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Loading ...Besen: What is the point of the ex-gay industry?
I’m on my way to Grand Rapids, Michigan to give a presentation at Grand Valley State University on the harm caused by the “ex-gay” industry. My speech, followed by a panel discussion, is in response to Focus on the Family’s traveling road show, Love Won Out, which will be in town on Saturday.
Having countered several of these conferences, I must confess, I still don’t understand what point they are trying to make.If Focus on the Family’s goal is to convert gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people into evangelical Christians, they are doing a lousy job. It seems convincing gay people to end their relationships is a far higher priority to this ministry than having gay people develop personal relationships with Jesus Christ.
For every guilt-ridden homosexual who temporarily falls under their spell, they lose hundreds, if not thousands, of gay people who view their conversion program as intolerant. If your ministry causes many gay people to write off not just Christianity, but all religion, by what measurement can you consider your evangelizing a success?
At Love Won Out, speakers go to great lengths to profess their deep concern over the mental and physical well being of homosexuals. It turns out, however, that the anti-gay sentiment expressed at these conferences may be hazardous to the health of GLBT people.
A new Emory University study concludes that the bans on same-sex marriage pushed by Focus on the Family can be tied to a rise in the rate of HIV infection. The scientists found that a constitutional ban o n marriage equality raised the rate by f our cases per 100,000 people.
“We found the effects of tolerance for gays on HIV to be statistically significant and robust, they hold up under a range of empirical models,” says Hugo Mialon, an assistant professor of economics. “Intolerance is deadly,” Mialon said. “Bans on gay marriage codify intolerance, causing more gay people to shift to underground sexual behaviors that carry more risk.”
Earlier this year, a study by San Francisco State’s Caitlin Ryan concluded that “teens who experienced negative feedback (when they came out) were more than eight times as likely to have attempted suicide, nearly six times as vulnerable to severe depression and more than three times at risk of drug use.”
So, if Love Won Out is truly concerned about the health of gay people, particularly teenagers, it will transform into a gay affirming ministry. To continue down their destructive path of judgmental condemnation is senseless and significantly harmful to the very GLBT people that Focus purports to want to help.
Of course, Focus on the Family will insist that they love gay people and just want to help those who are unhappy. But, isn’t it a conflict of interest when you lobby to pass anti-gay laws that make gay people miserable and then offer yourself up as the panacea to the pain? Is it not hypocritical to sponsor a conference supposedly about love, where the main speaker is Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International?
Chambers hosts a Christian television show, Pure Passion, which pollutes the airwaves by repeatedly calling gay people “sexually broken” and “perverse.” Exodus also sells “Pursuing Sexual Wholeness” a book authored by Andy Comiskey that says, “Satan delights in homosexual perversion.” Such pronouncements are often accompanied by exorcisms given by churches affiliated with ex-gay ministries. Obviously, such extreme actions are anathema to creating a welcoming church environment for GLBT people.
Focus on the Family also claims its conferences are for parents, friends, family members or ministry leaders who want to “lovingly reach out with uncompromised faith.”
Genuine love, of course, requires making the very compromises and sacrifices that Love Won Out is telling people are unnecessary. Rejecting a friend or family member’s innate sexual orientation as sinful and defective, rarely leads to a healthy relationship based on trust and mutual respect.
Finally, the investigative reporter Thomas Maier just released a groundbreaking book, “Masters of Sex.” In it, he reveals that the famed sex research team, Masters and Johnson, had fabricated claims of curing gay people in their 1979 book, “Homosexuality in Perspective.” Given this vital new information, why hasn’t Focus on the Family taken the opportunity to review and question the validity of its program? Wouldn’t that be the moral course of action to take?
The hard truth is, Focus on the Family’s leaders are only capable of loving people exactly like themselves, which explains their tremendous efforts to remake gays in their image. While their splashy road show may get high marks for good theatre, it’s ultimately futile because their transparent version of “love” rarely wins converts and succeeds only at convincing most gay people to run out of the church door.
Are these people considered “false prophets”, and didn’t god say to be wary of people who claim they are talking to GOD. Thats how I see most of the religious nuts out there, as “FALSE PROPHETS”
The ex-gay industry has the same goals as any other anti-gay group: reducing the number of gay people, particularly happy out gay people. If they happen to do some of this through disease and suicide, I’m sure they see that as a bonus, even if they won’t publicly say so. Thanks for making this point so clearly in your article.
Besen States:For every guilt-ridden homosexual who temporarily falls under their spell, they lose hundreds, if not thousands, of gay people who view their conversion program as intolerant.
