Kidnapped for Christ

Do American parents have the right to forcibly send their gay kids out of the country and have them brainwashed by pray-away-the-gay Bible-thumpers in a remote Caribbean location, far from the protection of U. S. laws? Filmmaker Kate Logan explores such a school in a new documentary premiering tonight on Showtime.

Trailer:

Marriage News Watch, 6/30/14

Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights reports:



Via Joe.My.God., the Mormon-run Deseret News provides this graphic showing the spread of pro-marriage rulings in the year since the Windsor ruling:

Click to enlarge.

Also in the news:

• After Hobby Lobby, Right-Wingers Pray Gays Are Next
• Supreme Court Declines to Review California’s Conversion Therapy Ban

Newsbites, 4/9/13

• Both mourned and reviled by her compatriots even in death, Britain's Iron Lady, Baroness Thatcher, is dead at 87:

• America's Sweetheart and and favorite Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello, also died yesterday at age 70:

• Detroit's Catholic archbishop orders gay-marriage supporters among his flock to abstain from communion or risk further penalties for disrepecting the teachings of the Church - which, as he puts it, amounts to a kind of criminal perjury.

• Westboro Baptist announces they will picket the funeral of "fag enabler" Roger Ebert. Your Head Trucker thinks they should be barred from appearing at anybody's funeral, period, and given very hefty fines and jail terms if they don't mind their own fucking business. But you know, it's practically gotten to the point that now, you're nobody if Westboro doesn't picket your funeral.

• Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights brings us up to date on developments in marriage equality this week:

• Gay activist and Democratic political strategist Richard Socarides talks about coming out to his psychiatrist father, who founded the so-called reparative therapy movement to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals:

• The trailer for Behind the Candelabra, set to premiere on HBO in May, starring Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Dan Ackroyd, and Debbie Reynolds (as Mama Liberace) is here:

Your Head Trucker saw Liberace in concert back in the 80's and can attest that the man was indeed "Mr. Showmanship" - I took my mom, thinking it might be a bit of a bore, but to my amazement, he kept everyone on the edge of their seats the whole time with a dazzling display of sequined costumes and two hours of non-stop excitement. Quite a memory.

Sometime in the next decade, I happened to see in the paper that Scott Thorson, Liberace's ex-lover and adopted son, was going to be speaking about his life with Liberace at the biggest Baptist church in town - the kind built like an auditorium, with vast tiers of rocking, thickly-padded, movie-theater chairs instead of pews. And he stood up there, golden-haired and movie-star handsome, in the midst of all those tut-tutting Baptists and told a long, rambling tale of how he was "molested by my own father" - weeping on cue while doing so. Then after milking that angle for all it was worth, carried on with some sordid, convoluted story of being taken into FBI custody and hidden for months in a windowless skyscraper room for his own protection as a witness against some drug dealers or something like that. Not to mention all his personal failings with drugs, booze, sex, and you-name-it.  The Baptists, rocking contentedly and purring like old cats, ate up every word.

I thought there was something fishy about all this at the time - and I'm sure the rich Baptists paid him very nicely to come warn them of the wages of sin - but we didn't have the Internet back then to double-check with, so I just filed it away under Suspicious Stories in my mind. And wondered how many of those hatchet-faced old blue-haired ladies had flocked to hear the great entertainer - that awful sinner, you know - back when he had filled the civic center.

Spanking the Gay Away

Over at Box Turtle Bulletin, just read this deeply moving seven-part series, "What Are Little Boys Made Of?" on the case of a 5-year-old boy who was subjected to George Rekers' anti-gay therapy - something I wish all my truckbuddies would go check out.  Brings up a lot of thoughts and reflections for me, maybe it will for you, too.

Rekers, in case it's slipped your memory, is one of the big honchos in the conversion therapy movement, a founder of the Family Research Council and an officer of NARTH - and last year was photographed at Miami International after a European jaunt with a rent boy he hired to, um, "lift his luggage."

Excerpt:

Kirk had learned that playing with girls’ toys in the clinic was a bad thing to do, but that lesson didn’t extend to the home. So the Murphy home became the scene for the next phase of Kirk’s therapy with Kaytee set up as Kirk’s primary therapist.

“And so then they set me up with the poker chip program,” Kaytee said, referring to a system of punishments and rewards devised by Dr. Lovaas and adapted by Rekers. Mark and Maris would simply remember it as “the chips,” and they always spoke of it with dread. “Well I didn’t know,” their mother sighed. “I trusted these professionals to know what they were doing, you know?”

She explained how it worked: “When Kirk would do something bad, or play with the doll instead of the train or the truck or whatever, he would get a red poker chip. If he picked up a helicopter or an airplane or did a boy thing, then he would get a blue chip. At the end of the day, I would deduct the red from the blue. And then however many blue chips there were, they told me to give him an M&M for each for a reward. And then I had to keep this all written down.”

They also put Mark on the chips even though he wasn’t under treatment. “I think we put Mark on it so that Kirk wouldn’t feel intimidated,” she said. “It was to show Kirk that big brother was on them too.” . . .

“If it (the study) was based on the numbers of chips,” Mark countered, “I screwed with those chips like you wouldn’t believe. I used to take some of his ‘whip it’ chips and put them in my pile.” As he said that, a note of pride crept in his voice. His reasons for doing this would prove to be the study’s fatal flaw: the terrible consequences of collecting too many red chips.

Mark took a deep breath and explained, “My goal was to take the beating for my brother.” Mark had long been accustomed to getting into trouble and being punished for it, and so he reasoned that he could take the beatings more easily than his younger brother. “I saw my brother’s whole back side bruised so badly one time, my dad should have gone to jail for it. Of course, he was somewhat carrying out instructions from the therapist. But my dad whipped my bare ass so many times before that, I figured I could take it. I mean that’s the way we got spanked. You dropped your pants, you bent over the bed, and he whipped your bottom with a belt.”

“My dad would come home, and every Friday we settled up with the chips. It was like ‘you go to your room; you go to your room’ and the whippings came on, it was over. And then we started with a clean slate.”

The chips became a system of terror. . . .

Update:  Just found this four-part video report by Anderson Cooper.