More on the situation in Memphis, from someone who has looked it in the face…

Once again, a teenager who was taken into the Love In Action/Refuge program in Raleigh is speaking out against the self-proclaimed "ministry" as teaching a lesson of conditional self-love. The condition is simple: don’t be gay and you can love yourself.

E.J. Friedman asks how throwing a child of 15 or 16 into a place where people are discussing, among other things bestiality, is supposed to help them cope with themselves…

Are they supposed to equate their same-sex desires with fucking a dog or turning a trick?

And what is profoundly disturbing here is that E.J. needs to reassure his readers that he is not slandering LIA’s methods. Yes…that is Exactly what John Smid does to gay teenagers. He throws them into discussion groups with adults who have engaged in sexually ugly and extreme behaviors…this has been verified again and again. And make no mistake, what he is trying to do is tear down that kid’s sense of self esteem, make them come to understand their sexual nature as something horribly and irreconcilably perverse and disgusting, so that they will as adults, be utterly incapable of forming a lasting intimate bond with another person of the same sex. They are not a soul saved, so much as a soul annihilated. In the name of Christ. And for money.

This is child sexual abuse, or the term simply has no meaning. I’ll say this again: John Smid belongs behind bars with all the other child molesters. Just because he doesn’t physically abuse them, does not make it any less a case of child sexual abuse. He is doing to them emotionally, exactly what child molesters do, and he needs to be held accountable for it.

E.J, and the folks at QAC, say they have no problem with LIA treating gay adults who voluntarily seek their help. This is where I part company with them. If LIA were a simple ministry or prayer group I would agree it’s a matter of religious freedom. But they claim to be more then that, at the same time they claim religious freedom as their shield from laws that otherwise protect people from medical quacks. They are doing things to people that science and medicine regard as hazardous to people’s emotional well being, serene in the religious zealot’s confidence that whatever harm they wreak on people’s lives just isn’t their fault, because god gave them permission. If people feel they need counseling for issues of sexual orientation they need to go to professional counselors. If they want spiritual guidance they can find a church or church group, where they can work out their own way to God. LIA acts as if they are both, and thereby announce that they are neither. They are taking people’s money and fiddling around with their deepest emotional and spiritual selves, with no more understanding of what they are doing, let alone regard for the damage they cause, then if they were chicken pluckers posing as brain surgeons. That place needs to be shut down, and the people in it who dragged helpless gay teenagers into a world of mistrust, fear and self loathing, need to be locked up.