If the Texas State Board of Education moves to include mention of Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell in school textbooks, Faith In America hopes they will document how harmful their anti-gay actions have been to millions of gay and lesbian youth.

The Texas State Board of Education in a 10-5 party line vote approved some controversial alterations to what most students in the state and other areas of the country will be studying as history. After a public comment period, the board will vote on final recommendations in May.

According to an Associated Press story, it would mean not only increased favorable mentions of anti-gay activist Phyllis Schlafly but also more discussion about the anti-gay Moral Majority and Heritage Foundation.

“The bigotry, prejudice and violence that has been justified and promoted by these so-called conservative groups has inflicted a horrific toll on the lives of gay and lesbian individuals, especially youth,” said Brent Childers, an evangelical Christian who serves as executive director Faith In America. “It’s unimaginable that millions of kids across this nation may now be taught that people who espouse and promote religion-based bigotry are to be looked upon as favorable.

“History, time and time again, has judged such religion-based bigotry as harmful and unacceptable, whether such bigotry and prejudice was perpetrated toward American Natives, women or African-Americans. Apologies have been issued by the church and others for their role in promoting religion-based bigotry toward a minority group.”

Childers said that he recalls how his own past bigotry and prejudice toward gay Americans was fostered and reinforced by Falwell and other anti-gay figures who for years used the religious and political arenas to promote the attitude that it’s OK to be prejudiced and hostile toward gay and lesbian individuals.

“Now, the Texas Board of Education is poised to use public school textbooks to give a stamp of approval to the religion-based bigotry and hostility that has been promoted by groups like the Moral Majority or Heritage Foundation. To put a positive spin on those group’s prejudice and hostility toward gay Americans is no different than if someone proposed to rewriting history to portray segregation, racism or looking upon women as inferior in favorable terms.”

Faith In America is a national nonprofit organization founded in 2005 to educate Americans about the harm caused when religious teaching is misused to justify prejudice, discrimination and violence against people based solely on their sexual orientation. Brent Childers, a straight evangelical ally, serves as executive director. In September 2008, Faith In America founder and longtime civil rights advocate Mitchell Gold published “Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay In America”. The book, a not-for-profit venture, has been used in community forums across the nation to bring awareness and understanding to one of the greatest moral failures of our time: Misusing religion in a way that subjects gay teens to traumatic depression, fear, rejection, persecution and even physical violence.
www.faithinamerica.com

Meyer joined Faith In America as a supporter after hearing founder Mitchell Gold talking about his book CRISIS on a PBS radio show in December. He recently met with Mitchell to discuss our work and a presentation he has developed as a clinical social worker that addresses the topic of “prejudice masquerading as science”.

Meyer has served on the faculty of North Carolina’s Duke University in the Department of Psychiatry for nearly 30 years. Last spring, he made a presentation at the Duke Grand Rounds weekly lecture series, entitled, “On the diagnosis and ‘treatment’ of homosexuality: When prejudice masquerades as science.” In the presentation, he detailed much of the history (up to the present) of the relationship between mental health professions and homosexuality to demonstrate how professional organizations have hurt people and have been used to promulgate social bigotry.

Last August, he received an invitation to present on this topic before the U.S. Army’s Department of Psychiatry.

Since then, he has presented for Grand Rounds in Departments of Psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in N.Y.; Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.; Cooper University Hospital in New Jersey; the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and the Departments of Psychiatry at the University of Alabama in Birmingham and Virginia Commonwealth University; before a group of 300 mental health professionals in Pinehurst, N.C.; the North Carolina Chapter of the American Psychological Association in Charlotte, N.C.; and the N.C.Society for Clinical Social Workers.

Conversion therapy: When the ‘cure’ becomes a curse

Prejudice and violence. We recognize it at its extremes.

We recoiled when we recently learned that the Ugandan parliament had proposed a bill that could put people to death for being homosexual. Many are unaware that the death penalty for homosexual acts already exists in seven other countries. Several years ago we were reminded of this fact by an AP photo of two slender young men, not much more than boys, really, as ropes were being placed over their heads in Iran. Fortunately, there were blindfolds over their faces, so we didn’t have to look them in the eyes.

