Rutherford Institute founder John Whitehead, has produced a radio spot entitled “Gays Have Rights, Too.” The Rutherford Institute, a legal organization of the Religious Right, had long been active in attacking the “radical homosexual agenda.” But Whitehead now supports the U. S. Supreme Court ruling against Colorado’s antigay Amendment 2 and is now defending some gay clients as well as people who have been discriminated against because of AIDS. Says Whitehead: “I’ve changed a lot in recent years.” This change has not gone over well with other conservatives. Alexis Crow, Rutherford’s general counsel, says: “We’re getting some flak from the supposed pro-family organizations.”
Focus on the Family co-founder Gil Alexander-Moegerle has written a 300-page book called James Dobson’s War on America. It’s an inside, behind-the-scenes look at Dobson’s $100-million (annual budget) organization that sends Dobson’s daily radio show to over 5-million listeners. According to The Christian Booksellers Association: “books such as this, though painful, are perhaps necessary.” Alexander-Moegerle served on the Focus board of directors, was editor of the corporation’s magazine, and was co-host of the radio show. He paints Dobson as a marketing genius but a self-righteous bully. With chapter titles such as “Racism,” “Sexism,” “Abuse of Power,” and “Misuse of Funds” there’s not much here for Dobson’s fans to be happy about — except, perhaps, the chapter entitled “Homophobia.” But here, Alexander-Moegerle focuses on a “simulate[d] … interview with a person of Dobson’s persuasion” rather than on much documented evidence of Dobson’s own antipathy toward homosexuals. He admits that he himself “became friends for the first time with a gay person” only “about a year” before writing this book. He says he considers that “odd and regrettable.” In recent meetings across the country, Alexander-Moegerle has apologized to lesbian and gay Americans who are “demeaned and dehumanized on a regular basis by the false, irresponsible, and inflammatory rhetoric of James Dobson’s antigay radio and print materials. … When we began Focus, in 1977, the seven founders had only two objectives: (1) to help Americans raise their children, and (2) to help us maintain our marriages.” Following his speaking engagement at a congregation of gay and lesbian evangelical Christians in Texas, Alexander-Moegerle wrote: “We thank God on every remembrance of you: for your joy in the Lord. … We hope Sunday will not be the last opportunity to fellowship with you because of the great gift of joy you gave to us.”
Focus on the Family reacted angrily to a Christian Century review of Gil Alexander-Moegerle’s book, James Dobson’s War on America. In a letter to the Century, Focus vice president Paul Hetrick states: “Alexander-Moegerle had nothing to do with the founding of the ministry of Focus on the Family. …Before swallowing Alexander-Moegerle’s desperate propaganda, Simpson [the reviewer] might have tried to get our view, but no such contact was attempted.” Timothy Simpson replies: “I did contact Paul Hetrick and I have the letters he sent me, plus the phone records and my notes from our conversation as proof. I have no idea what would make him suggest otherwise. As to Alexander-Moegerle’s status as a cofounder of Focus on the Family, current board member Mike Roberts, who himself was a member of the original board of directors, but who is inexplicably left off of Hetrick’s list of founding directors, confirmed to me that Alexander-Moegerle was at the very first meeting that he attended and that Alexander-Moegerle was in fact on the original board.” Simpson goes on: “Furthermore, of the original board, only Alexander-Moegerle lived in Wheaton, Illinois, which was the organization’s mailing address. It was here that Focus’s mail was opened (by Alexander-Moegerle’s first wife, Ruth), where funds were deposited (in an account opened for Focus by Alexander-Moegerle), where the organization’s materials were produced (Alexander-Moegerle being the only board member with any experience in running a media-based Christian ministry), and where the materials were stored (in Alexander-Moegerle’s garage). These facts were confirmed for me by David Mains of the Domain Agency, Alexander-Moegerle’s employer until 1980, at which time he also left Focus’s board to become its senior vice-president, a fact also confirmed by Mike Roberts.”
A group called Council for National Policy “meets four times a year at posh resorts around the country, allowing socially conservative grass-roots organizers to hobnob with the rich-but-not-particularly-famous business people who finance the movement.” This is according to World magazine, a publication of the Religious Right. World calls CNP “decidedly right-wing.” James Dobson of Focus on the Family “declared war on the Republican Party” at a recent CNP meeting in Phoenix. He attacked Republicans –including Jesse Helms — for a variety of offenses. Among them: confirming Ruth Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, failing to pass school prayer laws, increasing condom distribution, and funding the National Endowment for the Arts and Planned Parenthood abroad. Dobson declared that if this remains the way the Republican Party repays conservative Christians like himself and his audience, “I’m gone. And if I go, … I will do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible.” World reports that his audience “surged to its feet, whistling and whooping.” However, Ralph Reed, former executive director of Christian Coalition, says: “We can stop the Republicans from winning,” but, he warns: “they can also stop us from winning. We need to de-emphasize the divisions, to be team players, not kamikaze pilots.” Still, the controversy continues. The New York Times quotes Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, as saying: “The go-along, get-along strategy is dead. No more engagement. We want a wedding ring, we want a ceremony, we want a consummation of the marriage.”
The Exodus “ex-gay” movement’s vice-chair, John Paulk, has been hired by Focus on the Family to represent Focus on matters of homosexuality. Exodus head Bob Davies says: “I am very excited about this new link between Exodus and Focus on the Family.” Says Paulk: “The Exodus network will be positively impacted by my new role.” Though the “ex-gay” claims of “freedom” have been show repeatedly to leave much to be desired and though the history of the “ex-gay” movement is strewn with failures, the promise is still attractive to the Religious Right.
