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.

Ex-Gay Watch posted a report this morning which shows an Exodus International in dire straits, indeed, something many of us on this side of the fence have suspected for a while. Alan Chambers threw a “Hail, Mary” conference several weeks ago for the purposes of finding a way to save/revitalize the organization:

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 it’s 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.

Knowing this, Chambers called the New York meeting together and posed the question, “how can we save Exodus?” Unfortunately for those of us who might have a glimmer of hope to the contrary, this plea does not seem to be based on any deep, inner change of heart or ideology. According to first person accounts, the emphasis was on how to make Exodus more “donor accessible.” The meeting was filled with the modern lingo of those who advise on the solicitation of charitable funds. This is about money.

Chamber’s apparently wishes to “re-brand” Exodus into something more palatable to those with funds to give, and the general public alike. According to our sources, Chambers said that “everything is on the table.” That everything apparently includes the possibility of his resignation. It was also clear from the meeting that this is their last resort, their “Hail Mary” so to speak — they’ve tried everything else. Indeed, it seems certain that Chambers would have made pleas to anyone he knew with money before taking this drastic action. And we’ve all seen the odd inconsistencies apparent in their public face. Exodus is an organization fumbling for a solution.

David Roberts goes on to mention that Alan Chambers is mystified by people’s positive reactions to John Smid’s journey toward humanity, and seems to want a piece of that pie. What’s sick about it, though, is that one gets the sense, reading the report, that any “change” in message from Exodus would be purely motivated by money. On some level, at least, the leadership of Exodus understands that the Western world has left them behind, and that the money is drying up for their sort of hateful work, but it doesn’t seem that they’re actually soul-searching in any way. Just looking to rebrand the organization so they don’t look so hateful.

One of the reasons Truth Wins Out and Ex-Gay Watch and other people/organizations with a dog in this fight work so tirelessly to simply expose what these “ex-gay” businesses are all about is that the whole “reparative therapy” model doesn’t fare well in the light of day. Indeed, even moderate-to-conservative Christians, when they find out that it exists, tend to roll their eyes and consider the notion preposterous. So into the light of day we send them and let them succeed or fail on their own merits. Failure tends to be the order of the day.

Exodus plans to announce their “new direction” after their 2012 Leadership conference in January:

It will be after this conference that Exodus announces whatever it is they decide, presumably some sort of apology which allows them to maintain their core ideology, while claiming to have gone about expressing it badly — too much truth and not enough grace, etc.

Wayne remarked in the comments section on Ex-Gay Watch on the plastic, transparent nature of this Hail, Mary! pass from Alan and the Exodus clan:

When Exodus apologizes we expect substance, not a strategy. Chambers must realize that Smid received support because his apology seemed sincere, or at least he was heading in the right direction.

Meanwhile, no one bought The International Healing Foundation’s recent apology from Richard Cohen, who we all thought was full of shit. Chambers would be wise to look at the Cohen flop, not just the Smid success.

The dishonesty and deciept; the semantic games and double talk; the arrogance and allegiance to the political right; the forays overseas that spread hate in places like Uganda; have earned Chambers incredible ill will.

An apology absent a resignation will ring hollow. Chambers should practice some of that conservative “personal responsibility” and admit he has been a failure as a leader and maybe as a human being. He should go somewhere peaceful and quiet to reflect on the harm he has caused as an agent of intolerance. When he returns from exile, he should consider spending the rest of his life undoing the damage that occurred at his hands.

Well said.

I suppose that NARTH was jealous that Exodus was the only “ex-gay” business being humiliated this week, and decided to thus reassert their relevance in a world that cares less and less each day.  NARTH persistently misrepresents the research of noted geneticist Francis Collins [who happens to be an Evangelical], and Collins has the audacity to respond to it forcefully, so therefore NARTH will stomp their feet like this:

The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) is once again attacking the veracity of noted geneticist Dr. Francis S. Collins. For a review of the history of this issue, please see the summary and links in our previous post. The original NARTH article that started this is “Homosexuality Is Not Hardwired,” Concludes Dr. Francis S. Collins, Head Of The Human Genome Project” from 2007.

This latest effort comes in the form of an article identified as submitted to the NARTH website by David C. Pruden, NARTH’s Vice-President of Operations. We will assume from here on out that Pruden is the author unless or until we receive information to the contrary. In it, this writer is painted as having wooed Dr. Collins into making statements favorable to a pro-gay position by “misinforming” him about NARTH. Supposedly, by not telling him what a good and wholesome organization it is (cough), we hoodwinked Dr. Collins into perverting the science in our favor.

