WASHINGTON, D.C., September 13, 2013 (Americans for Truth) - The above is a graphic from a CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) online slide presentation, “HIV Surveillance in Adolescents and Young Adults” [1] – breaking down the incidence of HIV among young men ages 13-24. In 2011, an astonishing 94.9 percent of HIV diagnoses among teenage boys (13-19-years-old) were linked to homosexual (“male-to-male”) sex. And 94.1 percent of the cases among young men ages 20-24 (more analysis below) were from “gay” sex.

With the incidence of HIV among men so closely tied to homosexual sex, shouldn’t the government and all concerned and compassionate adults be urging young men and teenaged boys not to engage in or experiment with dangerous homosexual behavior? And yet, the CDC and other pro-”gay” institutions (including many schools public and private) are doing exactly the opposite, as they focus instead on affirming “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender” youth as a “sexual minority.”

Feds Fund ‘Gay’ Youth Activist Groups

Another CDC document, “HIV and Young Men Who Have Sex with Men” (June 2012), reports that in 2011, the CDC awarded funds to two homosexual activists groups — the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and the Gay-Straight Alliance Network (GSAN) — “to assist CDC-funded public health and environmental changes to help schools and communities meet the health and medical needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.” See this CNSNews article on the CDC grant.

With HIV rates growing among YMSM (young men who have sex with men), the CDC’s focus on building self-esteem among LGBT youth and creating a “positive school climate” for homosexuals — includes forming “gay”-affirming clubs in schools — seems disconnected from reality. The aforementioned CDC report on HIV and YMSM states:

Gay-straight alliances (GSAs) are one approach being used to create safe and welcoming school environments. Research has shown that in schools with support groups such as GSA’s, lesbian, gay and bisexual students were less likely to experience threats of violence, miss school because they felt unsafe, or attempt suicide than those in schools without such groups.

In the same report, the CDC identifies the behaviors among young homosexuals that are causing the escalating HIV rates:

A CDC analysis of date from 13 YRBS [Youth Risk Behavior Survey] sites found that sexual minority students, especially those who identified as homosexual or bisexual, were disproportionately likely to engage in many health risk behaviors, including sexual risk behaviors (such as having sexual intercourse for the first time at younger ages, having multiple sex partners, and not using condoms); tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use; and behaviors related to attempted suicide.

Elsewhere in the CDC report it touts CDC funding for “school health professionals…to help them understand the needs of lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth and shape behavioral messages accordingly.” But those behavioral messages apparently do not include discouraging students from engaging in homosexual sex.

Elephant in the room

The chasm between the obvious and extreme health risks associated with “gay” male sex and the CDC’s politically correct, pro-homosexuality mindset reflects public policy malpractice on an Orwellian scale. “Gay” activist ideology and assumptions — including intrinsic (many would claim innate) “gay”/bi/transgender identities — go unquestioned at the CDC. Ironically, the most direct answer to the HIV-youth crisis — teaching young people NOT to practice unhealthy homosexual sex — is the one thing that is essentially forbidden.

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All across America, “gay” activists and their straight liberal allies are advocating “gay”-positive lesson plans and strategies in response to anti-homosexual bullying. However, while everyone can agree that all bullying is wrong, many “anti-bullying” programs double as pro-LGBT affirmation programs. This is troubling because: 1) bullying can be discouraged with neutral messaging that does not promote “out and proud” homosexuality and transgenderism; and 2) in the name of “safety,” educators and cultural elites are advocating a sexual lifestyle that has continually been shown to be dangerous, particularly for males.

ENDNOTES:

1. Produced by the CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD & TB Prevention, a division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. Data is for 2008-2011.

This article originally appeared on Americans for Truth and is reprinted with permission.

March 28, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) - Mother Angelica could be (and usually was) sweet, funny, witty, personable and charming. But she also had a fierce side to her. She was a fighter.

And she was never more fierce than when confronting the degradation of her Catholic faith by "liberals" who she viewed as effectively replacing Catholicism with a false religion of their own devising - one without Christ, without the resurrection, without the Real Presence of the Eucharist, without any of the unpopular "hard" teachings on sexuality and family, without any of the difficult doctrines, without miracles.

