TWO Demands That Bachmann Stops Petty and Vindictive Threats Over $150 Fraudulent ‘Therapy’ Bill
Burlington, Vt – Truth Wins Out expressed surprise today that Marcus Bachmann personally called the organization demanding $150 for cancelled July sessions of “ex-gay” therapy with a counselor at his office. He threatened that if TWO did not pay him by Friday he would turn the phony bill over to a collection agency.
In July, Truth Wins Out went undercover and exposed Bachmann & Associates for practicing a form of discredited “pray away the gay” therapy. The revelation rocked Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign. After TWO’s John Becker, who went undercover, had enough videotape evidence to prove that “ex-gay” therapy occurred at Bachmann’s clinic, he called the clinic and cancelled his remaining appointments. Despite widespread circulation of TWO’s video footage, Marcus denied the therapy had taken place.
“I cancelled my remaining appointments in compliance with Bachmann & Associates’ stated procedure,” said John Becker, TWO’s Director of Communications and Development, “yet Marcus Bachmann himself called me and threatened to send the fraudulent $150 ‘bill’ to a collection agency by Friday. I find it odd that Bachmann handled this matter personally rather than through his billing department. This is certainly an unorthodox way of doing business, much like the unethical ‘ex-gay’ therapy offered at his clinic.”
“We call on Marcus Bachmann to immediately stop his petty and vindictive campaign of harassment and threats against our organization,” said TWO’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “Perhaps, now that Michele’s campaign is foundering, the Bachmanns are frustrated and looking for scapegoats to explain her failure. Truth Wins Out refuses to be intimidated or blackmailed by Bachmann. This bogus bill will not be paid.”
Becker was surprised when he received a voicemail from Bachmann on Monday demanding payment for cancelled sessions which never took place. On Tuesday, he returned Bachmann’s call and spoke with him for nearly seven minutes in the presence of a reporter from the local ABC/FOX affiliate in Burlington. The video of the tense exchange can be viewed at Truth Wins Out’s website.
“We saw firsthand that the ‘ex-gay’ therapy practiced by Bachmann & Associates is unethical and unhealthy for clients,” said Becker. “What goes on in that clinic is rejected by every respected medical and mental health organization in America.”
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 religious 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.
Contact: Wayne Besen, Executive Director
Phone: 917-691-5118
E-Mail: wbesen@truthwinsout.org
Contact: John Becker, Director of Communications & Development
Phone: 920-265-6023
E-mail: john@truthwinsout.org
UPDATE: 11/15/11, 3:30pm — I just finished a nearly seven-minute telephone conversation with Marcus Bachmann. A member of the media was there, and a video report will be forthcoming. It will be posted as soon as it becomes available.
Yesterday afternoon I was in a meeting and, of course, had my phone off. After the meeting concluded, I checked my phone and saw that I missed a call from a number I didn’t recognize. Since the mystery caller left a voicemail, I checked it, and my jaw nearly hit the floor when I found out that the mystery caller was, in fact, Marcus Bachmann.
Bachmann was calling in an attempt to collect $150 in no-show fees from two “pray away the gay” appointments I canceled after going through five such sessions with a therapist at his clinic back in June.
Before patients at Bachmann & Associates start services, they’re required to sign a paper acknowledging that they’ve been made aware of the clinic’s no-show policy. According to said policy, patients are assessed a $75 no-show fee for each appointment that they miss without giving prior notification. I always booked the maximum number of appointments in advance that I could (3) in order to avoid suspicion — after all, it was to be a 4-6 month course of treatment — so when I went back to Vermont, I called the clinic to cancel them. However, I didn’t want to give them any kind of a heads up about the story that was about to break in the media, so I said that a member of my immediate family “back home in Wisconsin” (they had seen and photocopied my Wisconsin ID) had had a health crisis, and that I needed to go out of state but didn’t know when I’d be back. On the voicemail I left at the clinic, I told them to cancel all three of my appointments and that I’d schedule my next sessions when I knew when I’d be back in the Twin Cities.
