Ex-Gay Watch

Source: Peterson Toscano

In a recent post on his blog, Peterson Toscano’s A Musing, Peterson asks these important questions. As has been noted before, often those with stories of change describe a past which many of us would find frightening.

When looking at most Exodus testimonies, we hear stories of people who lived as sexually addicted, miserable, lonely, faithless, confused people (who also overindulged in drug and alcohol abuse, illegal activities and unprotected sex). They found Jesus and the church, and they changed their lives.

They became celibate, began to develop healthy relationships, changed their lifestyle–not to a straight one, but to one far less reckless and destructive than their previous life.

When people hear that “change is possible,” what change are they expecting? And for those who want it, why do they want it? For at least some, it would appear they are struggling to escape a life of dangerous addictions and excess, for which others have blamed their attraction to the same sex. But what about the others?

Sure we can choose to no longer identify as gay. We can deny ourselves relationships with LGBT people. We can even marry someone of the opposite sex and have children. This is no great miracle. Men and women have done this for centuries with and without the help of Jesus.

Why is it necessary to change? Mostly because life would be easier for many of us. Parents would treat us better. Society would gift us with privileges and affirmation. We can feel normal for a change, for a time.

It’s not difficult to see why some would seek to change that part of themselves which those around them consider wrong, sinful, and sick, is it? But in the end, how can they most be helped? There are plenty who offer to help them do the impossible, who sympathize with their dilemma and reinforce it. But what does that really do for those in need? Is there a better answer?

Is change possible? Yes, our societies and churches and families and laws can change so that people who are romantically and sexually attracted to people of the same-sex can be fully accepted and affirmed and celebrated just like heterosexuals. This change takes work and love and listening and painful realization, but well worth the effort.

Read the full post here, it’s excellent. And to those who are gay and perhaps find the idea of being so difficult to deal with, do yourself a favor and “Question Change.”

Speaking of his four years attending New Hope Ministry, and Exodus International member ministry, Shawn O’Donnell describes how his group would go down to the mall to ogle guys after church on Sundays. After a while he realized the “therapy” just wasn’t working.

Source: Truth Wins Out

I’ve been the victim of sexual harassment.

Near the end of my 20-year, U.S. Navy career, a subordinate of mine decided I was gay and didn’t want me in his Navy – he talked to my last four division officers trying to get an investigation into my alleged homosexuality started on me.

My subordinate finally found a sympathetic ear in a new Executive Officer (XO). I got called in front of the XO twice. I’d stayed within the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) rules, but he asked me if I were gay anyway.

I wrote up my subordinate and my XO for male-on-male sexual harassment — they violated the DADT rules in a way that met the Navy’s three criteria for sexual harassment:

1. The attention was unwelcome.
2. The harassment was sexual in nature.
3. The harassment involved the workplace.

Unfortunately for my harassers, for seven years of my military career I’d been a Naval Equal Opportunity and Sexual Harassment instructor. Both of my harassers were found at the end of investigation to have committed male-on-male sexual harassment. The Navy didn’t take male-on-male sexual harassment seriously, so my subordinate’s punishment was a verbal reprimand, and my XO got a “fiche 5″ service record entry.

I knew the rules and criteria for sexual harassment. (One can read more of my DADT story on the SLDN‘s or HRC‘s website.)

Why mention my story of harassment here? Matt Barber of the Concerned Women For America’s Culture And Family Institute recently announced what he believes a sexually harassing, hostile work environment is created when a transwoman uses a female designated bathroom.

Read more…

Read through the materials of just about any Christian organization that speaks out against gay relationships, and you’ll almost certainly find reference to Leviticus 18:22. The wordings of our English translations of the verse appear very clear, and at face value lend weight to those groups’ political crusade against gay rights. One can, after all, hardly speak positively about anything that God called an “abomination.”

Of course, there are many other “abominations” listed in the Old Testament, shellfish being the most famous example, so conservative theologians have been forced to refine their arguments to explain why some of Moses’ commands are still applicable today and some are not. To facilitate this, a third category was added to the Law; in addition to the ceremonial laws and the purity laws, they argued, there are also universal moral laws.

Whereas the ceremonial and purity laws are easily distinguishable based on context, the primary criterion for determining whether a command falls into the universal moral law is whether it appears to be something that most Christians would agree ought to be considered wrong under any circumstances. Since such acts as murder, theft, adultery and incest are clearly wrong regardless of whether one is an observant Jew, then commands found against those activities must be exceptions to the freedom that the New Testament grants Christians from the Law.

