debbie-thurman.jpgA member of the church pastored by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell has launched a website offering advice to homosexuals who want to find “healing from same-sex attraction.”

Debbie Thurman of Thomas Road Baptist Church, Lynchburg, VA, has set up TheFormers.com as “a place of fellowship for those who have found healing from same-sex attraction — or are on that journey — and their supporters.” Echoing a by-now-familiar refrain of ex-gays and anti-gays, Thurman writes that, “Even if science one day finds a genetic predisposition to same-sex attraction, we don’t believe gays and lesbians are designed that way.”

The site is a melting-pot of ex-gay resources, with little discrimination shown. Demonstrating an ecumenism that temporarily bypasses fundamentalists’ usual hostility to other religions and non-orthodox sects, the site links to Jewish ex-gay group Jonah and Mormon ministry Evergreen, as well as Christian groups across the spectrum, including NARTH and the increasingly extreme PFOX.

To get some idea of where Thurman’s sympathies lie, consider her defense of her late pastor, who infamously declared that AIDS was God’s judgment on both homosexuals and the society that tolerates them, and announced that gays would “literally crush all decent men, women and children.” He later blamed 9/11 on gays and lesbians, among others. In a letter to the Lynchburg News & Advance earlier this year, Thurman decried a columnist for saying that the late Falwell “spouted hate,” joining the call for him to apologize to “the Falwell family, Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University.”

It seems the ex-gay movement has found itself yet another hardline advocate.

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Meanwhile, Box Turtle Bulletin reports on a new website about the history of treatment for homosexuality in the UK since 1950. The site will archive research carried out by University College London, in the UK.

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