Ex-Gay Watch

British teenager Michael Causer died on August 2, 2008, aged 18, a week after being beaten and stabbed for being gay.

Almost three years after this brutal, homophobic hate crime, Michael’s family, along with the LGBT community in Liverpool and across the UK, are asking why the story was largely ignored by the national media in the UK. This short documentary on the subject, The Invisible Death of Michael, retells Michael Causer’s story and features interviews with his family and gay activists, including Peter Tatchell.

Michael lived in the village of Whiston, Merseyside, in the neighbourhood I call home. He was murdered a short distance away, in the adjacent town of Huyton. This documentary was jointly produced by Light Factory and Homotopia, the queer arts festival based in nearby Liverpool. If one positive has come of Michael’s tragic story, it’s that its horrific injustice has strengthened the resolve of the local LGBT to unite and fight homophobia in the city.

A BC Conservative Party leadership candidate has said in a radio interview that gays should not have “special rights” because homosexuality is a choice.

John Cummins, who recently stepped down as Conservative Member of Parliament for Delta-Richmond East to run as leader of the BCCP, told Victoria’s CFAX Radio that he’s “not a scientist, [but] some of the research tells me that there’s more of an indication that that’s a choice issue.”

According to the Times Colonist (Victoria), Cummins later told reporters, “I’m pro-life, I’m protraditional marriage, that’s my view, I’m not a scientist.” He refused to defend his views, saying they were “personal issues, private issues.”

In 1996, as an MP, Cummins voted against introducing sexual orientation under the Canadian Human Rights Act, which lists “prohibited grounds of discrimination,” including religion, race and gender.

In the run-up to the recent election, many of us here in Canada were concerned that a majority Conservative government would put power in the hands of social conservatives who want to curb the rights of gays and lesbians. In 2006, 110 out of 124 Conservative MPs (and a minority of Liberals) voted unsuccessfully to turn back the clock on same-sex marriage and “restore traditional marriage,” in a free vote called for by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Harper, who returned to parliament with his first majority government last week, said during the election campaign he would not reopen the same-sex marriage debate. Cummins’s comments are a reminder that social conservatives — holding unscientific, religiously motivated views that can and will be used to discriminate against LGBT persons — are still a presence in Canadian politics.

Meanwhile, a new study finds that two out of three non-heterosexual kids in Canada don’t feel safe in their schools.

[This story has been updated to make a factual correction.]

According to a Parliament of Uganda order paper published today, a second reading of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 is imminent.

The legislation, dubbed the “Kill the Gays” bill, would effectively make homosexuality a capital offence. Related offenses of “promoting” homosexuality could carry the same punishment.

While the order paper doesn’t make it certain the reading will be soon, Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin has done the math and considers it likely the bill will be addressed by the Parliament of Uganda on Wednesday, May 10.

There are several petitions circulating. I’m generally skeptical of internet petitions — do they really achieve anything? — but at this stage, anything’s worth a shot. Click here to sign the All Out petition.

For a concise run-down of the facts on the bill, see my previous post: Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009: Just the Facts.

Update: Here’s the email I sent to my local MP, Rick Dykstra, asking him to raise the issue with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Exodus International President Alan Chambers is upset at a TV commercial aimed at encouraging gay teen victims of homophobic bullying.

The ex-gay leader told the Christian Post he found it “disappointing” that the commercial used the character of Woody, the cowboy from the Disney/Pixar movie Toy Story:

Children all over the world, including my two children are fans of Toy Story and to see a character like that endorsing something that at this point children have no need to know about, it’s disappointing.

The ad, a promo for Google Chrome and part of the It Gets Better campaign, aired during an episode of Glee last week. Why would Alan’s five- and six-year-old would be watching a show like Glee anyway? Alan worries that if his kids “happen to see that and ask questions and if they get the full understanding of what the commercial is actually about, we will have to have the conversation. It’s not something I plan to talk to my kids … about.” One wonders why this concern about children having “the conversation” was never a problem with Exodus’s own highly public billboard campaigns.

But, while “it gets better” for targets of anti-gay bullying, Chambers’s message only gets worse:

“For organizations like Exodus International, which has thousands of men and women like me who have lived a gay life, it obviously didn’t get better living a gay life for them. I would say that today it has become radically better,” he said.

“I think that we have to promote the stories of people who have found an alternative to homosexuality but I think that at the same time the church has to do a better job at addressing issues related to bullying and violence and how kids have been treated at public schools.”

