Ex-Gay Watch

President Bush says he supports Sen. Rick Santorum, but not necessarily Santorum’s verbal attacks on privacy and same-sex couples.
– CNN

In response, FRC escalates its retaliation against the White House and GOP.

FRC President Ken Connor and Focus on the Family President James Dobson defend Santorum’s remarks and criticize the GOP in Dobson’s online radio show.

Exodus News favorably quotes an antigay African-American who’s very upset at gay groups for playing tokenism with racial minorities.

Well, some gay groups play that unjust game. Regrettably, many political groups play that same game. Including Exodus.

Exodus makes a point of putting minorities in its online photography, yet its board of directors and regional representatives are white.

Over at Focus on the Family, which is the key underwriter for Exodus political rallies, one finds the same situation:

Much of the Focus web site’s stock photography features ethnic minorities. But according to Focus on the Family co-founder Gil Moegerle in his book, James Dobson’s War on America, minority and female candidates have historically been unwelcome on the Focus board of directors. During Moegerle’s years near the top of the organization, Dobson preferred that women work in subordinate positions at Focus. Dobson made minorities feel unwelcome in any position, Moegerle said.

Exodus News also said (regarding immorality on TV):

While we are calling others (gays) to integrity it would do good to look at ourselves first.

Sounds like good advice for Exodus to practice, not just preach.

Comments about this message, submitted to Ex-Gay Watch’s former blog location

Gay pride parades have featured groups with names like black and white together, inter-racial couples, since the early 70′s.

In the 70′s in Chicago, gay bars were usually the only places in the city that minorities were welcome. Generally leather clubs have had black, hispanic and asian members for as long as I have been around. Gay politics seems to be the preserve of boring white guys. Everyone else is out having fun.

—Dale • 4/25/03; 9:40:12 PM

I bet you’re on Exodus’ mailing list, too. But just in case you missed it, you may want to see this from February [2003].

Um…the “Black History Month” rendition.

Well, at least they’re trying.

—Jayelle • 4/29/03; 1:02:32 PM

From Exodus News, April 23:

Christine Sneeringer of Worthy Creations ministry in Fort Lauderdale Florida wrote “All We’re Created to Be” and describes her personal story of overcoming lesbianism….

I’m happy that Christine’s happy. Everyone should be happy, if they can.

And I wonder, how she (or Exodus) ever came to believe that sexual orientation is an “ism” — an ideology or religion??

Anytime some activist for any political cause comes at me with jittery nonsense about some dangerous “ism” to be overcome, I do two things:

1. I ask where I can join up with that persecuted “ism,” and
2. I point them to the “No Solicitation” sign nailed to the crucifix around my neck.

Over the past three days, the Family Research Council has harshly criticized the GOP for not defending Sen. Rick Santorum. It has done so not only in its own publications, but also in the mass media.

As reported by countless media outlets, Santorum has stated that the American family’s right to privacy should be eliminated in favor of surveillance and prosecution by Big Government, particularly when relationships inside the home — gay, nonmarital or extramarital — offend local or national bureaucrats.

The White House and GOP leadership have been understandably silent, thus far, about Santorum.

Bush and Republican Party officials have always placed a very high value on public loyalty. Disloyalty is viewed as an extreme moral failure. When groups or individuals express disloyalty or ingratitude toward the leadership, these groups are gradually eased away from the corridors of power. Gary Bauer is but one example of religious-right activists who have crossed the GOP, and lost.

Now America waits to see whether Exodus and other religious-right organizations join FRC in acts of betrayal against the GOP.

Meanwhile, the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America and Focus on the Family have already joined Santorum in attacking the American family’s right to privacy.

Our Christian traditions tell us that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead today, victorious over sin that had enslaved humankind.

Faithful Christians are thankful for that gift, which was liberation from death, injustice, and spiritual oppression.

Sadly, there are still some Christians in our world who are not so thankful. On both the Left and the Right, they seek to deny other groups of people access to liberty, peace and salvation. There are still Christians who promote job discrimination, harassment in the schools, censorship online, and perhaps worst (from a Christian standpoint), diatribes in the very churches that should be saving people, not condemning them.

Today I am grateful for my liberation not only from sin in general, but from the personal isolation of my almost-ex-gay lifestyle in high school and for the first 18 years after high school. I am grateful that there are gays and ex-gays who tolerate one another, who live and let live.

