Exodus President Alan Chambers, Exodus Executive Vice President Randy Thomas, and disgraced evangelical Ted Haggard all claim two things in common: An egocentric evangelical faith, and the notion that molestation at an early age caused them to “battle with homosexuality.”
In an article written for the religious-rightist publication WorldNetDaily, Chambers declared today that “there are some important lessons that the church can learn from Ted Haggard.” Chambers applies his own egocentrism to a disingenuous commingling of sexual orientation with sexual trauma, resulting in an article that intentionally misinforms readers about gay people’s lives, values, and religious beliefs. Readers are expected to illogically believe that, because Chambers is an amoral victim of sexual trauma, all gay people are just like (or anything like) Alan Chambers.
Chambers surmises, “For every gay activist that shouts in the parades, I’m willing to bet that there’s someone in our congregations who painfully struggles with homosexuality, but is afraid to reach out for help. I know because I was that person.”
With this statement, Chambers stereotypes participants in gay pride events, insinuating that anyone who attends a gay pride event — parents, children, choirs, country square-dancers, rollerbladers, music-lovers, and foodies — is a stereotypical, lockstep “gay activist.” He also stereotypes people who are born with a strong predisposition to same-gender sexual orientation, falsely insinuating that — because he, Thomas, and Haggard say so — real gay people share Chambers’ own lonely, lust-plagued “gay life” that is incompatible with religious faith.
Chambers praises freedom-from-sexuality as a virtue:
While there is freedom through the power of Christ….
and then Chambers complains:
… the sad truth remains that there is still something terribly wrong in many of our congregations, something that all of the marriage protection laws and constitutional amendments cannot fix. Many of our churches are not safe places for us to be vulnerable and seek help and so many continue to suffer in silence.
Exodus is not a solution to the antigay violence and unchecked fear that plague churches: It is a cause.
All too often and all too loudly, Exodus defends murder, rape, and battery as religious “free speech” rights. Randy Thomas routinely opposes all efforts to punish hate crimes in which the victim is targeted for one’s perceived sexual orientation or gender identity, going so far as to accuse antiviolence advocates of being thought police. Meanwhile, he and Chambers offer no concrete objections to existing hate-crime laws that punish violence which targets people for their religion or ethnicity. Exodus joins with religious-rightist allies in promoting paranoia and self-pity over non-existent threats to Christian free speech, while each year hundreds of people are brutally and deliberately murdered — and thousands more are beaten and injured — because of their orientation or gender variance.
Exodus promotes the myth that gay people are promiscuous, unhappy, lonely, faithless and amoral. Instead of discussing sexuality, orientation, and mental health honestly, Exodus leaders project their own unhappiness, loneliness, childhood traumas, self-denial, and past or present sexual compulsions onto the gay population. The natural result is a marginalization of gay people within their churches, as Exodus misinforms churchgoers about gay congregants’ “struggles.” Another result is family breakup, as misinformed relatives stigmatize their gay family members.
Given Exodus’ role in making churches unsafe, it’s sad but unsurprising that Chambers’ article offers no concrete solutions to readers — except to place their blind trust not only in Exodus and its psychobabble, but also in convicted (and largely impenitent) Watergate criminal Chuck Colson, who has made a second career out of scapegoating society’s bogeymen for his own sins while curtailing religious freedom and respect toward Jewish and other non-evangelical prisoners.
Botswana’s Sunday Standard published a Dec. 13 story which begins by promoting the notion that heterosexual people can change their orientation to gay and then recruit other people into homosexuality.
The article cites only a single example: an unidentified woman who was “fed up” with abusive men and claims now to be lesbian even though she has only dated men in the past and she offers no indication of any previous attraction to women. “I can easily introduce one to the gay life and they will be hooked,” the woman says. The article adds, “She, however, is cagey and does not reveal whether she was introduced and trained in the homosexual world” — as if homosexuals lived in a different world than heterosexuals.
Caine Youngman, board president of Lesbians, Gays and Bisexual People of Botswana, tries to set the record straight.
He says there is a difference between heterosexual sex and being heterosexual, citing that homosexual people can indulge in heterosexual sex and heterosexual people can also practice homosexual sex but that’ not changing their sexual orientation. Youngman avows that his opinions are based on his personal experience, experiences of those around him, available literature and the confessions from different people.
