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With celebrities and other public figures speaking freely about their sexuality in subtle and understated ways, coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) is no longer widely perceived as an uphill battle.

But what happens when a married spouse, who identified as straight, comes out as LGBT — and, more specifically, how do their partner and family members react?

As part of HuffPost Gay Voices’ ongoing partnership with Whisper, we asked the app’s users to anonymously reveal how their partners reacted when they revealed the news.

“My husband came out of the closet but we can’t afford to move separate right now, so we just keep pretending everything’s fine to people,” one user wrote. Added another: “I came out as bisexual to my husband and he just said that it doesn’t change how he sees me. I caught a keeper.”

Check out all of the amazing responses below (WARNING: some posts contain graphic language). Be sure to check out more on Whisper here.

For more coming out stories and other LGBT revelations, check out Whisper here.

LONDON (RNS) Touching or kissing the corpses of Ebola victims at funerals is helping to spread the deadly virus, according to one of the world’s top scientists who was among the first to identify Ebola in 1976.

Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said worsening conditions in West Africa contribute to a “perfect storm,” including a growing population, decades of civil war, widespread government corruption, dysfunctional health systems and a growing distrust in Western medicine.

Piot, who in 1976 co-discovered the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first case of Ebola, said traditional cultural and religious beliefs in parts of Africa help spread the virus.

“There are very strong traditional beliefs and traditional funeral rites which require that the whole family touch the dead body,” he said in an interview, “and they have a meal in the presence of the dead body.”

As well as being a renowned scientist and doctor, the Belgian-born Piot is also a former diplomat, having served as undersecretary-general at the United Nations from 1994-2008.

Part of what’s fueling the deadly outbreak is funeral rites that involve touching or kissing the bodies of the deceased; dead bodies can still host the Ebola virus and spread the disease to the living.

Churches across the region have been closed or have altered some worship rites, including shared Communion, in a bid to stop the spread of the disease. Some Western aid workers have been killed by suspicious locals who fear foreigners are spreading the disease, not stopping it.

Piot is now reaching out to African religious and cultural traditionalists who believe that the goal of life is to become an ancestor, and that particular funeral rites are required to ensure the deceased’s passage into “the other world.”

(RNS) Protestant clergy rarely preach about mental illness to their congregations and only one-quarter of congregations have a plan in place to assist members who have a mental health crisis, a new LifeWay Research survey found.

The findings, in a nation where one in four Americans have suffered with mental illness, demonstrate a need for greater communication, said Ed Stetzer, executive director of the evangelical research firm, a ministry of LifeWay Christian Resources, which is an agency of the Southern Baptist Convention.

When it comes to mental illness, researchers found:

66 percent mention it rarely, once a year or never
26 percent speak about it several times a year
4 percent mention it about once a month
3 percent talk about it several times a month.

“When we look at what we know statistically — the prevalence of mental illness and the lack of preaching on the subject — I think that’s a disconnect,” said Stetzer.

The survey taken among evangelical and mainline churches was funded by Colorado-based Focus on the Family and an anonymous donor whose family member suffered from schizophrenia. It included the perspectives of pastors, churchgoers who have suffered from mental illness — depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia — and family members of the mentally ill.

Author Kay Warren commended the survey’s findings and said she and her husband, megachurch pastor Rick Warren, have been vocal about the “terrible scourge.” Their 27-year-old son, Matthew, suffered from mental illness and killed himself last year.

She urged church leaders to not only preach about it but allow those struggling with mental illness to give testimonies to their congregations.

“I would encourage any pastor or church leader, yes preach a message, but put in front of your people those who are living with mental illness so they can share their stories and become human in that process,” she said in a conference call Monday (Sept. 22) about the survey.

In contrast to the findings about the relative scant attention the pastors give to the subject, almost seven in 10 mentally ill people said churches should help families discover local resources for support.

While 68 percent of pastors said their church maintains a list of local mental health resources for church members, just 28 percent of families are aware of such resources.

