Why Rick Perry's Noble Experiment is Doomed

Rick Perry thinks the nation is in crisis, but Perry's idea of a crisis is quite different from the American mainstream. You can tell what Perry thinks the real "crisis" is by looking at the featured speaker roster for his 7-hour-long fasting and prayer service scheduled for today. To get to root of Perry's intentions I personally find myself looking at his event, with its catchy title, "The Response," in the context of how many American's responded to a news story of a week ago. No, I'm not talking about the debt crisis. I am talking about the headline, "Alex Trebek sleeps in the nude."

The connection between the scandalous idea of a naked Alex Trebek and the prayers of the pastors at Perry's "Response" event needs some history, so let me fill you in on the back-story.

A century ago, here in America, there was another religious-based furor going on. How that made-up "crisis" played out should be a lesson to Perry, his pastor friends, and their fundamentalist Christian sheep. That crisis has now become known as the "Noble Experiment," and history has judged it to be a colossal failure. Most people know it as the period of Prohibition, or the doomed Eighteenth Amendment.

American Prohibition traces its roots all the way back to 1657 when the first ban on the sale of liquor became law in Massachusetts. There were other fits and starts as states and cities toyed with some kind of a ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol, but the move toward a Constitutional Amendment was finally kick-started by Carrie Nation. She earned her place in history by becoming a one-woman-posse as she went into saloons across Kansas to break their liquor bottles with her hatchet.

My point is, it failed! In truth, it never worked. Not even for a day. The abolitionists were in complete denial about it. But it was the fodder that the preachers needed to fill their pews. Nothing fills a church as quickly as having a powerful enemy, and liquor had become the common enemy of the 19th century. Finally, on December 18, 1917, the Senate officially declared that the enemy would be conquered as they proposed the Eighteenth Amendment. After 36 states gave it a nod of approval, Prohibition became the law in January 1920.

And nobody stopped drinking.

Like alcohol of a century ago, human sexuality became the "enemy-of-choice" for the latter part of the 20th century. Pastors have learned that nothing fills church pews better than a willingness to talk "dirty" to a congregation. And just as was true with the pastors of the Prohibition period, few people are bigger hypocrites than the pastors. Names such as Ted Haggard and Eddie Long come to the forefront of epic failures as it relates to homosexual dalliances, and on the heterosexual side we have the Jimmy "I-Have-Sinned" Swaggart and Jim Bakker.

And so, we arrive at last week when Canadian-born-and-raised Alex Trebek felt no compunction about mentioning that he needed to grab his underwear before chasing his intruder down a hotel hallway. For three days, millions of American prudes went all a-flutter and news commentators like Mika Brzezinski giggled and blushed as they told the story. Was this because they all secretly imagined themself with a naked Trebek, and then felt guilty at the thought? This would at least explain what drives them to church, full of guilt, every Sunday morning. And so the pastors reap the benefits of more money in the collection plate. Using Eddie Long as the most recent example, this money will then buy trinkets, toys, and trips for the boys on the down-low.

Returning to today, Rick Perry's "moral experiment" of 2011 is going to follow in the long-established tradition of other Southern Strategies. It will be full of code so that can stir up the fear that drives the sheep of the religious right to the polling booths in 2012. It has been their strategy-of-choice since 1976 when Jerry Falwell laid the foundation for what would become known as the Moral Majority. It needs to be mentioned that this movement would never have found this kind of traction anywhere else but in the South with a deeply entrenched anti-intellectual mentality.

Rick Perry and Texas come to the forefront in the battle to keep human sexuality as a taboo topic because of their heavy influence on designing elementary and secondary school textbooks and curriculum. And as one of the nations leading forces for abstinence-only sex education, Texas provided the rest of America with a model of failure in how pretending that something is not a problem actually exacerbates the problem. Take the following quote from a Washington Post story:

"In the seven years since their schools began teaching abstinence-only, young people here have been anything but abstinent. Teen pregnancy rates in the state remain above the national average, and Lubbock County consistently has one of the highest rates in the state. In addition, the number of Texas youths with sexually transmitted diseases has risen steadily."

I am a big fan of tracing a problem back to its roots, so let's not get caught up talking about sex education. Let us instead back up one layer and talk about human sexuality. Let's talk about what it is that makes an American blush when a foreigner (one of the proverbial "others") can be so casual about human sexuality that they find nothing wrong with telling a reporter that they had to grab their undies before chasing an intruder.

Actually, hold on a second. How about instead we talk about the state of denial that has to be in place to even be having this conversation in the first place in the year 2011.

Since you are already on a computer reading this, enter the search parameters, "nude male" or "nude female," into your search engine of choice. Now tell me whether an eight-year-old would have any trouble finding porn today. Even with parental control software we are kidding ourselves to think that we will be able to "protect" our children from images of the naked human body, so why don't we instead embrace it as an inevitability, like teenagers having sex? Why don't we instead educate our children about the difference between healthy nudity and unhealthy pornography? After all, nobody is born wearing underwear, so why pretend otherwise?

Maybe it is because of my Canadian birth and Scandinavian ancestry, but I too like sleeping in the nude. Heck, I like being nude every chance I get. I keep the house warm enough during the day so that I never have to get dressed. I do try to leave a pair of shorts by the door so that I don't embarrass the mail lady and other delivery people because I certainly never want to force my nudity on anybody who does not want the memory of seeing "all" of me. But trust me, I am really quite harmless - dressed or naked!

So, like Scott Brown, if I ever run for politics there will likely be a pictures of me in the buff that surface from the dark recesses of the Internet. I dated enough gay men before I met my hubby to know that they have probably kept some of their favorite photos of me on their computers. I have also been naked on enough beaches to know that somebody, somewhere, will likely recognize me and come forward to say that they saw me on said nude beach.

My question is, why is that such a big deal?

It is a "big deal" because Rick Perry and his pastors want to make it their business, and they will continue to fool themselves into thinking that their children will never have a sexual thought. They will continue to fill their church pews and the ballot boxes by having people think that nakedness is the gateway to a life of sinfulness.

And like the last "Noble Experiment," this effort too will fail. But this time it will not fail because of the proliferation of "Speak Easy" establishments. Instead it will fail because of Google.

Rick and Michele, knock yourselves out as you consider your runs for president and imagine an America under a Christian version of Sharia Law. It won't change the fact that all men really do have a penis, and women have a vagina; and that's a good thing! Too bad you won't teach that to your children.

It's Official: Actions During Prop 8 Campaign Qualified Mormonism as a Cult

On February 25, 2011 Mitch Horowitz, with the Wall Street Journal, wrote a piece entitled: "When Does a Religion Become a Cult?"

