This former ‘exgay’ leader realized she was doing more harm than good. She’s now officiating same-sex weddings. – LGBTQ Nation

For years, Wendy Gritter led the ex-gay ministry New Direction (an affiliate of Exodus International), and her mission in life was to “cure” gay people.

She eventually put the pieces together and came to realize she was doing more harm than good, publicly apologizing for the harm she’s done.

And now, she’s clearly working to right her wrongs.




This former ‘exgay’ leader realized she was doing more harm than good. She’s now officiating same-sex weddings. – LGBTQ Nation

PS::  Like Matthew Vines, who I applaud his efforts, I will give kudos where they are due.  BUT,,, I am an anti-theist and I am against any form of institutional religious indoctrination.  I struggle with this aspect being that one can assign any interpretation to the Bile one wants - pro or anti.  While I applaud both their efforts, I have reservation.

One Ex-Lesbian's Plea to Pastors Across America — Charisma News

So the ex-gay community has another new face, Linda Italiano, who claims a meeting with a pastor changed her sexuality after 30 years as an out gay woman.  What is not mentioned in her Charisma magazine piece, one of the main purveyors of this crap, is that this individual comes from a background of self loathing and the need for acceptance.

It wasn’t always like this. I didn’t always enjoy a life full of quality friends, days spent productively, and a real understanding of why I am on this earth. No, just a few short years ago I stayed mostly in the house and isolated myself. I was afraid to live and afraid to die. Allow me to back up and fill you in as to what led to this amazing transformation in my life.
,,,
Thankfully, I was wrong about all of this. I requested a meeting with the pastor where I told her everything and I was met with love and respect. I was also shown exactly what the Bible says about homosexuality and it was made clear to me that it was unacceptable and wrong. [I would love to know exactly what the pastor showed her about homosex, since it is not in the Bible.]* I came away from that meeting still feeling welcome and accepted in the church, but understanding that homosexuality is a sin like any other sin. I understood that the Word of God is more important than anything else, and He is the answer to all of my problems. It did not take very long before I was completely delivered from the homosexual lifestyle and I totally renounced it. God did for me what I had been unwilling or unable to do for myself.  

Self-reported alcoholism, or as I like to call it - self-medication,

In 1980, the drinking age was eighteen, much to my detriment. It had become increasingly difficult for me to spend time at home because my mother was taking out all of her unhappiness and hurt on me. I had become her target for all that was lost in our family. I began to spend much of my time in bars. I drank to excess from the start and I quickly became an alcoholic. I also met a woman who introduced me to lesbianism. I chose this lifestyle for thirty years or so until I became a Christian in 2014.  [Notice the seduction by another women, ie. lack of personal responsibility.]

Drinking for me was like a job. I lived in fear of withdrawal and tried unsuccessfully to walk that line between maintenance drinking and blackout drinking. Blackout always won. This lasted until the age of thirty-three when I finally stopped drinking.

All wrapped up in a history of a traumatic, dysfunctional family life.

In 1980, a month before I turned eighteen, my older brother was killed in a car accident. This was the event that changed everything for me. I went from a stable person with goals and dreams to an angry, hopeless, directionless person. My family started growing apart immediately after the accident as we each dealt with the loss separately. This began many years of victim mentality thinking, which hindered me in a big way as it colored all of my decisions going forward.

If the formula sounds familiar it should. It is the same story used by recent right-wing, anti-gay poster children Linda Wall and Katy Faust.

• dysfunctional family life due to traumatic event
• development of self-loathing:  lack of self-worth, a reliance on "others" for perception of self or acceptance
• self-medication:  drugs or alcohol
• seduction by another:  lack of personal responsiblity
• a "god" fixes everything, at the flip-of-a-switch "I'm" healed

Not that it would have mattered much to the readership of Charisma, but her full story needs to be examined.  Italiano is in need of a therapist, not a minister.  As I said in regards to Katy Faust, "Having the personal, private belief that same-sex relationships are not Biblical may not be hateful per se (wrong IMO); it is her belief.  BUT, traipsing around the world spitting rhetoric that is not even your own,,, is vile; it is hurtful. Being loud about it, so that the whole world can hear you, is being hateful."

One Ex-Lesbian's Plea to Pastors Across America — Charisma News


*Just like with Linda Wall I would like to ask Italiano if she and her pastor delved into the complexities of the following:

• 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 (arsenokoitai and malakoi)
• Genesis 1:26-28; 2:18-25, Matthew 19:3-12, Romans 1:26-27 (male/female, sexual/gender complementarity)
• Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 (toevah)
• The sins of Sodom and Gibeah (Genesis 19/Judges 19)
• Also have you studied the socio-cultural norms of cultic temple prostitution (OT-Ashteroth /NT-Cybele)

You see, even after 30 years of "study", I still don't think I have all the answers.

