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)
The Exodus Global Alliance hosted a conference of antigay religious groups in Melbourne, Australia, on Saturday. The conference accused all sexually honest, same-sex-attracted persons of being sexually “broken.” Exodus declared that homosexuality is “unwanted,” and it contended that sexually honest, openly gay persons are required to lead what Exodus calls “the homosexual lifestyle.”
According to PinkPaper.com, the conference planned to promote “reparative therapy [to] communicate the message of liberation from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.”
The church hosting the conference dismisses its same-sex-attracted parishioners as “sexually confused.” Organizer Shirley Basket told the Melbourne Herald Sun that her ex-gay path was “the right path” for everyone. And, that in order to choose Jesus, gay people must combat their sexual orientation.
Equality advocates countered the conference, declaring that it is immoral to offer false promises of sexual conversion and to promote prejudice toward LGBT family and church members.
“You can’t choose to become straight just because your religious leaders tell you that homosexuality is a sin,” Melbourne equality advocate Tim Wright told the Sydney Star-Observer. “Churches need to be teaching their gay and lesbian members to be proud of who they are, not ashamed. This conference will only cause more pain and anguish for the participants, not help them…Our message to participants is: if your church rejects you because of your sexuality, you should reject your church. Closets are for clothes, not people.”
In Australia, several religious communities including the Uniting Church welcome LGBT people of faith unconditionally.
In the United States, Exodus International spokesman Randy Thomas falsely claimed that the Australia conference is “there to speak with and minister to those seeking their advice and opinion on how to live with same sex attractions in congruence with their faith.” Not true: Exodus coaches conference attendees not only to deny their attractions, but also to reject Christian faith perspectives that accept the attractions or permit expression of those attractions.
Thomas sidesteps Exodus’ affirmation of Australia’s law against marriage for gay couples.
Earlier last week, Australian former ex-gay Anthony Venn-Brown discussed the pressure that Exodus and similar organizations place upon ex-gays to enter doomed heterosexual marriages. Here’s video of Venn-Brown’s reflections:
Australia’s national breakfast show, Channel 7’s Sunrise
Uganda Family Life Network leader and conference organizer Stephen Langa has declared that Uganda’s gay people are child molesters, and that Uganda’s life-imprisonment sentence and extrajudicial torture and execution for homosexuality are too lenient.
Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, co-founder of the European hate group Watchmen on the Walls, has advocated that persons convicted of homosexual orientation be detained permanently for ex-gay brainwashing. If the brainwashing fails, then the convicts — it seems — would remain subject to Uganda’s life-imprisonment statutes as well as extrajudicial execution.
Exodus International board member Don Schmierer has given a silent nod to the above conference proposals: Exodus was warned in advance of these policies, and Schmierer continues to take no action whatsoever to protest them. Instead, Schmierer used his March 5 conference speech to blame African parents for sexual orientation, and declared that parents should raise their children according to U.S. evangelical Christian ideology — or else.
The appropriate opportunity for Exodus to retract its conference involvement passed some time ago. Both the Exodus Global Alliance and Exodus International board member Phil Burress have persistently sought to criminalize homosexuality. Exodus’ flagship Love In Action program has previously been caught allowing parents to force youths into involuntary ex-gay detention and brainwashing. The time for Exodus to act against any renegade board members and programs was before, not after, these pre-planned and persistent attacks upon human dignity and human rights.
In recent years, Exodus International chose to renew its membership in the Exodus Global Alliance, knowing that the EGA was acting to condemn gay people in Jamaica, Barbados, Uganda and elsewhere to years of imprisonment, torture, and vigilante violence. Exodus leaders have chosen to re-associate with Lively through illicit promotion of his Holocaust revisionism; and Exodus has chosen to re-associate not only with same-sex sexual-cuddle and tennis-racket therapy advocate Richard Cohen, but now with Cohen’s ex-gay foundation witchdoctor, Caleb Lee Brundidge, who is said to perform tribal magic rituals — dressed in a veneer of pentecostal language — upon would-be ex-gays.
Given Exodus’ deliberate choices to allow and affirm its leaders’ extremist activities, no after-the-fact cosmetic statement from Exodus (to the effect that its board members and flagship program act autonomously even when they use Exodus’ name in their activities, or that its leaders have a right to engage in public policy no matter how immoral their personal policies are) is acceptable.
Ex-gay movement pundit Warren Throckmorton called on Alan Chambers and Richard Cohen to have their representatives make public statements distancing themselves from the conference proposal for forced ex-gay brainwashing.
