Ex-Gay Watch

Exodus International - 190 N Westmonte Dr Altamonte Springs , FL

Exodus President Alan Chambers called a meeting together this past November 16.  The subject was quite simply how to keep Exodus International from social and financial oblivion.  In attendance were Exodus leadership, prominent religious leaders (such as Gabe Lyons) and lay people.  The latter were mostly those who once counted themselves in the ex-gay camp but now are either in the process of changing their views or are fully gay affirming.

We had been following odd activity at Exodus for some time.  It was clear that something was up but only after being contacted by some of those directly involved did our speculation clarify into fact.  The past couple of years have seen Exodus cut it’s staff, lose key alliances, and suffer from a general moderation in American views toward homosexuality.  So difficult has this been for them that they have increased efforts abroad where there exists less formal opposition to their message — that living a gay affirming life is sinful, wrong and unhealthy, and change is the only way to truly please God.

Three years ago, Exodus purchased a building for a little over $1.1 Million.  This was at the height of the real estate bubble and it’s value must have decreased significantly since.  While they seem to have shed as many of their obligations as possible, debt service for that building must be a great draw on their meager resources.  According to IRS documents, they burned through $200,000 of their savings in 2010 alone.  In short, if they continue on their current trajectory, there seems little doubt that Exodus will fold in the near future.

Knowing this, Chambers called the New York meeting together and posed the question, “how can we save Exodus?”  Unfortunately for those of us who might have a glimmer of hope to the contrary, this plea does not seem to be based on any deep, inner change of heart or ideology.  According to first person accounts, the emphasis was on how to make Exodus more “donor accessible.”  The meeting was filled with the modern lingo of those who advise on the solicitation of charitable funds.  This is about money. Read more…

Roger Crouch, the British activist who led the charge against homophobic bullying following the death of his teenage son, has died.

Dom Crouch committed suicide in 2010, saying he had been the victim of malicious gay rumours. His father, Roger, and mother, Paola, have since dedicated themselves to fighting homophobia and speaking out against bullying.

Earlier this month, the UK LGBT lobbying group Stonewall awarded him the title of Hero of the Year, an honour voted for by the organization’s supporters. Receiving the award, Roger said:

I see this as an award for Dom. I want to say by choosing us for this award you’ve also chosen to take a stand alongside all the young people whose lives have been ended by bullying. We are parents who loved our son. We stood by him in life and we stand by him in death.

Below, watch Roger speak about his son:

Roger’s passing was reported by his wife on the Friends of Dom Crouch Facebook Page last night.

-A Baptist congregation in North Carolina votes against conducting any more weddings until gay couples can legally marry.

-Jayson Littman shares his experiences as a Jewish ex-gay.

-The Nigerian government considers a same-sex marriage ban.

-An Orthodox Jewish rabbi marries a gay couple.

-Major League Baseball adds sexual orientation to its anti-discrimination provision.

-Three men are sentenced to prison in Cameroon for having sex with each other.

-The US Supreme Court rejects Protect Marriage Washington’s attempt to keep its petition signers anonymous.

-Fifteen transgender individuals are killed in a fire in Delhi, India.

-Get Up Australia releases a powerful new ad for marriage equality.

Current PFOX president Greg Quinlan appeared for an interview recently on a local D.C. station.  While the interviewer, Mark Segraves (WDCW-TV), was better prepared than most, it doesn’t seem he understood the depth of misinformation Quinlan is willing to put forth.  It would take a week to tease through the factual errors in this short interview, and much of it has been covered before.  For example, claims that PFOX won a suit in D.C to have ex-gays considered a protected class have been confronted before.

Quinlan goes on to accuse noted geneticist Dean Hamer of lying about his research, Dr. Robert Spitzer of not knowing what his own research says on the possibility of sexual orientation change,  and claims that AIDS is a “homosexual disease.”  This is not the first time Quinlan has been accused of distorting a researchers work.

Most astounding were Quinlan’s claims that Truth Wins Out director Wayne Besen wanted someone to run him over with a bus, or inject him with AIDS:

Truth Wins Out if you look further, including Wayne Besen. He’s asked for people, you know, somebody needs to run Greg over. He needs to be hit with a bus. Somebody should inject him with AIDS. Those are the things that Wayne Besen and Truth Wins Out says about me. That’s pretty hateful rhetoric.

These are serious allegations and demand a solid source for confirmation.  For the record, Besen denies ever making the comments and we join him in challenging Quinlan to produce evidence of this claim.  It’s worth reviewing the video in full just to see how fast and lose Quinlan plays with the truth.

Greg Quinlan is listed as president of the anti-gay PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays), and also claims to work full-time for the New Jersey Family Policy Council, a conservative lobbying organization.  One can only wonder what he tells lawmakers.

