American Fascists

by Chris Hedges

  “They trusted us more than their family,” she says. “They thought we had a clearer path to God because we were on television. They thought we were on television because God put us there. We were prophets to these people. We were seen as people who could walk on clouds and heal and pray. We were God’s special messengers. Pat was seen as having the ear of God. He had words of knowledge that could identify their deepest fears and illnesses. We would identify people on the air by speaking about the color of their clothes or an illness they had. We would say, ‘There is a woman with a blue blouse crying at this moment. She has bad hearing in one ear. She is being healed right now.’ And viewers would claim these healings. They saw our presence on the show as a sign that we were anointed. They wanted to know how to live, how to operate on a daily basis, how to communicate with their family and friends, what jobs to get and how to interpret the world around them, even the daily news. They wanted every type of emotional, spiritual and physical information. We had this kind of authority over their lives. They abdicated their hopes and lives to us because we spoke for God.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Persecution

  JOE: . . . Does it make any difference? That I might be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it. What do you want from me? What do you want from me, Harper? More than that? For God’s sake, there’s nothing left, I’m a shell. There’s nothing left to kill.

  As long as my behavior is what I know it has to be. Decent. Correct. That alone in the eyes of God.

  —Tony Kushner, Angels in America1

  Flakes of snow fall gently over the ponds, statues and lawns sloping down from the gold-domed Massachusetts State House. A cluster of several dozen young men and women walk along the edge of the Boston Common on Tremont Street. They chant, “Hate is curable and preventable!” “Jesus, cleanse this temple!” and “Conversion Therapy kills gay teens!” It is 7:30 in the morning. Many in the group carry rainbow-colored posters that say, “We’re God’s Children Too” and “God Loves Gays.” Some peel away from the procession to dart into a Dunkin’ Donuts. They emerge a few minutes later cradling a cup of coffee or hot chocolate.

  When they reach the Tremont Temple Church, they form a half-circle outside the front doors. Boston police are standing out front to block people without registration papers from entering the building. The protesters have converged on the church to demonstrate against a Love Won Out conference, sponsored by Dobson’s Focus on the Family, being held inside. Love Won Out officials, already nervous, have ordered lunch from Subway for the nearly 800 people attending their conference so no one will have to leave the church. Love Won Out volunteers meet everyone coming through the front doors.

  “Are you registered?” a woman asks new arrivals politely.

  If so, people are directed upstairs, where their bags are searched for tape recorders and cameras. Wrists are stamped and wrapped in bright orange-red bands. Only those wearing wristbands are allowed to file into the sanctuary. The church has long, dark, wooden pews. It is surrounded on three sides by a balcony and has towering stained-glass windows depicting biblical scenes.

  The crowd takes several minutes to move through the swinging doors and settle into the pews. There are mothers and nervous teenage sons. Husbands and wives, their heads bent over the conference forms, circle on printed schedules the breakout sessions they plan to attend. Single men and women sit alone, thumbing through the conference notes. In a small media section at the back of the sanctuary, only a couple of seats are occupied. The event does not welcome the “secular” media, which it accuses of promoting an anti-Christian agenda. Love Won Out volunteers walk up and down the aisles looking for potential infiltrators or anyone holding a tape recorder or a camera. Those who attempt to tape or photograph the conference will be ejected.

  Love Won Out was founded, its brochure says, to help families, men and women, and especially those plagued by what the movement calls “same-sex attraction,” recover traditional male and female roles. The organization, led by many who identify themselves as “exgays,” brands homosexuality as a disease and condemns it as a threat to the family, the health of the nation and Christianity. The movement’s professed goal is to “cure” those who have “same-sex attraction.” But it has also declared war against gays and lesbians who are unrepentant, those they brand as “militant” and who actively promote “the gay agenda.” Although they speak the language of compassion toward those willing to be healed, they also say there should be no tolerance or acceptance of gays and lesbians who refuse to seek help. And America will soon pay a price, they warn, for permitting gays and lesbians to live openly in defiance of God.

