“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 to change their sexual orientation for religious reasons. That study was done by Kim Schaeffer and his colleagues at Point Loma Nazarene University. It was published in the evangelical Journal of Psychology and Theology. According to Yarhouse, “these results should be viewed as support for the role of religious values and motivations in helping people who contend with same-sex attraction and behavior refrain from homosexual activity.”
The American Medical Association denounces “ex-gay” therapies. In June, the House of Delegates of the AMA adopted the following resolution: “Resolved, that the AMA opposes the use of ‘reparative’ or ‘conversion’ therapy that is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a medical disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that the patient should change his/her homosexual orientation.”
Following the strong positions against “reparative” therapy taken by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychologicial Association, the Australian Psychological Society has issued its own policy statement. According to the APS: “To date there are no scientifically rigorous outcome studies to determine either the actual efficacy or harm of therapies or treatments that attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation. Reparative therapy literature also tends to overstate the treatment’s accomplishements while neglecting any potential risks to patients.” The conclusion: “Ethical practitioners should refrain from attempts to change an individual’s sexual orentation.”
While the Religious Right still pushes an anti-gay political agenda, the evangelical press is reporting that Focus on the Family is having a harder time finding host churches for its “ex-gay” seminar. Fewer and fewer conservative Christians are finding the “ex-gay” claims plausible. The focus of even the “ex-gay” seminar is tending toward a political agenda, e.g. “the inroads made by gay activist organizations in public schools and other institutions.” This is not surprising, considering the weak testimony of John Paulk, Focus’ out-front “ex-gay” man who married an “ex-lesbian.” Paulk says he’s an “ex-gay” because he “got tired” of the drag queen scene, promiscuity, and fear of diseases.
One “ex-gay” leader writes: “My outrage at the continued oppression and abuse of gay and perceived gay youth was not ablated, rather it has been quickened.” These are the words of Tom Cole of an “ex-gay” ministry in Detroit. Writing as “a self-identified former homosexual” now married to “a former lesbian,” Coles recalls that “as far back as I can remember I was called a fag, a queer or a sissy. … I was chased from school and beat up nearly every day of my elementary school life. I wouldn’t fight back. … Twenty years ago I found a safe haven within the gay community in the Detroit area. For the first time in my life, I felt accepted and loved for who I was.” Coles concludes his essay, published in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel with these words: “The conservative Christian Church, which is strident in its condemnation of homosexual behavior, seems to be in denial about targeted attacks on gay and lesbian youth. … We must be clear that the lives of gay people are worthy of respect, dignity and honor as those created in the very image of God.”
Tammy Faye Bakker is featured in the Sundance Film Festiaval hit, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, opening in theaters this summer. The film is narrated by drag star RuPaul Charles. Now divorced from Jim Bakker and married to the contractor who built the Bakkers’ now-defunct Christian theme park, Tammy Faye is interviewed in the July 18 issue of The Advocate, “the national gay & lesbian newsmagazine.” As she sees it: “Jerry Falwell’s Christianity is very judgemental. My walk with God is very nonjudgemental. I love people just for who they are. [But] you’ve got to be a certain way for Jerry Falwell to accept you. And that’s sad to me because, for me, that is not what the Bible says. The Bible says, ‘God is love.’ The Bible says that we all are sinners. The Bible says that all of us have come short of the glory of God. The Bible says that he loves everyone of us just the same and that he doesn’t classify sin, saying this sin is greater than that sin.” She says that the reason “other Christians’ are hostile to gays is because these “Christians are not living in the day of grace. They’re living with rules and regulations of their own making — not of God’s making, [but] of their own making. And they’re judging people by what they wear. They judged me by my makeup; they judged me by the clothes I wear. They judged me in every way possible. But that wasn’t God. It’s just that so many so-called Christians are judgemental. … Our PTL [Jim and Tammy’s ‘Praise the Lord’ television Club] was not judgemental.”
Lewis Smedes, retired Fuller Theological Seminary ethicist and best-selling author says that “The churches’ treatment of homosexuality has become the greatest heresy in the history of the church.” He goes on to say: “It’s living heresy, because it’s treating God’s children as if they’re not God’s children. The church isn’t just making a mistake. It’s doing a great wrong. The church’s whole biblical reason for excluding gays and lesbians from its fellowship is all wrong. And not only wrong, it is cruel, mean, and devastating.” He makes these comments in a video produced by Soulforce, the justice ministry founded by Smedes’ former Fuller faculty colleague, gay activist Mel White. Soulforce — at Box 4467, Laguna Beach, CA 92652 — is offering a complimentary copy of the video, There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy, for every gift of $50 or more.
