An article that really should be read to alert us to the threat that these
ex-gay organisations might pose to use in India. As this article notes, because
they are facing a dead end in places like Australia they are shifting their
focus to places like India. And far from providing just an individual focused
service, they are actively contributing to the rise of institutional homophobia.
This will not come as a surprise to many of us. We have got hints of this over
the years. I think there was a case when someone from Exodus International came
to NLS in Bangalore and was confronted by activists. The participation of
evangelical groups like Apostolic Churches Alliance among the petitioners
against the Delhi High Court verdict in the Supreme Court also hinted at this
kind of support, though groups like these might be trying to cover their traces
in order to prevent exposure of this international lobbying - even as they
accuse lgbt groups of being funded by international lobbies.
We need to be alert for these efforts and try to expose them. So please make
note of the names involved here - Ron Brookman, Living Waters Australia, On
Eagles Wings to Asia, Exodus Asia Pacific, Shirley Baskett - and publicise
their involvement if you come across it. And for real evidence of how twisted
and harmful these people are, don't just read the story, but also the extensive
discussion in the comments after it.
Vikram
Australia's anti-gay churches shift focus to Asia Pacific
Australia's anti-gay churches shift focus to Asia Pacific
The country’s final gay conversion ministry closed last weekend. Now the same
pastors are taking their mission overseas.
View on www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au Preview by Yahoo
from The Saturday Paper: Australia's anti-gay churches shift focus to Asia
Pacific
Luke Williams
The country’s final gay conversion ministry closed last weekend. Now the same
pastors are taking their mission overseas.
The little group met last Saturday at Ramsgate Community Church, on the
southern flank of Sydney. Attendance at the service was by invitation only.
Guests were asked to sign confidentiality agreements, assuring they would not
discuss what was said inside. This was the final meeting of the country’s last
remaining gay conversion ministry, Living Waters Australia.
In a letter to followers issued a few weeks earlier, long-time director Ron
Brookman confided that he had been unable to find anyone willing to take up the
running of his ministry, and that he sensed God telling him it was “time to
wind up”. He blamed a change in Christian culture over the past decade,
deficiencies in his own leadership, and changing views on how to “bring healing
to the broken”.
“Wholesome heterosexuality alone reflects God’s image,” wrote Brookman, who
believes the healing power of Jesus Christ eliminated his own homosexual
desires. “Though society resists this and is abandoning Godly moral
foundations, God’s truth will prevail.”
On the other side of Sydney, on the second floor of a Darlinghurst pub, a
soft-voiced man named Anthony Venn-Brown stood and spoke. “The trauma, the
grief … some of us have taken our own lives because of these ‘change is
possible’ programs,” the former ex-gay ministry member said. “Many of us sit
here today knowing we too have been to those dark places, where we thought
about taking our own lives. And some of us here today know we have tried it.”
This event was supposed to be a celebration, marking the end of the Living
Waters ministry and the so-called “ex-gay movement” in Australia, but the mood
was positively sombre. “It’s not when we first go to these gay conversion
programs that does the damage,” Venn-Brown continued. “It’s in the months that
follow … Every time we wake up and think about another man we are tormented.
You feel like a failure, you feel evil. It’s living out those moments every
single day which eventually drives people to suicide.”
Living Waters Australia had its heyday in the 1990s when, along with Exodus
International, it had popular weekly workshops and programs in all major
cities. It also outsourced its material, which meant many local churches ran
Living Waters programs for people who sought pastoral advice on same-sex
attraction.
Conducted like Alcoholics Anonymous but for unwanted homosexual attraction –
with support groups, counselling sessions, ex-gay testimonies and prayer
meetings – the ministry built itself on messages of grace and salvation. It
appealed to shy Christian men, mainly Baptists, Presbyterians and Pentecostals.
In recent times, however, Living Waters had been reduced to a trickle. Just two
or three social support groups were operating, in middle-ring suburbs in
Melbourne and Sydney. They were often frequented by fewer than half a dozen
men, many of whom didn’t stick around for long.
