Ex-Gay Watch points out that recent U.S. Internal Revenue Service filings confirm what Exodus International has long denied:

The abusive Christian Right quack-therapy network does try to change people’s sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual, despite executive director Alan Chambers’ ongoing insistence to the public that his “ministries” merely help people with “unwanted homosexuality” grow closer to godliness through a new ideological “identity” of ambiguous “holysexuality.”

Furthermore, the organization admits in its IRS Form 990 filings that it seeks to convert people’s sexual orientation against their will.

In 2006, for example, the organization budgeted more than $124,000 for “missions and other outreach projects (that) allow Exodus to reach individuals not actively seeking help who may be open to change.”

That’s Exodus-speak for “lobbying for harsh antigay laws” and “pressuring parents to detain their teen-age children in ex-gay boot-camps.”

In 2007, Exodus budgeted more than $342,000 to provide “various education programs and publications that explain how to change sexual orientation” at a time when Exodus publicly denied the existence of sexual orientation, preferring instead to characterize sexual attraction as nothing more than a label or “identity” that could easily be swapped out in favor of Exodus’ unholy redefinition of Christian faith.

Here is a disturbing excerpt from Nicki Gostin’s Pop Eater interview with Geraldo Rivera:

I’m sorry, but I still find it fascinating that you are at FOX. Do you get along with Mike Huckabee?
He’s a great guy. Obviously I don’t agree with him on a lot of issues — abortion and immigration foremost — but he’s a wonderful guy. I would vote for him.

How could you vote for him if you disagree on key issues?
Because sometimes honor is more important and he is a very honorable guy. I consider myself an Obama Republican. I’m liberal to moderate on most issues.

What do you think of the Tea Party movement?
I think they are the most potent political force in the country today. It’s totally sapped the energy of the political dialogue in that the liberals have nothing to say except whine and complain and I think it bodes very ill for the mid-term elections for the democrats. I think they’re going to get routed. If the other side, the so called left doesn’t have a more articulate message then people are going to walk.

And on a lighter note: you were quite the ladies man back in the day. Want to give me a ball park figure?
No I can’t! The worst mistake I made when I wrote my book was naming names and it continues to haunt me but I’ve been married five times and you’ve never heard a bad word about me from any of my ex-wives.

Maybe working at FOX News is slowly brainwashing Rivera and he needs to hurry up and lock himself in Al Capone’s vault until he is deprogrammed.

I’d love to know what would preacher Mike Huckabee really believes about Rivera’s five wives?

The JONAH scandal has ignited debate in the Jewish Community over “ex-gay” therapy and acceptance of homosexuality. Here are a few articles addressing the topic.

The Jewish Daily Forward

Goldberg, however, does try to provide an answer. Through his organization, Jews Offering New Alternatives to Healing (JONAH), he promotes the idea that homosexuality can be overcome through therapy. But the nature of this therapy has come under scrutiny after a video featuring two young Orthodox Jewish men was posted online in late July by Truth Wins Out, a group that battles what it calls the “ex-gay movement.”

The two men, Ben Unger and Chaim Levin, described to the Forward how they had struggled with their sexual identity. Unger told of being sent to therapists who recommended shock therapy, and to rabbis who told him to visit the mikveh (ritual bath) five times a day. He even contemplated suicide.

Unger and Levin both turned to JONAH around the same time, and were referred by Goldberg to a “life coach” named Alan Downing. Both men described a series of psychotherapeutic experiments they were asked to carry out that felt increasingly strange and uncomfortable.

“He told me take a pillow and beat it with a racket,” Unger said, referring to Downing. “He told me my mother is the reason for me being into guys, and I should beat the pillow as if it is her. He said that my dad was not man enough, that he didn’t show me proper masculinity, as if he knew my parents. I actually began to hate my mother. He convinced me it was her fault. But I was completely into it. I was desperate. There was no way out.”

The incident that made Unger and Levin each decide to leave the program involved standing in the mirror with Downing nearby, and taking off articles of clothing until they were naked. Unger said he took off only his shirt. Levin said he took off all his clothes and Downing told him to touch himself.

Contacted by the Forward, Downing said that there was nothing unusual about his methodology, which he referred to as “body work.” He said he works with a number of different “modalities,” including “psychodrama” and “guts work.” But he did say that the two men mischaracterized him as having “malicious intent.” All he wanted, he said, was “to eliminate shame.”

Jack Drescher, a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association who has written extensively on the “ex-gay movement,” said, “This is a marketing movement, not a science movement. Most of the people who do these kinds of approaches are the least trained of mental health professionals. ‘Life coach’ is not a licensed profession.”

The Jewish Week

A controversial treatment that is supposed to “cure” gays of their same-sex feelings — which has credence in parts of the Orthodox community — took another step toward respectability this week when it received apparent approval from a group of Orthodox scientists.

A recently posted YouTube video of two young Orthodox-raised men who complain of psychological abuse at the hands of a “reparative therapy” practitioner originally played a role in causing the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists to cancel the appearance last weekend of Arthur Goldberg, a leading advocate of reparative therapy, at the organization’s annual convention.

