Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Friday, June 19

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Biarritz, France; Bisbee, AZ; Chicago, IL; Columbus, OH; Cumbria, UK; Denver, CO; Edinburgh, UK; Grand Rapids, MI; Guadalajara, JAL; Huntsville, AL; Iowa City, IA; Juneau, AK; Knoxville, TN; Lancaster, PA; Las Cruces, NM; Louisville, KY; Lyon, France; Nanaimo, BC; New Orleans, LA; Oldenburg, Germany; Oklahoma City, OK; Olympia, WA; Portland, ME; Providence, RI; Regina, SK; Riga, Latvia (EuroPride); Salem, MA; Salisbury, NC; Schenectady, NY; Shanghai, China; Sioux Falls, SD; Sitges, Spain; Springfield, MO; Syracuse, NY; Thessaloniki, Greece; Vienna, Austria; Wilton Manors, FL; York, UK; Zurich, Switzerland.

Other Events This Weekend: Lesbian and Gay Stadtfest, Berlin, Germany; Durban Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Durban, South Africa; Folsom East, New York, NY; Frameline International LGBT Film Festival, San Francisco, CA; Cedar Point Gay Days, Sandusky, OH; Out in the Vineyard Gay Wine Weekend, Sonoma, CA.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From GLC Voice (Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN), June 1, 1981, page 9.

Sen. Lester Hunt, Sr. (D-WY)

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Lavender Scare Claims A Life: 1954. Sen. Lester Hunt, Sr. (D-WY) had an illustrious career. He served as governor of Wyoming from 1943 to 1949, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He was popular enough to defeat the incumbent Republican Senator by a landslide, but he only served one term. He became a bitter enemy of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and was a harsh critic of McCarthy’s slanderous Red and Lavender Scares.

McCarthy and his cronies got their revenge however when Hunt’s twenty-year-old son and namesake, Lester Hunt, Jr., was arrested in June of 1953 for soliciting a male undercover vice cop in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square. Ordinarily, with this being a first offender and all, this would have been handled quietly. But word of the arrest reached Sen. Styles Bridges (R-NH), who was chairman of the Republican Campaign Committee, which was locked in a battle to maintain the GOP’s razor-slim majority in both houses. Bridges and Sen. Herman Welker (R-ID) approached Hunt and threatened to expose his son if Hunt didn’t immediately retire from the Senate and withdraw from the 1954 campaign. Hunt refused, knowing that his resignation would allow Wyoming’s Republican governor to appoint his replacement and that Senator would be able to run in 1954 with all of the advantages of being an incumbent.

The Republican Senators apparently made good on their threat. On July 4, the conservative Washington Times-Herald published the details of the arrest. GOP Senators threatened to fire the DCPD’s vice head Roy Blick if he didn’t prosecute the arrest. They also began circulating rumors that Hunt had bribed Blick to drop the case. The case was re-assigned to another officer and that autumn, Hunt Jr., stood trial and was fined for soliciting “for lewd and immoral purposes.”

The following April, Hunt Sr. announced his run for re-election and early polling looked like smooth sailing. But after Sen. Bridges renewed his threat to make Hunt’s son a campaign issue, Hunt announced on June 8, 1954 that he was withdrawing from the race. Citing health concerns, he said, “I shall never again be a candidate for elective office.”

Ten days later, Sen. Joseph McCarthy announced on the Senate floor that he would open an investigation into an unnamed Senator who he claimed was bribing police. He didn’t name Hunt, but it was pretty obvious that McCarthy’s nemesis was in his crosshairs.  The next morning, Hunt brought his hunting rifle to his Senate office and shot himself at his desk. He died two hours later in the hospital.

News reports had it that Hunt killed himself because he was despondent over his health. But privately, Senate colleagues new differently. On June 21, Sen. Edwin Johnson (D-CO) rose on the Senate floor to speak of his colleague:

The details of Hunt’s blackmail and suicide had circulated through Washington’s political class and became just one more factor, albeit an unspoken one, in the Senate’s vote to censure McCarthy in December. But that vote was taken too late to save the GOP’s majority. The November mid-terms swung both the House and Senate into Democratic hands. The GOP-controlled lame duck Senate nevertheless had some more business to attend to, including a memorial for members who had died recently. Sens. Bridges and Welker among those eulogizing Hunt. Hunt’s cousin, William Spencer, learned of their eulogies and was outraged. He wrote to Welker:

I was shocked when I read this. It recalled to my mind so vividly the conversation with Senator Hunt a few weeks before he died, wherein he recited in great detail the diabolical part you played following the unfortunate and widely publicized episode in which his son was involved. Senator Hunt, a close personal friend of mine, told me without reservation the details of the tactics you used in endeavoring to induce him to withdraw from the Senate, or at least not to be a candidate again. It seems apparent that you took every advantage of the misery which the poor fellow was suffering at the time in your endeavor to turn it to political advantage. Such procedure is as low a blow as could be conceived. I understood, too, from Senator Hunt, that Senator Bridges had been consulted by you and approved of your action in the matter.

