David Perry Interviews Amity Pierce Buxton, Founder of the Straight Spouse Network
6About the Author
Wayne Besen is the Founding Executive Director of Truth Wins Out and author of “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth” (Haworth, 2003). In 2010, Besen was awarded the “Visionary Award” at the Out Music Awards for organizing the American Prayer Hour, an event which shined a spotlight on the role American evangelicals played in the introduction of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
Off topic: see the second article on arch-bishop elect Cordileone (August 30th). This guy was the ‘architect of prop 8′ and benedict xvi rewarded him; but besides being a drunk driver it sounds like another case of needing a young lad to ‘lift his luggage’
http://www.fathergeofffarrow.blogspot.com/
I like this lady, she has been hurt, she has seen the downside of the anti-gay ideas that keep people in the closet. And she’s not mad at the gay community, I’d imagine too many people who live through her marriage problems turning to the ex-gay bogus. And she doesn’t. She sees that the ex-gay, that the anti-gay, that the closeting is the problem. Lady got it right. I like that.
I’m glad there is a support network for the straight spouses. Too often they are ignore and pushed aside. I remember reading one article celebrating a gay couple marrying where the article flat out said the one man left his wife and kids and moved in with his boyfriend. It left me with an uneasy feeling – I felt bad for him for suffering in the closet but at the end of the day he still abandoned his family.
Our side has been virtually AWOL in articulating how the full acceptance of gay people benefits everyone. Probably the major area where straights need education is the tragic reality of deceived straight spouses, which of course is the result of society’s longstanding persecution of gay people. I don’t think many straight people are aware of the extent of this reality. Even I have been surprised at how many gay people I now know that came out of “straight” marriages in recent years. And in virtually every case there are also children that have been impacted.
I think our side has exhausted the appeal to notions such as fairness and equality. We need to articulate how our full acceptance benefits everyone. Isn’t it reasonable to expect people to consider the interests of themselves, family, and friends when making voting decisions? I would love to hear NOM articulate how a fundamentally dysfunctional marriage of a gay man and a straight woman is in the best interest of society.
KT,
“I felt bad for him for suffering in the closet but at the end of the day he still abandoned his family.”
I’d put most of the blame on a faux-pro-family society (particularly religion) that is so hostile to gays that many of them feel forced into “straight” marriages in order to avoid a life of persecution.
Richard, whenever I write, if there’s an opportunity to bring it in, I do. Ending this idiotic prejudice benefits everyone except forthe anti-ex- gay industry.
And frankly, that’s one industry that I should like to see fail and not get a federal bailout, which it will if R-money is elected.