Bob Davies, director of the Exodus “ex-gay” network, sent out an appeal for money in September: “Our bank accounts are empty!” That was his bad news. His good news was about “the worldwide media exposure Exodus has received” as a result of the national “ex-gay” ad campaign this summer and all the publicity it generated (the covers of Newsweek, USA Today, National Examiner, etc.). Davies reports that the Exodus toll-free line got 3,900 calls as a result. He writes that “the gay community came unhinged by a simple picture of people who have been set free. … One pro-gay media release boldly declared, ‘I am here to say these “ex-gay” ministries don’t work.’ Never mind that the Exodus ad showed scores of people set free.” But were they? Davies fails to note what “ex-gay” Exodus board chairman John Paulk has to say in his new book, Not Afraid to Change, about his own experience of the day Exodus posed him and “a cheering throng of people — all of them ex-gay — with the bold headline: ‘Can homosexuals change? WE DID!”‘ Six lines later Paulk says it’s “hard to admit,” but we were “disappointed, I think, that our homosexual struggles were still so strong and frequent. Shouldn’t we have been at least half-way healed by now? And what about heterosexuality? That seemed distant, unattainable, like standing on the Pacific coastline and gazing out to sea, looking for a distant land that was somewhere across a vast ocean.”
A press release from Exodus, the “ex-gay” network, trumpets board chairman John Paulk’s new book, Not Afraid to Change. The headline reads: “New Biography Smashes the Myth That Gays Can’t Change.” (Actually, it’s an autobiography.) But the press release does not claim that Paulk’s homosexual orientation has been changed to heterosexual orientation — something that consumers on the Religious Right no doubt think or hope “change” means. The press release speaks in terms of Paulk’s “self-acceptance in his male identity.” It reports that he is now “a husband and father.” But being a husband or a father are roles that have been or are true — under non-“ex-gay” conditions — for some 20% of homosexually-oriented men, according to research summarized by psychiatrist Richard A. Isay of Cornell University Medical College. Writing in the July issue of The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Isay states: “Since marital sex for a homosexual man usually has procreation and not pleasure as a goal, it tends to decrease in frequency or to cease altogether after the birth of the first child.” He notes the motivations for homosexuals’ getting into gender-discordant marriages as having to do with “conventionality, social acceptance, and approval.”
“I have not seen orientation change.” That’s what bestselling evangelical author and Spatula Ministries founder Barbara Johnson said in response to journalist Bill Turpie’s question about “change” on the Odyssey channel’s recent special, “Windows of Hope, Closets of Fear.” Johnson is the author of such popular books as Where Does a Mother Go to Resign, Stick a Geranium in Your Hat and Be Happy, Splashes of Joy in the Cesspools of Life and Fresh Elastic for Stretched Out Moms. One of her sons is gay. She said that the change is in the parents of gay and lesbian offspring: the parents learn to love the children they were tempted to throw out after learning of their homosexuality. Johnson’s Spatula Ministries addresses the needs of such parents. She is a popular speaker and a frequent guest on James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio show.
Realizing he’d go to prison if he’d “just go blow that guy’s brains out that got [his gay son] into the homosexual lifestyle,” Glen Hysom tells readers of a Focus on the Family magazine, he’d considered blowing his own brains out and blowing his son’s brains out. “But I knew that would hurt all of us.” So instead, he recommends the “ex-gay” movement.
A poll of readers of The Advocate, the national gay/lesbian newsmagazine, asked: “Do you believe homosexuality can be ‘cured’?” The response of 96% was no. The rest were divided between those who were not sure (2%) and those who said yes (2%). The survey was conducted in September and was sponsored by Saab.
American church historian Martin E. Marty states that the fact that homosexuality has become “the hot issue” these days “has to do with niche marketing, trend-spotting and entrepreneurship.” He says he comes to this conclusion from observations by Ralph Reed, former head of Christian Coalition. Marty cites Reed’s analysis of ad executive Janet L. Folger’s involvement in directing D. James Kennedy’s Center for Reclaiming America for Christ campaign for the “ex-gay” movement. Says Reed: “Janet is an ideological entrepreneur, someone who tries to pick the hot new issues.” Marty observes that “there is little rallying power” left in the issue of abortion and notes, along with social scientists, that “even evangelical churches have by and large given up on holding the line against divorce — too many church people get divorced to make this work. They have also retreated on alcohol use and sabbath-breaking, since so many members take a little wine at dinner and many work or shop at the mall on Sunday. But antihomosexuality has energy: it’s a good new stock.” Marty made these remarks in his regular column in The Christian Century (September 23-30). Writing in the Los Angeles Times concerning the claim of antigay Christians that in their dealings with homosexuals they “hate the sin” but “love the sinner,” Marty replies: “loving the sinner begins with listening to him or her.”
