November 14, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

In late October Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out that another researcher has announced that the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) “grossly and deliberately distorted” her research regarding sexual orientation. I have mentioned Besen’s own research and credentials in this blog several times, and his book Anything But Straight here).

Dr. Lisa Diamond, Associate professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, is interviewed by Besen here (5 minute video).

Diamond also comments in the video interview about so-called “reparative therapy.” “The [reparative] therapists are saying, “We can change your orientation,’when in fact all of the data—all of the data suggest that that’s not the case.” She is also particularly blunt about the willful misuse of published scientific findings by organizations who rely on the public’s gullibility. 

“There are a lot of scientists who would say, ‘you know what? I just produce the data, and then how it’s used is not my problem.’ But I think knowing that we have a culture that actually treats scientific findings very seriously in terms of support for public policy, that would be inappropriate. We have to be very vocal about what constitutes an unscientific use of the data and, that’s why I think it’s important to speak out. … I’m pretty accustomed at this point to the fact that these sorts of distortions will occur. My hope is that by doing something like this we can hopefully have a more scientifically-literate society and consumer culture that will get better at recognizing distortions when they occur, and will not simply take the citation of a scientific paper as evidence that that paper has been appropriately used.”

Besen has another web site which is very helpful, www.respectmyresearch.org, which names the distorters of scientific research. Among them, says Besen, are Dr. James Dobson who heads Focus on the Family (a multi-million dollar power house of right-wing rhetoric) and Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, former president of NARTH. “Nicolosi recently stepped aside after a member of his “Scientific Advisory Board” penned an article for NARTH’s website that justified slavery.”

Alongside the willful distortion of scientific research, NARTH has been known to use pseudo-science to prop up its persuasions. Although entirely discredited for his unscientific science, the views of Dr. Paul Cameron still pop up in NARTH’s archives. For example, Dr. Ross Olson cites a Cameron winner, “Gay Foster Parents More Apt to Molest,” by Paul Cameron, Journal of the Family Research Institute, Vol. 17 No. 7, Nov 2002, ). According to Respect My Research, Cameron “was dropped from the American Psychological Association for his shoddy and anti-gay work, such as claiming mosquitoes spread AIDS and gay people should be exterminated.”

Cameron and Nicolosi

(A week ago, NARTH held a convention. For one view of that, see Daniel Gonzales’ article, “Hair You can Straighten, Gays Not So Much” in the Box Turtle Bulletin here.)

It is to easy to suppose that the right wing nuts are simply crazy. There is a chilling consistency to their logic, a consistency for which they keep finding ways to misuse information and scientific studies. The consistency is what I called the Four Lies.

A few years ago I started writing a longer paper—but the longer research required and longer hours at my day job stopped me from finishing it—about the Four Lies I see behind the right-wing manipulation of public attitudes and public policy about homosexuality. The Four Lies are these: that we are child molesters, that we “recruit”, that we “choose the gay life style, and that we can simply change. These are not merely misunderstandings, they are Lies.

Change is the underlying issue, because it implies that there is a “right choice” and a “wrong choice.” Sexual reactionaries have themselves convinced that the chose heterosexuality, and take credit for making the “right choice,” in spite of the fact that credible academic research has yet to find a cause of heterosexuality or homosexuality, and increasingly supports the idea that no one chooses his or her sexual orientation.

The screwball doctrine that people choose be lesbian or gay supports the idea that impressionable young children must be protected from our influence. They encourage the public to fear the “bad influence” we supposed exert on the young so that they will seek to control us. Homosexuality must never be “taught in the schools” for example — which figured prominently in the “Yes on 8″ television ads in California. Conservatives in the African-American community, during the same Proposition 8 battle, insisted that black people do not choose to be black, but that homosexuals choose to be homosexual, and thus ours is not a civil rights issue. For conservatives who buy this Lie, since homosexual behavior is a choice, then we deserve no protected status and no civil rights.

The Lie about child molestation—which has been responsibly refuted over and over—is that any kind of an “experience” between a homosexual and a young person could influence that young person to become homosexual, as if it is such an attractive “lifestyle” that impressionable kids would choose homosexuality the way some kids choose to join a gang or get their navels pierced or their biceps tattooed. The whole thesis of “reparative therapy” is to fix the supposed damage to a young person’s gender identity to keep him from slipping or jumping into “the gay lifestyle.” On the so-called “gay lifestyle,” see my brief article “Two Gay Lifestyles” here.

After a while, I get so tired of arguing for truth over b.s. that like many others I tend to just make jokes about them. For example, the reason that heterosexuals have children is that since they can’t recruit they have to reproduce. But making jokes does not make Lies and misinformed public opinion go away. The Yes on Proposition 8 victory is evidence of that.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Lesbian/Gay Marriage, HIV and AIDS, LGBT Rights, Ex-Gay | Print | No Comments »

June 15, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

These twelve [disciples] Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. . . . Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town. — Matthew 10 

The closer we get to legal gay marriage in California, the more the fundagelicals will rant and rave. They have already written us off as “lost”—damned for sure, going to spend all eternity in the fires of hell. They will continue to look for clever new ways to pronounce shame on people who are now largely impervious to new shame. Meanwhile, we are getting married, and are finding new ways to feel proud.

