FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Contact: Wayne Besen, Executive Director
Phone: 917-691-5118
E-Mail: wbesen@truthwinsout.org
New Ex-Gay Watch Report Says Exodus International Trying to Repackage Lies As the Group is on the Brink of Collapse
Burlington, Vt. – Truth Wins Out warned the LGBT community today not to be fooled by future rebranding efforts by the “ex-gay” organization Exodus International, which is looking to retool as it stands on the precipice of collapse. The desperate state of Exodus was revealed in an exclusive story by Ex-Gay Watch today, which reported that talk of an Exodus makeover occurred during an emergency meeting that focused on the group’s solvency.
“The problem with Exodus International is that it peddles a faulty product that causes harm to its clients,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “Rebranding efforts for Exodus are no different than putting a new car body over a sputtering engine. It won’t be long before people realize it’s the same old lemon.”
The Ex-Gay Watch report, written by David Roberts, reveals a Nov. 16 secret summit in New York, where Exodus President Alan Chambers desperately plotted how to “keep Exodus International from social and financial oblivion.” The report discusses how an ill-advised real estate deal hindered Exodus’ ambitions goals to expand.
Three years ago, Exodus purchased a building for a little over $1.1 million. This was at the height of the real estate bubble and its value must have decreased significantly since. While they seem to have shed as many of their obligations as possible, debt service for that building must be a great draw on their meager resources. According to IRS documents, they burned through $200,000 of their savings in 2010 alone. In short, if they continue on their current trajectory, there seems little doubt that Exodus will fold in the near future.
According to the report, Chambers said that “everything is on the table” during the clandestine meeting and that efforts to re-brand Exodus as kinder and gentler were being considered. The talk included the possibility of a hollow apology that would occur without changing the group’s destructive core “pray away the gay” message. Chambers reportedly plans to make announcements about the future at Exodus’ Leadership Conference in January 2012.
“We will only accept apologies from Exodus that are substantive and sincere, not part of a cynical strategy to repackage the same tired old lies,” said TWO’s Besen. “Public relations alone will not improve relations with the LGBT community, and spin will not absolve Exodus from its anti-gay sin.”
Exodus became a virtual household name in 1998, starring in the “Truth in Love” advertising campaign, which was sponsored by 15 anti-gay political organizations. The campaign backfired when TWO’s Wayne Besen photographed its poster boy, John Paulk, in a gay bar. A second poster boy, Michael Johnston, was discovered by Besen and attorney Michael Hamer to be having intimate relations with men he had met on homosexual websites.
When Chambers took the helm at Exodus, he promised to avoid politics. He went back on his word and began lobbying against LGBT equality, with the help of his deputy Randy Thomas. Their efforts led to President George W. Bush inviting them to the White House in June 2006 to lobby for the federal Marriage Amendment, which would prohibit same-sex couples from marrying.
Exodus’ political involvement included forming a controversial alliance with Focus on the Family, where Chambers starred in FoF’s Love Won Out road show. When these groups teamed up — Exodus’ perpetual money woes seemed to disappear overnight.
In 2010, the much savvier Focus on the Family dumped Love Won Out. Observers of the “ex-gay” industry noticed Exodus’ message became increasingly incoherent and attendance at events began to fall. The group’s nadir came when its board member, Don Schmierer, spoke at a Uganda hate conference that helped lead to the draconian “Kill the Gays” bill.
“Focus on the Family made Chambers look smart,” said TWO’s Besen. “Without the larger organization’s public relations prowess and exposure to donors, Chambers was left to run the show on his own — and it appears that he lacks the skill to pull it off.”
Truth Wins Out is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to create a world where LGBT individuals can live openly, honestly and true to themselves. TWO fights anti-LGBT extremism, monitors anti-LGBT organizations, documents their lies and exposes their leaders. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality.