In one famous instance she gave vent to her soul. "I am so tired of you, liberal Church in America!" she lamented, before listing the horrors she saw being perpetuated by faithless representatives of Catholicism, particularly on children. 

Watch it here:

RELATED: Raymond Arroyo’s moving tribute to Mother Angelica

RELATED: Fr. Pavone: Mother Angelica taught me many things. But these are the greatest of them.

March 28, 2016 (MercatorNet) -- I grew up believing myself to have been born gay having always, and only, had the most powerful, all-consuming, erotic attraction towards my own sex.

Teenage years were hell. I often thought of suicide, occasionally self-harmed and had a growing problem with alcohol. I lived in a rural mining community in the north of England believing I would never be accepted among my own as a gay man, particularly as I watched a male cousin some ten years older than me – now deceased from a drug overdose – struggle to find his place as a gay man in the late 70s and early 80s among a society dominated by working men’s clubs.

In floods of tears I came out to my parents when 17 years old. Dad and Mum were amazing. They said they had known I was gay and affirmed their unconditional love for me. My mates in high school also told me they had known I was gay and not only honoured me for coming out but affirmed me in what they too believed to be my true sexual orientation. My deepest fears rapidly subsided. I felt a freedom like I had never experienced before.

At 18, I moved to the all-consuming metropolis of London and fully embraced my gay identity. I wholeheartedly served the gay community and actively preached its messages of diversity and inclusion, challenging every “intolerant, homophobic and bigoted” individual and institution that dared to suggest that being gay was somehow a choice, or even wrong. I have since come to see that our fight was not merely to have the concept of abnormal accepted but was rather to make normal taboo and to place it under ideological suspicion.

I was raised in a Christian family and always had a niggling desire to know more about God. I regularly went along to the monthly London meetings of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement and learnt a lot about safe sex, but little about God. I led a very promiscuous lifestyle, eventually settling down with a long-term boyfriend. We discussed travelling abroad to find a place to get married or at least to celebrate a civil union.

It was while I was in this long-term relationship that I was invited one evening to attend a series of weekly gatherings called Life in the Spirit Seminars attended by some of my fellow university students. I came to a place where I made the decision to enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ. There were no dramatic changes overnight to my life but my long-term boyfriend noticed that I was becoming calmer and less self-focused. He decided to come along to the weekly gatherings, gave his life to Christ and was profoundly touched by the person of the Holy Spirit. Almost overnight we were being upheld as the archetypal gay Christian couple.

As I developed a spiritual life, daily reflecting a little more deeply on my life, within months I came to realize that I had issues which affected my relationships with others, and especially with my boyfriend. I hadn’t seen them before. They had always been there and yet unbeknown to me I had been living under layers of denial which the Holy Spirit was now beginning to reveal to me.

I came face-to-face with my deep-rooted fear of rejection. I had commitment issues, and could easily be riddled with anxiety. I had used others for my own pleasure, and allowed them to do the same to me. Although I felt accepted by those around me, I realized that I had an innate fear of men – this was the real homophobia -- an intrinsic fear of, and a chasm between me and the normal heterosexual male -- and not the false homophobia the gay community projects onto mainstream society.

I came to a place where I knew that I needed to terminate my relationship with my long-term partner, having recognized that we were both trying to satisfy the mystery of manhood using each other when neither of us really possessed it.

I embarked upon an incredible journey of forgiveness, having many people from my past, and especially men, that I needed to forgive. The therapy and prayer sessions I now regularly engaged in never focused solely on my being sexually attracted to men, but I was encouraged to look every aspect of my present and past in the eye. This included the painful process of accepting that I had been consistently sexually abused by a number of men as a child over a three-year period.

Much of my spiritual journey became concerned with recognizing where, during my infancy and childhood, my little soul had chosen to build walls within myself against significant others in my life, especially against my parents, siblings and other prominent people from my past.

I eventually came to realize that as a boy I had failed to interact with other men on any significantly integrated emotional, physical and intellectual level. I realized that I had been rejected by men even as a small boy; that I had made an inner vow as a child never to deeply trust men again; and that I had lived out this decision throughout my formative years.

Only later did I see that other males had in fact tried to reach out to me at different stages during my childhood, but that I had always responded out of my perceived hurt and so became more distanced from other guys until they eventually gave up trying to interact with me. This included to some degree my father and two older brothers.