Ex-Gay Watch, meanwhile, warns that Exodus has a “very short window in which to soundly renounce the entire conference, the idea of forced therapy and, as we suggested earlier, call for the decriminalization of homosexuality in Uganda and the rest of the world.”
These calls against Exodus are noble, but insufficient.
Exodus was told in advance of the conference’s likely policies by representatives of Box Turtle Bulletin and Ex-Gay Watch. Exodus’ failure to pre-empt a leader’s role in extremist incitement to violence and affirmations of police-state activity is negligent and indefensible. That negligence, unfortunately, has long been Exodus’ intentional modus operandi: Exodus encourages its leaders’ and allies’ extremism, then repeatedly invokes a right-to-ignorance of its leaders’ ongoing immorality, incompetence, and incitements to violence. Executive vice president Randy Thomas is especially guilty of this abdication of basic morality and responsibility.
With its latest blank check allowing yet another organization official to affirm and collaborate with human rights violations, involuntary detention and brainwashing, and police-state activity, Exodus falls within the definition of a hate group — and a cult.
Until Exodus’ entire board and executive director resign, Exodus should be treated as a hate group by public schools, local governments, and community organizations.
A three-day antigay conference starting today in Kampala, Uganda, will promote magic, life-imprisonment, and parental blame-games as methods of “curing” people of their sexual orientation. Exodus International board member Don Schmierer of the United States will help keynote the conference.
Schmierer was scheduled to join Holocaust revisionistScott Lively and Caleb Lee Brundidge as speakers for the event, organized by Uganda’s so-called Family Life Network. Brundidge is a therapist within ex-gay Richard Cohen’s International Healing Foundation who also co-leads Extreme Prophetic, a movement of pentecostal extremists who anticipate that God shall empower them to raise corpses from the dead — right out of cemetery graves.
The decision of Exodus leadership, Lively, and a prominent therapist at Cohen’s foundation to endorse Uganda as ex-gay conference locale is appalling:
Uganda has an atrocious human-rights record. Security forces commonly inflict torture and illegal detention; the nation remains wracked by civil war; more than 1.2 million Ugandans have been driven from their homes; an estimated 20,000 children have been kidnapped by the LRA for use as child soldiers and slaves; and the country is led by president-for-life Yoweri Museveni.
The conference objective is to defend Uganda’s criminalization of homosexuality, which remains punishable by life in prison — or by extrajudicial execution, which also is common. FLN leader and conference organizer Stephen Langa justifies this brutality by falsely accusing gay people of recruiting children. (Langa offers no evidence of such recruitment.)
The conference is not intended for the people who actually struggle with their sexual orientation; it is targeted instead at antigay parents, politicians, violently antigay preachers, and vigilantes. Langa says the conference will (falsely) inform these audiences that sexual orientation can be suppressed and destroyed through changes in parenting, through brutal law enforcement, and through concerted campaigns of ostracism by organizations and communities.
Conference tickets cost 25,000 Ugandan shillings per day — U.S. $13, in a Ugandan economy whose per-capita purchasing power is about one-fortieth that of the United States.
Thus far, only one ex-gay pundit has spoken out against Exodus’ participation in the conference: Warren Throckmorton.
… Throckmorton says that he believes it is a big mistake for these US people to go to Uganda and discuss prevention of homosexuality when they are not scientists and have no training to discuss these matters in a reliable or factual manner.
He says people who are involved are not qualified to speak about the causes or change of homosexuality.
“None of them have any research on the topic or scientific qualifications to understand the research on the subject. They will be spreading old ideas about homosexuality which even Christian psychologists in the US and Europe have dismissed as without support,” he says.
He says that one of the presenters has a significant problem with credibility.
“Caleb Brundidge is affiliated with Extreme Prophetic here in the US. He leads groups to mortuaries to attempt to raise the dead!
“He believes God drops jewels and gold dust on worshippers but refuses to gain verification of these claims. He also claims he was gay and changed. Given his other claims, it is difficult to take any of his claims seriously.
“I also believe it is dangerous for those who might struggle to admit their struggle in Uganda when it might land them in trouble with the authorities,” he says in a commentary sent to our reporter after we broke the story of the Conference.
“Mr. Schmierer is a board member for Exodus International and he should not be promoting questionable theories of prevention in a country where just admitting being gay can lead to serious consequences,” he adds.
Exodus International and Exodus Global Alliance support criminalization and long prison terms for gay people in many countries in the world. Despite numerous requests, Exodus International has refused to disavow its membership in EGA or its role in EGA opposition to human rights. [And since 2002, despite my own personal appeals to Exodus executive vice president Randy Thomas, Exodus International has refused to establish and publish a clear and official policy opposing the criminalization and prosecution of homosexual orientation and behavior.]
