A former LIA "client" and now booster takes issue with this post of mine. Here’s my reply…
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> I, having been a client at LIA (March, 2005), would like to know some of
> Lance’s horrendous experiences caused by his time there.
A client were you? Swell. You know the difference between being a "client" and being an inmate…right? There’s the beginning of the horror right there buddy, and what’s disturbing right off the bat about your comment is that you seem utterly unable to even notice it. So you my friend, are part of the horror.
Those kids are not in there by choice. Most of them had either made peace with their sexual nature, or were at least beginning to, when they were dragged into LIA by parents terrified from the cesspool of anti-gay propaganda that the religious right vomits into the public discourse, much of which John happily repeats. Joe Stark was on Pat Robertson’s 700 club, mindlessly babbling that gays only live an average of 36 years. Where the hell did he hear that claptrap, if it wasn’t John? Even Paul Cameron isn’t claiming 36 years. But John doesn’t seem to care where he gets his facts on homosexuality, as long as they’re sufficently ugly.
For months at least, if not longer, John was linking his LIA website to a group called The International Organization Of Heterosexual Rights, and using their bogus statistics to paint a picture of homosexuals and homosexuality that was relentlessly perverse and disgusting. After community activists started pointing out how unChristianly it was to be linking to a hate site, John pulled the link. But he kept their bogus fact sheet online. So at least for a time (I haven’t been there recently), people visiting his site were still being given this crap from a hate group…only they weren’t being told who the source of this information was. Dig it. John responded to the accusation that he was spreading hate rhetoric, not by taking it down, but by making it harder for people to discover that the facts on his website were coming from a hate group.
I think part of the reason he does it is because he knows that it frightens parents, and that’s his last best source of clients now: Helpless gay teens who cannot legally refuse his dangerous blend of anti-gay religiosity and junk psychology. As more and more comes to light about the practices of these ex-gay ministries, and their spectacular rates of failure, fewer and fewer grown adults are checking in. So the kids, who cannot legally refuse, are his last best source of income, which he needs to keep the operation afloat. Never mind what it does to kids, to their parents, to the bond between parent and child…John’s on a mission from God, and Gods don’t feel shame.
Imagine a teen who is left handed. Imagine they’re told that their left-handedness is unnatural, perverse, a God condemned abomination. Imagine sending that kid to a place that claims to be able to treat left-handedness through prayer and counseling, and establishing a closer relationship to Jesus. They claim that left-handedness is a form of addiction, that using your left hand to do things like writing is no different from people who use their hands to rob, assault, and murder, people and animals. Imagine that left-handed kid being forced to sit next to grown men who’ve used their hands to do all manner of cruel and perverse things to animals and humans alike, while the staff of this treatment facility is telling him, perhaps not so much in word but sure as hell in deed, that he’s no better then those men. Someday, his desire to use his left hand instead of the God ordained right hand, will lead him into all manner of brutish, deviant, ugly acts.
Imagine this kid trying desperately…trying, trying with all his heart and soul to pray away his left handedness. But he can’t…he’s left handed. And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, it only serves to remind him that he doesn’t love God enough, that he’s headed for the same life that all those robbers, and murderers live. He’s going to become just like them one day…
What does that sort of thing to to a kid? Well we all know what it does to an adult because it happened. Does the name Jack McIntyre ring any bells? Or has John finally erased all memory of Love In Action’s bloody birth? McIntyre was one of LIA’s first clients (I say client because he went in of his own accord…a choice of free will that neither Lance nor Zach nor any kid in the horrifically misnamed Refuge "program" are allowed) A few months ago I finally stumbled on a copy of his suicide note. You want to know what the horror is my friend? Well…take a peek into the Pit then…
TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?
I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.
I loved my job and my clients.
I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.
I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.
All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.
However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.
It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.
I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.
I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?
May God Have Mercy On My Soul.
A Brother & A Friend.