Apparently, instead of cancelling all three appointments as per my request, the receptionist or whomever had the job of fielding voice messages only canceled the first appointment, because two months after the story broke I started receiving bills for $150 (two no-show fees) from Bachmann & Associates. I wasn’t about to have Truth Wins Out fork over another $150 for the clinic’s error, so on November 2nd I called them and very politely contested the fee. Neither the receptionist nor the billing representative with whom I spoke had any idea who I was. The billing representative merely told me that once the fees had been assessed they could only be waived at the therapist’s discretion, so she’d send a message to Timothy Wiertzema asking whether he’d be willing to waive them. She assured me that if Timothy hadn’t personally called me back by the end of the week, I could safely assume he’d agreed to waive the fees.
The rest of the week came and went without any further contact with anyone from Bachmann & Associates, so I assumed the matter was settled. Timothy must have deferred any decision on the matter to Marcus himself, as the following message was left on my phone:
Hello John Becker, this is Doctor Marcus Bachmann (emphasis his); I received a message from our billing department asking if we would write off the two no-show fees for 7/7/11 and 7/12/11. We will not (emphasis his) be writing those off, so you do owe those no-show fees, and we would expect payment as soon as possible, otherwise we will have to turn it over to collections. If you have any questions you can call (651) 379-0444. Thank you.
(NOTE: The phone number Marcus Bachmann provided is the publicly listed phone number for the Bachmann & Associates Lake Elmo office. Were it not publicly available, we would not have included it.)
Either Marcus Bachmann has a lot more time to personally attend to his underlings’ business matters now that his wife’s presidential campaign has tanked, or Truth Wins Out’s undercover investigation remains a very personal issue for him nearly five months later. I’ll be calling Dr. Bachmann back later today. Stay tuned!
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.
Recently I heard a young man share his story of battling his unwanted same-sex attractions. Growing up as a pastor’s son, Ben felt that his dad was pastor to everybody but him. He also felt like he didn’t belong with the other boys in school and church, leaving him with a longing for deep connection with males. What helped him turn the corner was when he found people with whom he could be completely honest about his shameful desires and feelings, who also helped him develop his relationship with God.
Shameful! And what a formulaic “ex-gay” story!
He shared that he slowly realized his heart was looking for three things in other men. First, he longed for someone to be like a loving father to him. He knew his dad loved him, but the lack of a heart connection with his dad left him with a father-shaped hole in his soul. And he realized that he was also looking for a rescuer, someone to be strong when he was weak, someone to scoop him up and make him feel safe and cared for. And he also realized he was looking for someone to comfort him, to walk alongside him through life, someone who saw the scars caused by the slings and arrows of living in a fallen world and would compassionately tend to them, soothing him and nurturing him. Optimally, he told us, it would really great if he could find someone who would be all three of those things at one time, wrapped up in one person. That would be the “Mr. Right” he longed to find and be loved by.
Oh, gawd. The dude is either into guys, sexually, or he is not. This whole “he lacked a heart connection” with his dad, therefore he wants to marry a man thing doesn’t even make logical sense.
But here is the thing. The other things in there are completely normal things to want in a spouse! Someone to be strong when you are weak, someone who makes you feel safe, someone who cares for you as you care for them? NORMAL!
Somebody to comfort you, to walk alongside you through life, someone who can soothe and nurture you? NORMAL!
The major “lightbulb moment” of his journey came when he realized that what he longed for was a Father, a Savior, and a Comforter. . . and that perfectly describes who God is—three in one, Father, Son and Spirit.
Therefore anyone who is looking for those things — aside from the whole father problem thingamajig, which is something that requires professional [not the kind Exodus offers] help — doesn’t need a spouse at all! And neither does anyone else!
When we delight ourselves in the Lord, He gives us Himself, and He is what our hearts desire. Uncover all the surface, temporary things we think we want, and underneath are the true desires of our heart: to be loved, to be known, to be valued, to be safe, to matter.
And as Ben showed us, to be fathered, to be rescued, to be comforted.
Yes, we want all those things—and our marvelous God delights to give them to us as He gives us Himself.
Lady still hasn’t explained how this means it’s bad for a man to want those things in a male spouse, but it’s totally a-okay for a woman to want them. Can’t she just “delight herself in the Lord” as well?
