The Sunday before the protests, the protesters organized a wee poster making party at Peabody Park in the Forbidden Zone (the forbidden Zone being being those regions of Memphis that Love In Action inmates are not allowed to enter while in the program). It was an affair that might have stuck you as a tad carefree, given the brutal nature of Love In Action’s Refuge program. But these folks, nearly all of them teens themselves (Morgan told me to go to Peabody Park and look for a bunch of crazy teens), had a message of genuine love and courage to be oneself, to speak to the people trapped inside LIA, and there were times when the atmosphere got a little giddy with it. But I could not emphasize this enough: the message they were determined to bring to the doorstep of LIA was not one of anger and fear and hurt, but of courage and love.
I can think of no quicker, surer solvent of the hatred and fear inside of John Smid’s hollow church, then the spirit these determined teens brought to the protests. They are an amazing group.
I made it home safe and sound. Sorry not to update sooner. I’ve been home since late Tuesday, and very fatigued. I seem to have picked up a head cold on the way. Not a bad one…but you know how it is with head colds. And I had some stuff to catch up on at work. More pix from the protests later…
In January of 2005, I came out to my parents as being gay. After an initial positive and supporting reaction they began to change their minds…I was sent to several different counselors, the last of which worked for a fundamentalist Christian church. This “counselor” informed me that I was not Gay, in fact, he said no one was really Gay…and anyone who claimed to be gay was living a lie. This pastor recommended to my parents that I be sent to Love In Action’s REFUGE program for teens.
On June 6, 2005 I left Jackson, Missouri at five o’clock in the morning to make the long trip to Memphis, Tennessee. The first things I saw at the Love in Action campus were the protesters. I spent the entire summer between my junior and senior year of highschool in Memphis, against my will, at Refuge, where I underwent many forms of “therapy” that were supposed to turn me away from being gay. These so-called “therapies” included group activities where one person was singled out and made to be ashamed of very personal occurrences in their lives. I had to participate in this activity many times. Other “therapies” included isolation, where you wouldn’t be allowed to communicate—we were not even allowed to make eye contact, with any of the other participants; making the women wear skirts and makeup to help them become more feminine; and making the men play sports in an attempt to help them become more masculine.
These are just a couple of examples of the type of “program” they use to turn people straight. Though while I was there, it just seemed to make people more depressed and self-loathing than they already were. I, myself, went through several of these depressive periods. After enduring this time in Memphis I returned home, unchanged.
My parents were very disappointed and didn’t know what to do next, feeling that they had tried everything. My mom took it upon herself to somehow change me. This began with daily bouts of verbal abuse, her telling me how ashamed she was of me. After a few months of this, the verbal abuse escalated into small episodes of physical abuse, with her cornering me and slapping me, while telling me what an abomination I was.This type of behavior continued until I could no longer stand to live at home. One day I packed up all of my belongings into my car, and told my parents that I was moving out right that minute. My mother got so angry when I told her this that she exploded and beat me into a corner, ripping my shirt and giving me scratches and bruises in the process. My dad had to pull her off of me so that I could get to my car to leave.
Fortunately I am now living with a wonderful, and supportive family who are very empathetic toward my situation. They have taken me in, and made me their son-in-spirit. Now that I am in a much-improved situation, I feel that I need to speak-out against the things that I went through. Parents should not be able to force their children to attend any type of program like the one I went to. When a child comes out to their parents as gay, lesbian, or bisexual they need the love and support of their parents. They don’t need to be made to feel that there is something wrong with them, something that needs to be fixed.
That’s the gist of it, but Lance gave Morgan a more detailed account later, and as they allowed me to photograph the interview process, I was able to hear it and it just breaks your heart. Keep this kid’s experience in mind as you read this statement on LIA’s newly updated Refuge website:
God has admonished us to respect our parents. God has given them to us as vessels of His choosing to bring us into His world. Whether or not our parents are worthy of respect.
In other words, if your parents are beating the living crap out of you, then God must want them to do that. That is the kind of thing John Smid is pounding into the heads and hearts of gay teenagers at Love In Action, and time and again I have heard from survivors that the emotional effect of it is devistating. I was able to talk with Lance for a while after the interview and he’s a decent and thoughtful guy and there are parents all over this country who would gladly have given him all the love he’d ever want. But instead of healing the wounds in the families of gay teens, Smid is taking his several thousand dollar fee and making a toxic ruin of their emotional lives, and cutting scars in the hearts of teens they’ll be dealing with for years, if not for their entire lives.
I’m on the road back home today. I’ll post more photos from the protests when I get back, and settled in.
I never thought I’d find myself applauding an essay on abstinence. Most essays you read on the subject start from a strongly negative view of sex itself. But then that’s because most essays you read on the subject come from religious right sources, and the religious right considers joy anathema. You should be ashamed, ashamed of your body, of your feelings, of your deepest inner self. Otherwise, why would you want to let them take control of your body, your feelings, your deepest inner self? Most essays on abstinence start from the premise that there is something evil about sex, and especially if you’re gay, something evil about you. When people speak of abstinence and gay people, what they’re really talking about is lifetime celibacy, lifetime shame.
