At Andrew Sullivan’s blog, an ex-gay survivor discusses his first-hand experience with emotional damage at evangelist Rick Warren’s ex-gay program, Celebrate Recovery.

The survivor recalls Warren’s phony 12-step program damaging the lives of married men and their wives.

Addendum: The PFLAG Blog responds:

Rev. Warren needs to clarify … if he disagrees with President-Elect Obama’s belief that there should be no place for these insidious practices in true communities of faith.

There should be no room at the inaugural pulpit for a pastor who would put young people’s well-being at risk. There is nothing to “celebrate” about endangering the lives of those we love.

Complaints from local residents compelled a billboard agency to remove a P-FOX ad along Interstate 19 in Tucson, Arizona, only three days after the billboard was first noticed.

According to KVOA-TV,

P-FOX didn’t pay for the billboard, but it was placed in a non-revenue space by Clear Channel Outdoor.

Jason Cianciotto of Wingspan asked KVOA, “What gives?  Why in the world as we focus on holidays does Clear Channel support attacking a minority group here in Southern Arizona?” says Cianciotto.

Wingspan is southern Arizona’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community center. Cianciotto has in the past defended gay youth from harassment and attempted censorship by antigay political activists.

Cianciotto told KVOA, “I think Clear Channel needs to answer some questions because who’s to say they’re not going to put up another PSA for conversion therapy.”

As a youth, Cianciotto was subjected by his parents and a “Christian lay counselor” to forced isolation, repression, and eventually abandonment when it became apparent that ex-gay “change” wasn’t really possible.

Columnist Anne T. Denogean wrote about Cianciotto’s difficult adolescence in an article in the Tucson Citizen in April 2008. Truth Wins Out commented on the ex-gay abuse suffered by Cianciotto here.

Antigay lesbian publisher Charlene Cothran seeks Americans’ cash in these hard times to “prevent homosexuality in youth.”

Cothran claims to be ex-gay, but she is still predominantly attracted to women and declines to say whether she has any significant attraction to men. In other words, she is a celibate lesbian who understands that telling the public the honest truth about her choice of lesbian celibacy is not profitable.

According to Rod 2.0:

Cothran wants substantial donations to fund a multi-platform broadcast ministry—with her as the host of course—on radio, DVD and internet. “Charlene Cothran has elevated her rabid capitalist ‘ex-gay’ charades from a magazine to a ‘ministry’.”

Cothran won’t identify the board of directors whom the donations would support; in the past, antigay activist D.L. Foster has served as her advisor and editor.

Nor does Cothran say what miracle she has discovered that “prevents” homosexuality.

And finally, the “ministry” is reportedly a business, not a non-profit charity, meaning the public’s “donations” might be better-spent at Wal-Mart.

Blogger Clay Cane compares Cothran’s ex-gay-for-pay ministry to “those modeling agencies that are advertised in the back of the Village Voice—if they have to ask you for money, it isn’t legit.”

Rod 2.0 says, “After the disastrous results of Prop 8 and the escalating tensions between blacks and gays, Cothran’s phony ‘pray away the gay’ story might be become welcome currency in many anti-gay black churches. Just ask Donnie McClurkin.”

Murder and felony violence against gay and Latino Americans are on the rise — while the religious right trivializes the issue of violent hate crimes and airs false and unfounded allegations of violence at peaceful gay protests in defense of the freedom to marry.

According to the Associated Press (Dec. 16),

FBI statistics show there were 830 Hispanic victims of hate crimes last year, up from 819 the previous year and 595 in 2003.

According to another AP article (Dec. 15),

A rash of attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people across the country - including the severe beating of a New York man whose attackers believed he was gay - suggests the number of reported assaults could rise in 2008, an advocacy group said.

The number of reported attacks against LGBT people increased 24 percent in 2007 over 2006, and they were expected to jump in 2008, said Sharon Stapel, executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project.

