There is a moral crime here. We are, after all, talking about men in positions of authority and reach, men who could make laws and influence public perception and who used that power against their own.
Put yourself in the shoes of the teenager, bewildered and frightened by these feelings he or she is not "supposed" to have, feelings of sexual attraction to people of the same gender. You try to deny them, try to ignore them, try to suppress them, but they will not go away. You are all alone, isolated behind a secret that presses down on you like weights, a fear of rejection that haunts you like ghosts.
And here comes Dr. Rekers telling you that you are abnormal, telling you that you are bad, telling you he can cure you, as if you had a disease like measles or the flu. Then, in his off hours, after he's done curing you, he's trolling rentboy.com looking for young men to handle his, ahem ... baggage.
That's more than hypocrisy, more even than self-loathing. It is a betrayal of one's own, a sellout of the most vulnerable. And what's sad is not just that a George Rekers would do this, but that ours is a culture that would encourage and reward such duplicity in the first place.
He purported to heal homosexuals? One is reminded of an injunction from the book of Luke: "Physician, heal thyself" (4:23). Rekers would be wise to heed that advice. Homosexual urges are the least of his afflictions.
--Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr.
On a lighter note, via Box Turtle Bulletin: Reker's I-am-completely-heterosexual defense was anticipated by The Onion five years ago.
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