Profile: Exodus International

9 Comments

1. 
   TA on January 17, 2005

   Mike- did you add the part about Mike Smid being divorced and remarried?

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2. 
   SharonB on January 17, 2005

   Great. A regional rep in Jax, FL with her tentacles in a “support group for parents of children with same-sex attractions.” The only support they’ll get is for rejecting their children and making all their lives a living hell. Destroying families… a priority just like destroying congregations will be.

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3. 
   Mike Airhart on January 17, 2005

   The divorce and remarriage were mentioned in Smid’s bio on the Exodus web site.

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4. 
   TA on January 17, 2005

   That sounds sort of interesting for an organization, some of whose members often claim their goal is to become whole with God (celibacy), not change. I’d really like to know the differency between homosexuality and divorce as it relates to God from him.

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5. 
   Dalea on January 18, 2005

   Hmmm, this seems to be typical of the general sloppiness of Exodus. Some people have locations, some have partial locations (Woodstock where?) and some have none. Then there are the overlaps. Why is the head of the Great Lakes Basin located on the Ohio River? As a residential description ‘in Wisconsin’ covers a whole lot of ground. And the center of the MidWest is Witchita, Kansas?

   What I notice is that almost none of these outreaches to gay people are located in any place where gay people are likely to be found. Instead they seem to be concentrated in Fundagelical strongholds. Where the chances of dealing with outgays are diminishingly small

   Thanks for the post Mike, great job.

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6. 
   Dan Gonzales on January 18, 2005

   Throckmorton has other affiliations you should prob mention, most notably his activity in NARTH.

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7. 
   JimP on January 18, 2005

   There is an interesting article in the lastest issue of U.S. News on James Dobson and FotF. It states that their budget last year was 146 million. I wonder how much was passed along to Exodus?

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8. 
   Anonymous on July 4, 2006

   Bob Van Domelen is a convicted felon. He admits as much in his webpage. read it for yourself, he buggered some kids when he was a teacher and now he’s gone all exodus on gays who have sex with other men because he’s got a problem with little boys. Whats even more sad is that he was appointed to a commission for the prevention of abuse while he was still on parole. Some role model.

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9. 
   Mike Airhart on July 4, 2006

   Anonymous,

   We prefer that any accusations be accompanied by links directly to the information source.

   You are correct, however:

   Exodus acknowledges Van Domelen is a “convicted sex offender” — but Exodus conceals his pedophilia and is equally vague about the sort of compassion that Van Domelen asks society to demonstrate toward sex offenders.

   According to Mark Pietrzyk, a contributing author at the Independent Gay Forum:

   During his college years, Van Domelen struggled with his sexual orientation and frequented public restrooms for homosexual encounters. After graduating from college, Van Domelen became a teacher and married a woman. As a teacher, however, he developed the troubling habit of molesting his male students. Fourteen years later, in 1985, he was confronted by a former student who reported him to the police. Van Domelen was sentenced to five years in prison for first- and second-degree sexual assault against minors. [He served three years.] He spent his time in prison studying the Bible, which led him to repent and seek to overcome his homosexuality. When Van Domelen was released, he started his Broken Yoke ex-gay ministry. Today, Van Domelen says that he is mostly healed, but that he still has to say a quick prayer before entering a public restroom.

   Writer Michelle Goldberg believes that Domelen helps Exodus with its rhetorical attempt to conflate homosexuality and pedophilia.

   According to Van Domelen’s web site, he served two terms as a director on a Wisconsin state panel on child abuse:

   In 1997, Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson appointed me to serve on the board of directors for the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board and recently appointed me for a second term. I retired from that position after serving seven yeras. On December 12, 1998, I completed my 10 years of parole.

   Beyond prayer, Van Domelen’s web site is vague about recommended treatment or punishment for sex offenders. But he seems to be giving his audience a false sense of security about convicted offenders:

   Van Domelen claims that unspecified “research” finds low recidivism — 13.4 percent — among sex offenders. Van Domelen neglects to cite any specific research study, though; he merely links to the home page of one low-profile prison-reform group in Alberta, Canada, as a general source for further information on recidivism.

   That organization, the John Howard Society, hosts numerous advocacy papers on criminal justice, among them a white paper on recidivism that cites recidivism rates of 61 percent among sex offenders — not the 13.4 percent that Van Domelen claims:

   The 1996 study* by Hanson et al. looked into the difference between the recidivism of child molesters and nonsexual criminals, using the same group of child molesters as in their 1992 report. The study included 191 child molesters and 137 nonsexual criminals, 15-30 years after their release from a maximum security provincial institution. The authors reported that long term recidivism rates for the child molesters were substantial, but the rates for nonsexual offenders were even higher: 61% versus 83.2% respectively. Although child molesters had much higher rates of sexual recidivism (35%) than did the nonsexual offenders (1.5%), the overall lower rate of recidivism for child molesters challenges the assumption that child molesters are a particularly high risk group of offenders.

   * Hanson, R.K. & Bussière. (1996). Predictors of sexual offender recidivism: A meta-analysis (No. 1996-04). Ottawa: Solicitor General of Canada.

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