Family Research Council senior fellow Peter Sprigg, who once advocated for the deportation of gay people from the U.S. to stop them from destroying society, fielded a call on the “Washington Watch” radio program yesterday from a listener named Janet, who recounted a heart wrenching story of her daughter coming out as gay.
Janet explained to Sprigg how she still supports her daughter and is sustained by her faith in Jesus Christ.
I want you to understand that I am a Christian, I do believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but I do have a quandary. I have a daughter who has been married for seven years and she came to me in tears and said, ‘Mother, I can’t live this way, it’s not who I am, I’m gay.’ I was astounded because I didn’t see it, we talked about it, we’ve done everything. My daughter was raised in the church. The thing that we talked about was — I asked, ‘Well why did you marry if you felt this way?’ She said, ‘Because I wanted to be like everybody else.’ I said, ‘Well how long have you know this?’ She said, ‘Mother, I’ve known this since I was a little kid, I’ve always been different from everybody else.’
I’m not turning my back on my daughter, I’m not ashamed of my daughter, I am deeply hurt that there is no church that my daughter can go to and not hear what an awful, sinful, against-God life that she feels that she is. I don’t think that the Jesus I grew up with and learned to love is a resentful or any kind of God that would want to cause pain. I don’t know why my daughter feels the way she does, but she does and she doesn’t lie to me and I know in her heart that this is how she feels. The only thing that I know that I’m supposed to do is to pray for my fellow people in this world, love everybody just as Jesus loves me and I think I have hurt so much because all I hear is what a God-forsaken life they are living. Well God didn’t forsake my daughter, He didn’t.
Sprigg, unsurprisingly, responded to this call by recommending the mother turn to two groups THAT espouse ex-gay therapy: National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX).
If she does indeed do research on such groups, she will find out that ex-gay therapy has been completely discredited by the mainstream scientific community and has been rejected by many Christian groups, including many former ex-gays.
