(PDF version available here.)
2021’s EC Fall Festival texts will be posted on EC’s website in October. Titles of Ralph Blair’s 3 lectures: You’re Never Alone at Thanksgiving! Pilgrims Enlighten the Dawn Lands Maturity in the 21st Year of the 21st Century?
The Supreme Court declined to hear a case of a Christian florist who declined to make a custom floral arrangement for a same-sex wedding. Reacting to the Court’s choice, an Alliance Defending Freedom attorney complained: “A government that can crush someone like [this florist] can use its power to crush any of us regardless of our political ideology or views on important issues like marriage.”
But, whether a florist, a baker or a candlestick maker, how much does one really know about the moral lives of those who come seeking professional services? All biblically-based Christians should be mindful of what Jesus said about always showing kindness via the Golden Rule (Matt 7:12) and by going the extra mile, even for a pagan centurion in service to the oppressively Roman state. (Matt 5:41)
A significant Christian testimony could be conveyed by following Jesus’ teachings and providing service for someone as a sign of kindness, especially if it’s realized that this provider is doing so as a friendly gesture of goodwill, in spite of, perhaps, a deeply-held difference of opinion on sex, and especially if the request was a trap, as some requests have been, to make trouble for a Christian baker, florist or other service provider.
By refusing to do the job, this poorly discipled Christian, unintentionally, reinforced a stereotype that Christians are bigots. Now she’s forced to pay a $1,000 fine and yet do floral arrangements for same-sex weddings or stop doing wedding flowers altogether.
The LGBTQ+ community’s worldwide Reconciling Pentecostals International Revival, “Reclaim! Renew! Revive!” will be held in Nashville at Mt. Pisgah Fellowship Church on September 25th. RPI’s 21st Anniversary and General Conference will be held in Phoenix, Arizona in November at the Kingdom Gate Pentecostal Church.
Video of a 12-year-old gay Georgia boy being berated and beaten by his family went viral this summer. They’d shaved the word “gay” into his hair and were calling him a “gay ass bitch”. accusing him of “doing gay shit.” His mother uploaded this video to Instagram Live. Viewers were so shocked they alerted Atlanta police who were able to locate and identify the boy. He was placed in Georgia’s protective services.
Devin Barrington-Ward, a local activist with Black Futurists Group and candidate for city council, said, “My heart was broken because I saw a piece of myself in that video.
As a Black queer man, I have experienced some of the same homophobia and some of the same abuse by the hands of people that I loved as a child.” And Atlanta Black Pride President Terence Stewart said, “So often in the Black community, we’re not given the tools that are needed to identify or understand. There is no doubt from this video that this is not the first time this child has gone through this.”
Gay City News reported that police apprehended Lorkeyla Jamia Spenser, Brittney Monique Mills, and Jordan Jarrode Richards-Nwankwo in connection to this abusive incident. They were all charged with cruelty to a child and were placed in custody at the Fulton County Jail in Georgia. Richards-Nwankwo was also arrested for battery and, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was released after posting $50,000 bond.
LeeQuan McLaurin had enrolled at Liberty University with distracting same-sex feelings. So, he joined LU’s “Armor Bearers”, an “ex-gay” strugglers group. The guys were told to “hope for that heteronormative existence” that God would give. “We talked about the goal being holiness, and that one day you can have a wife”, McLaurin recalls.
Then, he met his college boyfriend at “Armor Bearers”! He says that the group served many as a “hookup group.” Finally, he rejected the “ex-gay” line. He later served as Liberty University’s Director of Diversity Retention. He observes that, although the school opposes same-sex relations, the students themselves created an LGBTQ community. He says: “They thrive in a place that does not want them to thrive”.
Around 700,000 adults in America, mostly individuals with same-sex attraction, have been put through so-called “therapies”, variously labeled as “ex-gay”, “reparative” or “conversion therapies”, to rid themselves of their homosexual orientation. All end without any success toward that “ex-gay” goal. Many of them committed suicide. Most of the others have accepted their homosexuality, but they were so disappointed and traumatized by antigay church leaders for putting them through the counterproductive ordeals that they want nothing more to do with their religious oppressors who’ve been in denial for decades, refusing to recognize the overwhelming evidence that clearly indicates that nobody’s same-sex orientation was ever chosen or was ever changed.