Inquiring minds, etc.
Sue Bohlin is of course on the board of some discredited “ex-gay” wingnut business which offers false hope and depressive/suicidal feelings to unsuspecting, hurting people.
All should read this great piece by Bianca Phillips in Memphis’s alternative newsweekly, the Memphis Flyer. In it, she takes the reader back on a recap of what he and the Exodus flagship model Love In Action used to be, and describes the evolution Smid is undergoing as a result of meeting local gay filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox, whose documentary This Is What Love In Action Looks Like has been making its rounds this fall on the independent film festival circuit:
John Smid, the former director of ex-gay Christian ministry Love in Action, is a changed man.
Sitting in an office above the detached garage of his Germantown home, he has nothing but praise for the work of local gay filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox. Fox’s long-awaited documentary, This Is What Love in Action Looks Like, makes its local premiere at the Indie Memphis Film Festival on November 4th, and it was through the multi-year making of that film that Smid’s ideas about homosexuality began to shift dramatically.
“I’m realizing that people have the freedom in Christ to choose to live in a gay relationship. That’s not for me to judge on their behalf,” said Smid, who resigned as executive director of Love in Action in 2008. “I realize I was what the gay community often said I was: I was judgmental. I was critical. I was somewhat homophobic.”
People who were directly affected by Smid’s activities during his time at Love In Action are having varied reactions to Smid’s change in attitude, and that’s understandable. Peterson Toscano spoke to The Flyer for the article and had this to say, among other things:
“Love in Action was oppression in this concentrated form, so I was very depressed afterwards and suicidal for a time,” said Toscano, who wrote the play Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House as a way to cope with the damage. “I was really confused, and there was lots of self-hatred and shame. There was lots of bad training about sexuality. Nobody was trained to teach anything.”
Toscano said one of Love in Action’s core teachings was especially damaging.
“They insisted that, as queer people, we were not able to have healthy relationships. So even friendships would become twisted and perverted because we became too emotionally needy,” Toscano said. “I found myself putting up walls five to six years later as I was getting to know people. I had it in my head that I couldn’t get close to people.”
So glib apologies aren’t really going to cut it, though it does seem like Smid really is starting to grasp what he did. Peterson has talked about Smid’s “evolution” extensively on his blog, so if you haven’t read that, do so.
Lastly, Bianca also interviewed me for the article and asked what Truth Wins Out’s response to this sort of thing is. Here is what I said:
Evan Hurst, the Memphis-based social media director for anti-ex-gay group Truth Wins Out, echoes the sentiment many former clients have publicly expressed.
“If [Smid] is on a path of personal growth and starting to grasp that he played a key part of inflicting harm onto people, that’s great. [Truth Wins Out] only wishes him the best in continuing on that road,” Hurst said. “But part of our mission is to expose this industry for what it is. We’re not shy about our goal, and that’s to let every single person know how harmful these ministries are.”
Yup! So anyway, go read the whole thing to see what you’re missing.
Southern Poverty Law Center and Truth Wins Out Launch Campaign Targeting Destructive Conversion Therapy
Community Meetings Planned in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Truth Wins Out (TWO) launched a national campaign today targeting conversion therapy, a thriving practice that claims to “convert” people from homosexuality to heterosexuality. The groups made the announcement in coordination with today’s National Coming Out Day.
The campaign will begin with a series of community meetings in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., for survivors of the practice, which has been discredited or highly criticized by virtually all major American medical, psychiatric, psychological and professional counseling organizations. Survivors are also invited to share their own stories at www.splcenter.org/conversion-therapy. The campaign also will encourage community advocates and elected leaders to scrutinize local conversion therapy programs.
“Conversion therapy programs have devastated all too many lives and families by attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation,” said Christine Sun, deputy legal director, who leads the SPLC’s LGBT rights project. “This practice is based on nothing more than junk science and must stop.”
“There’s a serious concern that the damage inflicted by conversion therapy can reach far beyond the individual receiving the ‘therapy’ and into communities across the country,” said Wayne Besen, founder and executive director of Truth Wins Out.