He starts by explaining how the Mormon faith was born in the exceptionally weird climate of the "Burned-over District" of central New York in the early 19th century. He then goes on and writes the following:

Many academics and observers of cult phenomena, such as psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo of Stanford, agree on four criteria to define a cult. The first is behavior control, i.e., monitoring of where you go and what you do. The second is information control, such as discouraging members from reading criticism of the group. The third is thought control, placing sharp limits on doctrinal questioning. The fourth is emotional control—using humiliation or guilt. Yet at times these traits can also be detected within mainstream faiths. So I would add two more categories: financial control and extreme leadership.

Prior to Prop 8 I would have stopped at the first four of six qualifiers, but on June 28th, 2008 the Mormon Church qualified for "extreme leadership" by requiring that members side with the church on political issues or face disciplinary action, and with repeated satellite broadcasts both inside California and in the Inter-Mountain Region they qualified for the "financial control" element, where several families that I have heard of emptied their children's college funds to donate the lion's share of the $24 million that went into passing Prop 8.

Yes, the Mormon Church has now qualified with 6-out-of-6 prerequisites as a cult, according to experts.

Then Horowitz closes his article with these words (emphasis is mine):

Yet every coercive religious group harbors one telltale trait: untoward secrecy. As opposed to a cult, a religious culture ought to be as simple to enter or exit, for members or observers, as any free nation. Members should experience no impediment to relationships, ideas or travel, and the group's finances should be reasonably transparent. Its doctrine need not be conventional—but it should be knowable to outsiders. Absent those qualities, an unorthodox religion can descend into something darker.

Hello temple ceremony, secret handshakes and magic underwear! Strike Seven and you are DEFINITELY out! I was excommunicated for writing in my memoirs that I felt that I was born gay, and the Mormons could definitely not prove me wrong (I broke the second qualifier and at age 46...for the first time in my life...I consulted science about homosexuality), but they sure could excommunicate me fast! In less than 2 weeks I was gone, and no support materialized from my five older siblings to appeal the decision (they were trapped by the third qualifier...sharp limits on doctrinal questioning).

Too bad there isn't a law requiring that cults place a sign on their door, "Enter at your own risk." As noted in the final point, it is far easier to enter than it is to leave...unless you do something they don't approve of I guess.

Lethal Endearment

I received an email this week from a family member that, once again, forced me to deal with the realization that any contact with my siblings elicits a nauseating, visceral reaction in me that can only be equated with that penetrating sadness that one feels when they hear of a child that was kidnapped as a preteen and kept locked in a cell under the garage for a dozen years without ever seeing the light of day. And then, after being free for just a short time, somebody comes up and tries to defend the person that did the kidnapping by claiming that the young person somehow provoked the event.

It is in this way that contact with my family reminds me of how cruel siblings can be. What makes it worse is that when this kind of cruel behavior is taught to really young children they just don't seem to understand the importance of changing their behavior as adults. Instead, they live out their lives in denial that their behavior is even inappropriate and hurtful.

This is how it works in my family. Just so you know, I am 51 years old and I am the youngest of six, so this behavior is deeply entrenched. My problem is that I only started calling my siblings out for their cruelty in 2008, so they still seem shocked that behavior which used to be tolerated for decades is now being cast in a different light.

If you can't remember the final fight scene from X-men: The Last Stand, you might want to refresh your memory with this video. At the 4:50 mark is where Kid Omega (the porcupine guy) holds the female doctor close, and after whispering something gentle into her ear he pops out all of his spines and kills her with hundreds of spikes.

That is what it is like with my 5 Mormon siblings, but the difference is that I survived the first three times that they did this to me. The problem is, and this is the cruel part, they keep pretending that it has never happened before. In ever-so-subtle ways they keep trying to draw me in close enough so that their spines can penetrate my heart at the moment that I become most vulnerable. Examples of this behavior over the past while have come in the form of an invitation to participate with them in flowers for an uncle's funeral, a son's wedding, a phone call on my birthday, an invitation to a family reunion, and a short note that my sister's husband is going in for very dangerous surgery; stuff like that.

You might say, "Oh, there's no harm in what they are trying to do. That's normal family stuff." It might be normal for you, but when it comes being gay and a 7th generation Mormon, there is nothing that can ever be normal so long as the church stays in the mix. You need to understand the cult-like hold that Mormonism holds on its members."

Let me tell you about the three times that I was stabbed in the heart before I came to understand the tactic that almost every Mormon family will use on a gay sibling, son, or daughter. Luckily I'm still alive to tell the story so that other's might be saved. Other gay Mormon's have not survived the rejection by their families.

June 2006

The first time that my family sent a spike into my heart was when I was excommunicated in June of 2006. I had never been intimate with a man, but I had come out and said very publicly that I felt that I had been born gay. In spite of that (and this was an integral part of my very public message) I was intending to stay faithful to my wife of 25 years and somehow make our mixed-orientation marriage work.

Within weeks of finding out I was "gay" my stake president excommunicated me for apostacy. Because there had been no immoral act I appealed that decision. I was very open and honest with my siblings and asked them to send letters of support to the prophet on my behalf. While each of them, to a one, told me that my stake president had "gone rogue," there were no letters of support. In spite of the lack of tangible support from my siblings, I still won my appeal. In January 2007 the prophet ordered my excommunication proceedings vacated. I forgave my cowardly brothers and sisters and the dozens of nieces and nephews who were old enough to understand what had just happened. With their words of support over the phone they had pulled me in close for an embrace, making their failure to provide any tangible support that much more difficult to take. Their words had been empty, and the embrace felt contrived.

Strike one.

June 2008

After a year of muddling through, my ex-wife and I decided that we were still young enough to pursue authentic and more fulfilling relationships, so on her advice I started dating men. By April of 2007 I had met a man that would eventually become my husband, and over the next year my family continued to claim to support me in my desire to have a loving, authentic relationship. Their acceptance reached the point where most of them agreed that if my husband I were to visit we would be given the guest bedroom, just as they had done for the prior 25 years when I had visited with my ex-wife. My heart soared! This was amazing progress, and once again I allowed them to draw me in close in an "embrace," but within weeks fervor of the Prop 8 battle reached a fever pitch in California. By June 2008, two years almost to the day from my excommunication, my siblings had once again hit my heart with spikes. The turning point came when a letter from the Mormon prophet was leaked to the media. The letter was to be read in every Mormon congregation in California, essentially ordering all Mormons to give money and donate time to ensure that Proposition 8 would pass on the November 2 presidential election. I asked my siblings if, in a show of solidarity, they would walk out of church when the letter was being read. If not that, at least tell me that they disagreed with the church getting that involved in politics, and promise me that they would not donate time or money to a campaign that would directly impact my ability to have any kind of equal treatment in this country. I could not see how any good could come of what the Mormon Church was doing. In spite of my appeals, to a one each of my siblings said that they could not oppose the prophet with even a dissenting opinion, even in secret. They were still buying into the old axiom, "When the prophet speaks, the thinking has been done."