Apologies are all the rage with the “ex-gay” set right now! John Smid has been running around apologizing for various things for the past several weeks/months — he even showed up at Memphis Pride with those grotesque “I’m Sorry!” cards distributed by the Marin Foundation — and now Richard “Beat That Pillow With A Tennis Racket Like It’s Your Mom” Cohen has caught the fever as well! Unfortunately, his “apology” is not an apology at all, and nothing seems to have changed about his beliefs or his life’s work.
It comes via a press release on changeispossible.com, so let’s take a look. Here is the headline:
International Healing Foundation Apologizes to the LGBTQCommunity on its 21st Anniversary
Organization Expands Mission from ‘Change is Possible’ to ‘Coming Out Loved’
Uh huh. Notice that they are “expanding” their vision, rather than “changing” it. Change is apparently not possible in their world.
The International Healing Foundation has educated and counseled thousands of men, women and adolescents who experience unwanted same-sex attraction (SSA). However, on its 21st anniversary, IHF apologized to the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning) community for years of unknowingly fueling anti-gay sentiment by simply stating, “Change is Possible.”
That’s not what people are demanding apologies for. It’s more for the years upon years of religious bigotry repackaged as false, discredited “science,” giving people false hope, depression and increasing the suicide risk among vulnerable people who have been abused by religion into believing that “change” is even necessary, much less possible. It’s also for the thousands upon thousands of families which have been damaged further or ruined by such techniques. Moving on.
“We at IHF wish to offer a sincere, heartfelt apology to everyone in the LGBTQ community,” said IHF founder and director, Richard Cohen. “I apologize and ask forgiveness to those who were hurt by our message.” Cohen, a leading expert in the field of sexual orientation and married father of three, knows first-hand how it feels to be ostracized having lived a gay life.
I’m not feeling your apology, Richard.
Beginning today, IHF’s doors are wide open to everyone in the LGBTQ and straight communities. The new mission, “Coming Out Loved,” is the catalyst of true tolerance, real diversity, and equality for all. IHF staff will assist anyone who is conflicted about their sexuality and other challenging issues that arise for many in the gay community.
Wait, they weren’t willing to act as predators for any easy prey in the past? I’m confused.
IHF has adopted therapeutic guidelines from the American Psychological Association for members of the lesbian, gay and bisexual communities; American Counseling Association guidelines for the transgender community; and National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality therapeutic guidelines for anyone questioning their sexuality and/or experiencing unwanted SSA.
Nice! So if you come in and you’re happily gay — why would you go there if you were happily gay? — they’ll at least attempt to use a veneer of professionalism by using APA guidelines. If you’re transgender, they’ll use the guidelines of the American Counseling Association, from which Richard Cohen was banned for life in 2002 for multiple ethics violations. And if you’re their target market, which is, again, people who have been abused so much by religious indoctrination and bigotry that they believe that there are inherently sick, evil and flawed, they’ll continue to use the guidelines of the sham organization NARTH, a group which masquerades as secular and scientific [and which quietly kicked Cohen out of their lives a few years back -- they don't like for their public faces to be that crazy, though they will continue to work with people like him behind the scenes], while being purely ideological in nature, and a group so consistently dishonest, with such a long trail of broken homes in its wake, that I cannot imagine what would constitute an “ethics violation” in their world. Telling the truth? Reporting the results of a scientific study accurately? Not using willful abuse of children as the basis for much of their work?
Cohen asserts everyone should be loved and accepted for who they are. “By opening our doors to everyone in the LGBTQ and straight communities, we are expanding upon our mission and broadening the scope of our services,” he says. For more information, visit www.ComingOutLoved.com.
And that is the end of the press release. Is this anything more than a cry for help out of the ravines of inadequacy and irrelevance?
In case not everybody’s familiar, let’s take a little tour of the failure that is Richard Cohen’s life, and visit a couple of his friends as well, which should clear up any remaining confusion over whether Cohen’s apology is worth anything.
If readers have been following the “kill the gays” debacle in Uganda, it’s important to remember that one of the major backers of that bill is Stephen Langa, who got much of his information on gay people from Cohen’s book Coming Out Straight. Here is Rachel Maddow tearing Cohen apart on her show in 2009, and showing Langa teaching directly from his book.
