Fred Phelps, antigay hatemonger (1929-2014)

Antigay Christian fundamentalist jihadist Fred Phelps has died.

This WJTV report, Mississippi Born Pastor Fred Phelps Dies at 84 03/30/2014, says straightforwardly what Phelps' professed reason was for protesting at soldiers' funerals: "Phelps believed any misfortune, most infamously the deaths of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, was God's punishment for society's tolerance of homosexuality."

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian reports on Phelps' career in Fred Phelps Nears Death - Shocking Surprises In His Hate-Filled Life The Young Turks 03/17/2014:

It's been revealing but not especially surprising that conservatives have tiptoed around that motivation, since most of them agree with the sentiment if not the protesting. This piece at the conservative Christianity Today website on How Should We Respond to the Tragic Death of Fred Phelps? talks about him as a promoter of hate - without mentioning against whom that hatred was most notoriously directed.

The conservative Christian Post has a more intriguing set of article on Phelps' death. Michael Gryboski report in Fred Phelps' Estranged Son Comments on Death, 'I Will Mourn His Passing' 03/21/2014 that his son Nate Phelps is critical of his late father's antigay theology. But he also points out that Nate is an atheist, something not likely to endear him to the Christian Post's main readership:

Since leaving the Westboro Baptist cult several years ago, Nate Phelps has been a strong proponent of atheism and an LGBT advocate.

In the statement, posted on the website Recovering From Religion, Nate Phelps said that he "will mourn his (father's) passing." ...

Via the RFR post, Nate Phelps also equated the controversial rhetoric of his father with pastors who are opposed same-sex marriage and do not condone homosexuality.

"The lessons of my father were not unique to him, nor will this be the last we hear of his words, which are echoed from pulpits as close as other churches in Topeka, Kansas, where WBC headquarters remain, and as far away as Uganda," said Phelps.

It's an interesting reportorial move: stating who Fred Phelps brand of hate was directed against, including the fact that other churches besides Westboro express very similar sentiments - but putting it into the mouth of someone identified as "a strong proponent of atheism and an LGBT advocate," both sinister things to Christian fundamentalists, and someone who rebelled against his father, also a particularly suspect quality to Christian fundamentalist advocates of their version of "family values."

And check out this CP headline: Westboro Baptist Church Founder and Civil Rights Attorney Fred Phelps Dies 03/20/2014, an article by Morgan Lee.

The Christian Post is a conservative web publication that publishes articles by Christian Right honchos like Richard Land, Al Mohler and Eric Metaxas and is also Pentecostal-friendly, i.e., they publish writers who take demon-possession literally. They provide a convoluted we-don't-like-him-but-don't-think-we're-siding-with-them-thar-gays approach to Phelps' death.

For the Christian Right, "civil rights attorney" has a double-reverse meaning: "civil rights" are Good for guns and for American Christian fundamentalists being relentless persecuted (but they don't mean by Jews because they love Israel!) but Evil when being claimed by LGBT sorts or by, you know, "inner city" people (which has nothing to do with race, not at all!). So see, we're criticizing Phelps for being bad, too, so don't say we didn't criticize him!! I think of this as double-reverse thinking, because when I try to follow out rightwing logic like this, it feels like my brain is bending back on itself.

Maybe worst of all, Phelps was a Democrat who supported Al Gore: "Phelps was closely tied with Kansas' Democratic Party, helping Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign." Being a nominal Democrat does not mean someone is taking a liberal position; hardline rightwingers even now sometimes run for office as Democrats or claim to be Democrats. Cenk and Ana discuss this briefly in the video report above.

And there's this from Cenk and Ana from 2012, Fox News: Westboro Baptist Church is Left-Wing Cult 12/30/2012:

I was struck by this line: "The [Westboro Baptist] church also sees the 9/11 terrorist attacks as proof of God's judgment on the United States for allowing homosexuality and abortion."

This kind of judgment is not at all unusual among conservative Christian fundamentalists. Remember the classic comments of the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson just after the 9/11 attacks (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson say immorality and anti-Christian groups should share in the blame for the Terrorist Attacks on America TruthorFiction.com, n/d, accessed 03/23/2014; Austin Carty, Jerry Falwell 9/11 Remarks: A Former Liberty University Student Reflects Huffington Post 09/13/2011):

Falwell said, "The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God...successfully with the help of the federal court system ... throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad ... I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America ... I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen."

