Chuck Colson of BreakPoint Ministries has a very colorful history. The first member of the Nixon administration to serve prison time for the Watergate cover-up, he founded Prison Fellowship Ministries barely two years after in 1976. While Colson has gained respect for his work with prisons, there doesn’t appear to be anything in his history that would prepare him to speak authoritatively on LGBT issues. However, this has not stopped him from chiming in on the subject with only bad sources as a guide, spending his conservative capital to propel his message along the way.
In a recent radio broadcast (Real Audio of the April 23rd broadcast: here) he spoke with great authority on a number of LGBT issues. Some of the quotes from this broadcast, Coming to a School Near You; Normalizing Homosexuality, regarding the Sex Education curriculum controversy of Montgomery County Public Schools, include the following:
Worst of all, there is no mention whatsoever of the many health hazards associated with the gay lifestyle. A Montgomery County parent group, called Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, includes an infectious disease specialist, Dr. Ruth Jacobs. Dr. Jacobs put forward a petition signed by 270 doctors asking Montgomery County to warn kids of the health dangers related to homosexuality. Montgomery County ignored it.
Colson, not surprisingly, falls back on the religious right’s favorite catch-all phrase, “the gay lifestyle,” knowing that none of his listeners will call on him to define it. There is no more one “gay lifestyle” than there is one “straight lifestyle” or one “Christian lifestyle,” of course, but admitting that would undermine his point entirely, since many gay men and women avoid the risky behaviors that Colson attributes to all GLBT individuals.
Dr. Jacobs does appear to be an infectious disease specialist as advertised, which lends weight to her arguments about the dangers of anal sex, but unfortunately she (like Colson) seems to tie her entire argument against the “gay lifestyle” to this particular practice.
A quick scan of some of the articles posted at the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum website makes it clear that CRC, far from merely wanting the schools to fully disclose information about disease transmission, wants them to teach students that homosexuality itself is a disease, much like PFOX does. And, perhaps not surprisingly, numerous references to PFOX spokespersons and articles can be found on the CRC site.
Sadly, these programs offer nothing to teens desperate for help in overcoming homosexual feelings. They don’t learn how successful reparative therapy is, and where they can find it. They are simply told to “celebrate” their homosexuality. Teens with same-sex desires are condemned to a life of confusion, misery, disease, and early death.
If Colson really had done his own homework, of course, he’d be celebrating the fact that students aren’t being told “how successful reparative therapy is.” CRC’s website repeats the same old misinterpretations of the Spitzer study as proof that GLBT individuals who want to can become straight. Colson also fails to consider whether the “confusion, misery, disease, and early death” that GLBT youth experience might be the result of being bombarded by messages of fear, ridicule, rejection and condemnation, just as he fails to offer any evidence that these problems automatically accompany same-sex attractions, as he suggests.
A majority of Americans believe that homosexual behavior is immoral, which is why activist gays are targeting our kids with their propaganda, hoping to change them.
Setting aside Colson’s unsupported assertions about the agenda of “activist gays,” does he really mean to imply that the opinion of the majority has any bearing on the morality of homosexual behavior? Religious right activists frequently fall back on the claim that the majority of Americans agree with them as validation of the rightness of whichever cause they are championing at the moment, and just as quickly discard that same “might makes right” notion whenever they find themselves in the minority.
We need to make sure that we have accurate, factual information to counteract what is being taught in the schools—and in films, and on television, and on college campuses. And we ought to share this with our kids and grandkids and offer classes at our churches. If you visit our BreakPoint website, you will find excellent resources, including books by Harvard psychologist Dr. Joseph Nicolosi.
We at Ex-Gay Watch agree that everyone should have accurate, factual information on the issue of homosexuality. Unfortunately, the BreakPoint website offers little help in that regard. Most of the links provided are for other BreakPoint articles; readers are also directed to NARTH, PFOX, and a single article by Dr. Warren Throckmorton. One can also, of course, purchase the “Speak the Truth In Love Resource Kit” for a “donation” of $25.
Eugene Wagner contributed to this post.
I find it interesting how many Christians are perfectly fine with blatant lying, half-truths and misinformation.
All for a good cause, right?
Colson has been passing himself of as a “deep thinker” of the christian right for some time now.
That he seems to be largely accepted in this role by his fellow travelers speaks for itself.
Colson quoted someone else about the effect of the bill and I went to his website to somehow express my opinion and what I found there was that he was just as much a lying homophobe as the next fundamentalist Christian. Which I was going to point out didn’t make him a Christian whatsoever. I was just about to do that when I pressed the button to send off my Email (on his website) and I got an error message. My error, I guess, that I ever thought what i might say would mean anything.
It’s unfortunate but I know from experience that Evangelicals in general think Chuch Colson walks on water. He is apparently using some of that trust to pawn this stuff off on those who are all too eager to hear, thereby doing his part in the “war against the homosexual agenda.” I hope their ears were sufficiently tickled.