Chambers encourages the church and celebrities alike to stand up and be “supportive of our Christian values and to stand up and proclaim that.”

Let’s think about what Chambers is really saying here: He doesn’t want this positive message going out to gays because his ministry depends on homosexuals being unhappy. He pays lip service to “addressing” anti-gay bullying and violence, but his ultimate concern is that if gays are too happy, Exodus International is out of business.

Here’s the nasty, brutal reality of Exodus and “gay cure” organizations like it: They have a vested interest in keeping gays oppressed.

We’ve heard this before. When Chambers addressed his fellow Christians at last year’s Lausanne Conference, he said as much. Exodus accepts gays as long as they know their place. Exodus’s acceptance is for gays and lesbians who are helpless victims, willing to be pitied and then fixed. The more gays become well-adjusted and content, the less there is for Exodus to do — and that’s Alan’s biggest problem.

Watch the commercial for yourself, and see just how inoffensive it really is:

In an opinion piece for Christianity Today, Timothy Shah absolves American evangelicals from any responsibility for homophobia in Uganda and says the Anti-Homosexuality Bill is “a single legislative stunt by a single low-level politician.”

Shah responds to the claim that a 2009 conference stirred up anti-gay sentiments . The agenda of its American organizers, Shah says, was “therapeutic, whereas Mr Bahati’s bill is remorselessly punitive.” The reference is to David Bahati, the Ugandan MP who attended the conference and was later to draft the bill that would effectively put to death homosexuals and their supporters in Uganda.

Therapeutic? Perhaps Shah has not seen this video from the conference, in which historical revisionist Scott Lively explains his theory that homosexuals were behind the atrocities of the Holocaust and Rwanda:

Following the conference, chief organizer Stephen Langa, of the Family Life Network, continued to promote Lively’s so-called history of the “gay movement,” a fabrication that connects homosexuality to Nazism, communism and pedophilia. Lively later described his visit as “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.”

Along with other commentators, we predicted an increase in anti-gay violence in Uganda — and it happened.

More video at BTB.

Joel Burns shares his moving personal story of surviving anti-gay bullying with his fellow Fort Worth City, TX, council members:

Hat tip: Towleroad

Several anti-gay and ex-gay Christian and political groups want to prevent schools from addressing homophobic bullying by name. Day of Truth, sponsored by Exodus International, exists in deliberate opposition to Day of Silence, a day established to address the problem of anti-gay bullying and harassment in schools.

And yet the last few weeks have seen a spate of high-profile teen suicides apparently provoked by homophobic bullying. Billy Lucas, Jaheem Herrera, Seth Walsh and Asher Brown are just a few of the most recent teenagers to kill themselves after being bullied because they were–or people thought they were–gay.

Today, police have identified a body as that of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University, NJ, who threw himself off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate secretly filmed him having gay sex and broadcast it live online. Before his death, he told an internet forum he felt like Dharun Ravi, also 18, was telling the world, “Look at what a fag my roommate is.”

And religious right groups like Focus on the Family continue to deny that addressing homophobia in schools is necessary:

Do you sometimes wonder what century we’re living in that swaths of people would gladly ignore the prejudice and hatred that is leading to the death of these innocent young people?

This is a clear, concise and accurate analysis of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009, with its  implications laid out simply and horrifyingly. The narrator of this video demonstrates faultlessly that the bill in its current form would mean death not only for gays, but for anyone who supports them.

For more clear analysis, see Ex-Gay Watch’s earlier post Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009: Just the Facts.

A tip of the hat to Harry’s Place for the video.

Leading evangelical magazine Christianity Today has weighed in on Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009. In an editorial appearing today without attribution, CT urges American Christians to “listen, then speak.”

Faced with the possibility that thousands of Ugandans will be put to death, the writer has the audacity to say approvingly that “for American Christian leaders, both silence and open condemnation end up violating important missional and human-rights principles.”

This isn’t an argument about abstract moral principles. This is about human lives.

I can’t be the only homosexual wondering what human-rights principle could possibly be getting in the way of the clear condemnation of a law that would have you and me executed?

Despite the best efforts of activists, and political and social commentators, ignorance abounds concerning the atrocious Anti-Homosexuality Bill being proposed in Uganda at the moment.

Among the myths being perpetrated are that the legislation is only there to protect the “vulnerable,” such as children and the disabled, and that the death penalty either is being proposed only for these offenses or has been dropped altogether. All of these claims are false. The bill is effectively a mandate for the genocide/mass slaughter/mass murder/wholesale execution – call it what you will – of gays. Read more…