uvAggravator2.0

While the “American Family Association” was busy making silly statements about The Home Depot allegedly “exposing young children to lascivious displays of sexual conduct,” accusations that their own photos show to be ridiculous, there were revelations of real lascivious displays of sexual conduct being imposed on vulnerable youth - by the “ex-gay” reparative therapy racket.

“He was encouraging me, ‘It’s okay, Ben, you can take your shirt off’ … Here was a man that was much older than me, and I was around 20,” said Ben Unger. “At that point, I was just staring at a mirror with my shirt off and he was right behind me staring at the mirror with me at my body. Then telling me to look at my body and feel my body. It was weird.”

“While I was standing there without my clothes on, he asked me to touch my genitals,” says Chaim Levin. “Once again, I communicated that I was not comfortable with it. And he was like, you know, ‘Just feel yourself. Just feel it for a second. So, you can grasp your masculinity physically.’”

Ew. These are from the testimony of two former clients of a reparative therapy “life coach,” Alan Downing. Downing, the lead therapist for an “ex-gay” group called JONAH, admits that in spite of his years of being “ex-gay” he still “struggles” with gay feelings. No kidding; maybe that’s because he’s gay. And instead of being who he was created to be and living with wholeness and integrity, he’s creepily acting out his repressed sexuality on the minds and bodies of confused young men unwittingly handed over to him by their families.

One might think that a technique of having clients undress and touch themselves in front of a mirror while the therapist watches is unusual, but it’s actually not in the twisted world of self-hating gay life coaches trying to create others like themselves. As Wayne Besen reports the story, these practices are all based on the “touch therapy” developed by the discredited and expelled Richard Cohen, in which, just to be clear, “he places a male client between his thighs and caresses him.” Cohen, in turn, “learned his creepy methods from the Wesleyan Community Christian Church, a cult that practiced nude therapy, including adult women breast-feeding men in a church sanctuary.”

If I might make a humble suggestion to the “American Family Association”: Young people are being placed in the care of dishonest, damaged, sexually perverted charlatans who abuse them, all because their families have the false idea that they shouldn’t be who they are. Why don’t you busy yourselves doing something about that?