Hunt’s blackmail and suicide served as the basis for Allen Drury’s 1959 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Advise and Consent.

► Exodus International Announces Its Closure: 2013. In a dramatic and emotional plenary talk during the opening night of the Exodus Freedom Conference in Irvine, California, Exodus International President Alan Chambers announced that the 37-year-old organization would no longer continue.

The day began with a far-reaching apology for the “trauma … shame, sexual misconduct, and false hope” that former clients and members of Exodus-affiliated ministries had experienced. But more than a corporate apology, it was also a very personal one for Chambers:

Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly “on my side” who called you names like sodomite—or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine.

More than anything, I am sorry that so many have interpreted this religious rejection by Christians as God’s rejection. I am profoundly sorry that many have walked away from their faith and that some have chosen to end their lives. For the rest of my life I will proclaim nothing but the whole truth of the Gospel, one of grace, mercy and open invitation to all to enter into an inseverable relationship with almighty God.

The formal apology ended with a note of more announcements later that night at the conference, which we later learned was the close of Exodus’s final chapter. That chapter opened eighteen months earlier when Chambers appeared at a conference of the Gay Christian Network in Orlando and acknowledged that “the majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9% of them, have not experienced a change in their orientation.” He also acknowledged that he, too, was still attracted to other men (while also remaining in love with and devoted to his wife). Later that month, Chambers withdrew his organization’s support for the particular form of conversion therapy known as Reparative Therapy. In May, when Exodus board member Dennis Jernigan went to Jamaica — where homosexuality is a felony punishable with ten years’ imprisonment — to speak in support of its anti-gay laws. Chambers swiftly responded with a statement opposing criminalization of homosexuality and Jernigan resigned. Also that year, Chambers condemned the Family Research Council for honoring a pastor who called gay people “worse than maggots” and that God had an “urban renewal plan for Sodom and Gomorrah,” and he declined to oppose a California law that bans sexual orientation change therapies for minors.

All of this together has resulted in a general exodus of several member ministries from Exodus, with many of them forming a much more hard-core Restored Hope Network. The Exodus Conference in 2012 went ahead much as before although there were a number of differences in message and tone from before. But by the time the 2013 conference came around, it was obvious that what remained of Exodus was now much smaller. The conference schedule was significantly scaled back, and attendance was down to about three hundred, versus the thousand or more that was typical for previous conferences.

Chambers opened the conference by recalling the “scandal” of the previous eighteen months. “The scandal has been about finally sharing things about myself and about this ministry and about these issues that I’ve learned along the way,” he said. “Never in a million years did I dream that some of the things that I’ve shared would become the controversies that they are today, or the scandals that they are today, or would have ripped our ministry apart in the way that it has ripped our ministry apart. I tell people all the time I’m not smart enough to create a scandal like that. And therefore I’m convinced that the scandal is of God’s making.”

And what were those scandals? Saying that almost nobody changed their sexual attractions, and admitting that he also continued to “experience same-sex attractions.” Another scandal was a theological one: proclaiming that “that no matter what we do, no matter where we go, no matter how we behave, when we have a relationship with Jesus Christ, we have an irrevocable relationship with Jesus Christ. And what that means is what I just said.” He continued:

We in the church have been motivated by fear. It is our fear that keeps us straight, it is our fear that keeps us off of all sorts of chemicals, it’s our fear that keeps us looking a certain way, and acting a certain way, and living a certain way, and treating anybody who doesn’t live and act in those ways like sinners in the hands of an angry God. It is fear that is the biggest motivator for people in the Body of Christ to act in the religious way that they do. My true story is I spent the majority of my life pretending that I was something I’m not because I was afraid of the Church. And I was afraid that they might be right, that that’s how God felt too.

And it has been the most amazing journey for me to come to the realization that my Father in Heaven will never abandon me. He will never turn his back on me. He won’t turn his back on me even if I turn my back on him. … And you know what that means? All sorts of people will live in all sorts of ways that you might not endorse or condone. But let me let you in on a secret: you’re not God and it doesn’t matter what you think anyway.

He also listed as another scandal the fact that they had acknowledged the damage that they had done to  many of those who had been involved with Exodus. He described meeting a number of ex-gay survivors, an experience he described as “excruciating,” as “they told stories of abuse and pain, missed opportunities, awful words were spoken to them, stories of abuse and pain from the Church and even from Exodus.” Turning back to the apology that had been released earlier that day, he said that he heard from a number of people who were angry that he apologized:

“There is a concerted effort in parts of the Church to disqualify me from my rightful place as a son, simply because we dared to say we were sorry to people who deserved an apology. …We’re not going to control people anymore. We’re not going to tell then how they should live. We’re not going to be responsible for what they’re doing. It’s not our job. You are not the Holy Spirit.”

And finally, he acknowledged that Exodus had become a rules-based religious institution, “focused on behavior and sin management, and short on grace. … and it is for these reasons, and for other reasons, that we the International Board of Directors for Exodus and many within our leadership believe it is time for Exodus to close.”

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?