Jared Pingleton, director of counseling services at Focus on the Family, said pastors are often turned to for help but they may not have had any seminary or Bible school training to help them meet parishioners’ mental health needs.

The survey found that less than half of pastors — 41 percent — said they had taken seminary courses on caring for the mentally ill.

Daniel Aleshire, executive director of the Association of Theological Schools, said about 35 of his association’s 270 member schools offer master’s degrees in counseling or in marriage and family therapy. A recent study by Baylor University scholars found that of 70 seminaries with Master of Divinity programs, a majority offer elective counseling courses but few students take them.

Despite LifeWay’s finding overall reticence, almost a quarter of pastors surveyed — 23 percent — said they had personally struggled with mental illness.

“I think it helps us to understand why some pastors have a sense of empathy, not just sympathy,” said Stetzer. “It surprised me in the sense that people were very forthright about it.”

LifeWay found that slightly more than a quarter of pastors — 27 percent — said their church has a plan for supporting families with a mentally ill member.

Focus on the Family has developed resources for pastors based on the research, including “practical tools and tips about how to make a referral to a trusted Christian colleague,” said Pingleton, a minister and clinical psychologist who was on the conference call with Kay Warren.

He said shared worldviews are “vital” in the referral process “so that the pastor knows that they can refer a member of their flock, one of their sheep, to someone who will not, as it were, fleece them.”

But Kay Warren disagreed.

“If I’m going to get my heart worked on, I don’t really care if the cardiac surgeon is a believer or not,” she said. “I want the best.”

The LifeWay survey did not specifically address the issue of the faith of mental health professionals.

The survey results are based on a May 7-31 survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Smaller random samples of mentally ill and family members were drawn from a pre-screened national panel.

Next year will see the 50th anniversary of the creating of Singapore, widely hailed as one of the most successful of the Asian tigers. In that short space of time, the tiny nation state has grown into one of the world’s largest financial cities and most important ports. It has done so by becoming the partner every nation wants to work with: efficient, trustworthy and stable. In education, healthcare and economic competitiveness, Singapore routinely occupies a high position in global rankings. So it’s not surprising that commentators like Thomas Friedman often point to Singapore as doing well what the west does badly.

That polarization – between Singapore where everything works and the west, where nothing seems to – is alluring, not least in its simplicity. In a brilliant new book about their country, Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus, Donald Low and Sudhir Vadaketh dare something few Singaporeans attempt: they question this orthodox view of Singapore and ask how fit for the future their country is. In doing so, they do something infinitely more subtle and profound than identify weaknesses in national policy; they implicitly question many of the central assumptions on which all developed nations today are pinning their hopes for the future.

Competitive Meritocracy but Rising Inequality

Commentators routinely praise the competitive nature of Singapore’s schools and civil service. Slavish devotion to exams and credentials, they like to believe, is what bring the best to the top. In the early days of Singapore’s independence, this principle was coupled with the belief that everyone should have a fair shot at success. But as inequality has risen and social mobility has declined, those values look more like a justification for elitism. Does preserving this meritocracy does more to protect those in power than enable those who aspire to it?

Without social mobility and the continuing expansion of choices to the multi-ethnic population, meritocracy can come to feel like intrinsic, existential superiority: the sense that some are intrinsically more deserving than others. The bubble of money and power is isolating, severing the connections between governors and the governed. The surprise that greeted the 2011 election, in which the opposition to the governing PAP made significant gains, illustrated just how self-referential many in power had become.

With some of the longest working hours in the developed world, some of the least happy workers in the world and a population over half of which would emigrate if they could, Singapore’s society represents a more than statistical challenge. That trickle-down is now widely discredited as an economic defense for inequality only further exposes it to challenge. That a few are so wealthy and so powerful is no longer seen as providing a wider social benefit; indeed the rich may pose a bigger social threat than the poor.

