Chambers Is Blind to His Own Prejudice
In his latest article for Charisma magazine, Exodus President Alan Chambers speaks a lot of truth, but is blinkered to how it applies to his own organization.
With amusing timing, Chambers remembers a school bully who picked on him for being gay – and later turned out to be gay himself. He writes:
I did feel some empathy for him, but the fact that he was launching an all out verbal assault on me while he was struggling with the same issues was tough to reconcile. … [He] shunned me and encouraged others to do the same. I guess insecure people often displace their insecurity by demonizing others.
In a statement reverberating with irony, Chambers says that as he went from junior to high school, “I did a lot to repackage my image and worked hard to overcome anything that would hint that I might be gay.”
Little has changed, but Chambers cannot see it. Twenty-plus years later, ex-gays are still trying to repackage their image with the help of Exodus; and while Exodus’s attacks on gays may take on a more sophisticated form than the juvenile taunting of Alan’s classmates, it is nonetheless bullying borne out of fear.
“Chambers remembers a school bully who picked on him for being gay – and later turned out to be gay himself”
That’s the oldest story in the book. Almost every gay person I’ve ever talked to said their school bully turned out to be a flaming queen, come the first high school reunion.
From the Charisma article, Alan writes:
Hypocritical? That’s quite a statement considering Alan de-friended me a while back. I emailed to ask why and he never replied. At least those people told Alan why.
So, Alan Chambers tells stories about an alleged bully who turned out to be gay, and alleged friends that de-friended him due to his “controversial” ex-gay lifestyle.
The problem with all this is that I don’t believe the stories. The bully story seems common enough, and has happened to others. It is as likely that Alan borrowed someone else’s experience than had one himself.
The same goes for his de-friending experience. It is as likely that he made it up to paint himself as an ex-gay victim of discrimination, than him being the victim of shunning.
Alan Chambers has lied about so many things over the years that there is no reason to believe anything he says. Perhaps he should stop trying to paint himself as the victim and address real victims of discrimination: like the Ugandans who may suffer imprisonment, mob violence and possibly death at the hands of the mobs his organization riled up to persecute innocent people who are just trying to survive. Hmmm. That sort of action sounds like bullying taken to its logical extreme.
Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
What you resist, persists.
Maybe they defriended him because he supports human rights abuses abroad.
Although I think Chambers is probably ridiculously wrong in his assessment of his Facebook friends’ “intolerance,” I can understand where he was coming from. I remember being asked in a college class once whether I had ever been a victim of prejudice. Being a closeted homosexual and a fundamentalist, I related the story of a schoolfriend’s (lesbian) mother who had banned me from her house “because I was a Christian.” I always treated her nicely when I saw her, always treated her “with respect,” never treated her differently from anyone else, so why had she made me unwelcome in her house?
What I couldn’t see at the time was what a slap in the face it was to her that I would openly share with her son my belief that gays would be punished with eternal hell. I was oblivious to how utterly offensive and demeaning that was to her as a lesbian. Sounds crazy, but I just couldn’t see it. To me her attitude was “anti-Christian prejudice.” I expect Alan sees things much like I saw things when I was a teenage fundamentalist.
lol sounds like a bad horror movie – “I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist”
You know, for all that work Alan did in his youth to “not appear gay,” he didn’t do such a great job. Like Randy (seen here asserting his masculinity), he would be picked out by anybody looking to assault a gay person on the street.
…”No, you don’t understand, I’m POST-gay, I’m not really gay! And I might struggle with SSA, but really I’m NOT gay so you don’t need to pick on me!”
But such linguistic gymnastics don’t matter to a bully.
I “second” that emotion!
I just want to comment here after re-reading the article three times. Is it just me or does it read like one of those parody letters/posts where someone takes a pro-side letter change a few words and turns it into a anti-side letter?
The whole thing read like a support letter for “Day of Silence”.
Being bullied for being gay lead to re-branding himself as straight, which was hurtful and painful and failed solve his problems. Further more this re-branding lead to further “betrayal” by friends who didn’t approve of his re-branded self.
How is that supporting “Day of Truth”?
Young folks have to be trained to go against their baser instincts of isolating the weak and hurting them. It’s primitive and the domain of animals and adolescents, not civilized human beings that respond to the weak with real compassion, not control.
It follows some people’s nature to want to have a life of discipline and regimentation after many years of chaos and disruption and failure.
That’s not a ‘gay thing’.
Gay people are just PERCEIVED as weak in general, but perhaps particularly attract bullies because some kids aren’t raised to defend themselves.
