Core Issues director Mike Davidson told The Daily Telegraph he believes being gay is a “normal developmental aberration,” and explained what he really means when he says he’s ex-gay.
“We don’t consider it a disease,” he told the paper. He later added: “I see homosexuality as a normal developmental aberration. Which I know would sound profoundly disrespectful to some people, but that is how I have experienced it.”
Core Issues is the UK group that, with Anglican Mainstream, planned an advertising campaign on London transport, featuring the slogan “Not gay! Ex-gay, post-gay and proud. Get used to it!” Boris Johnson, London’s Conservative mayor, pulled the ads, saying they were offensive in a city known for its tolerance and diversity. Davidson and his allies are now planning legal action on grounds of both human rights and breach of contract.
In Saturday’s Telegraph interview, Davidson said he married and had a child while struggling with homosexual feelings. He had his first physical gay contact with a professor at Bible college, where he was training for ordination to Christian ministry. When he moved to the UK with his family in 1999, he began seeking out other gay men and again “acted out on those feelings.” His wife and son were devastated when they discovered his secret life.
Bizarrely, Davidson maintains that he and his wife have “had a fulfilled marriage in every sense of the word,” and appears to blame his relapse on the pressures of moving from South Africa to the UK so quickly. Yet his account of what followed does not sound like an account of an entirely fulfilled marriage.
He goes on to speculate, indirectly, whether another life crisis might trigger a relapse. He later says he could “probably” turn round and walk back. His way of depicting his “sexual orientation change” is revealing:
It may well be true that I could live such a life, but my choice, Cole [the journalist], is in another direction. … The gay community will say I am a repressed gay, that there is no real change here, it is just about behaviour modification. My experience has been that the more the behaviour has been modified, the more I don’t connect with that part of me that once was much more prevalent. … I feel I am far, far away from where I was.
What his words reveal is familiar. For all the simplistic soundbites about being healed, becoming ex-gay, leaving homosexuality or experiencing a sexual orientation change, when you pin down ex-gays on what they mean by change, it’s clear they’re not talking about a fundamental shift in orientation as the average person understands sexual orientation. The attractions are still there; the ex-gay has just chosen to view them differently and behave differently.
What also becomes clear is that, like so many prominent ex-gays, Davidson’s story is one of destructive gay behaviour. And blame for the consequences appears to be put squarely on homosexuality as a general state rather than simply one person’s bad choices. Interviewer Cole Moreton gets that it goes far beyond the mere fact of Davidson’s gayness:
Surely it isn’t homosexuality per se that he has had to deal with, as much as a series of painful, damaging experiences to do with secrecy and shame? How can he make the leap from there to urging people to turn away from faithful same-sex love, something he has never experienced?
Davidson gives a PC response to this, saying that monogamous gays should have “the freedom, the space, the respect and the value to do that.” This doesn’t flow with Core Issues’ rhetoric about homosexuality, however, or its decision to buddy up with the viciously homophobic Anglican Mainstream.
“Try not to paint me as naive,” Davidson tells Moreton. Sadly, he’s either naive or, for all his outer gentleness, just as homophobic as his allies.
I’m glad the journalist, Cole Moreton, did his research beforehand and wasn’t taken in by Davidson’s gently spoken style.
So what is Davidson offering to callers — informal psychotherapy or counseling?
See, that’s what I’m talking about! A gay person is firmly indoctrinated to believe a set list of mostly stereotypical things about homosexuality and gay people, and usually fall into traps with their gay experiences that validate those stereotypes.
Davidson has never been in a monogamous, gay relationship and never tried. All of his energy has been put into doing so with a woman.
Well, how negative was his experience with affecting being straight?
And as Moreton pointed out, Davidson’s responses to some cogent observations about his life and behavior was met with the very denial, weakness and lack of engaging the realities that ex gays make life harder for gay people.
And that it’s anti gay systemic bigotry and discrimination that has the negative affect on one’s life, and not homosexuality itself.
I refuse to flatter an ex gay on their decisions.
I’m not going to indulge what I feel are people who are weak of character and won’t admit it or do something about it.
And because of that, will hide behind the stronger collective anti gay influence to matter and be validated. And, they don’t care it’s at the expense especially of very young gay people. The way Davidson was young once and what having to deal with it did to him.
He’s on the party line being so convinced that it’s an ‘aberration’.
As I said in earlier posts: a misdiagnosis is going to lead to wrongful applications. A person who charges themselves with the job of being a counselor has to know what they are dealing with, and when they don’t, can do a lot of damage.
Drug dealers are always trying to sell people something THEY DON’T NEED to apply to the most minor of what are normal challenges in life, self importance and temporary entertainment. Some use religion just as fervently as some people use drugs. To not have to deal with personal shortcomings or difficulties to the point that the most minor and normal of them, become exaggerated and perceived as insurmountable without drugs.
I detect some serious self esteem problems in ex gays. They have a strange, outsized need to be validated and praised for not being gay. They require constant reinforcement that their decision was the TRUE one and their path uncomplicated with what complications gay people inevitably will have.
I’m a woman, a black woman. I’ve gone through, and still do, many ranges of discrimination and prejudice. Getting through them, teaching society how to deal with me, regardless of their initial judgement has been a character builder.
Something that ex gays are avoiding. Gay men and women who get to their authentic and honest selves, have to work harder to do so. But having done it, makes them stronger.
THAT is what is to be praised and a source of pride.
Think you will probably find that as a Christian his belief is that we are all sinners and as such we will all sin but that he recognises his homosexual feelings (like other peoples lustful feelings towards other peoples wifes or urges to commit adultery etc etc) as sinful and so he represses the feelings / urges as it is seen as a battle of the Christian journey
@ Alan, I know that’s his belief. But what is very evident, is that Christian doctrine is extremely inconsistent, spiteful and exceptionally obtuse when it comes to all the other sinners, and their civil and human rights.
Refusing to distinguish what is defined as MORAL sins, as opposed to RELIGIOUS sins.
Moral sins, never change. They are distinguished by treating another person badly, betraying and assaulting them.
Religious sins are distinguished by how they have evolved and changed with human progress.
And are largely ignored and accepted as essential rights to individual well being. Religious sins such as how we eat, medical procedures and medicine, how we dress and our romantic relationships.
And then there is the dictum, fairly universal in most culture to treat another as you’d be treated. This is an ethical foundation from which the most moral and just decisions and actions come from. They are the best path to what is true and right.
Yet, how many Christians refuse to live by these simple standards? And spend WAY too much time engaging in politics and social ideals that ARE damaging, wrong and intractable?
In other words, that “we’re all sinners”, generalization is a load of BS. Because not all sinners are treated the same, nor are their sins.
Not by society. Not by the gov’t. And they know it.
And try to pretend gay people don’t know that, nor should anyone else figure it out.
Which is why, I don’t CARE what someone’s belief is. As long as on their Christian journey, they expect and reap ALL the benefits of living in a more civilized 21st century society, while trying to relegate ONLY gay people to the dangers of Biblical times, they are as phony a Christian as there is.
And they better take the weight of THAT.