Sunday, September 19, 2010 5:21:35 AM
My Ex-Gay Life With the Tea Party Queen
Wade Richards in the '90s.
(waynebesen.com)
Wade Richards helped Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell rail against gay rights—until he came out. He tells Michelle Goldberg how O’Donnell abandoned him, and how her lesbian sister helped him accept his sexuality.
by Michelle Goldberg [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/author/michelle-goldberg/ ]
September 16, 2010 | 12:04am
A little more than 10 years ago, Wade Richards, a tormented, deeply religious 20-year-old gay man, took his Bible school tuition money and used it to fly to Los Angeles to join forces with Christine O’Donnell, a budding Christian right activist. O’Donnell, a former spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, had founded an organization called The Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth, or The SALT, in 1996; it was meant to organize young people around opposition to abortion, sex education, and homosexuality. Richards had just graduated from an ex-gay rehab program and had been interviewed about it on 20/20. Ostensibly cured, he got in touch with O’Donnell and became The SALT’s outreach coordinator and spokesman on homosexuality.
The SALT wasn’t much of an organization. It was run out of O’Donnell’s apartment, where Richards lived for his first month in California, and the two of them seemed to be its only employees. But O’Donnell was good at getting publicity. She appeared frequently on Politically Incorrect and other talk shows, and the two of them toured the country, giving press conferences and speaking at churches and colleges about sexual purity and curing homosexuality. Richards, though, was having doubts, which he confided to O’Donnell. “I told her, ‘You know, Christine, I’m still super struggling with same-sex attraction,’” he says. “‘I don’t really know if this is real, if I can really be this changed person that I’m going around the country speaking and saying that I am.’” She paid little attention, he says. Campaigning against gay rights was too central to her mission.
It still is. Battling Mike Castle for the Republican Senate nomination in Delaware, O’Donnell spread innuendo about her opponent’s sexuality. A firm her campaign employed released an ad that baselessly accused Castle of cheating on his wife with a man, and O’Donnell accused Castle of “un-manly tactics” and told him to “put his man-pants on.”
For O’Donnell, such gay-baiting was very much in character. Toward the end of the Clinton administration, she protested the appointment of James Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg, a posting the religious right opposed because Hormel was gay. “The SALT was concerned about Hormel’s ties to the pedophile-rights movement,” her website said, though there was not a shred of evidence behind the slur. In 1997, in a clip recently unearthed by Talking Points Memo, she appeared on C-SPAN, where, looking fresh, lovely, and innocent, she objected to AIDS sufferers being called “victims” because the disease is the product of their own actions. In an appearance on Fox in 2000, she exclaimed over the horrors of New York’s gay pride parade: “They’re getting away with nudity! They’re getting away with lasciviousness! They’re getting away with perversion!”
O’Donnell’s demonization of gay people is especially striking given the fact that, according to Richards, she has a sister who is openly lesbian. Indeed, it was meeting her sister, he says, that helped him begin to accept his own sexuality. “What helped me really come to grips was that her sister is an open lesbian and was living in L.A. and was in a long-term relationship and was working with a youth organization,” he says. “By hanging out with her, I saw, wow, she has a pretty normal life.” Being gay, he started to realize, needn’t condemn him to a life of seedy anonymous hookups, drug abuse, and nihilism.
Still, it took Richards several more months before he was ready to become ex-ex-gay. First, he went to work for a group called Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, whose founder, Peter LaBarbara, he’d met through O’Donnell. LaBarbara is among the most virulent anti-gay activists in the nation, famous for his prurient obsession with the outré corners of the gay sexual demimonde. After going undercover at an “International Mr. Leather” convention, for example, he appeared on Concerned Women for America’s radio show to regale his interviewer with tales of “grotesque hard-core homosexual pornography,” including urine fetishes and something called “pig sex.”
Richards was unnerved when he went into Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s “media room” and found copious hard-core porn—for research, naturally—as well as leather bondage gear for undercover work. “The sad thing was, there’s that 80-year-old grandma in Wichita, Kansas, thinking she’s donating this money to a good cause, and it’s going to who knows what kind of ‘research,’” says Richards. “As someone struggling with same-sex attraction, I thought, this is really not a place I need to be hanging out in.”
Eventually, Richards reached out to Wayne Besen, the founder of Truth Wins Out, a group that battles anti-gay religious extremism. The two had met when they debated on Alan Colmes’ radio show. Richards finally came out in an article in The Advocate in 2000. After that, he says, O’Donnell “totally turned her back on me. I never heard from her ever again. That’s been my experience with the Christian community in general. The minute I was struggling and saying, ‘Hey, listen, I don’t know really where I am with this,’ that’s when everyone really turned their back on me.”
