Focus on the Family New Zealand is the local satellite of the predatory US Christian Right transnational, Focus on the Family. What does it have to say about LGBT issues?

One might be forgiven for assuming not much, given that its New Zealand franchise tends to be more obsessed with a forthcoming local Nelson-based anti-abortion conference in October, as well as displaying inevitable umbrage against Auckland’s forthcoming “Boobs on Bikes” parade down Queen Street.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that it’s there, in the pages of Boundless, a US FOF publication for adolescents and young adults. In the first one I viewed, the unfortunately named “John Thomas” (…) dealt with a young woman whose otherwise orthodox fundamentalist boyfriend is not a gay virgin, and has recurrent same-sex desires, which he labels ‘demonic,’ and hates himself for having. Thomas plugs FOF’s “Love Wins Out” and the associated “Exodus” exgay movement, and recommends that boyfriend finds a male “mentor”, while the couple confesses all to an older straight couple.

Randy Thomas ‘used’ to be a gay man fifteen years ago, but turned fundamentalist for unexplained reasons. He realised that hey, he wasn’t an “abomination,” it was gay sex. Notice that Thomas doesn’t seem to give all that much away.

Mike Ensley is in an Exodus “Student Ministry”, which must be novel to New Zealand readers, given that our own fundamentalist exgay movement considers primarily of men over fifty. Anyway, Ensley tells us that it can be “difficult” to suppress one’s gayness, especially if one is single. However, he argues that straights can be ’sexually broken’ too, and guilt-tripped about having sex before marriage, extramarital affairs, abortions and other ‘transgressions.’ He also ‘answers’ questions about what happens if one gets married, but isn’t attracted to one’s wife. He opines much about ’struggles’, ‘temptations’ and advises fellow captives of the exgay movement to isolate themselves from the Internet, former gay friends and unhealthy relationships.

Which are? Apparently, they’re anything affirmative to do with same-sex relationships. Just so we get the message, conservative Catholic Josef Budzisewski lays down the (twelfth century Thomist scholastic) “natural law” dogma which cites junk science about physical, ‘emotional’ and ’spiritual’ damage from gay sex, then blithely advises intersexed people to have ‘corrective’ surgery, and finally resorts to the old chestnut that gay sex is ‘unnnatural’ ’sodomy’, while ‘good’ heterosexual sex should be used for procreation and heterosexual marital intimacy.

Uh huh. Lie to yourself, guilt trip yourself, isolate yourself from others, ruin some straight woman’s life through marrying her, and do it because you dare not face whom you really are. Boundless? Shameless would be more like it.

Not Recommended:

http://www.family.org.nz

Focus on the Family New Zealand

http://www.boundless.org

Boundless (US FOF)