“Our kids deserve to grow up in a state that values them for who they are—not one that tries to change them,” said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. He has issued an Executive Order that “aims to protect young and vulnerable Minnesotans from the cruel and discredited practice of conversion therapy and affirms that the LGBTQ+ community is an integral part of One Minnesota. This is not the end of our work to see this practice become a thing of the past. We will continue to fight for love over hate every single day.”
So far, such discredited “therapy” has been banned in 20 states and D.C.
Dr. Patricia Gentile, an Ohio psychiatric medical director, says so-called “conversion therapy” for gay youths “is dangerous and damaging”. She says, “We really need to be focusing on helping them to feel less isolated and less alone, and just being allowed to live in their body with their sense of who they are and not try to question them on their reality.” Ohio legislators have introduced multiple bills to protect such kids, 18 and younger, from the practice, but these bills haven’t gained traction in the Buckeye state’s House or Senate.
The co-directors of a Jewish “ex-gay” therapy called JONAH must pay $3.5 million to lawyers for a group of former “patients” for violating New Jersey’s consumer fraud law and a court injunction requiring them to desist from their services. This was the ruling of a three-judge panel of the state’s Appellate Division this July 6th. The original lawsuit was filed back in 2012.
Nigerian televangelist TB Joshua slaps “the spirit of woman” out of lesbians and cuts off a young gay man’s dreadlocks as he slaps the homosexuality out of him during “healing’ meetings in his megachurch, The Synagogue Church of All Nations, in Lagos. TB Joshua was once listed as the 3rd-richest preacher in Nigeria at between $10 and $15 million.
“Homosexuality is un-African!” This is a very common claim in Africa. It’s said there: “It’s Western”. Inclusive and Affirming Ministries in Africa (IAM) is an organization that aims to address this homophobic prejudice. According to its staff, “It’s slow and difficult work, and each meeting has to be carefully assessed to ensure the safety of IAM staff, who never work alone.” As Open Democracy reports, “IAM tries to counter prejudice by working with faith-based organizations to challenge their bias, and with African LGBTIQ organizations to help them to engage with religious organizations.”
Cru staff members are concerned that a woke “victim-oppressor worldview” has emerged within this organization that used to be called Campus Crusade for Christ, founded in 1951. They fear that this intrusion is distracting from Cru’s call to real gospel ministry. In its drive for “diversity”, the Cru staff has “inadvertently adopted a system of unbiblical ideas that have led us to disunity,” according to such staff concerns. “These concepts have created distrust, discouragement, and a host of other problems.” An anonymous staffer (referenced as, Minority Staff #30, said that this trend in Cru and the church at large, represents, “a brand-new religion of systemic racism, white privilege, and systems of power” that “labels all of Christian theology, a racist oppressive ideology of whiteness.”
“Queer in the Country” is a sociologist’s report in The Conversation (March 2, 2021). Christopher T. Conner at the University of Missouri has been doing interviews, since 2015, with gay folks living in rural America. Demographers estimate that 15% to 20% of the total US LGBTQ population – between 2.9 million and 3.8 million people – live in rural areas. They’ve rejected urban gay culture as being shallow and too focused on “gayness” as their “defining” feature of life. His and similar findings of other researchers may put a different light on “gay life” than what’s held by both LGBTQ+ folks and by the heterosexual public.
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of Ralph Blair’s founding of The Homosexual Community Counseling Center in New York City.
It was started with a bank account of $1,000 (equivalent to some $6,700 in 2021) and was headquartered at 175 Adams Street by the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn Heights.
HCCC was a listing service of homosexuals and heterosexuals, professionally-trained psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers, and peer counselors under professional supervision. It was a private organization supported by donations. HCCC associates viewed homosexual orientation as a naturally experienced direction of the sex drive of some people, and not as a sickness or a sin that needed to be changed, as was the common view of many in those days. Blair had researched and critiqued the etiological and treatment of homosexuality for his doctoral dissertation.
Services to which the HCCC referred New Yorkers included professional individual and group counseling and psychotherapy, family therapy, marital and relationship counseling, guidance for parents of same-sex oriented sons and daughters, psychological testing and consultation, pastoral counseling, and peer support.
HCCC had membership in the International Association of Counseling Services and the American Association of Sex Educators and Counselors and was an institutional associate of SIECUS, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States.