O'Donnell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Today Richards, who works as a hairdresser in Arizona, says he is doing fine, but, says Besen, “I think he was harmed by Christine O’Donnell. Christine O’Donnell was toeing the party line at the expense of an individual. Often these groups, in pushing their dogma, they overlook that there’s a human being that’s having their lives upended.”
Michelle Goldberg is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594202087 ] and Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393329763 ({items linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=12258062 and preceding and following, and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=16065712 and preceding and following)]. She is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Glamour, and many other publications.
---
Delaware's Tea Party Terror
September 14, 2010 | 2:10pm
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-14/christine-odonnell-delawares-tea-party-terror/ [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-14/christine-odonnell-delawares-tea-party-terror/full/ ] [with comments]
The Wingnuts' New Queen
September 15, 2010 | 1:14am
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-15/christine-odonnell-new-wingnut-queen-wins-primary/ [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-15/christine-odonnell-new-wingnut-queen-wins-primary/full/ ] [with comments]
---
COPYRIGHT © 2008-10 RTST, INC.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-16/christine-odonnells-gay-former-aide-speaks-out/ [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-16/christine-odonnells-gay-former-aide-speaks-out/full/ ] [with comments]
=====
TWO Calls On Delaware GOP Senate Nominee Christine O’Donnell To Apologize For Running Failed Ex-Gay Program
Posted September 15th, 2010
Truth Wins Out called on GOP Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell, last night’s victorious [ http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/09/15/primary-odonnell-delaware.html ] Tea Party candidate in Delaware, to apologize for running a failed “ex-gay” ministry while she headed the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT). O’Donnell heavily promoted the “ex-gay” industry and hired Wade Richards, an “ex-gay” poster-boy, to deliver this message.
“Christine O’Donnell is an extremist and was a staunch supporter of the lie that people can ‘pray away the gay’,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “It is time that she apologizes for harming people with her failed ‘ex-gay’ program and for pushing a lie that obviously did not work.”
SALT staff member, Wade Richards, came out of the closet and renounced the “ex-gay” ministries in an August 14, 2000 Advocate magazine article.
“I’ve been through so much in my life already,” Richards, 21, told the Advocate in 2000. “But the one constant is I’m gay. I just want to spend some time being who I am.”
Richards made the decision to come out after he and Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen, who at the time worked for The Human Rights Campaign, debated on the Alan Colmes Radio Show. Richards was featured in the movie “Fish Can’t Fly”, which detailed the harm done by “ex-gay” organizations.
O’Donnell defeated nine-term Representative Mike Castle, a mainstay in Delaware politics and a political moderate. O’Donnell also opposes masturbation.
Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that fights anti-gay religious extremism. TWO monitors anti-LGBT organizations, documents their lies and exposes their leaders as charlatans. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality. Our goal is to create a world where LGBT individuals can live openly, honestly and true to themselves.
Copyright © 2010 Truth Win Out
http://www.truthwinsout.org/pressreleases/2010/09/11265/
=====
Watch TWO’s Wayne Besen on The Rachel Maddow Show
Posted September 17th, 2010 by Evan Hurst
On Friday, I appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show.
We discussed Delaware’s bizarre and extreme GOP Senate nominee, Christine O’Donnell and her deep roots in the so-called “ex-gay” industry. As the director of The Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT), she had an ex-gay program led by Wade Richards. He came out of the closet and O’Donnell, like a loving Christian, abandoned him, showing that she is cruel, unforgiving and mean-spirited.
Copyright © 2010 Truth Win Out
http://www.truthwinsout.org/pressreleases/2010/09/11365/
=====
Castle Blames Hannity, Limbaugh For His Loss
---
Rush on Karl Rove's O'donnel comments
---
Colbert Mocks O'Donnell For Equating Masturbation With Adultery (VIDEO)
First Posted: 09-16-10 09:49 AM | Updated: 09-16-10 09:49 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/16/colbert-christine-odonnel_n_719082.html [with comments]
=====
and see (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54568354 and preceding and following
Wade Richards in the '90s.
