{"id":1214,"date":"2008-03-06T09:28:13","date_gmt":"2008-03-06T14:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1214"},"modified":"2008-03-06T09:32:40","modified_gmt":"2008-03-06T14:32:40","slug":"weve-decided-after-much-prayer-to-stop-calling-them-stripes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1214","title":{"rendered":"We&#8217;ve Decided, After Much Prayer, To Stop Calling Them Stripes&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Behold, Exodus International&#8217;s ministry to persons afflicted with Same Sex Attractions&#8230;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"320\" height=\"257\" alt=\" \" src=\"\/images\/exodus_hate_crime_billboard.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">&#8230;or <em>Was<\/em> at least, if you take their word for it.&nbsp; You know you can take them at their word don&#8217;t you&#8230;?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>In August, 2007 after a lot of prayer, deliberation and listening to friends and critics alike &mdash; but mostly the Lord &mdash; we decided to back out of policy issues and our Director of Government Affairs took a position with another organization.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.exgaywatch.com\/wp\/2008\/03\/exodus-leaving-politics-says-president-alan-chambers\/\">Alan Chambers, President of Exodus International to Ex-Gay Watch<\/a>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Jim Burroway has more <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boxturtlebulletin.com\/2008\/03\/05\/1581\">Here<\/a>. &nbsp; Peterson Toscano notes the shift in Exodus policy in his blog post <em><a href=\"http:\/\/a_musing.blogspot.com\/2008\/03\/lovely-shifts-and-dramatic-changes.html\">Lovely Shifts And Dramatic Changes<\/a><\/em>.&nbsp; Allow me to be the grouch here.&nbsp; Take another look at that anti-hate crime laws poster.&nbsp; It&#8217;s a damn lie.&nbsp; And they knew it was a damn lie while they were creating it.&nbsp; And in that, it is eminently typical of the quality of Exodus International&#8217;s relationship to honesty with regard to&#8230;well&#8230;goddamn near everything.&nbsp; Homosexuals&#8230; homosexuality&#8230; Teh Gay Lifestyle&#8230;&nbsp; ex-gay therapy&#8230;&nbsp; They have lied in the past.&nbsp; Brazenly.&nbsp; Ingeniously.&nbsp; Unashamedly.&nbsp; Unhesitatingly.&nbsp; But we can trust them now, can&#8217;t we?<\/p>\n<p>Um&#8230;.no.&nbsp; Let&#8217;s look at what&#8217;s being said here.&nbsp; Really look&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It may sound nuanced but we weren&rsquo;t really involved in &ldquo;politics.&rdquo; We never worked for the direct election or defeat of a candidate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>No Alan&#8230;that doesn&#8217;t sound &#8216;nuanced&#8217;.&nbsp; It sounds duplicitous. &nbsp; Never mind that lobbying politicians and voters on policy issues is politics too, observe the telltale adjective&#8230;the <em>Direct<\/em> election or defeat of a candidate?&nbsp; I&#8217;m laughing in your face Alan.&nbsp; Exodus has always been a republican tool in election campaigns.&nbsp; Why have so many of Exodus&#8217; &quot;Change Is Possible&quot; billboard campaigns been waged in swing states, with relatively small gay populations?&nbsp; You know goddamned well why.&nbsp; The republican candidate bashes the democrat over their stand on gay rights issues.&nbsp; You folks come along and tell the voters that homosexuals don&#8217;t have to be homosexual if they don&#8217;t want to anyway, thereby allowing the republican gay basher to blame gays for their own persecution, and the voters to tell themselves that by voting against gay rights they&#8217;re not hurting anyone, because the gays can always stop being gay when they&#8217;ve had enough.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The primary function of Exodus has <em>always<\/em> been to make political gay bashing palatable to voters.&nbsp; I mean&#8230;look&#8230;you don&#8217;t actually <em>Change<\/em> very many homosexuals do you?&nbsp; If I ran a corporation whose main product failed miserably so often I&#8217;d have gone out of business long ago.&nbsp; <em>But Change isn&#8217;t your product.<\/em>&nbsp; Animus toward homosexuals is your product.&nbsp; And by that measure, you&#8217;re still worth the money the religious right spends on you, if not quite as much as before.\n<\/p>\n<p>Ever since John Smid had that brilliant idea of dragging gay teenagers into ex-gay therapy against their will, you folks have had to endure a lot more critical scrutiny then before, and one fall out of that is that people are starting to notice all the political activism you&#8217;re doing tends to contradict your ersatz message of love.&nbsp; You&#8217;re more effective for the anti-gay right when people really believe that all you&#8217;re trying to do is help all those poor victims of Same Sex Attraction Disorder who hate themselves because&#8230;well&#8230;because of all the goddamned lies your kind likes to spread about them.&nbsp; Hence, the costume change.&nbsp; And notice how it went from &quot;We are not a political organization&quot; to &quot;We are not a political organization <em>Anymore<\/em>.&quot;&nbsp; Nice.&nbsp; But&#8230;yes&#8230;you are&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>One area that we found to be incredibly beneficial was simply sharing our stories with lawmakers. If and when there are opportunities to do that we will.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The word for that is <em>Lobbying<\/em> Alan.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>I know&#8230;I know&#8230;it&#8217;s So Hard to remember what words really mean after spending so many years as a mindless cog a lie factory&#8230;isn&#8217;t it.&nbsp; But they Do mean things, existence exists, reality is real, and when all is said and done that&#8217;s the enemy you&#8217;ve been fighting all your life right there, not teh gay, not teh liberal, not teh secular.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Behold, Exodus International&#8217;s ministry to persons afflicted with Same Sex Attractions&#8230; &#8230;or Was at least, if you take their word for it.&nbsp; You know you can take them at their word don&#8217;t you&#8230;? In August, 2007 after a lot of prayer, deliberation and listening to friends and critics alike &mdash; but mostly the Lord &mdash; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[30,46,60,6],"class_list":["post-1214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-uncategorized","tag-ex-gays","tag-the-kultar-kampf","tag-the-noise-machine","tag-the-right-wing-mindset"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}