Ex-Gay Watch

Subtitle: A Biblical and compassionate response to same-sex attraction.
Main authors and editors: Joe Dallas, Nancy Heche.

Part 1, Part 2

This book is an anti-gay training manual. A veritable bible on how to be the best anti-gay Christian you can be. There are a list of key points at the end of each chapter, some of which include mock debates.
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SUICIDE, BULLYING AND VIOLENCE

Nancy Heche on gay teen suicide:

Nancy Heche: A number of studies over the past decade have indicated that rates of suicide attempts, depression, and unhealthy behaviors are higher among gay teens than among their heterosexual counterparts … So the question we face is not “Where’s the blame?” Instead, it’s “Where’s the church?” [p353]

A’hem, Dr. Heche, what say you if the church is to blame?

She also writes the chapter on hate crime legislation. I realize the federal hate crimes law has already been enacted, but I think their defensive posturing on the matter deserves another healthy dose of attention.

Nancy Heche: So when we’re told that additional state and federal laws are statues are now needed, we should request the facts and documentation proving the point. [p439]

“facts and documentation?”

To quote Cecil Terwilliger of the Simpsons (Sideshow Bob’s younger brother):
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Tough-talking Pentecostal Dr Michael Brown is the latest Christian leader to be added to Love Won Out’s roster of conference speakers. In this article, we profile Dr Brown, and ask whether the ex-gay movement’s newest friend might only drag it deeper into “culture wars”.

Who is Brown?

Brown is an Old Testament scholar, a revivalist, a Pentecostal apologist, an evangelist to Jews and an unabashed moral crusader.

He is President of the FIRE School of Ministry, a non-denominational Charismatic Christian training college that grew out of the controversial “Brownsville Revival” (also known as the “Pensacola Outpouring”) of the 1990s. After a split between Brown and John Kilpatrick, then Pastor of the Brownsville Assembly of God, FIRE eventually relocated to Concord, North Carolina.

Since then, Brown has founded the Coalition of Conscience, a Charlotte-based network of conservative Christians working together for “moral and cultural change through the gospel,” and who want to “make an impact for righteousness” in the city. Chief among their activities has been opposing the Charlotte Gay Pride Parade.

Brown is a noted apologist for charismatic revival, particularly that which came out of Toronto in the early 1990s – a revival that divided evangelicals and became known for the exotic behaviour of its participants, including hysterical laughter, fainting (being “slain in the Spirit”), “spiritual drunkenness,” shaking and animal noises. He is also a Messianic Jew, and has an apologetic and evangelistic ministry dedicated to persuading Jews of “the Messianic credentials of Jesus (Yeshua) of Nazareth.” Read more…

Francis Schaeffer is a name that commands automatic respect in most evangelical circles. His book, How Shall We Then Live?, and its companion video series, have been credited as the primary catalysts that led to the formation of the religious right and the politicization of the evangelical church.

Now, however, Schaeffer’s son Frank (an evangelical celebrity in his own right) has come forward to set the record straight with his new book, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. In an interview with John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, he discusses what his father (who died in 1984) really thought about the religious right leaders who capitalized on his call to action, and what he thought the church should look like.

On the leadership of the religious right:

The public image of the leaders of the religious right I met with so many times also contrasted with who they really were. In public, they maintained an image that was usually quite smooth. In private, they ranged from unreconstructed bigot reactionaries like Jerry Falwell, to Dr. Dobson, the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met, to Billy Graham, a very weird man indeed who lived an oddly sheltered life in a celebrity/ministry cocoon, to Pat Robertson, who would have had a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement.

On his father’s alignment with the religious right:

He has been used by people like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and others to give some respectability to points of view that really were not his. What made my dad’s heart beat fastest was talking about people’s philosophical presuppositions and how they lived. He wanted to put people’s lives back together again, people who had problems. The politicized view of him is illegitimate.

On the politics of the religious right: 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

I’ve been encouraged to share personal narratives about what I’ve learned from ex-gay therapy/ministry. While I’ve never experienced being ex-gay personally, my unique perspective affords me a great deal of “inside” anecdotal information that could be valuable to folks on any side of the issues surrounding ex-gay therapy/ministry.

I hope that folks who read XGW will take this series as an opportunity to better understand the language and position of those in the ex-gay movement. I understand (not fully, of course) how offensive the very idea of ex-gay therapy/ministry is to so many of you who may read this. And yet, I know beyond all doubt that we ALL have things to learn from one another and that by at least attempting to understand a different perspective we are each able to more effectively communicate our own. The one and only path I’d like to steer all of us towards is that of love and understanding. I don’t mind adding that I personally believe the heavier burden of understanding lies with those on the ex-gay side of the issue.

Part One

If you’re reading this post, you’re on a computer. Your computer is loaded with an operating system. Most of the things that happen on your computer happen because of default settings. Default is the way computers are set up so that every amoeba and their pet parasite are able to browse the Internet.