(waynebesen.com)
Wade Richards helped Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell rail against gay rights—until he came out. He tells Michelle Goldberg how O’Donnell abandoned him, and how her lesbian sister helped him accept his sexuality.
by Michelle Goldberg [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/author/michelle-goldberg/ ]
September 16, 2010 | 12:04am
A little more than 10 years ago, Wade Richards, a tormented, deeply religious 20-year-old gay man, took his Bible school tuition money and used it to fly to Los Angeles to join forces with Christine O’Donnell, a budding Christian right activist. O’Donnell, a former spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, had founded an organization called The Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth, or The SALT, in 1996; it was meant to organize young people around opposition to abortion, sex education, and homosexuality. Richards had just graduated from an ex-gay rehab program and had been interviewed about it on 20/20. Ostensibly cured, he got in touch with O’Donnell and became The SALT’s outreach coordinator and spokesman on homosexuality.
The SALT wasn’t much of an organization. It was run out of O’Donnell’s apartment, where Richards lived for his first month in California, and the two of them seemed to be its only employees. But O’Donnell was good at getting publicity. She appeared frequently on Politically Incorrect and other talk shows, and the two of them toured the country, giving press conferences and speaking at churches and colleges about sexual purity and curing homosexuality. Richards, though, was having doubts, which he confided to O’Donnell. “I told her, ‘You know, Christine, I’m still super struggling with same-sex attraction,’” he says. “‘I don’t really know if this is real, if I can really be this changed person that I’m going around the country speaking and saying that I am.’” She paid little attention, he says. Campaigning against gay rights was too central to her mission.
It still is. Battling Mike Castle for the Republican Senate nomination in Delaware, O’Donnell spread innuendo about her opponent’s sexuality. A firm her campaign employed released an ad that baselessly accused Castle of cheating on his wife with a man, and O’Donnell accused Castle of “un-manly tactics” and told him to “put his man-pants on.”
For O’Donnell, such gay-baiting was very much in character. Toward the end of the Clinton administration, she protested the appointment of James Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg, a posting the religious right opposed because Hormel was gay. “The SALT was concerned about Hormel’s ties to the pedophile-rights movement,” her website said, though there was not a shred of evidence behind the slur. In 1997, in a clip recently unearthed by Talking Points Memo, she appeared on C-SPAN, where, looking fresh, lovely, and innocent, she objected to AIDS sufferers being called “victims” because the disease is the product of their own actions. In an appearance on Fox in 2000, she exclaimed over the horrors of New York’s gay pride parade: “They’re getting away with nudity! They’re getting away with lasciviousness! They’re getting away with perversion!”
O’Donnell’s demonization of gay people is especially striking given the fact that, according to Richards, she has a sister who is openly lesbian. Indeed, it was meeting her sister, he says, that helped him begin to accept his own sexuality. “What helped me really come to grips was that her sister is an open lesbian and was living in L.A. and was in a long-term relationship and was working with a youth organization,” he says. “By hanging out with her, I saw, wow, she has a pretty normal life.” Being gay, he started to realize, needn’t condemn him to a life of seedy anonymous hookups, drug abuse, and nihilism.
Still, it took Richards several more months before he was ready to become ex-ex-gay. First, he went to work for a group called Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, whose founder, Peter LaBarbara, he’d met through O’Donnell. LaBarbara is among the most virulent anti-gay activists in the nation, famous for his prurient obsession with the outré corners of the gay sexual demimonde. After going undercover at an “International Mr. Leather” convention, for example, he appeared on Concerned Women for America’s radio show to regale his interviewer with tales of “grotesque hard-core homosexual pornography,” including urine fetishes and something called “pig sex.”
Richards was unnerved when he went into Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s “media room” and found copious hard-core porn—for research, naturally—as well as leather bondage gear for undercover work. “The sad thing was, there’s that 80-year-old grandma in Wichita, Kansas, thinking she’s donating this money to a good cause, and it’s going to who knows what kind of ‘research,’” says Richards. “As someone struggling with same-sex attraction, I thought, this is really not a place I need to be hanging out in.”
Eventually, Richards reached out to Wayne Besen, the founder of Truth Wins Out, a group that battles anti-gay religious extremism. The two had met when they debated on Alan Colmes’ radio show. Richards finally came out in an article in The Advocate in 2000. After that, he says, O’Donnell “totally turned her back on me. I never heard from her ever again. That’s been my experience with the Christian community in general. The minute I was struggling and saying, ‘Hey, listen, I don’t know really where I am with this,’ that’s when everyone really turned their back on me.”
