Randy Thomas And Alan Chambers Invited To White House, Lobby For Marriage Amendment

Randy Thomas and Alan Chambers are in DC to lobby for the Federal Marriage Amendment. (I refuse to use the various names for such an amendment which seem to change monthly.) Randy writes on his blog (archive):

Yes, I am going to DC to lobby for the MPA (Marriage Protection Amendment) and also the next LWO is in the vicinity (Silver Spring Maryland.) We start the week with MPA, finish the week with Exodus Regional leaders meeting and then the LWO conference.

Michelle Goldberg at the Huffington Post tells a different story:

When George W. Bush announces his push for a constitutional ban on gay marriage today, a group of right-wing leaders will be there to beam wholesomely in approval. Among them will be Alan Chambers and Randy Thomas of Exodus International, the umbrella group of the ex-gay movement. A spokeswoman for Exodus said that as far as she knew, it was the first White House invitation for either of them.

[snip]

By inviting Chambers, Exodus’s president, and Thomas, its director of membership, to the White House, Bush is at least implicitly endorsing the ex-gay movement. This is of a piece with the administration’s continuing embrace of pseudo-science and its frequent attempts to elevate the institutions of the religious right to places of public authority. In a sense, Bush needs the ex-gay movement, because it provides a veneer of moral justification for his new anti-gay marriage push — the refusal to offer recognition to gay relationships can only be justified if homosexuality is a choice or a condition that can be cured. If, as virtually all mainstream experts believe, Exodus is wrong, then Bush’s attempt to rally support against gay families is simply gratuitously cruel. But mainstream experts carry little weight with this administration. Once again, Bush is using his position to symbolically subvert science in favor of a faith-based parallel reality. Gay people will suffer the most from what he is doing, but truth itself is also a casualty.

Exodus also issued a press release.

In his Wednesday Truth Wins Out press conference Wayne Besen will be detailing other anti-gay political activities exgay leadership have recently been involved in.