The state of Tennessee has begun an investigation in response to allegations of child abuse at Love in Action, a Memphis facility that advertises homosexual conversion therapy for adolescents, according to the state department of health [sic].
K. Daniele Edwards, a spokesperson for Child Services at the Tennessee Department of Health, confirmed an investigation is underway but declined to comment on the details. She noted that she presumes the Love in Action program would require licensing by the state.
Love in Action is not licensed by the Tennessee Departments of Health, Mental Health, Human Services, Child Services or Education, according to Rachel Lassiter of Gov. Phil Bredesen’s communications office.
[all emphasis added]
Alert reader Jerry brought the article quoted above to my attention. The piece is titled Tenn. investigates ex-gay camp, by Eartha Melzer and dated June 23, 2005 at ExpressGayNews
From the article, the following stood out:
-Blogger E.J. Friedman said that he had been corresponding with Zach via e-mail since March and became alarmed when he saw that Zach had begun to write that his world was coming to an end and that his parents were isolating him. “When I saw Zach had written in his blog, ‘all I can think of is killing my mother and killing myself’ I felt that clearly something needed to be said about the program,” Friedman said.
If anything, I believe that his parents ought to take most of the blame for coercing him against his will. Should we blame Love In Action for accepting him?
If anything, we should blame Love In Action for stupidity: any sort of intervention to change one’s sexual orientation cannot be forced upon a person. In fact, psychological treatment of any kind, whether it be for alcoholism or depression, or anything, cannot be forced. Coercion leads to all sorts of wide ranging issues. So, it should be fairly clear that to not acknowledge coercion as a major issue is stupidity.
Nah, I think the greater stupidity, if true would be to hold such a youth program without licensing. When it comes to kids the bar of responsibility is set higher (and rightly so). Baring the coercion issue, how do you know that theses people are a. trained and b. properly staffed/equipped to deal with minors. Hate to see some poor kid die cause no one knew first aid or there were not enough monitors or the building was not safe for the crowd ect….
Also quite frankly why on earth would you want a kid who DOES NOT want to be there. That could be quite disruptive in and of itself.
The lack of licensing further gives it a cult like demeanor.
Even Ben from scatteredwords.com has condemned them, and he is a pretty orthodox Christian with conservative beliefs regarding homosexuality.
I came across this article from Love in Action.
http://www.retirementwithapurpose.com/liahhostetler.html
Even though the people are misguided in their actions, I don’t believe them to be inherently bad people.
The following article brought a tear to my eye, because it would appear that at the very end, the mother finally accepted her son as gay, and acknowledged that he was in heaven despite never having converted his sexual orientation.
I would have more compassion for Smid, et al., but for two facts described by Wayne Besen on his website (I haven’t read his book, but have read Sylvia Pennington’s).
The first: there were two founders of Love in Action in the San Rafael days. The first was Kent Philpott, a heterosexual, who wrote The Third Sex?, describing six people who changed from gay to straight through prayer. Over time, it was revealed all six were still gay.
The second: The other founder of Love in Action, John Evans, denounced the program he helped create when his best friend, Jack McIntyre, committed suicide. He left a suicide note which Pennington quotes in her book, and which has even been posted recently on the web in the wake of the latest LIA fracus. It speaks clearly about what is wrong with LIA. It spoke so clearly to John Evans that he left his own organization. The founders of Exodus also realized through their own work that they were doing more harm than good. They not only left Exodus, they became life partners. Yet Exodus goes on today denying the ultimate lesson their two founders learned.
LIA has left a trail of destroyed lives, failures, shame, and self-loathing all the way from San Rafael to Memphis. Now LIA is trying to recast itself as some kind of 12-step-style program to curtail gay acts and to supress “same-sex attraction.”
If they listen closely to 12-steppers, they’ll hear some advice that I think has great relevance to their sordid history. “We keep doing the same things expecting different results.”
I understand people making mistakes in misguided attempts to do good. But there’s a point that the lack of efficacy of these programs, the destrutcion and even death that often follows in their wake, is so clear that they can’t be explained away as incompetence or stupidity. I think Love in Action is considerably past that point.
