I attend college at a very very conservative university. CSU, Fresno is known for having quite a few anti-gay unspoken truths, so I decided to help out our community a little, and volunteered to speak to some of the womens studies classes about homosexuality. IT was pretty damned awesome, because we educated a lot of people about what being gay is... AND, we also educated a few witnesses, thanks to me.
Generally when we run these panels, there are three gay students on the panel who introduce themselves, and then we run it as a question and answer panel. One of the questions we got was "how did your religions feel when you came out? " So generally the group looks to me for answers to the religious questions.. .so I related my story about leaving the JWs and I noticed a few faces in the back grimace when I said X JW to the class... and one of their hands shot up, so I called on her and she's like:
"I don't understand how you can say the JWs did that to you (refer to my coming out story way back on this forum) because i'm not baptized and I hang out with them and study with them and they are nice to me. " so I told the class of LOVE BOMBING, and how they are nice to u untli you're under their regime... She spoke with me after class and i referred her to this site as well as freeminds.org I wonder if she's reading this...? ^_^ Hope so. Either way, I told her that I had no reason to lie to her because I don't care about JW s anymore... but i didn't want to see someone make the same mistakes as me. She's a single mom, so I told her how single mom's are received in the congregation, the unspoken shunning they face, etc. She was in shock, so she told me she's going to talk to her grandma ( a jw) about it... I told her that her grandma will tell her i'm a liar and an apostate and not to listen, but gave her freeminds.org to check out.
Then, later laast night I gaave another paanel to a rehabilitatve therapy class for the masters program, and when I mentioned I was an ex jw, the professor goes " AH HA!!!! " turns out she has a lot of JW clients she tries to get out of the organization because she can SEE the mind control in the teachings and how it limits people's potential... so now I might be giving panels to the rehabilitave therapy classes on JWs . *LOL*