Officials were still crunching the 2008 figures, which will be released next spring, Stapel said.

An attack in Brooklyn last week united gay and Latino groups in demanding a federal response, as attackers killed Ecuadorian Jose Osvaldo Sucuzhañay, who was mistakenly thought by the killers to be gay. (Read More)

Box Turtle Bulletin says:

It is indeed possible to support Prop 8 civilly. But [Rick] Warren did not do that. Instead, he not only lied about what it would do, but he further insulted his “many gay friends” — and the rest of us — when he described their relationships as being on par with the lowest form of criminals. Even the most vile criminals — convicted rapists of old ladies, serial killers of defenseless orphans, and baby torturers — they all look down on child molesters, and they don’t think twice about killing them in the most sadistic way. But Warren thinks that the deeply held relationships among his “many gay friends” are no better than child rape. Or incest. Or polygamy.

That is the outrage. Maybe some day Rick Warren will see the need to apologize deeply for that offense. But it won’t happen until everyone — including the mainstream media — calls him on it. It’s not just about Prop 8. It goes much, much deeper, to that “model of civility” that Warren lacks.

The Family Research Council declared this afternoon that religious and political critics of Rick Warren are seeking to “silence” all of Christianity by denying this one superficial, controversial, and sectarian pastor the privilege of serving the inaugural invocation for President Obama:

[The Human Rights Campaign's] desire to exclude Pastor Warren from the inaugural, based upon his religious convictions, proves the validity of the concerns over the homosexual desire to silence the Church.

According to that logic, FRC and Rick Warren are seeking to “silence” the entire Roman Catholic Church, all of Judaism, and all the world’s atheists, by denying them a spot in the invocation.

According to Warren:

It’s interesting, the mainline [Christian churches] died. It’s an irrelevant word. The mainline is sidelined. There are more Muslims in America than there are Episcopalians. There’s less than two million of ‘em. We’ve had a 40 year decline in all the mainline denominations while the independent and charismatic and the evangelicals kept growing and growing.

Warren’s contempt for mainline Christianity may be, by itself, sufficient reason to oppose a role for him in inaugural prayer ceremonies that are intended to unite U.S. religious communities.

Addendum:

Pastor Dan observes:

Nobody likes Warren. The Religious Right think he’s a flake because he’s too liberal, and everybody else thinks he’s a flake because he’s a shallow idiot. From where I’m sitting, as the victim of an extremely expensive and extremely rigorous theological education, Obama could have gotten a better invocation from Stuart Smalley. It would have as much depth, and at least it would be doing a Democrat a favor. …

Mainline Protestant pastors are opinion leaders in their communities, and they tend to appreciate their GLBT friends and not appreciate slick weasels like Rick Warren.

Addendum II:

Focus on the Family avoids FRC’s foot-in-mouth disease.

Rev. Jerry Stephenson

Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen appeared on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor this evening. He discussed Barack Obama’s decsion to have Rev. Rick Warren give the invocation at the historic inauguration. On MSNBC, TWO’s Rev. Jerry Stephenson appeared to discuss the same topic.

U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama promised throughout his presidential campaign that, if elected, he would unite Americans and affirm a role for religion in public life. He cemented that vow with an assurance that he would expand President Bush’s “faith-based initiatives.”

The decision today by congressional Democrats to have evangelist Rick Warren give the inaugural invocation is the latest signal that the Democratic Party is friendly to evangelical Christians — even if that means slapping American religious minorities in the face.

First, I want to be clear: I believe that evangelical Christians deserve the same opportunities and freedoms as anyone else. And yet the notion of equal time for conservative Christians does not entitle a celebrity to serve as the sole official prayer-giver for all Americans at a signature federal event.