No. May God have mercy on yours, because I don’t have any to spare for the likes of you. Jack McIntyre killed himself, rather then make one more promise to God he knew he could not keep. Bad enough John Smid is doing this to grown adults. Now he’s dragging kids into his little psych room, where he’ll sit them down right next to grown men who have engaged in the most extreme sexual perversions imaginable, and let them know that they’re just like those men are, that their sexual orientation will lead them into all of that and worse. This is what John is subjecting gay teenagers to. He takes in kids who are more or less fine with their sexual orientation, or getting there, and puts his crowbar to their self esteem and tries systematically to utterly destroy their deepest sense of their inner selves, to make them see their sexual nature as ugly and perverse and foul, and that only a relationship with Jesus can save them from their homosexuality. But it won’t. They’re Gay. What happens is that they loose their faith, and often enough, loose their family too. But as long as the checks clear, John doesn’t seem to mind.
> I speak on behalf of LIA, not only because I believe in what they’re doing, but also
> because I care a great deal about John Smid and the LIA staff.
If you care about any of them then you need to do whatever you can to convince them to stop tormenting gay people, and particularly gay teens who are content with who they are. John is trying his best to gut their ability to ever feel good about themselves as gay people, and ever experience what it is to love and be loved, body and soul. He is systematically trying to put as much fear and loathing into teens and adults of their sexual nature so that they’ll never be able to love wholeheartedly without feeling ashamed and dirty. To assault someones sense of self to the point where they cannot see one of this life’s most wonderful, beautiful, amazing things as anything other then ugly and perverse is a crime against them of absolutely staggering magnitude. To do that to children is a crime against humanity.
> Zach Stark’s opinion of "reparative therapy," as it’s being dubbed, variegated a
> great deal after his experience at LIA. "Love In Action has been misrepresented
> and what I have posted in my blogs has been taken out of perpective and context,"
> as Zach is quoted at 365gay.com on 8-1-05. My question to Lance is this: What
> specific occurrences at LIA made your experience so horrendous?
As for Zach…I’m a little fuzzy about how you expect a kid who was forced into ex-gay therapy against his will, and who said in an update to that blog post you’re quoting from there that he could only post blogs his father approved of, to speak out publicly against his treatment. Actually, I’m being sarcastic. You know damn well he couldn’t. Since he’s still underage, and cannot speak for himself without suffering whatever consequences his parents (you know…the ones who put him into LIA in the first place) can dictate, it’s unreasonable to expect him to get on a soapbox about his feelings toward LIA. If I were you though, I would strongly suggest that his silence on the matter since those first couple of posts speaks volumes.
I was with Lance at a protest against reparative therapy in Silver Spring, Maryland. John Smid was there too, but too cowardly to come out to the line and speak with Lance himself. One of the other LIA staffers, a new guy, did come out because, as he said, he wanted to hear from Lance himself why he was upset about what LIA did to him. Lance gave him an earful, the gist of which was that he resented being made to feel horrible about himself simply because he’s gay.
John likes to boast that he brings families together. What happened to Lance after he left LIA was horrible, and he finally had to move out because his mom had become so abusive. The day he moved out, his mom cornered him and started beating the crap out of him. He’s told this to reporters and gave a more detailed account to Morgan Jon Fox who is doing a documentary on the LIA protests. Morgan and Lance let me sit in on the interview to take some photographs and Lance’s story nearly brought me to tears and I had to concentrate on what I was doing and I almost couldn’t. John did nothing, nothing for that family, except tear it apart. Oh…and he cashed the check.
You care about the LIA staff do you? Then dig up whatever stunted whithered stump of a conscience any of them still have left in them, and make them see two things they really, really need to see. First, that they are committing a monstrous assault on the human identity of the people they’re "treating" and their capacity to love and accept love from another. Second, that John has no brakes, and one of these days he’s going to push a gay kid too far and then they’re be more then Jack McIntyre’s blood on the LIA account books, and if you think the judgment on LIA has been harsh up till now, you haven’t seen anything. Yet.
Wait…you just gotta love this. A Pennsylvania pro-family group… Later in the article you discover that it’s the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association. Agape Press is owned and operated by the American Family Association. So it isn’t merely "A Pennsylvania pro-family group", but themselves that they are are talking about here. They can’t even get the first sentence of their "news article" out without being deceptive. Not one single sentence into it and they’re already being deceitful. If there is an answer to all the wickedness in this world, a way out of sinfulness and toward redemption and hope, their religion sure isn’t it, is it.
But…anyway…
…suggests that the recent arrest of a University of Pennsylvania professor on child sex charges should cause the school to consider banning homosexual professors, just as the Boy Scouts ban homosexual troop leaders.
