From Peterson Toscano:
Having experienced victory, aspiring ex-gay minister “Marvin” now voices hesitation about joining the world’s largest ex-gay organization.
Marvin asks: Does a local spiritual ex-gay ministry need to be entangled in Exodus psychology and politics? What are the benefits?
From Barry Goldwater via Wikipedia via Andrew Sullivan:
“On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.
I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’”
Apparently too many people have been requesting antihomosexual and exgay resources from Focus on the Family while offering less than the organization’s “suggested donation.”
So now Focus, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, is making it more difficult to “donate” less than its sales department deems appropriate for goods that should have been free in the first place.
Former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey called him a threat to religious liberty.
And evangelical voters and Baptist leaders are deserting him.
So whom does the desperate James Dobson seek for support?
The nation’s leading potty-mouthed priestess of political correctness, Ann Coulter.
Coulter will appear twice — Oct. 23 and Oct. 24 — on Focus on the Family’s daily radio program. Coulter accuses liberal and libertarian people of faith of godlessness for seeking to keep partisan and sectarian religious biases out of government.
According to Talk to Action:
What the vicious and vindictive Coulter has to contribute about family values or raising children is anybody’s guess, but it does confirm that James Dobson, just like the rest of the religious right, will do anything to help keep the Republicans in power this November.
Coulter is the antithesis of the values Dobson professes to believe in, and engages in all the actions he regularly decries “liberals” of engaging in, but obviously he now has no trouble in selling his soul to the Republican party, lock, stock, and two smoking barrels.
Tell us about exgay blogs that dare to think outside the box of the political religious right.
What should Ex-Gay Watch review or advertise in the future?
Lobbyist Randy Thomas complains on the Exodus blog that, at the Family Research Council’s misnamed “Liberty Sunday” event last weekend, a reporter for the Boston Herald chuckled at the label “ex-gay” and refused to receive ex-gay materials or interview ex-gay activists.
Thomas uses the Exodus blog entry to point the unnamed reporter to the Code of Ethics for the Society of Professional Journalists. This is a code that Exodus refuses to practice in its own blogging, lobbying, and media relations.
Thomas says:
People like Alan, including myself, are not gay whether the Boston Herald tolerates that fact or not. Diversity and tolerance includes people like us. If that fact is denied, then true diversity and/or tolerance is not displayed.
But Thomas has periodically admitted that he’s still same-sex-attracted. So by his own admission, he’s both not-gay and gay at the same time. He demands tolerance not for true former homosexuals, but for intentional mislabeling and misrepresentation. In other words, Thomas believes it is the duty of a reporter to parrot his political correctness.
He might have been right if he had said that true former homosexuals deserve tolerance. And he’s right that some journalists (TV talking heads especially) should show a little more respect for their subjects. But I fail to see why journalists for a reputable news organization should “tolerate” political correctness whether it comes from the left or from Exodus.
From the Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale:
You can’t make fish fly, but you can chuck them across the room and make them think, for just a little while, that they can.
Sarah Lohman reports on Peterson Toscano’s performance of “Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House: How I Survived the Ex-Gay Movement.”
The leadership at Exodus seems to have come up with a bizarre and totally unsubstantiated new talking-point claiming “most” gay people don’t care much for the work of gay-rights groups. In Exodus’ book “God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door” Randy Thomas is so kind as to oversimplify all gays and lesbians into three “groups of homosexuals.” From page 126 describing the “moderate” type of homosexual:
Perhaps to your surprise, I can say that most people who identify as gay or lesbian are like these women.
…Most moderate homosexuals are grateful to live in the United States and will challenge the gay establishment’s “groupthink” regarding gay activism. Many are also mortified by what the militant gay activist community proposes on behalf of everyone else in the gay community.
Alan Chambers was spouting the same thing on NPR two weeks ago. Both Chambers and Thomas cite “personal experience” as justification for this nonsense. Where Exodus hasn’t, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force actually bothered to do a survey to determine that gay people are in-fact interested in laws that protect them.
Really, why bother justifying your claims when you can just operate under the declaration of “proclaiming the Biblical truth” about “homosexuals?”
Exodus board member Phil Burress is the president of Ohio’s misnamed Citizens for Community Values, which identifies itself as “Officially Associated with Focus on the Family and Family Research Council as a Family Policy Council in Ohio.”
According to the Dayton Daily News (Oct. 15), Burress’ organization is seeking to overturn Ohio’s 27-year-old law against domestic violence, claiming that it conflicts with the state’s new gay-marriage ban.
The Ohio Supreme Court will hear State v. Carswell in December. If the court strikes down part of the domestic-violence law, it could wipe out longstanding legal protections for unmarried Ohioans in abusive relationships.
According to the Dayton Daily News,
In the past two years, more than 60 men accused of domestic violence against their girlfriends have argued that Ohio’s domestic-violence law conflicts with the ban:
• The constitutional amendment bars state or local governments from granting a legal status to relationships that approximate marriage.
• The domestic-violence law protects people “living as a spouse.”
CCV filed an amicus brief against part of the domestic-violence law. According to the Dayton Daily News,
CCV argued that while the group deplores domestic violence, the marriage amendment should be broadly applied and part of the law ruled unconstitutional.
“CCV believes a case such as this could lead to an inadvertent narrowing of the scope of the amendment by the court, as the motivation is great to preserve an understandably popular statute in its present form,” CCV attorney David Langdon wrote. … [snip]
CCV, Carswell’s attorney and the Ohio Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers argue that the part of the domestic violence law that includes people “living as a spouse” conflicts with the constitution because it grants a legal status to relationships that approximate marriage.
In other words, CCV’s opposition to any social recognition of unmarried couples trumps society’s need to reduce violent crime, and the needs of abused partners.
Previous XGW coverage of Exodus board member Phil Burress and CCV.
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