Ex-Gay Watch

From The Washington Blade, May 26:

Love Won Out, a controversial religious conference that espouses reparative therapy and encourages gays to change their sexual orientation, is coming to Maryland next month.

Counter-vigils are planned. Worth reading are statements by spokespersons for Focus on the Family, Equality Maryland and PFLAG…
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The Queer Action Coalition of Memphis, Tenn., plans a June 5 vigil at Love In Action, marking one year since LIA’s involuntary detainment of sexually struggling youths made headlines.

The scandal severely curtailed LIA’s activities, but the antigay organization appears to have received a fresh injection of cash because — as the coalition reports — LIA recently expanded its recruitment of antigay and troubled youths. LIA uses the language of war — “ammunition” and “battle” — and positions struggling youths as pawns in a culture war. Visit the QAC website for details.

Find additional commentary by LIA patient/survivor Peterson Toscano here.

A Tenable Belief and Good As You assess Focus on the Family’s latest ad campaign, which exploits stock photos of unhappy children. The ad campaign’s objectives:

• humiliate children whose adoptive parents happen to be gay,
• redirect a backlog of unadopted children into fundamentalist Christian foster-care and halfway-house assignments, and
• promote an Oklahoma law that sought to enable state police and antigay medical authorities to seize the children of families that visit or drive through Oklahoma, if it were reported to (or suspected by) authorities that the adoptive parents might be gay.

Oklahoma prohibits adoption by couples that are gay; that law remains in effect. But a recently passed law would have gone much farther — possibly revoking the parental rights of adoptive couples passing through Oklahoma who did not conform to Oklahoma’s own adoption laws. The new law was overruled by a judge who respects U.S. constitutional values; Focus and FRC (both enemies of states’ rights on the gay-marriage issue) are raising the states’ rights flag to defend a “right” of fundamentalist states to impose their antifamily laws upon families from non-fundamentalist states.

An Ex-Gay Watch operative called NARTH earlier this week to determine if Bill Curnow’s western Michigan based LIFE Coaching International is a member.

I pray that one day my son will be on eHarmony.com looking for a wife. Do you have any therapists in the Grand Rapids area?

You know, that sorta story.

NARTH’s receptionist informed our caller there are no referrals for the entire state of Michigan and then proceeded to try and give out information for a therapist in New York.

Either NARTH needs to brush up on their geography or they’ve got a major membership gap in the Midwest.

To aid Michigan PFOX moms in finding NARTH therapists in New York, we have created this handy Google map:

Click the map to enlarge, or visit Google Maps for road directions.

Katherine Volin of the Washington Blade wrote a wonderful profile of Pam Spaulding’s work as a black lesbian blogger who specializes in monitoring the religious right.

Thanks to efforts by bloggers such as Spaulding, XGW can spend less time analyzing the religious right and more time focusing on exgays.

Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays operates a Yahoo group for antigay parents and relatives of adult gay persons.

The e-mail discussions are tightly moderated by conservative federal “civil rights” attorney Estella Salvatierra, who has served as PFOX vice president. Salvatierra not only blocks any e-mail message that is critical of an exgay activist or tactic, but also has been known to edit the PFOX list members’ messages — changing key phrases and deleting paragraphs to comply with PFOX’s strict and politically correct worldview — without informing the writer or the group of her changes.

Following PFOX president Richard Cohen’s embarrassing appearance on CNN on May 23, three messages of support for Cohen were released by Salvatierra. It is unknown whether any messages voicing skepticism toward Cohen were blocked, or whether these three messages of support were rewritten by Salvatierra.

Here are the three messages, shown in their entirety except for the writer’s identity.

Read more…

Since 2000 the American Family Association has been peddling a video about exgays titled “It’s Not Gay.” Ex-Gay Watch reader Jim Burroway recently threw $10 at the AFA’s discount-bin for a copy of the video.