Strike two.

October 2008

Well, during the Prop 8 campaign, Mormon insiders were heavily involved in the Protect Marriage coalition that had designed a deceitful ad campaign that came to be known as the "Six Lies." It was the brainchild of Frank Schubert and Jeff Flint. The coalition, propelled by the Mormon insiders, ensured that my siblings were pressured into being heavily involved in spreading these lies.

Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.
The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California...were assigned two ZIP codes to cover.

Maybe Fred knows the fellow from San Diego who was cited in a news story after he was on a conference call with Mormon leaders:

Robert Bolingbroke, a Mormon who lives near San Diego, said he and his wife decided on their own to donate $3,000 in August. Later, he was invited to participate in a conference call led by a high church official, known as a member of the Quorum of Seventy. Mr. Bolingbroke, a former president and chief operating officer of The Clorox Co., estimates that 40 to 60 Mormon potential donors were on that call, and he said it was suggested that they donate $25,000, which Mr. Bolingbroke did earlier this month. Mr. Bolingbroke said he doesn't know how he or the other participants on the call were selected. Church leaders keep tithing records of active members, who are typically asked to donate 10% of their income each year to the Mormon Church.

I've already posted in a previous blog post a complete reduction of the "Six Lies" that explains, and completely refutes, the ad campaign that would eventually be supported with over $24 million dollars in donations. Furthermore, the "Six Lies" proved to be completely indefensible in the subsequent (victorious) court challenge of Prop 8. Over this period of time I held conversations with each of my brothers and sisters to explain this to them, but there was no getting through. As evidenced by my brother's October 22, 2008 blog post, he and my siblings had bought into the "Six Lies" lock, stock, and barrel. They had gone door-to-door and donated money to deny me any form of equal treatment.

Strike three, and they were out. They had drawn me in close for the last time.

The Funeral

A short time later an uncle passed away, so my sister calls and asks me if I would participate in buying a flower arrangement from "the six of us" to represent our family at the funeral. Well, I wasn't exactly feeling the love at this point, so I told my sister that before I would be sacrificing my hard-earned money I would like to have first seen some evidence of solidarity. I didn't see any benefit to me of demonstrating any kind of "belonging" to a group of siblings that only wanted to be seen as a family when it was convenient. I had given my five brothers and sisters three chances to "claim" me as part of this "family," but in three out of three times they had shut the door on me and left me outside in the cold. It felt like this was an attempt to just "move on" without addressing the "three strikes" that had just happened.

The Wedding

By the following summer it was obvious that my son was getting serious with his Mormon girlfriend, and we knew that a wedding was likely in the works. In spite of advice from my husband and my other three children, I could not expose myself once again to the temptation of an "endearing hug." In a June visit with him when he came out to Florida I explained to him that if he was going to insist on a temple wedding in the Mormon Temple I would not be attending his wedding. I was not going to fly out to San Diego just to be a lawn ornament at the temple, where I would be expected to wait politely for the photo op. This was my "Rosa Parks Moment." I was no longer going to settle for the back seat on the bus and allow the Mormon propaganda to dictate what kind of a relationship I would have with my family. If I were going to have a relationship with my family, including my son, it would be on common ground that we could share between us. It would certainly not be at a wedding where everything was dictated to me by a Mormon prophet...through my own son.

A Birthday and a Family Reunion

This brings me to my birthday last October when my sister called. After wishing me a happy birthday and cheerful catching up, she said the family would all love to see Mickey and I at the family reunion in January. I asked if there would be any awkwardness in talking about what was happening about gay marriage and civil unions for same-sex couples, to which she responded, "Well, there will just have to be some topics that we will agree not to talk about." I chose to hang up rather than beat a dead horse to get it to go one more time around the block.

Cancer

And that brings us up to this week, when my sister's husband sent me an email to advise me that he was in Seattle, preparing for prostate cancer surgery in two weeks at one of the nation's leading hospitals. The contrast between the worries and concerns that he and my sister do not have, and the worries and concerns that my husband and I would have, were just too much. They take for granted the following rights that "marriage" naturally has granted to them:

• That a spouse from out of state will just naturally be allowed next to his side throughout the entire procedure and the recovery. My husband and I were married in Connecticut and have a domestic partnership registration in Broward County (a very progressive county in South Florida...like an oasis in a desert). However, a feature of DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act that was passed in 1996), that the Mormons supported in order to avert any consequences from the battle in Hawaii over same-sex marriage, was passed in order to prevent a same-sex marriage or civil union or domestic partnership of one state from being recognized in another.
• That if my sister's husband dies from the surgery, or if his life is not prolonged by the surgery, his estate will pass seamlessly to my sister. If my husband were to die, these are the consequences of DOMA in our lives:
• 1. His brother could easily challenge the will, forcing me to defend it in court. It would cost thousands of dollars and it is often done by antagonistic family members who just want to be malicious against a gay sibling's lover, somehow blaming him for their sibling falling into temptation. In some states the courts rule in favor of the family members, leaving the widower a tenant in his own home. Thankfully, Mickey's brother is not likely to do this, but it still happens far too often.
• 2. I would have to pay an estate tax to IRS on anything that I get from Mickey. Because of DOMA the federal government sees me as an arms-length stranger to my own husband. Clause 2 specifically states that "spouse," wherever it is used in any law, has to mean a person of the opposite sex, which nullifies our perfectly legal Connecticut marriage certificate, and further precludes civil unions from being validated should a state not go after the word "marriage."
• 3. I would not get any of Mickey's survivor benefits from his Social Security, in spite of him paying into it his entire life, once again nullified by Clause 2 of DOMA.

And so I find myself as the child who just escaped a basement cell in 2006. In my short five years of freedom I have found wonderful and supportive people who remind me that my captors were not horrible, awful people. No, my friends remind me constantly that my siblings were themselves victims of a captive childhood, and that they carry all the same scars that I do. My husband and my friends remind me that, like Jesus, I should just say, "Lord forgive them for they know not what they do."

And so I try, but then they reach out to me. At first it seemed genuine. It felt nice to hear their reassuring words in my ear, but then, three times in a row, right after whispering support in my ear, all of their poisonous barbs come out. The pain is unbearable.

It would be far better if they just kept to themselves until they find the courage to get counselling to help them see the world as it really is, instead of looking at it from the windows of their basement cell.

Opportunities Missed vs. Opportunities Denied

Five Words

The professor’s instructions were clear enough. “Use all five words in some kind of creative writing piece,” she had explained.

She then proceeded to write the words on the whiteboard:

Crow Cripple Silver Mud Regret

“You can use them in any tense,” she added.

