Shameful

Not many stories are sadder than this one, nor tell us more about who we are. Who some of us are.

I don't think I'd known the name George Rekers until he was discovered, a while back, traveling with a "rentboy." (Hadn't known that name, either.) Rekers, it seems, like so many of the most virulent anti-gay activists, is gay. More importantly, he ran a much-touted (by some) deprogramming-conversion-destruction scheme for gays. His prize convert was a kid named Kirk, about whom he wrote in reportedly respectable psychology journals (Rekers called him Kraig in his papers):

Kirk survived his ordeal, and he continued to grow up under relative anonymity. Neither he nor his family knew that he was the subject of nearly two decades of discussion among behavioral therapists working to change their clients’ sexual orientation. Through it all, Rekers wrote that Kirk had a “normal male identity, had normal aspirations for growing up to be married and have a family, and was well-adjusted as a teen-age boy in general.” The truth was far different. His suicide attempt at the age of seventeen was unsuccessful. But twenty years later, he took his life on December 21, 2003. He was 38.

Anderson Cooper is doing a three-part series on the story.

There have been countless examples of right-wingers denying reality to push an agenda, more often than not motivated by the religious fanaticism (or religious adherence to the god of Reaganism and selfishness) that permeates the teabagger wing (meaning pretty much the whole of it) of the current corpse of the Republican party. Their climate-change denial will merely destroy our planet; their attempts to Christianize education will only destroy our country; tax cuts will only complete our bankruptcy; claiming that homosexuality is an affront to their god and that it's a choice will only prevent nameless millions from being able to marry... But in the case of the insane rejectionism that is conversion therapy they may as well have put a gun in the kid's face and pulled the trigger. It's specific. It's horrifying. And it's inexcusable, even as -- because -- they believe they're doing the will of their god.

And it's an immediate example of what happens when fact threatens faith. When, given a choice between recognizing reality and finding a way for ones belief to remain within it, or rejecting reality in order to maintain pathologically-needed false belief, people do the latter, they're not just harming themselves. Not in this ever-increasing American theocracy.

If the molecules and pathways and genes aren't yet fully understood, it's nevertheless as clear as, well, the age of the earth, that for nearly all people sexual orientation is not a matter of conscious choice. To biblical literalists, and to those (Rekers, Haggard, Craig, Long, Mehlman...) bathed in self-hatred born of reconciling feelings over which they have no control with the fire and brimstone they've grown up with, this represents a classic conflict between the need for faith and living in the world as it exists. For so many, it means rejecting reality to maintain the fear-fleeing fantasy. The inevitable result is deeply destructive, inward and outward. What sad examples are Mr Rekers and his victims (of which he himself is one, too.)

There's no more dismal (if deeply complex) display of the damage done by religious discordance than the mob mentality now seen in state-halls around our country as they use their new-found power to pass anti-gay legislation (relegating our actual needs to something less than afterthoughts); and as citizens -- needful of validation, of personal exorcism, of an enemy, a scapegoat, a whipping boy, or, maybe, just a distraction from their self-loathing -- give their stamp of approval. This is pitchforks and torches, tar and feathers, ropes and trees. It's humankind at its very worst; fearful, shallow, hateful, weak.

Denialism is destructive. And, in the past several decades, it's the exclusive property of America's party of god. In the case of their hypocritical homophobia, their inhumanity is indescribably horrifying, shameful in the extreme.