revtj
11-03-2006, 08:15 PM
We had a fantastic press conference today which included Besen, a PFLAG mom who nearly made me cry, an ex-ex-gay who says his experience with Nicolosi has caused him to want nothing to do with religion ever again, an out African American pastor, & 2 civil rights leaders. Whew! And we've got the protest tomorrow at the church compound in Woodstock, GA. Please remember us in your prayers.
Here is the print version of a statement I released for media:
First of all I would like to say that Soulforce Atlanta and Truth Wins Out respect the constitutional right that we share with FOF & NARTH which makes it possible to have a civil debate about the issues we care about so much. Our goal is not to be intolerant of NARTH or FOF but to challenge the misinformation and non-truth which have repeatedly been demonstrated to be a pivotal point of NARTH and FOF’s anti-gay agenda.
A NARTH spokesman recently published an article suggesting an ‘alternative viewpoint’ to the kidnapping, enslavement and denial of basic human dignity and civil rights of Africans sold into slavery in America. The group says the slaves actually came to a better life in the Americas than they had in Africa. Therefore the millions of enslaved, (not to mention the estimated 14 million who were drowned en route), those forced to sexually procreate for profit, and the selling of their family members so that the African slave family unit could never be cohesive, supportive and therefore threatening to their white owners, somehow represents an ideal of family values to NARTH and FOF.
There is no alternative viewpoint in this opinion. It is white supremacy and it has existed in America since its beginnings. It has been rejected by reasonable people and people of faith repeatedly. It is no mistake that FOF & NARTH are applying this kind of logic to gay families. Their goal is segregation, religiously, psychologically and humanly.
NARTH makes LGBT and questioning people acceptable to their faith communities only if they agree to become something they are not. Gay people are dogged with emotional and religious messages that are wrapped in pseudo-science trying to force them to be what the nice white Christians want them to be.
The tactics of the ex-gay industry have changed dramatically over the last 40 years mostly because none of them work. Genital electric shock, aversive- conditioning therapy sometimes involving pornography, falsifying studies, statistics and numbers deliberately hawked without basis in legitimate research or scientific methodology have caused the ex-gay approach to be rejected by every professional psychological, psychiatric and clinical group except the ones they fund. Even the American Association of Pastoral Counselors rejects their methodology and the premises of their work.
And so the revisionary view of American slavery actually presents us with a good example of how this anti-gay industry approaches history, science, civil rights and the common good. They want to pour everything into an ‘Ozzie & Harriet’ paradigm, and they make an idol out of this kind of cheesy nuclear family. They bear false witness by making up science, revising history and statistics and by inducing testimony from former gays in exchange for payment and prestige within their industry. They covet the money and fortunes of people who are frightened by homosexuality and the so-called gay agenda. They reject any scholarship which would be true to the biblical norms of polygamy and misogyny which saturate the world view out of which the Bible came to us. They exchange the truth for a lie by holding out the impossible task of changing sexual orientation through nothing more than snake-oil religion. They have revised the Bible, science, the family, and faith to suit a mega-money-making anti-gay agenda.
But we are here to proclaim that FOF & NARTH are not our enemies. For many of us, they are misguided brothers and sisters in a faith we hold precious. The enemy is the misinformation, just as it was in the days of slavery. We are determined to expose the truth about this greedy, anti-gay hoax and we wish to do it in peace by speaking the truth in love.
What you see here today is not a multi-million dollar enterprise. We have organized this grass roots campaign with barely a thousand dollars of our own money. But the truth you can hear from those who have been spiritually and psychologically wounded by the anti-gay industry is priceless. We are here to tell our stories because we must tell our stories. We must do it for every gay Christian, Jew, Muslim, Atheist or confused person who is trying to find out the truth about homosexuality, sexual orientation and gender identity. We represent a virtuous grass roots response to an industry that continues to exploit people with fake research and tenuous testimonies. We are here to speak the truth in love.
Let me turn to the truth claims of NARTH and explain why we reject them. First of all, it is not significant that a homosexual can engage in heterosexual sex if they choose to do this. In fact, we know of many gay people who have lived heterosexual lives only to later come out as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. We think it is unethical for a clinician to use religion to try and obligate a client to a sexual orientation that does not feel normal to them. We think it is equally unethical to use religion to appeal to baseline fears of sexuality and normalcy in an effort to manipulate a client or patient into stating they prefer any orientation that is uncomfortable to them. Finally, we feel that the rights and dignity of a patient or client have been violated if a clinician makes a promise to a patient or client that they can become another sexual orientation through a mixture of religion and therapies. This promise, we insist, violates every professional standard of conduct, and is tantamount to emotional and spiritual abuse.
But the anti-gay industry says these patients are coming to them already unhappy with their sexual orientation and wanting to change. We do not doubt that this is true in some cases, however, it does not logically follow that because a person is depressed, sexually dysfunctional, or suffering from low self-esteem or oppression sickness, they are therefore to be cured by being magically changed into to a heterosexual. This is misdiagnosis at its worst and quackery at its best.
