In a new article in the conservative Charisma magazine, Exodus International youth activist Mike Ensley tells parents “What To Do When Your Child is Gay.”

Beginning with its patronizing title — parents struggle with the coming-out of older teen-agers and adult offspring, not a “child” — the article proceeds to declare that homosexuality is a disease, that family members are doomed to a lifestyle of depraved promiscuity, and that parents are to blame.

(Read More)

Ruling Undermines ‘Ex-Gay’ Propaganda And Lets Potential Recruits See The Truth About Same-Sex Relationships

NEW YORK – TruthWinsOut.org expressed jubilation over the California Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a ban on same-sex marriage. The momentous 4-3 ruling is one of the biggest victories in the GLBT equality movement’s history. It also undermines “ex-gay” propaganda that demeans gay relationships to recruit new members.

“We are thrilled to be a part of history and experience a monumental victory for marriage equality,” said Wayne Besen, TruthWinsOut.org’s Executive Director. “The court made a bold decision and confirmed that all relationships, regardless of sexual orientation, are equal in California.”

“Under these circumstances, we cannot find that retention of the traditional definition of marriage constitutes a compelling state interest,” the court said in a majority decision. “Accordingly, we conclude that to the extent the current California statutory provisions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, these statutes are unconstitutional.” (Read More)

UPDATED with revised conclusion.

Feministe say wrote May 13 of efforts to assist people struggling with gender identity:

Ken Zucker of Toronto’s Clarke Institute represents the widespread, traditional approach, where the goal is to eliminate cross-gender behavior and the desire to be a different gender. He basically describes his success rate as the number of kids he’s managed to steer away from becoming an adult trans person; as he’s said elsewhere, he wants to “help these kids be more content in their biological gender.”

Which sounds all right on paper, but how far do you go in denying a child’s perfectly innocent inclinations?

Feministe notes that some view Zucker’s attitude toward gender-variant people as repackaged ex-gay therapy. And so Feministe is naturally concerned that the American Psychiatric Association has put Ken Zucker in charge of a working group that will weigh changes to the definition of gender identity disorder.

Although I don’t know if I quite understand this given that the DSM is a diagnostic tool rather than a prescriptive tool, and given that previous DSMs were written from similarly retrogressive approaches, she also feels there’s “an additional danger that gay and lesbian communities need to be cognizant of […] if Zucker and company entrench conversion therapy in the DSM-V, then it is a clear, dangerous step toward also legitimizing ex-gay therapy and re-stigmatizing homosexuality.”

That may seem to be a logical fear, but apparently it is unwarranted:

Gay City News wrote a story today that addresses some (not all) activist apprehensions. Key points:

• The working groups will not prescribe treatment
• The diagnosis of homosexuality will not be put back into DSM

Dr. Jack Drescher, a gay psychiatry professor at New York Medical College and a member of APA working groups relating to sexual and gender identity disorder, was instrumental in clearing up concern relating to the scope of working-group efforts.

In an article that attempts to bridge a spectrum of gay, ex-gay, and ex-ex-gay viewpoints, The Advocate asks:

Three years after the furor over a teenage boy who was forcibly sent to one of its camps, the ex-gay movement may be losing steam. Meanwhile, ex-gay survivors are gaining strength. But are the two groups really that different?

While offering a comprehensive range of voices ranging from Exodus’ John Smid and Alan Chambers to ex-gay survivors Peterson Toscano and Christine Bakke, The Advocate article glosses over:

• the exploitation of ex-gay counselees by antigay and GOP-affiliated political organizations
• efforts by ex-gay therapists and activists to scare ex-gays away from friendships and dialogue with gay acquaintances
• the abandonment of counselees by their ex-gay “ministries” when counselees such as Noe Gutierrez reject certain ex-gay political positions or misleading claims about orientation change – or find a way for faith and sexual honesty to co-exist
• deliberate efforts by ex-gay activists to promote discrimination, intrafamily blame games, prohibition of legal gay relationships, and tolerance of antigay violence, as tools to pressure gay people to submit to quack therapy and abusive, politicized distortions of religion
• the tight connections between the Exodus International board of directors and the Arlington Group of religious rightists that strive to replace federal law with fundamentalist reinterpretations of the Bible, science, history, and the rights of non-fundamentalists
• the ongoing false marketing of Exodus and Focus on the Family, promising “change” and a dishonest ”heterosexual identity”

Until a substantial number of moderate members of Exodus take responsibility for their leaders’ political and cultural warfare, and act appropriately to interfere with that warfare, there really is no sincere effort toward common ground on the ex-gay side — contrary to what The Advocate suggests.

