This post is intended as a reply to the thread started by the post on GenX titled "I remember the days" by Sorrowful, but because of its subject matter is more appropriate on this board.
TF is not the only Christian group or movement that fracks-up people's minds when it comes to sexuality. Certainly, TF's Loving Jesus doctrine must really frack with men's heads, having to imagine they are female in spirit when "fracking" Jesus. However, as the following article points out, Christian dogma concerning sexuality itself can create great ambiquity in the minds of believers.
For those who don't like to click on links, or don't have time to read the whole article, I've provided a couple excerpts.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/49160/
"As the Christian right works hard to make gays and lesbians second-class citizens, society needs to make a stand -- or else the same tactics will soon be used against other "social deviants.""
[To the radical Christian right] "Gays and lesbians, like other enemies of Christ, are not fully human. They are "unnatural." And preachers in the movement argue that if America does not act soon to eradicate homosexual behavior, God will punish the nation."
"These attacks mask a sinister agenda that has nothing to do with sexuality. It has to do with power. The radical Christian right -- the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- has built a binary worldview of command and submission wherein male leaders, who cannot be questioned and claim to speak for God, are in control and all others must follow. Any lifestyle outside the traditional model of male and female is a threat to this hierarchical male power structure. Women who do not depend on men for their identity and their sexuality, who live outside a male power relationship, challenge this pervasive cult of masculinity, as do men who find tenderness and love with other men as equals. The lifestyle of gays and lesbians is intolerable to the Christian right because its existence is a threat to the movement's chain of command, one they insist was ordained by God."
"This hypermasculinity, which crushes the independence and self-expression of women, is a way for men in the movement to compensate for the curtailing of their own independence, their blind obedience to church authorities and the calls for sexual restraint. ... Jerry Falwell, in a New Yorker interview, said Christ was not a gentle-looking, willowy man: "Christ was a man with muscles," he insisted. Falwell and Gibson see real men, godly men, as powerful, able to endure physical pain and suffering without complaint. Jesus, like God, has to be a real man, a man who dominates through force. The language of the movement is filled with metaphors about the use of excessive force and violence against God's enemies."
"The unspoken truth is that Christian men are required to have a personal, loving relationship with a male deity and surrender their will to a male-dominated authoritarian church. The submission to church authority is a potent form of emasculation. It entails a surrendering of conscience and personal control and deadens emotions and feelings. Glorified acts of force and violence against outsiders, against nonbelievers, compensate for this unquestioning submission. The domination that men are encouraged to practice in the home over women and children becomes a reflection of the domination they are taught to endure outside the home."
"This cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check. It fosters this world of binary opposites: God and man, the saved and the unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, and male and female. There runs through this radical belief system a dread of disorder and chaos. The belief in a binary universe helps believers avoid confronting the confusion of human existence. Reality, when it is defined in these absolutes, is made predictable and understandable. All configurations of human life that do not conform to the rigid Christian model, such as homosexuality, are forms of disorder and tools of Satan and must be abolished. A world that can be predicted and understood, a world that has clear markers, can be managed and controlled. This petrified world of fixed, immutable and established roles is a world where people, many of them damaged by bouts with failure and despair, can bury their chaotic and fragmented personalities. They can live with the illusion that they are strong, whole and protected. Those who do not fit into these rigid categories, who are not subservient to dominant Christian males, must be proselytized, converted and "cured" through quack therapy."