As Steven Waldman details for BeliefNet:

• Warren is the type of Christian who calls socially responsible Christians closet Marxists.
• Warren is the type of Christian who asserts that Christians cannot be free so long as gay couples are free, and then he rallies throngs of followers to deny to gays the very freedoms that he falsely claims are threatened by the existence of married gay couples. His admission that divorce is a more serious threat to “traditional marriage” is unconvincing — he made no effort and rallied no souls to enact a constitutional ban upon divorce.
• Warren is the type of Christian who claims to oppose abortion — but calls efforts by liberals to help women avoid abortion a “charade.”
• Warren is the type of Christian who worships a god of war and assassination instead of the Prince of Peace.
• Warren is the type of Christian who points to antigay religious activists and ex-gay pundits Tim Wilkins and Chad Thompson as experts on HIV/AIDS
• And Warren is the type of Christian who revises the Bible when it seems convenient to oneself or damaging to one’s supposed enemies. (Worthy of note: Chad Thompson agrees that Warren is a Bible-verse cherry-picker.)

But Warren is not all bad.

Warren says he supports hospital visitation and private insurance-sharing for couples — provided these freedoms are not packaged as civil unions. He condemns torture (though he does little to stop it). And Warren doesn’t damn non-evangelicals to hell.

(Correction, Dec. 21: Warren damns Jews to hell.)

Warren is not as intemperate, sadistic, tyrannical, greedy, or emotionally disturbed as Donnie McClurkin or James Dobson, or a racist like Tony Perkins — but he claims to be different from Dobson only in tone, not substance.

I am troubled by his selection to give a presidential, inaugural invocation. Warren’s frequent use of strawman arguments against rival religious and atheist communities, his willingness to assassinate foreign leaders on the basis of religion, and his smug judgmentalism make him a poor choice to be granted such an honor.

Presentation of the inaugural invocation is a privilege, not a right.

If America has matured enough to elect an African-American as president, then surely it has matured enough to select a Reform rabbi, a Quaker, or a Unitarian to give the invocation:

Someone, in other words, who is:

1. loyal to the central tenets of one’s own religion, and yet
2. fully affirming of American families from other religious or secular backgrounds

Warren, unfortunately, seems to be neither.

As noted by TWO, Richard Cizik, Washington lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, resigned his post last week because of controversy over his nationally broadcast support of gay civil unions. The NAE and right-wing political organizations are applauding his departure with words both questionable and unkind.

During a Dec. 2 interview on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” Cizik told host Terry Gross that he voted for Barack Obama in the Virginia primary and said Christians should not fear supporting pro-choice and pro-LGBT candidates. Cizik also said that his views on marriage were “shifting” and that he supports civil union.

The comments made by the lobbyist — formally known as NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs — caused a huge stir in evangelical Christian circles and the controversy led him to resign his job. In a statement to the organization’s board members, the association’s acting president Leith Anderson explained his departure, saying Cizik’s radio remarks caused “a loss of trust in his credibility as a spokesperson among leaders and constituencies.”

It turns out that Cizik’s views are evolving even more. For years, he has been one of the rare evangelicals banging the drum for addressing climate change. The DC-based Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Mark Tooley told OneNewsNow that “Cizik has been very outspoken and in some ways ‘off the reservation’ for the last five or six years in terms of his global warming activism, which the board of NAE had initially somewhat disavowed — but that had not discouraged him.”

Cizik’s civil-union support was an apparent step too far from the reservation. “The National Association of Evangelicals has official positions strongly supporting traditional marriage and opposing same-sex marriage, and certainly by implication same-sex civil unions,” Tooley said. “So it seemed to be a very clear case where Cizik was ignoring the very obvious and official positions of his own organization, for which he is supposed to be the chief spokesman and lobbyist in Washington.”

Evangelical support for Cizik’s resignation is voluminous, the criticisms harsh.

Ingrid Schlueter, co-host of evangelizing radio show Crosstalk America said, “Those who are at war with God, the author of life, should be publicly confronted by evangelical Christians. Instead, they are aided and abetted in their evil by craven leaders like Cizik.”