And gay children AREN’T trained early to defend themselves, because the bullies aren’t always their school peers, but the adults in charge of their lives as well.
Chambers and so on, never got over mobbing up with their earliest detractors.
There still some arrest there, I think. A need to control as well as BE controlled. And it’s just easier to think of gay people as the ones deserving of that control, regardless of how much more satisfied and in control of their own lives in way Chambers never accomplished as a gay person.
We accept what we are familiar with as ‘human nature’, but the conflict here is really understanding that and differentiating how one treats another person, as opposed to how they want to be treated.
One can be caught up in the ex gay thing in a period of weakness and strong NEED to belong and be accepted by heterosexuals (i.e. being like them) , OR….one can realize that it’s not heterosexuality or heterosexuals that are the path to God, faith or happiness.
But gaining strength (and wisdom) from the experience of learning to know what God gave you and taking CARE of it, not killing it.
Chambers hasn’t caught wise yet.
I just read the entire article. In some ways, I think he has a point. Mainline Christianity is moving towards tolerance leaving the anti-gay sects more to the fringe and making them appear like social outcasts. But the way he writes… …it just irritates me. Like that time he claimed legalized gay marriage would have ‘blinded’ him to the better heterosexual life God had intended for him. Give-me-a-break!
You’d think that if Alan Chambers had such a traumatic experience as a youth, and that now he is a Christian, that he would not coward to the side of the bullies but rather stand firm in his faith and his true identity. The “bully” he encountered was not just gay but A GAY IN DENIAL. Seems he’s still catering his life to this type of gays.
I agree with Emily when she said:
I’ve mentioned this before, when I called Exodus the first time and the guy at the other end sounded so effeminate that my intial reaction was that, if I went exgay I was going to end up sounding like a Liza Manelli impersonator! And listening to Alan Chambers it could have very well been him on that phone that time.
If only Alan and his crusaders at Exodus could focus on acceptance they could help someone today in high school who is going through what Alan went through by letting people know it is NOT ok to discriminate, and that God loves us with no strings attached.
The hate message, unfortunately, is still coming from the pulpit to the parents to the kids. And as long as that cycle continues, incidents like what Alan Chambers described are going to continue. The cycle will only stop when the pulpit preaches LOVE, PEACE, TOLERANCE, and UNITY instead of HATE, WAR, DISCRIMINATION, and DIVISION.
So…. Chambers’ definition of “Facebook friend” is someone who endures his intentional lies about them because if they don’t, he will brand them “intolerant” of his lies and “hypocritical” for requiring two-way respect as a condition of friendship?
What remarkable egocentrism.
Heaven will be hell for Alan, when he discovers he’s not a center of others’ attention. Alan reaps from friendships what he sows — which is pretty much nothing.
He reserves the right to believe in doing to others what others should not do to him. And for him, that is the real human right. Perhaps because no one can have the right to just live as they are, but rather as they should be in supressing themselves. And in the process, Alan Chambers is now doing to himself (surpress), what he is doing to others (surpress); and by criminalizing gays via Exodus, he can blind others into believing that he is not “a gay”, that he is separate from gays in the world, that he does not need to be “a gay” anymore.
Anyone who supports the sending of Scott Lively to any country on behalf of Exodus is more than blind. They are trying to blind other people.
I’m quite sure that our 6 year old niece could bitch-slap that immature man into a crying fit if she needed to — boo-hoo — and yet his organisation is actively working to support the persecution and criminalisation of gay men and women.
‘Understanding’ persecution doesn’t mean ‘learning’ how to do it.
Humanity 101 is not the only subject that Alan Chambers failed in high school.
I don’t know whether to be amused or horrified by Alan’s attitude:
~And God retched~
“started speaking in a mocking … The message was clear, “Alan is gay.””
And in an instant, Alan understood. He was the ugliest thing God had ever seen.
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And after sharing the persecutorial testimony of his narrow escape from the ever pursuant clutches of the odious jaws of same-gender attraction, he concludes with a plug for Day of Truth:
“Many students will risk the rejection of their peers and subject themselves to outright discrimination on April 20 to stand up for biblical truth on campuses nationwide on the Day of Truth.”
Which was created in direct response to Day of Silence:
“…to bring attention to the name-calling, bullying and harassment — in effect, the silencing — experienced by LGBT students.”
Day of Truth‘s FAQ portrayal of Day of Silence:
Immediately portraying the victims of bullying, and their supporters, as a threat to be fought.
The message is clear, “being bullied is all part of our sinister plan.”