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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.
you bring up some good points… especially about turning people away from religion… I know it did it for me.
The point of these exercises in ‘curing’ gays is an extension of the world domination aspirations of these groups (sects, in my opinion). It’s not so much about establishing and maintaining the wellbeing of the target converted, but just the folding of the victim (and I use the term carefully) into the flock. My latest blog entry illuminates the issue: nathangarcia.blogspot.com
If these christianists convert 1 out of 100,000 then they consider it a success. And, even if they don’t have 1, they would never, NEVER admit they were wrong. Not at this stage of the game. To admit their program doesn’t work would be to admit defeat. And to admit defeat would crumble their entire belief system. Christianity as they know it would implode.
They honestly don’t care whether a person converts and stays converted, or not. They simply care about their image, as cracked and flawed as it may be. And I doubt very seriously they, themselves, ever report, or even acknowledge, the number of ex-ex-gays.
For them, it’s easier to believe a lie than to love the fallen.
Excellent article Wayne, though saddening to read.
I think though that one should delve deeper into the logical conclusion of your article i.e. that the ex-gay movement is not aimed at gay people or their families at all, but their right-wing base and those they seek to add to it.
It’s sole aim is to use “ex-gay-ness” to affirm to their base and their potential base the acceptability of homophobia. The more they can encourage acceptance for homophobia by justifying it in ways such as this, the easier it is for them to recruit based on the tools they work with best: fear and hate. Homophobia does well with both.
Mike and BruceLD: Your arguments would hold up better if the “ex-gay” ministry people would be claiming to help people to find a comfortable spot for themselves in the world. But their agenda isn’t to help integrate a broken person, it is instead to help a person suppress something which is an innate part of his psyche.
I can fully agree that, just as there are people who realize late in life that they are gay, there are probably those who realize late in life that they are straight when they thought they were gay. Those people are not likely to be helped by an “ex-gay” ministry.
Such ministries will encourage them simply to deny their former attractions as perverted, unhealthy and sinful and to deny that they were whole people. Instead such people need guidance in incorporating all of their psycho-sexual components into an integrated and happy self.
I am one of those pathetic people who spent 20 years trying to reconcile my awareness of my homosexuality with my belief in the catholic church. Just when I thought I found a spot where I thought I could balance the two, BLAMMO!, something would happen that would remind me that the church I thought I loved would love me back only if I were willing to suppress an integral part of who I am.
I tried to participate in their “Courage” ministry. They do not claim to be an “ex-gay” ministry mostly because the people who join refuse to admit that they are gay. As a matter of fact, you can’t use the words “gay” or even “homosexual” in the Courage ministry. They believe that everyone is heterosexual, but some people “suffer” from same-sex attraction issues.
I went to one and only one meeting of a Courage group and was devastated. I knew I couldn’t do what they were asking of me. Many of the people there looked so forlorn I couldn’t stand it. Soon after that meeting I seriously considered suicide. (This is how pathetic I am: I was driving towards a bridge abutment at about 90mph with my seat belt off, but then realized I didn’t know how to disable the air bags and I was driving a Volvo with 8 of them. Why didn’t I buy a Pinto that would explode on impact?)
Soon after that I left the church, which had its own drama since I was assistant organist at a cathedral and my brother was the cathedral’s assistant pastor.
The bottom line is that, when someone (individual or institutional) claims to love and accept you – but only on their terms, run as fast as you can. To quote a bumper sticker I saw on a local minister’s car: God bless everyone. NO exceptions.
Its pure politics people: hating on gays gives them a political niche and therefore political power. You should really be asking, “Why do they spend more on advertising their ‘cures’ than they do on the actual therapy?”
Jenny B. There are a lot of ‘Focus on the Family’ members. They are part of the Religious Right, and get their money from hate and intolerance, feeding guilt and shame to the masses. The people who send them money are those who feel they can buy their way into heaven. Hopefully the membership is shrinking.
How about an ex-straight ministry? Don’t straights need to be set on the correct path to salvation – whatever in hell that means?
The answer is that proponents of the ex-gay ministries couldn’t care less about saving gay people. They are only concerned with keeping their ridiculous claim that homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle alive. They don’t care if gays believe it — its the rest of the world they are trying to convince.
