Update, July 21: According to pinknews.co.uk, the parents of Bryce Faulkner are threatening to sue friends and youth-safety advocates that set up a web site to locate and protect Bryce from further abuse by an ex-gay re-education center.

A Wisconsin man, Travis Swanson, claims that last month, his 23-year-old boyfriend, Bryce Faulkner, was economically blackmailed by his parents into entering an “ex-gay” boot camp.  Swanson believes that Faulkner is in a ministry in Florida, where the ex-gay organization Exodus International is headquartered.

When Faulkner’s family found out their son was gay, they reportedly told him to enter an ex-gay program or lose financial support.

“Sadly, Bryce Faulkner is not an anomaly,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “Ex-gay organizations commonly use coercion to recruit new clients and often play on the fears of parents. We hope that he is found and escapes this boot camp before he is brainwashed and emotionally scarred.”

A Facebook page and website were set up to help locate Faulkner.

“We will do our best to help find Faulkner and end the psychological abuse that young people face as a result of being forced into such damaging programs against their will.”

Faulkner was a pre-med student from Arkansas. He was reportedly about to come out to his fundamentalist family when his mother found email correspondence with Swanson.  If you know of his whereabouts, please contact Truth Wins Out.

Last week, Truth Wins Out expressed concern that the ex-gay Exodus Global Alliance is helping to draw youths with drug and alcohol problems into involuntary and antigay “Teen Challenge” programs in the United States and New Zealand.

Now we learn from Ken Avidor (via Pam Spaulding) that U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar is requesting $500,000 in U.S. taxpayer money for Minnesota Teen Challenge, a pray-away-the-drugs program whose parent organization — strangely enough — hires ex-gay speakers, utilizes ex-gay media, and is operated by the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination.

The “Teen Challenge” network apparently offers no reputable professional counseling; instead, its amateur employees program youths with church ideology while blaming teens’ problems on “Satanic” influences such as Halloween and Harry Potter. It offers no well-designed tracking of success and failure rates; its reports and supposed success stories appear to consist of isolated anecdotes and head counts which exclude youths who failed to complete a treatment program.

Treatments, by the way, reportedly include up to a year of residency in isolation, denial of medical treatment, and relentless assaults upon Jewish and other non-evangelical faith perspectives. Supporters include U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s rumored choice for drug czar, former congressman Jim Ramstad.

Maia Szalavitz of The Huffington Post is alarmed at Teen Challenge’s substitution of brainwashing for sound medical treatment:

Further, according to Teen Challenge, “Addiction is a sin, not a disease.” Consequently, the program does not allow the use of medication.

Beyond this, it humiliates and attempts to “break down” people with addictions, using techniques that I have covered extensively elsewhere that are known to do more harm than good.

Since half of all addicts have a co-existing mental illness which often requires medication, banning it is not exactly evidence-based practice. And since there are medications that can help treat particular addictions, this is even more absurd. Given that Ramstad sponsored a bill to change the name of the National Institute on Drug Abuse to the National Institute on Diseases of Addiction, it is deeply troubling that he’d support an organization which views it as sin.

Andy Birkey of the Minnesota Independent says that Teen Challenge’s acceptance of past and future federal subsidies obligate it to submit to public scrutiny and accountability:

If you accept taxpayer money, you have to accept that you’re going to receive public scrutiny. That simple point seems to be eluding Minnesota Teen Challenge (MNTC), the faith-based drug treatment program which secured a federal earmark in early 2008 arranged by Rep. Jim Ramstad and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, for its “Know the Truth” program which aims to prevent drug use.

Operating close to the border of church and state, the group’s members are unrealistic if they think their work is not going to get attention.

…The point of my article was not to suggest that MNTC was not successful or beneficial, as Scherber implies. Rather it was to point out the overtly religious nature of the organization and that the program has historically been controversial. In the interest of brevity, I left some examples out. For instance, MNTC’s stance on Halloween verges on the comical (”Halloween is a day set up totally for Satan … The more people who go out dressed as demons, ghosts, witches and goblins, the more glory Satan receives”). …

I don’t question that faith-based programs can be very effective for those that share the programs’ faith. Faith is a huge motivator in people’s lives. I think MNTC has been very effective for the clients it serves. However, I don’t think it’s appropriate for judges, prosecutors or public defenders to suggest the program as an alternative to jail.

In economic boom times, taxpayer dollars should be restricted to professionally operated and audited facilities with solid, evidence-based performance records. In troubled economic times, taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on one prosperous denomination’s religious indoctrination centers.

Oklahoma Baptist Pastor Steve Kern, husband of notorious Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern, reportedly believes gay Americans should be incarcerated and forcibly “cured.”

“We have to get rid of that and start curing those sinners. It’s past time that this nation stopped placating sin and start putting them in education programs. Courts can force drug offenders into treatment centers and violent people into anger management. There’s no reason our courts can’t do that with homos.”

While he builds support among ex-gay activists for arrest and involuntary quack medical treatments, Kern in the meantime is said by the Gossip Boy blog to be teaming up with Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett to rid the city’s public libraries of accurate health, scientific, and therapeutic information about sexual orientation. According to James Miko and Wayne Fuller, the pair plan a campaign to “rid the library system of all gay and lesbian materials, as well as those their church-based philosophies find objectionable.”

Their goals:

• Win the 2010 governor’s race and gain power at any cost
• Deprive Oklahoma families of any information that might help them accurately and constructively understand gay family members
• Censor information that exposes the persistent failure of ex-gay programs to “change” their participants’ sexual orientation
• Use government power and taxpayer money to enrich corrupt ex-gay quacks from Exodus International and NARTH, the religious-rightist reparative-therapy lobby.

(Read More)

Zach Stark, who endured more than a month of involuntary detention in Exodus International’s costly live-in ex-gayification program Love In Action, appears briefly in the upcoming ex-gay documentary This Is What Love In Action Looks Like, which is planned for release later this year.

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Unlicensed “doctor” Daniel Serrano served 15 months in prison after he promised a youth-restoring treatment that would be superior to Botox to Hollywood celebrities such as Priscilla Presley — and injected them instead with low-grade industrial silicone.

It’s illegal to practice medicine without a license. Yet it is perfectly legal in the United States for unlicensed and uneducated “therapists” and self-appointed “counselors” to engage in the ex-gay industry’s own version of bait and switch: Promise false cures for sexual attraction, then inflict confirmed and long-lasting harm against counselees and their families — sometimes, even, against the will of youths who are involuntarily “treated.”

In 2005, the Exodus-affiliated, ex-gay, live-in treatment facility Love In Action drew national attention when it became known that the program was admitting teen-agers against their will.

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