Apparently, “ex-gay” activists don’t like to work very much.

Since the temperature dropped below 50 degrees, Exodus International’s staff has noticeably gone into hibernation. Consider the evidence:

• The group’s last press release posted on its sluggish website is dated November 16, 2009. Memo to Exodus, the New Year’s ball has dropped. You can come out of your slumber.
• The “recent” Nov. 16th press release was titled “Exodus Sends Letter Opposing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.” How nice of Exodus to get around to denouncing calls for genocide, considering the bill was introduced in mid-April 2009. It took the group 7 months to gin up the energy to crank out a single media release on Uganda. Such inaction is particualrly appalling, because Exodus played a key role in fomenting anti-gay sentiment in Uganda, which set the stage for the introduction of the “Kill the Gays” bill.
• The front page of Exodus’ website still lists an Oklahoma City event from October 2009. Um, Exodus, the leaves have changed colors, they have fallen to the ground, they have been raked up and there is snow on the ground. It’s okay to update the site before the beaches reopen.
• The only steady work from Exodus comes from its low-impact vanity blog with  infrequent posts (maybe one or so per day) from its Vice President Randy Thomas.
• There is no mention on Exodus’ front page of Love Won Out (LWO) – the “ex-gay” roadshow that Exodus recently took over from Focus on the Family. This is odd, considering the next ex-gay LWO circus is scheduled for March 6th in San Diego.

Exodus has a budget of more than $1 million dollars and a staff of more than a dozen people, yet, they can’t even update a website or write a press release?

Pathetic.

The Board of Exodus ought to launch a formal investigation to see how President Alan Chambers (pictured left, clowning around on the company dole) and Randy Thomas (pictured left, chilling out below) are spending contributions. They certainly aren’t using the money to “educate” or “inform” people on the Internet.

It seems that in 2010, Exodus has silently backed away from genuine public outreach. The group has retreated into American fundamentalist churches and taken its roadshow overseas – where people are not as informed of the groups dubious history and astronomical failure rate. All we have to do is look at the Uganda nightmare (after Exodus spoke at hate conference in Kampala on March 5 and 6) to see the disastrous results of the group’s global efforts.

Who can blame Exodus for its bunker mentality? Their lies were increasingly unconvincing to thinking people in the United States. This is why they now prefer to take their propaganda to more receptive fundamentalist churches where people are told how to think and what to believe.

In any case, Exodus’ sloth has been noticed and duly noted. The fact is, my chubby, slumbering cat seems to do more work of late than the clearly overpaid staff of Exodus International.

However, the award for laziest anti-gay extremist goes to Peter LaBarbera (aka Porno Pete). (Read More)

In the wake of Newsweek’s forthright article acknowledging the Bible’s conflicting and evolving definitions of marriage, here are more examples of prooftexting and cherry-picking of Bible verses by three ex-gay activists:

Randy Thomas, vice president of Exodus International, responded saying the musical showed a “sincere misunderstanding of Scripture.”

Tim Wilkins, a former homosexual who heads Cross Ministry, argued that gay marriage supporters “are doing the very thing they accuse Christians of.”

“They focus on Leviticus and ignore New Testament passages that forbid homosexuality. WHY? Because Leviticus provides easier arguments with its prohibitions against certain foods.”

SBC’s [Bob] Stith also denounced Hollywood’s attempt to make biblical arguments. “Anyone who cares to spend thirty minutes of serious study would see the many flaws in Black’s argument,” he said.

Clearing up some of the confusion, Stith called it a “factual error” to claim that Scripture nowhere says homosexuals are an abomination.

Thomas presumes to possess the sole correct understanding of the Bible. Both he and Wilkins fail to cite any actual Bible verses. Meanwhile, Stith cherry-picks verses that seem to smear same-sex-attracted persons while he ignores neighboring verses that condemn Stith’s chosen lifestyle.

Source: Christian Post, Dec. 9

On Sept. 28, Truth Wins Out protested a Baptist Press article by ex-gay activist and longtime Exodus member Bob Stith. While mourning the sexual honesty of Christian contemporary singer Ray Boltz, the article unnecessarily and falsely quoted Human Genome Project former director Francis Collins as saying:

Homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.

Collins never said that; ex-gay political activist Greg Quinlan did. Good As You made the same observation.

Collins had said almost the opposite: He told Ex-Gay Watch:

The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence.  But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved.  That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.

Collins added:

No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years.

Ten days later, Baptist Press finally changed the wording of the article — without acknowledging to readers the nature of the falsehoods that had previously been conveyed, without apparent effort to correct syndicated copies of the article that were circulated around the Internet, without apology to Dr. Collins, and — most importantly — without apparent reforms necessary to prevent future errors.

The only hint of the two-week deception appears at the top the article with this brief note:

REVISED: October 8, 2008 to reflect more accurate wording from “The Language of God” by Dr. Francis Collins.

Stith’s article now accurately conveys what Collins said — but the damage has already been done among readers who walked away from the article (and more than a dozen syndicated copies) believing that a leading geneticist had declared homosexuality a purely environmental choice.

