How to Ruin Your Gay Kid’s Life: Inside Linda Harvey’s Book

Some years back I had an e-mail exchange with Linda Harvey who like all good religious extremists left private sector employment to start a "ministry" called Mission America which is virulently anti-gay.  During the course of the e-mail exchange, Harvey admitted that she had no educational credentials that make her competent to be an authority on mental health issues or certainly the roots of sexual orientation.  Like most Christofascists, Harvey hasn't allowed this deficit to stop her from parading around as an "expert" on sexual orientation or maintaining that sexual orientation is a choice and changeable.  Her latest effort in perpetuating the "ex-gay" myth is a book entitled Maybe He’s Not Gay.   Fortunately, Amazon has pulled the book.  As would be expected, the spittle is flying in Christofascist circles.  Patheos.com looks at the ditching of Harvey's delusional and dangerous book.  Here are highlights (NOTE: Harvey blames evil gay bloggers for the book's demise):

Right-wingers are up in arms this week after Maybe He’s Not Gay, a horrific “guide” to homosexuality written by extreme homophobe Linda Harvey, was removed from the digital bookshelves of Amazon.

It’s not entirely clear why the book’s no longer available on Amazon. Back2Stonewall initially reported that Amazon made the decision themselves after reviewing the book’s borderline abusive content, while Queerty says the publisher made the final call. The anti-gay Illinois Family Institute and the Christian Post say that Harvey herself asked for the book to be taken down after it received an influx of critical reviews from, you know, intelligent and reasonable people.

“I saw the rotten reviews, a smear campaign by those who had not read the book, and the publisher attempted to get Amazon to pull the ad hominem reviews, but they were not immediately responsive,” said Harvey.

“So, since the book is brand new and I didn’t want it to be harmed by this uninformed and vicious campaign stimulated by ‘gay’ bloggers, I decided to pull the page for now.”

As she introduces the book, Harvey describes homosexuality as “an emperor without clothes,” claiming repeatedly that gay people’s “feelings” (I can just hear her saying it in a mocking voice) are totally misguided and don’t actually reflect facts or represent the “truth” — which is, apparently, that nobody can be gay.

The “factual” pillars she believes we’re violating are that being gay hasn’t been proven to be genetic and that there are “risks” associated with homosexuality — as you may have guessed, she throws around lots of outdated data and incorrect stereotypes about HIV/AIDS. (Chapter 4 is called “Friends Don’t Let Friends Be Gay,” and it’s all about gay sex. Which religious conservatives seems rather obsessed with…)

Here’s a pseudo-thesis statement:

If it’s not genetic and some people think there are some real risks and problems with homosexuality … then why can’t there be reasonable discussions about it? Wouldn’t that be reasonable, compassionate and… tolerant??? Maybe being gay isn’t “who they are.” Maybe their feelings have just had a head-on collision with facts.

She makes the argument that “our ancestors” throughout history opposed homosexuality, and she gets really tripped up trying to decide whether or not homosexuality is genetic, i.e. fixed at birth and unchangeable.

First, there are plenty of reasons to believe that homosexuality is at least partially inborn, even if we don’t have a “gay gene” to point to, and we’ve known that for ages. Second, why does it matter if it’s a choice or not? Many people choose to be religious, and yet we constitutionally protect them from religious-based persecution (not something we can say for LGBT folks), no matter what critics say about the Affordable Care Act. Even if a person chooses to be gay, why are they any less worthy of being protected from discrimination?

She also has a fit about the incongruity between a gay sexual orientation and reproductive abilities — namely, she’s freaked out that gay men are still generally capable of impregnating women, and lesbians are still capable of becoming pregnant

The part of this that made me start to hyperventilate is when she compared homosexuality to skipping class, being overweight, cheating on exams, cheating on a spouse, or even developing an eating disorder: all behaviors she considers “not genetic, high-risk, and changeable.” 

Harvey claims that accepting homosexuality will “shake the foundations of human culture.” And that it’s already happening! (The horror!) She offers a long list of the horrible, horrible consequences of greater acceptance of LGBT folks.

Kudos to Amazon for ditching this book.  Read the rest of the details at Patheos.  The take away, in my opinion, is that Harvey belongs in a mental ward.  Yet, she is typical of the "experts" that the Christofascists parade around in their desperate struggle to keep the "ex-gay" and "choice" myths alive.