The Royal College of Psychiatrists is warning the Church of England to reject so-called “reparative therapy” for homosexuals. The psychiatrists state that attempting to change one’s sexual orientation “can be deeply damaging. Although there is now a number of therapists and organizations in the USA and in the UK that claim that therapy can help homosexuals to become heterosexual, there is no evidence that such change is possible. The best evidence for efficacy of any treatment comes from randomized clinical trials and no such trial has been carried out in this field.” They go on to point out that there “is no scientific or rational reason for treating LGB people any differently to their heterosexual counterparts. People are happiest and are likely to reach their potential when they are able to integrate the various aspects of the self as fully as possible. Socially inclusive, nonjudgemental attitudes to LGB people who attend places of worship or who are religious leaders themselves will have positive consequences for LGB people as well as for the wider society in which they live.”

Another ex-“ex-gay” leader is speaking out against the “ex-gay” movement. In an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, Scott Harrison says: “There’s psychological damage when change doesn’t occur, when sexual orientation remains homosexual. I certainly heard stories and knew people who committed suicide. I’ve seen what I believe is a higher incidence of risky behavior and alcohol and drug use among a lot of people who go through an ex-gay ministry. A lot of it is because of spiritual conflict that emerges going through that, feeling betrayed by God, feeling betrayed by the church. … I can’t tell you how many people come out of the ex-gay movement with their faith wrecked.” He says: “Teenagers are idealistic. They’re going to grab for [the “ex-gay” promise], believing they can actually change their sexuality, when we have plenty of evidence showing it’s not possible. What’s going to happen when they don’t change? More youth suicides, more youths engaging in risky behaviors, feeling betrayed by the church and by God and giving up their faith. … I think the healthier option is to encourage them to accept themselves and find ways of maintaining a faith relationship while encouraging relationships that are healthier than promiscuity. For some people, that might be a monogamous same-sex relationship. For other people it might mean that they are celibate.” Harrison was involved in Living Waters and Desert Stream “ex-gay” ministries for eight years.

This winter, 2007, issue of Intelligence Report also quotes a woman whose ex-husband was in reparative therapy. She was advised to “hold [my husband’s] penis in my hand as we fell asleep. After a week or two of this, [he supposedly] would be suddenly and inexplicably inflamed with desire for me.” It is further noted that “at ‘ex-gay’ barbecues’ held at her home, [she] met several men who said they were asked to measure their penises and report the results to their [“ex-gay”] group. All of them refused.” Exodus president Alan Chambers reportedly told “a private audience of about 75 ‘strugglers’ at an ex-gay conference held in Phoenix last February” that he still struggles with homosexual attraction, saying: “Every day, I wake up and deny what comes naturally to me.”

Noe Gutierrez had been featured in “It’s Elementary”, a pro-gay video about gay youth. Then he was featured in Grove City College psychologist Warren Throckmorton’s “ex-gay” video, “I Do Exist”. Now Gutierrez says he regrets “the divisive message of the ex-gay movement and that my story became a vehicle for that message. I personally have had a change of heart in the matter of a person’s sexual orientation. It has been my experience in the years since joining (and later leaving) the ex-gay movement that a person’s sexual orientation may or may not be an area impacted by the change that comes by way of a diligent Christian faith.” He adds: “For those left wondering about my own sexuality, I have decided to no longer make that small part of my identity a topic for public discussion.”

Warren Throckmorton is shifting his focus. Thought he has been a promoter of “ex-gay” rhetoric, this Christian psychologist has announced that his “ex-gay” video, “I Do Exist”, will no longer be made available, explaining: “My current work does not emphasize changing sexual orientation”. He is joining with psychologist Mark Yarhouse of Pat Robertson’s Regent University in focusing on getting homosexual Christians to adjust their behavior to the belief that homosexuality is wrong.

The 700 Club-featured “ex-gay” teen is apologizing for “hurt[ing] lots of people in the gay community.” James Stabile, 19, says he’s “truly sorry from the bottom of my heart.” Stabile, who suffers from bipolar disorder and was off his medication, was swept up in a “purity siege” in Dallas. Antigay cultists of the “Interstate 35” (allegedly Isaiah 35) “Highway of Holiness” movement persuaded him in the manic phase of his condition that he’d been “delivered” from homosexuality. He was sent off to Pure Life’s “straight camp” in Kentucky and then trotted out onto national television via Pat Robertson’s CBN broadcast. He’s now back home with his gay-accepting parents – his father, Joseph Stabile, is a United Methodist minister – and is back on his meds. His mother, Suzanne Stabile, says this about what he went through at the hands of the “ex-gay” proponents: “None of that experience was Christian, helpful, loving or supportive”. Says “reparative” therapist Warren Throckmorton: “This story should give serious caution to those who are quick to accept such reports uncritically”.

