“Facts & Fictions About Homosexuality: Debunking the Socio-Biblical Myths of the Religious Gay Community” by Linda L. Belleville. Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture, Winter 2005, Vol. 2, No. 1.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Belleville has taught Bible at Christian colleges, worked for Jesus People USA, and now directs an Exodus “ex-gay” program. “First and foremost,” she urges, “evangelicals need to equip themselves with the facts regarding homosexuality”. Would that she had taken her own advice. Her essay in this otherwise refreshing new journal from Multnomah Bible College and Seminary is full of confusion, contradiction, misreading of science and misapplication of scripture.
Alarmed in a culture that’s “increasingly gay affirming” and where “lesbianism is ‘cool’”, she warns that Christians are at risk when hate crime laws protect homosexuals. Overlooking the “hooking up” that’s replacing dating among the nation’s youth, the fact that tons of condoms are distributed in the public schools and still almost 40 percent of all births are out-of-wedlock, the facts that evangelical Christians’ divorce rate outpaces the general population’s and their sexual abuse rate nearly does so, she stereotypes most gay people as promiscuous! Sadly, many are. But she’d never permit same-sex marriage to be a solution. She’d do well, though, to listen to a former “ex-gay” leader, now long since happily same-sex coupled: “You go to work; you do an excellent job; you mow your lawn; you pay your property taxes, and you go to bed at 10 o’clock at night. That’s the gay agenda.” (Kurt Jacobowitz-Cain)
Belleville ignores the scandalous history and degenerating claims of the “ex-gay” movement she endorses. John Paulk, board chairman of the Exodus network, director for homosexual issues at Focus on the Family and Newsweek’s “ex-gay” cover-boy, had to be dismissed after he was caught schmoozing with men in a gay bar while on an “ex-gay” speaking tour in 2000. Yet here, she’s still citing Paulk’s 1998 “transformation” testimony. She fails to admit that many leaders of “ex-gay” groups have had to be dismissed for repeatedly having sex with the young men coming to them to become “ex-gay”. This serial “falling” has become so routine that “ever-straights”, i.e., people who have always been heterosexual, are now the “ex-gay” leaders of choice. She’s silent on the lengthening list of leaders of the “ex-gay” movement who have left, either in disgrace or disgust (Guy Charles, John Evans, Michael Bussee, Gary Cooper, Jim Kasper, Doug Houck, Kurt Jacobowitz-Cain, Doug Upchurch, Roger Grindstaff, Greg Reid, Rick Notch, Jeff Ford, Colin Cook, Jerry Stephenson, John Paulk, Michael Johnston, Peterson Toscano, Deborah Bogle, Ann Phillips, Alex Haiken, Jeremy Marks and many others – not to mention the seekers who’ve drifted away in disgust or despair.
Reinforcing the impression that there’s a scientific basis in “ex-gay” promises, she misrepresents psychiatrist Robert Spitzer as being “influential” in the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to remove only homosexuality as a mental disorder in the DSM III in 1973. He chaired the revision for the entire DSM. Had homosexuality been retained, it would have been the one exception to the revision’s research-based two-fold criterion for classifying mental disorders: In its full-blown manifestation it must invariably be associated with both subjective distress and social dysfunction. This criterion clearly applies to real disorders such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, dementia, agoraphobia, dysthymic disorder, etc. But it clearly doesn’t apply to homosexual orientation and behavior per se. Belleville says that “after thirty years as a therapist,” Spitzer is now “conceding that reorientation therapy has been proven effective in a significant number of cases.” No. Spitzer chatted by phone with “ex-gay” leaders and their handpicked followers. He notes it wasn’t easy to get even these few. That amounts to a stacked “testimony time” – not scientific research. It’s legitimate to report that some pre-selected individuals claimed they’d “changed” but it moves beyond the evidence to say that, merely on the basis of their claims, they’d indeed changed.
Belleville rehashes anecdotal quasi-Freudian guesswork, baptized for an audience that never quite bought into that “atheistic” system. Pretending there are no homosexuals as such, she cites Elizabeth Moberly’s term, “same-sex ambivalence” but fails to say that Moberly, too, has long since left the movement. Against the experience of gay people, she says homosexual attraction merely “appears as innate”, woodenly arguing that it’s “learned”. She admits that two antigay evangelical psychologists (correctly) affirm that it is, indeed, rooted in “a complex interaction between genetic, biological, experiential and socio-cultural factors”
It’s wrong to violate conscience. So all who think their homosexuality is wrong should be supported in celibacy unless and until they change their minds. But celibacy or a “life-long process [of] transformation” can be called “ex-gay” only by a torturing of terms.
Space doesn’t permit a detailed critique, but Belleville makes some tragic interpretive and pastoral errors. Over against what she says, no less an evangelical scholar than the OT chair of the NIV and president of the Evangelical Theological Society noted that scripture is silent on what we now know as homosexuality. (Marten Woudstra) No less an evangelical resource than the IVP New Bible Dictionary begins its entry on the subject by stating: “The Bible says nothing specifically about the homosexual condition.” The article laments that “too often [passages on same sex acts] have been used as tools of a homophobic polemic which has claimed too much.” It’s noted that the Sodom story says nothing about “a caring homosexual relationship between consenting partners” and that “the force of other OT references are similarly limited by the context in which they are set. Historically, homosexuality was linked with idolatrous cult prostitution [and] the stern warnings of the levitical law … are primarily aimed at idolatry too; the word ‘abomination’ [being] a religious term often used for idolatrous practices.” The Dictionary points out that Paul, too, refers to such acts “in the same breath as idolatry.”
There’s no better way to drive gay people away from Christian faith and into the arms of anything but than to be so insensitive to their unasked-for and unchangeable sexual orientation. But that’s what this sort of “ministry” does, whatever the good intention