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“Its statements routinely outrage gay-rights activists. But two commentaries posted online in recent months by members of NARTH’s scientific advisory committee have raised concerns among its closest allies as well.”
–Stephanie Simon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, October 15, 2006

It took a while, but what was first documented at XGW made it to the mainstream press. On XGW, Daniel Gonzales covered Joseph Berger comments about gender variant children here, and then frequent reader of XGW Boo uncovered Gerald Schoenewolf’s comments on slavery here — Timothy Kincaid writing it up as a full post here .

These stories on gender variant children and slavery have snowballed in the LGBT press (here and here), civil-rights organizations (here and here), and the blogosphere (here and here).

Mainstream press publication The Los Angeles Times has now published a piece about what NARTH Scientific Advisory Committee members have had published on the NARTH website, and what Dr. Warren Throckmorton, Wayne Besen (director, Truth Wins Out), and Alan Chambers (director, Exodus International) said in response.

Article excerpts from the LA Times’ ‘Ex-Gay’ Group Draws Fire From Allies:

Berger’s advice that children with differences be ridiculed “wouldn’t be something we would tolerate from someone who was part of our board,” said Chambers, who recalls being teased for acting effeminate as a boy. “We have to be very careful about what we say and how we say it. Peoples’ emotions, hearts and even lives are at stake.”

And…

Schoenewolf’s essay on political correctness not only seemed to justify slavery, it also denounced the gay-rights movement as “mob rule.” Using explicit language, Schoenewolf asserted that “the entire planet has now been forced to agree that [homosexuality] is normal.”
“This puts a real spotlight on what we’re dealing with…. This organization is incredibly reckless and irresponsible,” said Wayne Besen, a gay-rights activist who founded a nonprofit, Truth Wins Out, to keep tabs on the ex-gay movement.

The slow snowballing of the coverage on the original Berger and Schoenewolf articles speaks to how these incidents are impacting NARTH’s credibility. Thank you Los Angeles Times for bringing these stories about NARTH and its Scientific Advisory Committee members to the general public’s attention.

Eleventh Avenue South has a picture of the Minnesota “Family” Council using exgay activist Janet Boynes to decorate its booth at a March 21 antigay rally. Ex-Gay Watch is curious to know how, exactly, Boynes believes she is helping same-sex-attracted persons — or anyone else — by promoting discrimination.
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According to his online testimony, Anthony Falzarano was molested by an older brother at age 12. He became a male prostitute, eventually catering to closeted antigay conservatives such as Roy Cohn. On the basis of his years of prostitution and anonymous sex, Falzarano claims to understand “gay living.”

Falzarano founded Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays in 1996 with help from the Family Research Council. He was ousted from PFOX in mid-1999. He accused the religious right of exploiting the exgay movement and failing to support the movement financially.

Falzarano then founded Parents and Friends Christian Ministries and currently serves as the group’s national director.

After forming PFM, Falzarano later moved from the Falls Church, Virginia, area (suburban Washington, D.C.) to Steubenville, Ohio.

In 2003, as owner of an antique store and three other downtown Steubenville buildings, he organized a local business revolt against the Steubenville-area chamber of commerce.

At the antique store, he became known as a Christian employer of some down-and-out folks.

He worked for the Bush campaign in Ohio in late 2004.

He removed his 17-year-old son Carter from Summit Christian School in Palm Beach County, Florida, in March 2005.

British gay human rights group OutRage is criticizing London mayor Ken Livingstone criticism, after the mayor thanked the anti-gay Islamic StraightWay Foundation for supporting his embrace of antigay cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

In addition to promoting al-Qaradawi, the Islamic exgay group defends fatwas, of “scholars” and Islamic political parties, that advocate the death penalty for public displays of homosexuality.

Google finds several U.S. exgay web sites, including Courage, NARTH, and Richard Cohen, that offer referrals and favorable reviews for StraightWay.

Revised Mar. 23, 2005

Earlier this month, American Family Association propaganda service AgapePress profiled James Hartline, an HIV-positive exgay activist.

Hartline claimed to be battling "taxpayer-funded gay bathhouses" in San Diego, but AgapePress offered no substantiation for the accusation.

As portrayed by AgapePress, Hartline seems to have nothing balanced or constructive to say about gay people. Instead, he says, "I’m very much involved in going around and educating churches and civic groups on the destruction within the homosexual community and how that’s affecting our families and our children."

Instead of blaming his own, specific, unsafe activities for his illness, Hartline says AIDS is one of "the consequences of our sin."

On Mar. 13, the owner of a San Diego gay nightclub died. This oddly mobilized Hartline, who apparently foresaw an opportunity to put his contempt for God’s mercy on display.

According to the San Diego Union Tribune, Hartline said he engaged in four discussions with Catholic bishop Robert Brom, successfully conning the bishop to single out the alleged sin of nightclub owner John McCusker as different from all others, and to deny McCusker’s family a Catholic funeral.

By Mar. 22, says the Union-Trib, public and mainstream Christian ridicule forced the bishop to apologize and to reverse his decision — to the dismay of Hartline and other religious-rightists.

(Google search for ex-gay activist James Hartline)