Today, homosexuality remains a crime in 93 countries. In 2003, United States courts declared that private consensual behavior between adults was not a crime. In England, anti-sodomy laws were repealed in 1967.

Prior to this, one Brit who was found guilty in 1952 was code-breaker Allan Turing, a man some consider to be the father of computer science. Turing, like Oscar Wilde many years prior, was convicted of gross indecency.

Unlike Wilde, Turing was given a choice about his punishment and he chose chemical castration over imprisonment. Turing became so despondent about the outcome of these treatments that he took his life at the tender age of 42. Several months ago, Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologized.

“It is no exaggeration to say that, without [Turing's] outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different,” he said. “…I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was convicted, under homophobic laws, were treated terribly.”

While homosexuality is no longer a crime, it was for many years considered a mental illness.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the scientific community joined forces with gay-rights activists to compel the American Psychiatric Association to examine how their nomenclature was hurting people.

When the APA classified homosexuality as mental illness, they were allowing their professional organization to sanction what was little more than social prejudice.

In 1973, homosexuality as a category of mental illness was officially deleted from the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, the American bible of psychiatry.

This year, I have been giving lectures to departments of psychiatry about how mental health providers have historically treated homosexuals who came for help. Most in attendance have been shocked and then saddened when they learn that in America and Great Britain, up through the early 1970s, psychiatrists and psychologists sometimes used electric shocks and nausea-inducing substances in an ill-fated effort to convert gay men and women into becoming straight.

In addition, many patients spent years and enormous sums of money in psychoanalysis and intensive psychotherapy with the hope that such sacrifices would “cure” them of same-sex attraction. Well-known practitioners of these treatments proclaimed cures by the hundreds and even thousands. Virtually every such report — including a now wholly discredited book by the venerated William Masters and Virginia Johnson — was found to be unsubstantiated, non-replicable and fraudulent.

Today in America, we have advanced to the next rung of civilization. Now that gays and lesbians are no longer criminals and no longer officially sick, large segments of our society still regard them as sinners in need of healing and redemption. A number of organizations encourage people with same-sex orientation to seek treatment through what has variously been called “conversion therapy” or “reparative therapy.”

Every major professional health and mental health organization denounces such therapies and clearly states that therapeutic attempts to change an individual’s sexual orientation are not only ineffective, but carry significant potential for harm. Yet, this has not stopped many religious leaders and their parishioners from foisting such treatments on vulnerable individuals who feel guilt-ridden or confused about their feelings.

While they are often sincere in their attempt to help, I doubt they would continue such efforts if they really knew the costs.

Imagine the emotional and psychological effect on teenagers who are told that if they act on their feelings then they have committed “an abomination” — therefore they must deny who they are, condemn themselves for what they feel and live with the shame of what they cannot change. Is it any wonder that suicide and suicide attempts remain at such high levels for gay youths?

It matters not, if punishment or condemnation is inflicted by the state, the doctors or representatives of the church. The consequences of such actions rest on all who inflict such harm and all should be called upon to atone for its damaging effects and the lives that are taken — even among those who believe they are delivering a message of holiness.

William S. Meyer, MSW, is an associate clinical professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Ob/Gyn at the Duke University Medical Center.

william.meyer@duke.edu

By Dean Hamer and Michael Rosbash

There was an elephant in the San Francisco courtroom where lawyers contested the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California law that prohibits the marriage of same-sex couples. One key issue should influence every aspect of the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger proceedings yet remained unspoken: What makes people gay? Is it a choice or is it innate?

Most geneticists consider sexual orientation a phenotype — namely, an observable set of properties that varies among individuals. Although physical phenotypes like height and weight are easier to quantify, behavioral phenotypes are intensely studied in animals and humans. Research from many directions leads to a strong conclusion: Human sexual orientation has deep biological roots.

Moreover, the empirical evidence for the role of genetics in human sexual orientation has been quietly but steadily mounting over the last 15 years. Studies of twins — the mainstay of quantitative human genetics — have been conducted on large populations in three countries. The results unambiguously demonstrate that heritability plays a major role in sexual orientation and far outweighs shared environmental factors such as education or parenting.