No wonder men and all things masculine had become a mystery to me. By the time I hit my teen years I had become obsessed with all things masculine and yet externally I felt wholly separated from, and unable to enter, the world of my own gender. No wonder being gay was so painful internally. Once testosterone kicked in at puberty I was erotically craving men with every fibre of my being and began to further feed this craving with pornography and sexual fantasy, two insatiable fabrications of truth and love.

My greatest strength across all of these hurdles was my spiritual life. The relationship I had now fostered with the Holy Spirit brought me immense comfort and wise counsel. I came to see that I needed to ask God for forgiveness, that I needed to forgive all the men whom I had pushed away for how they eventually had stopped reaching out to me and had abandoned me. I also had to forgive myself for making an understandable decision as a child to protect my heart, a decision that would have a devastating and stunting effect on me as an adult male.

Because I had failed to take my place as a man among men, I had had to find a place for myself in the world somewhere. I could not live without relationships. Through prayer, I began to see how, as a child, I had chosen to make my primary gender friendships among women. I had become emotionally embroiled with everything feminine and had nothing truly masculine alongside me with which to balance this.

I came to see that I also lived out of heterophobia. I despised women on many levels, but mostly for their natural ability to woo and engage every aspect of a heterosexual man, which I could not do. I found myself needing to forgive women as a whole for how they had, mostly unknowingly, enticed me into a place of false identity. They had graciously given me a place of belonging among them, and yet this, I came to learn, was not where I truly belonged. I needed to ask them for forgiveness for how I had taken my place among them instead of rejecting their invitation and walking away. I also needed to ask God to forgive me for my past mistakes and to then receive his forgiveness. And as ever, I needed to forgive myself for making poor decisions.

As I found resolution to past hurts, mostly through extending and receiving forgiveness, but also through periods of intense grieving and sorrow related to my lost childhood, changes began to take place deep within me. My fears gradually subsided. My anxiety levels steadily decreased. My sense of acceptance among both men and women began to rise. A strong sense of dignity and self-respect began to take hold of me in a way I had never experienced before.

My gait changed from being feminine to one of very deliberate footsteps. My posture changed and I began unwittingly to hold my head up higher. What was most noticeable to others was the change in my voice which suddenly dropped quite distinctly in my mid-twenties as I engaged with the process of forgiveness through therapy and prayer.

Even more challenging than accepting as a teenager that I was gay, I began to see that perhaps I had never truly been gay and that there was a man hidden deep within me as real and as noble as the men I had often admired, worshipped and yearned for, a man who was waiting to be freed and released. No one was more shocked and frightened by this than me.

For a few years I then lived chastely which permitted me to enjoy non-erotic heart relationships with all men and women. Subsequently, the ever-present erotic attraction towards men within me slowly subsided.

The more inclusive my friendships became with other men, and the less mysterious men’s hearts became to me, the more I began to desire an exclusive connection that contained “mystery” to it. I began to see woman in a way I had never seen her. I began to notice her curves. I began to get caught up in her scent. I started to see her as wholly different, mysterious, and yet complementary to me. Here I was in my late 20s experiencing what most males go through in their teens. Before long I began dating women. Eventually I got married and today I am a father, something the gay community and selected others told me I would never, and could never, be.

I had envisaged myself spending my entire life preaching that people are born gay, and yet the opposite has become true. Today I am socially excluded for rejecting the gay belief system and "deathstyle" in favour of a predominantly heterosexual identity although years ago I experienced no exclusion or rejection even when I was the first person to come out in high school and at university.

I was unknowingly given the freedom, and took it, to open a door that enabled me to scratch well below the surface of my conscious mind and to think outside the box of what has now become mainstream society’s beliefs about sexual orientation.

Today, I find myself a million miles away from where I expected to be half a lifetime ago.  I am surrounded by the richest of relationships and am certain of God’s eternal love for me. Nothing can replace this. Can life really get much better?

James Parker originates from the UK and moved to Australia having married an Aussie lady nearly ten years ago. He now lives in Western Australia and is passionate about the recovery and restoration of men and women. 

Reprinted with permission from MercatorNet.

