Newsletter of EVANGELICALS CONCERNED, INC

Spring 2003

Romans 8

The Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians marched with its banner in the March for Life in Washington, DC.  The March marked the 30^th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.  PLAGAL marched without incident this year.  At last year’s March, PLAGAL members were arrested at the behest of March officials.  At the conclusion of this year’s event, PLAGAL members visited with Congress members who are both pro-life and pro-gay.  The group’s slogan is “Human Rights Start when Human Life Begins.”  Its Web site is www.plagal.org. 

Right-wing World magazine columnist Andree Seu has some smug advice for high schools that support gay and lesbian students.  She dismisses these students’ struggles, stating that “if some of us [in her St. Clare High School class of ‘69] were occasionally (and privately) aware of libidinous stirrings in that direction, that gnosis was soon enough snuffed out in the seven-times heated ovens of Calculus, Latin, and English Grammar.”

John Silber, Chancellor of Boston University, shut down a gay support group at the BU prep school.  The program was aimed at understanding homosexuality, preventing harassment of gay teens and helping them cope with their minority status.  But Silber said he did not want sex “pounded” into the students.  And he said their sexuality is “none of my business.  So don’t make it my business by insisting on rubbing my nose in whatever your preference is, because I don’t want to know.”  

After Bono’s recent Wheaton College campaign for African AIDS relief, the evangelical school’s political science department contacted a Wheaton alumnus who writes speeches for President Bush.  According to Christian Century, he managed to get a presidential promise of an additional $10 billion for African AIDS relief into the State of the Union Address.
     The Washington Post reports that evangelicals have an increased interest in AIDS in Africa because they (including physician and Senator Bill Frist) are involved in mission work there.

Lutheran World Federation is a grant recipient for its HIV/AIDS work.  LWF was the first non-governmental organization to receive such a grant from The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.  The grant was for nearly half a million dollars.

Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network reported that a man was “healed” of AIDS when he was “healed” of his homosexuality.  AIDS experts say that the man probably tests at an undetectable level of viral load though he is still HIV-positive.         

A federal study shows that HIV infection among openly gay black men in America is 24 percent and among closeted black men it is 14 percent.  These figures are significantly higher than rates of HIV infection in gay groups of whites and Hispanics.

The new Archbishop of Canterbury will not soon be ordaining any more partnered gay men.  Archbishop Rowan Williams says that though he did ordain a gay man in the past and though he questions whether the conventional biblical interpretation on homosexuality is correct, as head of world Anglicanism he must abide by the church’s governing view.  In his enthronement sermon, though, Williams said: “No one can be written off, no group, no nation, no minority can be just a scapegoat to resolve our uncertainties.”  The new Archbishop is a scholar with an impeccably orthodox theology and a record of compassionate approaches to social issues.

A judge in Beaumont, Texas, has granted a “divorce” to two men, dissolving a civil union granted in Vermont last year.  According to a law professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, if appealed – though no appeal is planned – a higher court would no doubt simply not recognize the original union.

The federal government has paid over half a million dollars in compensation to a Pentagon employee who lost her lesbian partner in the attack on 9/11.  Since each case is being handled individually, legal analysts say it is not clear that an affirmative decision will be given to some twenty other gay survivors who have filed with the September 11^th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001.    

The Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry is pushing the government of Massachusetts to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples.  RCFM is a coalition of ministers drawn mainly from Unitarian, United Church of Christ, and Episcopal churches, though there are several Methodists and Baptists as well as several rabbis and “pagans” who have signed on.  There is a Buddhist, a Melkite, and a Lutheran, too.       

College freshmen are more than ever accepting of gay people and gay relationships. The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA has surveyed first year college students since 1966.  Its fall 2002 poll of 280,000 students at 437 schools finds that 59.3 percent of freshmen support same-sex civil marriage rights.  Male students’ support is at 50.8 percent and female students’ support is at 66.3 percent.  Private university students tend to be more gay/lesbian supportive than public university students.  But students at Catholic colleges are less supportive than are students at secular schools.

Belgium is the second country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.  But the country’s Catholic bishops denounced the law as “merely a legal decree and not equivalent with Church marriage.” 
     The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage.  Same-sex Dutch couples are also allowed to adopt children, something the Belgians are not allowed. 