A few kids in the class expressed some concern about finding a starting point, to which the professor explained that some people find it helpful to just stare at the words. Within seconds, Regret had started searing its way out of the locked chambers of my subconscious mind and was soon blazing in red neon on a billboard that blocked my vision of everything else.

With it came a flood of conversations from two years ago that had taken place over a ten month period with a volunteer therapist from a gay community center. That therapy had been followed by six months of group therapy, and it had all helped me redirect the anger that was now resurfacing.

Regret, for having spent 35 years in a prison where the door had never really been locked, but because I had been told that the door was locked I had never once even tried the doorknob.

Regret, for the rotten luck of having been born into a backwards family who lived in a backwards village that held onto a backwards belief system that should have died out more than a century ago.

Regret, for having condemned myself just for recognizing my own identity when I was 11 years old.

Regret, for suppressing thoughts that were as natural for me as eating, sleeping, and breathing.

Regret, for all the harm that I had caused in the lives of innocent people by perpetuating the lie that had been fed to me.

But I’m still in my English class, and the professor has only given us ten minutes for this writing exercise. What were the other words, and what do they mean in my context of Regret?

Crow…Matthew 26:34 “…before the cock crows you shall deny me thrice.”

Cripple…John 5:5 “…and a certain cripple was there who had an infirmity thirty and eight years.”

Silver…Matthew 27:5 “…and he cast down the pieces of silver and went and hanged himself.”

Mud…John 9:6 “…and he spat on the ground and made mud from the spittle, and anointed the eyes of the blind man with the mud.”

My involuntary recall of the Biblical verses was instantaneous, and with it came a new flood of anger. I knew at this point my writing was going to come out as a rant, but since this is only an exercise in creativity I proceed to write in a larger-than-life cursive script that reflects the magnitude of my growing rage. I quickly decide that my audience will be the other kids in my class. Most of them are in their twenties.

Yes, you should have regrets. You were lied to for more than 20 years. Perhaps ‘lied’ is too strong of a word, but you were definitely not given an opportunity to find your own truth.

As a preschooler the stories were easy to believe. It’s nice to think that a man can spit in the dirt and stir it into mud, and then heal a blind man by rubbing it on his eyes. Or that a cripple can be made to walk just by hearing a magical voice.

And then you grow up. Now you have an expectation that things make sense, but when you dare to doubt the miracle, you are told about Peter, who denied knowing the miracle worker three times before the cock crowed. Peter is said to have ‘wept bitterly.’

And if that doesn’t scare you righteous, the coup de grấce is the condemnation of Judas, who snitched on the miracle worker for 30 pieces of silver. He went out and hanged himself.

As the good book also says, ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’

Well, don’t you think it’s about time to grow up and stop believing in fairy tales? How about thinking for yourself now that you are out from under your mother’s thumb?

At this point the professor announced that the ten minutes were up.

Even as I wrote I realized that this kind of writing would not meet my own new standards, but it was out there now, as ink on paper. It matched the kind of writing that I used to do when the famous Mormon author Carol Lynn Pearson had responded to one of my emails with the gentle words, “Lester, you need to learn how to create light, not heat.”

She was right, of course, so I brought up the problem to the class that my piece had emerged as a rant. The professor confirmed that a rant is really not a recommended format for creative writing, but she did indicate that a rant can be a good starting point.

That brings me to this point, where I now find myself. When speaking of Regret, what advice would I give to Christian young adults today…without going into a rant?

Well, to put it simply, I would tell them that the dualism of religious fundamentalism has already caused the death of 400 million people in the history of the world.

I would tell them that the Christian Bible, the Torah, and the Qur’an have been adapted to be instruments of war by creating a tried and true mechanism for “othering.” This has been done with the sole objective of dehumanizing people of other religious beliefs so that they can be murdered at the whims of dictators.

I would explain to them that this tactic has worked in the past because the populace has been uneducated and were easily fooled into believing that a mortal man could become a “mouthpiece for god” if he would just recite the platitudes from the nation’s so-called scriptures.

I would ask them if they are so gullible as to believe that a so-called “loving god” would still perpetuate this idea that some races and classes of people are less worthy of life than others, or that an accident of birth is enough to doom a soul to eternal damnation.

I would remind them that on November 22, 2010, right now, during their lifetime, a United Nations committee finalized a resolution that would protect certain named people, and classes of people, from “summary execution.” This United Nations committee was successful in removing homosexuals from the list of “protected persons.”

The resolution passed because it found enough support to form a majority within the Christian nations of Africa and the Islamic nations of the Middle East. These are nations who do not want any political fallout for codifying a six thousand year old fable that they call “the word of god.”

Yes, I would ask these young adults to make a clean break from their past and help form a new consciousness in the world that is not rooted in foolish traditions, but instead would be rooted in an all-encompassing humanism.

In that kind of a world, and within a single generation, the Regrets that a gay young man will have might just be something as innocuous as having missed his senior prom because he was too shy to ask out that cute boy who would later become his boyfriend in college, and then his husband for life.

Regrets should be reserved for missed opportunities, not for opportunities that society entirely denied you.

The Gorgon in the Mirror

Medusa was a Gorgon, and according to Greek mythology the gaze of a Gorgon was so terrifying that it is said to turn a person who returns that gaze into stone. The version of the story that I remember saw Perseus slay Medusa by following only her reflection before striking his fatal blow. I grew up thinking that I was a Gorgon that everybody would despise, so I justified in my own mind the idea that people would want to be rid of me if they ever saw me as my true self. I was even afraid that my parents might suffer permanent and lasting harm if I was exposed. Following Perseus' lead, I survived by only having relationships with others through mirrors.

After first hearing this metaphor of the mirrors, some might argue that because I could only control what others saw of me, then it would imply that these others in my life were living in reality and I was not. I disagree. The truth is that I knew very well who I was; I was a Gorgon. If in fact these others were living in reality then they too would have been able to see me as a Gorgon, but they could not. So you see, the one who is doing all of the deceiving is really the one in control, and the ones being deceived are therefore living in an alternate reality that I created for them.

It is for this reason that I use the metaphor of the mirrors when I talk about my relationships. The mirrors, that only I control, have trapped these people in a kind of prison where I get to pick how they relate to me. One of the powers of a modern Gorgon like me is that I get to place a mirror as a stand-in for me with anybody of my choosing. It becomes a matter of semantics at this point to debate who was real and who was a mere reflection, but from my perspective I only had relationships with mirrors, not people. I specifically want to talk about the relationship that I had with my mother-mirror and my father-mirror.