Considering how often heterosexual teachers have been caught recently in bed with their students, your reflex might be to just toss this off as yet another fart from the kook pews. But what’s interesting about this piece is that, for a change, they seem not to be relying on Paul Cameron’s junk science to back them up, but another guy who I hadn’t heard of before. His name is Gene Abel.
The AFA of Pennsylvania leader cites a study of non-incarcerated child-sex offenders by research scientist Gene Abel that found homosexuals "sexually molest young boys with an incidence that is occurring five times greater than the molestation of girls." Abel’s research reports that, on average, 150.2 boys are molested per homosexual offender, whereas 19.8 girls are molested per heterosexual offender.
Well that sounds pretty bad. Bad in the same way mind you, as Paul Cameron’s factoid that the average lifespan of a homosexual is 46 years sounds pretty bad. Right away, even before you look into it deeper, you just know that there is something a tad…er…queer, about it. If homosexuals are molesting kids at a rate several orders of magnitude greater then heterosexuals are, then even if we’re just a tiny fragment of the population as a whole you’d expect to see something like nearly every kid in America having been molested at least once in their lives. And since kids eventually grow up to become adults, nearly all adults alive today must have been molested when they were kids. And yet, that is just not the case. So you know something’s wrong here right away, and that something is either Abel, or Agape is distorting the work of another honest scientist.
But Abel, though he seems credentialed in a way Paul Cameron is not, is a crank. Maybe even a bigger uglier crank then Paul Cameron, because Abel actually thinks that most child molesters are other children, not adults. Paul Cameron is something of a pathetic figure. Abel, at least to the degree I’ve been able to find out anything about him so far, is horrifying.
You can tell that something’s not quite right about this man immediately, simply by doing a Google search on him. What you get, page after page of it, are cites by the right wing kook press and nobody else, until you’re very, very deep in the rankings. So that’s the first tip off right there. A little casual digging further, and you start running across his books, like Stop Child Molestation, and that’s where it starts getting interesting.
Abel thinks the average age of a child molestor is 13, which means that most child molesters, according to Abel, are children themselves. According to one reviewer at Amazon.Com, Abel blames that on…testosterone, accidental pairings of orgasm with thoughts of younger children, sexual victimization, or "biology that is deviant." Don’t bother looking up "deviant biology" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because you won’t find it.
Deviant biology. Deviant biology. If you’ve ever entertained the thought that finally convincing the homophobes that our sexual orientation isn’t chosen, isn’t an artifact of poor parenting or ungodliness, but that it is something hard wired into us either at or before birth, if you’ve ever thought for a second that convincing them of this fact would make them hate us a little less, you can disabuse yourself of that notion right now. Repeat after me: Deviant biology. Deviant biology.
There is much in that review of Abel’s book that is worth noting. The emphasis in the following is my own…
The first sign that something is amiss is his claim that one out of every twenty boys develops pedophilia, usually in childhood or puberty. He never explains how he arrives at this figure, one which cannot be found anywhere else in the literature. This 5% prevalence rate would mean that pedophilia is one of the most common serious childhood diseases in America, similar in prevalence to asthma.
A handful of influential therapists began promoting the belief in an epidemic of childhood sexual deviance about 20 years ago-at the same time that some of the same therapists convinced the public that satanic ritual sexual abuse was occurring at nursery schools across the nation, and that large numbers of women had been sexually abused by their parents in childhood but had repressed their memories of it. Both of these beliefs were eventually disproved by investigators and researchers, but only after thousands of children were traumatized and adults’ lives were destroyed. However, the myth of rampant childhood sexual deviance has survived, most likely because its believers-juvenile sex offender therapists-comprise an industry mostly hidden from public view and exempt from oversight by the mainstream mental health community. Sexuality researchers have noted that these therapists commonly label children as "sex offenders" for mutually desired sexual contact with each other, then imply that they are dangerous to other children.
Abel recommends that all parents question their sons at around 6th grade about their sexual fantasies. Any boy who is suspected of having sexual thoughts involving younger children, or who has been sexually touched by an older child or adult, is to be referred to a "sex-specific therapist" who will test him for pedophilic symptoms. The test should be either a sexual interest test (developed by Abel himself, in which the boy examines photographs of children and adults in swimwear while a computer measures visual reaction time), a lie detector test, or a plethysmograph connected to his genitals while he looks at or listens to sexually stimulating material.