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council is expectedly meanspirited: “This is the risk of walking through the green door of environmentalism and global warming - you risk being blinded by the green light and losing your sense of direction. How else can you explain enthusiastic support for what will probably be the nation’s most pro-abortion, anti-family president in our nation’s 232 year history?”

Janice Shaw Crouse, director and senior fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, takes a broad swipe: “I think, perhaps, my dear friend Rich has been inside the Beltway for too long and has swallowed too much of the NPR and Vogue magazine Kool-Aid.”

I suppose the nasty talk has to be over-the-top. After all, Cizik has the ear of millions of Americans. People listen to him. You can see it in the responses on the FRC blog, where faithful Christians responding to Perkins’ statement wonder why caring about the environment or supporting Barack Obama contradicts their beliefs. Time magazine even named Cizik one of the world’s 100 most influential people this year. That’s a lot of clout to for the evangelicals to overcome.

Consider the response of NAE supporters of Cizik — and there are many of them. According to US News and World Report, “a coalition of roughly 60 evangelical leaders (mostly of the non-Christian right variety) has written to … Leith Anderson pushing for a successor [who, like Cizik, is] not beholden to the Christian right… [one] who embraces more progressive causes like combating global warming.” Read the full letter here.

David Gushee, a college professor and progressive evangelical activist who helped write the letter to Anderson, said this in an interview with USNWR:

I think Leith and the executive committee are going to take their time and let the furor over this die down. I personally think they need to find somebody who can promote all seven of the policy commitments in the NAE’s Health of Our Nation statement. There’s one on sanctity of life and one on climate change and one on poverty. There are always pressures from the right that the two fundamental issues of our time should be abortion and homosexuality. I think there will be pressure to hire somebody to make those the top priority.

I can tell you from some feedback that if the NAE makes the mistake of rolling back to the classic Christian right agenda, they would lose support of a lot of people who are currently happy to be working with them.

Yes, this comes from within the NAE.

The good news for Cizik, if he is sincere in his evolution, is that his message is being heard across the nation. It’s evident in the growing support for legal recognition of same-gender couples and for humane and just treatment of LGBT citizens. It is reflected in the fact that an increasing number of people are realizing that “gay” isn’t something that needs to be prayed away. Even the vote that passed California’s obnoxious and un-American Proposition 8 was a close one. Cizik is but one of many Americans who are slowly but surely understanding that being a Christian does not require denying compassion and equality to LGBT people.

Let’s hope this good man is snapped up by a progressive evangelical organization so that his vast influence — and his personal evolution — can continue. And let’s hope those questioning evangelicals continue searching their hearts and minds.

In a way, you have to feel for Old Spice.

A recent effort meant to reinforce the Procter and Gamble men’s product line’s ruggedly macho image backfired in a big way. Old Spice sponsored the Art of Manliness‘ 2008 Man of the Year poll, which existed to crown a paragon of masculinity, a regular guy who, among other traits, “is loyal to his friends and family… does the right thing, even when it’s not convenient… serves and gives back to his community… [and] sacrifices for the good of others.”

Nominations were submitted by the public and P&G whittled the list down to 10 finalists. Voting in the unscientific poll took place between Oct. 20 and Nov. 9, and roughly 10,000 votes were cast.

The winner announced Dec. 15 was: Matthew L. Chancey, a sharp-dressed Christian missionary and lawyer who works to save lives and souls in Africa. Chancey received roughly 30 percent of readers’ votes, largely on the back of a loving testimonial from his wife Jennie.
 
Mrs. Chancey’s nominating essay on her man’s manliness is truly touching. It speaks of his kindness and strength, lauds his perilous work in Darfur, and describes him as a churchgoing John Wayne-style Rennaisance man who can “read G.A. Henty’s historical fiction aloud to our [eight] children at the dinner table and fix the brakes on a 1964 Ford pickup.” And never, never let you forget he’s the man. “He’d never sing his own praises, but, as his wife, I never tire of doing so,” she writes.