“Don’t Crucify us with Hate.” That’s what the signs said at the rally outside D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in August. Kennedy told The Miami Herald that his effort on behalf of the “ex-gay” movement is “not about hate. It’s about hope.” A Christian woman among the marchers said, “I don’t dislike Dr. Kennedy. I don’t hate him. I just wish God would hurry up and enlighten him.” The domonstrators, numbering in the hundreds, were confronted by huge TV screens that had been set up by the church to play a short loop of “ex-gay” claims.
In a report on the “ex-gay” controversies, evangelical periodical Christianity Today quotes Tracey St. Pierre, a senior policy advocate at the pro-gay/lesbian Human Rights Campaign, as saying that she knows from 15 years of trying that “ex-gay” ministries do not work. “‘I prayed, I spoke to church counselors,’ she says. ‘I begged God to change me.”‘ She is still a lesbian and says: “I’ve never felt closer to God.”
Newsweek editors say they were not surprised when nearly 1,000 readers wrote in about the August 17 cover story on “ex-gays.” “Stories dealing with sexuality usually concern — and invite — controversy. …The surprise was the lack of controversy: readers almost uniformly viewed sexuality as innate, and excoriated those who ‘prey’ on troubled gays.” Wrote one: “What we really need are fewer ex-gays and more ex-bigots.”
“On the same day Americans learned … that Matthew Shepard, a 5-foot-2, 105-pound gay college student, had been tortured, strung up like an animal and left to die on a fence outside Laramie, Wyo., the Family Research Council was co-hosting a press conference … to demonize gay people.” This is how Frank Rich began his New York Times column on October 14. Noting the FRC’s “proud description of its readiness to ‘wage the war against the homosexual agenda,'” Rich argues that “if you wage a well-financed media air war in which people with an innate difference in sexual orientation are ceaselessly branded as sinful and diseased and un-American seekers of ‘special rights,’ ground war will follow. It’s a story as old as history. Once any group is successfully scapegoated as a subhuman threat to ‘normal’ values by a propaganda machine, emboldened thugs take over.”
Matthew Shepard’s cousin, Rev. Anne Kitch, spoke at his funeral on October 16. It was held in the packed St. Mark’s Episcopal Church of Casper, where this young victim of deadly homophobia had been baptized as a teen-ager and served as an acolyte. Kitch said that “Matt believed that if he had made one person’s life better, he had succeeded.” Her remarks were carried to an overflow of mourners outside the church, across the street in the Presbyterian church, and across town on radio. St. Mark’s pastor Royce W. Brown said: “There is an image that comes to mind when I reflect on Matt on that wooden cross rail fence” on which he was tortured and left to die. “I replace that image with that of another man hung upon a cross. When I concentrate on that man I can release the bitterness inside.” Meanwhile, a dozen antigay men and women led by a self-styled Baptist preacher from Kansas waved signs reading “GOD HATES FAGS” and “MATT IN HELL.” Mourners who stood outside the church shielded the Shepard family from the hecklers and sang “Amazing Grace.”
“The Lesson of Matthew Shepard” was the lead New York Times editorial on October 17. “His death at the tender age of 21 has brought home to the American public as nothing else ever has the menace and hatred that homosexuals still face in being honest in the United States,” according to the editorial. It goes on: “His murder has brought out enough sneers, jokes, caricatures and graffiti on college campuses across the land to make it clear that bias against homosexuals is not just an attitude among young toughs like the two high school dropouts who have been charged with the killing. In a society in which fundamentalist religious leaders and prominent Republican politicians insist on castigating homosexuals as a threat, that bias is everywhere.”
Following the murder of Matthew Shepard, the pastor of West-Park Presbyterian Church in New York City wrote a letter to The New York Times in which he said that “as much as I love sitting in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, I am disturbed by the level of antigay language used in harassing opposing players and other fans. What’s more disturbing is the way in which the rest of us tolerate it long after religious, racial and ethnic-based taunting has become unacceptable.” The minister, Robert Laird Brashear, continues: “In the last year, Methodist, Anglican and Presbyterian official denominational statements have reaffirmed centuries-old prejudices in doctrines and ecclesiology. Our denominations can’t protest such violence as long as our words give implicit support to the attitudes that inspire it.”