“No, I do not believe that one can turn just like that. There are some institutions who call themselves “Ex-gay”. They believe they can turn gay people into heterosexuals. The results are questionable since some people say they just choose to ignore their emotions. I have a friend who was a member of such an institution who had to go under shock therapy as part of his transformation. He is still a gay man,” says Youngman.
Homosexuality and gay-rights groups are illegal in Botswana, and the media seem to be pressured by the government to apply an antigay spin to their articles. Besides spotlighting a confused, anonymous, and possibly fictitious woman, the article fails to ask a very basic and obvious question:
Is the Exodus Global Alliance aware of — and supporting — shock therapy in Botswana?
In a Nov. 26 press release, ex-gay ministry network Exodus International says it’s “disappointed” and “saddened” that matchmaking company eHarmony is launching a dating site for GLBT singles.
Now, we’ve heard a lot about eHarmony of late: The site founded to serve Christian unmarrieds in 2000 initially discriminated against gays and lesbians seeking mates. Recently, the company announced plans to open CompatiblePartners.net, a companion site that will serve the GLBT community. Some have reacted with glee, while others find eHarmony’s separate-site approach to attracting gay dollars offensive. Still, this is the first time we’ve heard an entity admit to feeling sadness over the matter.
Exodus had wanted the issue surrounding eHarmony’s former no-gays-allowed policy settled by a judge. Two years ago, a gay man filed suit, claiming the company’s old plan violated New Jersey’s anti-discrimination law, which covers sexual orientation. (Exodus, interestingly, felt the need to surround the words “sexual orientation” with quotation marks.) Rather than risk a negative outcome in court, eHarmony decided to found CompatiblePartners.net as a way to settle the legal complaint.
This makes Exodus President Alan Chambers sad.
“Raising a white flag of surrender over foundational Christian principles cannot be an option when we truly believe that such truths are the gateway to freedom and new life,” Chambers said in the release. “The Bible is clear that homosexual relationships were never part of God’s creative design for humanity, nor is it His best plan for individuals. Those of us who have experienced the emptiness of gay life know that promoting it will inevitably lead to more heartache for many.”
What this has to do with the way in which a business chooses to operate escapes us. And what does eHarmony’s outreach to prospective gay and lesbian clients have to do with Exodus’ work? The group leadership says again and again that ex-gay ministries and likeminded reparative therapists exist to help those seeking relief from unwanted same-sex desires. In order to make a profit, eHarmony seeks to serve those looking to act on those desires. How does this threaten the work of Exodus and its hundreds of affiliates?
Chambers should take comfort knowing that eHarmony’s new GLBT-focused site may clear the decks, so to speak, so he can avoid wasting time on happy gays and more easily locate and “save” those not so accepting of their sexuality. And he shouldn’t take the existence of gay men and lesbians being happy and well-adjusted as a cause of misery — that’s just… sad.
Posted October 10th, 2008 by Rev. Steven F. Kindle
Millions of lives are destroyed, relationships are uprooted, and fortunes are wasted in the false hope of becoming ex-gay, all because of the blatant misuse of one biblical passage.
It is well-known that the ex-gay movement is based on very faulty psychological premises. What is not so well-known is that the biblical basis for their assumptions is equally bankrupt. It may be good to remind ourselves that every time oppressed groups began to make headway in America they were all opposed by those who claimed to have the Bible on their side. Eventually, their arguments were perceived as the rantings of self-serving demagogues and carry no weight today among mainstream Christians and biblical scholars.
So today we should not be surprised that the Bible is trotted out once again to keep another oppressed group under wraps. And just as before, a careful look at their arguments finds this current effort wanting.
On Sept. 28, Truth Wins Out protested a Baptist Press article by ex-gay activist and longtime Exodus member Bob Stith. While mourning the sexual honesty of Christian contemporary singer Ray Boltz, the article unnecessarily and falsely quoted Human Genome Project former director Francis Collins as saying:
Homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.
Collins never said that; ex-gay political activist Greg Quinlan did. Good As You made the same observation.
Collins had said almost the opposite: He told Ex-Gay Watch:
The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.
Collins added:
No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years.
Ten days later, Baptist Press finally changed the wording of the article — without acknowledging to readers the nature of the falsehoods that had previously been conveyed, without apparent effort to correct syndicated copies of the article that were circulated around the Internet, without apology to Dr. Collins, and — most importantly — without apparent reforms necessary to prevent future errors.
The only hint of the two-week deception appears at the top the article with this brief note:
REVISED: October 8, 2008 to reflect more accurate wording from “The Language of God” by Dr. Francis Collins.