Conversion Therapy's Deadly Outcomes | The Bilerico Project

"Conversion" therapies are acts of violence aimed squarely at LGBTQ people. They are also a tool used by right-wing religious organizations to raise money and advocate against LGBTQ civil rights. And with this money these organizations are able to produce politically and religiously biased, agenda-driven science like "reparative therapies," attempting to justify them by presenting LGBTQ people as genetically flawed. This charge is eerily reminiscent of the scientific racism and sexism that once undergirded the belief that blacks and women were morally inferior due to supposed genetic flaws.

With more and more "ex-gay" ministries not only losing potential clients and political leverage, but also losing money, there is a gradually shift from "curing" one's LGBTQ sexual orientation to abstinence from it. In other words, the theological message that homosexuality is an abomination to God and is a sin remain intact, but more emphasis will be placed on celibacy.

An emphasis on a discipleship to celibacy is equally as harmful and damaging as "ex-gay" ministries. This message suggests we're incurable and should execute control over our ungodly desires. However, when we miss the essential point that human life is varied, precious, and of equal worth, we ignore the unique gifts that each life brings to each other and to the world.

"Ex-gay" ministries should all fold because they don't focus on families, but rather they blur the distinctiveness that makes us who we are. God created humanity as a tapestry of variety. Diminishing that variety diminishes ourselves.

That's what Leelah was telling us.


Conversion Therapy's Deadly Outcomes | The Bilerico Project

LGBT Youth & the Tyranny of Christian 'Conversion Therapy' | The Bilerico Project

This so-called "conversion therapy" really amounted to aversion techniques -- including watching lesbian pornography while being forced to smell ammonia, undergo hypnosis, take psychotropic drugs, and solitary confinement. Staff also imposed so-called "behavior modification" by requiring Lyn to wear dresses, and forced punishments of cutting the lawn with a small pair of scissors and scrubbing floors with a toothbrush.

[,,,]
She eventually connected with a local journalist, an attorney, Legal Services for Children, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and she fought and won in the courts a legal emancipation from her mother. A lesbian couple adopted her when was 15, and today Lyn Duff serves as a successful activist and journalist for the Pacific News Service and for KPFA radio's Flashpoints.

Many of the more extreme Christian Right groups and religious ministries push what they refer to as "Christian therapy" for the purpose of removing people from the so-called "homosexual lifestyle." It is important that parents, social workers, and other mental health professionals know that these so-called "therapies" go by many names: ex-gay religious ministries, Homosexuals Anonymous (a cynical co-optation of Twelve-Step program method of recovery), PFOX (Parents, Families, and Friends of Ex-Gays and Lesbians (an obvious rip-off of the LGBT allies support network PFLAG -- Parents, Families, and Friends of Gays and Lesbians), and so-called "conversion therapy" (a.k.a. "reparative" or "reorientation" therapy).

All falsely promise conversion to heterosexuality if the person has the requisite motivation to change.

[,,,]
Jacob Rudolph, Lyn Duff, Samuel Brinton, and many other young people have cut to the very heart of the issue by showing that the problem does not reside within those of us whose sexuality and gender identity and expression differs from the majority, but rather, within society, including a (hopefully) shrinking minority of religious denominations that adhere to an erroneous view of human diversity.



LGBT Youth & the Tyranny of Christian 'Conversion Therapy' | The Bilerico Project

‘Kidnapped for Christ’ Review: Come Because You’re Gay, Stay For Jesus - The Daily Beast

I am eagerly waiting for this documentary to be available on DVD. If it is anything like Jesus Camp, there will not be enough Xanax produced to settle my ire,,,

"Most students were very wary of us, since they could get in a lot of trouble for saying anything negative about the program. We have several interviews where it was painfully obvious that the student was just reciting lines about how great the school was. Later, I found out that many students thought we had actually been hired by the school to catch them saying bad things about the program—that was the level of paranoia they had. Conveying to the students that we were on their side without getting kicked off campus by the staff was a constant struggle. In the end, it was really the bravery of a handful of students who dared to speak honestly with us that made the film possible."