Full Video Here

One aspect glossed over in recent media reports about Liverpool Frontline Church and its ex-gay ministry is its roots in an American ministry, LIFE. Here’s how I summarized the issue back in July, for The Guardian‘s Comment is free:

But let’s be clear that concern over the Life connection is not a simple matter of guilt by association. Joanne Highley, a woman who teaches that homosexual orientation is a sin that can be cured by a combination of psychological therapy and prayer, personally visited Frontline multiple times to help establish an ex-gay ministry based explicitly on her teachings and methods.

Oklahoma-born Joanne Highley founded LIFE in New York City with her husband (now deceased), Ron Highley. She continues to run the ministry from her Manhattan offices — and Liverpool Frontline Church continues its ongoing association with LIFE NYC and Joanne Highley, the preacher and teacher who helped them found their own version of LIFE in the UK.

Highley describes herself as a former lesbian who was delivered from her homosexuality through, among other things, having demons cast out of her. Here’s a clip of Highley sharing her own testimony of deliverance, as shown in the 2008 documentary Chasing the Devil: Inside the Ex-Gay Movement:

In all its complaints about how the media has misrepresented its ex-gay ministry, Frontline has yet to address the question why it chose to align so closely with Highley, an obvious extremist. Frontline has failed to explain why it continues to foster such an association. Why, if the church, as it claims, is lovingly supporting gays and lesbians in a way that simply reflects the same traditional beliefs held by millions of orthodox Christians, has it decided to throw in its lot with Highley — and why is it saying nothing about that deeply troubling connection? Read more…

-A coalition of civil rights groups renews the campaign for marriage equality in Washington State.

-Baylor University quietly renames a sociology course originally titled “Homosexuality as a Gateway Drug.”

-An anti-LGBT bill is introduced in the Legislative Assembly of Saint Petersburg, Russia.

-Oklahoma City adds sexual orientation to its employment anti-discrimination law.

-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan publicly endorses marriage equality.

-Amanda Terkel examines NOM’s claims of victimhood.

-The California Supreme Court rules that proponents of Prop 8 have standing to appeal Perry vs. Brown.

-An Oklahoma pastor bears false witness.

-A Republican official in Texas comes out of the closet.

Local government, police and community investors have distanced themselves from Frontline Church in Liverpool, England, after details of its “gay conversion” ministry were publicized.

In July, I wrote for The Guardian‘s Comment is free about Liverpool LIFE ministry, a group patterned after LIFE NYC, an extreme, anti-gay organization founded by Joanne Highley.

Although Frontline’s defenders are quick to claim they’re only following traditional Christian teaching, Joanne Highley’s teaching goes far beyond the “orthodox” Christian view of homosexuality. Among other things, she believes and practices casting demons out of any bodily orifice that has been penetrated and received an “ungodly deposit of semen.” For Highley, gay sexual orientation in itself is sinful, and it’s something that can be completely cured through prayer, exorcism and dealing with the emotional wounds that supposedly caused it in the first place. She tells her clients to cut off all gay friends completely, as they were never true friends in the first place.

Frontline Church has said it doesn’t follow all of Highley’s teachings, but it has not explained why it made and retains such close ties with an obvious extremist.

The church’s allies in the community are evidently not impressed by the revelation of Frontline’s ex-gay ministry. According to the Liverpool Echo, Merseyside Police has asked the church to stop referring to the regional police force as an “official partner.” Housing association Plus Dane has pulled funding from the church’s Food Bank. And Liverpool Council has said it “would not fund an organisation or its activities where they contradicted our equalities and cohesion policy in the way alleged in this case.”

The story has also been picked up by national newspapers The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Also, check out Ex-Gay Watch’s previous coverage of the backstory on Liverpool Frontline Church’s promise of a gay cure.

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Correction (11/17/11): The original article incorrectly stated Plus Dane would continue to fund the church’s Food Bank. Plus Dane has, in fact, withdrawn all funding from Frontline.

-300 gay Mormons hold a conference in Salt Lake City.

-An anonymous anti-gay flyer taints a Virginia state senate race.

-60 major corporations join the battle against the Defense of Marriage Act.

-The United Kingdom lifts its ban on blood donations by gay men.

-A gay man and a transgender woman win seats in Poland’s parliament.

-LGBT and gay-friendly candidates fare well on election day.

-Director Brett Ratner steps down as a producer of the Academy Awards in the wake of his recent anti-gay comments.

-Basic Rights Oregon opts against pursuing a marriage equality ballot measure in 2012.

-American soccer player David Testo comes out of the closet.

-Gay rights pioneer Barbara Grier dies at age 78.