It always amuses and annoys me that people who are losing influence talk more and more stridently about the “dire consequences” if the world does not listen to them. The panicked, angry voices of hateful Christians has been too loud for too long in America—and they will continue to insist that we are sick or “of the devil.”

As we get closer to Tuesday’s new marital opportunity, even lesbian and gay people are having some misgivings. The media have been picking up on this more and more, since they’ve run out of steam about queer euphoria. Some same-sex couples have determined to sit this one out at least until the November ballot is over. Others are dusting off retro-thoughts from the 1970s that “marriage is an institution—who wants to live in an institution?”

We ourselves still live with some of the internalized homophobia of the early gay rights movement a half-century ago, fearful that we are somehow sick or lost or pathetic, or don’t deserve to be free and happy and gay. We wonder out loud if we are really fit for marriage, or that the (especially male) gay character is inherently commitment-phobic—that we are tramps to the core. “All men are pigs.”

Well, no, really. Thousands of us can’t wait to pay our $70 for a license to accept responsibility for one another for the rest of our lives.

For those right wing folks (who still pretend they don’t know any of us personally), we will remain society’s lepers. They insist we are not only unworthy of enjoying the rights, privileges and respect of the mainstream, but suited only for living in our pathetic ghettoes (creative neighborhoods and designer-perfect abodes filled with high-end consumer products).

It was easier for prejudice before our sense of pride emerged. We were dangerous social lepers when we skulked around truck stops, tea rooms (now reserved for Republican senators) or elementary schools. We were lepers in our pathetic promiscuity.

We were lepers when HIV and AIDS killed off our young, bright and beautiful. The right-wing fundagelicals enjoyed trying, and were highly successful for a long time, in shaming us with such terms as “sodomites” and “homosexuals.” They could describe us with words of seeming precision to elicit immediate understanding and financial support within their donor base.

And the whole reason that straight, right-end Christians portray us in such terms is their desire to keep us isolated by our shame, because of their fear of contamination (by our good taste? our open-mindedness? our sculpted abs?).

But it will be harder and harder to isolate and condemn us when we are highly visible as out couples, husbands, and wives, and when it becomes clear that California is not being incinerated under God’s wrath or falling into the ocean.

In Matthew 10, Jesus says that on the day of judgment God will look with greater tolerance upon Sodom and Gomorrah that upon other places that do not receive Jesus’ word or turn away Jesus’ offer of peace, who refuse hospitality to those who come in his name. The contrast between the self-righteous Christian and the compassionate Christ couldn’t be more stark. Today we are finding that lesbian and gay people are open to Jesus’ word of compassion, and to our offer of peace in his name. It is the right wing which rants and warns of damnation.

In this same chapter Jesus recognizes that ministry will almost certainly trigger controversy. The wolves out there may try to tear us apart, and we should be prepared.

It will not be any different for those of us in the Christian church who welcome couples who want to marry and to revel in the sense of God’s blessing.

Less than 48 hours from now, it will be legal for two women or two men to tie the knot in California. “Gay marriage” will become the new leprosy to the Religious Right. They are expected to spend at least 10 million dollars by November to fight the Supreme Court’s decision. This will be a summer of great controversy because the religious right is seeding it into our society.

In our congregation, there have been, and there will be many more wedding ceremonies for women and men who love one another against all odds. Our hospitality to the lesbian and gay community will never be more thoroughly tested than it will with the legalizing of marriage. But our doors will remain open to lesbian and gay couples simply because Jesus sends us his disciples to serve the outcasts, the lepers and those rejected or harassed by others, and to offer a word of peace, not dire warning.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, HIV and AIDS, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, Fundamentalism, LGBT Christian, Coming Out, Public Affairs, LGBT Rights, Ministry | Print | No Comments »

April 7, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

Dedicated to the memory of Marc Anthon Reilly

Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear, having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ. —1 Peter 3:15–16, KJV

In the 1980s, Marc came to our small gatherings in an upper room of a church that was uneasy about our being there.  But we talked and talked, as he asked questions and I scrambled to frame potential answers about faith and sexuality, love and ethics.  We challenged each other, and I especially needed that, to better understand my own struggle to keep faith.

When my friend Marc died of AIDS in 1989, I inherited some of his own books, among them a Bible given to him by his family on his birthday, October 14, years before.  Recently, I needed an open Bible for the main photo for my new site site, www.gaycatechism.net (a soft-covered Bible that would flop open for a pleasing picture), and I picked up Marc’s Bible quite randomly from my bookshelf.  The flyleaf was inscribed:

Dear Marc:

This Book contains the Word of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers.

Its doctrines are holy, its precepts immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be saved, and practice it to be holy.

It contains Light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you.  Christ is its grand object, our good its design, and the Glory of God its end.