David’s experience at Escuela Caribe, along with the experiences of Beth and Tai, two other American teenagers abducted from their homes and taken to the DR for religious fixes, is the focus of Kidnapped for Christ, an award-winning documentary directed by Kate Logan and executive-produced by Tom DeSanto, Lance Bass, and Mike Manning, that premiered Thursday on Showtime (available On Demand until September 3, 2014) Funded by online campaigns at Kickstarter and IndieGogo, Kidnapped for Christ made its film festival debut in January at Park City, Utah’s Slamdance Film Festival and took home the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Initially, unaware that the school was considered by many to be dangerous and abusive (alleged offenses range from mental, emotional, and spiritual manipulations to sexual and physical abuses), the up-and-coming director says she had no intentions of filming an exposé. But soon, upon meeting and interviewing David and some of the other students, and witnessing the harsh tactics used by the counselors to control teenagers and maintain a fear-driven environment—some tactics that Logan believed were abusive—her filmmaking intentions began to change. In the beginning, the staff at Escuela Caribe trusted Logan, openly answering her inquiries about the ministry’s practices and goals and allowing her to film most on-campus activities; however, a week or two into her stay, when Logan’s camera started showing up at inopportune times—for instance, once her camera appeared while a staff member disciplined a student—her access on campus was limited, her interviews with students monitored, and her personal housing moved to an off-campus facility.

However, despite those limitations, Logan’s firsthand account of offshore American fundamentalism—a kind of Christian fundamentalism that gleefully paddled teenagers, engaged in military-like activities and disciplinary actions, brainwashed students with false “what ifs,” public humiliation, and reprogramming classes, and forced conversion therapy onto teens who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—is a fascinating, heartbreaking, and at times, surprisingly fast-paced adventure that keeps you guessing as to how David’s, Beth’s, and Tai’s stories end. Once Logan’s six weeks at Escuela Caribe are up and she’s back in the States, Kidnapped for Christ becomes a thrilling and frustrating tale, a plot that surprises you with several unexpected turns, including some pretty shocking confessions showcasing all too well the varied and long-lasting effects that faith-based behavioral modification programs have on people.

[,,,]
All three New Horizons Youth Ministries campuses [NHYM is the ministry that ran Escuela Caribe] were donated to another private therapeutic Christian residential program called “Lifeline Youth and Family Services.” Lifeline re-opened a program for teens on the same campus in the Dominican Republic and retained several of Escuela Caribe’s staff members. The new program is called “Crosswinds.” They are also running a reform camp in Canada on the same property that NHYM owned. They are currently enrolling students in both programs.

In December 2013 article by Raw Story, they focused on Deirdre Sugiuchi whose interview did not make the final cut of the documentary:

“My parents were fundamentalist Christians,” she said, “and they didn’t like the way I was turning out.”

So, at 15, Sugiuchi was sent to school in the Dominican Republic at Escuela Caribe. There were only about 40 students at the school at any given time, she said, and from the moment students arrive they are placed on a stringent system of punishments and rewards.

Students were broken down into levels, with lower level students forbidden from speaking or even looking at higher level students.

“When you start at zero level, you then had rules about who you could look at,” she explained. “You couldn’t talk to members of the opposite sex until you were on second level and you had to fulfill a wide variety of requirements to move up.”

“At zero level, you’d have to be three feet away from a staff member or a supervisor at all times. You had to ask to go from room to room. It was insane,” she said. “Prisoners actually have more freedom than we had.”

Sleep deprived and worked to exhaustion, the students are fed on a diet of “sugar and fat,” Sugiuchi said. “It was in no way adequate to the amount of manual labor we were doing. We weren’t getting the nutrients we needed.”

[,,,]
Sugiuchi is currently working on a book, Unreformed, about her experience at Escuela Caribe. The film “Kidnapped for Christ” is premiering at the next Slamdance Film Festival, the rebel indie festival that now runs alongside the Sundance Film Festival in January. She hopes to raise awareness of these programs, which have deep ties to groups like Focus on the Family — who referred her parents to New Horizons Youth Ministries — and the Republican Party.

“If you follow the money, you’ll see that the Republicans are so, so in bed with these people,” she said. The Romney family contributes heavily to the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP), an umbrella organization for evangelical reform schools like Escuela Caribe — which was briefly closed down, then reopened under the name Crosswinds — and their Mormon equivalents.

Someday, she said, she hopes to see legislation against people sending their children to these types of schools, “but the legislation always gets stalled,” she said.

‘Kidnapped for Christ’ Review: Come Because You’re Gay, Stay For Jesus - The Daily Beast

Ex-Ex-Gay Pride

Far-right groups including the Family Research Council and the American Family Association pooled $600,000 to place ads promising the effectiveness of reparative therapy in The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. Anne and John Paulk smiled from full-page newspaper spreads.

In front of the crowds and cameras, Paulk was the image of certainty. But backstage, he was faltering. More than that, he knew he was lying.

