"Ex Gay" ministries and conventions are notorious in the gay men's community for lots of sex going on between the "ex gay" men. However, I didn't know that there may be sexual harassment going on.

Truth Wins Out has put up a video on YouTube with former "ex gay" Patrick McAlvey who talks about the futile and painful nature of these ministries. Most queers already know about this part, but there are other aspects of them that McAlvey reveals that are disturbing in a whole new way.



Genocide for Jesus has the transcript of this former "ex gay" which is really disturbing. First, lets look at the desperate psychological situation that McAlvey was in.

Well I distanced myself from Mike sometime in early high school, and really had very minimal contact, he sent a couple letters, but I had very minimal contact until I was 19. And so when I was 19 I was kicked out of a missionary training school and forced to move back home with my family, and I was kicked out because of my attraction to men, and so in that time, I was sort of in a crisis mode and was very low, very depressed and just trying to make sense of my life and mostly of my attraction, so I contacted Mike again, and we started meeting regularly.

Look at the "therapy" McAlvey was exposed to.

That night he suggested we go over to his friend’s house so that we could do “holding therapy.” So we drove together to his friend’s house and had an hour where I was instructed to lay in his arms, chest to chest, and not talk, it was just an hour of silent holding and he told me to feel the strength of another man, smell the smell of another man, feel the security of another man’s arms. And it was supposed to replace, or fill a void that I had from some unmet childhood need.

I thought the holding therapy was very strange, and it made me uncomfortable, but I was willing to try anything, and trusted Mike.

The "holding therapy" part sounds really suspicious, to put it mildly. It gets worse.

As part of the therapy, he asked how large my penis was. He asked if I shaved my pubic hair. He asked about the type of underwear that I wore. On one occasion he asked me to take my shirt off and show him how many push-ups I could do, which I did not do, and he wanted me to describe my sexual fantasies to him, and the type of men I’m attracted to. And one time he asked me to rate my own attractiveness, on a scale of 1-10, with separate scores for my face, my hair, my body, and then an overall score. And then after I scored myself, he assigned scores for my attractiveness, each category, and I remember that my hair got the best score and my face got the worst score.

As part of the therapy, he had me come over to his house, and he rented the movie of the play Equus, and he had us watch it together, in his home. In the movie there was full frontal male nudity, and it made me rather uncomfortable to be watching it with him, but it was his idea, and afterwards he wanted to talk about some the dynamics of the play and then also how I felt about seeing the naked actor.

If not for the religious aspect of these "ex gay" ministries, I've long thought that they might have been prosecuted for fraud and practicing medicine without a license. Now, I wonder how many sexual harassment are just waiting to be filed.

Our society needs to stop treating religion as if it is above scrutiny. Religious groups should be held to the same legal standards as the rest of our society.

 

I'm amazed that anyone even admits to supporting John McCain at this point. Why would they want to encourage the crazy people supporting the GOP? Here are some disturbing examples of what I'm talking about.

Hat tip to Bay of Fundie.



More hateful fools for McCain. Hat tip to It's My Right to Be Left of Center. (I like how the guy from the McCain campaign tells the flock, "Refuse to answer his questions unless he offers them in writing.")



The rest of the videos I found with a YouTube search.

Outloud Radio talks to dumb and bigotted pro Palin Supporters in SF Bay Area



Part 2 - The McCain-Palin Mob in Strongsville, Ohio



Is Sarah Palin as racist as her supporters?



McCain surrogate attacks non-Christians at rally. He also bosses around his non-existent "god."

It can be so funny watching the Christian Taliban stumble with its latest scheme to undermine the teaching of evolution in public school science classes: “Intelligent Design”

The theory, based on the odd assumption that a high degree of complexity necessitates an intelligent designer, may seem superficially helpful to the Talibanists' cause. However, if humans were designed, rather than being the products of evolution, there is a significant problem: aspects of human anatomy and physiology that do not work very well.

In Christian theology, the deity is all-wise, all-powerful, and all-knowing. Such a deity could not produce organisms with flaws such as the following.

1. Humans have an appendix, an organ that accomplishes nothing for us and can kill us if it gets infected, which is a reasonably common occurance.


2. Male-pattern baldness


3. The human cravings for foods that are bad for us.

While items 1 and 3 are easily explained in evolutionary terms, they could only be the results of an intelligent, but imperfect designer, bad news for Christianity. The appendix is a reduced vestige of a caecum, an area of the intestinal tract that primates use to digest cellulose. Digestion of cellulose no longer is done by humans, who can get their nutritional needs met through meat and the remaining molecules of plants.

Humans crave fat and salt because both were scarce for our ancestors. However, in a perfectly designed organism, cravings would match the current dietary environment.

As for items 2, it can be explained through the concept of neutral mutation. Mutations that have no impact on reproduction (and survival's impact is on the organism's ability to reproduce) have no selective pressures and can become randomly incorporated through a process of what is called “genetic drift.” Males going bald would have little or no impact on reproductive levels, especially among ancestors that seldom lived past the age of 30, and started breeding in their early teens.

“Intelligent Design” is as unChristian as it is unscientific. It is so funny when the Christian fundamentalists end up undermining their own faiths while trying to undermine scientific facts that threaten their faiths. If “Intelligent Design” did not threaten science education, it would just be part of a litany of unintentional humor by religious extremists.

NBC's Medium features bad writing, horrible acting, and a goofy premise. But, that doesn't stop some people from watching it. However, the show could have a damaging effect if viewers cannot distinguish television from reality.

Given the overly superstitious nature of our society, NBC has a responsibility to run a disclaimer similar to the following:

This show is a fantasy. In real life, psychic powers do not exist. “Mediums” do not help police solve crimes. Do not be taken in by “mediums” pretending that they can help you communicate with the dead.

The Skeptic's Dictionary has an excellent article on mediums.