Hi Rainboy,

I suppose the academic tone of my text partly comes from rushing, since I do find myself trying to squeeze a lot of ideas into a short space of time.

Also, though, I would be hard pressed to deal with this on an ordinary everyman level with you. At street level, you are persistently comparing my 30 year loving marriage with my wonderful boyfriend to fucking a dog or a pig or a cow. The moment of (after some editing) "outraged frustration" that this engenders is best put aside by keeping it an even tempered academic discussion. I think if you went up to any other married person you know and compared their relationship to the same number of years of fucking a domestic animal, their reaction would be more along the lines of lowering the tone than of elevating it.

As a Christian, though, I recognize that God has many ways of being merciful. Some boylovers have some ordinary gay or heterosexual capacities and others are really pure boylovers. When those who are pure boylovers pray to God for relief from wanting relations that would cause them tremendous amounts of trouble and perhaps also do significant harm, who am I to criticise if God responds by shielding them in an ultra-ascetic religious interpretation that promotes their peaceful celibacy? As a member of a mostly-gay church, I have become used to gays and lesbians who accept and prosper their loving relationships and gather together in many ways to celebrate God's love, take their kids (adopted or from previous relationships) to Sunday School, and so on. I need to re-learn the ancient patience about scriptural interpretations that would deny and destroy all this when I realize that they may be helping some wonderful boylovers through a near-impossible situation.

The blessings of the lord Jesus Christ be upon you.

I will come back to the issue of "the norm" and other matters you raise later, but I think I am timed out for now.