This generation views 16 to 17 hours of television each week and sees on average 14,000 sexual scenes and references each year. That’s more than 38 references every day.
INTERNET
This generation spends three hours a day online and is the first to grow up with point-and-click pornography. Almost 90 percent of teens have viewed pornography online at one of the 300,000 adult websites, most while doing homework.
MUSIC
More than 25 percent of teen-targeted radio segments contain sexual content; 42 percent of the top selling CDs contain sexual content.
Well no duh. Human beings are sexual creatures (its how we reproduce), and at a certain time in our lives (scientists call it ‘puberty’), sex starts becoming a pressing interest for us. So much, so goddamned obvious. Ask me if I’m happy about the commercialization of sex. Ask me if I think sex is being treated in this culture with the respect it deserves. But it’s not like any of the above are things you wouldn’t expect from human beings. The presence of sex in popular culture is as unsurprising a thing as the presence of weapons and violence. Note however, that you don’t hear a peep from Battle Cry about how frequently teens encounter violent images in popular culture. That’s probably because Battle Cry is itself dealing in violent imagery. It’s okay to imagine yourself as a warrior slaying thousands of your neighbors in blood strewn battle for all that is righteous and holy, but imagining yourself as a lover, laying down with someone and taking them into your arms and driving each other into fits of joyful sexual ecstasy is evil, and you need to have your mind washed out with soap. Jesus didn’t say love thy neighbor, he said to make war on them.
But if Battle Cry is a teen website, the teens writing for it are doing so with adults looking over their shoulders, and feeding them the words. Contrast it with a recent essay I found on Mogenic, a site for gay teens, about abstinence. It’s by a gay teen, and it’s titled, A Virgin, and Proud of it…
…gays have traditionally felt the need to identify themselves as separate from the mainstream. We have created our own subculture, and every subculture needs its own doctrines to follow. We tend to throw out religious teachings—especially Christian teachings—without fully considering their worth. We create our own beliefs, and often we choose beliefs that directly oppose those espoused who have adopted a dislike for homosexuality—like Christians, say. In doing so, we drop many things that perhaps Christianity got right. An example of this is abstinence.
The other problem in gay society is that we don’t have a point to define as the moment when abstinence should end. Abstinence traditionally means waiting until marriage to have sex. As long as gay marriage remains illegal, we don’t have that magical marker in the sky that shows us when, if we decide to abstain from sex, we can stop abstaining. Those of us who choose to remain abstinent, therefore, must forge our own definitions, such as “Once I’m in a meaningful, loving relationship, then I’ll have sex.” But there’s no sure indicator as to when that occurs, and it is easy for us to begin to have sex without infringing upon our morals.
I, personally, am a proud virgin. And by virgin, I mean Virgin, with a capital “V”. Unless you consider masturbation a means to end virginity, I am about as close to 100% virgin as they come. I intend to remain this way until I find myself in the aforementioned “meaningful, loving relationship.” It’s not that I do not find myself attracted to the idea of no-strings-attached sex. In fact, I fairly often fantasize about it. But I cannot imagine myself actually going through with such an act. There are several reasons why I believe abstinence to be the best way to go…
Okay, he gets many things completely wrong in this essay, like when he says "the sexual abandon of gays is legendary". Yeah it’s legendary…as in urban myth legendary. There’s a lot of claptrap talked about gay men and sex, most of it pushed by religious right propaganda machines using studies they’ve either distorted or produced themselves to arrive at the conclusions they were after, namely that gay people are dirty twisted sexual perverts who have sex compulsively and never experience anything like love. This kid buys into a lot of that myth, but so so a lot of us, even many of those of us who should be old enough to know better. Never mind.
And…personally…I strongly doubt that abstinence before marriage is a good idea. I think after you’ve made a vow is the wrong time to find out you’re not sexually compatible. Again…never mind.
What was so heartwarming, so thrilling, about reading that gay teen’s essay, was the self confidant conviction running throughout, that he was entitled as a human being to experience sex in a context of pride, dignity, and self worth.
That’s it. That’s the golden heart of it. Right there. You give that to kids, and it won’t matter what the popular culture says at them. They’ll take from it what they need, what validates their lives, and ignore what does not. Look at the example of the Netherlands, where sex education is frank and comprehensive, and prostitution is legal, and yet they have among the lowest of teen STD and pregnancy rates. Pride matters. And for so many years, my own teen years included, pride was such a scarce commodity for gay teens. I have seen the cost firsthand, of the absence of pride. I have experienced it. And that is why, to this day, I still fight for it.