A 21-year-old Indiana student and four friends were physically attacked May 9 in the latest apparent antigay hate crime to be ignored by ex-gay activists.

Last month, in a declaration that antigay violence is a non-issue, Exodus and Focus on the Family voiced opposition to a national Day of Silence which commemorates antigay violence and seeks to establish specific school policies to reduce violence and harassment. Pro-exgay pundit Warren Throckmorton sought to compete with the Day of Silence through a Golden Rule initiative, while Exodus featured speaker Ken Hutcherson organized a antigay protest purposely intended to disrupt public-school classes at a school in Washington state where the Day of Silence was being observed by some students. Exodus and Focus supported a so-called Day of Truth three days later. The DOT was a national religious-right campaign that sought to:

• oppose school programs that offer specific measures to reduce antigay violence
• vent antigay religious judgmentalism and sexual insults against gay and gay-tolerant students while they are at school trying to learn

Since the February killings of California gay student Lawrence King and Florida gay youth Simmie Williams, reports of antigay assaults and killings stretching from Tennessee to Illinois to New Jersey and elsewhere have been met by the ex-gay movement with ongoing silence and a refusal to act — except to silence survivors and hold rallies for bullies.

At the University of Toledo in Ohio, administrators apparently made the mistake of hiring a bigot to administer university hiring policies which forbid discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation.

In an April 18 article in the Toledo Free Press, Crystal Davis, associate vice president for human resources for the university, declared her support for discrimination on all three counts:

• she was willing to enforce her own antigay religious views upon university employees and students possessing less-homophobic, more-genuine religious beliefs,
• despite university hiring policies to the contrary, she denied that gay people have civil rights or that discrimination victimizes them, and
• she implicitly denigrated gay African-Americans.

Davis also denied the natural existence of intersexed and gender-variant people who might apply for jobs at the university — and threatened God’s wrath against such people:

She concluded: “My final and most important point. There is a divine order. God created human kind male and female (Genesis 1:27). God created humans with an inalienable right to choose. There are consequences for each of our choices, including those who violate God’s divine order.

Davis was fired for flouting the policies that she was hired to enforce, and religious-right media have been in an uproar ever since — accusing the university of discriminating racially and religiously against Davis because it would not permit her to deny religious freedom to others, nor to arbitrarily violate campus hiring and employment policies with impunity.

Two ex-gay activists have now leapt to Davis’ defense with a bizarre assertion that antigay African-Americans somehow enjoy a special racial and religious right to discriminate against others on the basis of victims’ religion and sexual orientation, whatever local laws and employer hiring policies may say to the contrary.

(Read More)

By Wayne Besen

“What is it about gay sex that makes U.S. health officials want to play Chicken Little with AIDS prevention and public safety?” Tony Valenzuela writes in the latest Poz magazine, where he criticizes, “The clueless tabloid and public health hysteria over man-on-man sex.”

Valenzuela points to “an imaginary ‘super strain’ of HIV to the sci-fi MRSA superbug.” And, he is correct that it seems the media and society seem to always take on the absurd posture that gay sex is a mysterious ticking time bomb.

It is important to remember that gay bashing is a multi-million dollar industry. There is a vested interest by fundamentalist groups to convince the public that gay people are morally inferior and diseased, thus a threat to children, society and themselves.

The notion that AIDS is a punishment from God is a staple of right wing literature. Instead of focusing on the condemnation of unsafe sexual practices, extremist groups say that the very nature of being gay makes one a candidate for an early death. For example, the so-called “ex-gay” group Exodus International uses the Bible to justify their belief in God’s wrath and fury against homosexuals.

“Those who practice these sins ‘receive in their own persons the due penalty of their error,’” writes former Exodus Executive Director Bob Davies in ‘A Biblical Response to the Pro-Gay Movement.’ “In today’s society, homosexuality is reaping a bitter harvest…homosexual involvement reaps deep devastation in the lives of many who practice it.”

