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Exclusive Op-Ed: Gay Iraq War Vet Who Confronted Alan Chambers Takes On Ex-Gay, Inc.

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Guest author and ex-gay survivor Sean Sala appears in Oprah’s OWN “Special Report: God & Gays,” on “Our America” with Lisa Ling, which airs Thursday. Here, in this exclusive op-ed, Sala shares his experiences with Alan Chambers, the ex-gay movement, and his own faith.

Moments before I was to take my own life, I stared at the closet door in my friend’s room. Behind that door was his loaded gun. In a desperate plea before I was going to end it all, I had flashes of the decade I spent in the Church where I was told I was possessed by demons. Flashbacks of when I was walking into a Sunday service, called a “fag” and was ultimately kicked out of Christian Life Assembly in Carrollton, Texas (under the past leadership and former name) for being gay, and memories of the Exodus International “Living Waters” program where I was told time and time again that I was molested and that is what lead to me becoming gay.

“I’ve never been molested,” I repeated over and over again to the leadership who promised that “thousands had been delivered” from homosexuality. But my questioning and resistance to things that were manufactured within the therapy instantly demonized me. Since I would not “admit” I had been molested I was deemed as “rebellious, insecure and non-deliverable.” Which, in my teenage mind, damaged me and brought me to the point of suicide years later when I was 21. I believe that only the Divine stopped me from ending my life that day.

After coming out to the youth pastor I grew up with, he said to me “just go and indulge with men and come back and repent.” That was his response to my honest and transparent moment about my life. But because the political fallout to him and his effectiveness as a minister was on the line, he basically told me to be a hypocrite in order for the anti-gay church establishment to survive. This happened before Exodus International CEO Alan Chambers finally “came out” and stated that gay “reparative therapy” had caused immense damage, even though just months before he had said in an interview to Lisa Ling that “change is possible, I stand by that phrase.”

Before I came on the “The Great Reconciliation,” I had been involved in national LGBT policy activism for almost three years. In my own work as an activist, I had a growing concern for the anti-gay criminalization laws that were brewing in Uganda’s parliament, along with rumors that other African nations were cooking up genocidal policies against the LGBT community as well. Evangelical Churches in America were a large conduit — psychologically and financially — for these bills of hate to come to fruition. I desperately called my former Pastor who now served as staff of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas — the seventh largest mega-church in the nation. I believed if I could rally mega-churches against Uganda’s proposed laws (although they themselves would never condone being gay) surely they would stand up against genocide?

Well, the moment I contacted the staff of Ed Young, my former Pastor, I was unfriended on Facebook without a word. Multiple emails were never responded to, social media pleas ignored and he has ignored my calls since then. Complete radio silence from Fellowship Church. Not because I asked them to stand up for “being gay” but because I asked them to stand up against genocide. Although I can not say that Fellowship condones genocide, the silence and fear from their end echoes the damage that ex-gay therapy and the larger hatred and second class citizenship of gays has still not truly been addressed in the church. If it’s gay we can not touch it, even if it is to aid someone in need because LGBT people are “evil.”

But the moment my former Pastor found out that I mentioned their Church and their smug attitude towards LGBT Ugandan issues in this expose, I received a phone call. Which I ignored. The tide has turned and they are on the wrong side of history and frankly the wrong side of the Gospel of Christ’s mission. I don’t have time to play PR games with a so called “Church” because now their credibility is on the line, again.

skitched-20130619-182010Image:
A photo from Lisa Ling’s “Special Report: God & Gays.”
Left to right are Sean Sala, Lisa Ling, and former board member of Exodus Michael Bussee.

When I headed into that church basement in Los Angeles to film the documentary, Alan Chambers apologized. For me though, that apology will not be enough until Exodus agrees to shut down. Although I can’t share details of the show until it airs Thursday, I am actively working to assure that the tired, old magician Alan Chambers will never be able to wield more damage than he has already done — especially in light of a recent revelation that Exodus could directly have had a ripple effect that has lead to pending genocide in Africa, as revealed by the Reverend Albert Ogle in a recent article.

The world experienced the “Great Reformation.” America has experienced the “Great Awakening.” Now I believe we as a nation stand at the point of what I call “The Great Reconciliation.” The nation has changed. Supreme Court rulings of equality are pending and the Evangelical Church that once ruled the bias against gays, the moral majority movement, has withered almost to extinction.