I pray for those Christians who feel they cannot rise and be victorious in their own faith unless they create difficulties for God’s other children.

Is Exodus playing a bit loose with the truth when it says it supports sodomy laws?

The possibility does exist.

In the legal case Lawrence & Garner v. State of Texas, two Texans are battling Big Government after an antigay neighbor had them arrested for sexual intercourse in the privacy of their own home. The neighbor was later convicted for filing a false police report in order to lure police into the men’s home.

In the Texas case, the men were fined just $200.

However, in Florida, where Exodus is based, both heterosexuals and homosexuals can be jailed for 60 days if convicted of engaging in non-reproductive sex.

It stands to reason that ex-gays are at exceptional risk of arrest under sodomy laws. Ex-gays do not live their sexual lives in the comfort and relative safety of accepting homes and neighbors. Struggling ex-gays often are married or living among friends who are hostile toward gays. When they succumb to temptation after anguished efforts at abstinence, ex-gays go to bars, parks, or the Internet in search of anonymous or casual encounters. In other words, they go to the places at highest risk for police surveillance — and, in the future, for surveillance by activists looking to turn sodomy laws against the very people (ex-gays, the religious right) who enact and defend such laws.

Even when ex-gays “go straight,” their nonmarital sexual activities with the opposite sex may be considered illegal in the 10 states, including Florida, where heterosexual sodomy is illegal.

Exodus has declined to say whether it supports enforcement of the existing sodomy laws. I believe this is a cop-out. Refusal to enforce a law is the equivalent of obstruction against a law.

Either Exodus supports fines and incarceration of gays, ex-gays, and anyone else who expresses non-reproductive sexuality in private — or Exodus is misleading its audience when it claims to support the nation’s sodomy laws.

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Randy Thomas is the spokesman for Exodus, but he also operates his own personal blog.

In polishing and extending his April 9 mini-reviews of two books, I hope he will finish connecting the dots that he has drawn. After all, if one puts dots in one’s blog, it makes little sense not to connect them. Right?

About the first book, Randy writes:

After The Ball by Kirk and Madsen

this Book … oh my … well I am about 100+ pages into it and had to put it down for a bit. I got really upset by it. Some times I react emotionally before I can figure out why. Now, I knew that this was a progay political book when I picked it up. And it really offended me on one level because of my faith but that wasn’t the core of my anger. I was angry more as a person who was once gay. I was angered that my pain and struggle was manipulated and used to usher in the politically minded gay elite into power. This book unabashadly reveals a designed marketing plan for social engineering. They are not hiding that fact. The problem is that they basically lied and crafted a war where millions in the gay community were being devastated by the HIV horrors of the ’80′s would become bitter and fight for the causes they (the gay elite) purposefully defined inaccurately and jammed silent any opposing viewpoint. I want to finish the book but I have had to take a break. I want to write a full response.

The book, written in 1990, was considered a common-sense outline of the same sort published by many advocacy movements. It was a protest against outlandish and offensive militance by queer leftist extremists. It was a call for mainline gays and lesbians to make themselves known and heard in mainstream society. It was a warning that the mainline gay community needs to throw the religious right’s unholy tactics back in their faces. And it was an appeal to gays and lesbians to live healthier, more responsible lives.

At the same time, the book was marred by harsh statements and sweeping generalizations, some of which are now 13 years out of date.

Before writing a full review of the book, Randy would serve himself well to read the Amazon reviews of the book. And then cite specific passages that he finds offensive.

I found this remark by Randy especially troubling:

I was angered that my pain and struggle was manipulated and used to usher in the politically minded gay elite into power.

I don’t like to hear the Left whine incessantly about its victimhood, so I’m less than pleased to hear the same “victim” rhetoric coming from mature ex-gay Christians like Randy. I think Randy has always been capable of making his own decisions. He has never been controlled by others. In the past, he made reasonable choices as an independent thinker, not wanting to be exploited by any one side in the culture war. (And there are many sides, not just two.) Now, I fear sometimes, his choices and words are steered more by ideology than by independent thought inspired by faith. “Victim” rhetoric reflects poorly on the speaker. I know Randy is capable of so much more.

And before making judgments about old gay-agenda books like “After the Ball,” I hope Randy will research the infamous and dishonest plans of the religious right at its own early-Nineties movement-planning events, among them Glen Eyrie.