“Revolting as the death-by-torture” of Matthew Shepard was, Christopher Caldwell says “it’s hard to think of a group that should be more opposed to [hate crimes legislation] than gays.” Writing in The New York Press (Oct 21-27), this conservative commentator argues “as Hannah Arendt notes in her dazzling chapter on Proust in The Origins of Totalitarianism, such special consideration is always at risk of turning into its opposite. … Once you stop protecting people because they’re citizens and start protecting them for other reasons, you wind up with repellent moral reasoning.” Caldwell concludes: “The Matthew Shepards of the future will be far more secure if they’re protected not as one of them but as one of us.”
In his Newsweek column headlined “Trickle-Down Hater” Jonathan Alter notes that conservatives “like to say that ideas have consequences. Well,” he writes, “the consequences of condemnation can turn out to be death. … it’s hard to argue that there’s no connection between gay-bashing in Washington and gays actually getting their heads bashed in.” Alter insists that “just as white racists created a climate for lynching blacks, … so the constant degrading of homosexuals is exacting a toll in blood. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center,” as he points out, “21 people were killed in 1996 because they were gay or lesbian. That compares to 20 blacks reported lynched in 1935, and fewer than 10 a year in the 1950s and 1960s. Whatever the real numbers — and they are believed to be underreported -– violence against gays is a fact of life and a national disgrace.”
Richard Ostling, an evangelical editor at Time magazine, reports that James Dobson’s operatives have withdrawn support of P. M. Wynn, a Colorado talk- radio host who runs a community gospel fair. They were angered by her acceptance of a donation from openly-gay businessman and philanthropist Tim Gill. Says Wynn: “They did it to punish me.”
Hell Houses made their appearance at fundamentalist churches around the country again this Halloween. More than 350 churches have purchased $199 Hell House kits from Abundant Life Christian Center in Colorado. The Hell Houses feature graphic displays to scare young people to “turn to Christ”– for example, a tableaux of a young gay man in a casket, dead from AIDS. A new twist this year: a depiction of the President and Monica Lewinski embracing in the Oval Office.
The Ford Foundation has announced a $100,000 grant to the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, America’s oldest primarily gay/lesbian denomination and the largest of all gay/lesbian organizations. The grant is designated for the church’s programs for at-risk gay and lesbian youth.
The 150 African-American men’s voices of the First Baptist Church of Hamilton Park (Richardson), Texas join with the 200 voices of the gay men’s Turtle Creek Chorale of Dallas and the six women’s voices of New Arts Six to sing through a new 2-CD set of African spiritual and Gospel music called “United We Stand.” The recording may be ordered from The Other Side at (800)700-9280.
The first openly gay Episcopal rector in New York City was installed at St. Peter’s Church in October. Rev. K. Dennis Winslow, Jr. is the West 20th Street church’s ninth rector.
The world’s Anglican bishops cast an antigay vote, 526 to 70, declaring in August that what some called the “Western disease” of homosexuality is “incompatible with Scripture.” With the growing clout of African and Asian bishops, the once-a-decade gathering of bishops condemned same-sex unions and the ordination of homosexuals. However, the declaration is not binding on any Anglican communion including the Episcopal Church in this country. Plans for a presentation in which Christian gay men and lesbians were to have spoken for themselves were canceled. After the vote, Bishop Duncan Buchanan said he was “shocked and traumatized” by the antigay rage of other bishops. Bishop Richard Holloway said he felt “gutted, shafted and betrayed.” Bishop John Spong said that the Third World Anglicans who led the antigay movement have “moved out of animism into a very superstitious kind of Christianity. They’ve yet to face the intellectual revolution of Copernicus and Einstein that we’ve had to face … . That’s just not on their radar screen.” Spong went on to say that “I’m not going to cease to be a 20th-century person for fear of offending someone in the Third World.” He was promptly accused of racism and he later apologized for any “perceived insult to Africans.”
Author Bruce Bawer, a gay Episcopalian, commented on the bishops’ action saying that he used to be comforted by the “little blue-and-white sign” hanging outside Episcopal churches. It reads: “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You.” Bawer says “The signs now seem to me, frankly, something of a lie.”
