Jim Rutz lives in Colorado Springs where he makes his living as an “author, columnist, teacher, pioneer thinker, chronicler of the miraculous, and spokesman for the worldwide house community” which includes selling evangelical books to promote what he refers to as the Open Church. Rutz has also served as convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson’s communications manager and has a guest bio and article on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network (CBN.com).
Rutz, author of the now infamous “Soy is Making Kids Gay” article, seems excited by all the attention his rather hyperbolic claim has garnered for him and his theories on the dangers of soy – claiming he got hundreds of emails and dozens of media requests. Rutz responds to these inquiries by laying out more of his theories about what eating soy does to human beings – conceding “Not being a physician, I can only pass along information.”
Perhaps fewer than 10 percent of us are aware that soybeans are a hotly debated topic in medical circles today. Soy products – eaten, drunk and slipped into thousands of commercial products – are rightly being blamed for a horrendous variety of medical conditions, several of them nearing epidemic status and a few of them irreversible. Pediatricians and other doctors are starting to see a growing parade of patients suffering from serious symptoms that were quite rare just a generation ago.
Rutz begins this second column with answering what he says was the most commonly asked question of him: “If soy is so harmful as to potentially alter sexual physiology and behavior, why haven’t the Chinese and Japanese all died off or become homosexual centuries ago?”
One reason is “that Orientals simply do not eat as much soy as Westerners think.” Rutz claims that the “The highest intake of soy in Japan is among monks, who eat it to turn off sexual desire” warning readers to “think about that the next time you’re in the grocery store.”
You have to wonder if seeing soy as the root of all sexual ills (for men anyway) also makes one seem, well, just a little odd. However, there may be another reason for finding this claim unbelievable: Rutz acknowledges his initial column fell just a teeny bit short in the substantiating-his-claims category and promises to now remedy that by addressing all of what he sees as the “problems with soy” in “a scientific, footnoted format” by tucking “footnotes and excess text” into future columns. Rutz writes titillatingly that he will address what soy is doing to male “sex organs” and will describe its impact on “sexual orientation” if we but only “tune in next week” because the story “gets worse.”
Could the story really get any worse? Not a big chance we’ll be reading his future columns closely to find out.
