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.

Image: Exodus International

Exodus International President Alan Chambers has decided, over a year after the launch of the It Gets Better project, that he should support the campaign instead of condemning it.

In May, the ex-gay leader was livid that Toy Story character Woody was being used to promote the message that things get better for bullied teens. We figured out what enraged him so: The message and ministry of Exodus International depends on the opposite message — according to Exodus, it only gets worse until you submit to its religious agenda, renounce your “gay identity” and try to change your sexual orientation. Put simply, as long as gays are oppressed and miserable, Exodus remains in business.

Now, five months on, Chambers has realized he was wrong:

A few months ago I went on record criticizing the “It Gets Better” campaign that has gone viral with an anti-bullying message for LGBT teens. My criticism was over the use of “Woody,” the fictional star from the box office smash Toy Story trilogy. I reacted because I hate when iconic children’s heroes are used to further what I perceive to be adult causes. With further reflection and thought, though, I have to admit that I was wrong to question their marketing strategy without expressing my full support for what is the heart of their campaign – encouraging LGBT teens to choose life.

This slowness is nothing new to Exodus. In March 2009, Exodus board member Don Schmierer participated in a conference that fanned the flames of homophobia in Uganda. An announcement of the Ugandan “Kill the Gays” bill swiftly followed. Yet it was eight months before Alan Chambers weighed in to denounce the bill, a year before Exodus made an official statement and 15 months before Exodus issued a mea culpa taking some responsibility for Schmierer’s role in the conference.

Always too little, too late. If you’re a Christian leader and it takes you a year to realize that executing homosexuals is an idea worth fighting against, or that the lives of kids are more important than your religious agenda, it’s probably time for a radical reassessment of your values.

Anti-gay activist Dr Michael L Brown will be a guest speaker at NARTH’s conference in Arizona this fall.

Brown, who recently self-published a massive diatribe against the “gay agenda” titled A Queer Thing Happened to America, will appear at a plenary session on November 4.

We’ve already documented extensively Brown’s anti-gay rhetoric and his hostile, inflammatory stance towards gays and lesbians. To this history of homophobia, he recently added a skewed interpretation of the death of Lawrence King, the California teen shot dead by classmate Brandon McInerney. Writing on OneNewsNow.com, Brown placed the blame for Larry’s death on gay activism:

And how can I claim that gay activists are complicit in Larry’s death? To start, there are plenty of unstable children in our schools today, just like Larry and Brandon, yet gay activists are encouraging kids to come out at young and younger ages. This is downright irresponsible.

After all, it is gay activists who constantly remind us that LGBT kids are bullied and even beaten up at school. They tell us how dangerous the school environment is for kids who identify as LGBT, and yet at the same time, they praise kids like Larry for coming out at 10. They even want more Gay Straight Alliances in our middle schools, where pre-teens can declare their gay identity to their peers and faculty advisors without their parents’ knowledge. Why? So they can become targets of hatred and potential violence? If our schools really are so “homophobic” and dangerous, why not encourage these kids to keep their sexual orientation to themselves until they’re in a safer environment?

More of my review of A Queer Thing Happened to America  is forthcoming, as promised — when I have the stomach to pick it up again. Alas, discovering Brown had written seven pages comparing my arguments to those of NAMBLA left me literally feeling nauseated.

Hat-tip: Dr Warren Throckmorton.

(Updated 07/22/11 — scroll down)

Seattle preacher Mark Driscoll has provided some “some backstory” on — though not apologized for — his “flippant comment” about effeminate worship leaders, saying it arose from a conversation with a trucker, and his executive elders have since told him he needs to “do better by hitting real issues with real content in a real context.”

Yesterday, we reported Driscoll’s vicious Facebook post, in which he essentially asked his followers to expose and ridicule effeminate worship leaders:

So, what stories do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leaders you’ve ever personally witnessed?

After hearing about this hideously sophomoric behavior, I sent an email to Mars Hill Church, where Driscoll is pastor:

Millions of kids in schools across the world are bullied every single day because their peers perceive them as effeminate, gay, less than masculine. Many of them suffer such humiliation, they’d rather kill themselves. I don’t think you can have missed that, as several high-profile bullying-related suicides have been reported in the US over the last couple years.

I sent him this quote, from a straight, married Christian who knows what it is to be hurt by such remarks:

When you put out a call on Facebook for people [to] verbally attack “effeminate anatomically male” men, I find myself back in high school—shoved against a locker, with the bullies calling me a faggot.

I added:

Celebrity preacher Mark Driscoll, of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, is a bully — though that’s no revelation to anyone familiar with his macho posturing and derisive attitude towards those who fail to live up to his archaic vision of the Christian alpha male.

Now Driscoll is in trouble again over a vicious Facebook status update in which, with all the finesse of a high-school jock, he called on his followers to expose and ridicule effeminate men:

So, what stories do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leaders you’ve ever personally witnessed?

Before Driscoll apologists take issue with “expose and ridicule,” I ask you what other possible intent Driscoll could have? By characterizing effeminate men as “anatomically male” — he could have said just “male,” or even just “worship leaders,” since only a male can be effeminate — he’s clearly making fun. And by asking for “stories” about subjects his followers have “personally witnessed,” he wants more than vague, friend-of-a-friend tales. He wants the details. “Expose and ridicule” is a frighteningly accurate description of his request.

Doesn’t Driscoll know that every day millions of effeminate young men suffer untold misery because they don’t live up to his misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic ideal of what a man should look and sound like? Doesn’t he know that many kids would rather kill themselves than face such humiliation? Apparently Driscoll doesn’t know or doesn’t care.

