For years, I never understood the appeal of TV’s “Everybody Loves Raymond.” I always thought it was formulaic humor for the lowest common denominator. Never did I imagine that in the comedy stylings of Ray Romano, a sinister campaign to turn kids gay was lurking just beneath, by portraying Raymond and other TV husbands like him as buffoons. This, dear parents, is why your kids are gay, according to the “ex-gay” world’s finest, Christopher Doyle, and his trusty sidekick Chuck Peters. On the flip side of that, apparently women are the only ones portrayed as strong and intelligent on the television:
Peters: I split off that side of myself, the masculine side, the boyhood side. I thought ‘I’m not going to be a man, I’m going to be like a woman.’ So I way-over-identified with my mother. That’s why I believe a lot of gay-identified men really worship these celebrities, these strong women, like Madonna or Cher or Lady Gaga because these women are strong women, like the mom that I grew up with, that are very opinionated, have a chip on their shoulder, wear the pants in the family, and these are the women that I wanted to be like or I wanted to identify with because I didn’t have a man in the house who wore the pants, who would teach me how to be a man.
Rios: That seems to be the theme, Chris, so often.
Doyle: You see any straight heterosexual male on TV is now the buffoon.
Rios: Don’t I know it? All the dads are stupid and all the women are supermoms. I’m the antifeminist, if you want to complain about that you’ve came to the right studio. I just can’t stand what they’ve done to manhood.
Doyle: It’s absolutely damaging for kids. In so many minority cultures now it’s still an epidemic problem that the father is not in the home. Then they turn on the TV, which is basically where they have to go because they don’t have two parents in the house and dad’s not there, then they see this caricature of men on TV.
And here is Christopher Doyle, who still won’t tell us how old the girls he tried to molest in his mother daycare were at the time, explaining that he thinks gays are funding the Westboro Baptist Church in order to make the anti-gay side look bad, as if any on that side need any help looking bad:
And of course, finally, Chuck Peters says that efforts to ban “ex-gay” therapy for minors will result in suicides, an alarming case of projection if I’ve ever seen one. All the real, peer-reviewed studies show that what leads to depression and suicide among LGBT youth is societal and family stigma and a lack of acceptance, and that these same kids thrive when they have the support of their families, churches and communities. Check out this quote though:
“If you want to kill somebody and force somebody into suicide, take away hope. And that’s what these pending bills and that’s what the bill in California is doing and the bill that was passed and signed by Gov. [Chris] Christie is doing, the blood of these minors who commit suicide because they can’t go to a licensed therapist will be on the hands of Gov. Christie and Gov. [Jerry] Brown who both signed these bills into law.”
Myriad testimonies of people who have survived “ex-gay” therapy describe how the therapy itself involves a gutwrenching loss of hope, as those involved in it tend to be convinced that, if they don’t change, they’re not praying hard enough, that God doesn’t love them enough, that they must not be doing it right. Since such therapies tend to involve everyone in them communally agreeing upon a lie to tell each other — that they’re all changing, and you can too! — individuals in the tentacles of the “ex-gay” industry are often isolated into thinking they’re the only one in the group who isn’t having success, when, as Alan Chambers has testified, 99.9% of them aren’t changing one bit. So really, it sounds like Chuck Peters needs to go to a real therapist and stop agreeing to tell the lie. Nobody else changed either, Chuck.
