Religion / sexualité
Dans le New York Times d’aujourd’hui, un article sur la Unity Fellowship Church, une Eglise dédiée aux gay, bisexual and transgender members of minority groups (alors que l’autre association d’églises gaies, la Metropolitan Community Church, est plutôt blanche.
A gay church in a battered neighborhood led by a black minister with AIDS may sound like something dreamed up by a politically correct screenwriter. But Unity is the very real, raucous spiritual home for hundreds who feel cast out by traditional churches, which for many people serve as the heart of the community and an extension of the family.
“There are churches here and there” that welcome gay worshipers, said Gerard Williams, an assistant minister who teaches the Sunday school course on homosexuality and the Bible at Unity, “but ain’t nobody going to love you like we do.”
Unity also finds itself on the front lines of an emerging cultural battle. Across the country, black clergy members are joining forces with conservatives and white evangelicals over their common opposition to gay marriage. Kenyon Farrow, public education coordinator for the New York State Black Gay Network, said that many black ministers were condemning homosexuality with increasing force, and that unspoken “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” pacts in churches were dissolving.
(Il y a peu de travaux sur les Eglises du Unity Fellowship Church Movement, raison de plus pour signaler : Bates (Aryana), “Liberation in Truth: African American Lesbians Reflect on Religion, Spirituality, and Their Church”, dans Thumma et Gray, Gay Religion, Altamira Press, 2004.
Dans le même NYT, un article sur les activités sexuelles des Américains, et notamment sur celles des adolescents :
[yarpp]The new findings on teenagers and oral sex have been of special interest to health experts.
“After years of provocative headlines and breathless stories based mostly on anecdote, we finally have some solid data,” said Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. “The news is probably not as bad as adults might have been led to believe, but it is likely not as good as most parents might wish.”
The proportion of teenagers who have given or received oral sex was slightly higher than the proportion who have had intercourse, the survey found, with 55 percent of the boys and 54 percent of the girls having given or received oral sex, while 49 percent of the boys and 53 percent of the girls have had intercourse.
“One thing that surprised me is that we expected, based on anecdotal evidence, that girls might be more likely to give oral sex and boys more likely to receive it, but we didn’t find that at all,” said Dr. Jennifer Manlove, of Child Trends, which, like Ms. Brown’s group, released an analysis of the data, “There’s more gender equality than we expected.”
The government data does not provide any indication of the age at which oral sex first occurred, how often it occurred, or how many partners a teen had had. But the survey found that nearly all teenagers who have had sexual intercourse have also had oral sex: 88 percent of the boys and 83 percent of the girls.
“A very significant proportion of teens has had experience with oral sex, even if they haven’t had sexual intercourse and may think of themselves as virgins,” Dr. Manlove said. “We’re not sure whether these teens who have not had sexual intercourse are engaging in oral sex because they view it as a way to maintain their technical virginity or even because they regard it as an easy method of birth control.”
