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Posted on Wednesday 1 December 2010

With the release today of the Report of the Comprehensive Review of the Issues Associated with a Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, DADT is in its last throes. In fact, the anti-Homosexual rhetoric seems to have simply faded recently. It occurred to me that I’ve not heard from the anti-Homosexual Religious Right [specifically James Dobson] for some time. So I googled James Dobson and came up with this:

In the wake of a number of gay students’ suicides this fall, and a national conversation about bullying, Exodus International, a group dedicated to "freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ," announced that it would no longer sponsor The Day of Truth. An annual event that encourages students to "counter the promotion of homosexual behavior," The Day of Truth has been organized as a counter-event to the much larger, Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network-sponsored Day of Silence held every April. But The Day of Truth is not going away. The James Dobson-founded Christian ministry Focus on the Family has stepped in to replace Exodus International as the event’s sponsor, and has re-branded and re-framed it The Day of Dialogue.

Since 1996, The National Day of Silence has brought "attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools," according to GLSEN’s website. Participating students refrain from speaking for a day, and GLSEN says hundreds of thousands of students take part nationwide. Meanwhile, since 2005, The Day of Truth has promoted a particular kind of Christian perspective on homosexuality, and Exodus International says 6,000 students participated last April. This year, though, Exodus International appears to have had a change of heart. "All the recent attention to bullying helped us realize that we need to equip kids to live out biblical tolerance and grace while treating their neighbors as they’d like to be treated, whether they agree with them or not," Alan Chambers, President of Exodus International, told CNN in October. Some statement, coming from a group that views homosexuality as outside of God’s will, and promotes a "message of liberation from homosexuality."

Just weeks after Exodus International made its move, Focus on the Family announced that it was adopting the event. "We’re trying to raise awareness that more than one side needs to be heard on the issue of homosexuality, and we’re helping to ensure Christian students have the chance to express their viewpoint," Focus on the Family education analyst Candi Cushman said in a news release. The Alliance Defense Fund, which actually founded the event before handing control over to Exodus International, said it would also remain in a supporting role…
So Dobson’s still around. This is what he says on his web site‘s Q&A:
    Q. There seems to be so much gender confusion in our society. Pop stars blend male and female qualities. It is considered bigoted not to accept homosexual and transsexual lifestyles. How can I keep my kids from being adversely affected by all this?

    A. You probably experienced an early stage of this social movement when you were a teenager. There has been a steady progression toward total gender confusion over the last three decades, and now it is well-ingrained in Western society. Although fashions have come and gone, the trend has been toward an erasing of the distinctions of sexual identity in hair length, manner, interests and occupations. Such similarity between men and women causes great confusion in the minds of children with regard to their own sex-role identity. They have fewer distinct models to imitate and are left to grope for the appropriate behavior and attitudes.

    There can be little doubt that this blurring of roles is contributing to the homosexual epidemic, and it is a frightening trend. Dr. Charles Winick, professor of anthropology at Clay University of New York, studied 2,000 different cultures and found 55 that were characterized by sexual ambiguity. Not one has survived. Dr. Winick feels America’s future is at stake in this issue, and I am inclined to agree…

    Q. What causes homosexuality? Can homosexuality ever result from a single, traumatic experience? What can parents do to prevent this tendency in their children?

    A. Despite all the shouting to the contrary, no credible scientific research has substantiated the claim that homosexuality is genetic or innate. The causes of homosexuality, as they are known, are too complex to treat in the context of this booklet. As a generalization, it can be said that homosexuality results from a home life that usually involved confusion in sexual identity. Again, conditions vary tremendously, and the active recruitment to that lifestyle that is going on in some quarters has muddied the waters. I think we can still say that the most common home environment of a future male homosexual is a home where the mother is dominating, overprotective and possessive, while the father rejects and ridicules the child. The opposite situation occurs too, where the mother rejects her son because he is a male. Generally, the same kinds of role confusion in the home contribute to female homosexual tendencies. In some sense, the girl feels rejection because of her gender and comes to believe only a male identity carries worth…
As always, I wonder where he gets this stuff? The family constellations he presents usually create angry children, not homosexuality. And his insistence that homosexuals are in the active recruitment business is never ending. I’m not even sure where the idea comes from. Their only evidence are their own peculiar interpretations of unrelated things.

Looking back over the last decade, it’s hard to imagine that this was such a divisive topic. The Religious Right almost defined themselves by this "fight." And what were they fighting for? The right to look down on other people? The right to live by the frankly paranoid idea that Homosexuals were actively recruiting their children? The right to espouse disproved  and grossly simplistic psychological formulations like Dobson’s above? The right to claim God’s stamp of approval based on a few anachronistic comments in the Torah? In the process, they threw their lot with the war-mongering neo-conservatives and the business elite, providing bloc votes to elect people who wouldn’t pass muster by the Torah, the New Testament, the US Constitution, or the S.E.C.

I’ll be glad to see DADT go away. Gay Americans willing to die for America deserve the right to live equally in America. But more than that, I’ll be glad to see a big piece of this era of religious intolerance fade into obscurity. In retrospect, it has been a shameful time. History will not be kind, and future generations will legitimately ask, "What were they thinking?" And as for the Day of Truth Day of Dialogue, let’s hope it slides into the oblivion along with DADT. Christian children will get along fine without it, particularly Gay Christian children…

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