And here is a picture you may have seen before, of Stephen Langa with other noted unhinged American homophobes and “ex-gay” leaders, Scott Lively and Don Schmierer, respectively. The man in the middle is Caleb Brundidge, who is also on the staff of Richard Cohen’s International Healing Foundation [sic]. The picture was taken in Uganda, right before the “kill the gays” Crusade really got its legs. Thanks for all your help, American hate group leaders/whack-jobs! Cohen definitely has blood on his hands.
Richard Cohen also used to be the president of PFOX, but thoroughly embarrassed himself and his entire movement when he was on The Daily Show a few years back, so they canned him. [Our own Wayne was also on that episode, if you haven't seen it.] He keeps close ties with them, though, and with NARTH. Indeed, his close associate at the International Healing Foundation [sic], the group who issued this crap apology, is Christopher Doyle, a “sexual reorientation coach” who is also on the board of PFOX.
If you don’t remember Christopher Doyle, here is a picture of him queening out and running away from Joe Jervis at the Truth Wins Out protest of the NARTH convention.
The tall bald guy is Christopher Doyle, an “ex-gay” who is on the board of PFOX and who is on staff with “ex-gay” whackadoodle Richard Cohen as a “Sexual Reorientation Coach” at the International Healing Foundation. If that wasn’t enough for this professionally “former” c*cksucker, he writes newspaper editorials arguing against the Day Of Silence. Anyway, I don’t think pillow-whacker Richard Cohen has totally gotten Doyle in touch with his “natural masculine nature,” because when I kept taking photos, Doyle put his hand on his hip and hissed, “I don’t need this. Why don’t you just sssssssstop!”
If you don’t know what Joe means when he refers to Richard Cohen as a “pillow-whacker,” we’ll get to that at the end, so that we can end on a funny note.
Earlier this year, Christopher Doyle, who is, again, the very fey bestie of Richard Cohen, who works with him at the organization which just issued this BS apology, said this:
Putting “ex-gay” in quotes suggested that such a sexual orientation is not valid, not recognized or both. But thousands of former homosexuals collectively identify themselves as such. The D.C. Superior Court ruled in 2009 that ex-gays are a protected sexual orientation class in the District.
Not all persons who experience same-sex attractions choose to live gay lives. Many of us have voluntarily left a homosexual life through therapeutic work or behavioral choice. I did, and I have been happily married to a woman for nearly five years; we have two children. I no longer experience same-sex attraction and have no desire to return to the homosexual life. Please respect this choice.
Left unproven, as he is obviously unwilling to do so, is his assertion that he “no longer experience[s] same-sex attraction.” Wayne and I wait with bated breath for the first professional “ex-gay” swindler to submit himself to testing which would prove that they are no longer gay, but it never comes. Instead, on a fairly regular basis, they admit, as Alan Chambers and John Smid have, that they are still totally into dudes.
To wrap this up, you can have a look at the truly insane things Richard Cohen believes about why people end up gay or lesbian, or you can just have a laugh watching a couple of videos. Here’s Richard Cohen on CNN beating a pillow with a tennis racket and screaming at his mom, just after he cuddles a grown man.
And here is Richard having a bizarre, queeny temper tantrum about how mean gay people are. Listen to him scream!
This is the man who is very sorry for seemingly nothing, and wants you to think he is relevant, and also to give him more money, because his movement is dying and his life’s work is a waste.
Uganda’s parliament voted to reopen a debate on a bill that seeks to outlaw homosexuality that may be expanded to include the death penalty for gay people.
The bill had died in the previous session of parliament, earlier this year, while under threat of U.S. and European human-rights sanctions. That threat has faded, as the U.S. has promised Uganda additional military aid to fight the Lord’s Resistance Army.
