I wrote a book that came out in... I wrote a chapter of a book that I helped edit that came out in 2018 called

39:39

The New Normal. And in that one, I have a chapter called Chase is the New Queer. So I have a couple of books.

39:44

Yeah, the one about academia seems very appropriately titled. That's pretty funny. Yeah, yeah.

39:50

Well, Robert, thank you so much for lending me some of your time to talk about these things.

39:56

I think they're very important. And I've talked about the social justice movement quite a bit.

40:02

And it's been said that there's kind of three trains. There's this kind of like an anti -white and then there's like this kind of like anti -man and then like an anti -straight.

40:11

It's been phrased different ways. But it's that last train which has the LGBT stuff on it that I think is the one that Christians should be focusing on the most.

40:21

It's the greatest threat to the gospel directly. Yeah, I do.

40:26

Here's what I would say because I do a lot of work with black and Latino churches. I do a lot of work on racial reconciliation.

40:33

Definitely there is a lot of extremism in the church right now with people talking about reparations and white privilege, et cetera.

40:41

But that really is a very thin layer at the very top. And in your average black or Latino church, there's a disconnect.

40:49

Those people are not really following that concern. But the LGBT lobby has enormous amounts of money and enormous amounts of power.

40:57

And they can call in a Christian leader from one day to the next. They can say, hey, I need to meet with you tomorrow at noon.

41:03

Whereas the black leaders don't have that kind of pull because they don't have as much money. And if you go to any church, the

41:10

LGBT ideology has trickled all the way down to the person teaching Vacation Bible School or the person teaching the youth classes.

41:19

So I do think the LGBT lobby is much, much more severe. And it's a much more direct attack on scripture because scripture is clear.

41:31

Homosexuality is a sin. Thinking about it's a sin, doing it's a sin, following through on it, building your life around it is a sin.

41:38

I mean, because there's so many scriptures. People say there's only six scriptures, but that's not true. It comes up in Job. It comes up in second

41:44

Kings. It comes up in all over the place. And then Jesus Christ does talk about sexual immorality.

41:49

And there's tons of passages that really clearly say that God created us to be heterosexual. So all the people who say, well, heterosexuality is not holiness.

41:57

I'm like, ah, I don't know if I can really sign onto that because God did design us to be heterosexual. So I think the

42:03

LGBT lobby, I would say, is the biggest of the challenges. Yeah.

42:09

How can people pray for you? If they want to pray for me? Yeah. Um, gosh, if they could just pray that God places a hedge of protection over me,

42:21

I really feel like there's a lot of work to be done in this area. And I don't want to get rich or anything.

42:27

I just want to be able to do what God wants us all to do. And if people could pray that I could open the minds and the hearts and the ears of others so that we can get a stronger response to this than we've seen so far.

42:45

I think the churches have followed the way of the world. The world did not respond well to this issue.

42:52

They made a certain number of mistakes. And I think they focused a lot on religious liberty, which is a problem because religious liberty, as an argument, presumes relativism.

43:06

It basically says you do your thing, I do my thing. And it doesn't focus on the objective reality, which is that homosexuality is physically dangerous.

43:16

It's physically unclean and it is biblically unsound.

43:22

Yeah, I completely agree with you on that. I mean, I've been thinking about doing a whole episode on this principled pluralism idea because it's secularism and it presumes that there's some neutral ground between Christianity and homosexuality and these other things that challenge

43:38

Christianity. And there's not. The two cannot really coexist in the long run. One's going to win. So yeah, you're absolutely correct.

43:45

And we will be praying for you. And thank you so much for being willing to talk about this once again.

43:51

Where can folks find you? Last question. Do you have a website yet or no? Yeah, robertoscarlopez .com

43:57

is gonna get launched. But for the time being, it's robertoscar... No, no, I'm sorry. It's englishmanif .blogspot

44:04

.com. Englishmanif is englishmanif .blogspot .com.

44:11

And I've taken most of the stuff down because I'm retooling everything. Okay, well, I'll put that in the info section for folks who want to find.

44:18

If you're watching this, just go down, scroll down and you'll find Robert Oscar Lopez's blog. So thank you so much.

44:24

bless. Thank you very much. Bye now. Bye.