In a rather self-congratulatory post to his personal blog, James Phelan claims to have picked a fight with a pro-gay man* during a recent public event.

They had several huge rainbow banners all lined up, seen for yards and yards away. As I passed the group, I yelled over that, in my opinion, they were there just to “push their gay agenda”. My opinion was they were using the large public event (which had nothing to do with homosexuality) to pollute it with gay politics. Well, one runner, a huge muscled-type, didn’t like me doing this and thought he’d teach me a lesson, unexpectedly shoved the heck out of me practically knocking me to the pavement, an act of violence and physical attack against my person. Of course, little did the fool know I was a trained fighter having served in an elite force of the US Army. So, I one-two drop kicked the hell out of him and got into a immediate fighter’s stance ready to take more of him. Naturally, the coward backed down and ran away.

Phelan is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and a scheduled speaker at their upcoming annual conference. He is also a member of Exodus, and PATH, and is “certified as a sexual re-orientation coach” by the International Healing Foundation (Richard Cohen) . He is also co-president of Transforming Congregations ministry and a prolific contributing author for Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH). He claims to be a Christian and wants to help gay people, saying he can identify with their struggles. From this it appears he is also quite a bully, and may have some deep issues of his own to resolve.

If all this happened as Phelan claims — and like other recent events we have no real proof that it did — then certainly the other person should not have become physical in response to Phelan’s heckling. However, one must question the motives of a man who claims to be a psychiatric professional and yet apparently spends his free time baiting gay people so he can become physically violent “with the fool” and “drop kick the hell out of him.”

We are waiting for a promised response from Exodus, but sincerely call on NARTH, PATH, Richard Cohen, JONAH and Karen Booth to distance themselves and their organizations from Phelan. At the very least, his clients should know about his issues and the prospect of abuse.

Update: Alan Chambers has commented on Phelan’s post here. We are still waiting for his official statement.

* (6.54pm ET): Mr. Phelan has not responded to our requests for clarification, but in a comment reply on his own blog about an hour ago he said that he didn’t know the sexual orientation of the man with whom he fought. His original account clearly implies that the man was gay, however since this all seems a bit confusing we are contacting the gay organizations represented in the marathon and will ask each one just what happened, including any information available on the man in question. Anything we find will appear in a new post and linked here.

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