  The legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts has helped mobilize the Christian Right, including many in the state who see the move as morally polluting their schools and communities. Christian activists in Massachusetts are frequent guests at Christian conferences, where they speak of their persecution by “homosexual radicals.” This cultivated sense of persecution—cultivated by those doing the persecuting—allows the Christian Right to promote bigotry and attack any outcry as part of the war against the Christian faith. A group trying to curtail the civil rights of gays and lesbians portrays itself, in this rhetorical twist, as victims of an effort to curtail the civil rights of Christians. One of the most vocal is Tom Crouse, a pastor in Holland, Massachusetts, who hosts a show titled Engaging Your World broadcast on local Christian radio station WVNE-AM 760 in Worcester. He features antigay guests and has held a “Mr. Hetero” contest in Wooster. The contest included “exgays.” Crouse says the contest was a way of promoting “God’s design” in response to a “Mr. Gay 2005” competition held in San Diego. He refuses to use the word “gay” on his talk show, saying he uses the word only “in its proper context, which means ‘happy.’ ”

  “People will call in to my show and say, ‘You’re gay,’ to me on the air, and I’ll say, ‘I’m gay, you’re gay.’ ” He lashes out at “homosexual activists” who he says “are well financed, well organized, and small in numbers.

  “They’re rabid and they’re active, and they have no problem telling you they’re going to kill you,” he has said, “no problem telling you they’re going to burn you to death, no problem telling you anything, all in the name of tolerance.

  “If you listen to how Jesus is proclaimed today, you’d think Jesus is some tie-dye-shirt-wearing, pot-smoking hippie. That’s not who Jesus is. You know, Jesus was a man who spoke the truth. He said, ‘You’re of your father, the devil.’ He walked away from those who could have stoned him and killed him. Jesus said, ‘I am God, you are not. I am the living truth and the life. No one knows what God knows but me’—I say Jesus was the most intolerant person in the world. Jesus would not be accepted in many churches today.”

  Mike Haley, director of gender issues at Focus on the Family, and himself an “ex-gay,” walks up and stands behind the pulpit in the Boston church. His collared shirt is pressed and tucked into his khaki pants. His sandy blond hair is combed neatly to the side. He welcomes the crowd to the first Love Won Out conference in Boston, the organization’s 36th event since its founding in 1998. Trinity Temple, he reminds those in the sanctuary, has hosted every president since John F. Kennedy and now, Love Won Out. He raises his fist in the air as the crowd claps and says, “Amen.” The successful staging of the event in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriages were first legalized, is, he assures the crowd, a victory for Christians.

  Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist, is president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, an organization known as NARTH. He says he has treated more than 1,000 men who came to him with “unwanted homosexuality.” He has written three books on the subject, including his most recent, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, co-authored with his wife, Linda Ames Nicolosi.

  Nicolosi says that all men are “born to be heterosexual.” He cal
ls heterosexual orientation that which corresponds to man’s “true nature.” Homosexuality, he says, “is a masculine inferiority.” He speaks of “the gender identity phase” when the boy begins to realize that the world is divided into male and female. Children who cannot disconnect from their mothers and identify with their fathers, he explains, become homosexuals. He says the male child is biologically “trying to fulfill his natural masculine strivings. He is wired to be masculine. His body is designed for a woman.” The job of the child is “to dis-identify with the mother and bond with the father.”

  The boy, he says, “begins to realize that he’s like this father image that he never really paid attention to before. He becomes interested in the father. And if he reaches out to the father, and if the mother supports him in making this transition, and if the father is welcoming and encouraging, the boy will make the transition. He’ll bond emotionally with his father, make that male identification, and that becomes the foundation of his sexual preference, what he finds sexually attractive.”

  But if the father is distant, detached, unavailable, in short a “negative figure in the boy’s eye,” the boy will reach out to the father and be hurt.

