“I was traumatized by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate campaign against ex-gays”

Hello, my name is Chuck Peters. I was born into a very toxic and dysfunctional environment. My parents never had any time for me. When I was seven years old, they got a divorce. The time preceding and after their divorce until I went off to the United States Air Force Academy was filled with endless conflicts, arguments, and emotional chaos. My dad was a neglectful rage-aholic and my mother was cold and lacked empathy. All of this emotional strain led me to hate myself as a male to the point that I couldn’t stand being inside my own body, which caused me think and feel I was a girl, leading to gender identity disorder at a young age, followed by strong sexual attractions to the same gender when I hit puberty. As a teenager, I felt strong homosexual desires but I didn’t want to be gay.

 

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. Feeling and processing the pain from my early family life in safe group settings has allowed me to let down my guard and genuinely believe that others love and want to help me heal from past wounds. These therapeutic groups have helped me to realize that my compulsive desire for sex with men was just a cover for unmet emotional needs, and when I started being more authentic with my real needs, my desire for sex with men nearly vanished. With the help of IHF’s seminars, I began to recognize my true heterosexual potential.

 

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!

 

I later found out that IHF questioned Mr. Wolfe after the first day of the seminar when they discovered who he might be representing. Mr. Wolfe told IHF that he was attending the seminar on his own, not on behalf of the SPLC, and that his intentions were to see if IHF’s program caused harm to participants. But his destructive actions had the reverse effect and have caused me harm! In order to protect all of the participants, IHF wisely asked Mr. Wolfe to leave the seminar and refunded his money, telling him that only participants, not observers, were allowed to attend. After reading his article on Advocate.com I realized he was not there to participate for himself, but rather, to deceitfully vilify organizations like IHF who assist persons like me who do not wish to live a gay life. It’s clear that this was not just for himself, but also on behalf of SPLC’s smear campaign against ex-gays.

 

Shockingly, the SPLC is engaging in a hate campaign against the ex-gay community and has recently filed a frivolous lawsuit against Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH). JONAH is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the world-wide Jewish community about the social, cultural, and emotional factors that lead to same-sex attractions. JONAH works directly with those struggling with unwanted same-sex sexual attractions (SSA) and with families who’s loved ones experience homosexual feelings. JONAH has helped many individuals leave the gay life, but the SPLC has recruited a few of their disgruntled clients who didn’t reach their goals, one of whom attended less than five therapy sessions and now claims he was “harmed” for not turning straight.

 

SPLC

A photo from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s interrogation of the gun man who attempted to murder employees at the Family Research Council in August 2012. The gun man (Corkins) admitted that his motivations stemmed from the SPLC’s online hate list.

In order to promote their anti-ex-gay agenda, the SPLC has teamed up with gay-activist attorneys and anti-ex-gay organizations in a national campaign to smear organizations that disagree with their political agenda, and they do it by bullying small organizations like IHF and JONAH and intimidate other counselors who have little power to fight against their massive $200-300 million in assets. They are targeting these counselors by listing them on an interactive hate map for anyone to look them up and thereby, putting them in danger. In fact, just last month it was revealed that the gunman who intruded into Family Research Council’s (FRC) Washington, DC office with a bag full of Chick-fil-A sandwiches, intending to smear them in faces of FRC employees and shoot them dead, was motivated by a similar hate map from the SPLC’s website. The gunman nearly killed the FRC guard.

 

The SPLC has made it their mission to convince the American public that people who experience same-sex attraction are born that way and have no choice but to live a gay life. This is in direct contradiction to all the evidence in the scientific literature. Because the facts are not on their side, the mission of the SPLC is to defame individual counselors and persecute organizations like IHF and JONAH, who have little power to defend themselves. But in the process, they are discriminating against former homosexuals, who are now recognized as a legally protected class against discrimination, and traumatizing persons like myself, who seek therapy on their own free will.

 

Because of the harm, trauma, and psychological distress I (and potentially others) have been caused by Sam Wolfe and the SPLC, IHF and myself are currently assembling legal teams to launch separate lawsuits for the damage they have caused. Please sign my petition by clicking here and join with me to stand against Sam Wolfe and the SPLC’s hate campaign against the ex-gay and faith-based community, demand they apologize, make recompense for the harm they are causing persons like myself, and stop defaming organizations like IHF and JONAH.

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Chuck Peters is a Research Assistant and Christopher Doyle is the Co-Founder and Acting Director of Voice of the Voiceless, the only anti-defamation league for former homosexuals, individuals with unwanted same-sex attractions, and their families. For more information, visit: www.VoiceoftheVoiceless.info