The Apostle Paul’s disgust with Corinthian Christians’ bringing lawsuits against each other is his focus in I Corinthians 6:1-11: “How dare you take one another into court! When you think you have been wronged by other Christians, settle it among yourselves, not in the secular courts. … But instead, among you, brother goes to law against brother — and all this in front of unbelievers!” And yet there it was, on the front page of The Wall Street Journal (Oct 21): “Unholy Mess … a Nasty Lawsuit.” A real-estate investment concern created by a highly-respected elder in the Christian Reformed Church has filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code. The conservative denomination stands to lose $11 million (5% of its total assets), a church-affiliated estate-planning concern stands to lose $12 million, and many individual church members who invested could lose all their savings. The response of the 280,000-member church has been to ignore Paul’s teaching against lawsuits between Christians and to file a lawsuit against the firm’s principal partners — their own fellow Christians. The Apostle goes on: “The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? As it is, you are cheating each other of Christian love and forgiveness.” Indeed, according to the WSJ report, “some Christian Reformed members … think the church shouldn’t have filed its lawsuit.” An investor who stands to lose $500,000 is quoted as saying that the CRC is out to “crucify” the targets of the lawsuit: “Basically the church feels that if they could prove the principals 51% guilty, then that makes the [denominational] institutions only 49% stupid.”
Ironically, while the CRC blithely disregards Paul’s argument in this portion of his epistle, it latches on tenaciously to a much-disputed word in a vice list Paul adds — examples of what besides such lawsuits, bars participation in God’s kingdom (e.g., the greedy, revilers, thieves, idolaters). Though the controversial term, which Paul seems to have coined, is unknown today from ancient contemporary literature, the CRC is sure it means all homosexuals and so uses it as one of its key antigay “proof texts.”
Former Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., who died in August, had told students at New York University Law School in 1990 that he regretted his 1986 vote in a consensual homosexuality case, Bowers v. Hardwick. He said he should not have changed his mind at the last minute to join four other justices in ruling (5-to-4) that there was no constitutional protection for consensual sexual relations between people of the same gender. He said he later concluded that the dissent “had the better of the argument.”
The Right-wing Georgia state attorney general who defended Georgia’s 19th-century anti-sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, Michael Bowers, is now known to have been carrying on an adulterous affair for more than 10 years — including the time of the landmark antigay lawsuit. Adultery is also against the law in Georgia. Though Bowers now admits that his antigay activism was “hypocritical” in view of his acknowledged years of adultery, he says he “would do it again.” Five years after Bowers v. Hardwick, Bowers withdrew a job offer to a young lawyer in the attorney general’s office after he learned that she planned to have a solemn commitment ceremony with her same-sex partner.
“Corpus Christi,” gay playwright Terrence McNally’s play about a gay Christ-like, “king of the queers,” who’s boyfriend is a sneering Judas and who does a wedding for James and Bartholomew, was judged by Pat Buchanan (without his having seen the play) to be “nothing less than a hate crime of modernity directed against Christians, the moral equivalent of Nazis marching through Skokie.” Liberal promoters of the play had insisted that freedom of speech was at stake. When opening night finally came, playgoers were met by picketers, most of whom were denouncing the play, though some were defending it. The audience had to pass through metal detectors that the play’s defenders said had been set up for safety and the play’s detracters said had been set up for publicity. Later, New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote: “The excitement stops right after the metal detectors.” His Times colleague, Frank Rich, wrote that “The only bomb was on the stage. … [the play] was stupefyingly dull.” According to The Washington Post, the “embarrassing” play was “The Greatest Story Ever Ruined!” The Los Angeles Times called it simply “silly.” Jonathan Kalb of The New York Press wrote: “Nothing would please me more than to be able to launch a laudatory broadside about Corpus Christi at the ignorant and vicious homophobes who have protested outside Manhattan Theater Club. … Sadly, though, it turns out that this supposedly offensive play … largely mirrors the constricted and simplistic worldview of its attackers. … The sheer unimaginativeness of Corpus Christi is the true shocker. … I kept waiting … to see if [McNally] could write himself out of this hole of banalities. Needless to say, he wasn’t up to it.”
Same-gender marriage was defeated in the voting booth of Hawaii and Alaska on November 3. The antigay vote was cast by 58% of Hawaiian voters and by 68% of Alaskan voters. On the same day, 38% of South Carolinian voters voted to retain the states constitutional ban on interracial marriage.
AND FINALLY:
Bob Jones University has announced that gay alumni will be arrested for trespassing if they return to the campus in Greenville, South Carolina. Homosexuals are not the only objects of the Bob Jones wrath. Over the years Bob Jones, Sr., Bob Jones, Jr., and the school have stood uncompromisingly against everything from “tango teas” and women’s suffrage to racial integration and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. According to the late Bob Jones, Jr., Billy Graham “is doing more harm in the cause of Jesus Christ than any living man. … wreck[ing] evangelism and leav[ing] even orthodox churches, if they cooperate [in Graham’s ecumenical evangelism crusades], spineless and emasculated.” In 1956, Bob Jones, Sr. threatened to “ship” a Freshman for standing up for Graham. That student was Ralph Blair.