The following family-friendly cartoon — appropriate for schools — refutes the ex-gay myth with humor as well as fact.
Compare that presentation to antigay reparative-therapy advocates Julie Harren Hamilton and David Blakeslee, whose ex-gay video presentation peddles the unfounded myth that bad parenting, bad perceptions of parenting, and sexual abuse play a significant role in the development of sexual orientation in most gay individuals. PFOX promoted this ex-gay video via official e-mail this week.
Why might these particular antigay Christians be so antifamily — so desperate to blame family members — and so eager to believe the ignorant guesswork of one particular 19th-century secular psychotherapist named Sigmund Freud?
Watch the video: Truth Wins Out and local GLBT equality advocates protested against Focus on the Family’s ex-gay roadshow in Mountain View, California, on April 12, 2008.
Lisa Miller and her partner, Janet Jenkins, exchanged vows in a civil union ceremony eight years ago in Vermont. Through artificial insemination, Lisa conceived and gave birth to Isabella in 2002. In 2003, Lisa adopted an ex-gay sexual identity, took Isabella and fled to Virginia, where she found an activist judge willing to violate Vermont child-custody and visitation orders.
From Vermont’s perspective, Lisa is now a law-breaking fugitive who has turned her daughter into a political pawn in the culture wars.
Since then, Lisa has flouted Vermont family law and constitutional precedent in which states (such as Virginia) may not override other states’ jurisdiction and court rulings in matters of family law. Even as she violated the law, lived as a fugitive in Virginia, and sought to sever Janet’s ties to Isabella, Lisa won child support from Janet.
On Thursday (April 17), the Virginia Supreme Court will rule hear arguments in the custody dispute.
Focus on the Family has weighed in, supporting Lisa’s violations of Vermont family law and implicitly favoring a “special right” of antigay states to disobey the court rulings of states that have jurisdiction over a marriage, civil union, or child custody.
In 1988, I was fresh out of college and working as a full-time volunteer for Catholic Charities in Nashville, Tennessee.
I was also a quietly celibate gay man who was living with fellow Christian volunteers.
By day, I helped illegal aliens apply for legal residency through Catholic Charities while my housemates worked with prisoners and the homeless.
When we weren’t working, my unpaid housemates and I spent evenings at home in low-income East Nashville, sitting in front of our portable black-and-white television watching “Facts of Life” and a new show called “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” We shared meals of low-budget jambalaya, chatted on weekends with acquaintances (on their dime, if possible) at the Vanderbilt University Fuddrucker’s, and explored various churches and neighborhoods around Nashville. As my one-year volunteer placement wound down in mid-1988, I sought religious sponsors who might help me work for Nashville CARES or for similar AIDS treatment and support organizations in other cities.
This was my gay lifestyle.
Across town, Exodus executive vice president Randy Thomas was, by his own new account, living a very different lifestyle: bar-hopping, using drugs, seemingly oblivious (then and now) to liberal Christian outreach to society’s outcasts.
In a heartbreaking moment of vulnerability, Randy remembers the day when he learned his former partner had died from AIDS: (Read More)
‘Ex-gay’ survivor Jaylen Braiden discusses his time in Desert Stream and Portland Fellowship ministries as a teenager. While in Desert Stream, Jaylen was taken advantage of by an Exodus team leader, who later got in trouble for sexually abusing other minors. Exodus has yet to come clean and publicly discuss the Desert Stream scandal.
Nick Cavnar spent 30 years as an Ex-Gay. When he finally found the strength to come out, he discovered a warm and friendly community ready to accept him.
Chris Camp was a victim of the “ex-gay” myth. For many years, he was a true believer, only to later realize he was living in denial.
In this video, he discusses how he had sex with women, prayed, tried sports and expensive therapy to go from gay to straight.
Camp also details how Exodus members would caress his hand during prayer meetings - highlighting how no one had “changed.”
Eventually, Camp found happiness by coming out of the closet. He closes his story by urging ‘ex-gay’ survivors to tell their stories on video for TruthWinsOut.org.