Standing is a minority that is spreading like a wild fire, such as churches like MissionGathering Christian Church in San Diego and others. That fire that is spreading? Gays are God’s creation. The nation is embracing it. Pastor Richard McCullen of MissionGathering, he himself a former closeted Charismatic Preacher, has come out and stayed out. Alan Chambers, the man whose eyes I stared into that night on “Our America” says he gets it … but will he? Lisa Ling who sat next to me during the expose said this:

“I am humbled to have been able to be part of one of the most emotional experiences of my life. I was in awe of the courage it took for the survivors to share their stories. My hope is that something really positive comes of it.”

The reconciliation is upon us. Whereas Evangelicals once thought that the world would turn gay, the exact opposite had occurred. Many churches are accepting of LGBT people and those that are stuck to the old ways are waning in relevance.

Chambers now stands in an opportune moment. Will he rage against the silence of Fellowship Church and Ed Young’s cronies who are so anti-gay they can’t even have a conversation about how gays should not be killed in mass numbers? Will Alan Chambers finally end the concentration camp of Exodus? Whatever happens, don’t miss it. Whatever happens, don’t let our poised moment of the reconciliation of the LGBT community and the Evangelical Church wane. This is Our America too and according to Rev. Ogle, He is “Our God, too.”

But Exodus must shut down and you can be a part of that. SIGN THE PETITION

 

_The Great Reconciliation__ Gays take on Ex-Gay Inc. on Our America with Lisa Ling - Google Drive-1Sean Sala is a national gay, social and sexual rights activist. He was the organizer of the 2011 Active Duty Military March in San Diego in which over 250 active duty Military marched in San Diego Pride while Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was still national law. He also was an organizer and liaison for the 2012 Active Duty Military March in which he pressured top Military brass resulting in the Pentagon issuing a historical first time blanket certification and approved the United States Military to wear their full uniforms for the first time in a pride parade in US history; where over 450 military personnel participated. He formally was on the national leadership committee of  Servicemembers United the nations largest LGBT military organization, where he participated in a White House Executive office meeting on Southern California and Gay Military issues and sparred in national news against anti-gay Republican Congressman opposed to Gay troops. He also advocated for troops battling PTSD to the San Diego City Council. He has been featured on the ‘Real World,’ MTV sponsored internet casts on gay rights, local, national and international news and an official Library of Congress documentation on the DADT repeal movement. He is a popular blogger and a columnist for San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

After resigning from Servicemembers United he is in progress of challenging the top ten Mega Churches in United States to denounce Uganda’s Parliament from executing gays and he is the chief organizer of the San Diego rally on March 25th to demand the Supreme Court to rule for full federal marriage equality. He also has formed the “Military Freedom Coalition” to challenge the Transgender ban in the Military. He is also currently working on LGBT issues affecting the continent of Africa.

He served in the United States Navy six years for Naval Intelligence, three combat tours and is an Iraq war Veteran.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article included an image that incorrectly identified Sean Sala, Lisa Ling, and Alan Chambers. We apologize for the error.

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News

Biden Amps Up Field Offices, Trump to Mobilize Thousands of Lawyers to Monitor Vote Counts

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52 mins ago

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April 19, 2024

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With less than seven months before Election Day the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign are taking shape, and like their politics they could not be more different.

President Biden is “scooping up record-making donations,” “flush with cash,” “building a behemoth of a campaign,” and “plowing the money into an expanding campaign operation in battleground states that appears to surpass what Donald Trump has built,” NBC News reported earlier this month.

Ex-President Donald Trump, struggling with donations, has “raised $75 million less for his presidential bid than Joe Biden and has 270,000 fewer unique donors now than at the same stage of his run for the White House four years ago,” the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

Now, as the Biden campaign invests in a massive ground game, Trump’s strategy is emerging, and it appears to be built on his “Big Lie,” the false and debunked conspiracy theory that there was and is tremendous election fraud.

READ MORE: ‘Repercussions’: Democrats and Republicans Stand Against ‘Pro-Putin’ House GOP Faction

Politico reports the Trump campaign plans to dispatch “more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers across battleground states to monitor — and potentially challenge — vote counting in November.”

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are calling their plan “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.” The RNC is chaired by Trump’s hand-picked elections specialist who worked on the Bush 2000 election Florida recount team, and co-chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law.

Despite Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020, his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, his own FBI Director, Chris Wray, his own Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs, all concluded there was no widespread election fraud and none that would have changed any election results. An independent federal agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, came to the same conclusion, all as The Brennan Center for Justice reported more than a month after the 2020 election.