In 2009, Don Schmierer traveled to Uganda and co-keynoted what became the launch conference for the kill-the-gays legislation. Along with Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively and Caleb Lee Brundidge — an acolyte of discredited therapist Richard Cohen — the Exodus board member assured Ugandans that parental upbringing and religious infidelity were to blame for any increase in undesirable sexual honesty and authenticity in their country — and that legal sanctions combined with Christian ex-gay therapy could rid their land of homosexuals.
Schmierer is program officer of Fieldstead & Company, the asset management company of far-right philanthropist Howard F. Ahmanson. Fieldstead has funded some extremist antigay U.S. projects in the United States, such as Linda Harvey‘s Mission America.
Box Turtle Bulletin details the latest Ugandan parliamentary maneuvers to exterminate homosexuals.
Several recent posts by Truth Wins Out have documented Linda Harvey’s efforts to promote antigay violence, defamation, and denial of access to health care.
It’s amazing what one ostensibly Christian woman can accomplish on just $29,000 per year.
Harvey’s IRS filings are incomplete and sketchy. According to Guidestar, Mission America is missing from the IRS’s most recent list of tax-exempt organizations, yet the group’s tax-exempt status apparently has not been revoked.
From the available information, we see that Harvey claims to work 20 hours per week, claims to collect no income, and yet somehow spent almost $27,000 on a weekly AM radio show for which she is the host.
According to her filings, Harvey’s four main supporters in 2010 were:
Thomas W. Harvey, same address as Linda
Fieldstead & Company, the asset management company of right-wing philanthropist Howard F. Ahmanson. This same company employs Exodus director and financier Don Schmierer as program officer.
George Edward Durell Foundation, Westerville, Ohio
The IRS filing implies that each foundation gave no more than $5,000 directly to Mission America, but altogether, these four sources can single-handedly supply Harvey with most of her annual revenue.
If Harvey keeps promoting antigay violence, then it’s only a matter of time before she appears on official lists of U.S. hate-group leaders.
In the meantime, we can ponder why Don Schmierer, a key director of Exodus and its holding entity, is so closely tied to one of Linda Harvey’s primary sources of cash.
The goal of a reporter should be to tell a story as accurately as possible and paint a realistic portrait. Facts should be vigorously checked and follow-up questions asked. Unfortunately, the Oprah Winfrey Network’s Our America with Lisa Ling produced an indulgent puff-piece on “ex-gay” programs, “Pray the Gay Away”, that included gross factual inaccuracies resulting from a lack of research and lazy reporting.
Some of Ling’s mistakes were prosaic, yet annoying, such as using the term “gay lifestyle”, even though the 1980’s have been over for quite some time. I’m surprised she didn’t regress even further and refer to gay people as “inverts”. Ling’s excuse was that she was trying to make the “ex-gay” activists comfortable by speaking their lifestyle lingo.
I’m curious if she would extend the same courtesy to a white supremacist group while they politely discussed other minorities in a pejorative way? Furthermore, even if the phrase was uttered within a conversation, it should never have made it out of the editing booth. The fact that Ling and her assistants did not pick up on the obnoxious “lifestyle” phrase and leave it on the cutting room floor suggests a surprising cluelessness.
However, it was not the style (or lifestyle) of the report that was so upsetting, but the lack of substance. Ling shamefully allowed herself to be used by Exodus International, an extreme “ex-gay” group that desperately wanted an image makeover after being tied to the deadly Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. Sadly, Ling never brought up that Exodus board member Don Schmierer joined a Holocaust revisionist at a conference in Kampala to drop what was called “a nuclear bomb on the gay agenda.”
The enterprising reporter also omitted any reference to spiritual warfare – commonly known as the exorcism – that is a major part of “ex-gay” programs. Exodus President Alan Chambers has said, “One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy, is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can.”
Why did Ling conveniently overlook such disturbing views? Couldn’t she at least have asked Chambers why many of his inflammatory statements in support of spiritual warfare were at odds with the milquetoast image Exodus was peddling in the mainstream media?
Ling was completely uninterested in Exodus’ nefarious lobbying efforts, including the group’s work to pass Proposition 8 in California and enthusiastic support of the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would ban marriage equality in the United States constitution. Could Ling not have taken a moment to explain how Exodus vigorously opposed federal hate crime legislation, was in favor of sodomy laws, and is still fighting against all efforts to protect students from bullying in schools?