Brookman spoke to The Saturday Paper after his final thanksgiving service in
Ramsgate. He said he wouldn’t talk about the service because “the press does
not act with integrity when reporting on this issue”. The confidentiality
agreements were in place, he said, to prevent unethical coverage. “The only
thing I will say is that the majority of people who spoke were all people who
went through the Living Waters program who are now extremely happy and are very
glad they went through it.”
Collapse of ex-gay movement
The ex-gay movement is in decline everywhere. The world’s biggest ex-gay
organisation, Exodus International, based in the United States, closed its
doors in June last year. In the process, it apologised to the gay community for
“years of undue judgment by the organisation and the Christian Church as a
whole”. Major health organisations around the world issue stark warnings about
the dangers of “sexual orientation” therapy. In Britain and the US, laws are
being enacted or debated to ban ex-gay therapy on minors.
Closer to home, in the past five years a number of ex-gay ministries have
closed. For the Mosaic and Roundabout ministries, their end came amid
allegations they might have played a hand in the suicide of former member
Damien Christie. The once dominant paradigm in Australian churches was to “pray
the gay away”, but that is now dismissed even by conservative church leaders.
Sydney’s Hillsong pastor, Brian Houston, specifically condemns pastoral or
therapeutic attempts to change sexual orientation.
Yet as The Saturday Paper can reveal, Australia’s ex-gay ministries are finding
ways to reinvent themselves in socially volatile developing nations, where
legal rights for homosexuality are close to non-existent.
The former umbrella organisation of Living Waters Australia, Exodus Asia
Pacific, stretches beyond Australia and New Zealand to parts of south-east Asia
and the Pacific. In recent times, its message has been expanded to Singapore
and Fiji, where it is trying to set up an ex-gay conference.
Sanctuary Ministries, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, has previously sponsored
a Malaysian ex-gay ministry leader to give talks in Australia. Adelaide ex-gay
identity Nick Kuiper has started his own ministry in the Philippines.
The pioneer of ex-gay ministry in Australia, Peter Lane, closed his Liberty Inc
Ministries, but has launched On Eagles Wings to Asia with his wife, Dot. The
Eagle Wings website says the ministry is about helping people become “liberated
from homosexuality”, equating it to sexual abuse and incest. The site is full
of testimonials from people who discuss Lane’s help in rectifying “sexual
brokenness” and who believe in the power of Jesus Christ to “heal”
homosexuality.
Lane’s organisation works exclusively overseas, with a focus on India. For the
past 12 years, he has delivered talks and workshops to churches, schools, youth
groups, student hostels, Bible colleges and Christian organisations in India,
Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore – all nations where homosexuality is a
jailable offence. The ex-gay message is not only alive and well in these
nations, it is often used to justify strict anti-gay laws.
And the sessions go over well. After one workshop conducted in Singapore by the
director of Exodus Asia Pacific, Shirley Baskett, Pastor Daniel Yap wrote: “We
are energised as individuals and as a church to begin to minister well to
homosexual strugglers, and would love for Shirley to come again to share her
gifts to strengthen us.”
Psychoanalytical beginnings
Ex-gay ministries metastasised from the removal of homosexuality from the DSM –
psychiatry’s standard classification of mental disorders – in the early 1970s.
The ministries based themselves on the idea that homosexuality is disordered
and can be mitigated or changed through various therapies. Much of the work
relied on deeply theoretical psychoanalysis from the 1950s and ’60s, which
suggested homosexuality was a sublimated behavioural response to an absent
parent of the same sex. Once the conservative revolt became a fringe movement,
it began developing its own methods based on neo-Freudian talking therapies,
divine healing and, in some cases, Pentecostalism.
When a person joined the Living Waters group, they would normally be placed
into a 26-week “program”. The program, conducted with weekly themes, was not
always fixed, although it generally included special readings from obscure
research with titles such as “The Root Causes of Inappropriate Sexual
Development”, Bible readings, occasional prayer groups, and Pentecostal-style
healing sessions.