The problem with this approach is that it requires one to pick individual verses out of the Pentateuch while in many cases ignoring other verses immediately before and after. Not in every case – one can make a reasonable case for placing the Ten Commandments in the category of universal law, and few Christians would dispute such a claim – but even here we have a command (observing the Sabbath) that carries little or no weight in many churches.

Read more…

We don’t discuss politics at XGW and we don’t plan to start now, but one has to take note of such hubris. Today we received this email titled “Special Report” from the Focus on the Family mock news site CitizenLink. It was brightly colored to set it apart from all the others we get from them, even the one announcing Jerry Falwell’s recent passing. Braced for the earth shaking news, I opened it to read the following:

Focus on the Family Action Alert:
Dr. James Dobson Says Won’t Vote for Giuliani

“It is an irrevocable decision.”

That was the entire message.  Besides smacking of the imperial tone which Dobson is so fond of, is there anyone who doesn’t think that the phrase “and neither should you” is implied at the end of that statement? A disclaimer stating that the email is paid for by Focus on the Family Action is included of course, though it seems odd since they want CitizenLink to look like a news site.

Focus on the Family Action was formed under IRS section 501(c)(4), supposedly to keep Focus and Dobson from breaking any of those pesky laws that prohibit politicking by tax exempt organizations. Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter since those laws don’t appear to be causing them any problems anyway.

A major figure in the Religious Right, Jerry Falwell was found unconscious in his office after breakfast this morning and was pronounced dead a few hours later at Lynchburg General Hospital. He had a recent history of heart problems.

Founder of the now defunct Moral Majority in the 1980s, Falwell was arguably one of the architects of what is now called the Religious Right in this country. He held a consistent and vocal anti-gay stance and XGW has had occasion to report on his views and actions a number of times over the years. Recently, however, he seemed to change direction a bit on equality and basic rights for gays and lesbians.

The Rev. Mel White, founder of Soulforce, was once associated with Falwell as a ghost writer among other things. He has devoted a great deal of time and effort into convincing Falwell to change his anti-gay views, as he remembered Falwell changing his anti-civil rights stance for African Americans decades before. Now we will never know how far this change of heart may have gone.

It is unknown who will replace Falwell in his ministry leadership position.

Note: This is a cross post from Box Turtle Bulletin.

If anyone has paid any attention to gay-rights debates over the past three decades, they would have undoubtedly come across at least a few of Paul Cameron’s many pronouncements. As the head of the tiny Family Research Institute (it appears to consist only of himself, his wife, a daughter, and a son who is also a frequent coauthor), he’s nevertheless made a name for himself by publishing more than three-dozen anti-gay “studies,” mostly in the pay-to-publish vanity journal Psychological Reports.

He has also expressed his virulently anti-gay views in several pamphlets (including his most famous pamphlet, “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do“) and in his quasi-monthly newsletters. His penchant for distorting social science research has been denounced by the American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Nebraska Psychological Association. More recently, he’s been called out by the Eastern Psychological Association and in the latest issue of Anthropology News.

n 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report saying, “Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany in that these disparaging descriptions of homosexuals are reminiscent of themes found in the ugly history of anti-Semitism…”. But as we shall see, Cameron does much more than just echo Nazi Germany in his theories on homosexuality. He actually engaged in a bit of holocaust revisionism to advance his cause. And the surprising thing is, this evidence has been right there all along on his web site, largely unnoticed for eight years.

Read more…

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) is concerned that the media isn’t reporting the details of reparative therapy accurately.

“During the past month, Montel Williams and Diane Sawyer have run features dealing with reparative therapy, but neither one of them invited a therapist on their shows to explain it,” said Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D. “Both shows actually dealt with faith-based ministries, not reparative therapy–the approach I developed more than two decades ago. If the mainstream media has any interest in accurately reporting on our therapy, they should invite real reparative therapists to tell their stories.”

Considering Nicolosi’s own bizarre response to CNN’s rather basic questions during a recent Love Won Out event, it’s odd that he would now complain about a lack of investigative interest by the mainstream media. One can sympathize with his desire to save face after the aforementioned tantrum, but Dr. Nicolosi should be reminded that the press is unlikely to submit to his considerable ego in the manner he apparently expects from those around him.

NARTH President-elect A. Dean Byrd, Ph.D., agrees. “Whenever any form of reorientation therapy is discussed in the mainstream media, it usually involves someone who either never went through such therapy, or went through a faith-based process and became disillusioned.

Both Nicolosi and Byrd mention faith-based conversion programs with apparent disdain. Is NARTH now officially expressing what has until now only been rumored — a disagreement with the effectiveness of programs such as Exodus which are not based on his reparative therapy model?

