Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH), whose “alternatives” are not new and aren’t that Jewish, has a lot to answer for. That’s why not long ago I sent them the following email:
My name is Emily Kesselman and I’m a writer for Ex-Gay Watch (www.exgaywatch.com). I author articles under the pseudonym “Emily K” and specialize in researching the Jewish end of the ex-gay spectrum. I have some questions that I would love for you to take the time to answer, because I want to report only the facts on your organization. In turn, I request permission to publish the answers – which I will faithfully report – in an upcoming article.
1. NARTH has used rhetoric to discuss homosexuals which, and I don’t say this lightly, eerily parallels that used by the Nazis. Even if you agree with NARTH on the nature of homosexuality, how can you not openly call them on this horrendous characterization? What are your feelings about this?
2. You have several articles in your online library written by a man that advocates Jewish conversion to Christianity. How do you justify this to your Jewish clientèle?
3. Richard Cohen has disgraced himself publicly numerous times, including disastrous television appearances. Many ex-gay groups and ministries have erased his name and books from their websites as a result. He is also well known as a man who was stripped of his counseling license, had ties to the Moonies, and has renounced his Jewish faith. Do you have any concerns endorsing Mr. Cohen, bearing all this in mind? Why/Why not?
4. Scott Lively, author of “The Pink Swastika,” is a holocaust revisionist who believes gays and homosexuality in general are largely responsible for its occurance. He is featured on both the NARTH and Exodus websites. Do you share Scott Lively’s views?
5. The ManKind Project’s “Journey Into Manhood” has been recommended by Joseph Nicolosi and NARTH to men who want to change their orientation by getting in touch with their masculine side. However, MKP has stated that they do not see a correlation between masculinity and sexual orientation, and actually support gay men who come to their events to be themselves. Now that this has been established, will you continue to endorse them? If so, why?
6. You have declared that JONAH is an organization that only wants to help those who seek it. However, many ex-gay groups and advocates have gotten involved in denying content, well-adjusted, healthy homosexuals rights as equal citizens by lobbying in Washington and protesting gay equality advocacy. Do you agree with this politicizing of the movement? If you do, how do you feel making the lives of homosexuals unequal in the eyes of the law benefit your cause of helping people change?
Thank you very much for taking the time to help me obtain the facts.
Emily Kesselman
I got this response (or rather, lack thereof):
Although you state your desire to “report only the facts,” the assumptions, misperceptions, and factual misrepresentations contained within your questions (as well as in other material you have written) show such a misunderstanding of JONAH and our programs that to set forth an accurate response would require writing a treatise. Frankly, we are so busy helping men and women who are dealing with unwanted same-sex attractions that to take the time to respond to your innuendos would take far too much time away from the work we do helping those who seek assistance.
Shalom, Elaine Silodor Berk and Arthur Goldberg, Co-Directors of JONAH
This response only leads me to believe that JONAH doesn’t care about the facts at all. First of all, they refused to answer my questions, which were in no way hostile and did not contain any “assumptions, misperceptions and factual misrepresentations.” They weren’t statements of fact, they were questions. Second, although their response suggests they are familiar with my previous articles on JONAH, they have yet to take issue with anything I’ve written publicly or privately. Aside from the word “Lez” mysteriously disappearing from their site after I published an article pointing it out, JONAH has remained impassive and silent as to what I’ve written.
This is behavior that would be expected of organizations like PFOX, whose rhetoric and actions are so hateful and deceitful that they’ve resorted to using profanity and deception, which is not becoming of people who claim to be Christian. Alan Chambers, head of Exodus International, has in the past responded reasonably and professionally to questions posed by XGW. JONAH has decided not to be as responsible. This is extremely unfortunate.
“Kill The Messenger” comes to mind. Instead of “fessing up,” they just want to make you “shut up.” Makes me feel that Jonah knows exactly what they are doing, they just don’t want anyone else to know.
While of course you were trying to help, JONAH perceived your message as baiting a response that XGW could use to embarrass them. So they responded in a way that seemed safest to them. Gandhi said that when you work with your enemy, you must give them a way to save face. In this case, leave JONAH a way to distance themselves from Cohen et all that makes them look good. Or at least decent.
A more constructive email would have been, “I’ve noticed that these authors in your library have anti-Jewish setiments. I think you should replace them with authors like . . . lest gays or Jews have reason to disrespect your ministry or your clients be led down the wrong path.”
