Yesterday (Oct. 6) the Southern Poverty Law Center weighed in on the NARTH Schoenewolf controversy with an Intelligence Report article “Ex-gay” psychologist claims Africans “better off” as slaves.
Titled “Gay Rights and Political Correctness: A Brief History,” Schoenewolf’s angry polemic was published on NARTH’s website. In addition to his outrageous historical claims about the conditions of life in Africa, he writes that human rights proponents are intellectually stunted. (Schoenewolf draws upon Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, who theorized four stages of intellectual development, with the most advanced stage consisting of abstract and complex thinking. “[F]ollowers in the Human Rights Movement,” have not reached this stage, according to Schoenewolf.)
They correctly recognize that ex-gay and other self-proclaimed “pro-family” organizations, though heavily intertwined with NARTH and it’s efforts, have said nothing to distance themselves from the views in the Schoenewolf paper.
The controversy over Schoenewolf’s apology for slavery has battered the so-called “ex-gay” movement with accusations of racial bigotry for the first time. The movement’s leaders and their close allies at Christian Right powerhouses like Focus on the Family have failed to condemn Schoenwolf’s inflammatory arguments.
In what appears to be the first public comments on the matter from Dr. Schoenewolf himself, there are these quotes:
When interviewed last week for this article, Schoenewolf stood by his comments on the intellectual inferiority of civil rights movement supporters. “The civil rights movement has from the beginning and today seen itself as good and others are evil, like slaveowners are evil,” he said.
During the interview, Schoenewolf lambasted civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. “All such movements are destructive,” he said. He also claimed the American Psychological Association, of which he is a member, “has been taken over by extremist gays.”
In one of the first solid comments to indicate that anyone at NARTH is responsible for anything at all going on over there, there is this quote from former NARTH member Dr. David Blakeslee:
For now, Schoenewolf remains a member of NARTH’s Science Advisory Committee. This committee has “the authority of opinion and the authority of their recommendations,” over what is published by NARTH, according to former committee member David Blakeslee, who resigned in protest over the Schoenewolf essay Sept. 29.
There are quotes from Dr. Warren Throckmorton and Dr. David Blakeslee, both of whom have commented on this site, expressing their disbelief over the Schoenewolf paper and NARTH’s puzzling defense of it.
Interestingly enough, on the same day this article was published to the SPLC website, NARTH published an apology (of sorts), saying “NARTH regrets the comments made by Dr. Schoenwolf [sic] about slavery which have been misconstrued by some of our readers.” The sincerity and depth of this statement overwhelms us.
Please read the entire article. You can also find a record of the controversy here.
It’s terrific that you are staying on top of this story. Do not let it go. NARTH and Exodus never want to be held accountable for their actions and words. They believe they can say and do the most outrageous things and no one will call them on it.
In his defense of his article, Schoenewolf says, “The civil rights movement has from the beginnin and today seen itself as good and others aer evil, like slaveowners are evil.”
Yeah, what’s “evil” about buying human beings and forcing them to harvest your crops? The exercise probably did them some good, eh?
Schonewolf has not apologized and neither has Nicolosi. WHO at NARTH is apologizing? Do anonymous “apologies” mean anything when the author is still saying the same things — and Nicolosi himself remains silent?
I wish NARTH would have exercised editorial judgment earlier — I wish they would publicly state they have a new peer review process in place, and that they’re going to weed out outrageous statements like Berger’s and Schoenewolf’s.
My boyfriend said to me “Its too bad Schoenwolf wasn’t born 50 years earlier, Hitler would have loved to have him at his table, he’s the perfect Aryan b**tard”.
Narth’s apology sounds a bit like the Pope’s recent ‘apology’ re: Muslims. An apology means you realize you did something wrong – it does not mean you’re sorry something was ‘misconstrued.’ If Narth is not apologizing, they shouldn’t say that they are.
No “apology” is REAL unless it addresses the “Four R’s:
(1) RESPONSIBILTY: “I did or said “X” and it was WRONG.” No excuses. Not” “some readers have misconstrued” their comments.
(2) REMORSE: As in: “I recongnize that my behavior and/or comments were HURTFUL and I feel badly about that.”
(3) REPAIR: ” I have done “X” to repair the damage or HURT I have done.”
(4) no REPEATS: “I have done thus and so to certain this does not happen again.”
So far, NARTH has done NONE of these things. Therefore, they have NOT apologized and the racist comments still stand.
NARTH Apologizes For Article:
Misconstrued?
Neither the “plain folk” readers, the National Black Justice Coalition, nor the Southern Poverty Law Center miscontrued what Gerald Schoenewolf wrote about slavery, nor do these readers and groups misconstrue what Gerald Schoenewolf currently believes. Blaming the readers for “misconstruing” a lucidly written, author defended piece makes for no sincere apology at all.
Actually, I have to admit I have seriously misconstrued much of the Schoenewolf article. For example, when Schoenewolf wrote:
Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who charted stages of intellectual development in his landmark book, Origins of Intelligence in the Child (1936), noted that most people do not reach the fourth stage, the stage at which people can do abstract thinking, can make fine distinctions, can see the complexity and the interrelatedness of all things. Marx apparently did not reach the fourth stage of development, nor have his followers in the Human Rights Movement.
