Exodus International executive vice president Jeff Buchanan last week countered the organization’s recent move away from orientation change.
In an article for The Gospel Coalition (a pious and politically correct organization name, no?), Buchanan accuses people who are honest about their sexual orientation of being “addicted to identity labels.”
Unlike ex-gays (who are presumably addicted to a heterosexual label), Buchanan says LGBT persons’ use of a “self-referencing label creates a personal crisis of identity and purpose.”
Buchanan then purports to offer six reasons why people cannot be sexually honest and also Christian at the same time.
Key among those reasons is Buchanan’s claim that one can only be truly authentic by suppressing oneself and conforming to an ultra-conservative evangelical idol of Jesus-as-Holy-Hypocrite, rather than Jesus as a personal guide or savior.
Instead of affirming sexual honesty, Buchanan counsels people to silence their gay loved ones (or themselves, if they are gay); pray; and wait for a miraculous change of sexual orientation to occur — perhaps through a relationship which the partners will convince themselves is heterosexual.
Exodus International has double-crossed its followers at various times in the past — telling opposing messages to different conservative audiences at the same time, and reinventing and then uninventing itself within just a few weeks.
Exodus appears to be repeating its own history.