It should fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet.

Read it slowly, frequently, and prayerfully.  It is given to you in life, will be opened at the judgment, and will be remembered forever!

I met them briefly at the end of Marc’s funeral, knowing from his prior warning that they would likely be judgmental.  Most of us shrug off such momentary meetings at funerals, but I was the preacher for that service, and I had done my best to proclaim pure, unadulterated Gospel to everyone present:  to a congregation that had long since gotten over its antipathy to gay and lesbian people, and had become a “Reconciling in Christ” congregation; and to these parents whom none of the rest of us knew, except that Marc had told us they did not accept his homosexuality and probably believed God was punishing him with AIDS.

So, in reading this inscription page, apparently in Mom’s handwriting, I came face to face with what my friend had felt in his own struggle both to live as a beloved child of God and to die an untimely death comforted by friends but estranged from his parents.

What do we make of stuff like this?  LGBTQ people might blame the church, or would blame the parents for this estrangement.  The parents would blame the sin (”love the sinner, hate the sin.”)  The Church would go on studying the issue for another couple of decades, and blame its lack of resources for dragging this out at a snail’s pace.  But what do we make of this?

Personally, I am absolutely sick of hearing about the latest skirmish in the “culture wars” over homosexuality.  But unlike the right-wing person who is equally sick of it, I cannot close my ears or eyes to an unpleasant, tiresome “issue.”  Because I am gay, I must be ready to defend the hope that is within me, and even more, always be vigilant for the possible violence coming at me (whether physical, verbal, psychological, political or judicial) because of the underlying homophobia and hatred, much of it based on this Book.

I don’t formally disagree with the intentions of what Mom wrote to her son —she must have labored over the prose more than a little — but I see within it the smug and pious language of a faith which considers itself so superior to doubt or unbelief.  Why is it that the Christian hope, the Christian Gospel, cannot be proclaimed without this smug, sharp edge in its voice?

“The doom of sinners, . . . [this Book] will be opened at judgment.”  That is the kind of imagery which fundamentalists crave, but which kills relationships, estranges fathers from sons, and launches culture wars.  Can LGBTQ people find words of life here that aren’t dripping with the blood of apocalyptic warnings?  Can heterosexuals love the Lord without constantly arming themselves for a moral Armageddon?

My friend Marc was one of the lucky ones.  He died faithful to a Gospel which his parents did not fully understand, with a degree of honor and respect from the congregation which undoubtedly surprised them.  Through his battle (and his partner’s battle before him) against HIV and AIDS, he did not desert Jesus Christ in a time when cynicism and bitterness could easily have taken him down long before his death.

And thankfully he is not forgotten.  Marc left a small bequest to Lutherans Concerned/Los Angeles to help us carry on our teaching ministry through periodic lectureships.  And his faithfulness left a mark (a marc?) on me that has impelled me to keep teaching, writing and proclaiming the Gospel, without an edge to it.

Thank you, Marc.  I will always remember the gift you gave me through your faith.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in HIV and AIDS, Gay Catechism, Bible & Interpretation, Fundamentalism, Faith, LGBT Christian, Spirituality | Print | No Comments »

November 30, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

I think we are all suffering from “compassion fatigue.” People don’t care as intensely, or consistently, as we did a few years go, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in this country.

But our “suffering” is slight compared to those living with, and fighting against HIV/AIDS. The suffering of this country is slight, now, compared to the struggle being endured in developing countries. Dr. Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS, says that the epidemic has globalized and feminized. (Read his statement here.) The face of AIDS today is that of a heterosexual African woman of color. UNAIDS estimates that 95% of those living with HIV/AIDS are in developing nations, where all resources are scarce and costly.

There are countless world-wide and national organizations trying to help, but they too are often short on financial resources. The miracle drugs and “cocktails” which have made the continuation of life possible for thousands of Americans living with HIV/AIDS, are prohibitive elsewhere in the world, where even basic sanitation is spotty and difficult to maintain. Your compassionate response makes a difference.

Originally launched by the World Health Organization, tomorrow is the twentieth annual World AIDS Day, December 1.

This Sunday the Hollywood community will respond with an ecumenical Vespers/Concert in observance of World AIDS Day at Hollywood Lutheran Church, 1733 N. New Hampshire Avenue 90039. “World AIDS Hollywood” is an event to remember, pray and bring light. [Full details can be found at www.worldAIDSHollywood.org. Or call (323) 667-1212].

The event will feature the premier of “The Celestial Veil”, a new musical composition by Christopher A. Flores and Adrian Ravarour; music from Vox Femina and the Hollywood Wind Ensemble and other guest artists. Three 12×12 blocks of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt are on display. A bell will be rung and a votive candle lit for hundreds of names of those whom we have lost in our community. Please join us!

It is my prayer that our compassion fatigue has ended, and that the Hollywood community especially will be awakened again to the urgency of our compassionate response.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Hollywood, HIV and AIDS, Health, Public Affairs, PRAYERS, Ministry | Print | No Comments »