The implications of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that the Boy Scouts has a constitutional right to exclude leaders who assert values contrary to the organization’s are still being debated. According to a Stanford University assistant professor of child psychiatry and child development: “The self-esteem of gay adolescents is influenced by the not-so-subtle message that who they are is not acceptable. The court’s decision perpetuates the hostile social environment in which young gay people grow.” [Victor G. Carrion, M.D.] According to an attorney writing on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times: “The court’s decision goes to the heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free association. … Exercising the right to exclude others may seem intolerant, but such a right is indispensible to private groups seeking to define themselves. … If the Boy Scouts were required to admit leaders who advocated a position contrary to its own, then … gentiles could assert the right to head Jewish groups and heterosexuals could assert the right to lead gay groups.” [Steffen N. Johnson]
The Calvary Chapel in Capistrano Beach, California has at least two out gay or lesbian couples. And according to Marsha Stevens’ BALM Ministries Newsletter, one of the couples was supported in adoption efforts by the Capo Beach pastor, Chuck Smith Jr., son of the man who founded the first Calvary Chapel out of the 1960s “Jesus movement.”
Roman Catholic layman and award-winning historian Garry Wills has written a new book, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, published by Doubleday. Wills discourses on years of papal dishonesty and hypocrisy, Rome’s tortured interpretations of the Bible, and its distortions of church history. He says, on the basis of John 14:6, that Christ, not the pope, is truth. But, says Wills, “The pope alone, we are now asked to accept, is competent to tell Christian people how to live. … The Holy Spirit now speaks to only one person on earth, the omnicompetent head of the church, a church that is all head and no limbs.”
On one of the current hot topics in the Roman church, Wills states: “The admission of married men and women to the priesthood — which is bound to come anyway — may well come for the wrong reason, not because women and the community deserve this, but because of panic at the perception that the priesthood is becoming predominantly gay.”
World Pride Roma, a gay pride rally with workshops, fashion shows, parties, and a parade and concert featuring the evangelical Christian disco star Gloria Gaynor, is set for Rome beginning the week of July 1. According to organizers of World Pride Roma, Rome was selected as the site of the festival in order to confront the Roman Catholic Church during the Christian Year of Jubilee. The Vatican has objected to the event’s political intrusion and the Italian government has tried to work out a compromise. The World Pride festivities will have to take place away from the Vatican.
The Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church has again condemned homosexuality and same-gender couples who are living together. The Holy Synod also condemned the European Parliament’s proposal to guarantee same-gender couples the same rights as heterosexuals.
The Colorado Council of Churches has become the fourth such state group to vote admission of the predominantly gay/lesbian Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. But none of the other eleven denominations in the Council was willing to tell reporters what its own vote was. The other three state councils are in California, Hawaii and North Carolina.
Two synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have voted approval of same-gender unions. In May, the 5.2-million-member denomination’s Southeastern Michigan Synod followed the lead of the Greater Milwaukee Synod in permitting Lutheran pastors to “bless” gay and lesbian couples.
On June 22, the Oslo (Norway) Bishops’ Council voted 4-3 to confirm the appointment of a partnered gay man to serve as pastor of a Lutheran Church in Oslo. Seven of Norway’s eleven bishops have now called for “emergency” meetings to discuss this violation of the state church’s policy against non-celibate gay ministers.
The highest court of the Presbyterian Church (USA) ruled in May that its ministers may conduct “holy union” ceremonies for same-gender couples. But in June, the 2.6 million-member church’s General Assembly decided to forbid such ceremonies. The vote was 268-251.
A recent survey of Christian Reformed pastors finds that, in 1999, only 20 percent of them preached sermons that substantially dealt with homosexuality. By contrast, over 81 percent preached on tithing and stewardship, 53 percent preached on racism, 52 percent preached on abortion, and 47 percent preached on predestination.
The Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church plan to merge as the Mennonite Church USA next summer. However, some bishops are saying that unless the united church includes a clear statement that homosexuality is a sin and marriage is reserved for heterosexuals only, they will not support the union. Others say that the merger will go ahead with or without agreement on homosexuality.