He removed the offending status update when he was called out on it, but he has yet to comment on why he made the remarks in the first place.

If he hasn’t learned not to be a vicious bully by this stage in his pastoral career, Mark Driscoll should look for another job.

Christian writer J Lee Grady says that homosexuals can alter their sexual orientation, and points to Exodus President Alan Chambers as evidence of ex-gay change.

In a column published online last month, the Charisma magazine contributing editor urged Christians to “learn the argument” when it comes to homosexuality and gay rights. “Sorry, but timidity on this issue is not an option,” he wrote, before depicting sexual orientation as a sinful inclination that could be altered:

Many “gay Christian” advocates insist that some people are born homosexuals and therefore they have no hope of altering their orientation. But this is a lame argument since we all are born with a propensity toward certain sins. … Just because you are born with an inclination toward adultery, alcoholism, shoplifting or pride doesn’t mean you have to stay that way.

Grady speaks unmistakably of actual orientation change here, not merely acknowledging one’s orientation while resisting temptation. No surprise — Grady is a Pentecostal who no doubt would maintain the possibility of miraculous healing from homosexuality, even if he admitted the scientific possibility of change through, say, therapy were slim. What is surprising is that he holds up Alan Chambers as evidence of change:

The more strident voices in the gay community hate when Christians speak about homosexuals being healed or reformed. … They choose to ignore the fact that thousands of people have left homosexuality after coming to faith in Christ. … My friend Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, came out of the gay lifestyle many years ago and now has a great marriage with his wife, Leslie, plus two beautiful children.

Alan Chambers promoted the article on his Twitter feed without comment.

Yet this is the same Alan Chambers who says he still struggles daily with his attraction to men. His fundamental orientation is unchanged. This is what he said of his “same-sex attractions” in 2008:

And so every single morning — this is a ritual for me — I wake up and I say, “Dear Lord, I can’t make it today without You. I choose to deny what comes naturally to me. I choose to submit my will to the Lordship of your Son, Jesus Christ. And I choose better. I choose to follow You, I choose to allow Your Holy Spirit to walk before me, to guide me, to speak for me.”

Grady goes on to speak of self-denial, castigating Georgia Pentecostal pastor Jim Swilley for coming out gay to his congregation last year. He caricatures “gay Christians” (scare quotes his), saying “many … insist that if you are gay, it’s fine to go out and have all the sex you want.” Their message, he says, is simply to “go ahead and indulge.”

So once again we hear the familiar anti-gay, ex-gay narrative: Gays are just licentious hedonists, lacking in morality, while Alan Chambers is cured of his homosexuality, and his “great marriage … plus two beautiful children” is proof positive. And Chambers, the hero of Grady’s myth and so eager to show God’s grace to the “homosexual next door,” does nothing to correct Grady’s prejudiced perception.

In this video, gay journalist Ashton Elijah talks about his experience at The Ramp, a church ministry run by Damon Thompson in Hamilton, Alabama:

The interview above was filmed as part of The David Pakman Show. It featured in his July 4 podcast, alongside a segment about the dubious Marcus Bachmann, husband of Republican presidental hopeful Michele Bachmann.

See our previous coverage of Damon Thompson for more video of the Pentecostal preacher and his extreme anti-gay views and practices.

Minnesota Christian therapist Marcus Bachmann, the husband of Republican presidential runner Michele Bachman, is a spokesman for anti-gay and ex-gay causes.

In a 2010 radio interview replayed widely this week  Dr Bachmann expresses his homophobic views quite clearly:

We have to understand: Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. And just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to go down that road. That’s what’s called a “sinful nature.” And we have a responsibility as parents and as authority figures not to encourage such thoughts and feelings [from] moving into the action steps.

In an MSNBC report, The Daily Beast‘s David Graham alleges that Bachmann has practiced reparative therapy. When asked whether Bachmann believed in a “gay cure,” Graham said he hadn’t explicitly admitted it, but “that appears to be his attitude.”

Anchor Thomas Roberts also notes that Marcus Bachmann received over $130,000 in US public money last year to fund therapy, and he questions whether government money has been paying for gay-to-straight treatment.

Update 7-7-2011 by David Roberts

Full audio of the Marcus Bachman clip is available below.  While some have implied that his statements were taken out of context, the additional audio is anything but redeeming.  Notice also the host’s question refers to the letter sent to all school superintendents in the US by the bogus “American College of Pediatricians” (not to be confused with the legitimate American Academy of Pediatrics).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The entire show is archived here.

A gay New York Times journalist recently caught up with a former friend and colleague, Michael Glatze, the conservative Christian activist who, in 2007, renounced his homosexuality and claimed to have become straight. Benoit Denizet-Lewis wrote about the reunion, with background on Glatze, in the NYT story “Going Straight.”

Following his ex-gay conversion, Glatze, a one-time LGBT youth activist, wrote an editorial for World Net Daily, in which he called homosexuality “neurotic” and “abornmal,” saying it was “lust and pornography wrapped into one.” He also appeared to question whether homosexuality should even be legal:

Homosexuality allows us to avoid digging deeper, through superficiality and lust-inspired attractions – at least, as long as it remains “accepted” by law. As a result, countless miss out on their truest self, their God-given Christ-self.

He’s since made a habit of homophobia and misogyny. In 2009, for example, he called Barack Obama “the world’s first official girl-man president” and decried anti-bullying policies in schools as the result of hysteria from “victim-minded whiners.”

Read the NYT story in full here. A related NYT article this week addressed reparative therapists who “help God-fearing people stay in the closet.“

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…