  “He will be made to feel ashamed of his masculine ambition,” Nicolosi says. “The father’s nonresponsiveness will make him feel bad about that effort, and he will basically shut down. And he will be shamed for his masculine strivings, and basically what he says is, ‘If you make me unimportant, I make you unimportant. If you’re not interested in me, I’m not interested in you.’ And you know, if you know any homosexual men, they do not have a good relationship with their fathers. Their fathers are just not that important in their lives, period.”

  Nicolosi warns against fathers who are “weak and unmasculine, and perhaps beaten down by the mother.” He says that boys need a “strong, masculine father who is worthy of imitation, of modeling, worthy of disconnecting from the mother.” He also cautions against an “overemotionally involved mother” who is a “dominant, strong personality.”

  He argues that mothers who do not cede authority to the father, who do not represent to the boy that dad is the leader of the family, contribute to their child’s homosexuality. In proper development, he says, the nurturing of women becomes less important as the boy grows older. The rougher play of the father is required if the boy is to develop into a man.

  “You know, the young father tossing the son up in the air and catching him,” Nicolosi says. “And, you know, the father is laughing and the kid is petrified, you know? And the mother is watching this ritual and she has no idea, she’s getting a heart attack watching this. But as the father is tossing the kid up and down, because the father is laughing, the son starts laughing. And a very important lesson has just been taught, one that men teach boys: danger can be fun. Even if the father drops the kid and cracks his head a little bit, at least he will be straight. A small price to pay, I tell ya.”

  And when males are brought up by masculine fathers, when they become fully developed men, they are, he says, “a little dull, you know what I mean? We don’t see colors as vividly. Have you noticed? We don’t seem to remember show tunes, I don’t know why. Anyway, more importantly than ‘Danger can be fun,’ the boy is caught by the father, ‘And I can trust dad.’ And men with a homosexual problem do not trust other men.”

  Those who fail to achieve their masculinity, however, become mama’s boys. They seek to please the mother. They are the kind of boys, he says, who leave for school with their hair in place and wearing neat, clean clothes and come home from school in the same, perfect condition.

  “And you can see how in adulthood, the gay man desires to break that good little boy mold,” Nicolosi says. “He is angry and wants to rebel. He’s aggressive. He’s shocking. He’s offensive. He’s provocative because he wants to break out of that good little boy mold that he was in. While all the other boys were being bad, he was sitting with mommy in the kitchen; now he wants to be bad. Have you ever seen a gay pride parade? That’s exactly right. If you walk into a gay bar, it looks like a bunch of men who want to be bad little boys. You walk into a straight bar, and all these straight guys are sitting there, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ because they got it out of their system a long time ago. They’re exhausted. Their wives exhausted them.”

  He throws out that gay men gravitate toward theater to “escape into fantasy” because “fantasy is a big part of the gay identity.”

  A woman in a pew leans toward her husband and whispers that this is a description of their son.

  The cure for what he terms the “male gender deficit,” for those who suffer from “same-sex attraction,” is “reparative therapy.” It can come about through a close connection with a strong, heterosexual man who is comfortable in his male role. When homosexuals “make an emotional connection with a straight man, their homosexuality disappears,” he says. They no longer have trouble being assertive, and these “heterosexual men with a homosexual problem” are cured.

  It is left to Mike Haley, who identifies himself as an ex-gay, to back up Nicolosi’s assertions with personal testimony. He tells the group that his father was cold and distant, refusing to initiate him into the world of men, and taunted him because of his lack of athletic ability as “Michelle” or “my third daughter.” He describes his close relationship as an 11-year-old boy with a man who eventually began to have sex with him.

  Eventually Haley went to see a counselor who told him he was born gay. He frequented the gay bars and discos at Laguna Beach in California, not far from his home. He felt, he says, as if he had “come home.” His lifestyle, however, conflicted with the views of his church. And his pastor, when he confessed, told him he had to reform. The conflict between his desires and what he thought was right in the eyes of God began to haunt him.

