Last fall, while doing some reporting in northeastern Kentucky, I was talking to two local activists (registered Democrats, no less!) about why they were trying to shut down anti-bullying training at the public high school. Their gripe? By teaching that homosexuality is normal, and that students shouldn't harass their classmates because they're gay, the training sought to recruit students into being gay. "You know," said one of the activists, "homosexuality cannot be reproduced, because two homosexuals can't bear children. So they have to recruit people into their organizations."
There's still a slice of America, in the post-Ellen DeGeneres/Will and Grace era, that didn't laugh when prominent megachurch pastor Ted Haggard was declared "completely heterosexual" earlier this week by a panel of pastoral counselors charged with the task of turning him into the straightest man ever to hire a male prostitute. For them, the recruitment narrative is so powerful that Haggard's three-year dalliance with a man and his meth proves not that Haggard is gay, but that the "homosexual agenda" is so aggressive that it can recruit even the holiest among us. Far from encouraging them to denounce their vociferous anti-gay-marriage campaign as hypocritical and mean, it proves that the "homosexual agenda" is still very much worth fighting against. If you're not born gay, then what led Pastor Ted to give in to his "dark and repulsive" urges? As the Church Lady used to muse, "could it be . . . Satan?"
The recruitment canard explains a lot about why Haggard's fall from grace, although swift and thorough, did not irredeemably condemn either the man or the empire over which he presided, including the political movement to make gay marriage unconstitutional. Instead, Haggard reinforces the need to labor on. If Haggard could be recruited -- and, by the other side of the coin, converted -- then why concede the point that God could have made gay people in his image?
There's nothing this crowd loves more than a good conversion story, despite abundant evidence that gay conversion programs are psychologically devastating; they have been denounced by the American Psychiatric Association. DeGeneres' ex, the actress Anne Heche, was "converted" back to heterosexuality, and now her mother is a missionary for the cause, touting conversion on Christian television. This week CNN's Anderson Cooper featured Melissa Fryrear, a Focus on the Family employee who claims to have been converted to heterosexuality after ten years as a lesbian. (H.B. London, a Focus on the Family executive, was one of the facilitators of Haggard's alleged conversion.) As if to reinforce the point that only gay people are obsessed with sex, Fryrear insisted that "when I lived homosexually, everything in my world resolved around being a lesbian. And you know, when we say 365, 24/7. So it was all of my thoughts, my behaviors, my attractions." And now?
Alan Sears, the former Reagan Administration Justice Department lawyer who now heads up the Focus on the Family-affiliated Alliance Defense Fund, says that "the homosexual agenda and religious freedom are on a collision course." In other words, as Sears lays out in detail in his book, The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, gay rights are antithetical to the church. The homosexual agenda, Sears told an audience of hardcore activists last year, "probably includes the abolition of marriage, but also the silencing of speech [condemning] homosexual behavior." His book lays out a variety of ways that homosexuals "recruit" their next generation, including by exposing kids to SpongeBob SquarePants.
As retrograde and silly as it sounds, the recruitment narrative strikes a powerful chord with many fundamentalists, who grow up in authoritarian church environments where they're taught that the Bible is the unerring word of God, and as such, represents God's unerring condemnation of homosexuality. Haggard's transgressions may have disqualified him from church leadership, but he will continually be offered up as a poster child for conversion. Handed a clean bill of health but nonetheless banished from his megachurch live out his days with his wife, Haggard sadly represents a high-profile instance of something too many gay Americans raised in fundamentalist environments still endure. What kind of agenda is that?
Sarah Posner is a freelance writer and contributor to The Gadflyer and AlterNet's PEEK blog. She is working on a book about televangelists in politics.
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