Sfweekly.com lampoons a trio of Northern California ex-gay ministries.
One group helps parents reinforce their own stereotypes about “the gay lifestyle” that they imagine their adult children to be living. Group leader Carol has no qualifications in counseling or medicine, so it’s no surprise when the parental support talk runs amok. The parents condemn their children to hell, outright. They imagine their children to be pedophiles. They collectively reinforce their own namecalling — lobbing exactly the sorts of insults and stereotypes about their children that, Carol claims, cause homosexuality: “People call them sissy-boy or queer or fag, and they begin to believe that.” A bizarre sort of demon envy is evident, as the parents mistakenly attribute more power and influence to Satan than to God Almighty.
Like PFOX, this parents’ group seems never to have met honest, less-than-cured exgays. Is this because these parents barricade themselves within an artificial world of stereotypes, or is it because exgay advocates make no effort to set antigay parents’ groups straight?
“Jose,” the next profiled exgay advocate, is a bit more grounded in reality than the parents. He is honest than change of sexual attraction is a slow process — but dishonest, perhaps, in failing to acknowledge that significant change, if it happens at all, rarely lasts long. What Jose seems to advocate is not healthy, sexually aware celibacy, but rather asexuality — a denial or suppression of all sexual attraction.
Whereas Jose sees the exgay lifestyle as a journey into asexuality, the sfweekly.com article portrays a third profiled ministry as a warrior cult. These warriors invent the vice of “cannibalism” when a healthy, unaddicted gay person offers no tangible vices to blame on homosexuality. The warriors also, allegedly, accuse all men of wanting lust, not intimacy. Naturally, this belief raises troubling questions about the warriors themselves:
If this were true of men, then aren’t the exgay warriors condemned to a life of lust? Is it really wise for women to marry lust addicts? And might these exgay warriors really be the “man-hating feminists” popularized by their own conservative mythology?
The sfweekly.com article doesn’t explore questions as deeply as I’d like. It identifies none of the exgay advocates or groups, so most of its observations are unverifiable. Furthermore, the writer’s disguises and deceptions steer the story in some intentionally extreme directions.
As it happens, the third ministry’s slogan easily identifies the group, via Google, as New Hope Ministries. The article might have benefited from a look at NHM’s history: It was founded by two of the exgay movement’s grandparents, Frank and Anita Worthen.
The damage allegedly done by the Worthens to former exgay clients is profiled in Wayne Besen’s book, Anything But Straight.
(Hat tip: Dan Gonzales)
I believe Leanne Payne and Mario Berger were among the first to start this “cannibal” nonsense. I first heard about it in the late 70’s. The theory back then (still maybe) that these men are hungering for masculinity (father wound) and attempt to commune with it and ingest it through homosexual behavior with other men that possess it. In the same way as some cannibals attempt to ingest the bravery and courage of the enemy warrior they have killed, and then eat.
Pretty typical of some of these “ministries;” they have a paradigm that tends to make a certain amount of sense on the surface, but when you step back and look at it critically (NOT encouraged by the ministry) you see that something is seriously deranged with the construct.
For example, a former NFL star, now working with youth football in Texas was talking about this father wound being rampant in the NFL and 95% of the boardrooms across America (NPR interview). Applying the cannibal theory to this, one would expect a virtual epidemic of homosexual behavior in professional sports and corporate America.
Like most ex-gay explanations for the etiology of same-sex attraction, this cannibal compulsion just doesn’t hold up to critical examination.
As MUCH as part of me agrees with you I would be against a class action lawsuit. I wouldn’t be opposed to individual lawsuits against individual organizations but not a class action one goes too far. The trouble with ex-gay organizations is that they involve two things that have very little regulation, Religion and Psychology.
As destructive as it can be I would prefer that religion be as unregulated as possible. Regulating religion is the first step toward being intolerant of other religions.
I would prefer that psychology be more regulated, but psychology unlike medicine isn’t a hard science per se. There is a lot more gray area when it comes to psychology and a lot less agreement on disorders and standard treatment. In fact that is part of the reason why insurance companies don’t like to pay for psychologists. They don’t quite know what they are getting.
Although conservative Christians are dragging screaming and using religion to prop up there own insecurities. I suspect that eventually the mainline Christian churches will eventually embrace us. It just takes time. Sometimes lifetimes, but things often do change for the better. What is much more likely to happen is that they will loose clients and be pushed into the far right as more and more people see this as something that a. doesn’t need to be changed and b. doesn’t need to be changed by a church of all things(i.e. maybe a brian surgen?).
Nicolosi is a big fan of the “cannibalism” theory too. (former patient here)
did you email him at xiranicolo@aol.com?
when I was in therapy six years ago he had me email him at that addy and as of about two years ago it was still good when Linda used it to email a letter to my college newspaper I was working for at the time.
I thought that the article’s point about sex/alcohol addiction being confused with the mere fact of homosexuality was great. Once I got a handle on my depression, at least in part, through Lexapro, I was able to take some steps towards accepting myself and working through false guilt. My previous psychiatrist suggested that even if I hadn’t accepted myself, the Lexapro might have had the same effect. My (Christian) parents suggested that those kinds of drugs can change your personality.
The fact is that, just as no ‘gay gene’ has been discovered, no ‘gay-creating paradigm’ in family life has been discovered. There is not one, because, like heterosexuality, gayness is varied and woven into a person’s self-identity as well as their genetics/biology.
Great link, I’m bookmarking the article.