Ok — going way out on a limb — this is what I’ll watch for (hoping to see otherwise):1. having had quite a fair amount to do with community services that have “duty of care” as prime responsibility; any complaint will be investigated, regardless of who raises the concern or how it comes to the attention of, say, a Dept of Children’s Services. This does not indicate anything other than what it is — a requirement to quickly respond because of the potential for abuse with vulnerable people. Most just fizzle out, but you must respond (for parallel reference on the subject, google “Vatican” and “sex abuse”)2. Expect LIA to claim religious immunity. “I plead, it isn’t a crime for a parent to follow their religious beliefs. The State cannot interfer with this.” This would be a good thing, as it again exposes groups like this as religiously-inspired know-nothings — but that alone will not influence the views of the religious people that want to believe that LIA etc are a “solution”. see point 6.3. I anticipate that a great deal of pressure will now be placed on, say, a 16 year old client to not make trouble for their parents or their church. Given what we do know, LIA appear to be past masters at building up shame and guilt in particular individuals; they will be pulling no punches at this point. The purpose: to coerce silence (or worse).4. Throckmorton, Exodus et al will be nowhere to be seen in public on the fundamental issue of abuse/coercion etc (as, note, they have been to date). They’ll wheel out “experts” that nobody has ever heard of. Paging Dr. Rice, paging Dr. Rice…5. If worse comes to worse, LIA will simply decamp (ha) to a more amenable location. I heard Florida is lovely at this time of year.6. LIA and the parents will not “get” what this is really all about. Afterall, they are acting in love; and saving a mortal soul from the pits of hell. They will telephone conference with Regina Griggs (or wherever) about how to attack people and yet still claim to be the victim; possibly even a victim of a conspiracy.7. Regardless, some unfortunate kid is going to be put through the wringer. In 5 or 10 years time he will appear at some dive of a gay bar, ready to begin his life for real, and with more baggage than Hannibal crossing the Alps. If you do cross paths, remember this time and act accordingly.
Let’s cut to the chase. The kid, 16 years old, was apparently kidnapped and held without his consent. That’s the long and the short of it. A 16 year old might be considered a minor from a legal standpoint, but so what? At what age are the parents supposed to presumed to have relinquished deminion over their offspring?
Sorry, should be “dominion”
RE: John
If anything, I believe that his parents ought to take most of the blame for coercing him against his will. Should we blame Love In Action for accepting him?
Both are as bad as each other, but with that being said, the parents are naive to be suckered into the religious rhetoric of their parish priest/pastor, and LIA should hang its head in shame for selling a service that is false, and NEVER delivers what it promises.
If anything, we should blame Love In Action for stupidity: any sort of intervention to change one’s sexual orientation cannot be forced upon a person. In fact, psychological treatment of any kind, whether it be for alcoholism or depression, or anything, cannot be forced. Coercion leads to all sorts of wide ranging issues. So, it should be fairly clear that to not acknowledge coercion as a major issue is stupidity.
Alcoholism is a self destructive lifestyle; alcoholism is alcohol consumption taken to the extreme – anything taken to the extreme will be bad for you – it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, BUT for someone to change, they must first have a desire to change; once the *DESIRE* to change has been demostrated THEN family and friends can gather around and support him or her.
Regarding this young chaps sexuality and the so-called ‘ex-gay’ who runs the camp; the so-called ‘ex-gay’ is only disgruntled and ‘converted’ beecause he made some stupid decisions in his life, but instead of being an adult, picking himself up by the bootstraps and soldiering on, he blamed his sexuality.
If Zach’s parents wish to set him on a healthy life, they should be encouraging him to be responsible, take responsibility for choices being made, that ones sexuality isn’t the absolute focal point for existance, and to demonstrate to Zach that they (the parents) will always be there to love and support him when going through tough patches.
“I anticipate that a great deal of pressure will now be placed on, say, a 16 year old client to not make trouble for their parents or their church…they will be pulling no punches at this point. The purpose: to coerce silence (or worse)…”
Well…for what it’s worth it looks like Zach’s MySpace account was deleted last night sometime. Whether he did it himself as a result of that pressure you speak of, or someone got his password out of him somehow, or hacked it, nobody can say at this point. But there it is alright. Silence.
It’s a safe bet that those 1200 plus messages of love support from all over the world he received were bothering Smid considerably. But also, the stark and heartbreaking testimony of the kid’s own words. It all had to go. John Smid wants to erase that poor kid, and all the others in his clutches, from the inside out. Silence.
Bruce, it’s likely that the posts on Zach’s site have been cached elsewhere. Google comes to mind, but there are other sites that cache web pages. Memoryhole.com caches posts to a lot of web sites.
Let’s get something straight. A 16 year old might be legally a minor for some purposes. But that doesn’t mean that he is the possession of his parents. If he exists, and if he was put involuntarily put into the LIA program, he was kidnapped and held against his will. I do believe that kidnapping is a crime in most states.