Robertson said, "I totally concur, and the problem is we've adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government, and so we're responsible as a free society for what the top people do, and the top people, of course, is the court system."

Falwell added, "Pat, did you notice yesterday that the ACLU and all the Christ-haters, the People for the American Way, NOW, etc., were totally disregarded by the Democrats and the Republicans in both houses of Congress, as they went out on the steps and and called out to God in prayer and sang 'God bless America' and said, let the ACLU be hanged. In other words, when the nation is on its knees, the only normal and natural and spiritual thing to do is what we ought to be doing all the time, calling on God."

Another CP article goes into some detail to recall Phelps' reported civil rights background: Napp Nazworth, Before Fred Phelps Preached Hate, He Was a Civil Rights Hero 03/20/2014. Nazworth's reporting seems to be more straightforward journalism; but then, I haven't noticed the Christian Post holding to terribly high classical journalism standards. Still, it would seem that if Phelps had a serious personal commitment to defending African-American civil rights, his conversion to a far uglier perspective calls for some explanation. But neither of the two Christian Post articles I've cited here offers any kind of explanation.

And Nazworth's piece seems to be particularly intent on demonstrating what a dedicated advocate Phelps was for Those People. He quotes Phelps' son Nathan - who we know is "a strong proponent of atheism and an LGBT advocate" - saying that Old Man Phelps was a racist. He links to this article by Alex Hannaford, My father, the hate preacher: Nate Phelps on escaping Westboro Baptist Church The Telegraph 03/13/2013. Hannaford's report says:

"... [Fred Phelps] graduated with a law degree from a university in Kansas and fought various civil rights suits in the Sixties. According to local reports, he gained a reputation as a sharp, competent attorney "whose eloquent and fiery orations mesmerised juries". Two decades later, he received awards from the Greater Kansas City Chapter of Blacks in Government and a local branch of the human rights group the NAACP.

But Nate Phelps says the perception in some circles that his father was once this champion of civil rights, railing against discrimination, is laughable. "We would all call black people 'DNs' at home. It stood for Dumb N------ and was our private language," he says. “We thought it was clever to call them that in front of them. He was deeply prejudiced, and he believed the Bible said they were cursed.”

Nate says Fred Phelps saw an opportunity with the passing of the Civil Rights Act to cash in. "There was a lot of money, and a lot of opportunity," he says. "And suddenly my father was the man to go to." At the same time, Nate says, he and his siblings were being fed a distorted version of the Bible. "We were told we were the only people left on Earth; the only ones who were going to be saved." Nate says his father became an itinerant preacher, attempting to save Mormons in Utah and Native Americans in the south west, and believing that he was never going to die.

Nazworth cites the Telegraph report for Nathan's view. But he apparently got a statement directly from Shirley Phelps-Roper, who he identifies in the piece only as Fred Phelps daughter. By an earlier Christian Post article by Morgan Lee in The Christian Post, Live from Hell, Westboro Baptist Spokesperson Sings Church's Hate Messages in NYC Musical 10/08/2013, identifies Phelps-Roper more fully as "WBC [Westboro Baptist Church] spokesperson and daughter of WBC Pastor Fred Phelps."

His estranged son's word isn't necessarily definitive. But Nathan's version does explain the seeming conversion: there was money to be made in pursuing those lawsuits. And if you've got a white attorney that has, uh, old-fashioned attitudes about race but makes effective arguments in court, it wouldn't be surprising that his civil-rights clients were more concerned about his results than his private attitudes.

Nazworth also relies heavily on this article by Joe Taschler and Steve Fry, As a lawyer, Phelps was good in court The Capital-Journal 08/03/1994. And he approvingly cites the argument by Matthew Rozsa in The Creator Of Westboro Baptist Used to Be a Die-Hard Civil Rights Fighter — What Happened? 03/16/2014. Rozsa's argument, though, is a dubious pop-psychology speculation based on Eric Hoffer's general theory of fanaticism. None of the reporting I've seen on Fred Phelps' civil-rights work on behalf of African-American clients indicates that he was a fanatical believer in the cause of civil rights.