Soulforce sees the essential problem as misinformation. Human sexuality has only been studied scientifically for a little over 100 years. It is still a taboo subject in many contexts, and deviations from the norm of heterosexuality, possibly as little as 20% of the experiences of a given population, are still being investigated and understood. No one left, right, or center can claim to have final clinical evidence because there is insufficient data. That insufficiency feeds myth and stereotype and ends up being the trump card of the ex-gay hoax.
That celibacy is an option for people seeking spiritual insight and objectivity about their own sexual behavior is something affirmed by numerous religious traditions and admittedly can be an enhancement to clinical therapy around sexual identity issues. However, the forced obligation of abstinence is not the same as the ancient spiritual discipline of celibacy. To frighten a client or patient into abstinence, using their own doubts and misinformation as support, is emotionally risky. Even with the client’s permission and willingness, abstinence imposed under religious threat must be considered unethical and an abuse of the patient-client relationship.
We seek to match NARTH’s misinformation and the damage it does with information. We do not seek to censor any alternatives including the possibilities of bisexuality with a given preference for one sex or the other, or the gift of celibacy as it is seen by the longstanding traditions of the world’s religions. We need only mention in passing the thousands of happy, well-adjusted homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender folk who fly under the radar every day. But with every option on the table, we demand that NARTH cease and desist from unethical manipulation of information in the treatment of patients. We insist that the practices of physical, spiritual and emotional abuse be deemed prosecutable as unethical conduct for any clinician or practitioner, religious or otherwise. These are merely the same standards duly trained and credentialed professionals would be held to in any other public or private practice with clients.
Finally, Soulforce affirms that there is indeed divine liberation for LGBT and questioning people, and that liberation is now and always will be rooted in authentic rational, reasonable, scientific research. Jesus asked, “Who among you, when your child asks for bread, would give them a stone?” We are here to testify that many of us tried to eat that stone we were given, and only after great struggle and confusion, we found instead the Bread of Life, the Logos, the Divine logic ordained by God and pursued by westerners since the early questioning of the Greek philosophers to the rise of science and medicine following the Enlightenment, and we have tasted and we have seen, that the truth is good. We may not be visible to people who aren’t looking to find us, but we are happy, well-adjusted and gay, many of us strong people of faith, and we will not be silent while lies destroy people’s spirits and their lives.
We must turn the stones NARTH is giving our children and our families into the bread of truth by witnessing to the truth and by exposing the stone for exactly what it is: dead dogma, insufficient to support life and perpetuate love.
Thank you and God Bless you.:love:
Here is the print version of a statement I released for media:
First of all I would like to say that Soulforce Atlanta and Truth Wins Out respect the constitutional right that we share with FOF & NARTH which makes it possible to have a civil debate about the issues we care about so much. Our goal is not to be intolerant of NARTH or FOF but to challenge the misinformation and non-truth which have repeatedly been demonstrated to be a pivotal point of NARTH and FOF’s anti-gay agenda.
A NARTH spokesman recently published an article suggesting an ‘alternative viewpoint’ to the kidnapping, enslavement and denial of basic human dignity and civil rights of Africans sold into slavery in America. The group says the slaves actually came to a better life in the Americas than they had in Africa. Therefore the millions of enslaved, (not to mention the estimated 14 million who were drowned en route), those forced to sexually procreate for profit, and the selling of their family members so that the African slave family unit could never be cohesive, supportive and therefore threatening to their white owners, somehow represents an ideal of family values to NARTH and FOF.
There is no alternative viewpoint in this opinion. It is white supremacy and it has existed in America since its beginnings. It has been rejected by reasonable people and people of faith repeatedly. It is no mistake that FOF & NARTH are applying this kind of logic to gay families. Their goal is segregation, religiously, psychologically and humanly.
NARTH makes LGBT and questioning people acceptable to their faith communities only if they agree to become something they are not. Gay people are dogged with emotional and religious messages that are wrapped in pseudo-science trying to force them to be what the nice white Christians want them to be.
The tactics of the ex-gay industry have changed dramatically over the last 40 years mostly because none of them work. Genital electric shock, aversive- conditioning therapy sometimes involving pornography, falsifying studies, statistics and numbers deliberately hawked without basis in legitimate research or scientific methodology have caused the ex-gay approach to be rejected by every professional psychological, psychiatric and clinical group except the ones they fund. Even the American Association of Pastoral Counselors rejects their methodology and the premises of their work.