5. If worse comes to worse, LIA will simply decamp (ha) to a more amenable location.
I hear there’s still some prime real estate available on the far side of the moon…
Bruce, it’s likely that the posts on Zach’s site have been cached elsewhere. Google comes to mind, but there are other sites that cache web pages. Memoryhole.com caches posts to a lot of web sites.
I think google has actually been tweaking its algorithms to get much of the blog chatter out of its results. There’s been some controversy about how blog chatter skews the rankings. But never mind. It’s a safe bet that his friends have been saving the pages, particularly the ones with all those messages from all over the world to him. Most browsers have a Save The Page function that captures the page “as is” to your local disk. I strongly doubt those pages are lost. Someday he’ll see them.
But Smid has won a little victory here anyway: now that little virtual wall strewn with so many stunning, heartfelt messages from all over the world has been, in effect, painted over. MySpace rules probably prevent them from being reposted anywhere publicly. But it would be nice if somebody else with the bandwidth capacity could step forward, and put up another space for people to leave their messages of love and support.
In fact, it could be really good if such a virtual wall were created for friends, caring relatives, and concerned people everywhere, to leave their messages for all the imprisoned ones (and even the self imprisoned ones). I don’t have that kind of bandwidth. Be nice if someone who did would step forward.
An expanded Eartha Melzer article was posted today regarding the LIA controversy. It includes qoutes from Peterson Toscano (“Doing Time in the Homo No Mo’ Half Way House” and former LIA participant), Joe Kort, Jeffry Ford, LIA and Exodus.
http://www.newyorkblade.com/2005/6-24/news/national/blogg.cfm
Norm!
Yeah… Go to the Wayback Machine page and try entering Zach’s page into it and you get the following:
We’re sorry, access to http://www.myspace.com/specialkid has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt.
But as I said…it’s a safe bet those pages are not lost. He’ll see them someday.
http://www.asafeplace.org/
Here’s the link to this groups “counseling” programs…from LIA’s website…this site even lists the staff who is involved…the group called Refuge. Anyway, it provides alot of information on this program.
The Zach’s myspace page appears to still exist. If you examine the url, it has a number of variables that control access to the content. I joined myspace to watch the controversy, and Zach’s page and all the comments still come up for me.
A lot of people who were thrilled with a couple hundred hits a day are getting up to a thousand, and are overrunning their alloted bandwidth because they’re blogging on this issue or linking and being linked from others who are.
I have no inside knowledge, but I can see how myspace want to kill off some access keys that are resulting in nothing but drive-by traffic and may be making it difficult for their real users to participate in their essentially private community.
Remember, myspace isn’t a mass-appeal blog like Daily Kos for instance. It is a private journal-style blog and was a safe space for Zach. Someplace he felt comfortable talking about his life in more honest terms than he did with his parents. At least until he came out to them and got sent to Love In Action for it.
It’s still there.
http://blog.myspace.com/specialkid
Yeah… The chatter I’m hearing on MySpace now is that it could just simply be a MySpace maintenance thing. They’ve been doing something with all the profiles, and Zach’s may simply be getting caught up in that. People over there have said it sometimes comes up when you go to the direct link. I found a couple friend links to it and they seem to reliably work. So this may be just a false alarm.
One good thing though, is that it seems to have scared a bunch of people over there into archiving his pages.
Hi ReganThat quote was from “Administrator Tommy Corman”, not Smid. Whatever — what cracked me up was the following “It’s like when I tell my 3 year old to take a bite of broccoli. You have a legal, moral and ethical obligation to mold a child.”Hmmm, Tennessee must be a rough place to raise a child given the expectations on the parent. Eating broccoli is a legal, moral AND ethical obligation???. Cripes.Corman’s dismissive attitude to the LIA program — comparing it to youth group, bible or Sunday school — shows what sort of an environment is at work there. If memory serves me right… none of my youth groups or bible school starting with the belief that I was a damaged and rebellious child that needed to be isolated and broken on the wheel. I’m hard pressed to imagine even the most loony religious group operating a youth group on that premise.Notably, Corman’s sole qualifications are that he was once alcohol and drug dependant. And an ever-straight.Also — which insurance companies reimburse for the cost of LIA? Corman said some did… ack, care to email Magellan Health Service and/or Throckmorton anyone?