Stith’s article now accurately conveys what Collins said — but the damage has already been done among readers who walked away from the article (and more than a dozen syndicated copies) believing that a leading geneticist had declared homosexuality a purely environmental choice.
Thus far, it seems Stith might walk away from the damage with nothing more than a quiet admission of fault to one web site, Ex-Gay Watch, which his regular audience never reads. Meanwhile, Quinlan has not acknowledged any deception whatsoever. We have asked Stith for assurances of complete remedial action; he has declined to respond.
Stith’s peers say that he is a man of good character; at one time I believed that, but I became very doubtful 10 days ago and now I am nearly convinced otherwise. True accountability, transparency, and penitence require more effort and integrity than I’m seeing, at present, from a prominent Exodus speaker and policy wonk for the Southern Baptist Convention.
Longtime Exodus International member “minister” and speaker Bob Stith on Sept. 25 became the third ex-gay activist entity in recent times to falsely imply that the Human Genome Project or its director support ex-gay ideology.
In April 2007, A. Dean Byrd of the ex-gay advocacy group National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality cherry-picked partial statements by Francis Collins, Ph.D, of the Human Genome Project, for an article which falsely implied that Collins supported NARTH’s ideological position opposing the existence of sexual orientation as a biological phenomenon.
It troubles me greatly to learn that anything I have written would cause anguish for you or others who are seeking answers to the basis of homosexuality. The words quoted by NARTH all come from the Appendix to my book “The Language of God” (pp. 260-263), but have been juxtaposed in a way that suggests a somewhat different conclusion that I intended. I would urge anyone who is concerned about the meaning to refer back to the original text.
The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality ‚Äî the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.
[Ex-Gay Watch'] note indicated that your real interest is in the truth. And this is about all that we really know. No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years.
Earlier this month, New Jersey ex-gay activist Greg Quinlan and the American Family Association ignored Collins’ warning against NARTH’s interpretation — and further distorted Collins’ position. Quinlan said:
When [gay Christian contemporary singer Ray Boltz] says he’ born that way, we know now for a fact that that’ false. In fact, just last year in March, the director of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins, said this: homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.
Collins said nothing of the sort, and a few days after Quinlan’s article, Collins repeated his earlier assertion that NARTH had distorted his position. Quinlan refused to retract his claim — turning it from a mere falsehood into an outright lie.
For example, in 2003, the International Human Genome Consortium announced the successful completion of the Human Genome Project, which, among other things, identified each of the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA. The press release read: “The human genome is complete and the Human Genome Project is over.”
While this accomplishment was widely reported, almost no one reported the words of Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the project. Collins, arguably the nation’s most influential geneticist, said, “Homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.”
Somehow the major media missed that little tidbit. Collins and others
acknowledge that genetics can predispose but not predetermine. This supports other studies that clearly document the possibility of change for people who struggle with unwanted homosexual desire.
Stith is now the Southern Baptist Convention’s “National Strategist for Gender Issues.” That SBC “gender” panel is actually an ex-gay policy group within the SBC administration. It is dominated by Exodus member activists.
In other words, Stith is no longer a spiritual minister; he has become a professional spin artist.
Stith not only parrots the exposed lie of Quinlan, but also connects that untruth to an illogical assertion that if one bisexual person can “change” their behavior, then any homosexual person can “change” their orientation.
If anything good is to come from all of this ex-gay truthlessness and spin, perhaps it’s that Stith, Exodus, NARTH, Quinlan, and the AFA have become so untruthful that many concerned families of gay people are leaving Exodus and NARTH behind, and seeking help from trustworthy sources of information in mainstream therapeutic and gay-tolerant religious communities.
I invite Stith to apologize, to distribute a retraction to the same media outlets that received his original statement, and to condemn the stubborn untruthfulness of Quinlan and NARTH.
We have not lived in transparency. We have often cloaked our own weakness and pointed instead at the sins of others. We have settled for a form of godliness which manifests respectability but has no power to change the core of our being.
We do humbly ask forgiveness.
We have manifested more of an interest in being right than in being loving and often succeeded in being neither.
We do humbly ask forgiveness.
Forgiveness requires true repentance, and repentance requires actual change — not merely a token expression of regret followed by more of the same misconduct.
If Stith is truly penitent, then why did he not bother to factcheck — and why does he continue to abuse the word “change”?