No, it was more important for Ling to humanize a group of activists dedicated to dehumanizing LGBT people than to state the plain facts. Better to produce a tearjerker for Oprah than shine a spotlight on the anti-gay jerks causing tears for their victims.
It was also perplexing that Ling failed to include psychological experts to point out that such programs are rejected by every mainstream medical and mental health organization in America. During a live discussion of the topic directly following the show, a psychologist was featured. But, as soon as she told the truth about Exodus and said it was based on “quack therapy” they ushered her off the air. I guess expert opinion wasn’t as good for ratings as helping Exodus peddle its fairytale.
Speaking of fairytales, Chambers audaciously portrayed his marriage as true bliss and told Ling, “It (sex with his wife) felt natural, absolutely, and has every day for our entire marriage.”
What? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Chambers admitted that it took 9 months to consummate his marriage and said at a 2007 Love Won Out conference in Phoenix that to remain “ex-gay” he must “deny what comes naturally to me.”
Why didn’t Ling ask Chambers, “If your experience with your wife was so natural, then why are you saying that you deny what comes naturally to you?” Needless to say, Chambers was ecstatic with the false portrayal of his organization and his marriage.
“I would like to extend my thanks to Lisa Ling for the courtesy, sensitivity and respect she demonstrated during our interviews and the filming at our 35th annual conference,” wrote Chambers on Exodus’ blog.
Ex-gay therapy is a scam that exploits desperate and vulnerable people. Instead of an infomercial for Exodus, the focus of Ling’s piece should have been on the harm the group causes its victims. The Oprah Winfrey Network should take Ling’s embarrassing segment off its website and not re-air it until factual inaccuracies are corrected.
Any chance there is a program to pray away lousy journalism?
There is a piece in Christianity Today written by a “Timothy Shah,” which basically accuses gay activists of making a mountain out of a molehill in Uganda. Of course, real investigative journalists like Jeff Sharlet disagree. This is Shah’s read on the “Kill the Gays” bill proposed:
Instead, Uganda has attracted human rights activism because of a single legislative stunt by a single low-level politician named David Bahati, a member of the country’s authoritarian ruling party and an Anglican. In 2009, Bahati proposed an anti-homosexuality bill so draconian that it would make “serial” homosexual practice a capital crime and punish pro-gay advocacy with a seven-year jail sentence.
But the legislation has received widespread attention not primarily because of its draconian provisions, whose very harshness has repelled virtually all of Uganda’s major political and religious leaders—including the President, the Catholic Bishops Conference, and a parliamentary committee that recommended the bill be thrown out as unconstitutional, effectively stopping it in its tracks. Instead, a major reason for the attention focused on the bill is that many believe it is the fruit of American evangelical homophobia.
No, it’s both, sir. But he’s getting around to the real thrust of his piece, which is to absolve American Evangelicals of any responsibility for the consequences of their words and actions.
In the telling of journalist Jeff Sharlet, it’s the American fundamentalist gospel that turned supine Ugandans into raving homophobes. American “fundamentalists,” “evangelicals,” and advocates of “theocracy”—terms Sharlet uses more or less interchangeably—see Uganda as a crucial theo-political “laboratory.”
No, it’s more that the country was already rabidly homophobic [elsewhere Shah points out the statistic that a whopping one in five Ugandans are okay with homosexuality. Whoopie!], full of corrupt leaders who have chosen, on an institutional level, to make homosexuality the next scapegoat for the problems faced by the citizenry. This sort of strategy, of convincing people to blame people completely unrelated to them, or people who have less than them, has played out in the United States for years. The entire Tea Party movement is a case study of this sort of peasant behavior spurred on by political and business leaders. So in this already homophobic climate, American Evangelicals decided to go in and “help” with that “love of Christ” that looks like love only to people who are already inside their echo chamber.
