Here is a completely normal, run-of-the-mill, so-boring-I-can’t-believe-I’m-posting-it story. Try not to yawn from boredom at this story, which happens so, so often:

A conservative Christian politician has a secret life as a sperm donor for lesbian couples – even though he has campaigned against gay marriage.

American politician Bill Johnson has spent most of this year in Christchurch helping run the earthquake recovery, all the while using the online persona “chchbill” to meet women who want help to get pregnant.

Under that persona, he has discussed making donations to at least nine women without the knowledge of his family in the US.

Three of the women are now pregnant, and Johnson has assisted another three with donations in the past month. It is believed he has been in communication with at least another three women to discuss sperm donation.

His actions as a sperm donor sparked concern in the fertility medicine community, whose guidelines recommend donations are made in the regulated environment of a fertility clinic, and that no man provide sperm donations to more than four families.

Not only did he give some sperm to lesbians in New Zealand, officials are concerned that he gave too much sperm to lesbians in New Zealand.

In his political life, Johnson campaigned on a conservative Christian platform which opposed gay marriage.

He said he did not know the “relationship status” of the women he donated to: “I just know they want to have children.” Asked if it mattered, he said: “I’m not going to answer that question.”

Oh, so he can spread his seed throughout the Southern hemisphere but he can’t answer a simple question? Typical wingnut.

Wife not happy:

“This is a really, really difficult time for our family,” Kathy Johnson said in an email to the Press-Register. “I’m still in disbelief and very hurt, and our family has a lot of healing to do.”

Poor thing.

Three stories, three different places.

New Zealand:

A lesbian couple has faced two hate crimes within a week, with anti-gay slurs tagged on their home and vehicles, and a fire destroying their business.

Couple Lindsay Curnow and Juliet Leigh have lived peacefully in the small coastal village of Mangawhai Heads, Northland, for seven years. They said their sexuality has never been an issue before in the community.

But now they live in fear, not wanting to leave their home and return to something worse.

Two weeks ago the couple had their home and vehicles tagged with offensive anti-gay slurs.

Then a week later their shed, which is at the heart of their mail-order bulb business, was completely destroyed by fire.

“They’ve really invaded our privacy. It was a bit like being burgled, you know that sort of violation that you have,” Leigh said.

Georgia:

A Carroll County man told Channel 2 Action News that he believes he was the target of a hate crime.

Chris Staples said someone threw a rock through his window with a piece of paper attached that was covered in anti-gay slurs.

“I was watching TV and just finished smoking a cigarette and I heard this big thud. Boom!” Staples told Channel 2’s George Howell.

The rock had a threatening note attached.

“It said, ‘we know you’re gay. And God hates gays. You won’t be raping anybody in the county and God’s going to make sure that you burn in hell.’ And something about my daddy… my daddy will make sure you burn in hell,”

Then hours later, he woke up to flames filling his bedroom.

Toronto:

The principal of Jarvis Collegiate Institute said allegations that students are hurling slushies, shoes and homophobic slurs at residents of the Gay Village are being “treated very seriously.”

However, Enza Anderson, who has been harassed in the past, called the students “teens of terror” and has organized a public meeting to discuss what she describes as homophobia in the community after a recent attack.

Paul Winsor, a local florist, was singled out by a group of about 12 students who soaked him with two frozen beverages last Monday.

The 49-year-old narrowly dodged an airborne chunk of ice as he chased the teens before they ducked into the school at Jarvis and Wellesley Sts.

“A slushie drink is one thing — it stains your clothes and hurts your pride — but when it escalates to chunks of ice, that’s dangerous,” he said.

Just as there are gay people everywhere, in every nation and culture, there are also pig ignorant bigots. Sad, but true.

After Exodus Global Alliance lost its application for charitable tax-exempt status in New Zealand, the blog Slap Upside the Head noticed that Exodus already enjoys fraudulent misuse of this status in Canada.

That prompted blogger Mark to ask a very simple question: How is it “charitable” for a U.S.-based religious organization to commit unprofessional acts of psychological abuse  against Canadian gay people?

We’d like to know the answer to a similar question: How is it “charitable” for such organizations to charge hundreds of dollars per day for this abuse?

According to Mark:

Charitable status can be revoked for one of three reasons: Voluntary revocation (unlikely in this case), Revocation for failure to file taxes (also unlikely), or revocation for a cause other than a failure to file. The latter is complicated, but states that charitable status can be revoked for “a failure to comply with the requirements of registration,” which may include the “public benefit test.”