  “So what do you think I did as a 17-year-old junior in high school that didn’t want to be gay?” Haley says. “I read my Bible and I read my Bible and I read my Bible and I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. I remember kneeling next to my bed and saying, ‘Lord, I’m not going to stop praying until I feel different,’ only to fall asleep, waking up to feel just the same as I had when I had started to pray.”

  He finally turned his back on the church. He tells the group that at this juncture he believed Christianity was “a lie” and “hated Christians.”

  “I wanted to be moral within my homosexuality,” he says. “I wanted to have that long-term monogamous relationship. But when I didn’t find it in this city, I’d move to the next.” He lived, he says, on the “gay treadmill.”

  “It’s not a whole lot different than the treadmill that I see some heterosexual women buy in to,” Haley says. “When they believe they have to be a certain size, look a certain way, dress a certain way, to be acceptable to the heterosexual male population. Well, you take that same phenomenon and put it into the gay community, and it seems overexaggerated. To be the accepted commodity, you need to look a certain way, act a certain way, drive a certain car, talk a certain way. So I was working out three to four hours a day, I was doing injectable steroids. I was bulimic because I wanted to eat, but I didn’t want to gain weight because I had to have that perfect physique because that physique was what defined my value and my worth during my time and involvement in the gay community.”

  He says he became a gay activist in Dallas. He marched in Gay Pride parades.

  And then one night Haley picked up a man at a gay gym, but as they progressed the man stopped and told Haley he could not have sex. Haley recalls him saying: “I’m sorry that I’ve led you on, but I’m a Christian, and I’m trying to walk away from this.”

  The two men spoke most of the night. Haley was introduced through the man to a counselor named Jeff Conrad, who promised to help cure him of his homosexuality. Haley started what he says was “a godly, Christian mentoring relationship.”

  “He sent me birthday cards: ‘I don’t even know if you’re getting this card, but I want to let you know that I love you,
that God loves you, that change is possible,’ ” Haley says. “I’d write him back the nastiest, ugly letters about his faith, about his God: ‘Leave me alone, I was born this way.’ He’d write me back: ‘Mike, I want you to go to the library. I want you to find me a study that will prove to me that you were born gay. And if you can do that, then I will change the way that I believe.’ ”

  Haley says he left his “homosexual lifestyle” in December 1989 after his sessions with Conrad. He omits the details of his “cure.” He got married. He returned to the church and became a youth pastor. He started working for Dobson.

  Dobson’s attacks on gays are relentless and brutal. He likens the proponents of gay marriage to the Nazis.2 He warns in his book Marriage Under Fire that sanctioning gay marriage is the first salvo by the gay movement to destroy the American family. “This is an issue America has got to wake up to,” Dobson writes. “The homosexual agenda is a beast. It wants our kids. . . . ”3 And he goes on to ask, “How about group marriage? Or marriage between daddies and little girls? How about marriage between a man and his donkey?4

  “Moms and dads, are you listening? This movement is THE greatest threat to your children,” Dobson warns. “It is of particular danger to your wide-eyed boys, who have no idea what demoralization is planned for them.”5

  This conference is one of many Dobson and his associates mount throughout the country every year. Bill Maier, vice president and psychologist in residence for Focus on the Family, rises to speak. He attacks the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts, which he calls “the most radical social experiment ever proposed in our country that’s redefining the institution of marriage.” He defines the ruling as one made by “four rogue judges on the Supreme Judicial Court who basically forced their will on the people and the legislature of Massachusetts.” The ruling, he says, is “a radical redefinition of the human family.” At issue is “whether men and women are unique and different and whether the two genders complete each other in their differences. It’s about whether mother and father are both essential in the process of healthy child development, and it’s about whether there are compelling societal reasons to define marriage as one thing and not define it as something else.