In his book “Anything But Straight,” author Wayne Besen coined the term “exgay for pay” which describes how virtually every publicly visible person proclaiming to be healed of their homosexuality makes it their liveliehood. I refuse to assert any exgay is getting rich off this, infact many exgays take offense to such a suggestion. Possibly the most touching and relatable moment of exgay Stephen Bennett’s Straight Talk Radio show was when Stephen said sometimes he struggles just to pay his family’s health insurance each month.

But back to the video… Nine exgays appear in it. How many make/made their living exgays? You guessed it, every single one of them. Here’s the breakdown: (in order of appearance)

Michael Johnston – Founder of Kerusso Ministries, chair of National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day, and spreader of HIV.

KC Winters – Former counseling Assistant at Love In Action who is currently pursuing a counseling degree from Harding Graduate School of Religion in Memphis and teaching a Sunday school class at Central Church in Collierville, Tennessee. Central Church is among a list of supporting churches on Love In Action’s website. I was unsure if KC was on staff at LIA when the video was made so I emailed LIA graduate Peterson Tocano to check. Peterson wrote back,

“KC entered LIA in 98 I believe. It was during my time there. He entered along with Bob Painter. They both worked for the program. Bob is now out and just has begun to share some of his experience. KC went off to seminary and has been VERY quiet ans off the radar. I have a sense that he wants to live a private life. As far as I know he is still ex-gay but no one I know has talked to him in some time. In 2000 I belive ABC 20 20 did a piece on LIA and KC was interviewed.”

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An all male stork couple and an all female stork couple at a Dutch zoo in Overloon were each given an egg.

Zoo spokeswoman, Esther Jansen said: “The gay storks look after the eggs and the chicks just as well as our heterosexual birds.”

The Malcontent has video of Richard Cohen’s appearance on CNN. CNN’s website also has video. Pam Spaulding offers background on Cohen, and Steve at A Tenable Belief reacts to Cohen’s techniques.

Warren Throckmorton seems as freaked-out by Cohen’s antics as other XGW readers are. He emailed me last night after writing about it on his blog:

Read more…

“They feel like we’re intolerant. So I guess we should wear that as a badge of honor.”

– Phil Burress of the Cincinnati-based anti-gay Citizens for Community Values on Ohio placing dead last in measures for civil equality for LGBT citizens. Burress is a board member of Exodus International, the exgay network.

Pam Spaulding spotlights an abundance of illogical, self-contradictory talk from Burress in an American Family Association article. Here’s the AFA text:

A pro-homosexual group calling itself Equality of Ohio recently published a nationwide study about so-called discrimination against “gays,” lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals. The study rated the state of Ohio dead last in protecting the “equality” of those groups.

But Phil Burress of the Cincinnati-based pro-family group Citizens for Community Values (CCV) says one has to understand what homosexual activists mean when they talk about equality. What they are really talking about, he asserts, is “special rights” for homosexual, bisexual and transgendered people.

“You would be surprised what it is that they really want,” Burress says. “What they call equality is for everyone to accept their behavior and for them to have access to our children at a very early age, promoting homosexuality as normal.” Opposing the homosexual activists’ agenda is “what they call intolerance,” he contends.

…”What they’re complaining about,” Burress asserts, “is … that they don’t have rights and privileges that override the rest of us who are average working families and people here in the state of Ohio. They want special privileges.”

Also, the pro-family advocate says, homosexual activists want access to the educational system and government sanction of same-sex marriage. “They want to have all the things that the people and the governments and the laws have said that they can’t have,” he says.

Burress complains that what homosexuals call equality is, in fact, equality: “for everyone to accept their behavior … promoting homosexuality as normal.”

Burress assumes that all heterosexual parents are on his side; equates tolerance with homosexual recruitment of children; implies that gay Ohioans don’t work for a living or have families; and calls it “special privileges” when homosexual activists “want to have all the things that the people and the governments and the laws have said that they can’t have.”

Straight from the mouth of the Exodus leadership.