And so the revisionary view of American slavery actually presents us with a good example of how this anti-gay industry approaches history, science, civil rights and the common good. They want to pour everything into an ‘Ozzie & Harriet’ paradigm, and they make an idol out of this kind of cheesy nuclear family. They bear false witness by making up science, revising history and statistics and by inducing testimony from former gays in exchange for payment and prestige within their industry. They covet the money and fortunes of people who are frightened by homosexuality and the so-called gay agenda. They reject any scholarship which would be true to the biblical norms of polygamy and misogyny which saturate the world view out of which the Bible came to us. They exchange the truth for a lie by holding out the impossible task of changing sexual orientation through nothing more than snake-oil religion. They have revised the Bible, science, the family, and faith to suit a mega-money-making anti-gay agenda.
But we are here to proclaim that FOF & NARTH are not our enemies. For many of us, they are misguided brothers and sisters in a faith we hold precious. The enemy is the misinformation, just as it was in the days of slavery. We are determined to expose the truth about this greedy, anti-gay hoax and we wish to do it in peace by speaking the truth in love.
What you see here today is not a multi-million dollar enterprise. We have organized this grass roots campaign with barely a thousand dollars of our own money. But the truth you can hear from those who have been spiritually and psychologically wounded by the anti-gay industry is priceless. We are here to tell our stories because we must tell our stories. We must do it for every gay Christian, Jew, Muslim, Atheist or confused person who is trying to find out the truth about homosexuality, sexual orientation and gender identity. We represent a virtuous grass roots response to an industry that continues to exploit people with fake research and tenuous testimonies. We are here to speak the truth in love.
Let me turn to the truth claims of NARTH and explain why we reject them. First of all, it is not significant that a homosexual can engage in heterosexual sex if they choose to do this. In fact, we know of many gay people who have lived heterosexual lives only to later come out as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. We think it is unethical for a clinician to use religion to try and obligate a client to a sexual orientation that does not feel normal to them. We think it is equally unethical to use religion to appeal to baseline fears of sexuality and normalcy in an effort to manipulate a client or patient into stating they prefer any orientation that is uncomfortable to them. Finally, we feel that the rights and dignity of a patient or client have been violated if a clinician makes a promise to a patient or client that they can become another sexual orientation through a mixture of religion and therapies. This promise, we insist, violates every professional standard of conduct, and is tantamount to emotional and spiritual abuse.
But the anti-gay industry says these patients are coming to them already unhappy with their sexual orientation and wanting to change. We do not doubt that this is true in some cases, however, it does not logically follow that because a person is depressed, sexually dysfunctional, or suffering from low self-esteem or oppression sickness, they are therefore to be cured by being magically changed into to a heterosexual. This is misdiagnosis at its worst and quackery at its best.
Soulforce sees the essential problem as misinformation. Human sexuality has only been studied scientifically for a little over 100 years. It is still a taboo subject in many contexts, and deviations from the norm of heterosexuality, possibly as little as 20% of the experiences of a given population, are still being investigated and understood. No one left, right, or center can claim to have final clinical evidence because there is insufficient data. That insufficiency feeds myth and stereotype and ends up being the trump card of the ex-gay hoax.
That celibacy is an option for people seeking spiritual insight and objectivity about their own sexual behavior is something affirmed by numerous religious traditions and admittedly can be an enhancement to clinical therapy around sexual identity issues. However, the forced obligation of abstinence is not the same as the ancient spiritual discipline of celibacy. To frighten a client or patient into abstinence, using their own doubts and misinformation as support, is emotionally risky. Even with the client’s permission and willingness, abstinence imposed under religious threat must be considered unethical and an abuse of the patient-client relationship.
We seek to match NARTH’s misinformation and the damage it does with information. We do not seek to censor any alternatives including the possibilities of bisexuality with a given preference for one sex or the other, or the gift of celibacy as it is seen by the longstanding traditions of the world’s religions. We need only mention in passing the thousands of happy, well-adjusted homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender folk who fly under the radar every day. But with every option on the table, we demand that NARTH cease and desist from unethical manipulation of information in the treatment of patients. We insist that the practices of physical, spiritual and emotional abuse be deemed prosecutable as unethical conduct for any clinician or practitioner, religious or otherwise. These are merely the same standards duly trained and credentialed professionals would be held to in any other public or private practice with clients.
Finally, Soulforce affirms that there is indeed divine liberation for LGBT and questioning people, and that liberation is now and always will be rooted in authentic rational, reasonable, scientific research. Jesus asked, “Who among you, when your child asks for bread, would give them a stone?” We are here to testify that many of us tried to eat that stone we were given, and only after great struggle and confusion, we found instead the Bread of Life, the Logos, the Divine logic ordained by God and pursued by westerners since the early questioning of the Greek philosophers to the rise of science and medicine following the Enlightenment, and we have tasted and we have seen, that the truth is good. We may not be visible to people who aren’t looking to find us, but we are happy, well-adjusted and gay, many of us strong people of faith, and we will not be silent while lies destroy people’s spirits and their lives.
We must turn the stones NARTH is giving our children and our families into the bread of truth by witnessing to the truth and by exposing the stone for exactly what it is: dead dogma, insufficient to support life and perpetuate love.
Thank you and God Bless you.:love: