Truth Wins Out Protest of Anchorage, AK “Ex-Gay” Conference Gets Attention.
As you might have been aware, Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out went to Anchorage, AK to counteract the lies being foisted on the city by Love Won Out, Focus on the Family’s traveling “ex-gay” roadshow. His visit got a good deal of attention including a large feature story in the Anchorage Press
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Except that outside of these ex-gay ministries, virtually no one agrees that homosexuals can be turned straight, or that the “reparative therapy” these ministries offer is anything but damaging.“There is no published scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of reparative therapy as a treatment to change one’s sexual orientation,” states a report by the American Psychiatric Association.
The American Psychological Association agrees, and has stated that conversion therapy can “do more harm than good.” And an American Medical Association report stated, “aversion therapy… is no longer recommended for gay men and lesbians.”
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But there’s something more basic at work here at the Love Won Out conference. Few, if any, of the attendees offering their “amen’s” seem to be people struggling with same-sex attraction. These churchgoing folks are having their belief that overcoming homosexuality is a choice one can make successfully reinforced. And statistics show that if people believe homosexuality is a choice, they’re more likely to support anti-gay legislation.
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Read that last sentence again. Regardless of all the prattle about love, change and desire to “help” gay people that groups like Love Won Out peddle they have only one true desire. To convince people that being gay is a choice so they’ll support anti-gay legislation, and to actually support anti-gay legislation. That’s all it’s ever been about. Why do you think that Focus on the Family (the people who run Love Won Out) turns around and donates hundreds of thousands of the dollars they get from things like Love Won Out to anti-gay causes like Proposition 8? That’s pretty sick, using money obtained from harming gays to further harm gays. But I’m not the least bit surprised.
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“By and large, these so-called ex-gay ministries are really on many levels a propaganda operation aimed at convincing the public that homosexuality is a choice,” says Mark Potok, executive director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, an organization that tracks extremism and monitors civil rights violations.…..
Potok says that he believes that at first, a number of these ex-gay ministries were genuinely concerned with the welfare of the people they were treating. But now, he says, “I think that is less true every day. Every single one of these programs is based on a fundamental lie, which is that homosexuality is a mental disease. This kind of propaganda from the Christian Right has the effect of demonizing individuals and damaging them in serious psychological ways.” He describes Love Won Out particularly as “really noxious.”
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Besen, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, has flown to Anchorage specifically to help organize opposition to Love Won Out. A non-practicing Jew, he tells the congregation the story of when he got a job as a television reporter in Bangor, Maine covering politics—until his co-workers discovered him at a gay bar, upon which he was taken off the political beat and later fired.“This is what we face,” Besen says, noting that if he holds his boyfriend’s hand on a New York subway he has to look around at the people near him to see he’ll end up in a fight because of it.
“This industry is out there to keep discrimination strong,” he says of Focus on the Family and Love Won Out. “They do everything in their power to make us miserable. They ask you to lie to God, and have lust in your heart forever, while you bury your head in the sand. They need to open their eyes to the damage they’re doing, destroying families in the name of family values.”
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Sadly the RRRW doesn’t seem to care how much psychological, spiritual and even physical damage they inflict on LGBT people and their loved ones, so long as they get their way. It appears, though, that the tide is turning, though it seems to be doing so slowly, and these hateful bigots are a dying breed.
Now that you’ve read the article, watch the video.