The antigay sentiment is a crucial organizing point and fundraising tool for the Christian Right. American Christian fundamentalists, with a few individual exceptions as always, agree both with Phelps' attitude that homosexuality is sinful as such and with his view that God collectively punishes the United States for legal sins like tolerating homosexuality.

It was his tactic of staging protests at soldiers' funerals that brought him the level of attention it did. I'm not sure how influential he was on the politics of antigay hatred; there's no shortage of Christian Right fundamentalists promoting that cause. But he attracted plenty of attention to his group (which probably functions as a cult) by the protests. And conservatives were able to instrumentalize those protests by ignoring the religious-ideological reason Phelps and Westboro gave (antigay hatred) and expressing outrage only at the seeming antiwar aspect (although it's not clear to me that Westboro was antiwar, as such). Rightwingers are wedded to notion that war critics are "hostile to soldiers" and Phelps gave them a way to promote that image. Although in the end it will only fool people who want to be fooled on that score.

The Patriot Guard Riders is the motorcycle group (club? gang?) that formed to block Westboro protesters. The front page of their website doesn't mention anything at all about Westboro, much less their Christian-fundamentalist antigay position they placed at the center of those protests. Their website says their purpose it to go to funerals of soldiers at the family's invitation to: "Shield the mourning family and their friends from interruptions created by any protestor [sic] or group of protestors [sic]."

God forbid that anyone might think the Patriot Guard Riders were on the same side as LGBT advocates or antiwar activists in objecting to protests at funerals of individual soldiers! Their "Our History" page does refer to "misguided religious zealots" doing the protesting. Quakers? Buddhists? Gosh, who could those "religious zealots" be and why might they be protesting?

Christian Right activists and writers find it awkward if not completely insupportable to straightforwardly take a stance against Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist's antigay position. Because, for one thing, many Christian fundamentalist share the basic Westboro theology that homosexuality is evil and that God collectively punishes the United States for not repressing it more actively.

For another, they don't want to divide the political cause supporting antigay legislation. And the claim that Christian Rightists make that they only oppose "special rights" being granted to LGBT people is silly. Their attitudes toward anti-bullying programs and toward gays in the military illustrated that they don't just oppose "special rights," they support active antigay discrimination, even including encouraging violence against gays and lesbians.

Here's the endorsement that evangelical prince Franklin Graham gave to that manly-man Vladimir Putin, whose manly manliness American conservatives have been drooling over (see You'll Never Guess Who Loves Putin The Young Turks 03/19/2014) from an article in the March 2014 Decision Magazine, a publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Putin's Olympic Controversy 02/28/2014:

I have never heard Putin quote the Bible, but during his 2012 election campaign, he met with church leaders in Moscow and vowed to protect persecuted Christians around the world. That is one justification for his support of the Assad regime in Syria.

Syria, for all its problems, at least has a constitution that guarantees equal protection of citizens. Around the world, we have seen that this is essential where Christians are a minority and are not protected. The radicals in Syria want an Islamic constitution based on sharia law.

Christians have lived in Syria since the time of Christ. The Apostle Paul was on the road to Damascus when he met Christ. Christians in Syria know that if the radicals overthrow Assad, there will be widespread persecution and wholesale slaughter of Christians.

To be clear, I am not endorsing President Putin. To survive in the KGB and rise to power in Russia, you have to be tough. His enemies say he is ruthless. To some, he is a modern version of a czar. His personal life has its own controversies.

Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue—protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda — Russia’s standard is higher than our own?

In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.

Our president and his attorney general have turned their backs on God and His standards, and many in the Congress are following the administration’s lead. This is shameful. [my emphasis]

Tags: franklin graham, fred phelps, gay rights, lgbt rights, westboro baptist

Brasilian President supports gay marriage

Why are those Latino nations so backward?

El Mundo (Spain)/AFP reports that Brasilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in an interview on Brasilian TV that he supports gay marriage and that it's time to end the "hypocrisy" about it. (Lula, a favor de los matrimonios gays 19.09.2008)

Let's see. Spain has legalized gay marriage. Chile and Argentina have both elected female Presidents. Brasil's President endorses gay marriage.

Aren't these Latin nations supposed to be so macho and retrograde on matters of gender equality and gay rights than us enlightened, civilized, "advanced" Americans? Something in this picture doesn't quite fit ...