The problem with such tests (aside from their intensely humiliating and stigmatizing effects) is that they have never been validated, a process which would require testing a representative sample of American children to establish norms. In fact, all researchers are agreed that very little is known about normal sexual feelings during childhood and adolescence. To make matters worse, Abel refuses to release data necessary for independent researchers to evaluate his test.
I’m still digging for a reliable link to this, but I see out there what looks like a news article noting that Dr. Paul Fedoroff (who is a staff psychiatrist with the Law and Mental Health program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and co-director of the sexual behaviors clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital in Canada), said that at least some of Abel’s studies might not be reliable because…
…they were conducted on sex offenders who were given certificates of confidentiality, meaning that they would not be turned over to the police, no matter what they admitted. To get the certificate of confidentiality, the offender had to admit something. The more they divulged, the better they looked in front of their therapists.
So Abel was apparently interviewing subjects who had a vested interest in telling him what he wanted to know. And since he doesn’t divulge his data, we cannot even know whether even this self serving source of information was enough to justify his conclusions.
But never mind. It isn’t science, if you’re not willing to publish your data along with your results. That one fact alone tells us all we need to know about Abel. He is not a man of science. This is why you see him being cited approvingly in the kook pews. And just like all his other neighbors there, while posturing as a defender of children, Abel shows a stunningly depraved indifference toward them.
However, the most chilling part of Abel’s book comes when he outlines treatment methods to cure "pedophilia" among boys: separation from other children (possibly removal from the family), monitoring of sexual feelings and behavior by family members and friends who report to the therapist (and sometimes by plethysmograph), high doses of sex drive reducing drugs, covert sensitization, and aversion therapy with ammonia. The last two methods are intended to eliminate particular sexual thoughts by pairing them with pain, fear, or humiliation. Any of these methods may be imposed on the boy for life by the therapist, regardless of his or his parents’ wishes.
Although Abel refers to them as "breakthroughs in testing, medicine, and therapies," students of history will recognize plethysmographs, sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, and covert sensitization as the methods used decades ago to "cure" homosexuality. Mainstream health professionals and the public (even those who disapprove of homosexual behavior) now consider them ineffective, dangerous, and unethical. Numerous accounts show they lead to nightmares, depression, chronic anxiety, self-hatred, and suicidal thoughts among both gay men and children labeled as "deviant." And no wonder: Considering the fact that we know almost nothing about the development of sexual feelings, it is clear that such efforts amount to messing with something we don’t understand.
Like the "expert" doctors and therapists who justified their use on homosexuals, Abel shows no concern for emotional trauma and intense stigma these methods inflict on boys, instead rationalizing such abuse by writing that the protection of normal children takes precedence over the welfare of deviant children.
Especially disturbing is the apparent endorsement of this approach by some other leaders in the juvenile sex offender industry-an approach that would create a new class of lepers consisting, presumably, of 5% of all boys.
So with utterly no actual science grounding his notions of the developing sexuality of children, Abel proposes to subject any of them, as young as sixth graders, to having their genitals hooked up to a machine while they’re shown provocative images of scantily clad children and adults, and then perhaps a nice regimen of sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, covert sensitization and the occasional lungful of ammonia. Sixth graders mind you. And he figures some of them may have a "deviant biology" which makes them dangerous to the other kids. That…and testosterone. This is the man being cited by ersatz Christian publications as an authority on child molestation. Well…I guess so. Picture him shoving ammonia in a sixth grader’s face while the kid has his genitals hooked up to a machine and he’s being shown a picture of another kid in a bikini.
So by that logic, and accepting the premise (which I do not) that men who molest boys are by definition homosexuals, then we should not only keep gay professors out of colleges, we should keep gay students out of colleges too. And grade school. And you’d better believe that this is also on the agenda of the AFA too. Just…one step at a time please.
Eventually, it’ll be only Christian Nationalists who are allowed to go to school. Well…the straight boys anyway. The ones who pass the plethysmograph test. Because a women’s place is in the house, being gracefully submissive to her husband and bearing him as many children as he wants her to, so girls don’t need much of an education really. And the boys will only be taught by male professors, since women shouldn’t have authority over men. Remind me again…why did we bomb the Taliban?
