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Penalizing homosexuals does not save any innocent victims. The idea that God and the Church accept these people while they are celibate and then if they go off and do something with someone else and both derive joy from it without any apparent harm to anyone else, the Church excommunicates them - that, to me, is bizarre.

Andrew Solomon

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Andrew Solomon
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: October 30
Author
Clinical Psychologist
Journalist
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Manhattan borough
New York City
Something
Anyone
Victims
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Church
Innocent
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Celibate
Else
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Homosexuals
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Homosexual
Without
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Bizarre

More quotes by Andrew Solomon

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One has to weigh all of one's values always in relative terms. On the upside, you get people who are not acting on their homosexual attraction, who are avoiding the sin of practicing homosexuality. On the downside, you have destroyed marriages, traumatized children, and dead people who have taken their own lives.
Andrew Solomon
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I don't understand what the nature of God is. But I do have the feeling that I'm at some feet, and lucky to be there.
Andrew Solomon
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The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.
Andrew Solomon
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I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.
Andrew Solomon
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I grew up feeling that to be gay was a tragedy. I didn't grow up thinking that it was morally wrong, but I grew up thinking that it would make me marginal, prevent me from having children, and quite possibly prevent me from having a meaningful long relationship. It seemed that this condition would leave me with a vastly reduced life.
Andrew Solomon
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I'm a huge believer in science. But I don't think it explains everything.
Andrew Solomon
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I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way.
Andrew Solomon
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If your love didn't always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.
Andrew Solomon
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If I understand correctly, part of the objection to homosexuality used to have to do with the fact that gay people didn't reproduce. Part of it seems to have to do, as a lot of Christian resistance to gayness does, with a dim view of sex that is not procreative, and that is therefore lascivious.
Andrew Solomon
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There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.
Andrew Solomon
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People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.
Andrew Solomon
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That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.
Andrew Solomon
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I think what the Church should ideally do, and does appear to do in the context of straight relationships, is to support people in crossing from the easier pleasure of momentary carnal satisfaction, into the more difficult pleasure of love and family and relationship.
Andrew Solomon
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The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.
Andrew Solomon
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The world changed, and the idea of having a family became feasible for homosexuals. But I was still left with the question as to what it would be like for a child to grow up with gay parents.
Andrew Solomon
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The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.
Andrew Solomon
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If you are married and you go off and have an affair with someone, if you are a husband who does that, it may potentially hurt your wife enormously. But it seems to me likely also to compromise your marriage. That seems to me to be a harm.
Andrew Solomon
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I found it very comforting to see that there is no such thing as a completely normal family. People find their way through whatever the differences may be.
Andrew Solomon
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With children who have never said a word, parents tend to assume, for better or for worse, that there isn't any language there.
Andrew Solomon
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Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat -- it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.
Andrew Solomon