Why, then, is it a surprise to Prof. Throckmorton when Exodus board member Schmierer acts in support of imprisonment and forcible brainwashing in Uganda?
Addendum: A commenter at Ex-Gay Watch points out that it is effectively illegal to be ex-gay in Uganda. To admit past or present sexual activities with the same sex, immediately exposes oneself to imprisonment, torture, or extrajudicial execution.
Perhaps the entire leadership of Exodus International should fly to Uganda, stay there for a year or two, and enjoy life under the laws and vigilantism that they defend. To advocate for laws that one refuses to live under is both sadistic and cowardly.
[Dutch minister for education, culture and equality Ronald Plasterk] said that the Onze Weg (Our Way) foundation was in fact attempting to ‘cure’ homosexuality. Protecting minority interests is part of Plasterk’s portfolio.
Earlier in the week Plasterk had defended his decision to subsidise the organisation, prompted by written questions from two opposition members of parliament. Boris van der Ham of the left-wing liberal party D66 and Anouchka van Miltenburg of right-wing liberal VVD, quoted an article in the Revu weekly that claimed the group is targeting homosexuals in order to alter their sexual orientation. The organisation is mainly active among evangelical Christians and was granted a 50,000 euro subsidy in September 2008.
Another ex-gay organization, RefoAnders, received a government subsidy of 84,000 euros, according to Religious Intelligence. That handout is now being reconsidered.
Onze Weg and RefoAnders are both closely linked to Different [an orthodox Christian foundation] — and that foundation is a member of Exodus International.
Both organizations falsely claimed to be gay Christian organizations.
The web site of the Exodus Global Alliance profiles Johan van de Sluis, 70-year-old board member of Onze Weg, who thanks Exodus for helping move European ex-gay organizations out of isolation.
GayNZ.com voiced concern on Dec. 1 that Exodus Global Alliance is spreading involuntary and fundamentalist ex-gay programs down under, in the form of Member of Parliament Jonathan Young. His anti-Semitic Christian “Teen Challenge” has been linked to two U.S. ex-gay activists — David Kyle Foster and Janelle Hallman. Australia recovers from the allegation by several women that the global Mercy Ministries involuntarily detained women and denied them access to professional medical and mental-health care.
What if LGBT adolescent substance abusers entered Teen Challenge’s programmes? What if they are exposed to this unhealthy and unscientific message about the allegedly “essential” pathology of their sexual orientation? It is quite probable that they will experience sexual identity conflict, which could seriously impede their recovery from substance abuse problems, and/or face summary expulsion from fundamentalist oriented Teen Challenge programmes if they refused to “degay” themselves, without referral to mainstream counselors or psychotherapeutic professionals.
According to one professional study, the latter behaviour is rife in fundamentalist ‘exgay’ programmes, and not restricted to those alone. Over the last year, I’ve become aware of the toxic environment of “Mercy Ministries Australia,” a fundamentalist organisation that stated to young women that it could assist existing problems from eating disorders, past child sexual abuse, self-harm, substance abuse and sexual identity conflict. They were told that they would receive ‘professional’ help, but did not have such access. Moreover, if young female residents complained about the programme, or were labeled ‘non-compliant,’ they were summarily expelled from the programme.
Survivors of Mercy Ministries have reportedly assembled the following checklist for people to consult before submitting themselves or loved ones to Exodus-affiliated ex-gay programs:
Do you abide by a Code of Conduct that outlines client rights? Can I have a copy?
Do you have professional indemnity and public liability insurance?
Are you a financial member of an accredited professional body?
Do you receive regular professional supervision and guidance?
Are your qualifications from an accredited program?
The Exodus Global Alliance continues to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to defamation and human rights violations committed against Africans who are same-sex-attracted.
Yesterday, Queerty reported that Ugandan media are spreading the myth that gay people perform sexual recruitment of new homosexuals, primarily in secondary schools and prisons. A week earlier, Bishop Eria Paul Luzinda muttered the smear that same-sex-attracted persons are, without apparent exception, motivated by greed.
The Anglican Bishop of Uyo, Rt. Rev. Isaac Orama, last year condemned the activities of homosexuals and lesbians in language that typifies Nigerian Anglican leaders’ hostility to gays.
“Homosexuality and lesbianism are inhuman,” he said.
“Those who practice them are insane, satanic and are not fit to live because they are rebels to God’s purpose for man.”
Nigerian law states that anyone who has “carnal knowledge of any person against order of nature or permits a male to have carnal knowledge of him” can be imprisoned for 14 years.
Exodus’ response: Silence.