Tags: argentina, brasil, chile, gay rights, lula da silva

A side of the cultural war argument you won't hear on the campaign trail in 2008

When I saw Rachel Kramer Bussel's post, The Case For Open Relationships in the Huffington Post 12/10/07, it reminded me that one of the casualties of the "culture wars" has been that sober discussions of people's actual sexual practices have been largely pushed out of the popular press.

It's paradoxical - or maybe more of an Hegelian contradiction - that this has occurred at the same time that sex is featured more and more, from FOX News' "soft porn" features to a popular fiction series like Sex and the City. The latter dealt with people's sex lives with a frankness that was a key element of the series' success. But Bussel's article, discussing the real-world version of that, jumps out at the (American) reader like a rather scandalous take on universally accepted standards.

She makes the point that "monogamy", by which she means single-partner sexual commitments, work fine for most people. But in the real world, some people have other than monogamous sexual relationships, both in terms of "cheating" and in less serreptious version.

It's a sign of how the word "monogamy" in American English has come to be understood as referring to sexual relationships that I feel compelled to note at this point that in medically-based "safe sex" advice, maintaining an exclusive relationship with a trusted partner is highly recommended, apart from any more general moral considerations.

But, whatever moral judgment one passes on it, it's a fact of our world - yes, even in "Puritanical" America - that sexual "monogamy" is not universally practiced, to put it mildly. As Bussel writes:

I agree ..., completely, that "fantasy is a good thing." And for many people, monogamy works just fine. But for others, both men and women, monogamy is not a perfect system and doesn't allow them to fully realize themselves. By that I don't mean "sleep with anyone they want," but rather that we may reveal different aspects of ourselves to different people. Think about your various close friends; the way you interact with them is likely different for each one. Some people have that same experience with lovers; they may be married or in a long-term relationship, but have someone else they see occasionally or frequently. Open relationships are not all about sex, either. We may want someone we can talk to, share with, who provides a different kind of support or energy or way of relating than our primary partner.

I've been in both open and monogamous relationships, and one thing I can safely say is that there are plenty of people in so-called monogamous relationships where there's all kinds of cheating going on. Or, as Betty Dodson told me a few years ago, "America practices serial monogamy with cheating on the side. It's never acknowledged and it's lied about." If you've been cheated on, you know the pain and heartache this can cause, likely fostering distrust that can stay with us in future relationships. Even if there's not cheating, it's likely that one person may be up to something the other wouldn't necessarily approve of (flirting, for instance). Furthermore, when we make monogamy the be-all and end-all in relationships, in some ways we make the letter of the law more important than the spirit. Would you rather your partner make love to you every day, even though their heart's not really in it?

It's notable here that Bussel is using "monogamy" in a broader sense, as an institutional model of relationships. That's different than using "monogamy" to refer exclusively to sexual relationships.

The exclusively-sexual meaning of "monogamy" may be so entrenched in American usage by now that we need a whole new word or phrase to mean the broader cultural-social context in which Bussel uses it in the passage just quoted. It's a shame to think that the sniggering-frat-boy definition has become a defining one. But language has its own rules of development, and the frat-boy version may have carried the game for the word "monogamy".

Which is a shame. Because the changing nature of family relationships should be something that can be discussed more frankly in what the Christian fundamentalists like to call "the public square", i.e., normal respectable writing and conversation, without having it instantly translated in the listener's mind to an advocacy of "free love" or promiscuity. But it's probably a sign of something not entirely good that a term like "free love" is generally understood to be a bad, sinful thing. Incorporating the notion of freedom into love shouldn't be in itself a sinful concept.

It's also entirely understandable that mainstream politicians and more ideological activists would want to separate the issue of gay marriage from an implication that it means a breakdown of sexual morality and order, to which the opponents of gay marriage would be happy to have such an association made. Marriage is not only a social institution as well as a cultural practice. There are good reasons that most democratic societies define legal marriage or other legally-recognized forms of partnership ("domestic partners") on the basis of single-partner relationships, reasons from healthcare concerns to responsibility for children.

None of this is new to family law courts. They face challenges every day to fit the needs of children and partners into the actual structure of relationships as they are lived.

But the discussion over marriage laws, particular on the issue of gay marriage, often seems to be stuck in a strange state of suspension, as though there is some standard of Traditional Marriage that has been accepted since forever.