That is how sneaky gay bloggers are! All we have to do is snap our fingers and the leading scientists of the nation do what we say! Come on, now.

David Pruden provides no evidence, or clear argument to support that I “misinformed” Dr. Collins. Dr. Collins is a smart man and can clearly draw his own conclusions. The latest article is defensive and divisive, providing nothing new. Furthermore, Pruden’s claims are not relevant because XGW is not responsible for “representing” NARTH in a way that fits their own PR. I simply asked Dr. Collins questions and he answered after reading the original NARTH article himself.

[...]

Dr. Collins stated that the words used in that NARTH piece were “juxtaposed in a way that suggest[ed] a somewhat different conclusion than [he] intended.” If Pruden had a beef with that, then why point fingers at me, rather than just go to the source?

And on and on it goes.  Read the whole thing, because it’s a demonstration of just how little of a commitment to or relationship with the truth NARTH [and all related ex-gay religious extremist organizations] have.  They simply lie, and they hope that people are dumb enough not to notice.

Ex-gay activist Joe Dallas and Nancy Heche — estranged and embittered mother of a certain Hollywood actress — both base their livelihoods upon demonization of Christians who value grace more than they fear the unorthodox and the outcast.

As with their previous works, their recent book “The Complete Christian Guide to Understanding Homosexuality” is utterly incomplete in its perspectives on faith and sexuality. And for all of its butchered Bible quotes, the book falls far short of its subtitle, “A Biblical and Compassionate Response to Same-Sex Attraction.”

Patrick Fitzgerald of Ex-Gay Watch observes, “The book is nearly 500 pages long and most of the information contained is an organized conglomeration of things we’ve been hearing for years and rebutted ad-nauseum.” But, Fitzgerald notes, the book also contains numerous new defamations that require methodical investigation — since the book’s authors regrettably have a history of distorting research, telling half-truths, and — in Heche’s case — lying about her own family history.

Dallas and Heche are not alone in these defamations; they are joined by Exodus International and Focus on the Family veterans Alan Chambers, Paul Copan, Melissa Fryrear, Mike Haley, Bill Maier and Randy Thomas. The book represents the combined opinion of the leadership of Exodus International and key people at Focus on the Family.

Fitzgerald’s book review is lengthy; here are some quick take-home points:

• Exodus denies the existence of sexual orientation and contends that everyone is equally heterosexual.
• Exodus contends that love is counterfeit unless the Christian Right approves of it.
• Exodus promises “freedom” and “liberation” from authentic selfhood, not freedom from one’s sexual orientation.
• Exodus is incapable of explaining how consensual loving relationships are in conflict with the Golden Rule.
• Exodus employs circular logic to declare its interpretation of the Bible to be “authoritative.”
• Exodus cites Leviticus to justify the murder of gay men — and blames the murder victims for Exodus’ violence.
• Heche continues to lie about her marriage and about her daughter.
• Dallas severely mangles the Bible, contradicting himself regarding the supposed “characteristics of homosexual people” while allowing the armed forces to recruit felons, anti-Semites, and racists to replace the tough and talented gay, lesbian, and transgender servicemembers whom he wants purged.

Cloaked in pious humility, this collective work of Exodus’ leaders shows that unholiness, fear, ideological insecurity, lust, sexual predation, and bitterness have consumed an organization that is dangerously inserting itself into the nation’s public schools and church networks as a beacon of purity.

Arthur Goldberg’ damage-control campaign has begun, says Dave Rattigan of Ex-Gay Watch. His strategy is to portray himself as an innocent man who made a mistake, and is now the victim of a ruthless personal attack by the purveyors of the much-feared gay agenda.

Click here to read Rattigan’s excellent refutation, “I’m the victim: Arthur Abba Goldberg versus the world.”

Michel Glatze, a former gay activist who became a so-called “ex-gay” after what appears to be a possible nervous breakdown, went on a racist rant against President Barack Obama this week, according to Ex-Gay Watch.

According to Ex-Gay Watch’s David Roberts, Glatze has started posting rambling and disjointed thoughts to his new blog. Some examples, including the attacks on the President:

“Have I mentioned lately how utterly ‘disgusting’ Obama is? And, yes, it’ because he’ black. God, help us all.”

“It’s a shame Obama is black. He could end up setting back race relations decades.”

