“True Tolerance,” a campaign of Focus on the Family that enjoys promotional support from Exodus International, may be having an impact upon public schools:

As many as 107 Tennessee public school districts recently began blocking student access to gay health, science, family, and education resources. Instead, students who seek accurate information are being confined to ex-gay resources that have been rejected as inaccurate and harmful by professional medical and mental-health organizations.

Banned resources include:

• Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)
• The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN)
• Human Rights Campaign (HRC)
• Marriage Equality USA
• Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry
• The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)
• Dignity USA (an organization for LGBT Catholics)

“True Tolerance” is an antigay response to the Day of Silence, GLSEN’s national campaign to discourage violence in public schools. The antigay project espouses tolerance of outspoken on-campus activism by antigay Christians — and intolerance of those who oppose antigay violence or who disagree with discredited ex-gay propaganda. Without offering evidence, “True Tolerance” accuses antiviolence advocates of waging a “monopoly” and a “pro-gay agenda.”

The campaign does not claim responsibility for Internet restrictions in Tennessee specifically, but the web site encourages antigay activists to pressure schools to silence the allegedly “unbalanced” messages of the antiviolence crowd and to silence “vulnerable children” (teen-agers) who seek to be honest about their sexuality.

If pressure tactics don’t work, then True Tolerance lobs legal threats against antiviolence efforts. First, the campaign warns against schools’ fears of “legal liability for not making their school ’safe.’” True Tolerance dismisses the simple fact that antigay violence is making schools unsafe, and that parents of bullied youths are suing. Instead, True Tolerance offers to arm antigay activists with unspecified “legally accurate facts” in opposition to mandatory “diversity” policies. It would seem that, in the view of Exodus and Focus, “true tolerance” in schools cannot and should not be diverse enough to include bullied youths, their friends, or their parents.

Official efforts to “protect” mature students from the facts about gay health, science, family issues, and education are having a negative impact on Tennessee schools.

Karyn Storts-Brinks, a librarian at Fulton High School in Knoxville, points out:

Students who need to do research for assignments on current events can only get one viewpoint, keeping them from being able to cover both sides of the issue. That’s not fair and can hinder their schoolwork.

Box Turtle Bulletin reports:

The ACLU is giving the districts until April 29 to come up with a plan to provide access to LGBT sites or any other category that blocks non-sexual websites advocating the fair treatment of LGBT people by the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year.

In a new video, Peterson Toscano recalls his own journey, and that of friends, through Exodus International’s flagship ex-gay live-in program, Tennessee-based Love In Action.

In his introduction to the video, Toscano writes:

Some people come to ex-gay programs sexually naive. They never had sex in their lives and have little idea where they would even procure gay sex. That is until they walk into an ex-gay program where day after day they hear people talk about gay sex–what’s it like, where to get it, how good it felt during the act, how icky one might feel afterward (particularly if that one gets in trouble for it.)

I know of at least two guys from my Love in Action days who came into the program virgins and successfully graduated many months later armed with so much information about cruising spots and anonymous sex protocol that once they left off being ex-gay, they plunged into a gay sex fest that lasted months if not years.

They learned their lessons well. Sadly those lessons insisted that gay men were driven by dysfunctional, sinful, compulsive desires and lesbians had a penchant for unhealthy emotionally enmeshed relationships. It takes years to detox from that misinformation.

Contrary to their own advertising, ex-gay live-in programs do not free people from homosexuality — or sexuality. Often, unfortunately, these programs merely poison sexuality and interrelationship. They condition people to experience sex and relationship in ways that may be dangerously unhealthy.

Tennessee businessman Mark Siedlecki tells the Chattanooga Pulse about his ordeal in Alabama and British ex-gay “deprogramming” programs:

“The Christian church I was raised in taught me I was going to hell [for being gay]. I did not want to throw away my Christian beliefs, but I had to be at peace with myself.”

But Siedlecki had seen the director of his Montgomery “reparative therapy” group at an Atlanta gay bar “dancing with men all over the floor.”

And his experience in England, which he describes as “deprogramming,” did not work. “I never changed in my attraction to men,” he says. He was genuinely committed to trying, he says, and had decided, “If God requires me to be celibate, I am prepared to do that.” Yet when the principal of the program told him, “Mark, you need to move back to Chattanooga, find the nearest woman available, settle down, have kids and be happy,” he was repelled at the hypocrisy. “Marrying a woman for ‘cover’ is not Christian-like,” he says. During the next couple of years, he realized his “life was empty,” he says. “I had given it my all. I had discussions with other people and [reparative therapy] didn’t work for them either.”

(Read More)

In an October 13 response to a London Times article, Exodus International president denies knowledge of any Exodus-affiliated live-in “boot camps.”

We are astonished at Chambers’ memory loss regarding the flagship Love In Action program in Memphis, Tenn.

I pray to my nominally Quaker God that Chambers finds secular professional medical assistance for his problem. Clearly Chambers’ god is causing him a terrible case of amnesia.

On April 25, antigay activists — among them, Exodus and Focus on the Family — sought to disrupt antiviolence vigils in schools across the country. They sponsored walkouts and demonstrations in which religious activists, parents, and bullies sought to change the topic of the day from stopping violence in schools to venting prejudices and hostility toward gay youths. They followed up their efforts to shout down antiviolence vigils with a religious-right “Day of (Un)Truth” in schools on April 28; that day was dedicated exclusively to broadcasting religious rightists’ antigay prejudices and arrogant religious judgmentalism in public schools during school hours.

Because of antigay authorities’ refusal to stop antigay violence in schools, support for Days of Silence continues to grow. Plans are afoot for Days of Silence are afoot in Russia, Poland and Slovenia — regions where U.S. antigay pastor and Exodus speaker Ken Hutcherson has fueled antigay violence through his co-leadership of the Slavic hate group called Watchmen on the Walls. (Read More)