Ex-Gay Watch

Anglican Mainstream has once again demonstrated its deep-rooted homophobia. The British-based organization teamed up with ex-gay group Core Issues to coach a disappointingly small audience on how to treat gays and lesbians — and it took the opportunity to deliver vile smears against the LGBT people it claimed to help.

According to Changing Attitude‘s report, American lawyer and pastor Jim Reynolds, came across the most gracious at The Lepers Among Us, the conference held in London last weekend. The level of compassion declined considerably when Anglican Mainstream’s Lisa Nolland took to the stage:

We were then treated to what can only be described as a lip-quivering and blazing-eyed rambling rant from Ms Nolland about the evils of sex education. She seemed set on outdoing all previous speakers in the smearing of the LGBT community. We had already heard about gays as paedophile child molesters, gays as threats to the family and marriage, gays as spreaders of disease.

But now Ms N was going for gold with her bitter denunciation of LGBT organisations, and especially the Terrence Higgins Trust, for producing perverted and obscene curriculum materials intended to corrupt the innocence of children. Apparently gay activists have conned their way into schools to tell kids that ‘eating faeces’ is great sexual fun (Lisa taught us to call this ‘scat’) and to teach them how to do ‘cock and ball torture’ really well (Lisa said we should refer to this as ‘kink’).

Ms Nolland is also an enthusiastic advocate of the spurious slippery slope argument: tolerate homosexuality and we will be engulfed by all manner of perversions and we will drown in vile pornography. She distributed several ‘information’ sheets including a list of the most popular acts advertised and depicted on the internet such as ‘double anal’ in which ‘a woman is penetrated anally by two men at the same time’, ‘multiple men ejaculating onto a woman’s face’, ‘a penis thrust so far down a woman’s throat that she gags’ etc etc.

Ms Nolland seems to be a world class scaremongerer, alarmist and demoniser. Her presentation was very ugly indeed. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. I suspect that even amongst her own constituency there was embarrassment about a lack of balance which appeared to border on pathological obsession.

Even conservative Anglican Peter Ould describes the damning account, which you can read in full here, as “sobering reading.”

As I have written before, Anglican Mainstream is anything but mainstream. By slandering gay men and women, and promoting myths and misconceptions about homosexuality, it proves itself hateful and homophobic.

A number of British conservative evangelical leaders have written to the Daily Telegraph to express their support for Lesley Pilkington, the Christian therapist found guilty of professional malpractice for offering a “gay cure” to an undercover journalist.

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is among the 70 signatories of the letter. Also joining him are the former Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali, the current Bishop of Chester the Right Reverend Peter Forster, the Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham — and several names representing the most extreme end of the anti-gay, ex-gay movement in the US. They include JONAH’s Arthur “Abba” Goldberg, PFOX’s Regina Griggs, and David Pickup, Jeffrey Satinover, Julie Hamilton and Benjamin Kaufman of NARTH.

To defend the practice of gay-to-straight reparative therapy, the signatories rattle off the names of Joseph Nicolosi, Dean Byrd, Robert Spitzer, and Jones and Yarhouse, apparently ignorant of just how limited – and sometimes outright misleading — the scope and results of such research have proved.

But Carey et al have also glossed over the reasons why Lesley Pilkington was banned from practising psychotherapy in the UK. That she offered to help journalist Patrick Chapman to change his sexual orientation is almost beside the point — she insisted, despite his denials, that the roots of his homosexuality were in low self-esteem, (non-existent) childhood sexual abuse and (also non-existent) a family history of freemasonry. Lesley Pilkington was guilty of sheer quackery.

It’s no surprise that Lisa Nolland and Chris Sugden of the ultra-homophobic Anglican Mainstream would support Pilkington. But that leading Church of England evangelicals such as Lord Carey and Bishop Michael Nazir Ali would not only support her but throw their weight behind the anti-gay pseudoscience of NARTH is indefensible.

[Edited to reflect the fact that Michael Nazir-Ali is the former Bishop of Rochester.]

The UK-based Christian group Anglican Mainstream has once again shown its extreme anti-gay propaganda is anything but mainstream.

In 2008, Anglican Mainstream published a book that included, among other homophobic essays, a vile anti-gay tirade penned by Ronald G Lee, in which the author said gays would spend most of their lives in pornographic bookstores until they die of AIDS and that gay Christians only go to church to cleanse their consciences from cruising for sex the night before. Canon Chris Sugden, the Church of England cleric who edited the volume, justified the inclusion by saying Lee deserved an equal hearing, and that “we love those struggling with same sex attraction too much to do otherwise.”

Now Anglican Mainstream has thrown its weight behind Dr Michael L Brown‘s new book, A Queer Thing Happened to America, a 600-page tome against the “gay agenda.” Anglican Mainstream blogger J Davies parrots Brown’s narrative that A Queer Thing is the book “publishers were afraid to touch”: Read more…

Today, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams told the worldwide Anglican Communion that the “infamous legislation” now being discussed in Uganda was rightly received with “repugnance.”

Meanwhile, the Anglican Church of Uganda released an official statement on the same Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009. Its verdict? The Church supports the death penalty for “serial offenders” (practicing homosexuals) and sentences of up to life imprisonment for a variety of lesser offenses, including failure to report homosexuality. Its suggestions for the bill were all designed to make its aims clearer.

It would appear that gay bishops, priests and communicants are a minor issue. The most timely issue for Anglicans worldwide at the moment is whether you and I deserve death.

[Edit: Mea culpa. The actual position of the Church of Uganda is more complicated than I first understood. Contrary to the report by Christianity Today, it appears what the Church is suggesting is an amended version of the already-existing Penal Code Act, incorporating revisions to reflect the general aims of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. The Church's statement explicitly affirms some aspects of the Bill (in particular, stating that sexual orientation must never become a "protected human right"), but it does not explicitly affirm the death penalty for homosexual offenses.]