I never thought I’d find myself applauding an essay on abstinence. And there I was, seeing to my delight, the difference, the profound life affirming difference, between an abstinence discussion based on shame, and one based on self worth. So many kids, so many gay kids especially, never get to have that discussion, because the adults talking to them aren’t really concerned about whether or not they have sex. They’re concerned that they might wake up one day, and realize that to be a human being, is not a dirty thing.
Kids start believing that, and it won’t matter what the religious right says to them, never mind pop culture. And that is exactly why the religious right does not want them to have pride, dignity, and a sense of self worth. They must be ashamed of themselves. Ashamed of what they are: sexual beings. Ashamed, ultimately, to be human.
I’ll be protesting in front of Love In Action here in Memphis tomorrow. Already I’ve heard from some of its supporters, posting on the QAC comment boards, how homosexuals have given themselves up to their base sexual urges, over a holy god. No. We have embraced life. And we are angry at those who would take away from teens, their pride, their dignity, and their self worth, in the name of the creator that gave them life.
Those of us who were following the events in Memphis last year closely knew there were other teens imprisoned in Love In Action besides Zach…
"When we drove around to the front…we saw these men and trailing behind them–four young guys, all with their heads hung, staring at the ground as they walked. They are not allowed to make eyecontact with ANYONE for the first few days.so they are forced to fucking…i’m crying now…but…they have to look at the ground as they walk, for three days it’s a walk of shame, their heads hanging for being themselves, for having the courage to stand up and say "this is who i am"…and now all these people are saying ‘no you aren’t and we will change it. and you will be punished for thinking such things.’ I will NEVER get that picture out of my head. those four guys…"
Thus began the summer of shame for at least four gay youths. One of them will be back in Memphis a year later, 18 now and free to speak for himself, to bear witness to what John Smid is doing to innocent children, in the name of love. His name is Lance Carroll…
…and this is what happened to him last year:
In January of 2005, I came out to my parents as being gay. After an initial positive and supporting reaction they began to change their minds. They had me see three separate counselors, the last of which was a Christian counselor in St. Louis who worked for a fundamentalist, evangelical church. He told me that I wasn’t really gay, in fact no one was “really” gay. He tried to convince me that the whole idea of homosexual orientation is a lie, and that I felt the way I did because of some sort of early emotional/psychological deficiency. This counselor recommended Love in Action to my parents.
On June 6, 2005 I left Jackson, Missouri at five o’clock in the morning to make the long trip to Memphis, Tennessee. The first things I saw at the Love in Action campus were the protesters. That morning began my summer as a participant in the Love in Action Refuge program.
…
I am attending the protest in reaction to my own horrendous experience last summer, and as an opportunity to voice my personal opinions concerning the Love in Action Refuge program…while I was there, it just seemed to make people more depressed and self-loathing than they already were. I, myself, went through several of these depressive periods.
And in case you’re wondering how John Smid handles these sorts of depressive periods in his clients, here’s what he told Tom Ottosen, when he was on the verge of suicide:
"I would rather you commit suicide than have you leave Love In Action wanting to return to the gay lifestyle. In a physical death you could still have a spiritual resurrection; whereas, returning to homosexuality you are yielding yourself to a spiritual death from which there is no recovery."
"That’s exactly how he put it," states Tom Ottosen, 24, an expressive, articulate two year ex-LIA group member.
Ottosen says he clearly recalls that experience. He says it occurred in October of last year during his last one-on-one conference with John Smid, LIA’s Executive Director, who claims to be able to change gay men into straight men through a live-in rigidly controlled indoctrination program Smid calls "reparative therapy."
Ottosen says Smid clearly and emphatically warned him, "It would be better if I were to commit suicide than go back into the world and become a homosexual again. He felt that a physical death–with my soul intact–was much preferable to a spiritual death, which would happen if I were to leave the group and go back to being gay." claims Ottosen.
Ottosen further states that Smid said this at a time when Smid clearly was aware he had strong suicidal feelings and was going through periods of extreme depression, guilt and loneliness.
Ottosen recalls his depression had been building for several months during his second year at LIA, primarily because of a warm and emotional relationship he was experiencing with another group member. "It wasn’t sexual at all, but it was strictly forbidden and I was kept from even talking to him for several months."
Also, earlier in July, "Another house member, who was in his fourth year with the group and in a position of authority, became depressed and attempted suicide" and was sent away for observation. "He was taken from his position of leadership and then he just kind of disappeared." Ottosen admits that he too, within a few months was at point where he had never been before. "I couldn’t work. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t do anything."
It is bad enough that this man is counseling gay adults who go to him of their own free will. But John Smid is determined to expand his program for gay youth, dragging in more and more of them against their will, to be taught to hate themselves for what they are.