Before the incorporation of the Homosexual Community Counseling Center, no entity had ever been incorporated in New York State that included, in its name, the word, “homosexual”, which we chose to signal a more serious, clinically substantial purpose than the newer term, “gay”, associated with “gay bars”, “gay baths” and “gay agendas”. “Counseling” was chosen to avoid pathological connotations of “psychiatric”, etc.
As Founder and Director of HCCC, Inc., Blair set up a Board of Directors that included psychoanalyst Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (president), Canon Walter D. Dennis of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, psychiatrist Richard Robertiello, Fr. Herbert Rogers of Fordham University, and psychotherapists Susanne P. Schad-Somers, Elizabeth Stirling Cole and Scott Hatley. Psychologist Barbara E. Sang chaired the HCCC Executive Committee, consisting of endocrinologist/psychiatrist Charles L. Ihlenfeld, psychologists Phyllis Stevens and Glen Boles, and psychiatrist Jochanan M. Weisenfreund, along with lay members.
HCCC’s Advisory Board included: Gregory Battcock, Barbette Blackington, David Brudnoy, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Barry Farber, Barbara Gittings, Leo Goldman, Martin Hoffman, Evelyn Hooker, Virginia E. Johnson, Raymond R. Killinger, Phyllis Lyon, Jeanne Manford, Kate Millett, Merle Miller, Jean Munzer, Troy D. Perry, Richard C. Pillard, Wardell B. Pomeroy, John Porter, Craig Rodwell, Robert Seidenberg, Robert Veit Sherwin, Zelda Suplee and Ernest van den Haag. Legal counsel was John Somers.
Endorsements for the HCCC came from New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch who said: “It is clear that a counseling service such as HCCC can make more people conscious of the need to end discrimination against homosexuals, as well as make homosexuals unashamed of their sexual preference.” Eleanor Holmes Norton, Chair of The New York City Commission on Human Rights, said: “I am glad to see the development through the Homosexual Community Counseling Center of a vital service to a minority community in our city which is perhaps most ignored and lacking in the basic social services available more effectively to others.” Psychologist and bestselling author George Weinberg, who coined the term, “homophobia”, and attended the very first planning meeting for HCCC, said: “The HCCC is a wonderful opportunity for gay people who want therapy without being victimized.” Eda J. Leshan, psychotherapist, TV host and bestselling author of How Do Your Children Grow, said: “HCCC is helping parents to say, without feeling overwhelming panic and guilt, ‘Be a homosexual if you prefer, but be the best person who is a homosexual that you can possibly be’.” Abigail Van Buren, syndicated columnist of Dear Abby, advised gay folks in her column: “Write to the Homosexual Community Counseling Center. Good luck and God bless.”
From 1974 into 1976, HCCC published a quarterly, The Homosexual Counseling Journal. Due to lack of quality articles submitted for publication, HCJ was suspended.
Over the years, as it became easier for folks to find supportive professional therapists who well understood our clients’ needs, HCCC disbanded, its mission accomplished.
1710 N. Crilly Court in Chicago is where, in 1923, America’s very first gay rights organization was founded as, “The Society for Human Rights”. In the 1920s, this building was a boarding house where two of the group’s founders, Henry Gerber and Henry Teacutter, rented rooms. A black preacher, John T. Graves, was the group’s president. Specifics had to be left out of their application for non-profit status, so here’s what they wrote about their purpose on their application: “To promote and to protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness.” They were given their incorporation on Christmas Eve 1924. With six regular attenders, “poor people [who] were illiterate and penniless”, as Gerber described them, they held meetings and published two issues of a newsletter, Friendship and Freedom, aimed at revising Illinois’ sodomy law.
But in July, 1925, in the middle of the night, and based on a social worker’s report of complaints made by the wife of an SHR member, whose marriage was unknown to Gerber and the other men, Chicago police led raids against all of the members, without search warrants, while trailed by a newspaper reporter. After three trials, the case was dropped due to malpractice on the part of authorities. But Gerber lost his Post Office job. Financially depleted, he moved to New York City and he re-joined the Army as a proofreader and editor. He’d later write for homophile publications and spent his last decades in Veterans Homes. He died on New Year’s Eve, 1972, and his remains are buried in the US Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home National Cemetery.
