• Mike EnsleyWriting for Focus on the Family, Exodus antigay youth activist Mike Ensley channels reparative therapist Joseph Nicolosi, whose mantra at Exodus/FOTF events has been, “We advise fathers, if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will.” Like Nicolosi, Ensley equates youths’ gay family members and gay friends with sexual predators. Ensley says, “Our youth have hearts that need pursuing. If we [Christians] don’t go after them, there are other people out there [gay people] who will.”
  • Corrected: An open lesbian becomes engaged to a man. Confession of an ex-gay, perhaps? No, just a woman who’s honest about her sexual flexibility, the inadequacy of labels, and possible bisexuality.
  • Lost in her own strawman arguments, ex-gay activist Janet Boynes misses the point of her critics.
  • Exodus International executive vice president Randy Thomas prays for a miracle for the presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, but hopes for a “truly viable third party” by 2012.
  • Long-time ex-gay activist Bob Stith of Texas is now the Southern Baptist Convention’s national strategist for gender issues. He is interviewed this week by the Southern Baptist Texan. He acknowledges that antigay evangelicals are less well versed in the Bible than many gay Christians — but instead of learning from gay people of faith, Stith calls them a threat. Stith acknowledges a genetic predisposition to same-sex attraction, but then he rejects as failures all studies that attempt to find a “biological cause to homosexuality.”
  • Former ex-gay Peterson Toscano reflects on his time in Exodus International’s flagship live-in program, Love In Action — and looks forward to Beyond Ex-Gay’s effort next week to deconstruct the ex-gay myth in LIA’s home city of Memphis, Tenn.
  • A Tennessee bill filed by Rep. Stacey Campfield of Knoxville would ban “any instruction or materials discussing sexual orientation other than heterosexuality” in Tennessee’s public schools. On the surface, this legislation denies the existence of gay and bisexual students, suppresses these students’ free-speech rights, and promotes ignorance among these teenagers’ peers. But would the bill also lock Tennessee’s “former homosexuals” out of public-school instruction and materials?