They will be kids who have already gone through one of life’s most traumatic moments – coming out to parents who have reacted in shame and anger. Smid will take these already wounded and bleeding kids, and in essence try his almighty best to rip their hearts out of them, tell them that its all their fault, make them believe that they are broken, make them ashamed and deeply afraid of their inner selves, in the hope, the earnest hope, that they will never know what it is to love another person whole heartedly. And I don’t think even the suicide of one of his teenaged clients will be enough to make him stop. Shame is for his clients. Smid is on a mission from god, and gods don’t feel shame.
We will be gathering Monday, June 5th at the Love In Action HQ on at 4780 Yale Road in Memphis, Tennessee. There will be two protests: one from 8:30am until 10:00am, and another from 4:00pm until 5:30pm. If you can be peaceful and respectful, please come. Come to support the young ones silently walking the walk of shame. Come to support the survivors bearing witness. Come in the name of love. Show the world what love in action looks like.
A few more shots from my recent road trip. I left Guymon Oklahoma and headed west to Boise City and from there to Clayton New Mexico. I picked up I-25 in Raton and in Tridadad Colorado I took 350 to La Junta, what was once a spur on the Santa Fe Trail, and then to Granada when I took 385 to I-70 in Burlington.
This is the territory I think of as the Big Empty. The high plains, where the wind is constant, the land gently swells like a calm sea of grass, and there is nothing, nothing between the little villages and towns but the random farm house here and there, and, sometimes, a line of high voltage towers that stand across the landscape in relentless single file from horizon to horizon. Driving it at night, the little towns appear out of the darkness like small galaxies, and the random house lights seem as isolated stars slowly drifting by you in the night, while overhead the light of the milky way blazes down over everything.
I love travelling through this place. I’d go nuts if I had to live in it. I hear that once upon a time many pioneers did just that. But there is a solitude within me, that only this place speaks to. Somehow, it’s good for me to visit here.
Highway 64, Near Guymon, Oklahoma
Sign – Guymon Oklahoma
Grain Elevator And Propane Tank Trailors – Boise City Oklahoma
Christian Identity is a religion based on race. It believes that the historical Jews of the bible, the Israelites of the old testament, God’s Chosen People, were the white Aryan race. According to Christian Identity, it is the white race that God created in [his] own image. It holds that other races are so-called "mud people" – descended from a race God created before Adam and Eve…I suppose as a test. The mud people are the ancestors of all the people of color of the earth. The people we now call Jews are another story however. Christian Identity holds that the Jews are an entirely separate race, created when Eve had sex with the devil in the Garden of Eden.
In short, Christian Identity holds that Jews are, literally, the spawn of Satan.
This came to mind last night, as I read (via Andrew Sullivan) the following Wikipedia entry on Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind stories…
Born in the county of Cluj in Romania, Carpathia’s birth is the product of genetic engineering. His mother Marilena Carpathia, is convinced by parties who are followers of Satan, although she is kept unaware of this, to become the mother of a child who they assure her would change the face of the world. Marilena’s husband, Sorin, and his gay lover, Baduna Marius, provide genetic material to facilitate Nicolae’s conception.
Dig it. LaHaye and Jenkins are telling their readers that the Antichrist is, literally, the spawn of a gay male couple.
And some days I sit here at my computer and wonder if this is what it was like to be a Jew in 1920s Germany, watching the horror coming on the horizon. This is the kind of stuff that gets people killed. Someday, it might well get me killed. Someone with a baseball bat or a gun comes along and takes my head off, because he thinks that gay people are going to deliver the world to the Antichrist.
And LaHaye and Jenkins are hardly alone in this. Variations on this theme are popping up all across the kook pews. The Gays are in league with Satan… Just last week James Dobson was telling his listeners on the Focus on the Family radio broadcast, that same sex marriage was an attack on the family by the very forces of hell itself (via Ex-Gay Watch):
…as you all very well know marriage is under vicious attack, now I think from the forces of hell itself. Now it’s either going to continue to decline, and as I told you in my office a few minutes ago, I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of western civilization itself.
What was soft peddled before the re-election of George Bush is coming out of the closet, free, free at last to dispense with the loathsome hypocrisies of Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin. Now the message is clearly and unambiguously that homosexuals are in league with Satan. Not mere sinners, we are destroyers of the world. We will give birth to the Antichrist. Next thing you know, we will be all four horsemen of the Apocalypse too. Whatever it takes, to make everyone hate us, as much as they hate us.
And then watch them wash, wash their hands of our blood…
Imagine you’re a gay teenager, and you’ve either just come out to your parents, or been outed to them. Imagine they react with anger and shame and contempt. You’re a kid, going through adolescence, struggling with your emerging sexuality. It’s a confusing, embarrassing time when you begin to feel things, things about the attractive sex, that you’d never felt before. Thrilling, confusing, embarrassing things. You are a pervert, your parents tell you. You’re going to catch AIDS and die before you’re 40 they tell you. You’re a shame on your family name, and on them. You’re going to hell.