As a Jew and as a really big fag, I find a group like JONAH rather amazing, just as I find the vitriolic aspersions of orthodox Jews towards gay people to be frightening. did they not learn anything form 1700 years of antisemitism? Have they never noticed that all of the things that are supposed to be true about gay people have also been directed towards Jews? Whether it be the blood libel (gay men are molesters and child murderers) the rejection of Christian truth (gay people are abominationists– my new word) or the protocols of the elders (the pink mafia) or rich blood suckers (ask Randy Thomas why gay people don’t deserve civil rights protectons, and on ansd on and on….
the libels are all the same.
Anti-Jew & anti-gay speech side-by-side:
http://www.hatecrime.org/subpages/hitler/hitler.html
Yeah, take that Emily! They’re much too busy helping people to worry about how they may be harming people.
I mean, just because “One of JONAH’s primary missions is community outreach and public education,” and just because they need to “speak out, publicize our cause, and help our fellow Jews who are suffering from unwanted same-sex attractions,” doesn’t mean that any of that public education should be wasted on Ex-Gay Watch, or that any of those Jews suffering from SSA who happen upon Ex-Gay Watch, are not entirely expendable in God’s eyes, so long as Elaine Silodor Berk and Arthur Goldberg, Co-Directors of JONAH, say so.
Emily,
I thought that your request was quite clear and non threatening and certainly deserved a more detailed response. However, JONAH has been on shaky ground for sometime as they have allowed Cohen to do as he wishes. It is also puzzling that JONAH would allow a Jew who has converted to Moonism then to Christianity to be involved with their organization. So is Cohen still considered Jewish at this point? No Jewish organizations that I know would never allow this. There are certainly plenty of Jewish psychologists and psychiatrists who are well credentialed and published, but they choose to have Cohen instead. Jonah also relies on Cohen’s publications, which don’t hold to the rigors of any scientific standards, as well as on Cohen’s controversial therapies, including the self serving”holding” as Cohen has demonstrated so well on the controversial internet videos; being licked on the face, neck and body (yes, with the tongue like an animal) especially by your mother, but father, brother , or just anyone will do (he evidently hasn’t given public demonstrations of this to date, probably because this would really nail him for being a certified nut case); hiting a pillow with the tennis racquet while screaming mom, mom, whatever ad nauseum; and then there is the warrior clearing stuff, which is so fraught with cult like language and ritual which raises even more red flags; and then there is his eye ball to eye ball contact, which is an old moonie technique to mesmerize patients into a hypnotic state so they can be manipulated even more; and of course there are many more technqiues that he uses, all without any scientific foundation or otherwise proof that these techniques are in any way beneficial for SSA or anything else for that matter.
By the way, there is no evidence that Cohen ever had a license for any kind of counseling whatsoever, so he never had one taken away. What he did have taken away was membership in the American Counseling Association, a permanent expulsion for serious violations of the ethical code and they were far more than just one client complaining about having to read and buy his books and materials as he states on his web site. ACA has plenty of therapists on both sides of the sexual orientation fence and ACA does protect the rights of all who seek help for the therapy of their choice, so Cohen is way off base saying that he was expelled because of his SSA therapy, etc. and this is real bunch of BS. ACA (the largest counseling organization in the US with over 150,000 members) rarely expels anyone permanently, maybe one person every few years and only for very serious violations.
It is difficult to understand why organizations like JONAH and NARTH especially would want to keep their association with Cohen after all of the circus-like internet fiascos of the last year.
Ben, love ya brother!
I remember bringing this up the Chad Thompson that the most aggressive conversion these days is against Jews and homosexuals.
However diasporic and minority, the distortions regarding political and economic influence ARE the same.
And I was researching some material recently on the perception of threat and real threat.
Gays and Jews, as a minority don’t really have the political clout to challenge laws that compromise civil rights.
And discretion regarding identity is something that Jews and gay folks have in common. However, what Chad wasn’t getting and what I’ve posted before is the urgent need to allay the stereotype regarding threat and negative influence.
The perception of conspiracy, in particular. In part BECAUSE Jews and gay folks (unlike people of color), are integrated before anyone can segregate. Which seems to be the scarier aspect of homosexuality, if not Judaism now.
Suspicion and vigilance are the weapons of choice on gay folks.