Her words are very moving and obviously persuasive to many. What’s more compelling, however, is what Mrs. Chancey did not share. Her reference to the writer G.A. Henty hints that there is more to the story: Henty was a writer in Victorian England who specialized in youth-focused adventure tales that supported his racist, classist, imperialist worldview and who is beloved by many archconservative Christian evangelicals.

Turns out Old Spice’s 2008 Art of Manliness Man of the Year is deeply involved with Vision Forum, a ministry so reputedly racist and  radically right-wing it couldn’t support Sarah Palin for vice-president. On his Web site, Chancey praises pastor Doug Phillips as his “patriarch par excellence.” Check out what Vision Forum thinks of LGBT people:

Homosexuality is not a victimless crime. It is a cruel moral perversion that wreaks moral, physical and spiritual havoc on men, women, children, families and institutions. The Bible makes no distinction between homosexuals, pedophiles, bestials and rapists. All are criminals, the toleration of which brings judgment on the land and devastation to children.

… It is the mission of the Christian, and is no contradiction, that we lovingly preach repentance to sodomites, even as we seek to drive from the land every manifestation of homosexuality. Furthermore, Sodomy was a punishable crime at common law and should remain such. Any politician who supports same sex marriage or civil marriage for sodomites is complicit in a moral crime against God and should be actively opposed.

He’s a state leader of the Family Policy Network, a right-wing political group that works the same turf as Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. He’s also a politician — Chancey recently lost a bid to become Alabama’s public service commissioner. and though he ran as a Republican, he was endorsed by the ultra-right Alabama Constitution Party. He even gained some notoriety in 2005 when the Washington Post discovered communications specialist Chancey — apparently no bastion of manly ethics — playing fast and loose with Gov. Tim Kaine’s (D-VA) Internet domain name. And he’s earned quite the reputation for ruthlessness in evangelical Christian circles.

His Biblically inspired views on marriage, gender roles, and family are ultra-traditional. Men are meant to be in the world and to serve as heads of households. Women, from birth, are groomed for service in the home, as the following photo from the Vision Forum Father-Daughter Discipleship Retreat shows.

Vision Forum girls compete to see who can do the best job at grooming, shaving, and tying a tie on their dads.

Matt Chancey’s daughters don’t get to go to college — they don’t even get a Rumspringa. And Chancey — his wife also doesn’t divulge that she runs the Ladies Against Feminism Web site — believes women should not vote.

That’s right. He’s a real man’s man, a regular guy.

Art of Manliness and Old Spice say their hands are clean and that the vote is a win for diversity:

It was not possible, or even desirable to quiz each candidate about their political, religious, and social views. While we selected the finalists, the winner will be determined by you, the reader. If you don’t support a particular candidate’s message, you should vote for those you do believe in and spread the word about that candidate. The contest is not about who AoM or Old Spice believes should be the winner, but who the public determines should be the 2008 Man of the Year.

Matt will be receiving the $2,000 cash prize sponsored by Old Spice along with a manly assortment of Old Spice products. Congratulations, Matt. Right now Matt’s in Africa working for his non-profit. … His $2,000 prize will be going to Darfur to help refugees from the genocide.

Chancey works for the Persecution Project Foundation, which is run by Vision Forum leader Doug Phillips’ brother Brad. The group’s mission is to “take the gospel message of Jesus Christ to the people of Africa, simultaneously bringing them physical supplies and food.”

Whatever one’s views of its captive-audience evangelizing, PPF helps people in desperate need That, of course is an admirable thing, no question.  But if P&G knew the whole story, would it be so blithely accepting of having Chancey serve as the epitome of “good, clean, wholesome manliness?” Is this the role model they were seeking? And now that the announcement is out there and the boycott-threatening complaints by outraged customers are coming in, can you imagine how P&G execs must feel about the whole once-avoidable mess? Chances are, they are praying this controversy just goes away — and fast.