Imagine your parents force you into Love In Action to be cured. Imagine you find yourself one day, inside the Love In Action program. You are a young teenager, and you are in one of the group sessions, surrounded by older adults who have in their past engaged in sexual perversions and addictions the likes of which your teenage mind could never have conceived. Imagine being force into exposing yourself, your deepest sexual thoughts and feelings, to these men, and being forced to listen as they expose themselves to you. They are sexually broken, say the staff at Love In Action. You are sexually broken, they tell you. You, and the man next to you telling you how it is to fuck animals, are both sexually broken. You are the same as they. The sessions last for weeks. There is no place inside of yourself that is safe from the staff at Love In Action, and you must expose it all to the men who fuck animals, rape children, and have never known what it is to have a healthy adult sex life. You’re a young teenager. Throughout it all you are told in word and in deed that you are no different from them.
Eventually, you begin to believe it. You are finally dismissed from the Program, and perhaps you decide you are still gay and there is nothing wrong with that. Or perhaps you try, as so many do, to stop being gay, only to discover you can no more choose your sexual orientation then you can choose whether to be right or left handed. Perhaps some logical, rational part of your mind rejects what you were told about your sexuality at Love In Action. But deep down inside, the seed is planted. I’m a freak…There’s something wrong with me…with my sex…I’m a freak…I’m a freak… You try to go on with your life, find yourself failing utterly to find love, emotional intimacy, peace…
Surely, nobody would do this to a child, even if they think that homosexuality is sinful and wrong. Right? You don’t understand. Faith excuses everything. Faith, and hate. Peterson Toscano has an expanded post up now that you should read.
Back in January 2005, I met with the BBC crew that had just finished filming LIA/R. The presenter and the crew expressed shock at the treatment of the youth in the facility. They told me that adults and minors gathered together and talked about serious issues including prostitution, sexual abuse, and beastiality. They told me of a 16 year old lesbian placed in the program against her will. And the message that she received by being there is that her same-sex attractions are on the same level as a man having sex with animals.
I couldn’t believe it, so on June 1, 2005, when I bumped into John Smid at the Atlantia airport, I questioned him about this. (I had not yet heard of Zach’s story as it was just unfolding). He assured me that although the youth and the adults attended the some of the same sessions, they did not talk about their particular "issues", just their feelings.
Even if that were true, any 16 year old I know is smart enough to figure out within a half a day why everyone is in the program.
This fall, I spoke at length with a young man who was in the adult program this summer when Zach was also in attendance in Refuge, the youth program. I asked him to describe the sessions and he confirmed that adults and youth met together. When I asked, "But of course they don’t talk about issues, just emotions, right?" He replied that they talked about the issues often, in fact, each participant had to give an introduction which outlined the exact nature of their issues.
[Emphasis mine] Notice how John Smid was able to look Peterson right in the eye and tell him it wasn’t happening. And it was.
Today, pumped up on the war rhetoric of saving youth from a culture set out to destroy them, potentially thoughtful and kind human beings who run LIA/R end up employing harmful strategies designed to scare these kids straight by any means necessary. Even if it means exposing them to pedophiles and people with extreme sexual fetishes. (The language reminds me of the fear-fueled war talk of the US Christian fascist group BattleCry)
I know folks from my time at LIA who before they entered the program never had sex with another person and were quite naive sexually. By the time they left, often with the shame of failure, armed with loads of details about what we thought of as "the gay lifestyle", they ended up living self-destructive lives filled with anonymous sexual encounters and worse addictions than they ever experienced before.
Go read the whole thing. This is why I’m going to be in Memphis on June 5th. If doing this to kids in the name of love appalls you, and you can make it to Memphis, then be there too.
I’m going to do a small loop around southwestern Kansas, maybe into New Mexico and Colorado, and then head back to Baltimore for a few days. Maybe. I am making no firm plans this road trip save for being back in Memphis on the 6th. I want to see Liberal Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle though.
But back to the video [It’s Not Gay]… Nine exgays appear in it. How many make/made their living exgays? You guessed it, every single one of them.
Ex-Gay for pay, as Wayne Besen calls it. And the sad thing is, as Daniel Gonzales at Ex-Gay Watch points out, most of these folks aren’t making a lot of money. But just look at the roll call Gonzales lists in his post. Founder of Kerusso Ministries…Former counseling Assistant at Love In Action…Social Research Analyst at Focus on the Family…Director of LIFE Coaching International…Counselor at Quest Ministries…Director of Quest Ministries… On and on it goes. And they’re seldom if ever up front about their connections to the ex-gay movement. But that’s not the basic dishonesty here. The basic dishonesty is when they say that change is possible they’re not really addressing that to a gay audience, but to a straight one.
