Besen Promotes ‘Pray Away the Gay’ Line to Discredit Ex-Homosexual Christians and Biblical Truth

Yes, Wayne, there is a God, and he has helped many praying men and women overcome homosexuality

Yvette Cantu Schneider, husband Paul and their two children. Yvette was once a committed lesbian but recently she and Paul celebrated their ninth wedding anniversary. Homosexual activists like Wayne Besen ridicule Christian ex-homosexuals like Yvette with their slogan, “Pray away the gay” — which trivializes healthy change and God’s redemptive work in the lives of men and women.

By Peter LaBarbera

I don’t know if Sodomitic Spinmeister Wayne Besen of “Truth” Wins Out invented the silly slogan “pray away the gay” to slam the observable reality that homosexuals can leave the lifestyle (as countless thousands have), but he is busy promoting it. The following is taken from Besen’s new column criticizing President-elect Obama for picking evangelical pastor Rick Warren to say the invocation on Inaugural Day:

After all, Warren has a program to “help” homosexuals “pray away the gay” and played a prominent role in passing Proposition 8, which prohibits same-sex couples from marrying in California. He has even compared same-sex couples marrying to incest and child abuse.

Now what’s Besen’s goal here? Obviously, to ridicule the notion of healthy change for homosexuals, but with the added bonus of playing to secularist, anti-Christian cultural biases and caricatures — which Wayne himself stokes at every opportunity.

Some observations:

• There are lots of men and women who once identified as “gay” or “lesbian” who left the lifestyle and are living contented and fulfilled lives in their post-homosexual identities.  My friend Yvette Cantu Schneider just celebrated her ninth anniversary — Yvette was once a proud lesbian [see her testimony HERE] but now is happily married to husband Paul, and they are the parents of two beautiful children. (Yvette also testifies that she has no lingering sexual attraction toward females);
• Many “ex-gays” and former lesbians appear to have come out of homosexuality through a religious experience — others not. In Yvette’s case, she experienced a born-again relationship with Jesus Christ. That involved prayer and repentance, to be sure, but to dismiss such profound experiences as “praying away the gay” is to cynically trivialize a most powerful spiritual transformation;
• We don’t know about “the gay,” as Besen puts it, but profound change like that experienced by Yvette and former homosexual D.L. Fostor — creator of the Gay Christian Movement Watch website –provides serious anecdotal evidence that serious change in homo-sexual behavior and attractions IS possible. This is hardly a surprise to evangelical Christians, whose lives testify to the power of Jesus Christ to overcome ANY sin — including horrible addictions like drugs and alcoholism. (Imagine deriding AA — which has a spiritual component — as “praying away the drunk.”) We trust that most Bible-believing Christians would agree that there is no reason to treat homosexual conduct/ideation as some “special sin” that cannot be overcome like other behavioral sin patterns.
• Back to the notion of “the gay”: as we’ve written before, the evil genius of the “gay” construct is that it turns changeable, sinful and destructive behavior into personhood — i.e., an innocuous trait; ditto for “sexual orientation,” which implies that one has no control over aberrant sexual feelings and indulging those feelings. (It’s “who I am,” homosexuals say, as if deviant sexual propensities are intrinsically part of their nature; the corollary follows: “if it’s who I am, and I was born this way, how could it be wrong?”) The reason homosexual activists like Besen despise happy “ex-gays” like Yvette and DL is that they shatter the rigid, “fundamentalist”-like “gay identity” paradigm and suggest that all “homosexuals” (including Wayne) have the ability to stop practicing (wrong) homosexual behaviors. Taking personal responsibility for your actions — as countless men and women have by repenting of their past homosexual lifestyle and abandoning same-sex behavior — means, ultimately, that nobody has to be (act) “gay.” Choice IS involved in the embrace of homosexuality. Here we could spend several hundred pages discussing feelings versus behavior and lingering same-sex attractions, etc.  (Besen and others allege that ex-homosexuals really are only curtailing behaviors, but that they remain essentially “gay.”) But the bottom line is that all people struggle with temptations and sinful desires that they should not give in to (lust, greed, selfishness, etc.); this does not require that we assign an identity to those feelings/struggles and remove culpability from the person for indulging them;
• Lastly, to assert that men and women working with God through repentance and prayer CANNOT experience deep change is an affront to our Savior, Jesus Christ. When homosexual activists flip nature on its head and insist that their aberrant feelings and conduct are natural (and not sinful) and that the Bible is the problem  — or at least the way it has been interpreted by multitudes of “homophobic,” bigoted Christians down through the centuries — they insult their Creator, who created men and women for one another, and who has already proven His awesome, transformative power in the lives of countless sinners from the beginning.

Taking all the above into account — and the sheer animosity that so many homosexual activists like Besen have for Christians and religious people who refuse to compromise the Bible to accommodate a pro-homosexuality agenda — it becomes obvious what “pray away the gay” is: another arrogant attempt by homosexual militants to discredit faithful Christians and subvert Biblical Truth, and to affirm their destructive lifestyle as natural, normal and good — no matter what their loving Creator says.

Former homosexual DL Foster and his beautiful family. Foster created the website “Gay Christian Movement Watch” to monitor the subversive attempt by homosexual activists to argue that the Bible and Christianity actually affirm their sinful lifestyle choice.