But, in a sudden reversal, the AOJS let Goldberg speak, in the convention’s final session on Sunday. Goldberg’s views apparently were not challenged — either from members of a hastily arranged panel or from the more than 100 people in the audience. And no mention was made of the contents of the video.

In the video, posted on YouTube two weeks ago by the gay activist group Truthwinsout.org, Ben Unger and Chaim Levin allege that Alan Downing, a “life coach” who serves as a therapist for JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality), had them remove their clothes in front of a mirror — with Downing standing behind them — as part of therapy to change from gay to straight. Levin also states that Downing encouraged him to touch his own genitals “to increase my masculinity.”

The Jewish Star

That public rebuttal coincides with allegations of misconduct by JONAH, Jews Offering a New Alternative to Homosexuality, the most prominent organization offering reparative therapy in the Jewish community.

Truth Wins Out, a group that combats what its founders consider to be false information about homosexuality, produced a video about Jonah, of two Jewish teenagers describing the therapy they underwent with life coach Alan Downing, who considers himself a former homosexual.

In the video, that has been widely viewed on YouTube, Ben Unger speaks about how during a one-on-one therapy session with Downing, he was asked to undress while repeating the statement, “‘I feel less masculine,’ and every message was a layer of clothing,” Unger said. “Till I was standing there without clothes.” Afterwards, Downing asked Unger to touch himself.

There are groups in South Africa which are claiming to be able to “cure” gay people, as though human sexual orientation and gender identity is some form of disease or “lifestyle choice“. Their attack on human rights and freedom of expression comes ENTIRELY from the perspective of religious conservatism and fundamentalism and has no basis in fact, reality, science or medicine whatsoever.

They claim we are “broken“, burdened with “unwanted SSA” (that’s “Same Sex Attraction”) that we are somehow in need of their intervention, and so they believe that the same God that made us gay, bisexual or trans, has duly appointed them the moral guardians to rush to our aid and to save us from our sinful natures.

I find the fact that so many people actually fall for their nonsensical prattle rather disturbing. In fact, I think it is because of a lack of education on what we are as opposed to what they say about us. (Read More)

Last week, TWO’s Evan Hurst reported that House Minority Leader John Boehner joined right wing Catholics to attack the Human Right’s Campaign’s Harry Knox as an “anti-Catholic bigot” and called on him to resign from President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Why?

They were allegedly upset that Knox correctly stated that the Pope is hurting people in the name of Jesus by actively working against honest sex and contraception education in sub-Saharan Africa, and is thus contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS on that continent.

The attacks on Knox over old comments seemed oddly timed and forced – as if those leveling the bogus charges were desperately groping to find a political issue to serve as a smoke screen to distract the world. It was unclear at the time why these pious henchmen wanted us to avert our gaze.

Well, today the other Prada shoe fell.

It became sickeningly obvious why the Church needed to quickly find a Boogie Man. A new child abuse scandal rocked the Roman Catholic Church in Pope Benedict’s XVI native Germany. According to The New York Times:

The widening public scandal began last month with allegations that three priests at the elite Canisius Jesuit high school in Berlin had sexually abused students in the 1970s and ’80s. In the midst of a steadily growing uproar over the handling of that case, the German magazine Der Spiegel published an article that said nearly 100 clerics and laypeople had been suspected of abusing children and teenagers nationwide since 1995.

Der Spiegel said that at least 94 clerics and laypeople had been suspected of abuse since 1995, based on a poll of 27 of Germany’s 30 Catholic dioceses. The magazine’s cover this week was illustrated with an image of a priest reaching suggestively under his robes.

Making matters worse for Rome, Irish victims of the church’s rampant sexual abuse wrote a letter to the Pope asking him to take responsibility for the church’s concealment of child molestation by forcing out bishops implicated in the decades of cover-up.

Exactly, why hasn’t The Pope done this already? Why isn’t punishing child rapists a top priority, rather than the Vatican’s outrageous campaign against marriage equality, where consenting adults commit their lives to each other?

The way I see it, conservative Catholics, such as Boehner, Thomas Peters of the American Papist Blog, Dr. Kevin Roberts of Catholic Families for America, and Larry Cirignano of Faithful Catholic Citizens tried to pick a fight with America’s largest LGBT rights groups last week over condoms only days before the German report and Irish letter were publicly released. They knew this week’s shameful news would turn stomachs and they needed to find a scapegoat.

Fortunately, their conjured anti-gay dust-up fooled no one and the world’s eyes are firmly fixed on the real issue — the church’s continued exploitation of youth and the heartbreaking cover-ups.

Before the Roman Catholic Church preaches about values and points fingers, I believe it must clean up its own house. At the moment, it has no moral authority to talk about sexual matters – from condoms to birth control to homosexuality.

The Vatican has a priority problem. I suggest it take a break and spend the next year devoting all of its energy, time and financial resources to healing the hurt it has caused to its own members. Indeed, Germany has lost 3 million Catholics since 1990. Today’s tawdry revelations won’t help reverse this trend. Nor will launching fake attacks on LGBT people and leaders as a diversion from perversion that has brought the church to its knees.

