Its a shame society does that to people this is the us of a as i am told

Exodus pushes the attendees so hard to seek change in another, when they all must really seek to find change in themselves. It tells them: “Ignore the beam in your own eye; if you have fault, it is in the past and the past cannot be changed. It is they who can and must change.”

The line that these people — the parents and other consumers of this information, not the producers of it — need to be confronted with is not “no more hate” or “hate-free zone” but “no more lies” and “the truth will set you free.” The correct criticism is not “you are full of hate” but “you have been told lies.” If the Truth can win, it will clear the air of the lies and darkness that have blocked love and perverted it into anger and sadness and bitterness and yes, hatefulness. If the Truth wins out, love will be able to find itself again.

Anyway, when confronting these people, it’s not “no more hate”, but rather “no more lies.” That’s the core of the problem here. And telling a grief-stricken mother she’s hateful won’t get her anywhere, but telling her she’s been lied to might get her thinking.

Anyway, I just wanted to add that it seems to me that the hate is subtle, but quite clear. Would you have found the old man’s story so touching if he were upset about anything else? He was sad that things turned out this way, but when he speaks of continually fighting with his son over the phone, what do you think he’s saying–that his son shouldn’t eat so many carbs? No. He’s telling the son that he shouldn’t be gay, that it’s wrong, that he’s a lesser being and he’s going to hell. The son rightfully gets angry, and they hang up. Wait a few weeks, and they do it all over again.

The problem, in my opinion, is that this kind of reviv…er…conference is not trying to help the family understand that not only are their sons and daughters gay, but that it really has little to do with them. This conference makes the assumption (and pushes the idea) that sexual orientation can be changed and that it *should be changed.* That for your son or daughter to “remain” gay not only is a sin, but a character flaw–not only is he gay, but lazy too!

If there were a “conference” tent right next to this one offering to help people come to terms with their relatives’ sexuality (which, again, I can’t see is any of their business–I don’t discuss sex with my parents), do you think these people would be lining up for that? Call me cynical, but I doubt it.

Maybe, if they are so concerned about their relatives, they would put some effort into ensuring that those relatives are not treated as second-class citizens, rather than trying to “cure” them.

To me, the hate is obvious, but I’m certain it isn’t to the man himself. He doesn’t realize that while hating what his son does so much that he can no longer see him, he is hating who his son actually is.

You walked among the attendees there at the conference and you could clearly see their humanity, and how deeply some of them were suffering. And this was your first time inside of one.

Question: how can the people organizing these ghastly things, who have been organizing them for year after year now, who have without a doubt heard stories like these over and over again, year in and year out, not see the bleeding hurting humanity in those people the way you could, at your very first encounter with it?

There’s the hate. There’s the stinking rotten core of it. No…it’s not the innocent people caught up in it. Not the ex-gays themselves. Not the hurting parents of gay children. They’re not the ones making money, and political hay, out of demonizing homosexuals. There is not a single person in Focus On The Family, from James Dobson on down, who couldn’t see for themselves, I submit, who haven’t seen for themselves, exactly what you so clearly saw while you were in there talking to those people. All the hurt. All the pain. All the broken bonds between parent and child. They know perfectly well what they’re doing to people.

And yet…they keep it up. They keep promising change for their children. They keep feeding parents one filthy lie after another about homosexuals and homosexuality. How many times have you yourself documented them dishonestly manipulating science to feed the fear and loathing of homosexual people? Don’t tell me they don’t know what they’re doing to people like the parents you spoke with there. It’s not like any of them, Dobson and his cohorts, are just walking into one of these conferences for the first time like you did. They know.

What did Timothy McVeigh call it…collateral damage? There’s the mindset. There’s the hate.

Folks, I can now state categorically that this is not true and we need to stop saying that .. those who attend Love Won Out don’t go there because of hate. To say otherwise is to commit a terrible slander and we should abolish that kind of language from our discourse.”

Thanks for defending this fact.

It’s the story of a mother who finds out that her younger son, Bobby, is gay, and her efforts through religion and prayer to change him. She didn’t do this out of fear or hate. She did it because she loved him and was terrified that because he was homosexual, he would never go to heaven and she would be seperated from him for the rest of eternity.

Of course, nothing works. Bobby is unable to change himself, falls further into depression, and eventually commits suicide.

His mother then has to deal with the heartbreaking knowledge that her pushing her son to be straight, as well meant and loving as it was, resulted in his death. She has since become a spokesperson for GLBT rights, in the hope that her story can save other families the sorrow that hers has gone through.

It was your reference to the love that the people who attended feel for their GLBT kith and kin that reminded me of it. Mary Griffith (Bobby’s mother) truly loved her son. You can see that in this story. It’s also what makes the eventual outcome of her actions and the lateness of her understanding so tragic.