This morning, LA Times’ Stephanie Simon reports on the controversies with NARTH. Alan Chambers is quoted and draws a distinction between how NARTH has handled things and how Exodus would.

Here is a portion: One of NARTH’s scientific advisors has quit in protest, and a prominent therapist has canceled his presentation at the group’s annual conference next month. Alan Chambers, who leads the nation’s largest support group for “ex-gays,” urged NARTH’s members to “think long and hard about the mission of the organization.”

UPDATE: The Miami Herald, The Olympian (WA), Monterey County Herald and the Daily Dish (among numerous other blogs) picked up this story today. Stories have also been filed by AgapePress and the USA Radio Network (10/17/06).

UPDATE: 1/17/07 – The Southern Poverty Law Center included the article by Brentin Mock in their print and online magazine, The Intelligence Report under the title, One More Enemy. I noticed that bloggers, including The Daily Kos are picking it up again.

In light of Dr. Schoenewolf’s accusations that Brentin Mock, reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center twisted his words in the SPLC article, Mr. Mock wrote to tell a little more about his interview with Dr. Schoenewolf.

Mr. Mock asked Dr. Schoenewolf this question: “What exactly did you mean by the paragraph in which you say Africans were better off as slaves in America?”

Dr. Schoenewolf replied, “The point I made is what I was trying to say. I don’t know that there’s any other way to say it. I expected people to take issue.”

Dr. Schoenewolf is welcome to come on here and dispute this. However, this exchange paints a somewhat different picture than Dr. Schoenewolf presents in his newest NARTH article.

UPDATE: 1/17/07 – The Southern Poverty Law Center included the article by Brentin Mock in their print and online magazine, The Intelligence Report under the title, One More Enemy. I noticed that bloggers, including The Daily Kos are picking it up again.

Responding to controversy surrounding his writings on political correctness, Gerald Schoenewolf was interviewed by an anonymous writer for an article on the NARTH website. In an article titled: Political Correctness Gone Amok: The Latest Controversy, Schoenewolf criticizes the recent report by Brentin Mock of the Southern Poverty Law Center. He blames Mock for twisting his words regarding slavery. Schoenewolf says: “No person is better off enslaved, obviously,” Schoenewolf told NARTH. “What I tried to say, before my words were twisted by that reporter, is that despite the clear and obvious evil of that practice, we tend to forget that many of the enslaved people had been first been sold into bondage by their fellow countrymen; so coming to America did bring about some eventual good. No social issue has all the ‘good guys’ lined up on one side and ‘bad guys’ on the other.”

Let’s compare this idea with what he said in his initial article: With all due respect, there is another way, or other ways, to look at the race issue in America. It could be pointed out, for example, that Africa at the time of slavery was still primarily a jungle, as yet uncivilized or industrialized. Life there was savage, as savage as the jungle for most people, and that it was the Africans themselves who first enslaved their own people. They sold their own people to other countries, and those brought to Europe, South America, America, and other countries, were in many ways better off than they had been in Africa.

I will leave it to the reader to judge whether Dr. Schoenewolf’s words were twisted. I am glad he is now saying that the good done was “eventual” but that is not what it seems to me that he said in the original article. While we are on that point, I do not see why one would imply that a moral evil is of necessity associated with an eventual benefit. This assumes that the only way the current good (African-Americans are here and not in famine and war-torn Africa) could have happened is via the moral evil (slavery). On the other hand, we could look at it this way: Current economic benefits, freedoms and safeties have occured despite slavery, not because of it. Slavery was not a necessary precursor to the current situation; Africans could have come here under some other more positive circumstances if the moral evil of slavery did not exist.

Schoenewolf did not address one of his central tenets (civil rights movements are derived from Marxism) in this new defense. To wit, here is a passage from the original article:

Subsequent to Marx, various human rights groups began using his ideology to rationalize their movements, primarily in America. First came the Civil Rights Movement, which began in the 1850s and was one of the causes of the Civil War. In this case, European-Americans (Caucasians) became the oppressors and African-Americans became the oppressed; European-Americans were demonized, and African-Americans were idealized; European-Americans who had practiced slavery or segregation were viewed as all-bad and African-Americans were seen as all-good.

African-Americans were urged by various leaders to unify and rebel against European-Americans and to demand special privileges as compensation for their suffering at the hands of the latter. Civil rights leaders, like Marx and Engels before them, believed that their way, and only their way, was the valid way to look at the issue. In the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement went into high gear, and the leaders of the movement, just like Marx and Engels, began to punish anybody who was in any way critical of the movement or had any other point of view with respect to solving racial discrimination by labeling them “racists” and “bigots” and attempting to isolate and ostracize them.