In 2007, Mark Yarhouse of Pat Robertson’s Regent University co-wrote an informal study of ex-gay therapy. The study was funded by Exodus International — the North American network of evangelical ex-gay activists — and co-written by Stanton Jones, another evangelical who is employed by the conservative Wheaton College in Illinois.

Exodus falsely marketed the study as “peer-reviewed” — it wasn’t — and Yarhouse and Jones were criticized for rigging the sample of subjects and standards of success or failure in order to guarantee a result that would satisfy Exodus.

Specifically, Jones and Yarhouse’s work suffered from the following flaws:

• The study originally sought 300 participants, but after more than a year of seeking to round up volunteers, they had to settle on only 98 participants.
• During the course of the study, 25 dropped out, and one participant’s answers were too incomplete to be used.
• Of the remaining 72 only 11 reported “satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment.” Most of these 11 remained primarily homosexual in attraction or, at best, bisexual, but were satisfied that they were just slightly more attracted to the opposite sex, or slightly less attracted to the same sex.
• After the study ended, but before the book was finished, one of the 11 wrote to the authors to say that he lied — he really wanted to change, had really hoped he had changed, and answered that he had changed. But he concluded that he hadn’t, came out, and is now living as an openly gay man.
• Dozens of participants experienced no lessening of same-sex attraction and no increase in opposite-sex attraction, but were classified as “success” stories by Jones and Yarhouse simply because they maintained celibacy — something many conservative gay people already do.
• The study purposely declined to interview any ex-gay survivors: people who claim to have been injured by ex-gay programs and who have formed support groups such as Beyond Ex-Gay. Despite — or because of — this omission, Yarhouse and Jones made the unfounded claim that there is little or no evidence of harm resulting from unproven, unsupervised, unlicensed, and amateur ex-gay counseling tactics.

In short, the study design was so flawed that no mainstream, peer-reviewed, mental-health journal would publish it.

Nevertheless, Exodus, Focus on the Family, and other Christian Right political groups immediately cited the study as proof that anyone can change their orientation without fear of ill effects from disproven methods or disreputable amateur counselors.

Now, however, Yarhouse is backing away from some of the early reactions to the study.

At a Sept. 25 symposium at Regent, Yarhouse said — according to The Virginian-Pilot — that while same-sex attraction may be changeable in some individuals, not everyone can change.

“For me, in my own practice, I would not focus on change of orientation,” said Yarhouse, a psychologist and counselor who teaches at Regent, an evangelical Christian school. …

Yarhouse’s study focused on those who said their same-sex attractions collided with their religious beliefs. He said his research found that there was “modest” movement away from homosexuality among some Exodus participants, but categorical conversions to heterosexuality were rare.

Yarhouse recommended that counselors avoid uniformly steering struggling gays toward heterosexuality and focus instead on the best outcome for the individual.

That could include celibacy or exploring different faith groups with various attitudes toward gays and lesbians, he said.

Despite Yarhouse’s statements, no one on the Christian Right who misreported the study’s findings in 2007-2008 has yet retracted their false boasts. Until Yarhouse becomes much more vocal, the public in general and Christian Rightists in particular will remain purposely misinformed about the inability of most same-sex-attracted persons to change their orientation.

Millions of lives are destroyed, relationships are uprooted, and fortunes are wasted in the false hope of becoming ex-gay, all because of the blatant misuse of one biblical passage.

It is well-known that the ex-gay movement is based on very faulty psychological premises. What is not so well-known is that the biblical basis for their assumptions is equally bankrupt. It may be good to remind ourselves that every time oppressed groups began to make headway in America they were all opposed by those who claimed to have the Bible on their side. Eventually, their arguments were perceived as the rantings of self-serving demagogues and carry no weight today among mainstream Christians and biblical scholars.

So today we should not be surprised that the Bible is trotted out once again to keep another oppressed group under wraps. And just as before, a careful look at their arguments finds this current effort wanting.

(Read More)

In a WorldNetDaily article promoting the Love Won Out ex-gay road show, writer Bob Unruh reports:

One organization, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays, said the term “ex-gay” threatens the homosexual community because “it implies that one remains homosexual by choice. That the gay person need not continue in the homosexual lifestyle is an unsettling message.”

[Gary] Schneeburger [of Focus on the Family] agreed. He said the one thread that runs through all the testimonies of speakers at Love Won Out conferences is the revelation individuals had when they realized that change was possible.

“That message is what folks [in the homosexual community] are intolerant about. They don’t want to have the discussion,” he said.

Various web sites periodically voice the false hope that the ex-gay movement is moderating its dishonest rhetoric of undefined “change”; PFOX and Focus on the Family, however, demonstrate a steadfast commitment to the failed rhetoric of the past. (Read More)

An article published last week by the Christian New Man Magazine claims to interview Exodus president Alan Chambers, but a careful reading suggests that the questions could easily have been written by Chambers or his handlers.

The answers are boilerplate ex-gay rhetoric; what makes the interview interesting is the narrowmindedness and political correctness of the questions. (Read More)