A year after it helped launch the Uganda genocide legislation, Exodus is teaming up with Robert Knight, Matt Barber, and an attorney who affirmed child abduction by her ex-gay activist client. Joining with NARTH’s leading political activists “therapists” at Liberty University’s School of Law, their objective is simple: Convince the public that the Constitution’s Bill of Rights cannot survive so long as LGBT people have any rights at all.
Exodus International President Alan Chambers will headline a two-day conference and symposium Feb. 12-13. The events will criticize sexual honesty, reject mainstream psychiatry, deny the existence of sexual orientation, and assert that conservative Christians’ rights are incompatible with the rights of sexual and religious minorities.
According to the Liberty Counsel, a Christian Right legal-attack squad, the February 12 conference is titled “Understanding Same-sex Attractions and Their Consequences.” On February 13, the Liberty University Law Review will host a legal symposium entitled “Homosexual Rights and First Amendment Freedoms: Can They Truly Coexist?” Liberty University was founded by fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, and it is operated as a veritable police state where no dissent from the late Falwell’s ideology and lifestyle are permitted.
Chambers will tell fundamentalists — as he has done many times before — that same-sex attractions are caused by bad parenting and abuse, that public honesty about one’s orientation is sinful, and that recognition of the equality of religious and sexual minorities is demonic.
Also appearing at the events: Rena Lindevaldsen, associate professor of law at Liberty University School of Law. Lindevaldsen is an attorney who counseled ex-gay activist Lisa Miller through the violation of numerous court orders regarding visitation in recent years, resulting in Miller’s complete loss of custody of daughter Isabella. Lindevaldsen was also instrumental in forming a Facebook group which affirmed Miller’s subsequent abduction of Isabella. Miller remains a fugitive in hiding.
Conference leaders will criticize the American Psychological Association for exposing widespread unprofessionalism, fraud, and client harm among ex-gay amateur counselors and reparative therapists.
Various sessions will present the discredited and unscientific ideology of the ex-gay National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and the American Association of Christian Counselors as if their myths qualified as “current research and therapies.”
The legal symposium will assert that conservative Christians’ “freedom of speech, religion and association” require that these very same freedoms must be denied to religious and sexual minorities.
Besides Chambers and Lindevaldsen, attendees will include Julie Harren-Hamilton, president of NARTH; Tim Clinton, president of the American Association of Christian Counselors; Mathew Staver, dean of Liberty University School of Law; Professor Lynne Marie Kohm of Regent University School of Law (the university founded by televangelist Pat Robertson); Professor Lynn D. Wardle of Brigham Young University and J. Reuben Clark Law School; Elaine Donnelly, founder and president of the antigay Center for Military Readiness; Robert H. Knight, senior writer for Coral Ridge Ministries and senior fellow for the ultra-conservative American Civil Rights Union; Matt Barber, associate dean at Liberty University School of Law, and others.
The conference and the symposium are free.
