A note before we begin: I’ve been on a little blog sabbatical. And the other day I found this comment waiting for a proper response. The Lord has a sense of humor.
Someone left a comment on an IG reel debunking conversion therapy with what they clearly believed was a devastating spiritual mic drop. The gist:
You can only speak for yourself. Respect ex-gays the same way you want to be respected. Love your neighbor. GROW UP.
I’m going to respond to this carefully, because it deserves a careful response.
Just kidding. I’m going to respond to this honestly.
I absolutely believe in free will. You want to call yourself exgay? That is your right. I’m not picketing your house. I’m not calling your employer.
What I am doing — what I will keep doing — is refusing to extend institutional respect to an ideology that has caused demonstrable harm to real human beings.
Those are not the same thing.
Respecting your autonomy is not the same as validating the system you’ve chosen. I can believe you have every right to your choices while simultaneously saying: the framework has been discredited, dismantled, and denounced by its own founders. I know this not from the outside looking in. I spent 31 years inside it.
Here’s what the false equivalency argument always misses: LGBTQ+ identity is not a program. It does not promise to fix you. It does not raise money by trafficking in your shame. Ex-gay ideology — the organized, institutionalized, marketed version — does all of those things. And when the flagship organization finally closed its doors, its own president said: We were wrong. We caused harm. I am sorry.
That was Alan Chambers. That was Exodus International. I was there for all of it as the final EVP.
And while we’re here — the rainbow reclamation projects. Every few years, a new ex-gay leader decides they’re going to take the rainbow back for Jesus. They design a logo. They launch a website. They write the manifesto.
Sweet baby Moses.
You cannot rebrand your way out of a theology that tells gay people they are broken. The flag isn’t the problem. The doctrine is the problem. New logo, same harm.
I’m writing this on the 10th anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting. Forty-nine people went to a gay bar on a Latin night and never came home. Beloved children of God, killed for being exactly who they were.
On this day, I don’t have the bandwidth for false equivalencies.
I speak for myself. I always have. But I spent 31 years in a world that told people like the ones we lost at Pulse that they needed to be fixed — and I’m not going to grow up and get quiet about that.
Not today. Not ever.
— Randy
WHY: A Memoir is available on Amazon.
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