First he dismissed 81-year-old Mary Lambert from the Diaconate Board of the First Baptist Church along with two members, claiming there were attendance issues.
Now the Rev. Timothy LaBouf has dismissed Mary Lambert as a Sunday School teacher for an adult class after she’s been on the job for over 50 years, claiming that his interpretation of the Bible is that a woman is prohibited from teaching men.
Lambert has been a church member for 54 years and a long time Sunday School teacher but got a letter dated Aug. 9 from LaBouf and the board saying that the Bible says a woman can perform any job, as long as its outside of the church.
LaBouf, who has been pastor at the church for about two years, and is also a member of the Watertown City Council, quotes the first epistle to Timothy which hold "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent".
Lambert received the letter signed by Kendra LaBouf, wife of the pastor. "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission" the letter said. "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became sinner".
The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, who also serves on the Watertown City Council, issued a statement saying his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a city leader in Watertown, where all five members of the council are men but the city manager who runs the city’s day-to-day operations is a woman.
Something I hadn’t heard about the recent Bin Laden rant, is that he wants the Danish cartoonists who drew Mohammad extradited…to al Qaeda. For a fair trial of course…
Al Qaeda’s leader focused much of his almost 52-minute message on what he continually referred to as “a Zionist-crusader war on Islam,” which he said was shown most explicitly by the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
Muslims consider it sacrilegious to produce a likeness of Mohammad, and the cartoons sparked violent protests throughout the Muslim world.
He said the cartoon controversy was “too serious for an apology” and was the most serious aspect of the alleged war against Islam.
Now, in a babbling rant that touched on “…what he called the slaughter of Muslims in places such as Palestine, Bosnia, Kashmir and Chechnya”, you’d think he’d rank that slaughter at least a tad higher then twelve cartoons of Mohammed. But…no. In the screaming mental chaos of the religious fanatic, bloodshed isn’t nearly as offensive as defiance.
He called for the extradition of those responsible for drawing and publishing the cartoons to be tried by al Qaeda, just as he said the United States and United Nations had demanded he be turned over after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“We demand that their governments hand them over to us to be judged by the law of Allah,” he said.
“This request is from the category of treating in kind, and we say to you, if you have not forgotten, let us remind you that when you announced Osama bin Laden was accused of striking at American interests, you issued a [U.N.] Security Council resolution which was passed unanimously declaring the extradition of Osama was mandatory despite no evidence being provided,” bin Laden said.
Al Qaeda has previously claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.
In kind. In kind. He really thinks that drawing cartoons of Mohammed is worse then killing Muslims. Perhaps he’d like a few more then. I’d certainly rather draw cartoons then kill anyone.
Damn…I’m going to be so happy when we finally have a president who wants to go after that bastard.
They’re remembering the death of pope John Paul this week, and in couple more it’ll be the ascendancy of pope Ratzinger. So since my weekly cartoon is late again (I did another sleep clinic at Hopkins which really mucked up my weekend…), I’ll try and bribe you with a re-run:
Calling same-sex unions “pseudo-matrimony” the pope said: “The various forms of the dissolution of matrimony today, like free unions, trial marriages and going up to pseudo-matrimonies by people of the same sex, are rather expressions of an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man.”
Although was his first public comment on same-sex marriage since becoming Pope, Benedict had long history of attacking same-sex unions.
As Cardinal Ratzinger he was the Vatican’s most outspoken opponent of gay marriage.
He was the author of the a 2003 Vatican directive to priests around the world calling for a proactive stand to stop governments from legalizing same-sex marriage and for a repeal of those those already on the books that give rights, including adoption, to gay couples. (story)
In just a year Ratzinger took John-Paul’s various assaults on the humanity of homosexual people, removed the paternalistic veneer from them, and turned it all into a relentless machine. And now worldwide, violence toward homosexuals is on the rise. Imagine that. You’d think the Catholic church would know better then to go down this path again…
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism”; between Christian Jew-hatred as a “necessary but insufficient” cause of the Holocaust; between the “sins of the children” and the sinlessness of the Church as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.
-James Carroll, “Constantine’s Sword”
…but hate takes away all reason. In another year people will be marveling at how Ratzinger managed to make the climate for gays and lesbians even worse then he already had. And that hostile climate will in turn, kill more innocent people.
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