Either through luck or just a familial trait of pure stubbornness, I somehow managed to avoid getting involved with any “ex-gay” ministries as I was coming to terms with my sexuality and spirituality in my early 20s. However, I know plenty of people who succumbed to such “ministries” and the common thread in all of those stories is that once these people realized that being gay was, indeed, God’s will for their lives—they became persona non grata to their previous ex-gay “friends.”
So, it comes as no shock to read that Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Congress in Delaware, whose anti-sex positions (pardon the pun) have been well documented, would react in much the same way to “ex-ex-gays.”
Back in 1996, O’Donnell founded The Saviors Alliance for Lifting the Truth, or The SALT (an outfit run apparently from her Los Angeles apartment) that opposed abortion, homosexuality, and sex education. O’Donnell’s organization attracted then 20-year-old Wade Richards, a graduate of one of those “ex-gay” programs. He became O’Donnell’s “ex-gay” posterboy and the two toured the country talking to church groups and colleges about overcoming homosexuality and other matters of sexual purity.
Then, in 2000, after working for Peter LaBarbera’s Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Richards recanted—and O’Donnell disowned him.
He told The Advocate at the time that she “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.” It’s not a shock really. Once the “ex-gay” industry can’t use these people to make money—I mean, redeem gay people—they have no use for them anymore.
Today’s article in the Daily Beast is enlightening on one point: apparently O’Donnell has a sister who is a lesbian. It was through this sister that Richards finally saw through the lies he had been told about gay people by the “ex-gay” industry.
“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 longterm 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.
What O’Donnell’s hateful treatment of Richards, and her crusade against any form of sex outside of man-woman marriage (and definitely against sex for actual pleasure), proves is that she is already in violation of her own preaching about “chastity.”
In a 1998 piece for Common Dissent, she writes that chastity means to be “clean, pure and holy. […] The dictionary listed words like integrity, honesty and purity as synonyms.”
If living a life of integrity, honesty, and purity is synonymous with living a chaste life, so far O’Donnell has a long way to go to live up to her own standards.