Security requires trade-offs

The physical vulnerability of tiny Singapore, wedged between Malaysia and Indonesia, coupled with its lack of natural resources and its complex ethnic composition, has been used in the past as an argument for restricted freedoms: only a very strong and unquestioned government can protect such a fragile state. Safety demanded the abdication of personal freedoms.

That this trade-off is no longer embraced without question is due to several forces. Globalization, rising educational standards, new technologies and pervasive sources of diverse information have combined to make Singaporeans less comfortable with the idea that their country alone cannot afford freedoms. Rising inflation and increasing problems with housing and transportation have seeded the provocative thought that perhaps the government does not always know best – and that ideas from outside Singapore might now be needed to preserve its success. It’s a unique insight that those most likely to challenge the status quo are those who, heretofor, most benefited from it.

Poetry or Money?

I have a Singaporean friend who has spent substantial periods away from her country, working in the U.S. and Europe. What, I asked her, did she miss when she went away? “The fact that everything works,” was her reply. Why did she keep leaving? “Because that’s not enough.”

The clean streets, high levels of service and safety that characterize Singapore are all efficient – but efficiency is fundamentally a negative virtue: an absence of friction rather than a richness of experience. And efficiency, Low and Vadaketh argue, masks an emptiness. All that order is bought: with fines for transgression. The emphasis on monetary sanctions has produced a populace that is compliant and submissive – but not socially engaged. The competitive emphasis on individualism coupled with obedience and conformity may make things work but it doesn’t make them meaningful. Where is the rich skein of dependencies, shared triumphs and victories, rights and responsibilities that lie at the heart of every dynamic society?

Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, once insisted that “poetry is a luxury we cannot afford” but few still believe that that is still true. More recently, concert halls and art schools have sprung up but they rarely feature indigenous art or art forms and Singaporeans are hard pressed to define their shared cultural values. It may be that poetry is just what Singaporeans need now to understand who they are and why they care.

US – or THEM?

What makes The Singapore Consensus fascinating reading, even for those who’ve never visited the country, is that this analysis of a political and economic crossroads is so similar to the landscape most developed economies confront today. We now know that, while competition can be motivating, it routinely produces perverse outcomes in the form of inequality, arrogance, complacency and a sense of entitlement among the rich and powerful. No meritocratic society in history has ever successfully escaped these byproducts.

The tradeoff between security and civil liberties is at the heart of western political debate today. Neither Edward Snowden nor Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of America’s Patriot Act, feel comfortable with this kind of deal. If the elites are secluded by their privilege and wealth, then we need an open society more than ever if we are to find creative solutions to the dangers we face. Challenged on all sides by groups that feel keenly disenfranchised, extending that disenfranchisement is no solution at all.

And the neoconservative doctrines that brought the western economies to their knees had at their heart the notion that there was no such thing as society – only the economic contest for, and exchange of, goods. That transactional view effectively blinded financiers, regulators and governments alike to the threats contained in an economic system indifferent to social consequences.

Seen in this light, the early success of Singapore represents a triumphant validation of principles that the west holds dear. Imitation may be a sincere form of flattery but in holding a mirror up to our values, we may not like what we see; the country’s current challenges and frustrations show us limitations we all need to see. Meritocracies, powerful central states and transactional social modes, in other words, may be enough to get a nation from birth to prosperity – but not nearly enough to keep it there. In that respect, the United States and Europe have far more in common with Singapore than perhaps their governments recognize.

What Singapore holds in reserve, however, is an asset western leaders would give their eye teeth for: a national surplus accrued over many years of fastidious economic management. How will this wealth be used? While western leaders use insolvency as a perennial alibi for their failure to make coherent strategic choices, Singapore’s government has the money and the power to effect real change. Should it fail to do so, after this incisive an analysis of its opportunities, no politicians in Singapore will be able to claim they didn’t see their chance. If, with the freedom to spend that most western leaders lack, Singapore cannot address its problems, then the principles it espouses – principles still broadly accepted by western governments – will be discredited for good.