The institution of marriage as we know it in the United States has changed considerably since 1776. It's changed significantly in more recent decades, as well. The establishment of community property laws, for instance, was a significant change in the legal positions of partners in a marriage.

If we look a little farther back, the changes are even more obvious. Prior to the Civil War (1861-65), women's property rights in general were distinctly subordinate to those of male relatives, not just husbands. Women also couldn't vote. Women's disadvantage in property rights and opportunities for independent work outside the home were even more restricted in the South than in the North.

"Traditional family" for slaveowners was theoretically a union between a man and a woman. But the real existing family practices of slaveowners often included sexual activity with slaves, as well. In most cases it was male slaveowners with female slaves, though female slaveowners were also known to indulge their sexual impulses with male slaves, as well. I haven't read about same-sex activity in that regard, though it undoubtedly took place.

Slaves formed single-partner relationships, but they were strictly informal. The slave codes did not recognize slave marriages. And the rights of husbands, wives and children were essentially nonexistent. Families could be divided at any time by slave sales, and they very frequently were. Slaveowners could require one slave to breed with another whether either partner wanted to do so, and whether either partner was in a single-partner relationship with someone else.

But that was the "traditional family" under slavery.

Clearly, the institution of marriage in the United States today is not what it was in many ways in 1860. I think it would be beneficial if the political discussion about gay marriage and other family-law issues could take place in a less-constricted framework that recognizes that legal frameworks of marriage have to change in regard to changing social developments and norms.

Legalizing divorce doesn't mean that any particular couple has to get divorced. But it allows those for whom it is a preferable option to do so. Setting the legal age for marriage without parental at 18 doesn't mean that everyone has to get married at 18. In fact, compulsory marriage is not legal at all in the US, so the fact that marriage exists as an institution doesn't require any particular adult to use it.

The same thing is true with gay marriage. It's no threat to heterosexual marriage to give gays and lesbians the option for legal marriage. And, just as having divorce legalized doesn't stop a church from teaching that divorce is a sin, having gay marriage be legal wouldn't stop any church from teaching that homosexuality is a sin.

But in the larger discussion of not only what's legal but what should be considered moral or socially acceptable does need to take account of the realities of contemporary life. It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that not all "alternative" sexual practices should be considered benign.

What Bussel's post reminded me, though, is that the conventions of political conversation on "family" often don't take account of the realities of the way healthy adults actually live their lives. Good for her for contributing to the public discussion in a positive way. Even if politicians can't talk about the real world in an equally frank way.

Tags: gay rights, rachel kramer bussel

Republicans in the closet

Ganymede, Zeus' cup-bearer and male sexual companion: the Republicans need to make peace with him

Joe Conason has a thoughtful column in which he raises a very good question: since so many conservative Republicans are gay, including some that have had important roles in the Party and the conservative movement, maybe the Republicans should seriously think about laying off all the anti-gay agitation: The GOP's crowded closet Salon 08/31/07.

As I said in an earlier post, I'm dubious about to what extent it damages the Party politically, or even individual candidates who are caught somehow involved in gay sexual activity.

But the Party's anti-gay atmosphere and ideology does force gay Republicans to live in public and even private denial of their sexual orientations. This is not right and it's not healthy.

Why don't they just stop it?

Tags: gay rights, republican party

The Christian Right wants to "repair" us all

The fourth and final part of Salon's series on conversion therapy/reparative therapy is now available: True confessions Salon 07/21/05. The first three parts have Mark Benjamin's byline, but this one has none.

There is something deeply disturbing about these quack therapists:

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality, says that gays who are unhappy with efforts to change their sexual orientation are no different from patients who are disgruntled by some other medical treatment. "That can happen in any treatment," Nicolosi says. "You name any kind of procedure or treatment, and you are going to find people that are really dissatisfied with it."

He dismisses any alleged harm caused by his methods. "They say we are doing harm," Nicolosi says. "There is not one case against me. There is not one legal or ethical case against me. Where are all these people who have been harmed? There should be a small busload."