As Ex-Gay watch is now documenting, the movement is starting to focus its efforts on heterosexuals. Counter-intuitive? Not when you realize that they were actually the target audience all along. The point was never to offer change to homosexuals, but to give heterosexuals an excuse not to care what happens to their homosexual neighbors. They can always change if they want too…Their blood is upon them…
After decades of trying, and failing to produce any objectively measurable change in sexual orientation, the people actually running these ministries, and dealing with the human wreckage they’re piling up firsthand, cannot possibly Not Know that they’re selling people snake oil. They keep right on selling it, but as the ex-gay movement finds itself under heightened scrutiny now after the Love In Action protests last year, they’re getting fewer takers. John Smid, who has had to sell two of the houses where he kept his adult residential clients, is now turning his focus onto exploiting the fears and loathings of parents toward their gay teens, who cannot legally refuse to be put into Refuge. Easy pickings for the moment, that might let him at least keep his hollow church. But even that market has no real growth potential and they know it. What’s left? The base, of course. As the ex-gay myth comes crashing down around them, there is still the base. The base will always be there to listen, and believe.
Exodus and PFOX are now focusing attention on heterosexual youth, creating youth groups with the specific intent of disrupting gay-straight alliances in schools. It may seem a shift in focus, but it’s more a lifting of the mask. The Ex-gay movement was never about creating ex-gays. It was always about giving bigots an excuse to hate, and to act on that hate. Next comes the name change, to probably something like, Parents of Bullies Alliance in Support of Hate. PBASH.
It was about a year ago that I first read these words…
I pray this blows over. I can’t take this… noone can… not really, this kind of thing tears you apart emotionally…It’s so horrible. This is what it’s doing to me… I have this horrible feeling all of the time… I wish this on no person…
A 16 year old gay teenager had been outed to his parents. It happens probably every day in this country, and all too often with brutal results for the kid. Parents, who should love their children unconditionally, are taught by this nation’s men of god to hate them instead if they are homosexual, the better to make gay teens hate themselves, and thereby produce self destructive, self hating adults: convenient scapegoats for all the problems heterosexuals would rather not deal with in themselves.
Zach’s misfortune was not only to have parents who could not see the child for the homosexual, but also to be living just a few miles from the first ever ex-gay program, Love In Action, which had relocated from its San Fransisco birthplace to the friendlier climes of the bible belt, and its current leader John Smid had only recently decided to create a program, ostensibly for teens, but actually for frantic fundamentalist parents who were easy pickings for his ex-gay snake oil. Smid was able to talk Zach’s parents into his little two-week teaser program, which of course led to the full eight week course.
It’s a brutal, sexually abusive program where a teen’s deepest feelings about themselves, their bodies, their sexuality, their relationships to their parents, peers and god are systematically ripped out of them using the same mind control techniques that cults throughout the world use to alienate people from the world, the better to imprison them within themselves. And make no mistake, Love In Action is a cult. You want proof, read the rule book that Zach found on his parent’s computer, and posted on his blog for the world to see. A teen who is forced into the "program" finds their life utterly controlled, who they can talk to, what they can read, what they can wear, even down to the kind of underwear they’re allowed to put on, when they can eat, and even – I am not kidding – how many minutes a day total they can spend in the bathroom. There are actually timers placed in or near the bathrooms to insure compliance.
It has one purpose and one purpose only: to break a kid’s spirit. Not to make them a better person. Not even, really, to make them heterosexual. As with any cult, the purpose is to erase the soul within, so the cult leaders can put their will in its place. And in June of 2005, a 16 year old gay teen was thrown into that cult, that ex-gay soul grinder so laughingly misnamed Love In Action. But before he vanished into it completely, he was able to get a cry for help out to the world. You can pretty much bet that John’s advice to parents nowadays is Take The Fucking Computer Away Before You Tell The Kid Where They’re Going!!!
When I read Zach’s words, and the LIA rule book, I literally could not sleep for about a week after, so sick with worry was I for him, and for other gay teens who I believed were almost certainly being forced into that "program" too. I was later to learn that it was not an uncommon reaction. People from all over the world have since told me the same thing: I couldn’t sleep for days after reading that… But for Zach’s amazing, loving, devoted friends, worry and stress turned into activism. They could not stand silently by, they did not stand silently by, while their friend was being abused behind closed doors. They took to the street, and stood side by side in front of the door to a gay teen’s nightmare, and with their simple presence sent a message of support of their friend, and all the other teens inside, and they took to the Internet, to shout out to the world what was being done to helpless kids in Memphis, and to spread the word about LIA and programs like it, so other teens wouldn’t have to suffer the same silent abuse.
