Straight and narrow: church's 'gay cure'

[emad]

Alarm raised over Memphis evangelicals' therapy

Julian Borger in Memphis
Friday August 26, 2005
The Guardian


Love in Action International stands on a bluff in north Memphis, the steep roof of the ministry's angular modernist church offering itself as a beacon of hope for the world's reluctant homosexuals.
That should include every gay man and lesbian on the planet, according to the Reverend John Smid, the head of this evangelical group, whose mission is to take gays and straighten them out.

"I hope we can help men and women overcome ... mindsets counterproductive to their walk in Christ," Mr Smid said on a sweltering Tennessee afternoon as he showed Love in Action supporters around the new mission headquarters.

About two dozen mostly elderly wellwishers went on a tour of the compound, the size of a small school. One, Anne Layne, confided that her financial support for the group arose from bitter experience. "My first husband just left me with two children. I didn't even know he was gay."

Mr Smid left his wife and two daughters in 1980 in similar circumstances - he had decided he was gay. The potted autobiography he hands out is unusually graphic for a church document, revealing his former "addictive habit of masturbation" and his homosexual experiences.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1556715,00.html

[TlalocW]

1. Mindests counterproductive to their walk in Christ?

Are they going to send some brochures and a personal invitation to Pat Robertson?

TlalocW

[Not Me]

2. "...He decided he was gay."

These people are clueless.

[Javaman]

3. I heard those gay straighteners don't work in high humidity...

What a bunch of fucking bafoons.