Thursday, August 10, 2006

Call for testimonies

I’m still waiting for someone to send me an ex-gay testimony like the one I described in my post last Friday. If you know of a credible testimony by someone, preferably a guy, who had once been truly homosexual, who had an orientation change and became convincingly heterosexual (and please read my previous post so you know what I mean by “convincingly”), please send it to me. Because quite honestly, I’m beginning to doubt if such a testimony even exists. The leaders in ex-gay ministries sure know how to talk it up as if it does exist. You can go to the NARTH website and hear them talk about “orientation change” and read the testimony of Exodus president Alan Chambers who says, “I used to be homosexual and today I am not.” Yet specific, detailed testimony of people being transformed into true blue heterosexuals is always missing from these claims.

So what am I to make of this? Maybe the really convincing testimonies do exist, but they are being withheld from the general public. Is that it? You almost get the impression that maybe they were excavated some decades ago from a set of clay jars in the caves of the Dead Sea and now sit someplace in Germany pressed between two sheets of acid-free glass to be examined only by an elite team of six scholars, but the rest of us hoi polloi are forbidden to lay our uneducated eyes on them and have to just take the experts’ word about what they say. Is that what’s going on here?

I say to ex-gay ministries, Don’t hold back any longer. Take out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, run your best slam-dunk testimonies for a whole week and put an end to this debate once and for all. If you convince me, there would be no need for me to "muse" any longer. I can take down my website and this blog and use the money I normally pay to the web-hosting company as a donation to your cause. What do you say?