Last week the Tennessee Dept. of Child Services conducted an investigation of allegations of child abuse at Love In Action. Now the Tennessee Department of Health has launched it’s own investigation. Excerpted from Tenn. opens new probe of ‘ex-gay’ facility, Washington Blade, by Eartha Melzer, July 01, 2005.
The Tennessee Department of Health has sent a letter to Love in Action notifying the group that it is suspected of operating illegally, according to Andrea Turner, communications director for the department.
Turner said that if the program is strictly faith-based it would not require licensing by the state, but that according to the group’s Web site, Love in Action has licensed counselors and provides services related to alcohol and drug addiction on site.
“If this is the case, they are required to be licensed as a drug and alcohol treatment facility in Tennessee,” Turner said.
If employees there are providing counseling on homosexuality, it is possible that they are operating outside their area of expertise, Turner added.
Legislation giving the health department the authority to issue cease-and-desist orders to unlicensed alcohol and drug treatment facilities goes into effect July 1. Turner said that the health department is considering whether the Love in Action facility is causing harm.
Thanks MikeDitto
The group of us over at free zach are doing a postcard campaign to send Zach some words of support. It’s a statement in itself, because if even half the group sends a card or letter, it will be 2,000 messages flooding the Refuge camp’s mailbox. That would be hard to ignore.
Zach
c/o Refuge
P.O. Box 171444
Memphis, TN 38187
This news encourages me because hopefully the story will spread even wider into the media, so “mainstream” America (who ever that might be) will hear about this and react.
With the Love Won Out conference, the upcoming Exodus conference in Asheville, the Fish Can’t Fly Film and then of course this story, America will have to look again at gay reparative therapy and hopefully speak out against foolishness and oppression–especially for those who have little voice or power to resist.
Thank you for keeping us talking, writing and spreading this story.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t had enough sleep in the last 24, but I’m about to cry with joy at this news.
I hope that the child is emancipated from his parents, and that a *CARING* and *ACCEPTING* family take him in, and look after him.
If I were over there, I would be more than happy to look after him; allow him to finish school, and live in an accepting environment; sure, I wouldn’t be the perfect father, but atleast I wouldn’t bully him like his parents did.
Well, its good to see that we are still somewhat a nation of laws and that professionalism is not entirely dead.
But if the religious right has its way all these restraints will be gone in 20 years.
After reading Eartha Melzer’s article, I wondered if any of the ethics violations that led to Dr. Wright’s license revocation were related to the reorientation therapy he offered. The article mentioned that Wright revocation was “due to alleged ethics violations”. I found a PDF copy of the order revoking Wright’s license to practive psychology on Tennessee’s Department of Health website.
The revocation order does not mention reorientation therapy or youth treatment, but involves a different kind of sad scandal. Apparently Dr. Wright was treating a client who came to him due to “stress and anxiety resulting from her financial difficulties”. Dr. Wright decided to help his patient by offering to invest $81,000 of her money after showing her “a file on another investment client wherein he claimed to have turned a $20,000 investment into $200,000 in two weeks”. Dr. Wright invested and subsequently lost his client’s money causing his client to lose her home.
Dr. Wright agreed to having his license revoked after admitting to harming his client and claiming to have been in “a manic episode for several months during this period when he was treating” the client. I do sympathize with those who suffer mental illness, but it seems there was a more serious ethical/moral issue undermining Wright’s practice.
Bay Windows has a new interview with Wade Richards, an ex-ex-gay who was with Love in Action for about a year and a half.
Thanks for that Wade Richards link James. It’s a powerful article.
Wow. This news made me cry as well. It’s about damn time. God bless Zach; I am getting my entire extended family to send postcards to him.
I commend you on spreading the news about Love In Action.
I directed a film called Trembling Before G-d about Hasidic and Orthodox gays and lesbians and have been dealing with reparative therapy and those who have been damaged by it for over a decade. In fact one of the main characters in Trembling is an Orthodox gay man who tried to change his homosexuality for 11 years and failed. We film him reuniting after 20 years with the Hasidic rabbi who directed him towards conversion therapy. In a tough scene he asks this religious leader: what should he do? In the DVD we further follow up with the two of them.
We convened the first-ever Orthodox Mental Health Conference on Homosexuality which brought together over 40 Orthodox psychiatrists and psychologists and therapists from across North America to counter this predominance of reparative therapy in religious communities. It was a secret conference as a number of people there especially from ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn would face serious repercussions if they were associated with us and the film not to mention attending the conference.
The organizers ranged from a straight Orthodox therapist in NYC to the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi. One of the best sessions was having four Orthodox and Hasidic gay and lesbian people speak to the group about their worst therapy. (The therapists ate that up!)
If you are curious to know more or write a story on it we are happy to help.