“They are hearing about Exodus while reading their Bibles.” But it’s not the exodus from Egypt that’s in view here. In Zondervan’s new YouthWalk Devotional Bible, it’s the Exodus “ex-gay” organization that is “promoted in the section on homosexuality as the place for teens to go for information if they are struggling with this issue,” according to Exodus’ newsletter. Exodus head Bob Davies is thrilled: “It’s so exciting to give teens hope that there is a way out.”
Elizabeth Moberly has left the “ex-gay” movement. In a March 4 fundraising letter she says that her “change of ministry has also resulted in the loss of most of my supporters.” Her attention now will be to “prayer for world evangelization,” “an informal ministry of listening and encouragement,” “alternative” approaches to cancer issues, and “critiquing Darwinism.”
Christian Coalition has severed ties with subsidiaries aimed at reaching blacks, the poor and disadvantaged, and Roman Catholics. A drop in contributions — off 36 percent to $17-million in 1997 — is said to account for these cut-backs. The Coalition has laid off staff. Christianity Today reports that Christian Coalition’s former top financial officer received a suspended sentence in January after confessing to embezzling over $40,000.
“Among the children of our church families are some who will grow up to have a homosexual orientation. They are there. If we don’t see them, they may have begun already to hide from us and swallow the bitter pill of self-hatred. When we rail against homosexuality, we hurt these children deeply and convince them God has no love for them.” So writes pastor Jack Branford in the “Platform” column of the February issue of The Church Herald, the monthly magazine of The Reformed Church in America. Branford is the minister of a Spring Valley (NY) congregation. He says he’s convinced that what Christians see of the behavior of some East and West Coast gay people inflames much of the antigay rhetoric. “I suggest that we leave these people to God. If they do not enter the kingdom of heaven, it will be for a multitude of reasons. Instead, let’s focus on our children.” Arguing that “the Bible does not speak clearly about homosexuality,” and that “our children cannot change their sexual orientation for us,” Branford asserts that “Every time we use our pulpits to harshly condemn homosexuality, we cut out the hearts of some of our children and sacrifice them on the altar of the ancient tribal god.” He concludes: “Our energy can be better spent raising our gay children to have love for themselves, live in a monogamous conventional relationship, and honor Christ each and every day.” In the two months following, most of the letters to the editor, reacting to the essay, have been hostile and have evidenced an ignorance of homosexuality. The letters have been framed in poses of “love for the sinner.”
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has rejected efforts to overturn a year-old church law that effectively bars ordination of lesbians and gay men. The balloting by the denomination’s 173 regional bodies showed a 2-to-1 ratio against gay/lesbian ministers.
An openly gay Episcopalian might become the church’s next bishop of Newark, New Jersey. Gene Robinson, a top official of the Diocese of New Hampshire, is openly gay and one of five nominees for Newark. Robinson and the other four were selected from a field of 70.
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has fired a librarian who had served for 35 years. Paul Debusman lost his job after writing to the fundamentalist president of the Southern Baptist Convention, calling his attention to inaccuracies in a chapel address in which he’d attacked the previous and more moderate administrations of the school. Debusman was already in disfavor with the present fundamentalist administration. He had recently responded to a journalist’s question as to what Baptists had to say to homosexuals other than that Baptist “hate them.” Debusman replied: “I think we are all sinners. I am not so much impressed with the sinfulness of any one group as I am with the sinfulness of all of us.”
A Southern Baptist church in Austin, Texas has been “tacitly disfellowshipped” in the words of a vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention. The reason? The local congregation ordained a gay member as deacon and announced an outreach program to gay people. In the 1940s, this same church was ostracized for welcoming blacks.
Father Andrew Greeley, the Roman Catholic priest, novelist, and University of Chicago sociologist, has written a New York Times review of an indefinately-postponed episode of ABC-TV’s “Nothing Sacred” in which a gay priest reveals he’s HIV-positive. Greeley calls it “the best story about the Roman Catholic priesthood since Graham Greene’s classic 1940 novel ‘The Power and the Glory.'” Acknowledging the opposition to “Nothing Sacred” that’s coming from “the ultraconservative Catholic League,” Greeley nonetheless assesses that “the decision to suppress the episode is based … on a curious kind of anti-Catholicism, the conviction (widespread in the upper news media and academia) that Catholics are really unsophisticated and indeed unthinking peasants or ‘hard hats’ who would react in shocked horror to the suggestion that a priest might have AIDS.” He sees the story as one that’s “about forgiveness and new beginnings” and says that it “is the best advertisement for the priesthood that has come along in many, many years.” To Greeley, any “opposition to the show ought to come from ‘professional’ anti-Catholics … [rather than] from ‘professional’ Catholics like William Donahue of the Catholic League, an organization that,” Greeley points out, “is not affiliated with the Catholic Church.”
AND FINALLY:
University of Chicago historian Martin E. Marty, observing the fact that “many contemporary academics write obscurely about clear things,” cites an example from “Erotic Autonomy,” an essay by a gender studies teacher whose failure to gain tenure at The New School in New York City prompted a hunger strike by some of her student fans. Discussing “heteropatriarchy” in the Bahamas, M. Jacqui Alexander asserts: “The paradoxical counterpart of erasure in the con solidation of hegemonic heterosexuality is spectacularization. State managers relied heavily on biblical testimony in order to fix this specter, using reiteration and almost incessant invocation to God and Sodom.”