In the past year, African bigots have used Christian churches and other moral platforms to promote the “corrective rape” of lesbians, and to demand long prison sentences or death for persons who are honest about their same-sex attraction.
Anglicans in Africa are waging cultural warfare against their own family and church members who dare to be honest about their same-sex attraction. Worse, they seem to be dressing their bigotry in the trappings of conservative Christian language and exploiting similar bigotries among conservative Episcopal congregations — all for political gain within the Anglican Communion.
Exodus has responded to these instances of antigay hostility and dehumanization with a mix of support and apathy. Its singular political statement in recent times regarding the global human rights of gay people was an expression of support for criminalization of same-sex attraction and expression in Barbados, where ex-gay activist Donnie McClurkin is currently spreading antigay hostility, misunderstanding, misdirected hope, and division among families and communities in which some people are same-sex-attracted.
Georgia-based ex-gay activist D.L. Foster is something of a leader within Exodus Global Alliance.
In recent years, Exodus has given Foster an international soapbox from which Foster affirmed violence and imprisonment in Jamaica and Barbados as tactics to coerce local gay people to closet themselves and pretend to be heterosexual.
At his blog Gay Christian Movement Watch today, Foster berated Canadian ex-gay advocate Wendy Gritter of New Direction for a comment yesterday here at Truth Wins Out. Gritter said:
I would go to a close friend’s gay wedding and yup, I’d bring a gift. I know that all of my close friends know what I believe about sexual ethics and would not assume my beliefs had changed but that my attendance was a sign of my love and friendship. I’m sure I would get some serious flack for this decision – but at the end of the day, I believe loving people is what God asks of me.
Unlike Jesus of Nazareth, Foster disapproves of — in his words — “hanging out with sinners.” Even though Foster has exploited the Exodus global network, Foster now warns antigay clergy not to support Exodus’ North American operation, Exodus International:
Pastors should not refer people to the organization until it can solidify its message and practice into one which is faithful to the Word of God not science, polls, surveys and people like Wendy Gritter.
Foster’s demand spotlights an apparent difference in approach, between the global alliance’s support for antigay violence and imprisonment, and the North American operation’s approach of hiring professional ex-gays to distort science and create appealing soundbites at ex-gay roadshows and ex-gay support-group meetings. Unlike Exodus in North America, Foster rejects science and critical thinking outright — advocating blind obedience to his selective and brutal reinterpretations of the “Word of God.”
So long as Exodus International affiliates with Exodus Global Alliance — thereby aiding ungracious and politically correct thugs like Foster — it puzzles me that relatively gracious moderates like Gritter bother to affiliate with Exodus International.
Surely there are effective and ideologically consistent ways to draw referrals and to promote one’s message, without sacrificing individual, intellectual, and religious freedom?
We have commented many times on the atrocious human-rights record of the global ex-gay network Exodus Global Alliance: It supports imprisonment of homosexual persons in Barbados and refuses to condemn documented antigay violence from the Caribbean and Latin America to Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. In Ecuador, as previously noted, the Exodus alliance co-exists with ex-gay torture and incarceration centers without voicing so much as a hint of opposition.
That trend of silent support for violence continued this week with the apparent murder on May 26 of Bahamian musician and AIDS activist Wellington Adderley. Exodus’ response was to show callous and immoral disregard for the latest murder of a gay humanitarian leader.
The Exodus alliance met earlier this month in Toronto. It said not one public word about global antigay violence; instead, Exodus implied that the solution to any gay problem is for gay people to stop being gay.
The Exodus Global Alliance views violence and imprisonment as useful methods of coercion to force gay people around the world to submit to its missions’ quackery, its false piety, and its brutal distortions of Christian faith.
Jamaica prime minister Bruce Golding reiterated this week that he believes all Jamaicans should enjoy a right to privacy and equality — except same-sex-attracted Jamaicans.
Antigay Caribbean nations, some of which criminalize homosexuality and permit mobs to assault and kill gay people, enjoy the ongoing support of the ex-gay Exodus Global Alliance.
From Ecuador and its ex-gay torture and incarceration centers to Gambia and its plan to behead all gays, Exodus Global Alliance says nothing about the human rights of those who “struggle” with same-sex attraction. Instead, the Exodus alliance legitimizes its host countries’ violent methods by promoting undefined ex-gay conversion while offering no public guidelines — no restraints — upon the barbarity of powerful antigay church and government agencies.
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?
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.
However, the award for laziest anti-gay extremist goes to Peter LaBarbera (aka Porno Pete). (Read More)
“You can’t choose to become straight just because your religious leaders tell you that homosexuality is a sin,” Melbourne equality advocate Tim Wright told the 