Christian contemporary music singer Ray Boltz (pictured) recently emerged from decades of effort to be “heterosexual” and honestly declared that he is same-sex-attracted. His story of sexual and religious struggle was reported last week in The Washington Blade. In short order, New Jersey ex-gay activist Greg Quinlan and the American Family Association’s “OneNewsNow” lied about Boltz’s action.
The AFA falsely stated that Boltz “has publicly announced he’ living a homosexual lifestyle” and falsely characterized a person’s honesty about sexual attraction as a “decision to engage in homosexuality.”
Quinlan went further — misquoting established science regarding the biological impulses that define sexual attraction and the psychological impulses that define romantic attraction. In particular, Quinlan misquoted Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project:
When he says he’s born that way, we know now for a fact that that’s false. In fact, just last year in March, the director of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins, said this: homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality.
Quinlan’s fiction, however, was exposed as such sixteen months ago. After the ex-gay pseudoscience outfit NARTH also misquoted Collins, Collins told Ex-Gay Watch in May 2007:
It troubles me greatly to learn that anything I have written would cause anguish for you or others who are seeking answers to the basis of homosexuality. The words quoted by NARTH all come from the Appendix to my book “The Language of God” (pp. 260-263), but have been juxtaposed in a way that suggests a somewhat different conclusion that I intended. I would urge anyone who is concerned about the meaning to refer back to the original text.
The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality ‚Äî the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.
Your note indicated that your real interest is in the truth. And this is about all that we really know. No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not held up), but it is likely that such genes will be found in the next few years.
Sidestepping any discussion of science, the Gospel Music Association mischaracterized Ray Boltz’s honesty, saying, “We do not comment on the lifestyle choices of people in our community.” (Emphasis is TWO’s.)
For more insight into the (mis)handling of sexual orientation by the Christian gospel music scene, check out averyfineline.
Dr. Gary Remafedi Says Conservative Group Guilty of “Gross Misrepresentation” And Questions If Focus Actually Read His Article Before Misquoting It
NEW YORK — TruthWinsOut.org published a letter today from a researcher who claims Focus on the Family twisted his work. In the letter, Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, asked Focus on the Family’ leader James Dobson to stop misrepresenting his findings from a key 1992 study.
“I want to draw your attention to a gross misrepresentation of our research at the website of Focus on the Family,” Remafedi wrote in his letter to Dobson. “More important, had the authors of “Myths and Facts” actually read the article, they would have found no support for their contention that “many children experience a period of sexual-identity confusion when they can be influenced in either direction.’”
(Full Text of Letter Below)
Remafedi’ report was published in Pediatrics in 1992. The study explored patterns of sexual orientation in a representative sample of more than 34,000 Minnesota students in grades 7 to 12. Focus on the Family distorted his findings to make the case that young people should not learn about homosexuality because they were sexually confused, and could thus be influenced by educational material.
“Focus on the Family has engaged in a disturbing pattern of misrepresenting the work of legitimate researchers to further their anti-gay agenda,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of TruthWinsOut.org. “We call on Focus on the Family to immediately expunge all falsehoods and fallacies presented as”facts’ from their past and present literature.” (Read More)
The cynically named “Day of Truth,” organized by the antigay Alliance Defense Fund and planned for April 28, is little more than an excuse to inject “ex-gay” propaganda and a disruptive dose of antigay prejudice in public schools.
Ex-gay survivor Daniel Gonzales, who was inappropriately treated by famed reparative therapist Joseph Nicolosi, has released a new video that itemizes the untruths and prejudices that are promoted by the DOT. Check it out:
The Maryland pro-tolerance parent-faculty group Teach The Facts launches a thoughtful discussion of research into sexual fluidity among some women.
Various researchers, among them Dr. Lisa Diamond in Sexual Fluidity – Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, have asserted that sexual orientation in some women naturally drifts in both directions: from heterosexual to homosexual or vice versa. In other words, some women are naturally attracted to attributes other than a given person’s gender characteristics. Such fluidity appears to be extremely uncommon among men.
The TTF blog compares intelligent analysis of sexual fluidity and bisexuality with the ideological rigidity and deception of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays, an advocacy group which baselessly asserts that same-gender attraction is rooted in bad parenting or abuse rather than natural impulses; that all people can change; that change occurs by choice, not nature; and that change only occurs one way — from homosexual to heterosexual.
In a 
On Sept. 28, 
