“Ex-gay” activist Anne Paulk, who was one half of the couple featured in Newsweek’s 1998 cover story “Gay For Life?”, and who now is the executive director of the Restored Hope Network, the even more extremist group that rose from the ashes of Exodus International and other defunct “ex-gay” organizations, stated recently in an interview on Jerry Newcombe’s Vocal Point that her ex-husband John was being “disobedient” to God by renouncing the fraudulent “ex-gay” industry and embracing authenticity as the gay man he always was:
When host Jerry Newcombe noted that Paulk’s ex-husband, John Paulk, was the poster boy for the ex-gay movement until he announced last year that he is still gay and renounced ex-gay therapy, Paulk responded that John has been “disobedient” to God: “He walked back into it, that’s true. Can that happen? Absolutely. People can fall, Christians can be disobedient and people who once had a struggle can once again engage that struggle whether it’s alcohol, drugs or any other type of sin struggle, we are not immune to our past, we must either surrender or be invaded by once was and so that is the challenge.”
Newcombe dismissed ex-ex-gays like John Paulk as similar to people who, for a time, stopped cigarette smoking “but unfortunately went back into it.”
Listen:
Anne, perhaps, doesn’t have a clear concept of whether a person can actually change their sexuality, since she has admitted that she is bisexual. From an earlier Truth Wins Out report:
Anne Paulk lied about being an “ex-lesbian”during the infamous 1998 Truth in Love as campaign. She appeared in a full-page New York Times ad where she described herself as a “wife mother and former lesbian” and explained, “By the time I hit my teens…I just wasn’t attracted to men sexually.”
However, in a book, Love Won Out, that she co-authored with John, she contradicted her story that appeared in the ad:
Shortly after high school she met a man named Mark and wrote that he, “appealed to me sexually…We were drawn together by sheer animal magnetism…I came to see that I could be physically attracted to a male, but I just couldn’t surrender my heart to him.”
One does not have to be a sexuality expert to understand that genuine lesbians don’t have “animal magnetism” towards men. Anne may help bisexual women suppress their lesbian feelings, but she certainly is not an example of a person who has gone from gay to straight through prayer and therapy, as she often claims in her misleading “ex-gay” materials.
Furthermore, Anne Paulk was never part of the out lesbian community. Indeed, there has never been a single woman who has come forth to say that she had a sexual or emotional relationship with her. According to Anne:
“It took until college to say, ‘Yes, I’m a lesbian.’ And then Jesus found me within six months. He got a hold of me and that was the end of that.”
It continues to sound to us like Anne simply has found that spreading the false gospel of “ex-gay” therapy guarantees her a paycheck.
