Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Religion & Law Blogs -> Constitutionally Correct

Religion & Law

: Constitutionally Correct

Daid French: Christianity, stigma, and suicide

By Alliance Alert

ADF Attorney David French writing at Patheos: "According to some, the 'fundamentalist' or 'evangelical' (those terms are often used interchangeably) Christian community has created a 'cultural climate' that stigmatizes gay people. Allegedly, this stigma 'contribute[s] to the atmosphere' that makes suicide more likely . . . But all these contentions run hard against the evidence. Ever since the Stonewall riots, our culture -- including large segments of the Body of Christ -- has been working quite hard to 'de-stigmatize' homosexual behavior . . . As we de-stigmatize homosexuality, the human toll continues to mount. Why? Perhaps because the fundamental problem wasn't 'stigma' in the first place. Perhaps when the problem is sin, de-stigmatizing sin doesn't actually heal the human heart." |  At National Review Online / Phi Beta Cons, Robert VerBruggen reponds: "I remain unconvinced, however, that the overall higher rate of suicide for gays is unrelated to stigma . . . If humans don?t naturally process a given behavior as sinful, and yet that behavior is seen as sinful, that?s due to stigma. And thus attributing gay suicide to sin and attributing it to stigma go hand-in-hand."

Full post as published by Constitutionally Correct on October 22, 2010 (boomark / email).