If the consequences weren’t so serious and damaging, this would be funny as hell.
I told Chad that AS minorities, Jews and gay folks don’t have the same options of uniting and becoming a monolithic presence.
And are determinedly kept from doing so.
One is barely tolerable, two together is a conspiracy, as it were.
And as I don’t have to tell YOU, Ben..but what Chad needed to be educated on, was that gays and Jews are minorites under siege, given a bad rap and with little opportunity to speak for themselves.
It’s dangerous to have that happen bcause people DO work themselves up into murderous frenzies under the mistaken idea that Jews or gays as a collective, deserve elimination.
And conversion, in effect, is just that. Identity disappeared, underground, taken for granted as never existing or deserving to.
I had to tell Chad, he was in on a greater and more potent and dangerous conspiracy. And that even while a minority, why would he want to see LESS homosexuals in the world when so much is misunderstood already?
He does not speak for the existence of homosexuality. He speaks for that identity to disappear. He doesn’t speak for the public knowing the full import of what it means to the world to be gay, but engaging in fomenting ignorance and fear, creating a vacuum into which negative conclusions are born.
HIS own activity was closer to that of Nazis than he is willing to realize.
Nazis too considered euthanizing the handicapped or disappearing anyone else so easily classified as undesirable, as a mercy to them and a compassionate endeavor.
Those struggling with ‘unwanted same sex attraction’ are such a classification. And ultimate, who is unwanted is the homosexual BY straight folks.
There is no conspiracy among gay people to do anything but exist in peace and show the world who they are.
And to even intervene in that, I told Chad…was an unnecessary intervention.
First, he’d better be DAMNED sure of who didn’t want what.
And since the unwanted is mostly coming from the straight folks street, he wasn’t exactly consulting with gay people on what THEY wanted.
But what straight folks always have.
Well, it got too deep for Chad, I think. And he faded away.
Anyone heard from him lately?
He and Alan Chambers tend to tell me they want to talk and communicate, but they are always ‘so busy’ to really do so.
Funny, my gay friends, ESPECIALLY the ministers and rabbis ALWAYS have time for me and my questions.
I’m sure Alan and Chad are busy.
Doing more of the same, no doubt. Convincing themselves that they can straddle this situation and not get dirty.
What a hope…
I assume you have written a post (or posts) that detail NARTH’s Nazi-like rhetoric. You are correct, a Nazi comparison shouldn’t be made without an abundance of carefully compiled and solidly-sourced evidence.
Please provide a link. I’d like to examine this serious charge.
Emily may be able to add more, but here are a few posts which cover this issue quite extensively:
Jewish Ex-Gay Group Ignorant of Ally’s Nazi Rhetoric?
Holocaust Revisionism Supported to Further Jewish Ex-Gay Agenda
Paul Cameron’s World
Paul Cameron holds particularly odious, unsubstantiated views and his work is used as the basis for a lot of anti-gay rhetoric. Some groups seem to have caught on to this and eliminated his name as much as possible from references, but many of his conclusions live on second and third hand. While normally Nazi analogies are a bit extreme, in this instance they are hard to avoid as the man himself discusses it.
JONAH has been asked, both privately and publicly, to disavow the work of Paul Cameron and apologize for any previous promotion of his views but to no avail.
NARTH is a very close ally to JONAH, and have had other problems with ethics concerning the promotion of bigotry and prejudice. If they truly think they have legitimate science on their side, they certainly make it hard for people of conscience, on either side of the gay issue, to take them seriously.
Thank you for your input, Ephilei. While no doubt some would use that approach and perhaps even be successful, we have found that, more often than not, such approaches come across as formulaic and disingenuous. Also, just as a point of interest, the writers at XGW are not required to follow any particular tenants other than an honest, professional writing ethic.
That would include being honest to those we engage in debate, and we already believe that JONAH is leading people down the wrong path by their mission statement. To express the idea that we want them to become even better at spreading disinformation would be, well, dishonest.
Feel free to interject your suggestions when you feel compelled; no one approach works all the time.
Emily,
How much support does JONAH get in the Jewish community at large? I’m sure it varies according to one’s type or style of Judaism one practices, but it appears to me that JONAH does not get much support from the Jewish community because it is constantly seeking association with Christian ex-gay groups.
BTW – Excellent email. It’s too bad they can’t just be open and honest with you and try to address the issues presented to them.