One of The Advocate’s “Coolest Straight People of 2002” is former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming.  The man who jokingly calls himself “Reverend Simpson” is honorary chairman of the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay-straight alliance.  He told the nation’s leading gay/lesbian magazine: “There are a lot of people in Washington who will say behind closed doors, ‘Oh, I’m not homophobic at all.’  But then, they don’t do anything about it.  The point is to lay yourself on the line for what you believe in.”   Simpson says he has “a cousin who went through a very difficult time … and friends who have told me about their experiences.  I’ll never forget what I saw back in my days at Cody High.  There was one classmate who everyone would whisper about: ‘Jim, he’s one of those.’  Well, then Jim committed suicide. … I say to the religious right, ‘Quit your hypocrisy.  We all damn well know someone who is gay or lesbian by now.”

Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith says he’s “very confident that a hate-crimes bill will pass by a very wide margin in the 108^th Congress.”  He told The Advocate: “Conservative values teach that when it comes to the basic human needs like a job, shelter, public safety, we owe that to one another.  It is not a real reach to include [protections for] new categories of Americans who are discriminated against.”  

The American Family Association and other groups on the Religious Right opposed an anti-bullying program in West Virginia schools because in included references to antigay assault.  From now on there will be no specific mention of why  a child is a target.

“I no longer identify as gay [but as a] queer, Torah-observant, celibate, bisexual, Republican, show-tune queen.”  So says David Bianco, founder of a gay news service that supplies content to some 100 gay and lesbian periodicals.  He admits to having had sex with “a lot of men …but I don’t know that any of that worked.”  He says he’ll continue to write his “Over the Rainbow” column for his Q Syndicate and hopes to marry a woman and have children, though he’s “retaining the right to change my mind later.”  He explains: “I’m not trying to get everybody to do what I’m doing.  I wouldn’t have ‘queer’ and ‘show-tune queen’ in my identity if I was hostile to the gay movement.” 

“On December 20, 1998, I loaded my car and left Mississippi and homosexuality behind.”  This is the testimony of Matthew Walker, a leader of an “ex-gay” group, in a recent cover article of the Exodus newsletter.  He was “in the gay lifestyle for ten years” but he’d just then broken-up with a man who “didn’t want sex [and] two weeks after we met, he didn’t want me.”  So “I decided to leave the lifestyle.” 
     He now identifies himself as one of “those struggling [with] the gay lifestyle.”  He notes that though “celibacy has been my practice since 1998, I still have the potential to stumble in my humanity.” 
     Walker has become a trainer of marine mammals.  He says: “In animal training there is a concept that reinforcement drives behavior.  I have to admit that the clubs, the attention and the acceptance were all very reinforcing.  One of the hardest things to do is train an animal to perform a behavior differently than it was originally trained to do.  It can be done, but you are competing with a huge reinforcement history.  I can’t imagine having a 20-30 year reinforcement history to overcome.”

Two Brigham Young University TV stations have pulled the plug on a “therapy” show on which a psychotherapist was claiming that homosexual to heterosexual “change is absolutely possible.”  According to the Salt Lake Tribune, KBYU and BYU-TV management considered his approach to be possibly “an oversimplification of a complex issue.”            

Texas Christians recently played host to dueling views on homosexuality.  Focus on the Family sponsored a “Love Won Out” conference at Austin’s PromiseLand Church, pushing the “ex-gay” claims and teaching that all homosexual expression is sinful.  Over at Austin’s University Baptist Church, there was a competing conference called “Love Welcomes All,” sponsored by a number of churches and mental health agencies.  The event at University Baptist rejected the “ex-gay” claims as well as the notion that all homosexual expression is sinful.  According to Randy Phillips, pastor of PromiseLand, he was not only up against criticism from the “Love Welcomes All” advocates but also from ultraconservative church leaders who told him: “You shouldn’t be fooling with this.”

AND FINALLY:

“God Hates Fags” agitator Fred Phelps is picketing “ex-gay” conferences.  Outside a recent “Love Won Out” seminar, Phelps’ daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper, asserted: “Some of these groups that call themselves Christian are about as Christian as Balaam’s ass.”  She said the “therapy” the “ex-gay” movement offers is phony and declared all homosexuals to be “irreversibly doomed” to hell.

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