On her radio show last week, Religious Right broadcaster Janet Parshall praised ex-gay movement leaders like Anne Paulk, her guest on the program, for helping gays and lesbians “leave the homosexual lifestyle.”
Parshall said that Satan is responsible for increasing resistance to ex-gay therapy: “Anytime Satan can try to trample underfoot the truth that is the cross, he’ll do it, including telling people that they can’t change. You, however, are my expert witness because you changed, as did I, so that really should be the end of the discussion.”
Paulk argued that opponents of ex-gay therapy are “abusing kids” and making sure the government begins “sacrificing our youth to HIV/AIDS, syphilis and gonorrhea.”
While discussing the effectiveness of ex-gay therapy, neither mentioned Anne Paulk’s ex-husband, John Paulk, a former leader of the ex-gay movement who now says he is gay and that his sexual orientation never changed. Instead, Anne Paulk told Parshall that ex-gay therapy is just like having a diet or battling a drug abuse.
“When it comes to overeating, I can get that under control, I can become the size my body was meant to be, or I can feed it more and more and more and more and get to that 700 lbs. stage, that is unfortunately humanly possible,” she said. “If we take that and apply it to something like drug addiction, it is much harder according to the stats to overcome drug addiction than it is to leave behind homosexuality.”
