Conservative David Horowitz strikes back against Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America:
Render Unto Caesar
By David Horowitz
FrontPage magazine
Last week, Horowitz criticized the religious right over its harassment of Republican National Committee chairman Marc Racicot.
In Knight’s reply to that column, Horowitz now finds instances of:
- intolerance
- anti-Semitism
- strawman argumentation
- a “systematic confusion of ethnic, gender, or sexual groups with leftwing political agendas.”
Horowitz’s belief about the exgay movement:
The conversion movements have been miserable failures. They have recruited a highly motivated and extreme minority among homosexuals — people so unhappy with their condition that they are desperate to change it — and the results are pathetic. Only a tiny minority of what is itself a tiny minority of people willing to go through the conversion process achieve a well-adjusted heterosexual result.
It is factually accurate that exgays constitute a small segment of the gay population, and that the movement’s self-defined successes are even fewer. Whether Horowitz believes people should enter an exgay program is unclear; it may depend on whether exgay programs become more honest about success rates.
Horowitz’s conclusion is, it seems to me, inescapable for conservatives:
A mission to rescue homosexuals is a religious mission; it is not an appropriate political cause. Would Robert Knight like the government to investigate every American to determine whether they are homosexual or not and then compel those who are to undergo conversion therapy — or else? This is a prescription for a totalitarian state. No (philosophical, small-government) conservative should want any part of it.
I wish to thank an anonymous Ex-Gay Watch reader for pointing out this article.