You forgot to add unessicary. I don’t hold the belief that gender determines your sexuality and therefore I don’t stigmatise homosexuality as abnoral. There is both a biological and social componet to the developement of a persons gender/s attraction gay or striaght. Gays and lesbians have either been created or have evolved as a minority, the human race is reproducing fine and allways has.
I feel as activists when discussing conversion therapy we need to push the what makes people attracted to men or women, Not what makes people gay or straight after all you cannot anwser the question of what sex/relationships people have until you answer the question of what makes people attracted to men (Androsexual) or people who are attracted to women (Gynosexual)
The question was what I was ment to say
sorry ment to say we need to push the what makes people attracted to men and women question.
an “ex-gay??”; geez, I’ve never met such an animal!
I wish that someone would really check into Focus on the Family. Is this organization for REAL? How many people actually “belong” to it, and how does one “belong”?
Does it actually have members, or do people just register on the web and count as part of their force? I can’t believe there are that many mean, insensitive, intolerable people as they claim.
Real conservative people think that if you don’t talk about anything they consider immoral, it will go away eventually. I think the gay community should do the same. Why are we talking about these irrelevant clowns? And I mean irrelevant because even right wingers don’t like them neither. Do you believe that all those “wholesome family” groups like to patronize experienced and retired sodomites? Ha! I don’t feel sorry for them. The scientific facts are out there. They might not even be gay after all, just confused straights who had to invent their own torment to justify their wacky faith.
“False Prophets” is kind. They are radical christian terrorists. They are no better then zealots in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The goals are pretty clear. To show the world that gays can in fact, be persuaded to ‘change sides’, and become ‘healed’.
‘Healed’ has connotations that somehow we are broken or sick, and that we can be fixed. Hence the term, ‘reparative’.
The sad irony is that most of the people that go through this ‘repair’ end up more broken than when they started.
Free will is a marvelous thing. There’s nothing stopping me from going out and hooking up with a woman. But, doing so doesn’t make me less gay, or somehow ‘fix’ the parts of me that enjoy the company of men over women.
Same thing applies to the poor folks that have gone through this ‘therapy’. A bunch of people usurp the free will of an insecure person, get them to make choices they otherwise would not, and then claim victory that they’ve ‘cured’ the test subject.
Sadly, this person then become ammunition for the argument that who we are at our core is a choice.
These groups confuse ‘Free Will’ with ‘Made To Be Not Gay Anymore’, and are then shocked and dismayed when their test subjects assert themselves in dramatic fashion and go back to doing what feels right for them.
The spent shell is then thrown away, and a new test subject is loaded into the firing chamber.
Ultimately, it is in the end a fantastical display of an utter lack of understanding of human sexuality, at the cost of the emotional and mental health of their subjects.
-c
Why do these so called “ex-gay” ministries exist? Because it’s a sure fired cash cow. They are not in it for the betterment of society or the conversion of gays. That just seems to be their front. No, they are in it like any corporation; to make money. And as long as there are men and women out there who loathe themselves because of the anti-gay sentiment that has surrounded them, whether by family or religious affiliation, these types of organizations will exist. Outlaw anti-gay bigotry in all places, including the pulpit, and we will soon see these organizations put where they belong, in the rubbish bin.
The purpose of the conversion programs, IMO, have little to do with the people participating in them. Think of them as political marketing campaigns designed to reinforce the notions that gay people are sick, are in need of a cure, and can be cured with this program. It’s designed to keep ignorance about gay people active so that the Christian right can continue to leverage ignorance for their own political gain.
They don’t care about the participants! I loved the anecdotes from former leaders saying that they’d sleep together and carry on an affair while “teaching” the others how not to be gay. It was about appearances, like a glossy magazine ad or a brochure.
It’s not about HEALing us, it’s all about HEELing us. They just wanna hear us bark to their tune. Sigh…
While out at the courthouse on Freedom to Marry day (Feb 12) I encountered a protester there who claimed to “Previously engage in the homosexual lifestyle” but was cured by finding Christ and he now has a wife and children. His message was that he wanted to “help” us and help us feel the “joy” he felt.
That’s all fine and dandy, but I know plenty of gay christians who when they first came out and were rejected by others, sought out God’s mercy praying for Him to make them straight, and guess what, they’re still gay, and always will be, but that is in no way cause for damnation from anti-gay ministries.
This is why every year in every state (to my knowledge) we have parades and get-togethers of the GLBT community and we call it PRIDE. When we come together as a community, it’s one of the only times we feel undying support from the public eye, where you don’t have to worry about people staring as you walk down the street holding hands with your significant other.
This is what the “ex-gay” ministries don’t understand. They want to “cure” every gay lesbian and transgendered person but what they don’t know is that many of us ENJOY being who we are which is why we hold events to unify who we are as a community and we are a VERY proud community!