How Kirk Cameron and Jim Daily (of Focus on the Family) have this “we love gays” all wrong!

by Rev. Stephen Parelli
March 6, 2011
Bronx, NY 10458

With evangelical Kirk Cameron’s comments on Piers Morgan last week (March 2, 2012) that homosexuality is "unnatural...detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization," the question of “hate speech” has taken center stage again. 

“Some people believe my responses were not loving toward those in the gay community,” Cameron told ABCNews.com in an email statement today.   

Focus on the Family, reputedly the most influential evangelical organization in America today in opposing gay rights, has asked the question directly – do evangelicals “hate” gays?

On October 5, 2011, Focus on the Family, published to the Internet an article by Focus on the Family President Jim Daly entitled “Hate is too big a word to be used with such little restraint.”

Jim asks his readers to respond to the question “[D]o we [Focus on the Family], as Webster defines ‘hate,’ feel ‘intense hostility and aversion’ to gays and lesbians? Do we [Focus on the Family] regard them with ‘extreme dislike or antipathy’?” He answers the question in the negative: “Unequivocally not.”

Jim, along with his friends at Focus on the Family, has a blind spot. The answer is, as unlikely as it may seem to some conservative Christians,  an “unequivocal" yes. Yes, Focus on the Family “hates” gays and lesbians (using Jim Daly’s Webster definition of hate). Why don’t evangelicals like Focus on the Family, looking in the mirror, see themselves as treating homosexuals with “extreme dislike or antipathy?” How is it that evangelicals on a feeling-scale of one to ten don’t know that they register a ten-plus when it comes to feeling “intense hostility and aversion” towards gays and lesbians? How can they be so self-unaware? How do they not see the hate we know and feel?

Evangelicals are impervious to society’s cultural, human right advances whenever such milestones are, in their opinion, in complete discord with what God has decreed is his will for humankind. Love for one’s fellow citizen, in the evangelical’s mind, is to be expressed in the single context of loving what is God’s best for the human species as deciphered from the Bible. Evangelicals, by their standards, are loving when they offer understanding (but stop short of acceptance), provide support groups (to change one’s sexual orientation), and open their doors for all to enter their churches (where the gay and lesbian person can have fellowship with church members around the teaching that homosexual acts between consenting adults is always sin).

For evangelicals, gays and lesbians need to invite Jesus Christ into their hearts which is the formula for new birth which is the means by which (with much help) homosexuals will “come out of” homosexuality. For the evangelical, homosexuals will change; it is built-in within the spiritual “genetic code” of salvation in Christ. It is spiritually “natural” for an evangelical homosexual to change – moving by degrees away from homosexuality as a “life style” or “choice.” Thus, evangelical’s often quoted slogan: “hate the sin, love the sinner.” The idea is to “love the sinner” to Christ so that Christ can change the gay or lesbian person which, in actuality, amounts to conditional love. (Just ask a heterosexual to be received into church fellowship under the same conditions.)

No wonder none of this feels like love to the homosexual – and especially to the evangelical homosexual who for years upon years (myself until age 44) applies spiritual discipline, enters therapy, joins several support groups, attends “ex-gay” conferences, and does all this in utter isolation without being able to tell anyone in his church or family about the “ex-gay” process he is involving himself in without fear of rejection on some level. (“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is still alive and well in the evangelical church.)

Jim Daley concludes his article by calling for “debates, not denigration.” He asks that we cease with our “overheated, overreaching [hate] rhetoric.” I would like to suggest that what Focus on the Family needs to do is stop with its one-sided debates with the America people long enough to really listen to her own evangelical gay and lesbian parishioners. Focus on the Family is so engaged in saving the American culture from gay rights that they have failed to seriously take notice of their own evangelical children who are gay and lesbian. A parent who has forgotten their own children while saving the world – that’s Focus on the Family; Focus on the Family needs to focus on their own evangelical gay children; needs to stop and listen to them! When Soulforce, a few years back, asked to speak with Focus on the Family – to share their personal stories as Christian and gay – they were shut out by Focus on the Family. It appears “debate” rather than dialogue with one’s own evangelical homosexual children is the business of the day. Within our  own house – the evangelical American house – we don’t need debate, we need dialogue (for most of my life I identified as evangelical; I presently do not).

You see, dialogue feels like love; debate feels like hate. When can we really talk as a family. Until then, Focus on the Family's love-talk may be seen has hate-speech by their own evangelical children, not to mention by the secular world which Focus on the Family hopes to save from gay and lesbian human rights.

Focus on the Family's cry for religious freedom ignors gay marriage

By Rev. Steve Parelli

February 15, 2012

Bronx, NY

When it comes to Obamacare, Focus on the Family President Jim Daly is crying freedom of religion, the free exercise of conscience and government noninterference. But when it comes to gay marriage, this Colorado Springs evangelical ministry asks the government to define marriage as one man and one woman.