I knew I would find this eventually…This is from Bob Davies, former executive director of Exodus; dated 2001:One of the recent rumors circulating about Exodus is that we run secret camps for teens, whose parents force them to go to these “de-programming camps” and get brainwashed out of homosexuality and into heterosexuality! We have had several calls from the media, asking us for details on these camps so they can include some information in an upcoming program on ex-gay ministry!Ooh, it’s even still online! [See”>http://www.oneby1.org/resources/top5myths.html%5BSee also “Myth #2” — plainly, this is no longer a myth under Chamber’s leadership. Nice.]And, let’s not neglect: http://exodusyouth.net/youth/help.html or the many on the PFOX list that will take on youths My”>http://www.pfox.org/asp/newsman/templates/newstemplate2.asp?articleid=123&zoneid=14My guess, whatever Exodus used to pretend about their programs… Exodus feel confident enough now to openly target young people, even if they are unwilling. Where is this heading folks?”Sanctimonious clap-trap”. That’s my “must use” expression for the rest of the day 🙂
I wrote to Smid. For all the good that’ll do. I just wish there were a commando squad to bust Zach and the rest of the prisoners out of there. Adolescence is hard enough without being locked down in a psychological torture chamber designed to maximize your self-hatred.
Someday one of these kids will snap and fill Refuge with automatic gunfire.
P.S. Has anyone registered the domain GodHatesSmid.com yet?
Sorry, hogging the blog butAccording to Julie Neils, spokeswoman for Exodus International, an umbrella group for ex-gay projects, Love in Action’s Refuge program is the only project they are affiliated with that focuses on gay teens.Oh really?All the live-in ministries do:http://www.exodus-international.org/ministry_pages/ministry-LiveIn.shtmlAs do five in Tennessee alone:http://www.exodus-international.org/ministry_pages/ministry-tn.shtmlGuess we can add “clueless” or “liar” to “spokeswoman for Exodus International”.
Others are chiming in. WitchesVoice has a discussion of the issue, with input from a couple of gay teens. There is also a satirical essay which I am posting here. RAJ, what do you think of it?
http://www.witchvox.com/wren/wn_detail.html?id=13263
Researchers today confirmed that years of study have shown a suspected christian gene to instead be one long associated with other pathologies. The identified gene was previously documented to cause psychotic delusions, and fantasies about golden calves, parted seas, all people having identical values, beliefs, and personality types, the Sun revolving around the Earth, all life existing for merely 6000 years, and other detachment from reality.
This finding helps to identity useful reparative therapy to cure christianity. The christian pathology may have genetic sources, but is largely a matter of choice. That choice can be changed with anti-psychotic medications, along side reprogramming clinical programs to cure those afflicted of bad choices and learned pathological patterns. Extreme cases have been known to require more serious treatment, like lead pipes upside the head, or burning at the stake.
The American Reprogramming Association wasted no time in moving for legislation to ban christianity, and mandate anyone so afflicted be commited to an ARA clinic as soon as space allows. Asked about the minority of self-identified christians who appear to lack delusional patterns used to motivate violent hate crimes, ARA spokesman Gene Yus said, “given the propensity for child abuse and hate crimes by christians, do those few who don’t act that way really matter? After all, why do they call themselves christians if they’re not deranged psychotics overdue for reprogramming? With this new research, we can autopsy them and document that they have a different but serious pathology.”
That’s a great article you found grantdale! Maybe the teen de-programming camps were so secret, he didn’t even know about them.
Bob Davies also said:
“People usually come to Exodus due to their own desires–not someone else’s. Shouldn’t they have the right to do so?
“Here’s how I explain it to reporters in one sentence: “The majority of people contact Exodus because of an internal conflict between their religious/moral convictions and their sexual desires.” In other words, ultimately the motivation is INTERNAL–not something imposed on them by OUTSIDE FORCES like family/friends and society at large.”
I sure miss the 1990s.
RE: Regan DuCasse
I had a look at his site as well; the sad part, he sounds like a really great kid; too bad his parents think that it is their purpose in their lives to make this kids life a living hell.
Really shows you the true face of Christianity when the sugar coating is removed – an undercurrent of bigotry and a superiority complex equal of that to Stalin and Hitler.
Thank you for writing about this. I am working very hard to raise awareness on this issue. I am working to get every GSA in the nation to endorse a letter condemning the camp, and getting involved in awareness-related activities concerning the camp’s practices.
This comment removed because it’s author did not provide a verifiable source for a press release quoted.
I wanted to post the recent press release because I believe that it pertains to the abuse that Love and Action and Exodus do to others. They must be desperate if they are using others like myself as pictures on their website. I pray for Zach everyday. I hope this investigation sheds light on the truth about Exodus and Love and Action.