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I remember writing a post about Brian Leonard Paddick, the British politician who once was the Deputy Assistant Commisioner in London's Metropolitan Police Service in my other blog, Beautiful World. Brian was described as the most senior openly gay police officer there. Since childhood, he had known he was gay, but he said he tried genuinely to be straight once by marrying a woman named Mary Stone. The marriage did not last and now, he is married instead to Petter Belsvik, a man from Oslo, Norway whom he met in a bar in Ibiza, which is a Mediterranean island off the coast of Spain. What strike me perhaps is Brian's remark about his faith. He said he was not open about his sexuality because as a Christian, he was expected to be straight. In the end, he learned the lesson about being himself and to be open about his sexuality. Now, that also makes me wonder about Buddhism's stand on gays. Somewhere in the Internet, someone commented that from what he had read in the suttas, the Buddha gave no indication that one's sexual orientation has any bearing on one's spiritual practice. The five precepts, which form the most basic foundation of a moral life in Buddhism merely encourage abstainence from sexual misconduct, which the writer said is a term that generally refers to sexual activity between two people. That has nothing to do with being straight or gay. Somewhere in the Internet too, there is a website for Gay Buddhists...
I remember writing a post about Brian Leonard Paddick, the British politician who once was the Deputy Assistant Commisioner in London's Metropolitan Police Service in my other blog, Beautiful World. Brian was described as the most senior openly gay police officer there. Since childhood, he had known he was gay, but he said he tried genuinely to be straight once by marrying a woman named Mary Stone. The marriage did not last and now, he is married instead to Petter Belsvik, a man from Oslo, Norway whom he met in a bar in Ibiza, which is a Mediterranean island off the coast of Spain. What strike me perhaps is Brian's remark about his faith. He said he was not open about his sexuality because as a Christian, he was expected to be straight. In the end, he learned the lesson about being himself and to be open about his sexuality. Now, that also makes me wonder about Buddhism's stand on gays. Somewhere in the Internet, someone commented that from what he had read in the suttas, the Buddha gave no indication that one's sexual orientation has any bearing on one's spiritual practice. The five precepts, which form the most basic foundation of a moral life in Buddhism merely encourage abstainence from sexual misconduct, which the writer said is a term that generally refers to sexual activity between two people. That has nothing to do with being straight or gay. Somewhere in the Internet too, there is a website for Gay Buddhists...
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