The commandment says to "honor your father and mother", so the son has the duty to honor his father.

Of course "good Christians" like the father are very likely to be the kind who insist that the Ten Commandments need to be displayed in public places.

While I am not gay, I grew up having had a very difficult father. He often treated and honest mistake, an honest forgetting of something, or something not quite up to his standards as if it were a crime. And he would invariably say that what he was saying or doing was for my own good.

And sometimes (though not always) he was very poor at understanding, from my point of view, some sensitive issue that was causing me to be upset. Sometimes it seemed he did not even try to understand. He would often lecture me and say things that demonstrated a lack of understanding.

I had difficulties enough when I was young, both with my dad and with some of the mean kids in school. I shudder to think how much more difficulty I would have had if it turned out I was gay, i.e. if I had found that I was attracted to boys rather than to girls. People were not as open and accepting about being gay in the 1960's and 1970's as they are now.

I have to wonder, in particular, how my father would have taken it if I were gay and had told him about it. Actually one of the big problems I had with my dad was that he was rather unpredictable; sometimes he could be understanding and sympathetic, and other times he could be extremely judgmental.

I came to realize how angry I still was at my dad a little over a year after he died, over 20 years ago now. I had also been a Christian as a young man for about 15 years before my dad died. Along with the realization as to how angry I still had been at my dad, and that much of his behavior was actually abusive (i.e. it was not just something wrong or "sinful" with me that I had problems with him), I also came to realize that my supposedly having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ had been of no help to me in dealing with my dad those times he was obnoxious or abusive. After a period of time I eventually came to realize that I was not a Christian at all any more.

I think the Bible is subject to human fallibility and human prejudice just like anything else that has ever been written, and I think the commandment to unconditionally "honor your father and mother" is an example of something in the Bible that is definitely wrong, however time-honored the commandment may be and however much at the center of traditional Judeo-Christian morality it might lie. Anybody who advocates displaying the Ten Commandments in public places might just as well tell me to my face that it was my duty to gratefully accept all the "loving" rebukes from my dad which he decided in Godlike fashion that I needed "for my own good".

When I was a Christian I tended to uncritically accept the judgments of some Christians that homosexuality was something wrong and unnatural, because of what the Bible said (and I was not gay myself). However a former pastor at a theologically "liberal" church that I used to go to at one time gave a talk at a singles group meeting at the church. One of the things he said that struck me, and that I remember, is that people do not choose who they are attracted or not attracted to; they find themselves attracted to certain people. And some people find that they are attracted to people of the same sex.

Here is an episode in a series of episodes at a fictional cafe in another web site in which I post, in which an estranged father, who had previously rejected his son when his son came out to him as gay, comes to the cafe to inquire about his son and perhaps reestablish contact and communication with him.

One of the things that the father said was that he had felt, in effect, that there was a gay man standing before him who looked like his son, and who had murdered the son that the father thought he had.

http://www.lastchancedemocracycafe.com/?p=...

(Note: One of the comments in response to this blog episode is mine.)