And I agree SharonB, to me Colson appears to savor the sound of his own voice a bit too much. His books take the same tone. He may well have done great things for prison reform, but he also seems deeply aware of having done so. When he branches out into subjects about which he seems to have little or no awareness, that facade wears a little thin, especially when the rights we would deny are mine.
Colson is very active in national Republican politics; he plays an instrumental role in efforts to hold the evangelical base of the party in election years, and moral issues such as gay marriage are an essential part of the Republican political strategy.
In 2004, I briefly attended Southeast Christian Church, an 18,000-member evangelical church in Louisville, Kentucky. This church actively campaigned against gay marriage as part of a larger effort to influence the vote in the election that year. This included billboards all over town declaring that God’s plan for marriage was one man, one woman, and an October sermon series on marriage. This also included a national video conference on the subject, featuring Chuck Colson and other well-known evangelical opinion leaders. Church members were reminded of the need to register to vote (applications were available at the church), and the church heavily promoted the Dobson book on gay marriage (a pyramid of which was on display in the in-church full-service Christian bookstore). The result of all of this was to help ensure the passage of an anti-gay ballot measure in Kentucky by a 75-25% margin, and to help Republican Sen. Bunning retain his seat against a strong Democratic challenger.
I believe it was “saint” Ambrose of Milan (one of the founders of Christianity) that said that lying and deceit are completely acceptable if it is for the good of spreading the gospel.
Unfortunately, there will never be a single “gospel truth” that ALL Christians can agree on concerning homosexuality – so those who see the “gospel truth” being that queers are broken and perverted will do whatever they can to spread that message.
If prison ministry is his primary issue, maybe he should spend more of his time trying to protect people in prison from being sexually assaulted and raped, instead of trying to deny legal protections to gays and lesbians on the outside who are just trying to live their lives in peace.
This is why I ask those that agree with Colson, or anyone else like him that comments on gay people…
1. Do you or would you get your information on blacks and black lives from Strom Thurmond, the Citizen’s Council or the speeches of George Wallace?
Why shouldn’t thinking people challenge your sources and type of information? Especially if NONE of it came from someone gay, and definitively from biased AND discredited sources?
2. Why argue with a gay person at all on their experience and self knowlege regarding their identity?
How can anyone deny gay people don’t know best about who they are?
3. A man wouldn’t argue, or shouldn’t with what a woman would feel or know about being female, what gives heterosexuals the idea that they can do that with someone gay?
I usually say to an outside observer who can critically think, there are several words to describe this sort of behavior towards the subject of the discussion.
None of which are or should be flattering.
“I find it interesting how many Christians are perfectly fine with blatant lying, half-truths and misinformation.
All for a good cause, right?”
Christians today seem to be attention seekers with inflated egoes, jumping on the bandwagon borrowing jurassic ideologies, just to climb up a level higher in the heirachy of Christian ministries and political correctness. Curiously, whether they are ‘ex-gay’ or not does not seem to matter to them, or to any homophobic Christian.
Mr. Straight Colson by the way seems to be putting an icing branded Chuck-a-homo on his ministry cocktail, for a good cause indeed… his own….
“Unfortunately, there will never be a single “gospel truth” that ALL Christians can agree on concerning homosexuality – so those who see the “gospel truth” being that queers are broken and perverted will do whatever they can to spread that message.”
Again the word gospel… good news… So how is it GOOD NEWS to tell people homosexuals are BAD NEWS? How would these BAD NEWS save souls? And exactly how would telling such GOOD NEWS save their own souls?….
The thing is, Christians who see it as being “good news” to tell homosexuals that they’re evil live by the philosophy “love the sinner, hate the sin.” So they are not hating homos, but the “homosexual lifestyle.” They do not realize that by hating what they call a “lifestyle” they are hating a form of love expressed by millions of people, and a way of being for those people. So often I see Christians like these who don’t see their “love” as a form of hate. And when human beings can’t tell the difference between love and hate, I think that’s the greatest tragedy that can occur among mankind.
On the above about a gay marriage ban helping Jim Bunning overcome a strong Democratic challenger in Kentucky – his opponent was badly underfunded and not taken seriously until very late in the campaign when Bunning made so many senile comments and weird statements that many in the state were upset. Anti-gay campaigning did make some difference, possibly, but my guess is Bush’s name on the ticket was the real difference, not a marriage ban.
Chuck Colson is the same sweaty minion he was when he worked for Richard Nixon. He mouths these lies about us because it shows that he fits into the rightist/authoritarian party of his choice. His expectations continue to be that his performance will get him participation in that party’s power. It is enormously sad that his “prison ministry” seeks to draft those who suffer incarceration into that same party’s power base and then use what they do accomplish as a sort of ceremonial pryamid from which he gets to pontificate. Notice that sex education in Montgomery County does not have a whole lot to do with why people find themselves in state or federal prisons.
The reference Jesus is reported to have made to visiting the imprisoned was not about some conversion scheme. It was about sharing the sufferings of the prisoners and comforting them.