I discovered the need for mirrors at the age of eleven. It was at that point when I knew that I was evolving into a Gorgon-like creature, and in order to protect my parents I knew that I would have to prevent them from seeing me for who I truly was. I have only myself to blame for having substituted a mirror in the place of my mother and my father, but I only did what I thought was necessary to protect them. I was, after all, just an emotional, irrational kid, but the fact remains that I kept the mirrors up for the next 30 years. By then, both of my parents had passed away, leaving me with a problem that will never be resolved. You see, every time I look at the portraits of my parents on the wall of my den I realize that I only have memories of the relationships that I had with my mirrors.

The demarcation point of when I went from having a relationship with my real mother to a relationship with my mother-mirror is kind of blurry, but I do remember that my real mother loved to nurture "lost sheep." When I was very young my sisters would bring home boyfriends that did not believe in our particular mythology. I would see how my real mother would go out of her way to try to convert these boys to our belief system, and if they would not convert I would see how my real mother would encourage my sisters to be nothing more than “good friends” with those kinds of boys. Like me, my sisters had been taught from a very young age that there was nothing more important to our family than our mythology. That meant that if these boys...the lost sheep...would not convert, it necessarily placed them outside of our culture.

When I realized that I was becoming more and more like these lost sheep that my sisters would bring home I awoke to a hard truth. I knew that my unbelief, if ever uncovered, would place me outside of the culture that my real mother and father believed in. That was when I realized how useful the mirrors would be.

My real parents had become strangers to me by the time they died. My mother was 61 years old, and my father was 73. I knew my mother-mirror and father-mirror intimately, but before I could get to know my real parents I would have to shatter the mirrors and expose myself as a Gorgon. I couldn't find the courage to do that. The risk of rejection was too great. It was the frightened 11-year-old inside me that demanded that I maintain the relationship with the predictable mother-mirror and father-mirror.

It would be another decade before I would stop using the mirrors around my five brothers and sisters. What were the consequences of that decision? As it turned out, they all preferred the lies of the mirror over the reality of the Gorgon. They've had four years now to get used to the idea, and still, just this past month my sister invited me to send my mirror to the family reunion in six weeks so that they could all pretend that nothing had changed. My sister made it very clear that the Gorgon...the real me...was not invited. They won't admit it, but in the mythology of my family...that same mythology that ranks higher in importance than family ties...Gorgons will always be seen as a threat. Their mythology has evolved to the point that it no longer calls for the mortal assassination of Gorgons, but it leaves no room to doubt that their god will undertake a systematic elimination of Gorgons in the after-life. It is because of this dogged adherence to their mythology that it is easier on them if I just send my mirror to the family reunion instead of coming as a Gorgon.

So what is the moral of this story? In order to understand the fable you have to see it from the perspective of a teenager. That is when Gorgons begin to see themselves as different from the rest of their family and society.

Religious and cultural traditions are tough on teenagers. It is the very nature of adolescence to challenge traditions, but when a mythology cannot stand up to the rigorous questioning of a young person then one of three things will happen.

The first outcome, which is the one that every culturally devoted parent hopes for, is that the teenager will embrace the idea of living under the shroud of unanswerable questions and stop challenging authority. Under this option the parents perceive that their mythology has won the day, but society invariably suffers a loss when truth is suppressed for yet another generation.

The second outcome is that the teenager could rebel against authority and refuse to conform to the traditions of his or her parents. This places the parents in the awkward position of having to choose between their mythology and their own flesh and blood. If a teen chooses this option, and is old enough or mature enough, then the chances are good that they will find an authentic life. This is a win for the youth and his or her future descendents. In rare circumstances the family will actually follow the rebellious youth and leave their cultural roots in favor of truly authentic lives as well. This would be a win for everybody, but that outcome is rare. All too often these youth lack the maturity to be left alone, but nevertheless they either run away or are kicked out of their home. These teens then fall into a subculture that is all too eager to take advantage of the vulnerable, and this becomes one of the worst tragedies imaginable.

The third outcome is the one that I chose in the late 1970’s, which forced everybody involved into an alternate reality. The teenager lives a dual life and the parents are blissfully unaware that their child secretly no longer believes in the cultures or traditions of the family mythology. In this option everybody is a loser and scores of innocent people get dragged into the lie before it is exposed for what it is.

Is the fault all mine because I opted for the predictable outcome of a relationship that I could control with a mother-mirror and a father-mirror, instead of taking the chance on being rejected by my real parents?

Or does the fault lie with my mother because she adopted this rigid mythology where anything outside of our culture held a diminished value? I do not have to wonder much about where my real father would have been in the continuum of love because when it came to matters of the heart I am confident that he would have followed the lead of my mother.

The hard truth is that the slightest movement on the part of any one of the three of us would have shattered all of the mirrors. The real tragedy is that none of us, not a single one, had the courage to take that chance. And to this day, neither do my brothers or my sisters. The mythology is still ranked higher in importance than blood.

And so the tragedy continues, more than 30 years later. I can honestly say that I don't give a damn about my brothers and sisters. I saw their hypocrisy for what it was four years ago, and I had no hope that it would evolve back then. It would be nice to still see them and catch up on life, but I'm not going to give them the satisfaction of dealing only with my mirror. It is now time for them to grow up and accept me as a Gorgon. That means that they need to find a way to respect my rights, and to see me and Gorgons like me as their equal. We now live in a modern society where mythology has been trumped by science.

But unfortunately for my siblings, and because I am more like a Gorgon than I care to admit, I still find a perverse pleasure in poking them in the eye with a stick, just to see them twitch. No, I do not seek or need the approval of my family to be a complete and authentic gay man, and an atheist. Instead, what I care passionately about is what they are symptomatic of in the 21st Century.

Gay teenagers and non-believing teenagers alike still fear that they have become Gorgons when they realize that they cannot uphold the mythology of their family. As vulnerable and frightened teenagers, in order to cope, they first will try anything in order to please others. This is most easily done by adopting relationships with the predictable mirrors. This way they have complete control over every important relationship in their life. The only requirement is that they sustain the lie of their closeted lives.

My experience is far from unique. Conservative parents continue to choose an existence in an alternate reality where teenage atheism and homosexuality is something that happens to other less-than-perfect families. And so they deny themselves the authentic relationships that they could otherwise have with their teenagers; relationships where humanity triumphs over cultural dogma and narrow ideology. These parents have no idea that their children are constructing mother-mirrors and father-mirrors with whom they relate on their own terms.

These parents do not know who their real children are because they don’t want to know, and they make no effort to find out so long as the mirrors are reflecting a favorable storyline heading into their fictitious future. I now live in a community of Gorgons. They are my adopted family. I literally have hundreds of brothers and sisters, and among us it is still...by far...more common to send a mirror home for the holidays and family reunions than it is to go in person.

When parents and siblings are willing to question the dogma of their own mythology and embrace the authentic lives of their children, brothers and sisters, however they turn out, then and only then will they shatter the mirrors that are used to maintain inauthentic but predictable relationships with them.