In his Feb. 13th article entitled “What Every Christian Ought to Know about President Obama’s Healthcare Mandate,” Daly said, “In matters of faith and conscience, it is in the best interest of all Americans, of every ideological stripe, that this limit, this line, not be crossed.”

For decades Focus on the Family has hypocritically crossed that line: since gay marriage is not found in their Bible, it cannot be found in anyone else’s Bible, and government must back their Bible.

Daly needs to revisit gay marriage and “the free exercise of faith and conscience.” My conscience is fine with gay marriage.

This blog is an abridgement of Feb. 13th's blog:  Focus on the Family President Jim Daly and his hypocritical stance on the free exercise of conscience

As a New Yorker and a former evangelical Baptist pastor, I urge you, Senator, to vote for marriage equality

From: Stephen Parelli
To: flanagan@senate.state.ny.us; mcdonald@senate.state.ny.us; alesi@senate.state.ny.us; saland@nysenate.gov; grisanti@nysenate.gov
Sent: Wed, June 15, 2011 6:54:39 PM
Subject: As a New Yorker and a former evangelical Baptist pastor, I urge you to vote for marriage equality

To: John Flanagan	(518) 455-2071	flanagan@senate.state.ny.us
Roy McDonald	(518) 455-2381	mcdonald@senate.state.ny.us
James Alesi	(518) 455-2015	alesi@senate.state.ny.us
Stephen Saland	(518) 455-2411	saland@nysenate.gov
Mark Grisanti	(518) 455-3240	grisanti@nysenate.gov

From:

Rev. Stephen R. Parelli, MDiv

Executive Director
Other Sheep
2962 Decatur Ave., 5D
Bronx, NY 10458
718-360-0884 (office/home)
347-497-0861 (cell)
www.othersheep.org

Re:

Please vote for Marriage Equality

Message:

I grew up in the Syracuse, NY, area. I now live in NYC with my partner of 13 years. We were married in 2008 in California. He is a native of Brooklyn. I was an evangelical Baptist pastor until age 44. I am now 58 years old.

My partner, Jose Ortiz - a guidance counselor in the NYC public schools - and I both grew up evangelical Christians and were both taught that our sexual orientation is an abomination before God. It will be decades before the evangelical church welcomes us, I fear. We trust we don't have to wait that long for our civil rights.

My conscience before God is clear. I am a gay man. By nature? By nurture? Or both? I don't know; but this I know: I am constitutionally gay. May New York State give me marriage equality irrespective of what religion may or may not teach about same-sex marriage; and may I choose to attend the church that best represents my views and my convictions about my sexual orientation.

Vote for equality; let the church be the church and let the state be the state. Please vote for equality. Vote for sexual minorities.

(My parents have cast their "vote" - they have chosen to not speak to me ever; they live in the Cortland, NY, area. If you listen to constituents like my parents -- like the James Dobson crowd -- you will vote no. My own parents have disowned me -- I pray my state will not disown me. My right as a gay man to marriage equality in no way hinders the James Dobson crowd's right to marriage; why do they choose to keep from me the rights they enjoy?)

------End of email to the Senators-----------------------------

Note:  The above Senator names were provided by Citizen Link, A Focus on the Family Affiliate.  Of course, I used Citizen Link's action alert to tell the senators just the opposite of what Focus on the Family was asking for.

NPR November 24, 2009, radio broadcast TRANSCRIPT (by link) on the tie between The Family, an evangelical-fundamentalist group and Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill

by Rev. Steve Parelli, Executive Director of Other Sheep, with thanks to attendees of the RMN 2009 Convocation who notified me of the broadcast.

In a radio broadcast entitled "The Secret Political Reach of 'The Family" as heard on NPR Fresh Air from WHYY on November 24, 2009, host Terry Gross interviewed Jeff Sharlet about The Family and its connection to the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

You can find the full transcript by clicking here.  The second half of the transcript addresses the Uganda-Family "kill-the-gays" connection in detail.

I'm not surprised that such a group exists and that they could make their way into certain susceptible evangelical minds.  I'm from the evangelical-fundamentalist faith tradition and have heard it said personally, in the late 1980s, from the mouth of an evangelical-fundamentalist pastor who was ordained within a good-standing, well recognized conservative Baptist denomination that "they [gays in the USA] should all be taken out and hung." And he was saying it blatantly to my face, on Sunday morning just prior to entering the pulpit to preach, knowing full well I was dealing with same-sex attractions. My presence discussed him.  His response was to literally wipe out all homosexuals.  Such unbarred evangelical hatred of homosexuals is likely to find a religious, Bible-quoting country like Uganda where it can be unleashed.