But here is the statement from Shah that demonstrates that he fundamentally doesn’t get it. Referring to the conference led by Scott Lively, Don Schmierer and Caleb Lee Brundige in 2009, Shah says this:
There are, in fact, many reasons to doubt a causal or conspiratorial relationship between Bahati and American Bible-thumpers. Perhaps most important is that the agenda of the Americans who ran the 2009 conference was therapeutic, whereas Mr. Bahati’s bill is remorselessly punitive. His bill even contains provisions that would render the pastoral care advocated by the conference organizers illegal in Uganda.
Ha ha, like hell it was! First of all, no respected, grown-up mental health or medical association considers the work of Exodus to be “therapy” in any sense of the word. Moreover, this was the conference where Scott Lively dropped his “nuclear bomb,” in the form of a series of bold-faced lies fed to the Ugandan attendees, chief among them the insinuation that homosexuals were the kinds of people who caused the Rwandan genocide. Rwanda, of course, is next to Uganda. Perhaps Shah is not aware of the strange, bitter, gay-obsessed history of Scott Lively. If that is the case, click here. And perhaps Shah has never seen video of the presentation. If that is the case, hit the play button below.
So no sir, please don’t tell us that American Fundamentalists don’t bear any responsibility here because, after all, they were just trying to bring therapy and pastoral care to the poor people of Uganda! Those may be the buzzwords for extremist Christian eliminiationist policies against gay people, but they’re buzzwords just the same.
And encourage your ideological cohorts to stop trying to “help.”
There certainly is a direct line to be drawn between the work of American Evangelicals like Scott Lively and the brutal murder of Ugandan LGBT activist David Kato.
The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.
[...]
Mr. Lively and Mr. Brundidge have made similar remarks in interviews or statements issued by their organizations. But the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Later, when confronted with criticism, Mr. Lively said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh. Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape.
Then Joe ties it all up with a bow:
Yesterday Scott Lively’s “nuclear bomb” against Ugandan gays went off in the form of the iron bar which crushed the skull of David Kato. In some countries, it’s possible that Lively would be under arrest today. Also complicit in this murder is Peter LaBarbera, who for years has worked to publicize and praise Scott Lively’s evil agenda. Then there’s Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council, who last year paid lobbyists $25,000 to convince members of Congress to block a planned resolution denouncing Uganda’s gay death penalty bill. And let’s not forget Pastor Rick Warren, who supported, funded, appeared with, and publicized the work of Uganda’s leading anti-gay activist, Pastor Martin Ssempa.
Rhetoric matters. And as much as hate group leaders like Lively and LaBarbera bitch, moan and try to create false equivalencies wherein the Left are the “Real Haters,” the fact of the matter remains that there is a bodycount on just one side. Meanwhile, Christian Right stories of victimization are usually somewhere between tall tales and melodramatic crying about having to play by the same rules as everyone else.
Unfortunately, we’ve been consumed with Mehlman fever (antibiotics should do the trick) the past twenty four hours, so I missed this. Jeff Sharlet has a new book, and a new piece in Harper’s, which unfortunately isn’t available yet, but an NPR interview with Sharlet drops a bit of a bombshell about the private ambitions of the sick, twisted, maniacal Ugandan MP David Bahati, the sponsor of that nation’s infamous “kill the gays bill”:
“Bahati said: ‘If you come here, you’ll see homosexuals from Europe and America are luring our children into homosexuality by distributing cell phones and iPods and things like this,’ ” Sharlet recounts. “And he said, ‘And I can explain to you what I really want to do.’ ”
Sharlet accompanied Bahati to a restaurant and later to his home, where Bahati told Sharlet that he wanted “to kill every last gay person.”
“It was a very chilling moment, because I’m sitting there with this man who’s talking about his plans for genocide, and has demonstrated over the period of my relationship with him that he’s not some back bencher — he’s a real rising star in the movement,” Sharlet says. “This was something that I hadn’t understood before I went to Uganda, that this was a guy with real potential and real sway and increasingly a following in Uganda.”
