I think we all know that homosexuality and its related issues have become a focal point for this age. There’s just no escaping it. Whether it is gay civil rights, clarifying guidelines and reasonable outcomes for therapy and ministry help, educating the church and greater community on the bigger picture or

“bridging the gap” — we are in a moment that I believe our sovereign God has brought us to. It’s up to us — those who are appointed from all sides — to make the most of it.

I couldn’t agree more 🙂

I think you know what sexual addiction recovery is. Exodus in its statement does not imply this applies to all gay people or to only gay people; that is your generalization. Many ex-gays/post-gays acknowledge sexual addiction in their past.

Yes I know this, but the problem many ex-gay ministries have had – at least in the past, even the recent past – is that they state/stated that issues like sexual addiction, drug addiction,alcohol addiction, are problems that stem from one’s orientation – they often wouldn’t seem to separate the two, when they of course they WOULD if the client were straight. THAT is a problem and one that needs to be corrected – if that is already happening in such groups then I applaud them.

There have been gay clients in the past too that thought if they became straight their issues with things like addiction would go away, and this is patently false – but I feel that some ex-gay groups capitalized on this idea. Reading stories on Beyond Ex Gay, you found that many people who went through some ex-gay therapies did find help for their addictions, but not for their SSA.

Being gay has nothing to do with various addictions that some client’s may deal with anymore than being straight would.

I hope that was clear – I was writing very quickly 🙂

Thank you for that information re: Exodus affiliates. That is helpful. I suppose the best thing a therapist can do then is simply know a great deal about the group to which they might be referring a client – which, as Michael said much earlier, should be done regardless of the type of group it is anyway.

As long as the groups don’t step outside the APA resolutions, I suspect it would be fine to refer them.

The problem is – from my POV – that the things Cameron et al have said are far FAR more abhorrent than those things coming out of the mouth of Wayne Besen.

However – there are plenty of times we have spoken out against certain things Wayne has said on this blog.

For many years, Exodus leadership, it’s own Board of Directors, did not have a public face. It was nothing more than the ‘umbrella’ at the center where affiliates could find each other and gain access to more resources…in short, it was a central clearinghouse.

Very well said, Eddy. That was how it was from the very beginning. We had a map of the USA on the EXODUS office wall at Melodyland — and would add pins as we learned of other ministries. Some of these were just individual ex-gays with a printed testimony and a PO Box — not organizations or structured programs.

Our only criteria for inclusion was the they believed that gay sex was sin and that God could change people. A lot has changed — and remained the same — since then.