As for myself, I will forever wonder as I stare at the images on the wall of my den. I will never know if the faces are real or reflected. I will also never know who should ultimately be held responsible for the actions of that frightened young teenager.

My Brother Doesn't Think He Is Estranged from Me

In a recent Facebook wall post I referred to my brother with the generality of "your kind." I did this because he lives in California and he and his kids were out knocking on doors most Saturdays spreading the "Six Lies" about what the "gay agenda" supposedly was during the Prop 8 fiasco. He is also an avid Glenn Beck supporter, which further puts him into a "your kind" category as an ideological opposite of the world in which I now make my life.

The blog post originated over a hokey "letter to the president" from a doctor who had just treated an African-American woman who was going to be paying for her emergency room treatment with Medicaid. The doctor's complaint was that his taxes were supporting this woman who was not making enough sacrifices in her life to the point where she could pay for medical insurance.

This was my response to my brother's bewildered reply on the Facebook wall in which he wondered out loud why I never call so that we can have a chatty conversation about how wonderful our lives were back in the "good old days" before I became a non-Mormon liberal.

The definition of Estrange: to arouse especially mutual enmity or indifference where there had formerly been love, affection, or friendliness.

Fred:
[In spite of my repeated pleas to tread carefully going into the Prop 8 campaign,] you made a choice over Prop 8 that placed you squarely in the camp of a group of citizens willing to spend $24 million to spread six lies about gays and lesbians. You make choices that put yourself politically in direct opposition to the kind of legislation that would allow me to participate as your equal in society; where my new "family of choice" could serve openly in the military, adopt children, be married to protect our family assets, and file joint tax returns.

And you wonder who I am referring to when I say "your kind?" You are squarely aligned with a community of bigots that make no apology for your bigotry, but rather wear it as a badge of honor for your god.

Your complicity (and for 44 years, mine) created this culture that you now find yourself in, and it is so comfortable to "your kind" that you think of it as normal and accepted behavior. Your ideology of white privilege (and your complicity to not end it) has warehoused Blacks and the "others" into marginalized neighborhoods where education is supported with $1,000 less per pupil than the school your kids went to. In these marginalized communities, higher paying jobs are scarce and opportunities for self-betterment are deliberately suppressed. Zero-sum thinking justifies this because the "good" jobs out there are meant for "your kind."

"Your kind" see anything different from your behavior through the lens of Glenn Beck where anything "liberal," "progressive," or having to do with "social justice" for minorities of any kind as tyranny worthy of 2nd Amendment remedies.

No, I do not regularly make a habit of telephoning people with whom I have nothing in common other than some memories that originated only because I was living a fake life. No, I was raised in a culture that would have systematically "othered" me if I had been authentic to my birthright as a gay man. Out of fear I projected the image of a person that I knew would be accepted in a family of bigots and a community of zealots.

Until I see somebody demonstrate a willingness to open their mind and foster a climate where change becomes possible, there will be no chatty telephone conversations.

I peek in from the sidelines every once in a while and look for evidence of this open-mindedness, but to date, none has been found. You see, I associate with people who are supportive of "my kind." To date, my siblings and the majority of my nieces and nephews have failed to qualify, and that is no surprise. It is not hard to see why they make no effort to be supportive of equal rights for "my kind:" In June of 2006, before I had ever been intimate with a man, I became supportive of the plight of gay men. For that moment of enlightenment, I was excommunicated for apostacy.

Enjoy your church!

Bobo Dolls, Prop 8, and the Media

The fundamentalist and evangelical Christians (including the Mormons), who together comprise less than 18% of the US population, are among the most media savvy group of people in the world. The know about the 1961 "Bobo Doll Experiment," and they know how to apply the science that has risen out of the hundreds of studies that have been based on it over the last 39 years. Yes, the media consultants of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians used the tactics of the Bobo Doll Experiment to teach hate to a class of people who, like the children in the Bobo Doll Experiment, instinctively knew to avoid hate.

In 1961, psychologist Albert Bandura did an experiment to study how children responded after witnessing violent behavior in adults, and in particular, on television or in a movie. Last semester my Advanced Media Theory class studied this experiment in detail because the experiment was conducted in the earliest years of television. Here are three slides from the film. The child is holding the Bobo doll down and hitting it repeatedly, throwing it across the room, and hitting it with a hammer.

The experiment has become a landmark event in psychology because of how many other studies were inspired by it. It resurfaced in my mind recently because of a post by one of my Facebook friends who attended the APA (American Psychological Association) Conference in California. I guess a booth or workshop at the conference gave some prominent exposure to the study, or at least to a Bobo doll.

In the experiment there were actually three sequences of film. One just showed an adult being violent against the Bobo doll, another showed the adult being praised for the same violent behavior, and the third showed the adult being punished for the same violent behavior. In the first two instances, the children showed a dramatic increase in how violent they were with the Bobo doll as compared to the group that saw the adult being punished for violent behavior.

Most people, especially moderate Christians (at 66% of the population), would have been deterred by the fact that 50 years of undisputed research has underlined the tangible and harmful consequences of "learned violent behavior" that is taught through media, so you would think that if you were going to spend $40 million on advertising to attract this large voting block of moderate (and educated) Christians you would stick to material that was accurate and truthful. But media savvy fundamentalist Christians knew full well that the truth would not sell their idea to the far more numerous (and did I mention educated) moderate Christians that they needed on their side in order to pass Prop 8. They knew that they had to go further than just "education." As I stated in my thesis, the media consultants of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians used the tactics of the Bobo Doll Experiment to teach hate to a class of people who, like the children in the Bobo Doll Experiment, instinctively knew to avoid hate. And it worked.

Proponents of Prop 8 spent an unprecedented $40 million on a media blitz that not only used television and newspaper ads, but went even further. In the true spirit of the Bobo Doll Experiment, their campaign had the equivalent of door-to-door evangelists who did the equivalent of "praising the violent behavior." For the most part, we have the missionary-minded Mormons to thank for that as well.

It would have been different if the material that was used in the Prop 8 campaign had been truthful, but as the recent Prop 8 Trial has shown, the "Six Lies" of the Prop 8 media blitz were just that....they were lies. They had been tailor made by the media savvy Christian groups for a very special purpose. Those lies were designed to not only teach hate, but also to instill fear!

Zero-sum thinking is a fear tactic that has a history of success here in America and around the world. It is based on "us" vs. "them" logic. It basically tells one class of people (almost always the majority), that if another group of people (the "others") gain anything at all in society, it will mean that the desirable class ("us") has been harmed. The fundamentalist Christians knew that in order to build a media campaign to a fever pitch, it needs to instill fear, and nothing instills fear as much as the idea that somebody is taking something away from you.