Antigay social worker James Phelan boasts on his blog that he “one-two drop kicked the hell” out of a runner at the Columbus, Ohio marathon. He claims that after he’d yelled at some rainbow banner-carrying gay spectators “push[ing] their gay agenda”, one of the runners shoved him. “So, I one-two drop kicked the hell out of him and got into a [sic] immediate fighter’s stance ready to take more of him. Naturall, the coward backed down and ran away.” Phelan was involved in the Exodus “ex-gay” network and is a member of the NARTH “reparative therapy” movement. Exodus head Alan Chambers reprimands Phelan for his “atrocious” behavior and boasting and Phelan has been dropped from Exodus.

“The time has come for Christians to come ‘out of the closet’ [when] counsel[ing] people with same-sex attraction.” So says Eric Johnson, who teaches pastoral theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He complains that Christian counselors are accused of homophobia when, in counseling “people with same-sex attraction”, they take the view that homosexuality is psychopathological. Writing in the Christian Counseling Connection of the American Association of Christian Counselors, he urges Christian counselors to protest the “modernist” takeover of “soul care”. The AACC offers a Professional Certificate Training Program in Sexual Addiction Counseling on CDs. An Assemblies of God minister teaches the unit on homosexuality.

British evangelical expositor Roy Clements is concluding his Internet ministry.

After webcasting seven year’s of sermons, essays and other helpful features, this internationally acclaimed preacher says it is “time to say farewell”.

Much of his material will now be available at the website of Evangelicals Concerned: ECinc.org.

In 1999, after decades of preaching in the most vibrant church in Cambridge, Clements was forced to leave public ministry when it was reported that he was gay. He has keynoted the summer connECtions of Evangelicals Concerned and preached at EC’s annual fall Preaching Festival at Ocean Grove, New Jersey.

Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship has told a Texas congregation it can no longer give gifts to prisoners’ children through PF’s Angel Tree program. Why? It’s because the Friends Congregational Church in College Station welcomes gay men and lesbians to membership. The congregation, affiliated with the United Church of Christ, had been participating in the Angel Tree program for five years. Prison Fellowship’s senior vice president, David Lawson, says that most churches that have been disqualified from the Angel Tree program have been disqualified because of their affirmation of homosexuality. He says a recently revised mission statement calls for “transformation”.

Risk of “property damage and the potential for increased litigation” – that’s the stated reason a church does not qualify for insurance coverage. Brotherhood Mutual Insurance has informed a West Adrian, Michigan congregation of the United Church of Christ that, because of the UCC’s support for same-sex marriage and the ordination of lesbians and gay men, the church is too high a risk to the insurer. However, the church’s pastor says he knows of no acts of violence against gay-affirming UCC churches and says that his own local congregation declines to support the gay-affirming UCC policy. The insurance company denies its denial of coverage is antigay. It was founded in 1917 by evangelical Mennonites and is the largest insurer of churches in America.

Zac Bissonnette of BloggingStocks comments: “Religious organizations are important social institutions, and its bad news for America that law-abiding institutions are being denied coverage based on their stances – or their governing body’s stances – on social issues. Churches were a leading force behind the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and should be a leading voice in similar struggles today. But that will be tough if they can’t get insurance.”

Singer Pat Boone injected his antigay opinion into the Kentucky gubernatorial race recently. In a robo-call, Boone told Kentuckians that, if the Democrat won, Kentucky would become “another San Francisco”. The Democrat beat the Republican incumbant by 18 percentage points.

It’s not just the Religious Right that’s homophobic. In a Vanity Fair interview on the web, pornographer Larry Flynt slams Rudy Giuliani for befriending gays. Referring to Giuliani’s having spent some time living with his longtime friends, Howard Koeppel and Mark Hsiao, a gay couple, Flynt says: “I don’t hate gays. But I don’t want to live in an apartment full of them. They’ll bitch and cry and all. That doesn’t bother Giuliani. It doesn’t bother Giuliani to put a dress on to do ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I don’t trust him.”

Southern Baptist fundamentalists are attacking Mike Huckabee for being too much of a liberal. During the Religious Right’s takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention two decades ago, Huckabee was one of the Southern Baptist ministers who resisted those Right-wing efforts. One critic complains: “I know of no conservative he appointed while he headed the Arkansas Baptist Convention.” But, says Huckabee: “Real faith should make us humble and mindful, not [of] the faults of others, but of our own. It should not make us more judgmental but rather less judgmental, as we see others living a life with the same frailty we acknowledge within ourselves.”

The former governor of Arkansas graduated from Ouachita Baptist University and attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for a year. He worked for televangelist James Robison before launching into Baptist ministry and then going into politics.

When Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy was asked by Bob Costas about what he’d do if he had an openly gay player on his team, he answered: “I’m sure I’d talk to him about my views on it, what the Bible says.” He also said he’d show the guy respect and – if he was a good ball player – he’d keep him on the team. Dungy, the first African American coach to win a Super Bowl, is a devout Christian who is on record as opposing marriage for same-sex couples.