Chuck Colson of BreakPoint Ministries has a very colorful history. The first member of the Nixon administration to serve prison time for the Watergate cover-up, he founded Prison Fellowship Ministries barely two years after in 1976. While Colson has gained respect for his work with prisons, there doesn’t appear to be anything in his history that would prepare him to speak authoritatively on LGBT issues. However, this has not stopped him from chiming in on the subject with only bad sources as a guide, spending his conservative capital to propel his message along the way.

In a recent radio broadcast (Real Audio of the April 23rd broadcast: here) he spoke with great authority on a number of LGBT issues. Some of the quotes from this broadcast, Coming to a School Near You; Normalizing Homosexuality, regarding the Sex Education curriculum controversy of Montgomery County Public Schools, include the following:

Worst of all, there is no mention whatsoever of the many health hazards associated with the gay lifestyle. A Montgomery County parent group, called Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, includes an infectious disease specialist, Dr. Ruth Jacobs. Dr. Jacobs put forward a petition signed by 270 doctors asking Montgomery County to warn kids of the health dangers related to homosexuality. Montgomery County ignored it.

Colson, not surprisingly, falls back on the religious right’s favorite catch-all phrase, “the gay lifestyle,” knowing that none of his listeners will call on him to define it. There is no more one “gay lifestyle” than there is one “straight lifestyle” or one “Christian lifestyle,” of course, but admitting that would undermine his point entirely, since many gay men and women avoid the risky behaviors that Colson attributes to all GLBT individuals.

Dr. Jacobs does appear to be an infectious disease specialist as advertised, which lends weight to her arguments about the dangers of anal sex, but unfortunately she (like Colson) seems to tie her entire argument against the “gay lifestyle” to this particular practice.

Read more…

Reprinted with permission from the SPLC: Intelligence  Report

Rev. Gregory Daniels
By Brentin Mock

CHICAGO — The Rev. Gregory Daniels walks into the South Side’s famous Dixie Kitchen restaurant wearing a full-length chocolate mink coat and glass frames the icy blue color of toothpaste gel.

He knows why he’s been asked for an interview and immediately delves into the sizzling declaration reported in The New York Times in February 2004: “If the KKK opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them.”

It was quite a statement for a black man.

Despite what Daniels now describes as a mere “parable,” the president of United Voters for Truth and Change (UVTC) says he does not hate homosexuals. After all, if it weren’t for a few kind twists of fate, he says, he, too, could have turned out gay.

When he was a teenager, Daniels says, an older man repeatedly propositioned him with money for sex. The young Daniels was broke at the time, so he seriously considered the indecent proposal. His saving grace, he says, was a job offer that solved Daniels’ financial problems. He told the older man to stop calling him.

That wasn’t Daniels’ only rejection of homosexuality, he says. As a child growing up among nine brothers and one sister, he usually chose to play with his sister and her paper dolls, rather than horsing around with his brothers. In high school, he adds, he was teased by the guys because he cooked and cleaned house for his mother.

One day, Daniels says he told his mother, “People are thinking I’m gonna be a sissy.”

“Well, are you?” she replied.

At that point, Daniels explains, he chose not to be.

Today, Daniels says he doesn’t believe that a “special interest” group — men who he believes simply adopted homosexuality — should be entitled to marriage rights. After all, he has been a heterosexual husband of 25 years, a man who “chose” to go straight.

Today, Gregory Daniels is a key player in the religiously based black anti-gay movement. As head of UVTC, his own religious right voter education organization, he has traveled around America, from the Midwest to Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal. He has made his way to Washington, D.C., to confront and lobby lawmakers on issues related to homosexuality.

And he has campaigned to bring more blacks into the Republican fold. During the last presidential campaign, he wrote on Beliefnet.com, a religious news website: “This is our mission — to help President George W. Bush change the wind of destruction to a new wind of freedom and justice for all.”

The church that Daniels used to pastor, Greater Shiloh Missionary Baptist, sits on a block on Chicago’s South Side just across the street from one of relatively few still-standing high-rise public housing projects in America. The ground is littered with empty liquor bottles and patrolled by drug-addicted, drug-peddling teens, and an atmosphere of despair pervades the place. But Daniels doesn’t stress drugs, alcohol and gangs as damaging to inner-city African Americans.

Homosexuality, he tells the Intelligence Report, “is what has destroyed the black community.”

And what about Daniel’s infamous statement about riding with the Klan? Daniels says with a chuckle that he hasn’t heard from the men in white just yet. But he did get a provocative letter, he concedes, from a black woman. “What do you think they gonna do to you,” she asked, “after the ride?”

Intelligence Report
Spring 2007