During the early 1990s, there was an unfortunate flurry of less-than-convincing findings on specific genes and sometimes over-hyped media announcements. Indeed, critics of sexual orientation inheritance are fond of pointing out that there is no single identified “gay gene.” However, they fail to mention that the same is true for height, skin color, handedness, frequency of heart disease and many other traits that have a large inherited component but no dominant gene. In other words, sexual orientation is complex, i.e., many genes contribute to the phenotype.

Gay genes appear paradoxical at first blush. From the perspective of natural selection, how could they persist in the population if they lead to fewer offspring? Recent research has uncovered several plausible explanations. For example, one set of studies found that the same inherited factors that favor male homosexuality actually increase the fecundity of female maternal relatives. By balancing the number of offspring, they would contribute to maintaining these genes over the course of evolution. This explanation may not be exclusive but serves to illustrate that the Darwinian problem is not necessarily overwhelming.

There have been other surprises. One is the importance of epigenetics — changes that alter gene expression without a change in the DNA code of an affected gene. This is evidenced by the lopsided number of maternal versus paternal factors in male sexual orientation and by unusual patterns of DNA modification in mothers of gay men. Epigenetic changes may also explain the finding that a male’s probability of being gay is increased by his number of older brothers.

Although these factors are neither genetic in the traditional Mendelian sense nor fully understood, they are still biological and affect phenotype in an involuntary manner. Who chooses his number of older brothers?

All of these findings demand the conclusion that most gay people no more choose their sexual orientation than most heterosexuals. (”Most” is used here to indicate that — like almost everything biological — these are statistical data and do not apply uniformly.) This conclusion is also consonant with our memories: Most of us were stunned as unsuspecting adolescents to discover our sexual orientation — heterosexuals and homosexuals alike.

Biology cannot be avoided in determining whether fundamental rights are protected under the equal protection clause of our Constitution. This is because “immutability” is one of the factors that determine the level of scrutiny applied to possible violations and that determine whether gays are awarded “suspect class” status, which would give them more constitutional protection. Heritability is not necessary for immutability or suspect class status (religion is the usual counter-example), but it should be sufficient; we do not choose our genes, nor can we change them.

The court of public opinion may be the ultimate arbiter, and here there is cause for optimism about what education can achieve. Recent studies in college classrooms show that exposure of students to information on the causes of homosexuality has a direct influence on opinions about gay rights. This fits with polling data showing that people who believe that gays are “born that way” are generally supportive of full equality, whereas those who believe it is “a choice” are opposed.

The importance of education is also underscored by the extent to which a lack of education is problematic. One national survey found that 70% of those who think being gay is a choice favored the re- institution of sodomy laws. This would turn some 15 million Americans into common criminals for simply being who they are. Science education must help people understand that phenotypic variation, including sexual orientation diversity, is an immutable feature of human biology.

Dean Hamer is a molecular biologist who works on human genetics and HIV prevention and is the author of scientific books, including “The Science of Desire.” Michael Rosbash is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor at Brandeis University who studies circadian rhythms.

BOY’S SILENT STATEMENT MAKES BIG IMPACT AROUND THE WORLD

By Kate Ward

FAYETTEVILLE — When he chose to stand up for his beliefs by sitting down for the Pledge of Allegiance, 10-year-old Will Phillips never dreamed his message would circle the globe.

The West Fork student was honored by furniture designer and author Mitchell Gold on Saturday during a book signing at the Fayetteville Public Library.

Gold serves as chairman and founder of Faith in America — a group dedicated to educating the public about “the harm caused by religious-based bigotry and prejudice used to justify condemnation, discrimination and violence toward gay Americans.”

“Will, you’re on the road toward completing a noble mission,” Gold said. “Because of you, other people’s lives will be better.”

It was Oct. 5, when the West Fork Middle School student refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

The silent statement made a big impact around the world, gaining him international attention.

“I thought about not standing for the pledge because there really isn’t liberty and justice for all,” Phillips said.

“I’m glad my message is getting out to so many people, but it wasn’t my original intent. Originally, my intention was to not swear about something that doesn’t exist.”

Phillips parents said their son’s actions were based on his own upbringing.

