Ex-Gay Watch

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).

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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…

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.

Evangelist and conservative Christian activist Dr Michael L Brown is a little disappointed but mostly deliriously excited that the publishing world was “afraid to touch” his latest book.

The back cover of his self-published tome, A Queer Thing Happened to America: And What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been, lists blurbs by “a conservative pundit,” “a conservative publisher,” “a bestselling conservative author,” “the head of a New York City publicity firm,” “a publishing insider” and “a top literary agent” — all predicting what a flop Brown’s book would be.

To Brown, this is evidence that a gay agenda controls the media, making conservative publishers scared to publish this supposedly damning exposé of how homosexuals are destroying America, its faith and its families. Only to Brown, apparently, are blurbs like this a good thing: Read more…

Gay teens share their stories this week in the New York Times. The interactive series, which touches on issues of oppression, anti-gay bullying and the challenges of coming out in school, began this morning with 19-year-old John Albuquerque of the Bronx, and Thomas Miller, 17, of Mandeville, Louisiana.

We’ve met Dr Michael L Brown before. In The Fighting Words of Michael Brown, I analyzed the revolution- and battle-based rhetoric he uses to call evangelical Christians to rise up against gays and lesbians, and their rights. In Pedophilia, Hedonism & Impending Confusion, I revisited Brown’s anti-gay rhetoric and demonstrated how he misrepresented LGBT people with a classic “slippery slope” argument.

Now Brown is in the spotlight again with a book that claims to chronicle the rise of gay rights and, with the support of “massive research and extensive interaction with the GLBT community,” debunk the so-called homosexual agenda. A Queer Thing Happened to America: And What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been is, according to its author, a 700-page representation and demolition of the gay agenda, of which 100 pages are supporting footnotes.

Brown couldn’t find anyone to publish his book, a fact he puts down to fear. Read it and “find out why the publishing world was afraid to touch it,” he says. “Family values” apologist Bill Muehlenberg props up Brown’s theory in his enthusiastic review: Read more…

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:

Wendy Gritter of Canadian LGBT ministry New Direction urged her fellow Christians to stand against anti-gay bullying in a Palm Sunday message to her church yesterday.

Wendy highlighted two recent initiatives against homophobic bullying — Day of Pink and Day of Silence — and then had these words for her congregation:

In this time of confession, in this time of recognizing how quickly our own Hosannas can ring hollow, we, as the church of Jesus Christ, of all people in the Earth, should be standing in solidarity with those who are oppressed or are treated injustly for whatever reason. It ought not to be the world taking the initiative. The Church needs to stand up.

For those unfamiliar with the Christian story, Palm Sunday was the day when, according to the gospels, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, to be greeted with cheers of “Hosanna!” Less than a week later, the praise turned to betrayal, injustice and death on a cross.

Wendy’s daughter Arianna then sang Don’t Laugh at Me. Watch the video of Wendy’s short message and Arianna’s song below, or head to the original entry at New Directions’ Bridging the Gap blog. After that, browse the Ex-Gay Watch archives to find out more about the work of Wendy Gritter and New Direction.