The Traditional Values Coalition has published what they call a “fact-based report on the dangers of homosexuals and homosexual behavior to children and to our society.” One “fact sheet” is called, “Homosexual Sex = Death From HIV Infection.”

Focus on the Family offers that, “solid, irrefutable evidence proves that there are lethal consequences to engaging in the defining features of male homosexuality…”

Of course, blaming victims for deadly diseases is nothing new and has ushered in some of the most shameful and horrific acts in world history. In a recent New York Times magazine article, epidemiologist and physician Gary Slutkin (the article was about gang violence, not HIV) spoke of how Chinese Americans were once thought to be inherently prone to disease.

“Chinatown, San Francisco in the 1880’s,” Slutkin said. “Three ghosts: malaria, smallpox and leprosy. No one wanted to go there. Everybody blamed the people. Dirty. Bad habits. Something about their race…And people come up with all kinds of other ideas that are not scientifically grounded – like putting people away, closing the place down, pushing people out of town. Sound familiar?”

John Kelly’s book, “The Great Mortality” explains how Jews were blamed for the “Black Death” that wiped out an estimated one-third of fourteenth century Europeans.

“In January 1349, Basel burned its Jews on an island in the Rhine, while hygiene-conscious Speyer, fearing pollution, put its dead Jews in wine barrels and rolled them into the river,” wrote Kelly. “Strasbourg marched its Jews to a local cemetery and burned them…In Worms the local Jewish community, faced with death at the hands of Christian neighbors, locked themselves in their homes and set themselves ablaze.”

What I find bizarre is how the right continues to portray HIV as a gay disease when more than 80 percent of people infected worldwide are heterosexual. If God really wanted to punish the so-called “gay lifestyle” and send a message, wouldn’t He use a smart bomb – like blowing up gay bars on Saturday nights – instead of an indiscriminate shotgun blast that claims the lives of hemophiliacs and babies? The last time God was this inefficient, He placed George W. Bush in the Oval Office to carry out his will.

For reasons of political convenience and conservative correctness, anti-gay groups pick and choose who gets blame. In Washington, DC, black residents account for 81% of new reports of HIV infection and 86% of people with AIDS, though the city’s population is only 57% African-American. Based on anti-gay “logic,” this would mean that the “black lifestyle” is dangerous and should be condemned. Interestingly, they only focus on homosexuality and ignore other demographics and the largely hetero International AIDS epidemic because the inconvenient facts don’t mesh well with the right’s anti-gay storyline.

Gay people were around for thousands of years before AIDS and will still inhabit this planet long after the disease subsides or is eradicated. In the grand scheme of the universe, HIV does not define homosexuality any more than past syphilis or gonorrhea outbreaks in Europe defined heterosexuality.

Illnesses, like natural disasters, are not God’s wrath, but ordinary phenomena that affect different populations at any given time. History, however, teaches us that the most enduring disease is divisiveness in the name of the Divine, that predictably rears its ugly head at the very moments when healing is needed instead of hatred.

(Bob Davies, right)

Exodus claims to love homosexuals, but their message to those infected with HIV: “You are getting what you deserve and God is punishing you for being gay.” On Exodus’ website, there is a commentary by former Executive Director Bob Davies, “A Biblical Response to the Pro-Gay Movement.” In this screed he says:

Those who practice these sins “receive in their own persons the due penalty of their error” (v. 27). In today’s society, homosexuality is reaping a bitter harvest. Homosexual men are six times more likely to have attempted suicide than heterosexual men. Between 25 and 33 percent of homosexual men and women are alcoholics (the national average is 7 percent). Currently, 70 percent of Americans with AIDS are male homosexuals or bisexuals. Homosexual involvement reaps deep devastation in the lives of many who practice it.

It was certainly convenient for Davies to ignore that heterosexuals make up more than 80 percent of cases worldwide - so this is hardly a product of homosexual behavior. Many of the new infections are caused by right wing squeamishness to teaching comprehensive sex education - including condom use.

For political convenience, Exodus also skirts the obvious. In Washington, DC, black residents are hardest hit, accounting for 81% of new reports of HIV infection and 86% of people with AIDS, though the city’s population is only 57% African-American. Based on Exodus “logic” this would mean that the “black lifestyle” is dangerous and should be condemned. Interesting, how they only focus on homosexuality and ignore other demographics and the International AIDS epidemic because they don’t mesh well with the group’s bigotry.