Like virtually all other ex-gay ministries, non-sexual contact with other men
is seen as key to a program member’s success in reducing their homosexuality,
along with uncovering trauma, improving one’s friendships and learning not to
fight sexual feelings and desires. Dates with members of the opposite sex were
encouraged, but masturbation and lusty urges were discouraged. Almost all
questions were answered with broad references to passages in the Bible with
themes of transformation, salvation, purity and the battle between good and
evil.
But as these programs have collapsed in Australia, their therapies are being
exported overseas. Former ex-gay leader and now practising psychologist Paul
Martin told The Saturday Paper that Exodus Asia Pacific was taking the easy way
out by preaching in countries where there is limited protection for gay people.
“The ex-gay movement is dying here because people are seeing the damage it
does. People [in the developing world] obviously haven’t seen the damage yet,
but they will. People start getting physically unwell – they have problems with
their internal organs because of the stress these programs put them through.”
'The woman who outran the devil'
At the vanguard of Australia’s ex-gay export is Shirley Baskett, a broadly
built woman with a slight grandmotherly vibe. She identifies as “post-lesbian”
and is the director of Exodus Asia-Pacific.
Baskett returned to Christianity in the early 1980s. Her book, The Woman Who
Outran the Devil, details her relationship with a woman she met at an Auckland
Bible college in the ’70s. She says she subsequently drifted from her faith,
engaged in domestic violence, became an alcoholic, hung out with “bisexuals,
heroin users and prostitutes”, and considered becoming a male. Since then, she
gave up alcohol, married a man and dedicated herself to the ex-gay cause.
Today, she is an ordained Assemblies of God minister.
After initially refusing to answer questions about her Asia-Pacific ministries,
Baskett eventually accused me of being on a “vigilante crusade” against ex-gay
ministries. She said her reluctance to discuss her ministries was because “it
will stir ignorant hatred toward very loving people, and sometimes these
articles are a potential threat to our members. This is truly harmful and will
be the result of your actions. Yes, we do have evidence of this, as we keep the
‘hate mail’ and threats.”
For the past two years, Baskett has been working to set up an ex-gay conference
in Fiji, with guest speakers, workshops and testimonies. Homosexuality was
decriminalised in Fiji in 2010, although minimum anti-discrimination
protections remain. Reports of violence against gays and lesbians are common.
In 2012, Fijian police ordered a gay pride parade to be closed down, citing an
excessive risk of violent attack on the marchers.
Baskett said she would only speak with The Saturday Paper if I agreed to read
sections of the Bible, including the Book of John. When I asked why she chose
it and what I should be looking for, she advised: “Look for Jesus … Behaving as
a homosexual is the real, true, terrible sin. This is biblically a wrong
premise.”
Baskett refuted the idea that her ministries were spreading messages that could
lead to anti-gay attitudes and laws. She emphasised that people should be free
to choose how to deal with their homosexuality. “Our ministries do not coerce
or force decisions on people. Some people want to know how we have abstained
from homosexual behaviour,” she said. “Some may decide this is not right for
them. The idea that people must be offered one way to deal with faith and
homosexuality is offensive.”
When pressed further on her dealings in Fiji and Singapore, and the suggestion
she was playing with semantics to re-characterise events, Baskett eventually
confirmed her involvement in Fiji. “Like you, I have a heart to defend people
that I care about and those who are true underdog minorities,” she said.
Baskett said “homosexuality is more harmful than ex-gay programs” and that many
of the churches in the Asia-Pacific she had spoken with had previously been
completely ostracising gays and lesbians before she encouraged them to take a
more “loving approach” to sexual issues.
“The prevailing opinion is that our ministries do harm,” she said. “And some
people think that they have been victims of harmful connection. But there are
far more people who would say they have been helped, and churches that have
learned new ways to show grace and love through our ministries.”
The ex-gay interpretation of “grace and love” no longer has an audience in
Australia. Brookman’s last request at his Living Waters thanksgiving service in
Ramsgate was for donations to “assist in wind-up costs”. But these Australian
ministries have turned their attention to Asia and the Pacific, where far from
winding up, they are expanding their reach.
This piece was edited on April 19, 2014, to correct an error that misidentified
Damien Christie.
