Ex-Gay Watch

Exodus leaders Alan Chambers and Randy Thomas have frequently expressed support for President Bush’s re-election in 2004 — most recently they did so on Janet Parshall’s radio program. (Parshall is also a Bush supporter.)

But as Christian evangelical Jim Wallis noted last September in Sojourners magazine, Bush’s theology is not orthodox Christianity; it is, arguably, American civil religion.
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Andrew Sullivan is widely regarded among conservatives as an example of tolerance and accommodation. He addresses antigay individuals and arguments on a case-by-case basis. He limits his generalizations and makes an effort not to resort to sweeping insults.

Is it these qualities that prompt Tammy Bruce to label Sullivan a member of the “gay elite” and “gay gestapo”? And why does Exodus spokesman Randy Thomas cheer such namecalling?
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Catholic pro-celibacy blogger and Courage participant David Morrison remembers gay journalist Randy Shilts, who died ten years ago this month.

Shilts was among the first journalists, and surely the most thorough, to track government and corporate callousness, and intransigence among activists (both gay and antigay), in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

Every year in February, oddly enough, though I have never known the date of Shilts’s death until just now, I read Band again. I re-read it for myself and for my friends who have died. I read it so that, whatever might have happened in the rest of my life since I read it last, I might not forget the hubris, prejudice, brilliance, fear, arrogance, compassion, glory and tragedy that so dramatically changed all our lives and ended some of them.

Morrison also pauses to remember radical Catholic activist Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement.

Too few Christians, especially those affiliated with the religious right, know what the CW movement is. Here is a summary from the movement’s home page:

Today over 185 Catholic Worker communities remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and foresaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms.

The CW movement upholds authentic Christian values — not culture wars.

From The Washington Post:

A Catholic lay panel found that 4 percent of the nation’s Catholic priests who have served since 1950 were at one time or another accused of sexually abusing minors.

Let’s crunch some statistics, and see whether the crisis can be blamed on homosexuality per se:

1. 20 percent of those alleged or reported abuses were male-female. Eighty percent were male-male.
2. In other words, 3 percent (80 percent of 4 percent) of priests allegedly abused minors of the same gender. Of these same-sex offenders, some were gay and some were not.
3. Conservatives including Bishop Gregory periodically complain that far too many U.S. Catholic priests are gay — between 20 percent and 50 percent.
4. Therefore, even if the entire 3 percent of priests who were same-sex offenders were gay, and conservatively assuming 30 percent of Catholic priests were gay, then 27/30ths — or 90 percent — of Catholic gay priests would not be alleged sexual abusers.

Based on this admittedly superficial number-crunching, derived from a single report, it would seem that the number of same-sex offenders is disproportionately higher than the number of opposite-gender offenders, but that the cause is not attributable to sexual orientation per se.

Also worth noting:
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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.
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Eric Scheie at Classical Values nicely summarizes pundits’ up-and-down votes for ‘The Passion of the Christ.’

Hopefully, Exodus ex-gay spokesman Randy Thomas will broaden his own perspective in the coming days. His review demonstrates some humble insights, but also suffers from serious oversights.

In focusing narrowly on sin and obsessively on sadism against one man, many reviewers say, the film buries Jesus of Nazareth’s radical faith and politics — views that were at odds with the conservative orthodoxy of his time, views that prompted his torture and execution.
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Janet Parshall, former spokeswoman for the Family Research Council, operates a Christian Right radio show that appears to uphold themes of joyous secularism.

Exodus executive director Alan Chambers and spokesman Randy Thomas eagerly appeared on Parshall’s show yesterday to support the antigay Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They preceded their appearance with an enthusiastic e-mail promoting the show to Exodus supporters.

Thomas later said “it went really well I think. Didn’t say a whole lot. She took a bunch of callers.” Thomas neglects to tell his readers what the callers said, or how he responded. He also offers unconditional praise of President Bush, but doesn’t say why.

After all, why explain oneself when one has already chosen not to defend one’s views in discussion with gay-tolerant people, via e-mail or blog comments?

If Thomas were willing to dialogue with the gay people whom he claims to target with his ministry, he would need to explain what Christian principles require that a government representing all faiths and agnostics deny gay couples these responsibilities and benefits (courtesy of Atrios), including several that are difficult or impossible to obtain without marriage.

Thomas would need to explain whether he supports the Fidelity Pledge proposed by the Rocky Mountain Progressive Network.

Thomas would need to explain why he markets the FMA as a ban on gay marriage when, as Jack Balkin explained in November, the plain language of the amendment bans far more than marriage.

And Thomas would need to explain the extent to which he agrees with the Christian Reconstructionist constitutional amendments accompanying FMA. (The Right Christians and Dave Neiwart explain.)

To be fair, Thomas isn’t the only silent one. As Allen Brill notes, the Christian Left’s silence on gay equality allows the Christian Right to falsely portray the debate as one of religion versus secularism and “eternal truths” versus “postmodern relativity.”

PFOX was instrumental in the recent formation of the NEA Ex-Gay Educators Caucus.

PFOX’s history of support for discrimination and opposition to antibullying programs in the schools is summarized at Ex-Gay Watch under the PFOX category.

To develop an understanding of PFOX’s hopes for the nation’s schools, it may be worth knowing both PFOX’s official history, and the background of its staff.

Here is some background.

From 2001 through mid-2003, PFOX’s webmaster was a man operating under the pen name “Burning Black Triangle” or BBT for short.

Over the course of 2002, PFOX vice president Estella Salvatierra was notified several times, on one of PFOX’s discussion boards, that BBT was operating a site that advocated violence against homosexuals and the burning of gay-tolerant churches. In response, BBT said (in online discussions) that the death threats were a parody of old gay-revolutionary literature — but he refused to amend his web site to label his literature as parody. PFOX declined to take action regarding the webmaster’s personal web site for the better part of a year. Finally, the site quietly disappeared from GeoCities in mid-2003, and PFOX obscured the identity of its (former?) webmaster on its official web site.

But the webmaster’s hate site remains archived at archive.org, and people interested in the behind-the-scenes values of some of PFOX’s staff can evaluate the content for themselves.

Foreseeing the possibility that PFOX or BBT might request deletion of the pages from archive.org, I am copying them here. They are not copyrighted.
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People often come to realizations about themselves — as well as changes in their perspective — as they approach middle age.

What happens when someone develops serious doubts about their sexual orientation, especially as they approach midlife?

Must they be either homosexual — or ex-gay?

In my opinion, neither the decision nor the orientation are either/or, black/white.

I respond to this here on Rich Blinne’s blog.

I probably said way too much — more than the person asked for — but I felt it was important that someone thinking of “coming out” step back from hastily labeling themselves, and instead broaden their range of choices and work with the tangible impact of their decisions.

I don’t think my response is atypical of what other gay folks say to people who are struggling. But I do think it defies the ex-gay stereotype that homosexual individuals are out to “recruit” heterosexuals.

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An excellent article from Tech Central Station.

I’ve been looking at it since yesterday, and will try to comment further by this weekend.

Advance feedback welcome.