So much for the myth of exporting homosexuality as a Western idea (as if homosexuality in Africa never existed before colonialism came to Africa); instead, what we actually have is the exportation of Western evangelical-fundamentalist extremism that says "kill the gays."  I'm thinking my evangelical fellow-pastor who said "they should all be taken out and hung" would be very much at home in The Family, at least in The Family in Uganda where evangelial extremism is sanctioned by the government as true religion.

I am indebted to friends I made at the Reconciling Ministries Network Convocation in September, 2009, who notified me by email on December 1, 2009, that they had heard this broadcast and were bringing it to my attention.

Other Sheep is a sponsor of The American Prayer Hour

From The New York Times: "National Prayer Breakfast Draws Controversy" (over Uganda); and Other Sheep's vital interest in Uganda

Following is an Excerpt of The New York Times article "National Prayer Breakfast Draws Controversy"

"The objections are focused on the sponsor of the breakfast, a secretive evangelical Christian network called The Fellowship, also known as The Family, and accusations that it has ties to legislation in Uganda that calls for the imprisonment and execution of homosexuals.

The Family has always stayed intentionally in the background, according to those who have written about it. In the last year, however, it was identified as the sponsor of a residence on Capitol Hill that has served as a dormitory and meeting place for a cluster of politicians who ran into ethics problems, including Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, and Gov. Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, both of whom have admitted to adultery."

Above photo, left to right:  Bishop Carlton Pearson, Moses of Uganda, Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, February 2, 2010, The American Prayer Hour press conference, Washington, DC. Photo by Steve Parelli

Other Sheep is a sponsor of The American Prayer Hour.

Other Sheep is vitally interested in the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of Uganda.  Other Sheep has had a presence in Uganda since 2008 with  the creation of Other Sheep Uganda by Ugandan participants of an all-day seminar on the Bible and homosexuality.  Other Sheep Uganda is led by Chairperson  WAMALA DENNIS denkross@yahoo.com.  You can read his blog at Denkross' Life in Uganda. 

Other Sheep first visited Uganda in 2007.  The R. Rev. Bishop (Anglican) noted the Other Sheep visit indirectly by writing " . . . the sexual minority people whom some other sympathizers call the other sheep,"  Homosexuality:  Perspectives from Uganda, 2007, p15.

Other Sheep East Africa website is a feature of  the Other Sheep website.

Above photo: Jose Ortiz, Coordinator for Africa, teaching a seminar in Kisumu, Kenya, 2008, just days following the seminar given in Kampala, Uganda

Other Sheep works worldwide for the full inclusion of LGBT people of faith within their respective faith traditions by connecting people with people and people with resources. 

How The Family links The National Prayer Breakfast to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of Uganda

Above Photo:  Moses of Uganda at the American Prayer Hour, The National Press Club, Washington, DC, February 2, 2010
Photo by Rev. Steve Parelli, Other Sheep Executive Director

STATEMENT OF THE REV. BARRY W. LYNN,
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AMERICANS UNITED FOR SEPARATION OF
CHURCH AND STATE

February 2, 2010
The American Prayer Hour
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.
Murrow Room, 529 14th St. NW 
 
It is no secret to many of you that I have never been a fan of the National Prayer Breakfast. I’m not comfortable, frankly, with any event that gives Americans the false impression that religion and government in our country are one and the same.

Our Constitution is based on secular values, including the separation of church and state. But too often, the National Prayer Breakfast itself seems to send the opposite message. Often it seems to be suggesting, as politicians and clergy participate together in this exercise of religious outpouring followed by power broking, that government and religion in this country have an unholy relationship.

This year, of course, the National Prayer Breakfast is mired in much greater controversy, which we’ve heard about this morning. Recent reporting has cast a revealing light on The Family, the secretive, very fundamentalist Christian organization that sponsors the annual National Prayer Breakfast.

And what that light has exposed is alarming. It’s reason enough for our elected officials to approach this year’s event with added caution. In fact, neither the president nor any member of Congress should attend in
anything like an unthinking or uncritical manner.

My primary concern is that The Family – also of course known as the Fellowship Foundation – has a long-running goal of reaching politicians, wealthy business leaders and other individuals of influence and drawing them into a politically problematic network. Far from being some benign form of generic religiosity, the National Prayer Breakfast has become The Family’s primary principal vehicle to insinuate itself into the very highest levels of the American government.

Yet the group’s expression of faith does not represent some broad range of religious thought in America. And while the organizers of the Prayer Breakfast claim that the event is ecumenical, the fact remains that it is sponsored by a shadowy organization that shuns all public inspection and apparently sees itself on a messianic drive to merge religion and government under its own narrow brand and understanding of Christianity.