The point is simply this: if they can re-orient gays and lesbians to heterosexuality, they can go on claiming that being gay is a matter of nurture, not nature. These silly bigots, Boobles in hand, claim that we choose our sexual orientation and that if we only wanted to we could change. They’re hard put to explain away the many “formerly gay’s” who go back to being gay, often becoming spokespeople for the idea that being gay is not a choice but an innate trait. Groups like Exodus simply ignore modern scientific evidence, and especially neurobiology, showing that orientation is something we are born with, not something we simply acquire, and even if orientation were a matter of nature *and* nurture, what business do these creeps have telling anyone how to live their life?
They’re in it for the money. Period.
I have wondered why some folks believe being gay is a choice since that is part of what believing in the potential to change would depend on.
Possibly sex object “choice” is a choice for a considerable percentage of people–sort of your bisexual identity. Going strictly Kinsey for this argument consider the continuum from all gay to all straight with the varying degrees of attraction to both sexes in between. (Despite the skew question about Kinsey’s research, I believe the science suggests that his basic conclusions were authentic.)
It makes sense to me that there is a large portion of potential “swingers” out there that have attractions to both sexes. For those folks it isn’t hard to fathom the idea of choice. What if some of those in-the-middle folks that happen to be bisexual, and christian, and have guilt by socialization don’t understand the science? What if they think we all have the same genetic attractions that they have-bisexual. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that they believe that we all have a choice? Some of them might even claim not to be gay but occasionally solicit in restrooms. Some might be leaders in conservative religious groups with families but have secret gay lives on the side. They might have real (daily) experience with making a choice (for them). They might attribute the choice they make to all kinds of reasons: the devil has always worked for christians since science challenges so many of their beliefs. Science is still not part of many student’s education.
Playing the devil’s advocate here. The recent news about the straight student/wrestling champ performing for online porn brings up another thought: there are quite a few porn sites that sell the idea of straight guys having gay sex. (That pitch turns some of us on.) Where I’m going with this? Is it possible for men to have sex with men if there is no attraction behind it? Some of those guys probably really identify as straight or mostly straight but could they get it up for a guy for any reason other than turn on? (Money and viagra and being really horny are motivation of a kind but are they enough?). Imagine how the conservative religious and possibly bisexual interpret the straight guys having gay sex story. Can they see anything other than choice?
I would guess the ex-gay industry is mostly run by people who have succeeded in making a choice and believe everyone has the same choice they have. They are able to do straight sex, they want the privileges offered straight people, they have beliefs that they live by that condemn gay sex and they are choosing to go straight. Their daily “working the steps” is probably much like the AA work at not drinking.
But this doesn’t make us who are on the extremes of the Kinsey scale able to choose in the same way the middle folks can.
On mainstream TV a few years ago during the Olympics there was a well-done story on historical Greek Olympics including socialization of boys to gay sex. The sociological reasons for the socialization were that troops of warriors had to be out on the frontier warring for extended periods of time and that having a sex outlet as your fellows was convenient. They were socialized from a young age to participate in gay sex. Those folks were each located somewhere on the Kinsey scale too. When they got back home I assume some of them stuck with men, some swung, and some were straight. Difference was that no one felt guilty about their choice or lack of one.
More important arguments for me is:
I don’t believe all gay sex is choice.
This is supposed to be a secular society in which adults can freely make choices that do not negatively affect others as part of their pursuit of happiness. We don’t have to suffer the beliefs of others.
I believe in freedom of religion. My religion would say I can marry whatever other adult I choose. I would even argue in favor of more than one adult at the same time. (Didn’t Canada argue for marriage equality and win on the freedom of religion argument?) Check out Cheney’s recent support of marriage equality–he doesn’t stipulate number of partners (not that I identify with Cheney).
Besen, maybe what we need is a roadshow. One that talks about history, socialization, science, and the varieties of religious and sexual experience that have in the past and still do entertain all kinds of non-mainstream stuff. But, we’ve got better. We’ve got the internet with a vast array of everything imaginable. It’s a roadshow anyone can let into their home. Rather than reacting to our enemies show we should just keep generating our own productions. I’d say argue more science. Masters and Johnson need to be reviewed and so does Kinsey. A whole lot of who we are is belief not science. We’re humans, how else could it be?
Besides, the wonderful world is also changing in good ways. Even lots of young christians and I suspect islamics are more welcoming of diversity than their elders even if the fundamentalists are scary as hell.
If your argument is true that the turn or burn roadshow is turning off more folks than not we should be encouraging them. I don’t think the Focus on the Family folks are only capable of loving people exactly like themselves. They are us too. They vary as individuals in who they can love. (Look at some of the response of glbt people to blogs they don’t like.) I am arguing that the FOF folks probably think we are exactly like them. And in that belief I think they are wrong.