I consulted GCC Professor of History, Gillis Harp regarding the paragraph above and he had this to say:

“Hardly any Abolitionists ever read Marx or were particularly influenced by him. You (Throckmorton) are quite correct about the evangelical roots of the Abolitionist movement. The Quakers were among the first to oppose slavery in writing. The British leader, William Wilberforce — a Tory evangelical! — was about as far from a Marxist as one could get. Arthur & Lewis Tappan are good examples of American evangelicals who were Abolitionist leaders.”

Bottom line message I get from this new article: If you express disagreement with Dr. Schoenewolf, you must be a “so-called liberal” who is intent on stiffling dialogue. It is rare that I or anyone here in the Grove would be called a liberal. We’re as much liberals as Wilberforce was a Marxist.

The article concludes with Dr. Nicolosi saying: “The bottom line,” said NARTH President Joseph Nicolosi, “is that NARTH’s mission has nothing to do with any social issue others than same-sex attraction. Our mission is to defend our clients’ rights to assert their own values and say, ‘Gay is not who I really am.'”

This sentiment would represent a shift in NARTH practice which many would welcome. If this was true, then there would have been no controversy in the first place.

UPDATE: 1/17/07 – The Southern Poverty Law Center included the article by Brentin Mock in their print and online magazine, The Intelligence Report under the title, One More Enemy. I noticed that bloggers, including The Daily Kos are picking it up again.

It has now been nearly a month since the beginning of the controversy over the article by Gerald Schoenewolf (Gay rights and political correctness: A brief history). Apparently, NARTH is finished with the issue since they issued what they are calling an apology.

I have continued to research one of the central tenets of the article and that is that Marxism informed the abolitionist movement and the subsequent civil rights movement. This appears to be revisionist history. Christianity was at the heart of this movement and indeed most likely even of the early feminist movement. Wilberforce in England became invested in abolishing slavery after his conversion to Christianity. We are not talking about a difference of opinion here; this is simply bending facts to reduce complexity to a simplistic theme – the very thing Schoenewolf accuses human rights advocates of doing. There are several other significant problems that could be raised again but I will leave it at that.

There is much troubling about all of this but what continues to escape whoever authorized the apology statement is that the credibility of any movement or organization can be severely compromised by the inability to self-correct. By issuing a statement saying that some readers misconstrued the article, they ask those same readers to suspend rationality. The “apology” feels more like a slap at those who found significant errors and expect a scientific organization to be accountable for them.

A specialty organization devoted to sexual identity issues could provide a significant public service. An organization that I would join or help develop would:

-Develop research-based guidelines to inform clinical practice
-Focus on integrating all research relating to sexual orientation and sexual identity
-Avoid policy/political statements not in keeping with the organization’s mission, and then only when supported by a significant program of research
-Have a much broader focus than homosexuality (e.g., sexual identity)
-Have elections by members for the officers of the organization

Other suggestions?

NARTH today issued the following apology today in relation to the Schoenewolf article…

NARTH Apologizes For Article

NARTH regrets the comments made by Dr. Schoenwolf about slavery which have been misconstrued by some of our readers. It should go without saying that we do not wish to minimize the suffering of those who have been mistreated because of race, sex, religious beliefs or sexual orientation.

UPDATE: An article by Brentin Mock of the Southern Poverty Law Center provides additional comment from Gerald Schoenewolf, David Blakeslee and your humble host regarding the article about which NARTH today made comment.

Sojourneer, the anonymous blog administrator at the Narth blog has revised his/her statement about the Schoenewolf article controversy:

I am going to revise my comments on the Schoenwolf article. Many people have misinterpreted my defense of Schoenwolf, as speaking for Narth. I do not speak for Narth and any comments I have made on the blog are my personal opinions. Please read the Narth disclaimer regarding the blog. In addition, Schoenewolf can defend himself and his views are not endorsed by Narth. Regarding his comments about slavery, I regret his choice of words and think his point could have been made with a better choice of words. The comments were incendiary and have inflamed the debate. Therefore, for the sake of continued dialogue with all sides I am going to retract the first letter from Timothy Kincaid as an example of gay intimidation.

I don’t know when this revision was actually posted since it took the place of one that labeled negative reactions from a variety of quarters as attempts to discredit NARTH and Dr. Schoenewolf. This statement is the first that implies that Schoenewolf’s views are not endorsed by NARTH. However, since Sojourneer does not speak for NARTH, I cannot see how the statement can be accepted as an official position. Silence, thus far, is the only official response from NARTH.

Sojourneer at the NARTH blog has responded to the Schoenewolf controversy.