(VIDEO) "Ex-Gay" Movement Inflames Homophobia Here and Abroad

For those who watched Rachel Maddow squaring off against Richard Cohen about “ex-gay therapy,” it was like watching a tiger take on a tweetie bird, except in this case the tweetie bird is a dangerous force against human rights and really deserved to be swallowed whole.  Usually, Maddow probably wouldn’t even bother with anyone from the vanishingly small and strange “ex-gay” community, but in this case, she had a very good reason to confront Cohen, who claims that he can change people from gay to straight (though I’ve not seen any real evidence for his claims that he’s genuinely changed “thousands”). Cohen’s claim that being gay is a choice and that you can will yourself straight is being used by reactionary forces in Uganda that are pushing for severe sodomy laws that could include the death penalty for same-sex sexual relations.  In the process of interviewing Cohen, Maddow gave America a taste of how bizarre the world of “ex-gay therapy” really is.

Cohen condemned the Ugandan bill on Maddow’s show, but if you watch the interview, his condemnations feel a bit empty because he’s a slippery fellow.  He claims one minute that being gay is a choice, and then flips around and denies that he ever said that.  He tries to pretend that his therapy isn’t promoting anti-gay bigotry, but Maddow exposes how much vicious slander against gay people he includes in his book.  (The claims that the "error" will come out of the "next" edition are a popular right wing tactic; there is no reason to think that there will be a second edition.)  But the most ludicrous claim he makes is that the “ex-gay” movement isn’t a political movement, when it obviously exists for no other reason than to give the larger anti-gay political forces out there rationalizations for pushing bigoted policies.

Even Cohen couldn’t feign surprise at the videos demonstrating that anti-gay activists in Uganda are using his book to rationalize their hatred.  This is just an expansion of the purpose of the ex-gay movement in the United States. Right wing activists realized a long time ago that American opinions on homosexuality are being positively influenced by the perception (correct perception) that homosexuality is an innate tendency, and that it’s a natural variation in innate tendencies in humans in the same way that left-handedness is just as natural as right-handedness. “Ex-gay therapy” exists strictly to undermine the growing tolerance of homosexuality, and I think we all know that if the right was able to chase most gay people back into the closet and recriminalize sodomy, then “ex-gay therapy” would cease to exist because it wouldn’t be politically necessary.

The tiny numbers of “ex-gays” in existence only reinforces the argument that the entire movement exists to give homobigots cover. As Amanda Hess discovered, the leading ex-gay organization PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays) is having a really hard time getting ex-gays on its board; and if they can’t scrounge up more than two, then good luck to the rest of us.  That an organization for parents and so-called friends is the leader in this movement tells you what you need to know, as well---this is about creating the necessary appearances to provide political cover.

But elusive as actual ex-gay people may be, they are the only minority group whose rights the right has much interest in protecting.  The latest tactic of the ex-gay movement---chosen no doubt because they thought they didn’t come across as weird enough by promoting “treatment” for homosexuality such as platonic same-sex cuddling and “prevention” such as impressing upon your small son how huge your penis looks  compared to his---is to claim that ex-gays, aka people who live as straight, face some sort of horrible discrimination and that the ex-gay movement is merely here to protect their rights.  In service of this claim, they’ve mysteriously started to become the incredibly frequent victims of hate crimes that have no witnesses.  In fact, the head of Truth Wins Out, an organization dedicated to exposing ex-gay therapy as a fraud, has taken to counseling gay rights activists to avoid being near ex-gays to protect themselves from these accusations.  Cohen himself claims to be the victim of a “hate crime."  What is this crime? His expulsion from the American Counseling Association for--you guessed it--exploiting his clients for personal and political gain.  Conservatives often accuse liberals of inventing oppression for self-aggrandizing purposes, but it seems that the ex-gay movement actually had decided to do what they’ve forever accused others of doing.

Cohen claims that “ex-gay therapy” is about helping people and has nothing to do with promoting anti-gay bigotry at all.  This claim couldn’t be more farcical on its surface---after all, when you hold homosexuality out as a disease to be cured, then you are promoting homophobia.  We don’t cure things that aren’t diseases. Every respectable organization in psychology is on record pointing out that the claims made by Cohen and the ex-gay movement have the strong potential to seriously hurt gay people who are struggling with self-acceptance; no one who actually wants to help people would subject them to this sort of abusive degradation. Genuine help for gay people struggling in this way would look exactly like helping them accept themselves for who they are, and realize that there’s nothing wrong with being gay.   And contrary to Cohen’s claims that “ex-gay therapy” merely exists for people making a free, uncoerced choice to “change” their sexual orientation, the ex-gay movement is actually focusing much of its attention on young people who are being forced by their homophobic parents into "therapy" that is indistinguishable from punishment.

Eighteen minutes on the Rachel Maddow show merely gave us a taste of the strange world of “ex-gay therapy”, and the whole story gets weirder the more you dig in.  The supposed movement seems to be nothing but smoke and mirrors designed to make anti-gay forces look a little less evil, but even a cursory amount of research shows that it’s mostly a bunch of straight people and a couple of charlatans who are convinced by a fat payday to stay in the closet.    

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