“Homosexuals Can Change, Research Says.” This headline was typical of the overblown reporting of a talk given by psychiatrist Robert Spitzer at this year’s meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Spitzer’s own expressed cautions about the likely misuse of his presentation tended to get lost the mass media and much of the religious press.

“Not one of us doesn’t have someone close to us who is gay or lesbian.” These were the words of Republican elder statesman, former Senator Alan K. Simpson, as he addressed an inaugural breakfast honoring the Republican Unity Coalition, a new political group that includes many openly gay and lesbian Republicans.

Exodus “ex-gay” network board chairman John Paulk was caught drinking and socializing in “Mr. P’s,” a well-known gay bar in a heavily gay section of Washington, DC, on Tuesday night, September 19. Paulk, the manager of the homosexuality department of the Religious Right’s Focus on the Family, had been the cover boy for a 1998…

“Why not just let homosexuals `live and let live’?” This is the headline on a recent fund-raising letter from the recklessly antigay television preacher, D. James Kennedy of Fort Lauderdale.

“These results cannot be taken as evidence that homosexuals change their sexual orientation.” That’s the assessment of Mark Yarhouse, assistant professor in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at (Pat Robertson’s) Regent University. In his “Research Digest” review for Christian Counseling Today (Vol. 8,No. 2, 2000), he examines a follow-up study of 140 participants attempting…

Roy Clements, a leading British evangelical apologist and pastor of Eden Chapel in Cambridge since 1979, has resigned his various professional positions, separated from his wife, and has reportedly acknowledged his homosexuality and left for a “celibate relationship” with his research assistant, a young man who was also a member of his congregation.

Gay teen-agers are more than three times as likely to attempt suicide as other youth, according to a Massachusetts study reported this spring in The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. Young men are especially at risk. Robert Garofalo, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital at the Harvard Medical School and the lead researcher, noted that…

Max Lucado, 11-million best selling author and pastor of Oak Hills Church of Christ in San Antonio, was interviewed in a recent issue of Christianity Today. Asked how he’d assess the state of the evangelical movement today, Lucado replied: “We’re struggling to deal with some tough questions, like abortion.

The American Psychiatric Association, in December, issued its findings on psychiatric treatment and sexual orientation. The APA unequivocally concludes that efforts to “change” a homosexual orientation are based on the faulty assumptions that homosexuality is a mental disorder, that homosexuality should be changed, and that homosexuality can be changed.

The nation’s largest gay religious group and largest gay political group will co-sponsor what is predicted will be the largest gay civil rights event in history. It is to be staged in Washington, DC in the year 2000.