Once again, a teenager who was taken into the Love In Action/Refuge program in Raleigh is speaking out against the self-proclaimed “ministry” as teaching a lesson of conditional self-love. The condition is simple: don’t be gay and you can love yourself.
The program, originally designed to be a free of charge self-help group sponsored by Central Church, has in the years since its creation become more and more top-heavy and desirous of financial wherewithal. This led to the arrival of John Smid from California, a high school graduate who had no ministerial ordainment. With his arrival, there came a drastic change in leadership. Free programs became paid programs. Members of the board of directors shifted nearly overnight. It seems to me, and it’s only my informed opinion, that someone in the organization realized the amount of money that could be gained by creating a treatment facility, calling it a ministry, and thereby skating past state and federal regulations levied on facilities that provide therapy.
By developing a program which people would pay for, Love In Action began to gain acceptance and financial support from the church community. The residential treatment program (yes, it is still considered a treatment program) which exists today is designed for people with strong faith, deep pockets, and a desire to avow their faith in Christianity by purging themselves of their homosexuality.
When Love In Action realized how much more money they could make by reaching out to the families of teenagers who were struggling with their sexual identity, they developed the Refuge program for teenagers — a program which allows parents to admit their son or daughter to an outpatient-type treatment program at the parents discretion. There is a two-week program and an eight-week program followed by any number of group meetings and gatherings thereafter. The individual out-of-pocket cost of the program ranges anywhere from $2500-8000 depending on whom you ask and what program one is placed in.
The founder of the program, John Evans, has completely denounced the program he helped to found. He has done this publicly on numerous occasions stating quite plainly, “My ministry shatters lives.”
As I’ve stated on this blog any number of times, the program is designed to make parents believe they are helping their children to overcome their homosexuality. While any number of adults may have experienced homosexual attractions during their developmental years, the majority of the world is still heterosexual. Love In Action/Refuge’s program preys on the natural curiosity of same-sex attraction experienced by human beings, profilgating the already confusing feelings that many experience in recognizing their same-sex attractions into a much deeper and darker form of self-hatred. The self-hatred experienced by many former clients has been so insipid as to have led to attempted and actualized suicide.
The program is, like many drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, based on twelve steps. The steps are heavily altered to fit the design of the program’s aim: to purge one of the desire to act on natural homosexual tendencies or behaviors so that they may, thereby, become closer to Jesus Christ.
This, my readers, is fraud. It assumes that individuals are not capable of making their own choices in life, that we have no understanding of self, and it limits the focus of any type of real self-help to actualizing a single form of self-awareness. People pay a lot of money to be told that being gay is wrong and if you behave in a gay way that it is wrong. There are people who, sadly, will tell you that for free every day of the week in this world because they, themselves, are probably confused about their own feelings and desires.
Though the State of Tennessee has investigated LIA/R for dispensing medications to patients with mental illness or psychiatric disorders without a license (not to be confused with ‘prescribing’ them, merely handing them out at the correct time), LIA/R has the hubris to take on the State of Tennessee for interfering with their right to practice their religion as they see fit.
I mean, how much clarity does it take to follow this: if adults want what you have to offer them, then go for it. An adult is of a rational state of mind to recognize their desire for “help” if they see their own sexuality as a rehabilitatable condition rather than an inherent part of themselves. But children are not able to make this same distinction, and the precociousness of young adulthood is not something which requires rehabilitation. How does placing a child of 15 or 16 into a group where people are discussing issues as complicated as prostitiution and bestiality help them to cope with themselves? Are they supposed to equate their same-sex desires with fucking a dog or turning a trick?
Please don’t think me slanderous or misinformed. Nothing stated in this rant is false or incorrect, it is all accurate. The good state of Tennessee is deserving of institutions of religion that purport to practice only their religion, not to shamelessly cry “freedom of religion” when offering a form of therapy that has proven dangerous and ineffective.
In the weeks and months since I broke the story that started the controversy on this blog, I’ve been busy with my own life. But I have never forgotten the time spent researching this facility, the time spent at meetings, talking to people, marching with a sign in my hand to try and raise awareness of what goes on there. Parents looking for answers, I urge you: try talking to your children honestly about the issues they are facing. When you send them to a place like Love In Action/Refuge, it’s as if you’re telling them that you’ve given up on them. As my mother often tells me, “Love them like you find them.” As the child of parents who loved him unconditionally, and still do, I can tell you that there is no other way to love your child and nurture them.
If it’s your son or daughter, I’m sure they deserve better than a parent who sends them the signal that they don’t care. I can’t imagine a God or Jesus who would dare tell you to pay money to turn your child over to a group of total strangers who purport to have the answers to your child’s sexual identity and how they can live their life on a righteous path. Sometimes it’s hard to believe, but I’m confident God must have made your child perfect because that is your child.
If you’re talking to a group of people who tell you that the only way you can be a Christian is by denouncing homosexuality, find a new group of people to talk to. They will never love you for who you are no matter who you are.