After writing the mini-review of After the Ball, Randy wrote this:

The New Thought Police, by Tammy Bruce

I am about halfway through the book and it is wonderful. Ms. Bruce is a lesbian activist who was the head of NOW (National Organization for Women) for seven years. Her book is a defense of free speech and thought and exposes many tactics of the American political left and the gay elite. Her expose on the “Stop Dr. Laura” campaign is rivoting. I will write a full response on this as well. It was strange to me that a left leaning book and a progay political book hit me all kinds of wrong and then this lesbian author makes me want to join her fan club. As I meditated on it I see that she isn’t trying to manipulate or control the dialog. She doesn’t just spout off what’s expected and through her writings it is apparent she tries to respect everyone…even if they are at odds with her. Heck, Dr. Laura wrote the forward for her book! More later…

I’m happy that Randy has found a lesbian writer that confounds some of his stereotypes about gays and feminists. At the same time, I’m surprised that Randy would be surprised by this book. He has known about gay independents and conservatives like me for quite a while.

I see a clear disconnect between Randy’s assessment of “After the Ball,” in which Randy seems to attribute common-sense, conservative forms of gay-tolerant activism to some vast, sneaky conspiracy, and his positive assessment of another apparently sensible book by Tammy Bruce.

Like I said: Connect the dots.

More from the American Journalist Survey, as reported at Poynter:

Compared with 1992, the percentage of full-time journalists who claim to be Democrats has dropped 7 percentage points in 2002 to slightly above 37 percent, moving this figure closer to the overall population percentage of 32 percent, according to a July 29-31, 2002, Gallup national telephone poll of 1,003 adults. This is the lowest percentage of journalists saying they are Democrats since 1971.

This does not surprise me at all. Most of the editors that I know and work with are relatively apolitical. They are drawn to journalism by its creativity and analysis, not by advocacy.

From the American Journalist Survey at The Poynter Institute:

U.S. journalists are much more likely to have earned college degrees than the overall adult population in the United States (89.3 percent vs. 25.6 percent) and the overall U.S. civilian labor force (30.4 percent).

That statistic is very difficult for me to accept at face value. I am a journalist. Of the dozens of people that I know, only four ended school before college graduation.

Does this mean that the survey finding is misleading or inaccurate, or does it mean that journalists live their lives and careers befriending and reporting about people who are themselves unrepresentative of the general population?

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This is an old op-ed — the column appeared Feb. 28 in The Washington Post, and I’ve been busy moving for the past 40 days so I never posted it. But I think the column is still relevant, as the religious right rides a wave of euphoria over victories in central Baghdad.

The Rev. Fritz Ritsch commented on what he views as the heretical militarism and idolatrous nationalism of the religious right.

Bush’s religious supporters are his greatest cheerleaders. Rather than his spiritual guides, they are his faithful disciples. He is the leader of the America they think God has ordained. Contrary to popular opinion, the religion that this group espouses is Triumphalism, not Christianity. Theirs is a zealous form of nationalism, baptized with Christian language. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred by the Nazis, foresaw the rise of a similar view in his country, which he labeled “joyous secularism.” Joyous secularists, said Bonhoeffer, are Christians who view the role of government as helping God to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth. He viewed this as human arrogance and a denial of God’s sovereignty….

All too often, the religious right worships at this altar of nationhood, not the traditional God of Christianity.

The president confidently (dare I say “religiously”?) asserts a worldview that most Christian denominations reject outright as heresy: the myth of redemptive violence, which posits a war between good and evil, with God on the side of good and Satan on the side of evil and the battle lines pretty clearly drawn.

War is essential in this line of thinking. For God to win, evil needs to be defined and destroyed by God’s faithful followers, thus proving their faithfulness. Christians have held this view to be heretical since at least the third century. It is the bread-and-butter theology of fundamentalists, whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian.

In contrast, the Judeo-Christian worldview is that of redemption. Redemption starts from the assumption that all of humanity is flawed and must approach God with humility. No good person is totally good, and no evil person is irredeemable. God’s purpose is to redeem all people. Good and evil, while critical, become secondary to redemption.

While most Christian denominations do not reject war altogether, diplomacy becomes integral to our understanding of the practical application of redemption.

I find this assessment of the religious right’s “joyous secularism” intriguing — and ironic, considering the movement’s contempt for what it (inaccurately) labels as “secular.”