I thought he was saying that he loves nothing more than the sight of dead babies, but what he was really saying was that people who care about human rights are intellectually immature. My mistake.
And when he said:
Subsequent to Marx, various human rights groups began using his ideology to rationalize their movements, primarily in America. First came the Civil Rights Movement, which began in the 1850s and was one of the causes of the Civil War.
I thought he was saying that he approves of cannibalism provided the victim’s heart is eaten so that their strength will live on, but what he was really saying was that the antislavery movement was Marxist. My bad.
And when he said:
African-Americans were urged by various leaders to unify and rebel against European-Americans and to demand special privileges as compensation for their suffering at the hands of the latter. Civil rights leaders, like Marx and Engels before them, believed that their way, and only their way, was the valid way to look at the issue.
I misconstrued his comments as an endorsement of the total victory of Al Quaeda over all of western civilization, but he was really just saying that it was wrong of those Northern agitators to encourage blacks to demand the special privilege of not being a slave. Egg on my face for that one.
And when he said:
There is no attempt by civil rights leaders to see both sides of the conflict, to understand the complex sources of the problem, to view people on both sides as having both good and bad in them. There is no attempt to negotiate a win-win situation that would benefit all society; instead a win-lose scenario is forced on all of society, whether they like it or not. All whites are guilty of what was done to blacks, particularly all white males, and all must pay.
I mistook the passage for a claim that Galactica 1980 was a far superior show to the contemporary remake. Really, he was just saying that equality for blacks is a losing proposition for whites. I can laugh about it now.
And when he said:
With all due respect, there is another way, or other ways, to look at the race issue in America. It could be pointed out, for example, that Africa at the time of slavery was still primarily a jungle, as yet uncivilized or industrialized. Life there was savage, as savage as the jungle for most people, and that it was the Africans themselves who first enslaved their own people. They sold their own people to other countries, and those brought to Europe, South America, America, and other countries, were in many ways better off than they had been in Africa. But if one even begins to say these things one is quickly shouted down as though one were a complete madman.
Silly me, I thought this was a claim that gender conforming children should be encouraged to bully and ridicule gender nonconforming children, but he was really just saying that slavery wasn’t so bad because Africans were savage jungle people who were awful enough to enslave each other. Now that I look back on it, I don’t know WHAT I could have been thinking.
And when he said:
If one tries to analyze race relations in America and point out that the liberal solution to racial discrimination tends to reinforce victimhood–again one is quickly shouted down. We are not allowed to reason about civil rights. In fact, our whole approach to civil rights in America has been decided not by reasoned debate at all, but instead by a kind of mob rule and the hysteria of mob rule. It is the kind of mob rule described in such classic novels as The Oxbow Incident, in which a crowd of angry men are fueled by their growing hysteria to lynch an innocent man. The irony is that the Civil Rights Movement has been vehement about pointing out the hysterical lynchings that took place in the old South, but completely blind to its own hysterical tactics.
I had thought this was an attempt to compare rhetoric he disagrees with to the act of murdering another human being in cold blood, but it was actually… um… er… hmm. Well, obviously I couldn’t be right about it because that would be too ridiculous.
And when he said:
A striking example of this is what happened to Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Dr Laura, as she is known, a well-known radio personality whose talk show was at one time the most popular talk show on radio, made the mistake of speaking out about homosexuality in 2001, calling it a “biological error.” What she was commenting on is an article that appeared in an American Psychological Association journal that suggested that pedophilia–specifically sex between a man and a boy, could be beneficial to the boy and that men who have sex with boys should not be stigmatized.
Indeed, the American Psychiatric Association even went so far as to modify its stance on pedophilia, changing the designation in the DSM to “ego-dystonic pedophilia”–meaning that pedophilia would only be considered a disorder if the pedophiliac considered it a problem for himself. When Dr. Laura was critical of this article and of the Gay Rights Movement, she became the target of one of the most vicious character assassinations in American history.
I thought he had said that Dr. Laura was part of the reptilian bloodlines conspiracy to take over the world, as outlined by brilliant former soccer commentator David Icke in The Biggest Secret, but he was really just conflating homosexuality and pedophilia, and where’s the harm in that?
So I must apologize for my truly wretched reading comprehension skills. It must have been hysteria induced by my slavish adherence to Marxist-inspired political correctness.
“There is no attempt by civil rights leaders to see both sides of the conflict, to understand the complex sources of the problem, to view people on both sides as having both good and bad in them. There is no attempt to negotiate a win-win situation that would benefit all society; instead a win-lose scenario is forced on all of society, whether they like it or not.”
Ironically, if one were to replace “civil rights leaders” with Focus on the Family, NARTH or any of their allies in the above paragraph, the description would perfectly describe the strict either/or mentality that one sees at all levels of the “pro-family” movement.
Eugene: Irony abounds in this entire mess.