“The differences on homosexuality cause such tensions that we cannot function as one.” This conclusion led to the restructuring of the Northwest regional network of the American Baptist Churches into two separate bodies. That move, in May, signals the possibility that there will be other splits over issues of homosexuality throughout the 1.5-million-member denomination. The ABC grew out of the Baptist split of 1845 along North-South lines over slavery. The Baptists in the South went on to become the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America at nearly 16 million members.
The Southern Baptist Convention has written its opposition to homosexuality into the first revision of its Faith and Message statement since 1963. Meeting in Orlando in June, the delegates also revised the SBC position on women pastors, now declaring that “the office of pastor is limited to men.” Some talk of a denominational split over these Fundamentalist moves drew this comment from the newly elected president, James G. Merritt (a trustee of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University): “I don’t fear a split. I don’t even fear a splinter.” But SBC folk have already begun to organize themselves and their churches into more moderate congregations and associations.
The Baptist Memorial College of Health Sciences in Memphis fired student services specialist Glynda Hall in 1996. The Southern Baptist institution’s reason was the “conflict of interest” created by her having assumed a leadership role in a pro-gay church. Now the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit has ruled unanimously that the school did not discriminate against her based on her leadership in the church.
The United Methodist Church’s General Conference, meeting in Cleveland in May, again went on record in opposition to both same-gender unions and the ordination of “practicing” homosexuals. Two-thirds of the delegates voted that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.” As reported by Christian Century editor at large Jean Caffey Lyles, the 8.4-million-member denomination “is losing members in liberal territory and gaining them in conservative areas, and the resulting reapportionment of delegates will probably mean a stronger conservative presence” in the future. “Moreover,” she notes, “the church is growing overseas where church members’ disapproval of homosexuality is expressed in even stronger terms, especially in parts of Africa, where delegates are apt to speak of homosexuality as ‘an abomination.’”
Nonetheless, the delegates in Cleveland did vote down a call for all clergy to sign statements denouncing homosexuality and to fund “ex-gay” ministries. And throughout the UMC, dissident ministers are vowing to perform same-gender unions and to continue to call for the ordination of gay men and lesbian women.
By prior arrangement with the Cleveland police, Mel White’s Soulforce protesters were arrested for blocking an exit and impeding public access at the United Methodist General Conference. The liberal Christian Century editorialized that since the protesters’ “quarrel is not with the civil law at all, but with church law, as codified in the United Methodists’ Book of Discipline,” they “should practice ecclesial disobedience, not civil disobedience.” Noting that “no ecclesial relations were even hypothetically at stake” for the many protesters who were not United Methodists, the Century concluded that the protest could not be said to be in the risky tradition of the mid-century civil rights struggles led by Martin Luther King: “Using the civil authorities to make a point about life in the church is, by contrast, an exercise in media-driven street theater.”
Following the Century criticism, White issued a press release, insisting that his protest was in the tradition of Jesus, Gandhi, and King and claiming to have incurred over $30,000 in fines in Cleveland. He threatens to take his protests to “denominational headquarters, seminaries and colleges and even individual churches across the country.”
While many lesbigayt leaders are making a concerted effort to censor Dr. Laura, some gay and gay-friendly voices are calling attention to the hypocrisy of such efforts. Says pro-gay columnist Frank Rich, in his New York Times column: “The escalating vehemence of the protest against [Dr. Laura] makes me uncomfortable when it mirrors the tactics used by those on her side who fought to keep the openly gay Ellen DeGeneres’s eponymous sitcom off the air.” Gay syndicated columnist Michael Alvear writes: “The gay campaign against a TV show that nobody has seen proves my contention that the difference between liberals and conservatives is the difference between ice and water. One is just colder than the other. Turn the heat up and watch the differences disappear.”
Lesbian columnist Norah Vincent, writing in a recent issue of The Advocate, points out that “some of the strongest opposition to free speech about gays comes not from the Christian right but from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.” She illustrates with GLAAD’s “slandering of award-winning [lesbian] journalist Donna Minkowitz” and her “thought-provoking version of that night in Laramie” when Matthew Shepard was killed. Vincent says that the “rant [of the] grammar gestapo at GLAAD was sheer hokum” and asks: “Is GLAAD doing its job or protecting its job security? … Is anybody watching them?”
