According to Wayne Besen the recently taped Dr. Phil episode on gay teens will air Wednesday (tomorrow).
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According to Wayne Besen the recently taped Dr. Phil episode on gay teens will air Wednesday (tomorrow).
I watched it today. Not really about gay teens. The theme was gays (I guess). First segment was about a 30 something lesbian who didn’t get along with her whiney straight sister.
Second segment was an ex-gay priest (what denomination I couldn’t say), who was celibate, and a young man who had nothing good to say about ex-gay programs. This segment lasted about 10 minutes. They did feature a GLSEN coordinator of some sort who was gay-friendly.
The last segment was a couple who were worried that their 4 year old son might be gay because he liked to play with dolls.
While not especially hostile to glbt people it wasn’t terribly supportive either. I must say I wasn’t especially impressed with Dr. Phil (no relationship to me 😉
The mother of the 4-year old was going on and on about not wanting her son to be gay and instead of trying to tell her to deal with her issues, he told her to give him boy toys and if that didn’t work then “get help”.
The audience repeatedly applauded the ex-gay preacher. I think at one point he said that millions of people have become ex-gay.
The show was a mess, and to me Dr. Phil seemed very intimidated by the subject matter and by what his audience may feel regarding gays. It was a show he never should have done.
Not to sound like a paranoid person or someone who’s suspicious of everyone, but it appears that there is some screening process that takes place for members of the studio audience.
This info is derived from the drphil.com website. You need to speak to an audience coordinator.
Again, I’m not impressed. I think Springer is on at the same time. 🙂
This article discusses the efforts to stop Lake Washington High School from allowing ex-gays to preach and brainwash on their property.
https://www.247gay.com/article.cfm?section=66&id=7396
I watched the Dr. Phil episode and he’s absolutely useless when it comes to this issue.
Justin Tanner (name?) barely had a chance to speak and the ex-gay minister-is a celibate priest who just repeated the old (ex gay ministry) party line-distant, cold father yadda yadda yadda.
But wait! He knew ‘many’ ex gays with wives and children.
And the fact that ‘turning from homosexuality’ requires becoming religious is a HUGE clue right there. Not only do you get a new heterosexual, you get a Christian too.
As for the minister (David) he has yet to test his heterosexuality, with a hetero relationship.
And where have we seen that before?
The families involved, a lesbian in contention with her religious mother and sister and the divorcing young couple with the little son who liked girl stuff-bottom line, Dr. Phil wasn’t helping them at all and pretty much kept validating the people who had a problem with homosexuality, period.
I didn’t appreciate the families justifying their prejudice against someone they say they loved.
I never will.
And no one said that theirs WAS prejudice. And that’s exactly what it was.
The lesbian couldn’t tell her family it wasn’t a choice and here they were waiting for that to happen.
They don’t care what unfair or impossible disciplines were heaped on ‘the gay one’ and that clearly the ‘struggle’ is with heterosexual conceit, not homosexuality itself.
Why can’t a heterosexual just look at their own sexuality and think about what it would take to change it and how they’d feel if people kept demanding they change into a gay person, no mater what other talents they had?
If heteros either can’t imagine it, or don’t want to-then they should be able to empathize with the fact that being gay isn’t a choice anymore than being hetero.
The difference is the coercion to change or validation to never have to.
I’m getting real tired of ex gays. They ALL sound alike, say exactly the same things and don’t seem able to deviate from a rote response regarding ALL gay people.
Religion cannot and should not be allowed to make people commit such outrages within families.
It’s dangerous to give religion such free reign.
Case in point: an Amish community has five children infected with polio. They refuse vaccination based on their beliefs. Yet, they’ve now unnecessarily committed these children to be cripples or at risk of death.
Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in blood or tissue donation. Were they to refuse this medical intervention for their kids, in any other situation would be called before the law as neglectful.
Now these are matters of life or death and unnecessary risks, avoided by modern medical intervention.
There is no cure for homosexuality, there is no prevention and it’s indistinct from heterosexuality.
It’s not fatal, communicable or a compromise to any other normal function.
Yet, religious people, despite ALL evidence to the contrary, try to treat homosexuality as all of these-mental illness, addiction, emotional disorder, catching through pedophilia, fatal from HIV/AIDS and life shortening.