In 2007, the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) posted an article by Dean Byrd on their website.  It seemed written to give the impression that noted geneticist Dr. Francis Collins agreed with both the idea that homosexuality did not have a genetic cause and that it could be changed or prevented.  To be sure, NARTH believes all this, but it did not sound like something with which Dr. Collins would agree.  Collins has a reputation for being a brilliant and reasonable scientist, passionate about the truth.

A careful reading of Byrd’s article revealed some select comments from Collin’s book conflated with Byrd’s pontifications and information from other sources.  We decided it best to contact Collins with our concerns to find out what he really thought.  All this along with Collins’ response is detailed in our subsequent post where Collins essentially agreed with our assessment and then some (read the article for details).

Since then, we have had to recall, re-emphasize and defend that exchange as various groups and individuals repeated the distorted notion of Byrd’s article.  Collins was contacted again and reconfirmed his original position.  Then early this year NARTH resurrected the issue after receiving copies of this writer’s email exchanges with Collins via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.  While they claimed they had made the request themselves, we now know that the information was forwarded to them from the anti-gay Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum who had made the original FOIA request.

In their most recent post, NARTH accused this writer of flattering Collins with “adulation and praise,” and misrepresenting NARTH and Byrd’s article. They announced their discovery of the email exchange as a find, even though the entire thing has been posted on XGW since 2008 for all to see.  Read our response to this if you care to get up to speed on the matter.

We decided to take a page from their book and request any correspondence between NARTH and Collins.  In response, we received a copy of a letter (PDF) sent to him by NARTH President Julie Hamilton sometime after they received the FOIA material from CRC.  In it, Collins is treated more like a doddering old man than the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Even though we sent a link to the original article with our email to Collins, and it is clear from his reply that he read it, Hamilton encloses a copy noting “Although Warren Throckmorton [see this post to see where he comes in] and David Roberts led you to believe otherwise, your statements were not misrepresented by NARTH.”  No, Dr. Collins, regardless of what you think, you do agree with us — sheer arrogance.

Hamilton continues to reassure Collins that what he said he saw in the article is not there.  One can almost visualize her speaking slowly to help him understand, the supposition being that if Collins didn’t agree with NARTH, he must certainly have just not understood.  There seems no way for them to comprehend that he really does think they misrepresented him.  Hamilton goes on to lecture Collins in the NARTH mantra of change, trying to plead the case that NARTH is a professional organization and not at all anti-gay.

At the end, Hamilton does what she accused yours truly of, she flatters Collins with her own brand of adulation and praise:

I hope you receive this letter with the sincerity with which it was written.  Your book, The Language of God, has brought joy to many religious professionals, demonstrating that science and faith tradition are not inherently incompatible.  As an evangelical Christian, I testify to God’s love, and it is His love that many of us who provide professional care to those who are distressed by unwanted homosexual attractions find central to our motivation to help.

It should be noted that our FOIA request parameters were broad and yet no reply from Collins to NARTH was included.  In other words, while Collins responded not once but three times to our requests, he did not reply to NARTH’s one and only letter.  That says a lot.

Letter from NARTH to Dr. Francis Collins (PDF)

The founder of a Brazilian group that claims to heal homosexuals has come out against them in an interview with the “Flying Teapot Project” blog.

The English and philosophy teacher, also a theologian, Sergio Viula, 42, born and resident in Rio de Janeiro, was one of the founders of the Movement for the Healthy Sexuality (MOSES), an evangelical NGO which helps people interested in quitting homosexuality.

He tells a tale familiar to that of John Smid, who recently came out against Exodus. Viula recounts how he got married and had children, only to admit that his attraction to men never went away. In fact, according to him, no gay person had ever succeeded in changing their orientation.

[Interviewer] Didn’t you ever get convinced that you had become ex-gay? Did you ever know that you were deceiving yourself?

[Viula] Today I know that I was deceiving myself. But back then, I thought that every sentiment or attraction was a mere case of ‘temptation’ and that it could be overcome with prayer and dedication to god. In the group, we used to think, basically speaking, that being gay was a sin, which should be confessed and abandoned and, therefore, we would proselytize, counsel, pray, preach, recommend certain books, read the Bible – things that believers usually do, but focusing on homosexuality itself … I worked 18 years totals with the church, MOSES started in 1997. In 2003 I was out. I spent about seven years within the group.

Viula is left with much anger toward the ex-gay industry, and tells of MOSES’ utterly abysmal success rate:

Nobody really quit being gay. There were relationships even within the group, between an activity and another, they would always find time for that. Can you figure out how much suffering to myself and to all of those who have already worked or been influenced by this kind of ‘ministry’? That’s enraging! And there are people repeating that stupid discourse until today.

After Smid and former Exodus Global Alliance counselor Paul Martin, Viula is the third ex-ex-gay leader to come out recently against the movement. The dominoes seem to be falling.

H/T commenter James