“He had asked about the meaning of the pledge and why we say it,” Phillips mom, Laura, said “We shared our views. I told him that I don’t say the pledge and my husband does. We gave him the choice to do what he wanted because we’ve always raised him to stand up for what he believes in. We told him there would be social ramifications, but it’s something he feels really strongly about.”

After thinking about the meaning of the pledge, Phillips’ mom said her son decided he didn’t want to stand or say it in class.

“He’s received e-mail, phone calls and letters from people in India, South American, Canada, Germany — you name it,” she said. “He never expected any of this attention. He was adamant that the didn’t want to do it for self-promotion. I guess, it just goes to show that little voices can make a big impact.”

Phillips was one of three volunteers Saturday who read excerpts from Gold’s newly released book, “Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America.”

To show his appreciation for Phillip’s courage, Gold presented the fi fth-grader with a handmade leather chair.

“One of the boxes we’re stuck in right now is that people who grew up believing one way aren’t always comfortable changing their way of thinking,” Gold said.

“Will, as you sit down to stand up for your belie fs, we want to give you this chair so you can be comfortable.”

WASHINGTON (RNS) As thousands of gays and lesbians prepare to march on the nation’s capital to push for equal rights, leaders from a range of faiths say it’s time to stop using religion as a weapon to oppose same-sex marriage.

What’s more, advocates for gay rights say their faith and a sacred belief in justice are what actually form the foundation of their support for gay and lesbian unions.

Brent Childers, an evangelical Christian, said he once used religious tenets to support prejudice toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, but “I realized those attitudes were not in keeping with my religious values by causing harm using religious teaching.”

He said supporting same-sex marriage is in keeping with his faith because “what’s essential is those core principals of love, compassion and respect for others.”

Now, as executive director of Faith in America, Childers leads a group whose mission statement embraces the goal of “emancipat(ing) lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from bigotry as disguised by religious truth.”

Childers is among the more than 100 religious leaders who have endorsed the Oct. 11 National Equality March on behalf of gay rights.

Several faith groups are planning religious events in the Washington area Oct. 9-11, including an interfaith service before the march.

The two-mile march on the afternoon of Oct. 11 will culminate in a rally outside the U.S. Capitol.

Speakers will include Judy Shepard, whose son Matthew was killed in a hate crime in 1998; lawmakers from New York City and Los Angeles; and veteran gay activists Clive Jones and David Mixner. Regional groups around the country are organizing trips to Washington, a well as events in their own cities on Oct. 11.

The march is preceded by two days of events that include workshops on lobbying tactics and media training. On Oct. 10, there will be a wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery to honor gay service members discharged under the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.

“We believe all people are created in God’s image. Doing anything less than fighting for equality for all is not living into our calling,” said Kareem Murphy, one of the members of Washington’s predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church, which is helping organize members of various Christian denominations to attend the march and related events.

“Christ ministered to people who are considered outsiders, and we want to continue that ministry,” he said.

Robin McGehee, co-director of the march, said it took years to reconcile her Baptist faith with her lesbian sexual orientation. “I finally understood I could have both uniquely and effectively and not have to choose one over the other,” she said.

Another march supporter, Faith in America founder and furniture magnate Mitchell Gold, said, “There’s been a real mobilization of faith groups saying faith is equal to justice.”

Several Jewish leaders also have endorsed the march, including Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, and Rabbi Denise Eger, president of the Pacific Association for Reform Rabbis. Eger said Jewish history, from slavery in ancient Egypt to the horror of the Holocaust, has colored Jewish activism on behalf of gay rights since the 1960s.

“We’ve had the ultimate experience of dehumanization,” she said.

“What’s happening now, that’s alarm bells. What’s next?”

The Rev. Irene Monroe, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Divinity School, likened the same-sex marriage debate to the 1960s struggle for African-American civil rights. She said there were religious teachings that supported slavery as well as a ban on interracial marriage that are now considered shameful.

“A lot of the bigotry that we as LGBT people face is based on religion,” she said.

Molly Kropp, 35, who attended a recent fundraiser for the march, said her support for same-sex marriage got down to a question of morality. “It should just be about common respect,” she said, “and spreading awareness of the idea of equality.”

By MICHELLE MINKOFF
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