Central to conversion therapy – sometimes known as reparative or “sexual reorientation” therapy – is the belief that being gay is a mental disorder – a position rejected by the American Psychiatric Association nearly four decades ago. People who have undergone conversion therapy have reported increased anxiety, depression, and in some cases, suicidal ideation.
Despite these findings, the conversion therapy movement continues to push its message and is increasingly targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth, often recommending that parents commit their children to treatment against the child’s wishes.
The American Medical Association officially “opposes the use of ‘reparative’ or ‘conversion’ therapy that is based on the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that the patient should change his/her homosexual orientation.”
In 2006, the American Psychological Association declared: “There is simply no sufficiently scientifically sound evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.”
Yet the message that LGBTQ people can and should change their sexual orientation is echoed throughout the literature promoting conversion therapy:
“Anyone who experiences SSA [same-sex attraction] is not ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian,’ ‘bisexual,’ or ‘transgender.’ They are all latent heterosexuals!”
“Self-deception about gender is at the heart of the homosexual condition. A child who imagines that he or she can be the opposite sex—or be both sexes—is holding on to a fantasy solution to his or her confusion. This is a revolt against reality and a rebellion against the limits built into our created human natures.”
Absurd theories and treatments also are promoted within the conversion therapy movement:
“The penis is the essential symbol of masculinity—the unmistakable difference between male and female. This undeniable anatomical difference should be emphasized to the boy in therapy.”
“The family model that produces a homosexual son has, in our view, typically failed to validate the boy’s masculine individuation during the formative phase of gender identification.”
There are other troubling aspects of this practice. The American Psychological Association expressed concern in 2006 that the positions espoused by some of the leading advocates of conversion therapy, such as the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), “create an environment in which prejudice and discrimination can flourish.”
The potential for conversion therapy to foster an anti-LGBT atmosphere is another concern for the SPLC, which analyzed 14 years of federal hate crime data and found that homosexuals are far more likely to be victims of a violent hate crime than any other minority group in the United States. The SPLC also has worked to combat anti-gay bullying in schools.
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The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, see www.splcenter.org.
Truth Wins Out (TWO) is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to create a world where LGBT individuals can live openly, honestly and true to themselves. TWO 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.
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1. Richard Cohen, Straight Talk About Homosexuality: The Other Side of Tolerance, 2010, p. 112.
2. Joseph Nicolosi and Linda Ames Nicolosi, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, 2002, p. 22.
3. Ibid., p. 24.
4. Joseph J. Nicolosi, Shame and Attachment Loss: The Practical Work of Reparative Therapy, 2009, p. 39.
Awwww, this is too bad. Poland unfortunately lags behind the rest of the European Union when it comes to abandoning medieval views about sexuality, so Joseph Nicolosi and NARTH were able to book one of their weird little “Reparative Therapy: How To Without Leaving Visible Wounds” conferences at a medical school in that country. But then the school canceled. The source article is LifeSiteNews, so you’ll have to filter this out of wingnut speak and into grown-up reporting in order to get the gist:
A conference on the treatment of homosexuality has been denied use of facilities at a medical school in Poland, after the school had initially given approval for the event. The decision by the Medical School (UM) Foundation not to host the September 16 Reparative Therapy Conference, featuring psychologist Dr. Joseph Nicolosi of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), followed front-page criticism of the conference by leading Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
“We received a reservation request for the organization of this conference and we granted it,” said UM Foundation President Roman Dworzynski at the time. “I see no (problem). (Reparative therapy) is a scientific theory like any other … When Louis Pasteur spoke about the existence of bacteria, no one believed him.”
Obviously Roman Dworzynski hasn’t been introduced to the wonders of Google or he would understand why he sounds like a product of the Texas school system with that remark.
Gazeta Wyborcza’s (GW) coverage of the conference has stressed that the American Psychological Association (APA) expresses concern about the effects of treatment for same-sex attraction. The APA also states, however, that there is “insufficient evidence” to either approve or discredit such therapy.
Actually, the APA resolution moreso says that there’s insufficient evidence to approve the therapy. The “discredit” part is really you all being cute with language. But again, we’re used to crappy reporting from right wing sources.