And he has connections to American leaders. Sharlet explains that Bahati is one of the Uganda leaders of an American evangelical movement called the Fellowship, or the Family — the secretive fellowship of powerful Christian politicians who wield considerable political influence, both in Washington and abroad.
If that’s what Bahati says to an American journalist with a history of reporting facts, I’d hate to imagine what he says behind closed doors to American Religious Right wingnuts.
Bahati is an aspiring genocidal maniac, and continuing American support from fundamentalist Christian leaders just proves what so many have always said: They are our American Taliban, and the only reason they haven’t started bombing things is because they live in a developed country where the Enlightenment and secularization have had a civilizing effect on the most grotesque applications of Deep Religious Faith. Bahati just has more “freedom” where he lives than our American mullahs do.
So, a year after helping to spark a wretched anti-gay bill in Uganda that has terrorized LGBT people, the ex-gay organization Exodus International puts out an offensive statement condemning the wreckage they helped cause.
For those who don’t remember, Exodus Board member Don Schmierer took part in a conference last spring in Kampala where attendees pledged to “wipe out” homosexuality in Uganda. Soon after, the dreaded Anti-Homosexuality bill was introduced. Nice work, guys.
TWO’s Michael Airhart analyzed the inadequacy of Exodus’ letter this morning. But, my first impression, aside from the term, “too little, too late”, is umbrage that Exodus’ main objection was that killing gays won’t give the group a chance to convert them.
No thanks, I personally see wasting time in a failed Exodus ministry with unqualified – and potentially abusive – counselors trying to brainwash me to be no more than a minor improvement over the noose. So, Exodus, you can spare us the “help” offered in your noxious note.
If Exodus wants to make a difference it should embrace the John Denver Plan: Leave for Kampala on a jet plane.
The group’s president Alan Chambers, Vice President Randy Thomas and Don Schmierer have a duty to fly to Kampala ASAP and condemn the bill in person. They should have a press conference at the same hotel where Schmierer appeared at the anti-gay conference. At this point, anything short of taking this step (other than Chambers, Thomas and Schmierer resigning in shame) are unacceptable.
Exodus helped create the mess in Uganda and only in this African nation can they clean it up. Writing woefully tardy letters from the comfortable confines of their Orlando headquarters is just unacceptable.
This the real world where people die, Exodus – not some joyride on a nice spring day at Disney World.
Fearing a renewed uproar over tonight’s ABC News investigation of Exodus International’s role in Uganda’s kill-the-gays legislation, Exodus President Alan Chambers has informally told conservative Christian pundit Warren Throckmorton:
I am disappointed that Exodus won’t be heard in this piece. Sadly, Don Schmierer declined the interview and our request to go on record with ABC was denied. I would have loved nothing better than to share our disdain for this bill and apologize for going anywhere near such a horrible conference.
It is neither sad nor surprising that Schmierer and the rest of the Exodus board declined to talk: Schmierer had already discredited himself, on Exodus’ own blog.
In December 2009, in an Exodus blog guest article, Schmierer admitted that, since 2002, he had been working closely with antigay evangelicals in Uganda to mobilize antigay political activity.
And yet, Schmierer claims that, over the course of seven years, he was somehow oblivious to evangelical colleagues’ internationally publicized lynch mobs which were killing gay Ugandans and destroying the reputations of rival pastors with false character attacks.
Such a ridiculous claim of ignorance would be torn to shreds by ABC and exposed as a lie — which it is. Hence, Schmierer’s refusal to talk, and Chambers’ failure to follow through with his offer to express disdain or apologize, regardless of whether ABC is listening. (Read More)
looking to retool as it stands on the precipice of collapse. The desperate state of Exodus was revealed in an exclusive story by Ex-Gay Watch today, which reported that talk of an Exodus makeover occurred during an emergency meeting that focused on the group’s solvency.
It’s amazing what one ostensibly Christian woman can accomplish on just $29,000 per year.
Some of Ling’s mistakes were prosaic, yet annoying, such as using 