I tell Nicolosi I have spoken to a half-dozen people who have been through reparative therapy. All are still gay. All feel hurt by the therapy. None are gay rights' advocates. Nicolosi's group claims that 25 to 50 percent of those seeking treatment get "significant improvement." So I ask him if he can introduce me to any men or women who have been converted from gay to straight who are not on the payroll of an ex-gay ministry. He responds that his patients will not talk to me because they don't get a fair shake in the press. They are done with homosexuality and have moved on with their lives. They don't want to talk about it now. (my emphasis)

One of the peculiar things about this to me is that this particular scam is sponsored by fundamentalist Christians. Yet fundamentalists have traditionally been hostile to the whole notion of psychotherapy, with the justification that Jesus can solve all your problems. There are more material reasons, too, like the fact that many fundamentalists insist on a distinctly subordinate role for women, in families and in society. Any honest and professional psychotherapy could raise all kind of challenges to that. And to hyper-restrictive sexual norms. And would not lie to people about birth control or sexually-transmitted diseases.

The callousness and lack of ethics that this series of articles describes is grim enough in itself. But, especially knowing something about the ugly history of the "recovered memories" therapy fiascos, I have a strong hunch that this "reparative therapy" business is the tip of a bigger iceberg.

When you cut through all the fakey Christian rhetoric - which doesn't seem to be too hard to do, as the quote above suggests - this whole "reparative therapy" production is just another attempt to stigmatize gay sexuality.

Once again, though, gay sexuality isn't their only target. Any kind of "deviant" sexual behavior is equally sinful to the zealots of the Christian Right. I recall once as a teenager hearing a fundamentalist minister at a summer youth camp seriously advise his congregation that kissing before marriage - yes, I said kissing before marriage - was sinful. God must have known what he was doing in creating teenage hormones, though. I doubt that advice persuaded anyone there.

Living together "in sin"? Having sexual activity that not for the purpose of reproduction? You're on their list for reparative therapy or some variety of it, too. For the Christian Right, even the notion that sex should be pleasurable is a controversial idea.

All those secular Republicans that think these people that are so prominent in their Party are just harmless kooks might want to think carefully about what life would be like in a Christian Republic.

Because there's something skin-crawling creepy about this "reparative therapy" scam.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, gay rights

Conversion therapy

Salon is currently running a series on one of the more disturbing enterprises of the Christian Right, the push to "convert" gays and lesbians into being straight. Salon calls it "a four-part investigation into the Christian netherworld of 'reparative therapy,' a disputed practice to convert gays and lesbians into heterosexuals."

The first three parts are:

Turning off gays by Mark Benjamin 07/18/05
My gay therapy session by Mark Benjamin 07/19/05
Getting straight with God by Mark Benjamin 07/20/05

Among several things disturbing about it, these articles give a glimpse at the seamy and bizarre way that some Chrisitians are willing to use dishonest appeals, unethical practices and quack medical theories to promote their particular version of Christianity.

I'm willing to believe that at least some of them sincerely think they're trying to help people. But consider the implications of this, from the first article:

It is not just gay rights activists who say that efforts to change gays and lesbians are voodoo therapy. The nation's two mainstream psychiatric and psychological associations, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, deny reparative therapy's very premise. Along with the National Association of Social Workers, these groups say homosexuality simply is not a mental disorder. Being gay by itself is not a problem, they point out; rather, the negative mental health consequences of discrimination have been well established and cited as a factor in higher suicide rates among gays. Therapy to change homosexuality may simply telegraph to patients they are sick when they are not, that they can fundamentally change their sexual orientation when they cannot. If so, failed efforts to change could prove disastrous, particularly for deeply religious gays.

Quack therapies can and do cause real harm to patients. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a type of therapy became popular based on "recovered memories" of early childhood sexual abuse. It generated the concept of "multiple-personality disorder." It has now become largely discredited, because it was based on unfounded theories and unethical manipulation of the patients. Some of the wild stories of Satanic cults and orgies and sacrificing babies and such came from this particular fad.

And it was a type of therapy largely pushed by fundamentalist Christians.

Fundamentalist Protestants aren't the only ones pushing bizarre and dangerous psychotherapies. Although the specifics would be a bit dated now, the book Crazy Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work? (1996) by Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich discusses a number of New Agey therapies, and includes some useful advice for recognizing when pyschotherapy is taking a wrong turn.