And yet, heterosexuals with these pathologies (even if genetic), or religious restrictions: are not banned from having children or taking custody of them.
Wednesday, a woman age 23, with three children ages 1, 3 and six-said voices told her to drown them. She stripped each naked and threw them into the San Francisco Bay. They found the body of the 3 yr old and are searching for the bodies of the other two.
Now there is a LOT of energy, legal and social committed to banning gay people from even being HONEST about who they are, let alone marry and stabilize their family situation.
But organize our laws to ban incompetent heterosexuals from doing the same? Naaaaaaaaah!
This is why, the moral, traditional, protective or preventive motives to ban gay marriage coming from the radical religious, or any conservatives is a pile of **it!
The Dr. Phil show was pretty shallow whether you are gay, a gay activist, or an ex-gay.
This is cut and pasted from Dr. Phil’s website:
Is Homosexuality a Learned Behavior?
Christine: My 22-year-old daughter is in a relationship with a woman. I don’t believe she is a lesbian. Could this be a form of rebellion and a result of getting in with the “wrong” crowd? Can homosexuality be learned and unlearned?
Dr. Phil: Homosexuality is not a learned behavior. A sexual orientation is inherited; you are wired that way. Certainly some people will experiment with a gay lifestyle, and a gay person might experiment with a heterosexual one. If she is really gay, she will find a place in that life and in that community. The important thing is that you just love her through that. What difference does it make if she is gay? Accept her, support her and do not be judgmental. It is difficult enough for her to live openly and honestly in this society; don’t put your judgment on top of that.
From The Show
Ask Dr. Phil
Sounds like Doc. Phil was not telling his audience in that show what needed to be said – like his statement above.
“Dr” Phil strikes me as being just another pop-psychologist who’s got a gig. Maybe he’ll end up like “Dr” Joyce Brothers (remember her?), something of a charicature.
Psychology as a science has a long way to go before it can be taken seriously. “Dr” Phil isn’t helping it any. But, it should be acknowledged, that isn’t his goal–his goal is to sell advertising time, which is the goal of any show on TV.
I found the commercials drove me nuts. And Justin didn’t get nearly enough time to speak. I was also frustrated that the priest got to name his ministry on the air, but Justin didn’t (he runs GayChristian.net). I thought that was unfair. But Justin was very well spoken, and I was very proud of him.
I also thought, given the title of the episode, that they spent way to long on that first family, because as far as I could tell (and I kind of got the impression that Dr. Phil thought this as well), their problem really did not have much to do with one of the daughters being gay, but with the rivalry between the sisters. Both sisters seemed to be unreasonable to me.
I thought Justin did a good job. I would really like to see him get more time in a better venue. I agree, the show was sorely lacking, though.
I was very disappointed to see the Priest be dishonest when he misrepresented the criticisms of the Spitzer study by claiming the detractors were all gay activists. I talk about it briefly on my blog.
Yeah, that thing about Spitzer pissed me off too.
I caught the Spitzer comment too. The minister failed to mention some important things about that latest study.
Like how narrow and remote it was, and his test subjects had all be reprogrammed in some way.
I didn’t appreciate his slam on critics being all gay activists either.
Your average heterosexual person doesn’t know all this about the ex gay movement. They don’t really have an interest in studying it or getting more information.
I’ve been trying to give ex gays a chance to speak for several years now, and they don’t really have anything to say, except the same thing over and over and over again, and only get defensive when you point out the holes in their system.
Or…they get strangely cagey and dismissive without really engaging.
Interesting that this same now minister spent years on drugs and as a prostitute. So many ex gays who are spokesmen for the movement have this in their past.
I found the commercials drove me nuts.
It took me a while to figure it out, but media in the US exists to sell advertising time (or, in the case of print media, advertising space). The viewer or reader isn’t the customer, the advertisers are.
It’s probable that, at some point, they will reach a saturation point, where the viewers and readers will just tune out, but apparently the media doesn’t believe it has reached that point yet.
NB: We stopped subscribing to several Conde Nast cooking magazines (Bon Apetit and Gourmet) when it became obvious that their editorial content was nothing more than an advertizement for their advertizers.