“If Obama had a baby with Down’s Syndrome, he’d probably be frustrated that the child’ intelligence would never be enough to discern that his father is the Messiah. Knowing this, Obama would probably have his Down’ Syndrome baby killed, before it was ever born”

I think such posts are further evidence of what appears to be Glatze’s mental deterioration and decline. I hope he has sought professional help and guidance, as he slips further into incoherent and incendiary diatribes. He used to do good work, but now it is clear that he offers nothing but angry rambling and disjointed thoughts.

Sadly, the virulently anti-gay website World Net Daily is exploiting Glatze’s state of mind for crass political gain. And, Glatze, who just solicited me for an interview, (I turned him down) is a stage horse who is actively seeking publicity. While he claims to have found God, it is clear that his Savior is newsprint featuring his name.

I truly wish him well and hope he sees through this charade and rejoins the reality-based community in the future.

Stephen Black, an Exodus spokesperson, compared “ex-gay” watchdog organizations to Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Black, the leader of First Stone Ministries, an Exodus affiliate in Oklahoma City, used his personal blog to opine that “gay activists, liberal blog bullies and the liberal anti-Christ media machine…and Darwinism,” were determined to make ex-gay ministries illegal.

Exodus International is becoming more desperate and shrill as they lose their war against homosexuality. We call on Exodus to take action against Black and apologize for the group’ outrageous slander against GLBT advocates. These paranoid, mean-spirited and unfounded attacks are unethical and undermine Exodus’ claim that they love homosexuals.

“There are actual GAY hate groups who wish to silence the voices of ex-gays,” wrote Black on his blog. “These groups are like the brazenly named “Ex-Gay Watch’ and their klan of bloggers who use hatefully sarcastic words in addressing ex-gays.”

Black went on to compare the work of ex-gay watchdog groups to Nazis and say — without evidence — that ex-gays were somehow being “stalked.” (Read More)

Exodus Increasingly Resorts To Delusional and Paranoid Attacks Against GLBT Community

NEW YORK — TruthWinsOut.org (TWO) criticized Exodus International after Stephen Black, an organizational spokesperson, compared “ex-gay” watchdog organizations to Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Black, the leader of First Stone Ministries, an Exodus affiliate in Oklahoma City, used his personal blog to opine that “gay activists, liberal blog bullies and the liberal anti-Christ media machine…and Darwinism,” were determined to make ex-gay ministries illegal.

“Exodus International is becoming more desperate and shrill as they lose their war against homosexuality,” said TWO Executive Director Wayne Besen. “We call on Exodus to take action against Black and apologize for the group’ outrageous slander against GLBT advocates. These paranoid, mean-spirited and unfounded attacks are unethical and undermine Exodus’ claim that they love homosexuals.”

“There are actual GAY hate groups who wish to silence the voices of ex-gays,” wrote Black on his blog. “These groups are like the brazenly named “Ex-Gay Watch’ and their klan of bloggers who use hatefully sarcastic words in addressing ex-gays.”

Black went on to compare the work of ex-gay watchdog groups to Nazis and say — without evidence — that ex-gays were somehow being “stalked.”

“One merely need to lightly read over blogs like the “Ex-GAY WATCH” (yes, they are WATCHING and STALKING ex-gay leaders) and/or Wayne Besen’s blog and you will know we are living in very dark days….A very successful attorney friend of mine recently told me he felt it was like 1933 in Nazi Germany for Christians and Exodus type ministries in the USA. He seriously joked with me and said, “Stephen it is like 1933 and your last name isn’t Black, but Bernstein. Your ministries will be on the front-line of the next demonic wave of an anti-Christ movement in history. It is coming.’ WOW! It was a sobering moment.”

Black also claimed that gay activists and the media are, “silencing their great stories about overcoming homosexuality.” He makes the bizarre case that there are so few ex-gay stories from people not on the payroll of right wing organizations because they are, “afraid to come out from fear of persecution.”

“Black must live in a delusional bubble,” said Besen. “The mainstream media has featured Exodus International countless times, even though the group provides no statistics and offers no concrete evidence of change. The reason that we see so few “ex-gays’ who are not on the payroll of political organizations is because they don’t exist. To say, without evidence, that it is because of persecution is a copout and a transparent excuse for Exodus’ astronomical failure rate.”

TWO also took Black to task for his dishonesty. His blog states that he is “not associated with any organization,” yet, he directs an Exodus Ministry.

“This was a radical hit piece with the intent of character assassination,” said Besen. “The question is, what does Exodus intend to do about it?”

- 30 -