2008 is the centennial of America’s first history book on homosexuality. Harper’s literary critic and novelist, Edward Prime Stevenson, under the pseudonym of Xavier Mayne, wrote The Intersexes. The 647-page book was privately printed in Naples, Italy, in 1908. It was “a history of similisexualism as a problem in social life” and included discussion of literature and religion. The author said “there is no proof that homosexual intercourse ever was or is an offense to God, even to a Jehovistic concept of God”. He expounded on the term “sodomy” as having been derived from poor juridical terminology and not from an accurate reading of the Bible story of Sodom, which he took to be “a common episode of a suspicious Oriental town[‘s] violat[ing] the hospitality that Lot offered to the strangers”. In this interpretation, Stevenson foreshadowed the consensus of later 20th century biblical scholarship.

The Human Rights Campaign lists 195 companies as 100% supportive of gay and lesbian employees. Among this gay lobby’s honored corporations are Aetna, Allstate, American Airlines, Boeing, Chevron, Chrysler, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Coors, DuPont, Eli Lilly, Ford, General Motors, Google, J. C. Penny, Kraft, Marriott, MasterCard, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Sears, Toyota, Walt Disney, Xerox and Yahoo!

The Anglican Church in Ottawa has voted to support the blessing of same-sex couples. The voting of the diocese, which included both clergy and lay people, was 177 to 97. The decision allows clergy to bless the duly solemnized and registered civil marriages of lesbians and gay men.

Roman Catholic twenty-somethings see “sin” in a different way from those of pre-Vatican II days. Those who were born before the 1960s see “personal sins – missing Mass on Sunday, premarital sex, lying [as] serious failings, while the millennial Catholics see social sins – bigotry, failing to give women equal rights, lack of respect for diversity, neglect of the poor – as major ills they need to confront.” Sociologist William V. D’Antonio of The Catholic University of America did this multigenerational study.

“Women go to church, men go to football games.” That’s the way a Roman Catholic writer puts it in his book, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. Leon J. Podles argues that Western Christianity has been feminizing itself for centuries. He faults biblical “Bride of Christ” language and ecclesiastical appeals to “fall in love” with Jesus. He believes this is off-putting to men. So John Allen, senior correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, observes: “It seems a safe bet that the rapid shift in parochial leadership toward women will exacerbate alarm about the ‘feminization’ of the church. Put in its most basic form, the concern will be this: If the tone in most parishes is being set by female ministers, what will that do to the comfort level of men, given that women are already overrepresented?”

On “the evacuation of male worshippers from liberal churches”, the London Times religion writer, Ruth Gledhill, notes: “Once women begin to fill and represent roles of pastoral leadership men withdraw. This is true, not only in the pulpit, but in the pews.”

But wasn’t it that seasoned old sea captain, John Newton, who hymned to Jesus, “my husband”?

One-third of New York’s homeless youth are gay, lesbian or transgender. This is the finding of the Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Services and points up the hostility such young people face in their families, schools and churches.

Five of 2007’s Top Ten religious stories are related to the “Culture Wars” – according to the editors of the evangelical flagship magazine, Christianity Today. In the Presidential campaigns, the editors note that the Republican candidates “all stumbled in appeals to Christian voters”, the Anglican Communion is fractured over homosexuality, Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy died after living “long enough to see great successes for the poligical movement they helped start”, James Dobson failed in his attempt to depose National Association of Evangelicals’ vice president Richard Cizik for his global warming activism, and the Supreme Court upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban. Of the other five Top stories, three had to do with anti-Christian hostility from so-called “new atheists” and physical abuse and killings of Christians by the Taliban and an ultranationalist group in Turkey. The other two Top concerned the death of Ruth Graham and Evangelical Theological Society president Francis Beckwith’s return to the Roman Catholic Church.

Though the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America removed a clergyman from its roster because he is in a same-sex relationship, his congregation refuses to let him go. Bradley Schmeling’s Atlanta congregation, St. John’s, where he’s served for over six years, says he has their “100 percent support”. In a recent interview in Christian Century, Schmeling says this about they young people in his confirmation classes: “There’s a new generation that’s eager to talk about poverty, war, the environment and the grinding effects of materialism. They see the fight over sexuality as a battle of the last century. ‘Are they still arguing about that?’ they say.”

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, blames both liberals and conservatives for the current “rivalry and confusion” in worldwide Anglicanism. In a lengthy letter in mid-December, Williams faulted the Episcopal Church for ordaining an openly gay bishop and faulted the Nigerian church for administratively adopting conservative Episcopal churches. Gay activists in the Episcopal Church faulted the archbishop’s letter for having “not a word of comfort to gay and lesbian Christians.”

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu criticizes the Anglican Church and its leadership for its attitudes on homosexuality. Interviewed on the BBC, Tutu said the Anglican Church is “extraordinarily homophobic” and “obsessed” with homosexuality. With reference to conservatives’ saying that homosexuality is a choice, Tutu countered: “It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to hatred. It’s like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.”

AND FINALLY:

Take your boys to wrestling matches! That’ll save them from homosexuality. This is a Spanish minister’s advice in his talk, “How to Raise Heterosexual Children”. In reaction, a gay activist group is threatening to sue him for “proselytism” that’s allegedly taking the country “back to the Franco dictatorship”.

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