It was on April 5, 1972, that Walter C. Alvarez, Professor Emeritus at The Mayo Clinic, “America’s Family Doctor” and nationally syndicated columnist of “Medically Speaking”, featured the HCCC in announcing that, “New York Counsels Homosexuals”. Alvarez wrote “I am much cheered by a note that I saw recently in the journal, Siecus [Sex Information & Education Council of the U.S.] that a non-profit health service for homosexuals and their families opened in New York City last October. This Homosexual Community Counseling Center maintains a staff of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and pastoral counselors. The director of the center is Dr. Ralph Blair. Although the great Sigmund Freud said he had no hope of ridding a decided homosexual of all his homosexual tendencies, today many able psychiatrists maintain that they can help a homosexual by helping him to accept himself and to cope with the loneliness, unkindness and injustice handed out by employers and others, perhaps even by his own family.”
Alvarez continued, “Fortunately, our people are becoming much more understanding of the homosexual, much less hostile to him, much more willing to learn about him. The laws in some states against homosexuals have been abrogated or softened, so that now what two people do in their apartment is no one’s business except theirs. The telephone number of the Homosexual Community Counseling Center is Area Code 212-834-1159.”
Perhaps Gerber read this column 8 months before he died and realized, once again, how much better things were for folks like him than they were in 1925. The HCCC founder’s father, James P. Blair, an avid reader of every Dr. Alvarez column, no doubt saw this installment in The Youngstown Vindicator. But he never said that he saw it.
And we’re now just 2 years away from the centennial of the founding of Gerber’s 1923 effort for gay rights, launched in that building on Chicago’s Crilly Court, now a private home. The homeowners know of, and are pleased about, its historic significance.
Notable LGBT conservatives today include: Dave Rubin, Deroy Murdock, Douglas Murray, Andy Gno, Andrew Sullivan, Guy Benson, Tammy Bruce, Mary Cheney, Pim Fortuyn, Caitlyn Jenner, Brandon Straka, Alice Weidel, Blaire White, Lucian Wintrich, Gregory T. Angelo, Chris Barron, Bruce Bawer, John Corvino, Jose Cunningham, Tony Fabrizio, Richard Grenell, Rachel Hoff, Michael Huffington, Chrys Kefalas, Jim Kolbe, Kathryn Lehman, Sarah Longwell, Ken Mehlman, Chadwick Moore, Rich Tafel, Peter Thiel, Robert Traynham, Robert Turner II, et al. Those who aren’t familiar with these folks aren’t getting the fuller picture and are missing lots of wisdom. Check them out.
Shirley Hoogstra, president of the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, told The Washington Post that, “I have come to see that LGBTQ people should have the same ease of movement about their lives. They shouldn’t run into unexpected, dignity-dismissing episodes.”
A Canadian Judge rules that the Ministry of Labour denied Redeemer University procedural fairness. This Christian Reformed Church institution in Ottawa was denied assistance due to its restrictions on homosexuality.
The school has since launched, among other adjustments, the “Respectful Campus Initiative” aimed at, “Listening to people from equity-seeking communities through anonymous surveys and discussion groups” and by “assessing classroom culture to ensure students can be honest and inquisitive without fear or recrimination.”
Are LGBTQ+ students worse off at Christian colleges? Gene Schaerr and Nicholas Miller are attorneys, Schaerr, teaches at Brigham Young University’s Law School and Miller, teaches church history at the SDA’s Andrews University in Michigan. They assess studies at secular and religious colleges, and find that, at religious schools, “four in ten sexual or gender minority students” are “uncomfortable with their sexual identity on campus”. Another study finds that five in ten queer-spectrum students and seven in ten trans-spectrum students don’t think they’re “respected” on their secular campuses.
They found that other surveys find that some 64% of “sexual minority students” report isolation and loneliness at religious colleges, about 18% more than “straight” students on these campuses. But in another study, just over 79% of queer-spectrum students on public campuses report feeling very lonely in the past year. That’s 20% more than their straight peers on their own campuses, and 15% more than their sexual minority peers on religious campuses. The reported numbers for depression and suicidal thoughts among sexual minority student are almost identical in the two settings. At Christian colleges, 60% of “sexual minority students” reported depression and 20% had suicidal thoughts. At secular colleges, about 60% reported depression and 23.5% had suicidal thoughts.
