Q Toon: Whoops for Wholeness

The Conversion Therapy scam lost another one of its founding fathers this summer. Hope for Wholeness founder McKrae Game publicly apologized on Facebook and in an interview with the (Charleston, South Carolina) Post and Courier this month for the damage the quack ministry had caused countless already conflicted and vulnerable gays and lesbians.

“Conversion therapy is not just a lie, but it’s very harmful, because it’s false advertising. ... I was a religious zealot that hurt people,” Game said in an interview. “People said they attempted suicide over me and the things I said to them. People, I know, are in therapy because of me. Why would I want that to continue?”

While condemning Wellness for Hope's practices, McKrae nevertheless believes that its Baptist construct could somehow serve as a community for people who believe “homosexuality is incongruent with their faith.” The Post and Courier article includes this response from a dissatisfied Hope for Wholeness client:

Josh Crocker, 32, a Greenville man who is gay and sought counsel from Hope for Wholeness as a college student in 2006 (known then as Truth Ministry), said that particular sentiment was troubling. There is no part of Hope for Wholeness, he added, that could be of benefit to anybody.
“For me, I just think that’s inadequate. ... I think he should be afforded the time and space to process all the things he needs to process and become who he is,” Crocker said in an interview, “but I’d love for him to apply that same passion he had for Hope for Wholeness ... to advocacy for the LGBTQ community ... and to dismantle conversion therapy and ex-gay ministries.”

Game founded Truth Ministry in 1999, after having "lived as a gay man for three years," according to the Hope for Wellness website. Now 51, he was fired from the program in 2017 and publicly declared himself gay this past June.

Game is hardly the only LGBTQ conversion therapist to discover that self-loathing is no way to live one's life. Sadly, the determination to force themselves to live heterosexual lives has left scores of ruined marriages in its wake.

[Mormon and conversion therapy advocate David] Matheson then confirmed [conversion therapy advocate Rich] Wyler’s assertions on Tuesday with a Facebook post of his own. “A year ago I realized I had to make substantial changes in my life. I realized I couldn’t stay in my marriage any longer. And I realized that it was time for me to affirm myself as gay,” he wrote.
Matheson, who was married to a woman for 34 years and is now divorced, also confirmed in an interview with NBC News that he is now dating men.

There was also ex-gay poster boy John Paulk, who appeared on the cover of Newsweek with his wife Anne back in August of 1998, only to transfer the prefix "ex-" from his gayness to his wife. Love in Action leader John Smid (the basis for the character of conversion therapist Victor Sykes in "Boy Erased") tried for 24 years to make a go of his mixed-sex marriage before admitting that he was not heterosexual and had "never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual." Exodus International former President Alan Manning Chambers is apparently still married to his wife Marilyn, but now identifies as gay and, like the others, has publicly apologized to the LGBTQ community.

In spite of all this, and several states and cities officially banning conversion therapy, the ex-gay Christianist movement is reportedly making a comeback, according to the Washington Post. Jonathan Merritt interviewed for his report one new-wave ex-gay leader after another — Rosaria Champaigne Butterfield, Jackie Hill Perry, Matt Moore — who has married or become engaged to an opposite sex partner.

No doubt those couples will be very happy together.

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I've arranged the four panels of this week's cartoon in one column as an experiment in making multi-panel cartoons legible on teeny tiny phone screens. It wasn't drawn to accommodate the format, and I'm not particularly pleased with the result.

And that's as far as I'm willing to go. You want to read cartoons on your smart watch? Sorry, Dick Tracy.

This Week's Toon: Bachsh!t Crazy

Last week, Michele Bachmann (R-Wonderland) hurried to sign an antigay pledge from Mr. Bob Vander Plaatz's FAMiLY LEADER group before the ink was dry, resulting in no end of approaches I could possibly have taken with this cartoon.

At the top of the document was a preamble positing that an African-American child was more likely to live in a two-parent home under slavery than "than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American president." (As Stephen Colbert pointed out last night, the slave child was more likely to be the property of his biological father as well.) That preamble was dropped over the weekend, although not before another antigay presidential candidate, Rick Santorum (R-Google) signed and defended the pledge.

Two presidential candidates, Jon Huntsman (R-Utah) and Gary Johnson (R-Ukidding) announced their refusal to sign the pledge before removal of the slavery plank; Mitt Romney (R-Obot) waited until the pledge was thoroughly discredited before deciding not to sign it.

Further on down the pledge, candidates vowed to protect the sanctity of marriage against the assault by homosexuality, bigamy, polygamy, and sharia law. The antiexgay group Truth Wins Out seized on this moment to go public with their undercover sting of the clinic of Michele's husband Marcus Bachmann, where "reparative therapy" is offered to patients who come in seeking to become straight.

The mainstream media have reported this story -- properly, I should add -- as an example of Republican right-wing extremism. But to the religious right, there is nothing about the pledge, even with the preamble, that raises any eyebrows. The sting uncovered nothing particularly shocking: no electroshock therapy, no sensory deprivation, no waterboarding, no naked pyramids.

"The undeniable goal of the sessions was transforming [undercover TWO agent John] Becker from homosexual to heterosexual. To his credit, the counselor [Timothy Wiertzema] did not claim that change would be instantaneous or even complete. However, he did explicitly promise that sexual conversion could occur as a result of prayer and therapy at the clinic."

The power of prayer is at the heart of Christian faith; it is also a given that human nature is sinful and one should repent of whatever infractions of the Mosaic code one has committed. (God revealed to St. Peter that it was okay to go ahead and eat shellfish and pork, but the rest of Leviticus remains on the books.) Thus I'm afraid that a lot of "middle America" is going to hear about this story and wonder what the fuss is about.

The third aspect of the story is Dr. Bachmann's acceptance of patients on federal assistance at his clinic, contrary to the Bachmanns' belief that gummint helping citizens get health care is pure evil, and even worse, socialist. We'll see how that part of the story plays out, although I suspect that the media won't have any lasting interest in going after a candidate's spouse. At least, I don't expect the sort of hunger that the right wing media displayed in going after Hilary Clinton ante Monica.

Where Marcus starts to get weird, however, is his equating gays and lesbians with "barbarians" and that we "need to be disciplined."

There's a cartoon in that statement, to be sure, but you've already drawn it in your head.