Politico warns, “should Trump once again attempt to overturn the election, he will already have in place tens of thousands of workers who could help with that effort.”

“Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day,” Trump said in a statement.

The Trump campaign “plans to deploy lawyers to monitor voter machine testing, early voting, election day voting, mail ballot processing and post-election canvassing, auditing and recounts. The campaign also plans to station lawyers at mail-in voting processing centers and set up a hotline that poll watchers and voters can use to report problems,” Politico adds. “The RNC also stated that attorneys will be stationed at ‘every single target processing center where mail ballots are tabulated.'”

READ MORE: ‘Big Journalism Fail’: Mainstream Media Blasted Over Coverage of Historic Trump Trial

The announcement of that massive operation comes on the heels of a convention this week hosted by the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association that “drew a parade of felons, disgraced politicians, election deniers, conspiracy theorists and, in the end, a few sheriffs,” NBC News reports. Also among attendees were “MAGA celebrities.”

“The group sees sheriffs as the highest authority in the U.S., more powerful than the federal government, and it wants these county officers to form posses to patrol polling places, seize voting machines and investigate the Democrats and foreign nations behind what they claim is a criminal effort to rig the vote by flooding the country with immigrants who vote illegally.”

David Gilbert at Wired reported: “Far-Right Sheriffs Want a Citizen Army to Stop ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Voters.”

Their plan perfectly dovetails with Donald Trump’s campaign push.

Gilbert writes, “election deniers and conspiracists have coalesced around a narrative they plan to push ahead of November: Blame the immigrants.”

Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association told Wired that immigrants “have already disrupted the election because they are getting registered to vote.”

“That is election fraud,” Mack added, “these people are not qualified to vote. They are going to vote for whoever got them here and gave them a bunch of free stuff to get here, and of course that’s the Democrat Party, who are complicit in all of this.”

There are no reports of undocumented immigrants registering to vote in any substantial number. NBC News last week reported, “noncitizen voting” is “already illegal and very rare.”

READ MORE: ‘They Want Russia to Win So Badly’: GOP Congressman Blasts Far-Right House Republicans

Those claims, however, echo some made by the Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson one week ago in his joint press conference with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

“We only want U.S. citizens to vote in U.S. elections,” Johnson said, standing next to Trump, “but there are some Democrats who don’t want to do that. We believe that one of their designs, one of the reasons for this open border, which everybody asked all around the country, why would they do this? Why would they allow all this chaos? Why the violence? Because they want to turn these people into voters.”

“Right now the administration is encouraging illegals to go to their local welfare office to sign up for benefits,” Johnson, one of the top election deniers in the country, claimed as he explained his conspiracy theory. He did not state how the Biden Administration is communicating with undocumented immigrants, nor did he offer proof of these communications. He also did not state that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are ineligible for any government welfare program.

 

Image via Shutterstock

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‘Repercussions’: Democrats and Republicans Stand Against ‘Pro-Putin’ House GOP Faction

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18 hours ago

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April 18, 2024

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Some House Democrats and House Republicans are coming together toward a common opponent: far-right “pro-Putin” hardliners in the House Republican conference, who appear to be led by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Congresswoman Greene has been threatening to oust the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Last month she filed a “motion to vacate the chair.” If she chooses to call it up she could force a vote on the House floor to try to remove Speaker Johnson.

House Democrats say they are willing to vote against ousting Johnson, as long as the Speaker puts on the floor desperately needed and long-awaited legislation to fund aid to Ukraine and Israel. Johnson has refused to put the Ukraine aid bill on the floor for months, but after Iran attacked Israel Johnson switched gears. Almost all Democrats and a seemingly large number of Republicans want to pass the Ukraine and Israel aid packages.

RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘Putin’s Envoy’? Democrat’s Bills Mock Republican’s Actions

Forgoing the possibility of installing Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker, which is conceivable given Johnson’s now one-vote majority, Democrats say if Johnson does the right thing, they will throw him their support.

“I think he’ll be in good shape,” to get Democrats to support him, if he puts the Ukraine aid bill on the floor, U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) told CNN Thursday. “I would say that there’s a lot of support for the underlying bills. I think those are vital.”

“If these bills were delivered favorably, and the aid was favorably voted upon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene went up there with a motion to remove him, for instance, I think there’s gonna be a lot of Democrats that move to kill that motion,” Congressman Krishnamoorthi said. “They don’t want to see him getting punished for doing the right thing.”

