Brahms, First I’d note that who I am is not in any way hidden … and I am responding now to what seems to be a person who wishes to remain anonymous. Pastors,don’t have the luxury of remaining anonymous. Sometimes we pay dearly for that lack of anonymity. Second, I’d acknowledge that at the time I wrote the words you quote (thanks, I appreciate your reading a book I wrote), I was just becoming known by the people I cared for as pastor as someone willing to stand in solidarity with them. That’s when a pastor starts to really learn what people experience. And I then heard story after story after story after multiple story [have you heard these stories, Brahms?] — believable, credible stories — from those who had experienced a form of what can only be described as psychological torture through group-mediated efforts to change their orientation on the theological grounds that their orientation was deeply offensive to God. If I knew then, what I know now by my pastoral experience, I would have said so. On the basis of this experience, I concluded, with the concurrence of some of the leaders of these ex-gay ministries that the ministries themselves, on the whole are harmful, rather than helpful to many, many people. The post was aimed at the churches that sponsor these ministries still … and the churches that adopt an interpretation of Scripture that regards all LGBTQ persons as perverted. The pastors who advocate these positions and sponsor these ministries have to take into account their effects on real people — a key point in the post. I have known same-sex attracted individuals, who, for many different reasons, choose to remain celibate or to marry those who are not of the same gender, despite same-sex attraction. Their stories are theirs to tell and their decisions are to be honored, and I do honor them. But that doesn’t mean the harm done to many many people by the ex-gay ministries, and more to the point of this piece, by the regard that this interpretation of Scripture generates, isn’t harmful. It is, and I will say so.
