A Quote by Howard Dean

From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people. — © Howard Dean
From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people.
Some people say homosexuality is a sin. It’s not. God is perfectly cool with it, God feels the exact same way about homosexuality that God feels about heterosexuality. Now you might say, ‘Whoa, slow down. You move too fast. How could you have the audacity, the temerity, to speak on behalf of God?’ Exactly, that’s an excellent point and I pray that you remember it.
God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning.
I think that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin, but the Bible also teaches that pride is a sin, jealousy is a sin, and hate is a sin, evil thoughts are a sin. So I don't think that homosexuality should be chosen as the overwhelming sin that we are doing today.
If homosexuality were normal, God would have created Adam and Bruce.
I feel like I've been observed as an individual more than a gay person, or as a filmmaker with a certain point of view rather than a lesbian filmmaker with a gay point of view.
According to my religious belief, I'm sorry if you feel like I'm pushing this on you - my religious belief is that you behave the way God wants us to behave. And that's simply love God and love one another. If we did that, there would be no need for any of the other commandments. It would be great. But in the same vein, we would have obtained paradise by that point. And it's tougher to get to paradise by that point.
I understood Stephen's point of view because if you had been given a death sentence at the age of 21, would you find it easy to believe in a loving God? Also, Stephen's work was taking him into the depths of the universe, and it was, I thought, fairly understandable that there wasn't much room for God in his equations.
God has decided the rules of life, whereby you don't trespass on anybody else's rights, and sin is something that upsets the balance of things. There are three types of sin: sin against yourself; sin against other people; and sin against God. People often sin against themselves and others and misbehave with God, too.
I never had a low self-esteem that would make me gay. At one point, though, the reverse happened. Being homosexual led me to have a loss of self-esteem when I first became aware of society's attitudes about homosexuality.
The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.
People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film... Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?
... it [masturbation] too often leads to grievous sin, even to that sin against nature, homosexuality. For, done in private, it evolves often into mutual masturbation - practiced with another person of the same sex - and thence into total homosexuality.
It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy.
If I was asked to do a film that was just trying to sell a political point of view or religious point of view, I wouldn't do that because that's a bad script.
We have to find a way to try and reconcile our beliefs - and Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, has traditionally seen homosexuality as a sin - with the reality of life in modern, pluralistic, secular societies in which gay people cannot be wished away or banished from sight.
My films are very rooted in specific people's point of view. Some film-makers give a more global point of view, like God looking down at the characters.
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