French Protest American Ex-Gay Program

I've noted many times in the past the efforts of the American Christian Taliban to export the ex-gay myth overseas, particularly to largely uneducated populations in Africa. But the effort is not limited to third world nations. Even countries like France are seeing the effort to import lies and false "experts" in order to denigrate gays and promote the myth that sexual orientation is changeable. Fortunately, the Christianist efforts are meeting with considerable opposition and outcry as recently demonstrated in Toulouse, France. Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has details. Here are highlights:

Organizers of Rainbow Toulouse had hoped that maybe a hundred people at the most might to show up in front of a small Evangelical church to protest a planned ex-gay seminar. Instead, they were pleasantly surprised to see between 200 and 300 protesters turning out.

The scheduled seminar, scheduled for last weekend, is affiliated with Andrew Comiskey’s Living Waters program in the U.S. Comiskey, a former president of Exodus International, has been aggressively expanding his Desert Stream Ministries and its Living Waters program in Canada and Europe. Former ex-gay leader Vonnie Pits issued an apology for her role in a Living Waters-based program she set up in New South Wales, Australia.

In 2005, DSM moved to Kansas City where Comiskey announced he was partnering with Dominionist theologian Mike Bickle (organizer of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s crusade in Houston) and the International House of Prayer. DSM reportedly uses “extreme methods that involve forms of exorcism (deliverance/healing prayer) and rely on teachings that believe that people become gay through demonic influences and the sins of ancestors.”

You can see a video testimony of an ex-gay survivor of Living Waters here.

These "ex-gay" ministries and the quacks who make a comfortable living peddling lies need to be shut down. State regulators need to start revoking licenses and/or instituting prosecution against the quacks who are knowingly defrauding the desperate and vulnerable.