May 31, 2013

Excerpt from an article entitled “I was traumatized by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate campaign against ex-gays” written by Chuck Peters on the Voice of the Voiceless website: “Over the past twenty years I have been in therapy to overcome unwanted same-gender attractions. During this time, ineffective counseling yielded small, but insufficient results. However, after receiving therapy from the International Healing Foundation (IHF) in the past couple of years, I finally began to make real progress.” …

“But recently I stumbled upon an article published on Advocate.com, a gay-activist news media outlet, written by one of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s attorneys, Mr. Sam Wolfe. This article detailed, almost exactly, the IHF healing seminar I experienced about two years ago. On the first day of the seminar, I sat next to Mr. Wolfe. I revealed very personal, private, and painful information to him when we shared in pairs. Reading about the processes he described in his article, which were supposed to be confidential, caused a great deal of psychological distress for me. Here is an excerpt from the article:”

“I’m a civil rights lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s LGBT Rights Project. Our work includes a national campaign to help end conversion therapy . . . as part of our investigation, I recently attended a conversion program where participants used “touch therapy,” which involves being held like a baby by another man, with lights dimmed and soft music playing. The idea is to receive the nurturing missed as a child, thereby becoming more “whole” and automatically shedding “unwanted same-sex attraction.” Tragically, some of the participants were teens, prodded by their parents and communities that reject them as they are.”

“It took a great deal of courage for me, a sexual abuse survivor, to gather up the strength to trust a stranger to hold me in a non-sexual way, when I’ve only experienced abuse and unhealthy sexual touch for so many years. For Mr. Wolfe and the SPLC to exploit my healing experience to further their political agenda is unconscionable! Mr. Wolfe signed a confidentiality agreement and swore not to reveal any information about me or the details of that event, and he broke that agreement. Who knows how many people he has told about me and the therapy I did that weekend! I feel completely betrayed and harmed by the actions of Sam Wolfe and the SPLC!”