One of the alarm signals is when a therapist directly tries to change the patient's religious beliefs. That is unethical behavior, and should raise the most serious concerns right away. And, yes, clinics symptoms with religious manifestations can be addressed without the therapist proselytizing the patient to change their basic religious beliefs - or lack thereof.

The whole field of "reparative therapy" is echoing with alarms signals. Psychological claims without good evidentiary bases, a heavily religious emphasis, operating in a regulatory gray area - something risky is going on there. And Christians who claim to be doing the work of God but engage in unethical and deceptive practices really should take a serious look at what they are doing.

The American Psychiatric Association has asked ethical psychiatrists to refrain from reparative therapy. "We are finding that the numbers of people claiming to be harmed by reparative therapy are increasing," says Dr. Jack Drescher, chair of the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Issues. "I don't know about the suicides because it is hard to determine why somebody killed themselves afterward. But the harm is increasing." The legislative body of Drescher's APA approved a statement this past spring that endorsed gay marriage to help reverse gay stigma. They also cite evidence that stable, monogamous relationships are beneficial for mental health, whether gay or straight. (my emphasis)

This is an interesting comment to me:

... Drescher says the mental health profession does agree with the reparative therapy crowd about one thing: No one knows for sure what guides sexual orientation, gay or straight, but mounting evidence suggests a biological component. "We do know there is a very good likelihood that [homosexuality] is biologically related. We do have some studies that indicate a biological component," he says. That homosexuality may be innate, Drescher says, bolsters the argument for gay rights. "And that's what the religious right is fighting against," he says.

I've thought that gay rights advocates may be making a mistake by putting too much emphasis on the notion that homosexuality is primarily biological. For one thing, finding a precise biological basis for even a specific physical condition is very difficult. And finding a biological/genetic basis for any complex behavior is still well beyond current scientific capabilities. Periodically, there will be a front-page headline about an exciting new discovery of a genetic predisposition to violent crime or something like that. The article a couple of months later reporting that other experiments have not been able to validate the claim tend to get buried in the back pages.

Because even though there's some biological basis for everything human beings do, virtually nothing about human sexuality is "natural". I mean, I enjoyed seeing Brooke Shields in the original Blue Lagoon movie discover the birds and the bees by trial and error with her male companion. But in fact, every kind of sexual behavior beyond the most basic physical arousal is shaped by some kind of cultural assumptions and training. And even physical arousal depends heavily on learned assumptions about what is attractive.

Sigmund Freud, in his provocative way, described any kind of sexual behavior other than intercourse as "aim-inhibited." In his view, the behaviors known as "perversions" - like fetishism, for example - are aim-inhibited sex. But then, so are "normal" sexual behaviors like kissing or holding hands. No, this did not mean he advocated the abandonment of all rules for sexual behavior. But he did insist that medicine and science should recognize that sexuality is more complex than good and bad, sick and healthy.

That's why in some ways it's surprising to hear fundis arguing that being gay is a "chosen lifestyle" and many gay-rights advocates insisting on a biological explanation. Apart from what is effective as a political slogan, it seems to me that if a straight person has to learn basically everything about sexual behavior, then it's hard to argue logically or sensibly that straight or "normal" sexual behavior is "natural," i.e., biological. And if even a kiss is a "perversion", an aim-inhibited sexual act that doesn't in itself serve reproduction, how can you really say that gay sexuality is wrong because it doesn't serve biological reproduction?

That may sound like a contrarian argument. But a lot of what the Christian Right holds up as the "traditional family" is an ideological abstraction that often has little to do with the changing nature of family and sexual life even among straight people. Understanding sexuality as being in great part a social product seems to me to be a powerful argument for a pragmatic and compassionate approach to such issues in public policy.

Just to be clear: advocates of "reparative therapy" are happy to use scientific arguments opportunistically, e.g., the fact that there is no consensus on the biological roots of sexual preference. But one of the things that Benjamin's series illustrates is how quick some of the Christian Right activists are to override medical and scientific findings with their "faith-based" approaches and unethical practices. Even if there were a consensus among biologists about an identifiable physical determinant of sexual preferences, the hardcore Christian Right would reject it.

And straight people shouldn't kid ourselves about the anti-gay agenda of the Christian Right. They want to dictate our sexual behavior, too. And for many of them, fear of gay sexuality is part of a larger fear and hostility to sexuality in general.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, gay rights