Now, on the one year anniversary of that moment, the Queer Action Coalition is calling for a protest at LIA’s hollow church in Memphis. And the need is as urgent as ever, because even having suffered setbacks and losses, John Smid is as determined as ever to expand his "program" directed at gay teens. Child abusers are like that…they never stop with just one:
From LIA’s document: REFUGE International BOOK/Summer 2006:
Although we have seen success in our ministry, we see the culture relentlessly fighting back. So, we are expanding our ammunition to battle for young people and their families. Our experienced counselors and staff will offer a whole new array of options starting during the summer of 2006:
• Residential recovery for young adults (ages 18-25)
• College campus outreach
• Revamped summer program for youth (ages 13-17)
• Seminars to equip church and community youth leaders
• Conferences to heal wounds within families
• Creative support for parents and families
It appears, in this 8 page document, that LIA will launch a 3-month pilot program this summer for youth ages 13-17, and have begun to request funds for its operation. They have also launched a MYSPACE.COM blog in an attempt to further target youth by adopting main-stream/pop-cultural avenues of communication/outreach….these tactics seem to be the stepping stones towards a much larger front in an attack on youth, and their vunerable parents…
The Queer Action Coalition is rather concerned about these actions on LIA’s behalf, simply because WE ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THE WELL BEING OF OUR FELLOW CITIZENS.
The Lords Of The Ex-Gay Cults claim they act in love. During the first week of protests in Memphis last year, witnesses saw for themselves what had been largely hidden from the world up until that moment: their love, in action:
Whilst in this centre he [Zach] had to spend the first three days in total silence unable to talk while he was talked to by their counsellors. An eye witness has reported "When we drove around to the front…we saw these men and trailing behind them–four young guys, all with their heads hung, staring at the ground as they walked. They are not allowed to make eyecontact with ANYONE for the first few days.so they are forced to fucking…i’m crying now…but…they have to look at the ground as they walk, for three days it’s a walk of shame, their heads hanging for being themselves, for having the courage to stand up and say "this is who i am"…and now all these people are saying ‘no you aren’t and we will change it. and you will be punished for thinking such things.’ I will NEVER get that picture out of my head. those four guys…"
You may have a different definition of love then beating shame into an innocent kid because you hate what they are. If so, then come to Memphis on June 5, and show your love in action.
I see John Smid finally covered up that bare sign in front of his hollow church…
This is perfect. Almost too good. If you can’t quite make it out, that’s the god-forsaken Love In Action logo under the LOVE IN ACTION verbiage. It’s a pink triangle with a heart superimposed on it. Here it is:
Now I’ve no idea what exactly was on Smid’s mind when he settled on this as his logo, I suspect he thinks he’s somehow slyly co-opting the pink triangle symbol, but whatever was in his foreground thoughts, this is the gutter of his subconscious speaking and it’s almost better then the vacant whitewash that was on the sign previously.
The pink triangle is not a symbol of gay liberation. That would be the Lambda if you’re my generation, or nowadays, the rainbow flag. When gay people display the pink triangle, we do it as an act of defiance against the hate that sent thousands of homosexuals to the death camps, or we do it as a remembrance of those who died, and those who survived. We are emphatically not embracing the status the Nazis imposed on homosexuals, that of a dangerous sub human perversion that it was better to exterminate for the good of society.
Recall that the triangle symbols the Nazis used in the concentration camps to identify classes of inmates, were derived from the shape of traffic hazard signs widely in use throughout Germany at the time. The colored triangles were put onto human beings to identify them, literally, as though they were some kind of hazardous biological waste. That is the meaning of the pink triangle. John Smid’s drawing a little heart over it is akin to putting a smiley face on a swastika.
Well…I couldn’t have said it better myself. The bedrock premise of homosexual conversion therapy is that homosexuals should not exist. Couched under layer after layer of "love the sinner, hate the sin" bullshit, the bottom line for them is that this world would be a much better place if there were no homosexuals. And here comes John Smid, to make it all plain as day that what they want to do to us, they mean in love. Honest…we don’t hate you…we love you… And to prove it, he’s taken the death camp symbol for homosexuality and put a fuzzy little heart over it.
I’m in Memphis now, on the first leg of a brief road trip vacation, not so much mandated as encouraged by my employer (I had gobs of unused and accrued vacation time and due to budgetary considerations they’d really rather we didn’t do that anymore…).
Anyway…would anyone I saw during my last visit like to do lunch or dinner or something while I’m here. I’d really like to sit down and chat with that bunch of Memphis area bloggers I met the last time. Great bunch of folks.
After Memphis, Topeka, and then probably back home to Baltimore to spend the last half of this vacation in my art room catching up on a few things. In the meantime, while I’m on the road, the cartoon is on hiatus.
The important thing isn’t whether it’s a boy or a girl you have in your arms, but whether or not you care that they’re better for having been loved by you, and not worse.
The invitation arrived in Tokes Osubu’s e-mail inbox on Monday, and the contents astounded him: Black and Latino men were being invited to attend a gay sex party this weekend where condoms would be banned. Show up with a condom, the invitation said, and you’ll be asked to leave.
"I was shocked and disgusted," said Osubu, executive director of Gay Men of African Descent, a Harlem-based nonprofit group battling the HIV/AIDS epidemic among black gay men.
Osubu sent the party’s promoter a letter urging him to reconsider the policy, and the group plans to protest Saturday outside the East Harlem building where the party is scheduled to be held.