March 28, 2016 (Savethe1) -- As a first generation immigrant from the Caribbean islands, life really came at me fast. In November 2010, at 17 years old, after a lifetime of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of my parents, they decided to rid themselves of the burden of having to live with me. I was a high school senior in Florida at the time -- six months shy of graduation. I had already secured a full scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C. My future was pretty much laid out, so I thought.

Then that's when my parents made the fateful decision two weeks before my 18th birthday to send me to go live with two male relatives, both of whom were notorious for a history of violence against women. I begged and pleaded for my parents to accept me to return back home. I sought outside resources for shelter; but as fate would have it, I would end up living for a total of four months with these men. Within two months of living there, the unthinkable happened: I was brutally raped of my virginity, molested and physically abused in every single way imaginable. I was told by the two male relatives that if I told anyone, I would be killed. To say I was horrified, dehumanized, terrorized and completely shell-shocked is an understatement. 

In the summer of 2011, during a routine physical for college, I learned that I was six weeks pregnant as a direct result of the incestuous rape. I was a virgin when the rape took place and I had never been with any other man. My doctor was just as devastated as I was. I remember the doctor and nurse practitioner repeatedly telling me they were “so sorry that this has happened.” Immediately, my doctor told me I had three options: 1) Abort the baby 2) Adoption and 3) Keep my baby.  This was not a tough decision for me. I am and have always been pro-life. What furthered my convictions was that my doctor ordered an ultrasound for me at six weeks pregnant. As soon as I saw that ultrasound, I realized that I was carrying a human life inside of me. No matter what, I did not have it in my heart to terminate this human life, regardless of the heinous, barbaric crime that had been perpetrated upon me. I never associated my unborn baby as being responsible.

Of course the rapist demanded I get an abortion and my family demanded I give the baby up for adoption. Adoption was not an option for me because I was already beginning to bond deeply with the unborn child I was carrying. No matter what, this was MY child! This was my flesh and blood and I was her mother. In February, 2012, I gave birth to my daughter Valencia Marie. Having my daughter alone at 19 years old, even though I was terrified, confused and shaking, when my mid wife handed me my child, I knew it was love at first sight.

By 2012 a full-on criminal case investigation was in full effect to get my rapist convicted of the crimes he perpetrated against me. After immense pressure from my family, I pursued child support. In retaliation, the rapist filed for partial custody of my daughter and then for full custody. I fought hard to protect my daughter from this monster. Luckily, the courts did not grant my rapist any parenting time and he has never spent time with my daughter, though he's still fighting me in court. Along the way, I never ever regretted not choosing abortion or adoption. Raising my daughter has been completely worth it. I never associated the rape with my daughter.

True Love is when I look into my daughter’s eyes. Valencia is the love of my life. And whenever I have more children, they will always be the most amazing love of my life. To be a mother really shows you the love your capable of. I would gladly die for my daughter. I want nothing more than for my daughter Valencia to feel the endless love my heart has for her and for her to have all the happiness in the world. I want to raise my daughter to know that no matter how far we are, our souls are connected and that nothing can ever break our bond. There is nothing my daughter can ever do that can limit my love for her. This is the type of motherly love I will always have for any future children as well.

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I went on to attend technical school and graduate with a certificate in Medical Administration. I am now earning my Bachelors in Health Services Administration, then I plan on earning my Master's in Management. I currently work in medical education at the largest medical school in the country. Later on down the road, I plan on becoming a Hospital Administrator or working in Emergency management, since I handle crisis very well. So you see, having an unplanned pregnancy out of rape, in no way ruined my life or my education.

I have never loved my child any less because of her biological father. Often people ask me how I feel about my daughter because her father is a monster who brutally raped me. I ask them a rhetorical question: "If a child's biological father was Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or Bin Laden, does that make them less of a child worthy of endless love?" The fact of the matter is NO, absolutely not! As human beings, we do not choose who our biological parents are. Whether it be a serial killer or a rapist, that child is pure, and that child is innocent. That child is a new life. I believe new life begins at conception. In the future, when I have more children, I know for sure I will not view little Valencia who was conceived from rape any different from my children conceived in wedlock.

Wedencise "Wendi" Lubin resides in Florida and is a mother, college student, and blogger for Save The 1, as well as active with Hope After Rape Conception.

Reprinted with permission from Save the 1.