In his State of the Union address, President Bush popularized a misunderstanding of the Federal Marriage Amendment. He said, more or less, that he supported a constitutional amendment banning marriages for gays, but he did not wish to ban civil unions.

The White House press office and the press corps marketed Bush’s position as an endorsement of the one well-known measure now in Congress, the Federal Marriage Amendment — which explicitly prohibits state laws from being construed as requiring civil unions or other “incidents” of marriage such as property, inheritance, visitation and custody rights.

The web site for Canada’s Christian Heritage Party (a minor party consisting of that nation’s “political religious right”) reported Jan. 23 that U.S. ex-gay activist Stephen Bennett is outraged at Bush.

“…The President seems to be OK with states individually legislating on homosexual civil unions,” notes former homosexual Stephen Bennett. “And that’s a problem for many in the pro-family movement.” …

“Many feel, ‘What’s the sense of this effort if homosexuals will ultimately be granted the same legal rights as heterosexual married couples, minus the word “marriage”? Actually, many wonder, ‘What’s wrong with homosexual couples in committed, same-sex relationships having the same legal rights as heterosexual married couples?’,” Bennett said.

Bennett, executive director of SBM, a pro-family advocacy group in Connecticut and a former homosexual, says, “The issue here is not about protecting marriage — it’s about homosexuality.”

XGW appreciates Bennett’s candor in stating that the goal of the profamily movement should not be to preserve marriage, but to punish homosexual people unless they seek “complete change” to heterosexuality.

Bennett proceeds to generalize that same-sex attraction is always “dysfunctional,” and that homosexual people are uniformly “abnormal, unnatural, unhealthy, mentally and emotionally destructive” and prone to die from AIDS.

Therefore, based on these stereotypes, Bennett argues,

“Granting homosexuals the right to marry or adopt children is deliberately creating dysfunctional families. This only enables them to remain trapped in a falsehood — a deception and a counterfeit of the real. It’s about time we put down the politics and the spin, and address the real issue at hand.

And he resorts to fear, paranoia, and victim politics:

“We’ve all been deceived. The nation is the real victim here. It’s about time someone… told the truth.”

There is, briefly, a sign that Bennett would like to help those specific individuals, regardless of orientation, who struggle with sexual addiction, substance abuse, or depression:

Stephen Bennett says addressing destructive behavior does not equate to bigotry or hatred. He says, “I have family members who are alcoholic. Do I ‘hate’ them because they are alcoholic? Absolutely not. I love them more than anything, and would lay down my life for each one of them. They know I don’t approve of their behavior, yet they know more than anything that I truly love them.

Unfortunately, instead of treating the addictions, compulsions, abuses, or depression, Bennett makes a wrong turn. He treats an individual’s root sexuality as a sickness and insists that the sexuality be treated. How, he does not say. Medical treatments for same-sex-attraction do not exist.

What is Bennett’s prescription for a cure? Prayer? Or stereotypes and discrimination?

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