Some of The Family’s actions that we’ve heard about today have had appalling repercussions around the world. This group has long had a longstanding presence in Uganda, and it has recently come to light that a member of the Ugandan parliament, David Bahati, who sponsored this evil legislation, is affiliated with The Family very directly.

Bahati has become famous – or better, I suppose, infamous – as the sponsor of that draconian law that would apply the death penalty in fact or in its effect to gay men and lesbians in Uganda. The bill would punish those who harbor gays and anyone who speaks publicly on their behalf.

It is difficult for many of us to imagine such a vile, backward policy being promoted in the 21st Century anywhere in this world, yet this one has the backing of many members of the Ugandan government and could in one form or another still become law. For a time, there were reports that Bahati himself might attend the Prayer Breakfast here on Thursday. More recent reports say he will not be there, but the real damage has already been done. This prayer service is already tainted with the stain of intolerance and religious extremism.

It’s time for political leaders to stop lending uncritical power and prestige to an extremist organization that all too often works behind the scenes to subvert the best of American values – values like human rights and
religious liberty and freedom. We tend to take these concepts for granted in America, too often forgetting that many people throughout the world still live under a yoke of oppression. The Family has never done anything to lift that yoke; it has simply added stones to it, decade after decade.

We cannot stand by while the United States government gives any aid and comfort to groups or individuals who do not understand the values or, worse yet, work actively to undermine the values of this country. I believe The Family does all of that.The Family, through its worldwide machinations of the rich and powerful, its espousal of an explosive mixture of religion and politics and now its ties to this hateful bill in Uganda, has forfeited any right to claim any position of moral authority. The fact that most of this activity is deliberately done in secret only amplifies the problem.

What does all of this have to do with Thursday’s breakfast at the Hilton Hotel? It has plenty to do with it. For many years, people looked at events like the National Prayer Breakfast, shrugged and said, “Well, it’s just another example of ‘civil religion.’” At least that’s what some of its defenders said. It’s just a little religious talk. What’s wrong with that?

Now I think it’s clear that this is about something more, because there is nothing wrong with religious talk and prayer when it’s freely chosen. But in this instance, we’re concerned with a corrupted messenger. We’re no longer shrugging over the National Prayer Breakfast. Rather, we’re taking a closer look at the group behind it and the alarming agenda that it brings and the consequences it spawns in Uganda and around the world. We deplore what we see, and people of goodwill should never be afraid to say it loudly.

If the president of the United States attends this event, then he should speak critically of support by government or organizations that support anti-LGBT legislation anywhere in the world. President Obama should affirm the primacy of personal faith and repudiate government involvement with it.

Moreover, the leader of The Family, Doug Coe, should himself in a public place like this prayer breakfast repudiate the horrific anti-gay legislation in Uganda and urge that persons of all faiths join in its worldwide repudiation. If the president condemns this legislation, and if Doug Coe acknowledges that this was a sin and a moral scar on the face of the earth, then it would truly be a prayer breakfast to remember. Maybe I’d go next year.

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn is executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Focus on the Family's Anti-Gay Rhetoric Ungrounded say two Researchers

In his article entitled "Childhood Sexual Abuse and Male Homosexuality," published on the Focus on the Family "Citizen Link - Issue Analysis" site, Jeff Johnston says "Many pro-gay researchers, activists and theorists deny that there could be a connection between child sexual abuse and adult homosexuality." To support the "connection," Johnston quotes, among others, the findings of an article from the book Unequal Opportunity: Health Disparities Affecting Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States, edited by Richard J. Wolitski, Ron Stall, and Ronald O Valdiserri.

With all the "data" seeming to weigh in on the side of Johnston's argument, he prematurely concludes that pro-gay researchers avoid "the connection" for reasons of (1) "stigma" (sexual abuse itself), (2) negative "associations" (such as pedophilia and recruitment) and (3) belief systems ("homosexuality is inborn").

But what say two of the editors of the book from which Johnston, in part, builds his case – Ron Stall and Ronald O. Valdiserri? How do they interpret the raw data? According Truth Wins Out, the two editors made a written statement in which they said:

" . . . Focus on the Family . . . misrepresented findings in the book to suggest
that childhood sexual abuse causes male homosexuality. The Focus on the
Family description of the findings in Unequal Opportunity is inaccurate and, in
our opinion, a distortion of the scientific literature.

"Most basically, the Focus on the Family characterization of the literature on
childhood sexual abuse among gay men represents a misunderstanding of scientific
approaches to distinguishing between correlation and causation. … " [Emphasis added]

According to Truth Wins Out, "this letter marks the tenth researcher in two years who has claimed that Focus on the Family misrepresented their work." [Emphasis added]