This is what the Prop 8 media campaign did, and it used blatant lies and the proven tactics of the Bobo Doll Experiment in order to do it.

How do I know it was all lies? Because during the Prop 8 trial the defense did not produce a single witness that could support the material that was used during the campaign. They danced around the "Six Lies" of the Prop 8 campaign and instead produced a witness to support other claims that were not an integral part of the media hype of the period. Early on, when Perry vs. Schwarzenegger was first announced, the defense had promised a "parade of witnesses" that would prove the harm that gay marriage would do to society. They were going to prove that gay couples were inferior as parents, and if the Prop 8 media material was to be believed, this would also mean that homosexuality would be "taught" to school-aged children as a "lifestyle choice" for when they grow up. Worse yet, according to the Prop 8 media, if gay marriages were recognized it would mean that the religious freedoms of America would be lost because churches that failed to perform gay marriages would lose their tax-exempt standing.

So what did this "parade of witnesses" look like when the defense had their day in court? The defense produced one "expert" witness and one non-expert opinion to bolster their claim that gay marriage (and by extension, the "gay lifestyle") was inferior to heterosexual marriage. They deliberately sidestepped all of the "Six Lies" from the media campaign, either because they recognized that none of those claims could withstand cross examination on the witness stand, or because every witness that they approached refused to appear.

If the Florida lawsuit challenging the ban on gay adoption is any indicator, the second option is the more likely of the two. In Florida, after an exhaustive nationwide search, the attorney general could only find one "expert witness" who was willing to attach his or her good name to the support of an unsubstantiated lie. Within a year, this "expert witness," George Rekers, was caught at the Miami airport returning from a 10-day European vacation with an escort that he had found on RentBoy.com. (Link to story.)

As Florida's Bill McCollum found out, expert witnesses who have published peer-reviewed papers in reputable trade journals are hard to find (George Rekers had only ever published with NARTH, which I touch on below). It is one thing to embellish a doctrinal point over the pulpit or to a faith-based audience when you are intent on misleading a congregation, but when, in your heart, you know it is just an opinion and not a fact, nobody wants to swear on a Bible and perjure himself/herself by stating the same sentence in a court of law.

Judge Vaughn Walker was so sympathetic to the defense (after dismissing the testimony of one witness as inadmissible) that he gave them a second chance during closing arguments to produce a better argument. He wrote in his instructions: "Seven million Californians, 70 judges and this long history that you described...why did you present but one witness on this subject?" (Excellent link here to a postmortem on the case.)

History will be the judge on that question, but another question still lingers in my mind on this topic of the Bobo Doll Experiment and fundamentalist Christianity.

My Facebook friend who prompted this post is a psychology student. He is also still attending the Mormon Church, and lives in California, so I watched him closely during the Prop 8 campaign, which he did NOT support. Now, in defense of my friend, he is likely just a Shadow Mormon, which means that he goes through the motions of being a good Mormon because it works for him, so this essay probably does not indict him as it does other Mormons who donated $24 million and testified door-to-door in support of the "Six Lies," but the idea that a university would grant a psychology degree or something akin to that to somebody from the Christian fringe really bothers me. (For an excellent study on Shadow Mormons, there is an excellent documentary: "In The Shadow of the Temple.")

A case in point about granting a religious bigot a degree rooted in scientific research: Augusta State University, a state institution in Georgia, recently refused a degree to a girl who wanted to be a school counselor. They refused to grant her the degree because she refused to take diversity and sensitivity training. She had spent her years at university spouting her opinions about homosexuality as though they were fact and trying to convert her classmates and professors to her version of Christianity, and then she wondered why the university would not give her a degree, and their blessing, to go out and tell school kids that it is okay to marginalize gays. After all, in spite of all she had learned, this student still did not see homosexuality as an immutable trait, but rather as a degrading and immoral lifestyle choice. (Link here for more details on this story.)

Three cheers for Augusta State, but what about the thousands of other students who hold the same beliefs that this girl does, but just hold their tongue and get to walk the stage wearing a mortarboard? These students will just go through school and become psychologists while silently thinking that the APA was wrong in 1973 when they declared that homosexuality was an immutable trait and that attempts to "treat it" were causing irreparable harm. Since 1973 that ruling has been challenged dozens of times by organizations like the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Meanwhile, a dozen other organizations have now joined the APA in supporting their 1973 findings. In all, there are now 148,000 licensed professionals across the nation who believe that reparative therapy is not only wrong-headed, but dangerous (link here). NARTH, in the meantime, has been reduced to a mere 38 practioners, who, by the way are so discredited that their "expert witness" testimony was deemed inadequate for the Prop 8 trial. George Rekers was the 39th, but they booted him out after his "European Vacation."

NARTH, for their part, is out of money, and as evidenced by the Prop 8 trial, out of ideas. They are only able to continue as a group through direct support from none other than the Mormon Church. Their offices were moved from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City to take advantage of the fact that the CEO from the Mormon supported Evergreen International ex-gay group would now serve as the COO for NARTH. I have not checked into the lease arrangements for office space, but Evergreen International is on the 3rd floor and NARTH is now on the 4th floor of a building that is likely owned by a Mormon controlled affiliate organization. The building is within blocks of the Salt Lake Temple and the church-owned City Creek redevelopment mega-project. (The Mormon Church has systematically been buying up downtown Salt Lake City in order to prop up the inner-city area around the iconic Salt Lake Temple from urban decay.)

But back to the idea of a psychologist that tries to hold onto a connection with a homophobic belief system. There are literally thousands of psychologists like my Facebook friend who will not publicly disavow themselves of their religious roots in order to truly comply with the ethics guidelines of their professional association. When you use the word "ethical behavior" in one sentence, and the term "Shadow Mormon" in the next, the contradiction just seems to slap you in the face. What is ethical about pretending to be a "good Mormon" when you know that you don't believe in the infallibility of the prophet? Just because it isn't a bold-faced lie does not mean that it is unethical to allow others to believe something that is not the truth. It is deliberate deceit. I know, because I did that for more than 30 years in order to stay in the good graces of my Mormon family and community.

To the credit of the APA, their ethics guidelines (and those of other similar professional associations) require that a therapist who adheres to fundamentalist Christian beliefs recuse himself/herself in instances where a client has stated that they are convinced that their so-called "same-sex attraction" is immutable. The problem is that up until that instant in time (when the client declares that they are no longer going to try to "overcome" homosexuality) these therapists can get away with trying to help their client adhere to a broken, and ultimately harmful, belief system. This, in the face of the fact that the psychologist has spent upwards of six years or more being taught that study after study has proven such belief systems to be wrong. Essentially, in spite of a stellar education, some fully accredited therapists are still telling gays and lesbians that what they are struggling with is a mere "temptation" rather than nature's call to live authentically as the person they were born to be.