I am Canadian. I have always known I was gay and am even legally married to my same-gender partner.
I have concluded many years ago that people are the way they are, and nothing can ever be done about their sexual orientation. We all start out as female early after our conception and our gender is later assigned to us in the womb. We all grow up with a certain identity throughout our childhood either playing with dolls or playing cops and robbers. As we go through puberty it is most likely then our programming comes to completion and our sexual orientation is fully realized and demonstrated.
Most gay, lesbian and bisexual people have to “come out” and come to terms with themselves because of the restrictions enforced on our society by religion. The restrictions enforced by religion do not affect heterosexuals where they do not have to “come out” or come to terms with their sexuality.
All gay, lesbian and bisexual people have to come to terms with how they fit in to our society. Some felt so pressured that they had to lie to themselves and go on to get in to heterosexual marriages and produce children. Some of them choose to “come out” later and express their true desire to be gay, lesbian or bisexual.
Based on my last statement, it isn’t beyond the realm of impossibility that the same works in reverse. It is possible that someone who spent their childhood playing with dolls may have grown up believing they were gay, lesbian or bisexual but in fact they are in fact heterosexual. It is also possible that they may have been sexually molested by a same sex person leading them to believe that they were meant to be gay when in fact they aren’t gay.
Who are we to decide whether someone is gay, lesbian, bisexual or straight? Aside from those who have had the the fortune to realize early on in their teens that they are gay, lesbian or bisexual and adapted to acceptance quickly with themselves or their families, but aren’t those who come out later in life are in fact ex-straight? Why can’t there be an ex-gay? Why should we decide what is right for others?
Perhaps there are gay, lesbian and bisexual people that are genuinely confused and tortured by their own identity. We see how kids that grow up being forced to live a certain way live tortured lives ultimately choosing to go through gender reassignment because they believe they are the wrong gender. We support them, why can’t we support someone who believes that they might be pursuing the wrong sexual orientation? Why can’t we be compassionate for them too?
I personally think it’s absolutely WRONG to force someone to be something that they feel that they are not. Forcing a child that plays with dolls to play cops and robbers instead, or forcing a boy who wants to dress up like a girl to dress up like a boy instead is also wrong. Forcing someone who believes they are gay to go out and marry a woman and have children is wrong, and so is forcing someone who believes they are straight to be gay is just as wrong.
There are support groups for gay, lesbian and bisexual people. There should be support groups for people in opposite situations as well.
I would gladly support someone who comes to me who admits that all their lives they thought they were gay and who then realizes that they now choose to be heterosexual. I would encourage them to be true to themselves, and I would want nothing more for them except their own true peace and happiness. I would love and support them no matter who or what they are.
I don’t think gay, lesbian and bisexual people should attack others for being different, and I don’t think the ex-gay movement should attack gay, lesbian and bisexual people either. This is absolutely wrong and only promotes hostility between everyone. We all need to quit attacking each other. We have more to gain by being more understanding and compassionate for one another. Our world would be a much better place if we did.
The first, and most important, reason for these ex-gay groups to exist is to raise money. Leaving aside for the moment the vulnerable questioning individuals who seek help to “repair” what they consider “broken” in themselves, there are many, many families who will seek out these groups when they learn that a loved one is gay. They want to find a “cure” so their loved one can return to “normal.” Of course, they are misguided, but mostly well-intentioned, I think. They also are willing to give just about anything they have to “fix” their loved one. That’s where the ex-gay groups come in. In true snake-oil salesman fashion, they offer salvation to the afflicted and, praise the lord, hallelujah, the loved one will be magically HEALED! At least until the next time he goes out cruising…
The second reason these groups exist is to provide a rationale for denying basic civil rights to us. While you cannot deprive a person of rights based on an immutable characteristic, like race or gender; or based on certain fundamental associations, like religious preferences; you can, nevertheless, justify limiting rights to persons who are a danger to themselves or others.
By showing first that gay people are “broken” (read: sick), and next that a cure is available without which our whole citizenry is in grave peril, lawmakers (not generally the brightest ones, mind you) can be persuaded that more restrictive policy changes are not just necessary, but imperative.
Use some of that money gathered from vulnerable folks and their families to buy air-time, and you’ve got the makings of a Proposition 8, and Amendment 2, sodomy laws, etc.
I have a couple of very simple questions to ask: What is the basic differnce between the Islamic Taliban and Christianity as each addresses homosexuality? And, do they both not depend on fear and intimidation to further their causes for control of the mind?