Oh goodie. Now AgapePress is quoting ExGayWatch for their “news” article about NARTH’s conference.
If there was any question as to whether the rightwing anti-gay press read our postings, I guess it’s answered.
Incidentally, Chambers is still pushing the “hundreds of thousands” line.
“Hundreds of Thousands” again?
I’ve been thinking about his “stat” and the only way it can be even remotely accurate is if he’s using every phone call to Exodus hotlines or attendee at the Love Won Out conferences as a number.
Keep in mind that quite a few phone calls and attendees consist of worried parents who can’t accept their kids.
Congrats guys! Although, I’m not sure why they referred to you as “an Exgaywatch.com blog.” Are there other blogs with that exact web address? Lol.
I found this quote interesting:
“Chambers believes more people than ever are finding out that homosexuality is detrimental to an individual’s physical, emotional, and spiritual health.”
What was Alan Chambers saying about tolerance and respect? All of the sudden I forgot.
Perhaps Alan Chambers has a lot of agoraphobic people in his following – you know that phobia where you’re afraid to leave the house.
Congrats on being lurked by AgapePress – pretty impressive!
Brady,
I’ve thought of starting side blogs. We’d simply need more volunteer writers (or donors).
And I’d need time to resume writing regularly.
Mike, that is a great idea, a number of we posters have blogs and I for one would be obliged to side blog for ex-gay watch. Good old Lifesite has Canadian origins and monitors the “gay agenda” regularly as I monitor their hate agenda. I would be delighted to be quoted by Agape Press as one of those “homosexual activists”.
“Hundreds of thousands”? That doesn’t sound anywhere near the realm of possibility.
I do think, though, that there is one big group that we probably don’t think of as “ex-gay” but that constitutes a big percentage of the clientele of reparative therapists, and that group is people who go into reparative therapy after spending some length of time in a heterosexual marriage.
These are people who maybe have never in their lives identified as gay, but their orientation is either homosexual or bisexual, and when they see information about ex-gay programs, or the Love Won Out conference or something, they say “Oh, yeah. That’s me. I struggle with SSA. This is something I need to look into.”
And I would think these are the people who would be least likely to be publicly ex-gay, right? Because they’ve never been publicly gay. So they’re kind of an invisible part of the ex-gay demographic.
Now, I don’t see how those people could account for the “hundreds of thousands” figures, but I think they’re one big reason why reparative therapists and “professional ex-gays” think of the ex-gay population as something that’s a lot bigger than what we think it is.
Brady:
Probably because XGW dispells the myths at a much faster rate than they can dish out thoughtful articles (which is most likely 0)?
To use on old Australian expression, that man couldn’t lie straight in bed…From AgapePress 18 Nov 2005:
Let’s do a quick check of what he has said elsewhere:From the misleadingly named Stonewall Revisited site (1999, and with an odd META title that includes bestiality. Huh?)
From his current version on the Exodus site:
From a debate on same-sex marriage at Berkeley on 17 Apr 2004:
And all this, we are supposed to believe, indicates a man who wasn’t consumed by self-hatred?Yeah, sure. Pull the other leg while you’re at it.But it’s not the first time Alan has shown a shameless willingness to re-write and re-claim in order to mislead his audience.From the press release Exodus Launches “Q & A” Ad Campaign on 8 Jul 2004 we have another testimony as a print advert:
This older “man” — a term readers of the advert would assume meant only one thing — had been earlier identified, by Alan in New Man Magazine Oct 1997, as his 14 year old cousin.(Exodus had a broken link to this article on 10 Jun 2004. Earlier links at Bridges Across and Christianity and Homosexuality are now gone. Shades of the vanishing Randy Thomas letter to Coral Ridge once again?)And around the same time, appearing before the Massachusetts Judiciary Committee, noted on his blog 12 Feb 2004, Alan makes the following claims about himself:
Yet, again from his current Exodus testimony, Chambers — this self-reportedly “openly gay man” — talks about only afterwards mentioning his “deepest darkest secret” with “my brother and his wife, friends, church members, and eventually my parents and the rest of my family.”(I wonder what Alan imagines a closeted gay man looks like — placed inside a lead barrel, encased in concrete and buried alone on the ocean floor???)We could go on and on, given Alan Chambers has been inventing himself in public for 7 or so years now, but will spare you the boredom.I think the most compelling part of all the BS and spin that Alan — Exodus and Focus — has created around himself is a simple and brief quote that should make one pause:
Yep. And we all know what people like that are capable of when they need to make a choice between being honest and being the centre of attention.
Mike, I think that would be a good idea, if you had the writers/donors to do it. As you probably are aware, there is plenty to talk about, but a lot of the writing also needs the research to be done first, causing posts to become more infrequent.
I suppose that Chambers would be able to provide evidence to back up his “hundreds of thousands” claim.
Heck, I could make a claim that there were millions of ex-straights, or that aliens from other planets were ruling the earth. I couldn’t prove ether (I’m currently dealing with the latter on another web site), and apparently Chambers can’t prove his claim, either.
Re: “hundreds of thousands”
fac·toid (fktoid)
n.
A piece of unverified or inaccurate information that is presented in the press as factual, often as part of a publicity effort, and that is then accepted as true because of frequent repetition.
—
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
(I wonder what Alan imagines a closeted gay man looks like — placed inside a lead barrel, encased in concrete and buried alone on the ocean floor???)
I love it! – excellent post grantdale.
David