“It’s funny, for those of us that worked in it, behind closed doors, we knew we hadn't really changed,” he says. “Our situations had changed—we had gotten married, and some of us had children, so our roles had changed. I was a husband and father; that was my identity. And the homosexuality had been tamped down. But you can only push it down for so long, and it would eke its way out every so often.”

When Paulk walked into that gay bar in 2000, someone recognized him and phoned Wayne Besen, a gay rights activist who now runs the nonprofit Truth Wins Out. Besen rushed over and snapped a picture. In the ensuing scandal, Paulk initially claimed he just went in to use the bathroom, and didn’t know it was a gay bar. But really, he was aching just to be in a welcoming environment.

“I went to a gay bar—not looking for sex, which is what people thought—but because I was missing my community. I was looking to sit in a place with people I felt comfortable with, and that was other gay people,” Paulk says. Though he continued to take speaking engagements, by 2003, he was burned out.

“I would be in hotel rooms, and I would be on my face sobbing and crying on the bed,” he says. “I felt like a liar and a hypocrite. Having to go out and give hope to these people. I was in despair knowing that what I was telling them was not entirely honest. I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Even in its earliest days, Exodus’s philosophy—that same-sex attraction meant a person was “broken” and could be “fixed”—was undermined by the reality of its members’ actions. Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper, two of the co-founders, left the movement in 1979 to be in a committed relationship with one another. (Bussee has spent the decades since actively fighting Exodus’s message.) John Evans, one of the founders of Love in Action (LIA), an early ex-gay ministry that helped establish Exodus in 1974, left LIA after a friend committed suicide over his distress at being unable to change his sexual orientation. "They're destroying people's lives,” Evans told The Wall Street Journal in 1993. “They're living in a fantasy world.” (LIA has since changed its name to Restoration Path.)

[,,,]
First came the photo of Paulk in the gay bar. Then in 2003, Michael Johnson, founder of “National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day,” was revealed to have infected men he’d met on the Internet with HIV through unprotected sex. John Smid, who joined LIA in 1986 and eventually became its executive director, left the organization in 2008. Three years later, Smid wrote on his blog that he "never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual," and that reorientation is impossible, because being gay is intrinsic.

Then it crumbled further. In 2012, psychologist Robert Spitzer—one of the leaders of the successful push in the 1970s for the American Psychiatric Association to declassify homosexuality as a disease—retracted a controversial study, published in 2003, often cited by the ex-gay community that had concluded some “highly motivated” individuals could change their sexual orientation. Spitzer wrote an apology to LGBT people who “wasted time and energy” on reparative therapy.

[,,,]
Lastly, there’s the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), founded in 1992 by psychologist Joseph Nicolosi. NARTH considers itself the foremost secular proponent of conversion therapy; it counts hundreds of well-credentialed mental health professionals among its ranks and has issued a number of white papers on the subject. It too, however, has suffered in the public eye in recent years: In 2007, NARTH therapist Chris Austin was convicted of sexually assaulting a client, and sentenced to 10 years in prison; in 2010, NARTH board member George Rekers was found to have employed a male prostitute as a companion for a two-week European vacation; and in 2012 the Internal Revenue Service revoked NARTH’s nonprofit status for not properly filing its paperwork.

Paulk left Exodus in 2003. He cautions against “speaking for everybody,” but says in his more than two decades of watching people undergo ex-gay therapy, the “large majority” of people he met “did not change one iota.” Paulk remained silent for a decade, until he issued a formal apology last year. "I know that countless people were harmed by things I said and did in the past, " Paulk wrote in a statement. "I am truly, truly sorry for the pain I have caused.”


Ex-Ex-Gay Pride

September Is 'Ex-Gay Awareness Month,' According To Family Research Council Groups

Hmm,,Let's see they had 10 people show up at their original "Ex-Gay Pride" event,,,how many do they honestly think will support this dreck for a whole month,,,

The original "Ex-Gay Pride" might have been an overall bust, but that hasn't stopped the right-wing group behind its inception from trying a second time.

As Right Wing Watch originally reported, Voice of the Voiceless and Equality and Justice for All have declared September "Ex-Gay Awareness Month," which will include a special "lobbying day and evening dinner" in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 30.

Details of those events, which include a "pre-event get-together and lobby education training" event on Sept. 29, can be found here.

Both Voice of the Voiceless and Equality and Justice for All are two new ex-gay rights organizations that were to be launched by the Family Research Council's legislative affiliate, FRC Action, in July.

September Is 'Ex-Gay Awareness Month,' According To Family Research Council Groups