For those interested in this topic the DVD/VHS is available now at Amazon.com or TLAVideo.com. It is a deluxe two-disc DVD set loaded with three hours of bonus materials including the featurette “Trembling on the Road”about the life-changing movement of the movie around the globe. It would be extremely useful for anyone doing educational work around issues of faith and sexuality. See below for more info and visit http://www.tremblingbeforeg-d.com
Best Sandi DuBowski
Director – Trembling Before G-d
Special Features of the DVD
• Featurette – Trembling on the Road
A featurette about the life-changing movement of the movie around the world. Trembling has touched and transformed lives across the globe. This is a dramatic document of dialogues, protests, reactions, screenings, and events from Israel, the first Orthodox synagogue screenings, the Sundance Film Festival World Premiere, Mexico City, Ohio, NYC, Santa Fe, San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Washington D.C., University of Pennsylvania, Dallas, Long Island, Scotland, Atlanta, Miami, Sacramento, and the Internet over the past 2 years. Includes poignant, funny, interesting, and angry reactions and reflections on Trembling and updates on all the character’s lives.
• More With Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the First Openly Gay Orthodox Rabbi
Rabbi Steve shares his inspiring life story of a religious leader’s 20 years of struggle to come out and reconcile what many believe is irreconcilable. From becoming Orthodox at the age of 15 in Columbus, Ohio to approaching a legendary rabbi in Jerusalem with the fear of being bisexual and being told “You have twice the power of love. Use it carefully” to opening his mouth to say morning prayers on the roof of his building and just weeping because no words could come out to becoming out and proud and feeling G-d’s love. Steve’s book, Wrestling With God and Men, on homosexuality, Judaism and the Bible will be published by University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2004. 25 min
• More with the Rabbis
Excerpts from interviews with a number of very prestigious Orthodox rabbis about the issue of homosexuality –. Rabbi Aharon Feldman, Rabbi Aron Tendler, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, Rabbi Meir Fund and Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo. There are some astounding stories; Rabbi Tendler tells the story of a gay teacher at his Los Angeles yeshiva who died of AIDS and how it transformed the school. Rabbi Feldman relays a story of how one of the leading rabbis of our generation gave a speech exhorting men to treat their circumcised penises like a holy Sefer Torah, the Bible. Rabbi Cardozo speaks of a kleptomaniac in his native Holland who only understood why he had such an inclination after stealing hundreds of Dutch Jews’ passports from under the nose of a Nazi officer, thereby saving their lives. 40 min
• Petach Lev: The Trembling Israeli Education Project
The Steven Spielberg Righteous Persons Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation as well as a number of other foundations awarded us funding to launch an Orthodox education project with the film. One year ago, we trained 11 facilitators in Jerusalem who have since held screenings and led dialogues for 2,000 principals, teachers, school counselors and therapists across the nation, breaking the taboo on discussing the issue of homosexuality in the country’s Orthodox school system. Here a group of them are interviewed about their groundbreaking experiences. 15 mins. In Hebrew with English subtitles
• Interview with the Director – Sandi Simcha DuBowski
Called the Mt. Everest of documentary, Trembling Before G-d took six years to make. DuBowski met hundreds of people around the world and only the tiniest handful came forward to participate in this film. Here is the story behind the story, how a film became a movement, and the challenges met in creating this landmark work. 21 min.
It seems to me that there are two issues, in this most distressing story:
1) Should parents have the right to compel their 16 year old to have such therapy and
2) Does the therapy ACTUALLY WORK?
These two are interconnected of course, but I will concentrate my comment on the second.
If parents who have a 16 year old with, for example, Type 1 (Insulin dependent) Diabetes are told of a therapy to cure it, and intend to compel their teenager to have the treatment, there are certainly legal issues, and no doubt laws vary from country to country.
But first and foremost, parents and physicians would surely want to know what CLINICAL EVIDENCE had been published in reputable peer-reviewed journals, establishing the safety and efficacy of the treatment. In other words, have those selling the treatment demonstrated to the satisfaction of other qualified health profesionals, that it WORKS and that it is SAFE. If there was no such evidence base, would they buy the treatment?
It is my belief that “Love In Action” and other such “therapy” vendors fail SIGNALLY and DISMALLY on these counts.
There is simply NO clinical evidence base of efficacy.
Simply saying that sex outside of heterosexual marriage, is incompatible with Christianity (which in fact I believe) is not at all a sufficient base to suggest that desire for such can be changed, rather than just resisted.
And, whilst pointing out the dangers of promiscuity is doubtless a good thing to do, there is no evidence that doing so removes sexual attraction, or can change it from homosexual to heterosexual.
If the ‘therapy’ sold by people like “Love In Action” actually works to change sexual orientation, it is up to those making and selling the ‘therapy’ to prove it and to have the proofs acepted for publication in reputable peer-reviewed medical journals. Personally I believe that it doesn’t, and they won’t.
The Spitzer “study”, if it shows anything, tends to show that this kind of ‘therapy’ doesn’t work.
Before there could be any general acceptance of such ‘therapy’, there would need to be a HUGE evidence base established, and at the moment there appears to be simply nothing.
One writes this in a somewhat dispassionate tone, but oh, poor Zach, and his poor parents.