On his personal blog, Exodus executive director Alan Chambers shares his letter to the Boston Globe, responding to a Jan. 20 article (archive fee required) about monogamous gay teen-age couples’ aspirations for getting married someday.
Chambers accuses the Boston Globe of
- promoting underage teen marriage,
- encouraging teens to drop out,
- excusing underage marriage when the partners are the same gender,
- encouraging the spread of HIV/AIDS among teens.
Chambers’ accusations are puzzling. None of the teens plans to marry before graduation. None is considering dropping out. Their parents are supportive. None of the teens is depicted as engaging in the unsafe or multiple-partner sex that put teens, regardless of sexual orientation, at risk for HIV.
Chambers seems unable to understand a short, plainly written article about gay teen couples who express the same forward-looking aspirations for marriage as heterosexual teen couples.
Chambers’ letter is not helped by his use (and misquotation) of controversial gay-gene research by Dean Hamer.
I read the article when it came out. Looked to be a nice couple.
I’m sure that the Boston Globe gives a tinker’s damn what Chambers has to say about it (/sarcasm)
Again Alan, like so many anti-gay types, pipes up with the “there is no evidence of a genetic/biological basis for homosexuality.” Funny, every single objective scientific analysis has provided evidence of such a basis – from the existence of homosexuality in every culture and ethnicity, to the twin studies that demonstrate the genetic basis for homosexuality, to the maternal inheritence and birth order effects in male homosexuality, to the pysiologic differences between gay and straight men and gay and straight women.
He also pipes up with the “tens of thousands of people” having changed the sexuality – well where are these people? Why are they not standing up and screaming about their “cures”? Why is it that the same “ex-gay” spokespeople appear again and again (until, of course, they “fall off the wagon” like Michael Johnson, and then like 1984 they simply are erased from the record)?
Of course Alan doesn’t like the Boston Globe article – it actually presented gay people as normal human beings with normal human aspirations. And I would love to know where the “monogamous gay relationships last only two months” crap comes from.