InterVarsity Graduate Christian Fellowship at the University of Iowa receives yet another Federal Court victory after the school punished this Christian group for not permitting an openly gay student to hold a leadership role. It came down to being a First Amendment matter. IVGCF’s policies forbid someone from being a leader if they openly support homosexuality and gay marriage.
In 1965, when EC founder Ralph Blair was on the InterVarsity staff at the University of Pennsylvania and was speaking at Yale Christian Fellowship and endorsed support for gays, someone reported him to IVCF headquarters and he was not reappointed for the following year. He then served on the Religious Affairs Staff at Penn State and stayed to do his doctoral research and critique of the etiology and treatment of homosexuality.
Reared by Jehovah Witnesses, he’s been disowned by his family for being gay. Bryan Fuenmayor says he was aware of his homosexuality since he was 10. He came out as gay at 31. He says: “I made a good choice, but I did pay severe consequences and went through the trauma of losing my entire family support system and all my friends.” He has since started an LGBTQ support group for others like himself.
A top priest with US Catholic Bishops resigned after Catholic media, via its organ, The Pillar, exposed high-tech surveillance of Grindr’s gay hook-up data tracked him going into gay bars and other gay venues. Grindr denies its data is accessible to snoops, but tech experts such as Rachel Bovard publicly warn otherwise.
The Boy Scouts of America settles with over 60,000 men who say they suffered sexual abuse by adults in the Boy Scouts organization over the decades. The $850 million settlement is the largest settlement ever reached in a child sex abuse case in US history. It might quantify into billions more when the insurance rights for the last 40 years are added into a trust that will be controlled by the survivors’ group.
Israel’s Supreme Court has cleared the way for same-sex couples to have children through surrogates after Parliament failed to meet the Court’s deadline to do so, set in 2020.
Amnesty International’s 2020 report on Palestine notes that consensual same-sex acts are punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment. The Palestinian Authority requires citizens to report on all same-sex activities to the police. Yet America’s anti-Semitic Left calls for BDS, i.e., Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, against Israel, where LGBTQ folks enjoy full freedom, and the Left propagandizes for Hamas and the PLO.
China-based social media messaging app, WeChat, deletes accounts of LGBTQ persons and groups. Such college chat groups were shut down at Beijing’s Tsinghua University and Shanghai’s Fudan University for violating China’s rules. College officials had told these students not to mention their universities on their online groups.
The Vatican protests Italy’s “Zan Bill” over discrimination regarding trans issues. The law would criminalize discriminatory conduct on the basis of sex, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. The Vatican Secretariat of State sees that such criminalization “would have the effect of negatively impacting the freedoms assured to the Catholic Church” by violating the Lateran Pacts, that establish Vatican City as a sovereign state and provide religious freedoms in its relationship with Italy. The main protest is over Vatican concerns that gender theory calls for equal recognition of nonbinary and transgender people and will be incompatible with Catholic teachings. The Vatican objects to the questioning of the reality of the difference between men and women and calls this intrusion, “ideological colonization.”
In Uzbekistan, formerly part of the USSR, sex between men is still a crime, as it is, as well, in the former USSR’s Turkmenistan. So, as a young man says in secret: “What I experience, what I feel, my pain, everything stays inside me. I cannot even tell my friends and family. Their hatred of homosexuals is endless,” for the family would then be publicly shamed. “Since childhood I have always known that I’m different. Deep down I feel lonely, as if I’m a foreigner in this world.” He knows that nobody would be punished for attacking him, but, he, himself, would be imprisoned, where he’d suffer more attacks.
Though Uzbekistan is urged by outsiders to drop the criminalization of homosexuality, the antigay laws have been reclassified under “crimes against family, children and morality.” Officials know homosexuality is “not approved by Islam and not in keeping with the Uzbek mindset.” Still, Uzbekistan is a full member of the UN Human Rights Council, supposedly committed to “uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights”.
AND FINALLY
Baylor University’s Board of Regents will allow exploration for an LGBTQ student group toward a more “caring community” while the Board also emphasized that this was not an abandonment of Baptist Baylor’s position on marriage between a man and a woman: “It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.” Most Baylor folks find these statements to be gibberish, so all sides are disappointed.
Well, as James Madison said, when commenting on similarly sticky disagreements that can’t be better formulated, “frivolous and fanciful distinctions” must suffice.