Fridy Gay Blogging

I generally avoid topics like ex-gays because there are much more uplifting things to think about -- and I get tired of pointing out the same lies over and over again. However, this week Jeremy Hooper at Good As You points us toward this story fromt he Anchorage Press. It's an interesting story -- Wayne Besen, who's organizing the protest against "Love Won Out" there, gets as much coverage as the ex-gays do, which is rare. This, however, is what struck me as interesting:

Melissa Fryrear, Focus on the Family’s Director of the Gender Issues Department, Love Won Out speaker, and former lesbian, stated, “We exist to help men and women dissatisfied with living homosexually understand that same-sex attractions can be overcome. It’s not easy, but it is possible, as evidenced by the thousands of men and women—like me—that have walked this road successfully. . . .”

Dallas named inborn characteristics that he says make one susceptible to homosexuality—sensitivity, creativity, compliance, preference for intellectual pursuits over athletics—and spoke of a “decision” homosexuals make to make their orientation and behavior part of their identity.

Love Won Out’s position sounds like, basically, that homosexuality is the result of choices, and it backs itself up with the testimony of speakers like Johnston and Fryrear, both of who say they’ve overcome same-sex attraction. Fryrear, reached by phone after the conference, specifies, “one of our corrections to Christians who don’t understand the struggle is that we don’t think the feelings are a choice, we’re trying to offer Christians our perspective, and what we’ve found to be complex influencing factors.”

In other words, we'll stand there and make it sound like same-sex orientation can be changed, but when you call us on it, the fallback is that, well, no, but you can pretend it doesn't exist. This, by the way, is a recent development -- now that the evidence is piling up and becoming more and more unavoidable, they have to change their position to maintain any credibility. Suddenly, "the feelings are not a choice." Hmmmm.

To add to the bullshit factor, Joe.My.God found one I missed:

Melissa Fryrear, Focus on the Family’s Director of the Gender Issues Department, Love Won Out speaker, and former lesbian, stated, “We exist to help men and women dissatisfied with living homosexually understand that same-sex attractions can be overcome. It’s not easy, but it is possible, as evidenced by the thousands of men and women—like me—that have walked this road successfully.”

We keep hearing about these "thousands," but somehow we never see them.

For an overview of the state of the art in the research, withi particular reference to the most recent brain-imaging study, see this interview at Salon.

On the marriage front, Jim Burroway and Timothy Kincaid have done a couple of excellent reports (here and here, respectively) on the Mormons' backing of the anti-marriage amendments in Arizona and California. As Burroway points out:

I fully expect this line of questioning to be very controversial. My email inbox is already full about this. But I do think it is newsworthy that one religious denomination appears to be bankrolling a serious public policy initiative under the guise of a broad-based grass-roots organization. If that doesn’t send a chill down the spines of everyone who cherishes religious liberty, I don’t know what does.

You know my feelings: there is too much religious doctrine on the lawbooks already. We should be weeding it out, not planting more

Dessert today courtesy of Queerty: