c. 1998 Religion News Service

(The Rev. Meg Riley directs the Washington Office for Faith in Action for the Unitarian Universalist Association and is co-chair of Equal Partners in Faith, a national, multi-faith network dedicated to promoting positive values of religion in society.)

UNDATED _ I still see her face. The teen-age girl was suicidal. When she told her father of her love for another girl, he took his Bible and beat her with it, blackening her eye and bruising her face. Then he kicked her out of his house.

It’s her face that came to my mind when I learned of the new TV ad campaign launched by 18 organizations, including Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and Gary Bauer’s Family Research Council.”It’s not about hate, it’s about hope,”is the ads’ refrain. They declare gays and lesbians can become heterosexual through a religious conversion experience and they name October 11″Coming Out of Homosexuality Day.” I’m not a psychologist, so others can analyze better than I the decisions by the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Institute to completely reject the notion of”conversion therapy.” I do notice, however, that the success rate cited by the converters themselves is an underwhelming 30 percent and that within that 30 percent are many who still experience same-sex longing but choose heterosexual relationships anyway. I also note that the two men who founded the ex-gay movement eventually fell in love with each other and jumped ship.

What I am is a minister, and it’s real faces that keep coming back to me.

One of the new TV ads features a parent. When her son came out to her as gay, she gave him”tough love”and told him she didn’t accept his homosexuality.

I’ve consoled a mother in the aftermath of her son’s suicide as she wished she had given her son love and acceptance while he was still alive. Where is the hope for her in this ad campaign?

As a minister, it’s the hundreds of stories like these I’ve heard that haunt me. Stories from gay, lesbian and bisexual people who thought they had to abandon God because of their sexual orientation, who were told that God had abandoned them.

I’ve been part of the huge, interfaith movement to help them knit their souls back together after profound spiritual abuse in the name of love. I’ve reassured person after person after person:”Yes, God loves you. Yes, you are made in God’s image. Yes, there are thousands of churches and synagogues that will welcome you, just as you are. No, Jesus did not condemn you. In fact, he never mentioned homosexuality at all.” This ad campaign is nothing but sour old wine in new wineskins. The conversion ministries have been around for years; there’s nothing new about them. What is new is that political action groups are paying millions of dollars to put their message into American homes. Why? In an election year with record-breaking low turnouts expected, these ads will be part of a larger ad strategy by political groups to get out the vote.

James Dobson, founder of the conservative Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council Political Action Committee, which has been in the forefront of funding and promoting the ad campaign, has been meeting with Republican leaders this spring.

According to news accounts, Dobson was angry the GOP was selling out his anti-abortion, anti-gay agenda. He threatened to bolt from the party, taking as many as possible of his 5 million radio listeners with him. Shortly thereafter, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott compared gays to kleptomaniacs and alcoholics in national media, and the new round of legislative and media assaults on gays and lesbians began.

To the average American viewer, the new ad campaign will appear benign _ if its premise of sexual conversion unlikely _ and not too different from ads for weight loss or smoke cessation or anti-balding products.

But imagine that the ads about hair re-growth were funded by a network of organizations and leaders that had called bald people”Satanic”and”Nazis,”as Robertson has called gays, and that this network raised the bulk of its funds by declaring baldness an indicator that our society is in a fatal decline, as many on the Christian Right have done.

We who are people of faith need to speak out with a different vision of healing and compassion for gay and lesbian people, the kind of healing that comes from loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, and working for justice and equality for all of God’s people. The kind of compassion that comes from knowing that, in the words of theologian Paul Tillich, every single one of us is”accepted, though unacceptable.”The kind of healing that comes from creating loving communities where each person’s worth and dignity is respected and cherished.

DEA END RNS