The party comes just weeks before the 25th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic and at a time when black men are facing startlingly high HIV infection rates. Nearly half of black men who have sex with men are HIV-positive, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
"I’m sick of 18-year-olds coming in here HIV-positive," Osubu, 46, said in his East Harlem office. "It’s got to stop."
As I get older I find myself growing more and more accepting of things then I was when I was young and a tad full of myself. I can accept now that for some people, sex is more like a hobby then a passionate joining of two people, body and soul. I’m not interested in having sex with any of them, but they’d probably find me a tad uninteresting anyway. And I really don’t care if some people get into these sex club scenes or how many people they have sex with or how often, as long as there is a measure of compassion and kindness given. Whatever it is you do, you can’t take advantage of or abuse anyone, and you can’t spread disease. You have to leave them better for their encounter with you, even if it’s merely a few moments of casual pleasure, not worse. It doesn’t have to be love…but if you don’t love, you still need to care. And if you don’t care, you’ve no business taking anyone into your arms.
Or…inviting them into your church.
I want to say one more thing to any younger folks who are reading my blog: If the person you are with doesn’t care enough about you to keep you safe from disease, (let alone pregnancy if you’re heterosexual) they do not care about you enough for you to be giving yourself to them. In any sense. Take a walk. Go find the heart that loves you. It’s out there waiting for you. Don’t let anyone, be it a bible thumping nutcase who thinks you don’t deserve honest, factual information about STD prevention, or a really really cute someone who swears they think the world of you, they just think taking precautions is silly, take the possibility of that perfect body and soul love away from you. Nobody who really loves you would ever want to do that to you. That isn’t love…it’s greed. Your body, and your love, are precious things. Give them to the ones who deserve you, the ones who want more then anything for you to be happy, and safe, as the person you are.
The second part of Jim Naughton’s series about the influence of right wing billionaires in mainstream American protestant churches, Following The Money is online now, here.
The Dromantine Retreat and Conference Center , a 19th Italianate mansion sits in stony isolation on a hilltop outside Newry , Northern Ireland . The center is home to a Catholic seminary, but it played host to a distinctively Protestant drama in February 2005. For five days, the Primates of the Anglican Communion assembled in its meagerly-furnished meeting rooms to determine whether the 77-million member body could be preserved despite bitter disagreements over homosexuality.
For the previous 15 months, the leaders of several conservative Episcopal organizations had been working secretly with their allies among the primates to remove the Episcopal Church from the Communion for consecrating a gay man with a male partner as bishop and permitting the blessing of same-sex relationships. Failing that, they aimed to establish a parallel American province for Episcopalians who differed with their Church on the nature of same-sex relationships.
At the Dromantine conference, the Americans and their international allies collaborated with an unprecedented openness, in an attempt to force Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to take a harder line against the Episcopal Church.
Among the primates who backed this effort were Peter Akinola of Nigeria , Henry Orombi of Uganda and Gregory Venables of Argentina . Working with them were the leaders of the American Anglican Council, the Anglican Communion Network, the Ekklesia Society and the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
Those groups, backed by five politically conservative U.S. foundations, and Howard F. Ahmanson, a benefactor of numerous conservative ballot initiatives, candidates and think tanks, had been cultivating relationships with evangelical leaders in the developing world since the mid-1990s. But at Dromantine, the Americans’ role as the principal strategists for the movement against their church came into focus.
The impending schism in the Anglican church is by no means a grass roots movement powered by disagreements over scripture. It is fueled and funded by a handful of American right wing billionaires who are also the source of most of the money funding the American culture wars for the past two decades. The Washington Blade this week, has a short article on how one of their front groups, the Institute on Religion & Democracy, has been stepping up its attacks on the gay community since the end of the cold war:
“There is a growing awareness that IRD and groups affiliated with them have been having an increasingly disruptive effect on our churches,” John H. Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, told the Blade. “In some cases, groups that have affinity with IRD provide instruction to churches seeking to leave the United Council of Churches.”
IRD’s critics point to the group’s leadership and funding sources as proof it intends to use gay issues to divide congregations.
Follow the money
IRD’s financial backers include conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Foundation; the Carthage Foundation; the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation; and the Randolph Foundation, according to Media Transparency, a research group that investigates conservative groups.
Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. has also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to IRD, according to a report by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington authored by Jim Naughton, communications director for the diocese. Ahmanson has also contributed hundreds of thousands to groups opposing gay marriage and pushing anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, according to the report.
By way of dozens and dozens of front groups and propaganda mills, this small circle of right wing billionaires have utterly poisoned American politics. The extent of their political influence has only come to light through the persistent work of a few small progressive watchdog groups. The extent of their reach into the religious lives of Americans is still being documented. For all the damage they’ve done to the political dialog in America, the damage they’ve done to the spiritual lives of the American people may, in the end, be far more profound.
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