Thus far, it seems Stith might walk away from the damage with nothing more than a quiet admission of fault to one web site, Ex-Gay Watch, which his regular audience never reads. Meanwhile, Quinlan has not acknowledged any deception whatsoever. We have asked Stith for assurances of complete remedial action; he has declined to respond.

Stith’s peers say that he is a man of good character; at one time I believed that, but I became very doubtful 10 days ago and now I am nearly convinced otherwise. True accountability, transparency, and penitence require more effort and integrity than I’m seeing, at present, from a prominent Exodus speaker and policy wonk for the Southern Baptist Convention.

Longtime Exodus International member “minister” and speaker Bob Stith on Sept. 25 became the third ex-gay activist entity in recent times to falsely imply that the Human Genome Project or its director support ex-gay ideology.

In April 2007, A. Dean Byrd of the ex-gay advocacy group National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality cherry-picked partial statements by Francis Collins, Ph.D, of the Human Genome Project, for an article which falsely implied that Collins supported NARTH’s ideological position opposing the existence of sexual orientation as a biological phenomenon.

Collins told Ex-Gay Watch the following month (and repeated this on Sept. 21, 2008):

It troubles me greatly to learn that anything I have written would cause anguish for you or others who are seeking answers to the basis of homosexuality. The words quoted by NARTH all come from the Appendix to my book “The Language of God” (pp. 260-263), but have been juxtaposed in a way that suggests a somewhat different conclusion that I intended. I would urge anyone who is concerned about the meaning to refer back to the original text.

The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.

[Ex-Gay Watch’s] note indicated that your real interest is in the truth. And this is about all that we really know. No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years.

Earlier this month, New Jersey ex-gay activist Greg Quinlan and the American Family Association ignored Collins’ warning against NARTH’s interpretation — and further distorted Collins’ position. Quinlan said:

When [gay Christian contemporary singer Ray Boltz] says he’s born that way, we know now for a fact that that’s false. In fact, just last year in March, the director of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins, said this: homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.

Collins said nothing of the sort, and a few days after Quinlan’s article, Collins repeated his earlier assertion that NARTH had distorted his position. Quinlan refused to retract his claim — turning it from a mere falsehood into an outright lie.

Despite those events, Stith repeated Quinlan’s lie to his Baptist Press audience on Sept. 25:

For example, in 2003, the International Human Genome Consortium announced the successful completion of the Human Genome Project, which, among other things, identified each of the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA. The press release read: “The human genome is complete and the Human Genome Project is over.”

While this accomplishment was widely reported, almost no one reported the words of Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the project. Collins, arguably the nation’s most influential geneticist, said, “Homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.”

Somehow the major media missed that little tidbit. Collins and others
acknowledge that genetics can predispose but not predetermine. This supports other studies that clearly document the possibility of change for people who struggle with unwanted homosexual desire.

Stith is now the Southern Baptist Convention’s “National Strategist for Gender Issues.” That SBC “gender” panel is actually an ex-gay policy group within the SBC administration. It is dominated by Exodus member activists.

In other words, Stith is no longer a spiritual minister; he has become a professional spin artist.

Stith not only parrots the exposed lie of Quinlan, but also connects that untruth to an illogical assertion that if one bisexual person can “change” their behavior, then any homosexual person can “change” their orientation.

If anything good is to come from all of this ex-gay truthlessness and spin, perhaps it’s that Stith, Exodus, NARTH, Quinlan, and the AFA have become so untruthful that many concerned families of gay people are leaving Exodus and NARTH behind, and seeking help from trustworthy sources of information in mainstream therapeutic and gay-tolerant religious communities.

I invite Stith to apologize, to distribute a retraction to the same media outlets that received his original statement, and to condemn the stubborn untruthfulness of Quinlan and NARTH.

Addendum:

In 1998, Stith spoke the following in his Sunday sermon as an apology to a gay man who attended the church that day:

We have not lived in transparency. We have often cloaked our own weakness and pointed instead at the sins of others. We have settled for a form of godliness which manifests respectability but has no power to change the core of our being.

We do humbly ask forgiveness.

We have manifested more of an interest in being right than in being loving and often succeeded in being neither.

We do humbly ask forgiveness.

Forgiveness requires true repentance, and repentance requires actual change — not merely a token expression of regret followed by more of the same misconduct.

If Stith is truly penitent, then why did he not bother to factcheck — and why does he continue to abuse the word “change”?

Who better to lead a Southern Baptist Convention panel promoting gender stereotypes than a cabal of gender-confused ex-gay political activists?

Photos of the panel show it to be dominated by Exodus International president Alan Chambers and other Exodus leaders including South Carolina ex-gay activist Tim Wilkins, Florida ex-gay activist Christine Sneeringer, and Texas ex-gay activist and SBC gender-issues czar Bob Stith.

The panel appears to be all-white — and all-male except for Sneeringer. Some members are not Southern Baptist.

None of these “ex-gays” has demonstrated academic expertise in gender issues nor a commitment to equal opportunity for women.

Instead of educating the public about gender diversity and individuality, the SBC gender panel plans to recruit Southern Baptist financial support for ex-gay activists and to confuse Christian teen-agers, their pastors, and their parents into believing they aren’t truly manly or womanly unless they mimic a 1950s-era heterosexual “lifestyle.”

Hat tip: Good As You