Gay columnist and entertainment writer Bruce Vilanch has recounted his appearance on ABC’s Politically Incorrect. He appeared on the show with anti-gays Rev. Lou Sheldon and Bill Horn. Vilanch writes in The Advocate: “The Bill Horn and Lou Sheldon on that show hate homosexuals for a living. The Bill Horn and Lou Sheldon who had coffee and perfectly pleasant conversation with me backstage, even patting me on the back, may not hate anybody. … They have found a good hot-button issue that will keep them employed for years to come.”
Sen. Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, the leading Senate Republican sponsor of a federal hate crimes statute that would include protection for homosexuals, is up against the Religious Right’s saying that gays threaten the American family. But Smith counters: “Adultery is a far greater threat to the American family than homosexuality.” He tells these conservative Christians that “it is time to say to the gay community, ‘We don’t agree with you on everything, but I can help you on many things.’”
A mother of a gay son says she’s had enough of the Religious Right’s antigay assaults on her son. Her original op-ed piece for the (Vermont) Valley News has been distributed over the Web and reprinted in the national newsletter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Sharon Underwood writes, in part: “I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the ‘homosexual agenda’ and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. …You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it’s about time you started doing that.”
Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright is using prejudice against gay men and lesbian women to elicit funds. Warning his “partner[s] in helping reach the world for Christ” that “Gay and Lesbian Pride societies” are “push[ing] their agenda [by] target[ing] … the incoming freshman class [with] something subtle — like a meeting on tolerance complete with free fast food,” Bright urges that contributions be sent to him “before [these freshmen] make decisions they may forever regret!”
Tufts Christian Fellowship, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Tufts University, was officially “derecognized” this spring because it refused to allow an actively lesbian member to participate in TCF leadership, even though she otherwise affirmed TCF’s evangelical theology. This means that the student group will have difficulty reserving campus meeting rooms, publicizing events, and enjoying other benefits that are granted to recognized student groups. The student judiciary’s decision to penalize TCF was later reversed by university officials but it could come up again in the fall. IVCF groups on other campuses (e.g., Grinnell College, Middlebury College, Ball State University) have been similarly “derecognized” for their politically incorrect views on homosexuality. Elliott Abrams, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, accused Tufts of religious bigotry. Pointing out a double standard when it comes to dealing with evangelical Christianson today’s college campuses, the head of a group called Friends for Individual Rights in Education said: “Students are persecuted for innocuous statements if they offend anyone on the left. But you’ll never find a student being charged for having yelled ‘born-again bigot’ or ‘Jesus freak’ at a Christian student.” He said it was unlikely that the gay group would have been disciplined for rejecting an “ex-gay” for leadership.” He said that Tufts reversal was a victory for genuine pluralism.
AND FINALLY:
Grammy-winning rap star Eminem raps: “My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge/ That’ll stab you in the head whether your’re a fag or lez. … Hate fags? The answer’s yes.” He raps: “I can’t wait ‘til I catch all you faggots in public” and goes on to make a joke about the murder of gay designer Gianni Versace (“Whoops — somebody shot me!”) This white rapper is imitating black rappers’ antigay lyrics but he’s being celebrated in both the mainstream and lesbigayt press and his latest CD is No. 1 in rap/hip-hop, according to Billboard.
Slate magazine’s David Plotz says: “Eminem has the greatest and rarest skill in hip-hop: ‘flow.’ His words and beats work together.” Entertainment Weekly calls his album “the first great pop record of the 21st century.” Newsweek calls Eminem “arguably the most compelling figure in all of pop music.” The Advocate headlines: Rapper Eminem slings trash about gays. …But should we hate him for it?” “Advocate reviewer Dave White writes: Eminem “wants to confound, to make good and evil switch places, to drop beats and bombs at the same time. He succeeds on all counts.” The rapper’s postmodernism seems to be working: “I am whatever you say I am.”
But PlanetOut’s Matt Alsdorf raises some objection: “If he were rapping about lynching colored folk [it] would probably not fly.” Eminem’s defenders rationalize that he’s being satirical. But Alsdorf notes that even if one grants that, it is doubtful that Eminem’s “adolescent fans have mastered the posture of postmodern ironic detachment. Eminen’s words have consequences — and the press should call him on it, even if he is the best rapper of his generation.”
Meanwhile, Eminem’s been arrested once on “felonious assalt and concealed weapons charges” and again for pulling an unloaded gun on an associate of the rap group Insane Clown Posse.
And what was all that fuss over John Rocker’s objection to purple hair?