According to Revenue Canada, claims of public benefit by any charity “may be [...] rebutted by concerns raised,” and there is definitely legal precedent of this.

Mark has thus created an action page from which Canadians may contact the Canada Revenue Agency and request reconsideration of Exodus’ charitable status.

Mark adds:

We’re looking for experts in the medical and psychological community to sign a common letter to send to the CRA attesting that Exodus is doing demonstrable harm in Canada. If you are, or know an accredited doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, please help us get in touch! Together, we’ll write a letter to send to both the press and the CRA.

We hope that some of our professional readers will contact Mark and offer to help with this common letter.

In New Zealand, an Exodus Global Alliance affiliate has been declined charitable status. The Charities Commission made its wise decision saying that Exodus does not serve any “public benefit” because homosexuality is not considered a mental disorder and did not need curing.

Most organizations that apply to the commission are accepted, so far nearly 25,000, but increasingly they are later dumped with 978 rejected this year so far.

In our view, Exodus should also have its tax-exempt status removed in the United States, because the group is practicing fake therapy that damages its clients. As in New Zealand, Exodus has no public benefit in the United Sates and thus should not be given tax breaks that make it easier for the organization to destroy lives.

One of the Pacific Rim’s leading evangelical voices regarding abuse and “sexual brokenness” is profiled in a new article by former ex-gay Anthony Venn-Brown. (Copies available here and here.)

Venn-Brown, now a gay Christian leader in Australia, has written an analysis that is concise, insightful, fair, and well-balanced.

Sy Rogers rose to prominence in the United States as executive director and later board member of Exodus International through the early 1990s. He appeared in a documentary of that period, “One Nation Under God,” in which — at odds with the statements and experiences of the movie’s featured gay and former ex-gay individuals — Rogers repeated Exodus’ mantra that homosexuality is caused by inadequate parenting and abuse which result in gender confusion. Rogers’ assertions were, in short, projections of his own transgender confusion on to mainstream homosexuals who experience no such confusion.

By 1996, Christianity Today cited Rogers as a leading up-and-coming young evangelical.

After Exodus, Rogers departed with his wife for Asia and rose to prominence as an evangelical speaker on abuse and sexual brokenness to audiences in Singapore and New Zealand. His speeches and self-help programs remain popular to this day. But his central themes remain unnecessarily — almost purposely — ambiguous and prone to deception, ripe for abuse by his ex-gay former colleagues. (Read More)

GayNZ.com has added the ex-gay movement to New Zealand’s list of endangered species.

Following the failure of several organizations, the web site reports, “Auckland’s Exodus houses the only ‘exgay’ outfit in New Zealand. It has no newsletter, no website, and apparently restricts itself to elderly conservative religious gay men who experience sexual identity crises.”

Former Exodus International leader Sy Rogers still resides in the western Pacific island nation, but apparently spends much time marketing conservative-Christian pop music and inflicting sex-and-gender ambiguity and confusion onto innocents in Malaysia. (Watching Rogers and Exodus’ Randy Thomas pose as experts on masculinity is about as convincing as the notion of Gwen Stefani or Pink posing as Amish Christian homemakers.)

GayNZ.com comments:

In effect, the exgay movement has failed largely because the New Zealand Christian Right has remained stubbornly unable or unwilling to develop counselling or psychotherapeutic skills. Most mainstream New Zealanders accept that sexual orientation constitutes a durable source of social identity and cannot easily be changed. These organisations have dwindled in the face of growing lesbian and gay community organisation, assertion and social inclusion, leading to exgay ‘enclavism,’ largely restricted to individuals who have lived most of their lives in fundamentalist social networks, isolated from mainstream New Zealand society.

Exodus International clearly senses that this grim future is on the horizon back in the United States — which is why the organization has smartly sidelined support to its member ex-gay ministries in favor of a focus on political networking among prejudiced antigay churches and religious-right organizations.

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:

1. Do you abide by a Code of Conduct that outlines client rights? Can I have a copy?
2. Do you have professional indemnity and public liability insurance?
3. Are you a financial member of an accredited professional body?
4. Do you receive regular professional supervision and guidance?
5. Are your qualifications from an accredited program?
6. Have you completed your training as a counsellor?