O'Donnell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Today Richards, who works as a hairdresser in Arizona, says he is doing fine, but, says Besen, “I think he was harmed by Christine O’Donnell. Christine O’Donnell was toeing the party line at the expense of an individual. Often these groups, in pushing their dogma, they overlook that there’s a human being that’s having their lives upended.”
Michelle Goldberg is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594202087 ] and Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393329763 ({items linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=12258062 and preceding and following, and http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=16065712 and preceding and following)]. She is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Glamour, and many other publications.
---
Delaware's Tea Party Terror
September 14, 2010 | 2:10pm
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-14/christine-odonnell-delawares-tea-party-terror/ [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-14/christine-odonnell-delawares-tea-party-terror/full/ ] [with comments]
The Wingnuts' New Queen
September 15, 2010 | 1:14am
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-15/christine-odonnell-new-wingnut-queen-wins-primary/ [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-15/christine-odonnell-new-wingnut-queen-wins-primary/full/ ] [with comments]
---
COPYRIGHT © 2008-10 RTST, INC.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-16/christine-odonnells-gay-former-aide-speaks-out/ [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-16/christine-odonnells-gay-former-aide-speaks-out/full/ ] [with comments]
=====
TWO Calls On Delaware GOP Senate Nominee Christine O’Donnell To Apologize For Running Failed Ex-Gay Program
Posted September 15th, 2010
Truth Wins Out called on GOP Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell, last night’s victorious [ http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/09/15/primary-odonnell-delaware.html ] Tea Party candidate in Delaware, to apologize for running a failed “ex-gay” ministry while she headed the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT). O’Donnell heavily promoted the “ex-gay” industry and hired Wade Richards, an “ex-gay” poster-boy, to deliver this message.
“Christine O’Donnell is an extremist and was a staunch supporter of the lie that people can ‘pray away the gay’,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “It is time that she apologizes for harming people with her failed ‘ex-gay’ program and for pushing a lie that obviously did not work.”
SALT staff member, Wade Richards, came out of the closet and renounced the “ex-gay” ministries in an August 14, 2000 Advocate magazine article.
“I’ve been through so much in my life already,” Richards, 21, told the Advocate in 2000. “But the one constant is I’m gay. I just want to spend some time being who I am.”
Richards made the decision to come out after he and Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen, who at the time worked for The Human Rights Campaign, debated on the Alan Colmes Radio Show. Richards was featured in the movie “Fish Can’t Fly”, which detailed the harm done by “ex-gay” organizations.
O’Donnell defeated nine-term Representative Mike Castle, a mainstay in Delaware politics and a political moderate. O’Donnell also opposes masturbation.
Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that fights anti-gay religious extremism. TWO monitors anti-LGBT organizations, documents their lies and exposes their leaders as charlatans. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality. Our goal is to create a world where LGBT individuals can live openly, honestly and true to themselves.
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzHcqcXo_NA (with comments) (embedded)]
Copyright © 2010 Truth Win Out
http://www.truthwinsout.org/pressreleases/2010/09/11265/
=====
Watch TWO’s Wayne Besen on The Rachel Maddow Show
Posted September 17th, 2010 by Evan Hurst
On Friday, I appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show.
We discussed Delaware’s bizarre and extreme GOP Senate nominee, Christine O’Donnell and her deep roots in the so-called “ex-gay” industry. As the director of The Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT), she had an ex-gay program led by Wade Richards. He came out of the closet and O’Donnell, like a loving Christian, abandoned him, showing that she is cruel, unforgiving and mean-spirited.
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvsg6mUso5o (with comments) (embedded)]
Copyright © 2010 Truth Win Out
http://www.truthwinsout.org/pressreleases/2010/09/11365/
=====
Castle Blames Hannity, Limbaugh For His Loss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap_dug7xe8Y [with comments] [embedded/more at "Rep. Mike Castle: The 'Lies' Of Hannity And Limbaugh Were 'Significant' Reasons I Lost To Christine O'Donnell (VIDEO)", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/15/mike-castle-hannity-limbaugh-christine-odonnell-lies_n_718811.html (with comments)]
---
Rush on Karl Rove's O'donnel comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW99MFt1Qgs [with comments] ([items linked in] http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54449629 and preceding and following)
---
Colbert Mocks O'Donnell For Equating Masturbation With Adultery (VIDEO)
First Posted: 09-16-10 09:49 AM | Updated: 09-16-10 09:49 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/16/colbert-christine-odonnel_n_719082.html [with comments]
=====
and see (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54568354 and preceding and following
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