And we wonder why Utah has the nation's highest teen suicide rate?

I guess the APA approach, however imperfect it might be, is working. Forty-nine years after the Bobo Doll Experiment we can look at the success of the Prop 8 trial in overturning the ban on gay marriage as a witness that this country may be willing to stand up against organizations that try to use media to advance violence against others.

As for those psychologists who try to negotiate a "middle ground" for themselves between research-based best practices and their faith-based archaic doctrine, while they may still placate their clients by telling them what they want to believe about homosexuality, they at least now understand that it has no standing in fact. This we know because not one of them dared take a stand against the science of their field in a court of law. The ethics guidelines of the APA have enough teeth as they stand that the consequences of such an act would have been felt financially.

History will be the witness. In her book, "The Fall of the Evangelical Nation," Christine Wicker writes that more than 6,000 people a day are leaving evangelical Christianity. Her findings are supported by the Barna Group, a group that has been studying Christianity in America for decades. Most who leave fundamentalism are becoming "moderate Christians (66% of the population) and skeptics (11% of the population), and that gives me hope for the plight of a gay teen who is faced with the same prospects today that I faced in 1978. Back then the climate was very different, but at the rate of 6,000 a day, the reach of the evangelical is getting smaller very quickly.

I thank Judge Vaughn Walker from the bottom of my heart for the part that he played in this drama, but before Judge Walker there was Ted Olsen and David Boies. History will now remember them for something far more significant than Bush vs. Gore.

The year 2010 was the year that fundamentalist Christianity went on trial in America, and lost. It was also the year that the Mormon Church placed their entire fortune on a single number at the roulette table. The wheel may still be turning, but one thing is for certain. Even if they don't lose their future on this gamble, they lost their credibility by even daring to make such a bet in the first place. It exposed them to be very un-Christlike in how they conduct themselves as a good neighbor and citizen in a nation founded on the principle of separating church and state.

PS. Mormon's are not supposed to gamble. It is one of their 4,300 commandments. (Yes, that is a real number supported by research.)

Only Two Words Have Been Altered in This News Story

Read the following story and see if you can figure out the two words that I substituted with "Taliban" and "Christian" consistently throughout the story.

Georgia Grad Student Sues University Over Suppression of Her Taliban Beliefs
Jennifer Keeton Says She Was Told to Change Her Taliban Beliefs or Be Dropped From the Program

Original Story By SARAH NETTER
July 27, 2010

A Georgia student studying counseling [to be a school counselor for youth] says her university went too far in requiring her to change her Taliban beliefs on infidels before she's allowed to graduate.

Backed by the Alliance Defense Fund, Jennifer Keeton has filed suit against Augusta State University after, she said, school officials threatened to dismiss her from its counseling program when she refused to participate in a "remediation" plan to increase her tolerance of infidels after she made it known that she believed Christians were lost souls.

According to the lawsuit, filed earlier this month in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, school officials told Keeton that she was failing to conform to professional standards because she saw Christians as infidels.

"Jen has voiced disagreement in several class discussions and in written assignments with the Christian 'lifestyle,'" read the university's remediation plan, as quoted in the lawsuit. "She stated in one paper that she believes Christian 'lifestyles' to be identity confusion."

"Faculty have also received unsolicited reports from another student that [Miss Keeton] has relayed her interest in conversion therapy for Christian populations," the lawsuit's quotation of the plan continued, "and she has tried to convince other students to support and believe her views that the only path to salvation for a Christian was through Islam."

The remediation plan, according to court documents, included attending three workshops on diversity, a monthly two-page reflection on what she has learned from research into Christian counseling issues, and increased exposure to Christian populations. The latter action came with the suggestion that she attend one of Augusta's diverse Christian churches.

A second portion of the remediation plan includes more work to improve Keeton's writing skills.

David French, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund and also director of its Center for Academic Freedom, told ABCNews.com that the lawsuit on Keeton's behalf is one of about a half-dozen similiar cases involving counseling or social work students in the last few years.

"It's an emerging issue, without question," he said. Requiring a student to change his or her beliefs [in a known terrorist organization] to graduate is "punishment of free speech."

"That is not the role of the state and it is not within the power of the state," he said.

Augusta State University declined to make school officials available for comment, and did not immediately provide a statement.

The Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund has advised Keeton not to speak publicly about her education at Augusta State or the pending lawsuit, but she stood up for her beliefs in a video produced and distributed by the Fund.

"While I want to stay in the school counseling program, I know that I can't honestly complete the remediation plan knowing that I would have to alter my beliefs," she said. "I'm not willing to and I know I can't change my Taliban [state of being]."

According to the lawsuit, Keeton had said both in class and in writing assignments that "she believes Christianity is the result of accountable personal choice[, and that after she graduates and is working in the field that if she were to allow her counseling clients - school-aged youth - to continue unchallenged in that 'lifestyle,' she would be a participant in them losing their soul]."

"Further, she has expressed her view that Christianity is a 'lifestyle,' not a 'state of being,' [like her own Taliban heritage] " the lawsuit read.

"In certain personal conversations away from the classroom with friends and colleagues, Miss Keeton has shared her Taliban faith, and commended its virtues and benefits," the lawsuit said. "In the course of such discussions, she has also communicated Talibani viewpoints on matters related to [the role of women]."

According to the lawsuit, which included several e-mails between Keeton and faculty, school officials said that they weren't trying to change her views or religious beliefs, but that it was "unethical" for her to apply her own personal viewpoints to other people "and not truly accepting that others can have different beliefs and values that are equally valid as your own."

W. Mark Hamilton, executive director of the American Mental Health Counselors Association, said he couldn't speak to the specific lawsuit against Augusta State University, but that's it's not unreasonable that a student be requested to take additional diversity training.

While the AMCA has not officially taken a stance on Taliban and Christian lifestyles -- "We have members on both sides of the issue," Hamilton explained -- they do expect their members to try to work with clients regardless of their faith orientation.

"Most certainly our members would take a positive understanding position," he said. "I don't think that most members or counselors would reject this client out of hand because of their beliefs. Of course there's always that option to terminate their relationship."

But French said the decision to require a remediation plan came before school officials ever saw Keeton interact with a client.

"There is no evidence she's mistreated anybody," he said. "It is not part of the program to single out a Taliban woman because of her religious beliefs.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Note by Lester Leavitt:

If you find yourself calling Keeton's claims (as presented above) "ridiculous" and "unfounded," you might be surprised at who it is that you are condemning. I substituted "Taliban" for "Christian" and "Christian" for "gay and lesbian."

In America, you must remember that if the law applies to one side, then it must apply equally to all sides. Christian fundamentalists have a serious problem with this. They consistently try to claim a preferred legal position based on their perceived moral superiority.

Link to original news story here.