Yesterday, I noted that Exodus spokesman Randy Thomas said ex-gay ministries don’t emphasize “gender-affirming” role modeling. Here’s an indication to the contrary: A statement by Exodus executive director Alan Chambers in the organization’s July 2003 newsletter (PDF document).
I know that the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is targeting our nation’s young people with a one sided message that homosexuality isn’t changeable and doing so with force, a lot of money and even more public support. And, that makes me mad. Why is it that GLSEN can raise more money to teach our children to hate God’s word, encourage them to try all forms of sexual perversion at a their young ages and convince our public school systems to endorse it while we sit here struggling for the money to hire one person to even try and simply talk to the kids who are dying on the vine? It isn’t right!
Now hear me: I am begging for your help, financial partnership, prayer support, and for you to be proactive in the host of other ways needed to meet the need as well as to prevent homosexuality. You can write a check today for $1.00 or $1,000,000, call your pastor and ask him/her to invite a representative from Exodus to speak, offer to pay your pastor or youth pastor’s way to the upcoming Exodus conference, attend school board meetings, city council meetings or support the local Exodus member or applicant ministry in your area. You can pray daily and specifically for God’s message of redemption and prevention to reach the world.
We can prevent homosexuality from gaining any more ground and if we work hard to proclaim to, educate and impact our culture we can begin preventing homosexuality in the lives of young people. We get calls
from kids as young as 9 who are experiencing same sex attraction issues. I know how awesome it was that I found help at 18. I can only imagine being able to really catch the majority of young people that early and earlier. It can be done because We Are the Church.
Call me a skeptic.
Preventing homosexuality in young kids would be achieved — how?
By promoting resentment toward antiviolence groups like GLSEN and falsely casting them as perverted anti-Christian organizations if they disagree with Exodus?
By supplanting a normal home life and public-school reading, writing and arithmetic with religious-right lessons in gender-affirming role modeling?
By redefining the church to include only the “We” who agree with Exodus?
Chambers never quite says how he intends to protect pre-teen children from the adolescent maturation process. However, the book ad following Chambers’ essay provides a clue:
A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality —by Joe Nicolosi
In the groundbreaking book A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality Joseph and Linda Ames Nicolosi uncover the most significant factors that contribute to children’s healthy sense of themselves as male or female. Listening to moving recollections from ex-gay men and women who describe what was missing in their own childhoods, the Nicolosis provide clear insight for identifying potential developmental roadblocks and give practical advice to parents for helping their children securely identify with their gender. Replete with personal stories from parents, children and ex-gay strugglers, A Parent’s Guide offers compassion and hope for all those parents who seek to lay a foundation for a healthy heterosexual identity in their children.
Regrettably, the ad contains no acknowledgment that the Nicolosis’ treatments are not working for 70 percent or more of ex-gays. (According to Chambers’ own claims of success rates. The Spitzer study suggests fewer succeed.) There’s no recognition that many gay men are, if anything, too masculine. And I find no indication that the Nicolosis respect the dignity, spirituality, or civil rights of those who are not helped by “gender affirmation.”
What really disgusts me about the whole “ex-gay” phenom is not just their deception, but their ignorance. To them, “gender” and “orientation” are fused and confused. Gender is a sense of who one is; orientation is who you are attracted to. They think gays are attracted to the opposite sex because they are confused about what gender they are. They really have no explanation for someone who is say, transgendered but a MtF lesbian or a Ftm gay male. I t entirely blows their facile construct.
Great site for gender identity questions.