Here’s the female Polish wingnut version of Joseph Nicolosi, whining about censorship:
The Foundation for Health and Psychotherapeutic Education head, psychologist Bogna Bialecka, said that her Poznan-based organization has been planning the conference for several months so that Nicolosi could share his professional experience helping men deal with their unwanted same-sex attraction.
“The decision of the Medical University’s governing body is a sad example of censoring the freedom of speech,” she said.
Yes, well, Ms. Bialecka, in the United States we have a word for people like you: quack. She showed up in the comment section to the piece and said this:
It’s still hard time. We are fighting for the right to free speech. And happygael is right. The worst part of it are thousands of homosexuals who don’t identify with gay activism, who are looking for change, but can’t receive it, because of lack of trained, fully professional reparative therapists.
No, you’re fighting for the right to hurt people based on your own bigoted, uneducated, ill-trained notions of psychology. And without unqualified hacks like you and Joe Nicolosi, spamming the public with your perpetual nonsense on sexuality, there wouldn’t BE “thousands of homosexuals” who are unhappy with their sexual orientation. People like you must first inject hate into the discourse for people to be unhappy with their natural sexuality. That said, Bialecka’s complaint about “trained, fully professional reparative therapists” and the “lack” thereof are not the result of censorship of free speech, but more about the fact that no such thing exists.
This crap might fly in Poland, but ask your friends at NARTH how well they’re doing in the United States.
Same-sex pairs of monogamous birds are just as attached and faithful to each other as those paired with a member of the opposite sex.
The insight comes from a study of zebra finches – highly vocal, colourful birds that sing to their mates, a performance thought to strengthen the pair’s bond.
Scientists found that same-sex pairs of finches sang to and preened each other just like heterosexual pairs.
Huh, well. And apparently some of these birds are so gay that, even when they brought in attractive female birds, the majority of the male birds which had paired off together stayed together.
And that, folks, is what happens when wingnut warnings about impending homosexopocalypses go unheeded. Seriously, how gay is this?
Zebra finches are known to establish life-long monogamous relationships that are routinely consummated through behavior such as birdsong, mutual preening, and beak nuzzling.
All while watching Glee.
Maybe if Marcus and Janet need an extra hand, they can get Porno Pete to come over with his camera and look for birds wearing teeny-tiny assless chaps.
[Photo: Keith Gerstung/Wiki Commons/CC License, via Bryan Nelson]
On Monday, August 1, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition aired a report from Alix Spiegel entitled “Can Therapy Help Change Sexual Orientation?” Instead of accurately representing “ex-gay therapy” as ineffective, dangerous, and condemned by every mainstream professional medical and mental health organization, NPR opted to misrepresent the facts, falsely framing the story as a debate between two equally legitimate sides that “has been raging in psychological circles for more than a decade.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. A 2009 press release from the American Psychological Association announcing the results of an exhaustive study on the efficacy of “ex-gay” therapy says it all: “Insufficient evidence [exists] that sexual orientation change efforts work… Practitioners should avoid telling clients that they can change from gay to straight.” In a recent ABC News interview discussing “ex-gay” therapy, renowned author and psychiatrist Jack Drescher put the discredited practice in its proper perspective: “This is so far outside the mainstream it’s practically on Mars.”
Truth Wins Out, GLAAD, and other organizations called on NPR to correct and apologize for parroting “ex-gay” propaganda. Instead, NPR Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos released a tepid, long-winded blog post in which he demonstrated a much greater interest in defending his reporter than correcting her errors.
The Ombudsman’s response is disappointing and woefully inadequate. We expect better from a top-notch, well-respected news organization like National Public Radio. Join Truth Wins Out in calling on NPR to meet with TWO and survivors of “ex-gay” programs so they can be fully informed about the dangers of the “ex-gay” myth –
X affiliate in Burlington. The video of the tense exchange can be viewed at Truth Wins Out’s website.
UPDATE: 11/15/11, 3:30pm — I just finished a nearly seven-minute telephone conversation with Marcus Bachmann. A member of the media was there, and a video report will be forthcoming. It will be posted as soon as it becomes available.