“I think it is a very bad policy of the House to allow one individual such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is an arsonist to this House of Representatives,” U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) told CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane, when asked about intervening to save Johnson. He added he doesn’t want her “to have so much influence.”

U.S. Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, one of several Republicans who won their New York districts in 2022, districts that were previously held by Democrats, opposes Greene’s motion to vacate – although he praised the Georgia GOP congresswoman.

CNN’s Manu Raju reports Republicans “say it’s time to marginalize hardliners blocking [their] agenda.”

D’Esposito, speaking to Raju, called for “repercussions for those who completely alienate the will of the conference. The people gave us the majority because they wanted Republicans to govern.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, like D’Esposito is another New York Republican who won a previously Democratic seat in 2022. Lawler spoke out against the co-sponsor of Greene’s motion to vacate, U.S. Rep. Tim Massie (R-KY), along with two other House Republicans who are working to block the Ukraine aid bill via their powerful seats on the Rules Committee.

U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a former Navy pilot, blasted Congresswoman Greene.

RELATED: ‘They Want Russia to Win So Badly’: GOP Congressman Blasts Far-Right House Republicans

“Time is of the essence” for Ukraine, Rep. Sherrill told CNN Wednesday night. “The least we can do is support our Democratic allies, especially given what we know Putin to do. To watch a report and to think there are people like Marjorie Taylor Greene on the right that are pro-Putin? That are pro-Russia? It is really shocking.”

U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), as NCRM reported Thursday, had denounced Greene.

“I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the Speaker over it,” he said, referring to the Ukraine aid bill Greene and her cohorts want to tank. “I mean that’s a strange position to take.”

The far-right hardliners are also causing chaos in the House.

“Things just got very heated on the House floor,” NBC News’ Julie Tsirkin reported earlier Thursday. “Group of hardliners were trying to pressure Johnson to only put Israel aid on the floor and hold Ukraine aid until the Senate passed HR2.”

HR2 is the House Republicans’ extremist anti-immigrant legislation that has n o chance of passage in the Senate nor would it be signed into law by President Biden.

“Johnson said he couldn’t do it, and [U.S. Rep. Derrick] Van Orden,” a far-right Republican from Wisconsin “called him ‘tubby’ and vowed to bring on the MTV [Motion to Vacate.]”

“No one in the group (Gaetz, Boebert, Burchett, Higgins, Donalds et al.) were threatening Johnson with an MTV,” Tsirkin added. “Van Orden seemed to escalate things dramatically…”

Despite Greene’s pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine positions, her falsehoods about “Ukrainian Nazis,” and Russians not slaughtering Ukrainian clergy, reporters continue to “swarm”:

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Afraid and Intimidated’: Trump Trial Juror Targeted by Fox News Dismissed

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‘They Want Russia to Win So Badly’: GOP Congressman Blasts Far-Right House Republicans

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22 hours ago

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April 18, 2024

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A sitting Republican Congressman is harshly criticizing far-right House Republicans over their apparent support of Russia.

“I guess their reasoning is they want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the Speaker over it. I mean that’s a strange position to take,” U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a three-term Texas Republican rated a hard-core conservative told CNN’s Manu Raju, in video posted Thursday. “I think they want to be in the minority too. I think that’s an obvious reality.”

Congressman Crenshaw was referring to the movement led by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), now joined by U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), over the Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s decision to finally put legislation on the floor to provide funding to Ukraine to support that sovereign nation in its fight against Russia.

“I’m still trying to process all the b*llsh*t,” Crenshaw added.

Crenshaw on Thursday also commented on Speaker Johnson’s remarks, stating he will hold the Ukraine funding vote regardless of attempts to oust him over it.

“To be clear, he’s being threatened for even allowing a vote to come to the floor. For allowing the constitutional process to play out as intended by our Founders. That’s a wild thing to consider, especially when his enemies consider themselves ‘conservative.’ Not conserving the painstaking constitutional process our Founders created, that’s for sure. Conserving Putin’s gains on the battlefield, more like it.”

Journalist Brian Beutler, a former editor-in-chief at Crooked Media, called it, “darkly funny to me that a pincer movement of MAGAns and leftists mock liberals for claiming the GOP works hand in glove with Russia, and then multiple conservative Republican dissenters are like ‘no it’s true, we’re lousy with Russian influence.'”

Watch Crenshaw’s remarks below or at this link.

READ MORE: Marjorie Taylor Greene, ‘Putin’s Envoy’? Democrat’s Bills Mock Republican’s Actions

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