The fact is, Exodus is a bona fide hate group that will say anything to smear homosexuals. Gay sex, when practiced safely, is no more dangerous than any other form of sexuality. Gay people have been around for thousands of years before AIDS and will be on this planet long after the disease subsides or is eradicated. In the grand scheme of the universe, it does not define homosexuality any more than syphilis outbreaks in Europe defined heterosexuality. It is time for Exodus to stop the blame game and act responsibly.

Stephen Black, an Exodus spokesperson, compared “ex-gay” watchdog organizations to Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Black, the leader of First Stone Ministries, an Exodus affiliate in Oklahoma City, used his personal blog to opine that “gay activists, liberal blog bullies and the liberal anti-Christ media machine…and Darwinism,” were determined to make ex-gay ministries illegal.

Exodus International is becoming more desperate and shrill as they lose their war against homosexuality. We call on Exodus to take action against Black and apologize for the group’s outrageous slander against GLBT advocates. These paranoid, mean-spirited and unfounded attacks are unethical and undermine Exodus’ claim that they love homosexuals.

“There are actual GAY hate groups who wish to silence the voices of ex-gays,” wrote Black on his blog. “These groups are like the brazenly named ‘Ex-Gay Watch’ and their klan of bloggers who use hatefully sarcastic words in addressing ex-gays.”

Black went on to compare the work of ex-gay watchdog groups to Nazis and say – without evidence – that ex-gays were somehow being “stalked.” (Read More)

Exodus Increasingly Resorts To Delusional and Paranoid Attacks Against GLBT Community

NEW YORK – TruthWinsOut.org (TWO) criticized Exodus International after Stephen Black, an organizational spokesperson, compared “ex-gay” watchdog organizations to Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Black, the leader of First Stone Ministries, an Exodus affiliate in Oklahoma City, used his personal blog to opine that “gay activists, liberal blog bullies and the liberal anti-Christ media machine…and Darwinism,” were determined to make ex-gay ministries illegal.

“Exodus International is becoming more desperate and shrill as they lose their war against homosexuality,” said TWO Executive Director Wayne Besen. “We call on Exodus to take action against Black and apologize for the group’s outrageous slander against GLBT advocates. These paranoid, mean-spirited and unfounded attacks are unethical and undermine Exodus’ claim that they love homosexuals.”

“There are actual GAY hate groups who wish to silence the voices of ex-gays,” wrote Black on his blog. “These groups are like the brazenly named ‘Ex-Gay Watch’ and their klan of bloggers who use hatefully sarcastic words in addressing ex-gays.”

Black went on to compare the work of ex-gay watchdog groups to Nazis and say – without evidence – that ex-gays were somehow being “stalked.”

“One merely need to lightly read over blogs like the “Ex-GAY WATCH” (yes, they are WATCHING and STALKING ex-gay leaders) and/or Wayne Besen’s blog and you will know we are living in very dark days….A very successful attorney friend of mine recently told me he felt it was like 1933 in Nazi Germany for Christians and Exodus type ministries in the USA.  He seriously joked with me and said, ‘Stephen it is like 1933 and your last name isn’t Black, but Bernstein. Your ministries will be on the front-line of the next demonic wave of an anti-Christ movement in history. It is coming.’  WOW! It was a sobering moment.”

Black also claimed that gay activists and the media are, “silencing their great stories about overcoming homosexuality.” He makes the bizarre case that there are so few ex-gay stories from people not on the payroll of right wing organizations because they are, “afraid to come out from fear of persecution.”

“Black must live in a delusional bubble,” said Besen. “The mainstream media has featured Exodus International countless times, even though the group provides no statistics and offers no concrete evidence of change. The reason that we see so few ‘ex-gays’ who are not on the payroll of political organizations is because they don’t exist. To say, without evidence, that it is because of persecution is a copout and a transparent excuse for Exodus’ astronomical failure rate.”

TWO also took Black to task for his dishonesty. His blog states that he is “not associated with any organization,” yet, he directs an Exodus Ministry.

“This was a radical hit piece with the intent of character assassination,” said Besen. “The question is, what does Exodus intend to do about it?”

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