What’s forbidden in the matter of black-white relations is mandated in gay-straight ones, namely a genetic explanation. As it is not allowed in general discourse to allege racial cause for black behavior, so it is required to say gays are born gay without hope of change.
See how the issue is argued in Oak Park, Illinois:
At the time, I didn’t believe there would be any opportunity for a discussion, but rather a one-way stream of hate, which would have likely led to health care-like forum shout-downs,
wrote Oak Park Trustee Ray Johnson about the Buzz Cafe book–author appearance to talk about gays becoming straight through prayer and therapy. The “hate” involved would be the contention that gays can change, vs. their being destined from birth to be gay.
[Buzz-owner] Laura Maychruk had a right to offer a forum to promote hate, but people certainly had a right to protest the poor taste of that event, and Maychruk had the right (and I believe the responsibility to her community) to cancel that event,
wrote Oak Park resident Rachel Weaver in the same issue of the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest, which had run the story about cancellation of the author-appearance, the author being a black Christian clergyman of inexact provenance [oops, see below], the book self-published (and Amazon-available) as Transition: From Homosexual to Preacher.
Again, the hate is the claim that gays can change and are not irreversibly programmed, a claim that Weaver compared to promoting “the Tuskegee Experiment” and “forced conversion of all Jews to Christianity.”
What really gets me . . . is the suggestion that people offended that Laura would offer to hype this book and make Mr. Williams money from his hatred of gay people shouldn’t have [told] her [their objections].
wrote David McCammond-Watts, referring to the reaction that led to the cancellation. Again, the hatred accusation relates to the claim that gays can change.
We need not even consider the reaction there would be if a speaker argued for a genetic cause for blacks’ low marks in school or rates of incarceration. It’s not going to happen, any more than the author appeared at Buzz Cafe arguing against it for gays.
Later: Not so uncertain provenance at that. Williams co-founded his “church without walls” in 2005, calling it “Holy Remnant International Ministries.” He was commissioned, as it were, by Rev. Leroy Elliott, pastor of the New Greater St. John Community M.B. Church, at 3101 W Warren Blvd. on the West Side, since 1978.
Rev. Elliott:
Missionary Baptists go a way back, to the early 1800s, in fact, per Wikipedia, which says their goal was
to organize para-church institutions for the promotion and funding of evangelism (particularly in foreign lands and on the American western frontier)
etc.

I didn’t base my suggestion that Mr. Williams hates gay people because of the idea, that I disagree with, that “gay people can change”. I base that assertion on his expressed views. For example, the bio he gives on his member profile at chicgowrites ( http://www.chicagowrites.org/profiles.aspx?member=130 ) equates homosexuality to both “abuse” and “rape”.
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The relevant quote from his Chicago Writers Assn. profile, FYI:
“His call and mission is to reach the world, helping those seeking restoration in the areas of abuse, homosexuality, lesbianism, rape and various other spiritual and social vices.”
This is the first reference in this debate to Williams’ thinking beyond his promotion of life-changing as an option. We may be getting somewhere.
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I think Oak Park has cowardly hidden in the dark trenches of their opinion of me far too long. I think that now is the time for us all to meet up and discuss the issue of homosexuality if they are not afraid of facing the truth about their life-style being a fad- and a learned behavior and not a genetic or scientific condition!!!!!
Cornelius Williams
Author: “Transition From Homosexual to Preacher”
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Alrite Dad!! I guess they dont want the truth then hu??
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Reading “Transition from Homosexuality to preacher” I like this Quote:
~God moved in my heart to take off my fancy vestments, get from behind the prodigious podium, and unveil who i was to help, to set someone free; someone who’s crying for help deep down in the secret place of your soul. Down in the place where “do not enter” and “do not disturbe” signs hang.
I am disturbing those places you may not get such a raw message from your conservative pulpits from the storefront to the mega church. But you are sure getting it in this book. I don’t have the energy, and neither should pastors around the globe continue to ignore the issue of homosexuality.~
This little passage stuck out to me being humble and only wanting to free the bound & stuck!
I love you Eld. Awesome Job.. Im def Honored to call you dad!! They just dnt know.. you got something they don’t and thats the HOLY GHOST & JESUS!!!
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My experience as a Ph. D., M. D. psychotherapist has included work with several (male) homosexuals. After thirty years of such work, I offer the folowng observations, applying only to male homosexuals.
1) Many such persons (I must call them patients) are grossly unhappy with their “problem,” but feel helpless (actually, futile) about their chances for change
2). There is a substantial sub-culture of such persons, which serves as encouragement and support for its members;
3) ostracism (often condemnation) serves to alienate such persons from the ordinary society, with two consequences: like most “out-groups” these persons 1) often adopt antagonistic and pointedly hostile attitudes toward the dominant (normal) culture; and 2) develop a mutually self-sustaining sub-culture that offers an “in” group of like-minded supporters and that encourages further separation from the dominant heterosexual culture. Most of these factors are toxic interferences with our ability to assist the patient in his (I use the term advisedly) struggle to recover.
For the therapist, there is a very thin line to walk between having a committment to assist the patient to adopt a typical and more satisfying normal life-style, and (on the other hand) to cause the patient to feel that he is being condemned because he is “different” in some unacceptable way. Successfully working past this dilemma is more than half the battle in restoring the patient to a more traditional sexual adjustment.
In my experience, psychotherapy offers some assistance to such patients, but is by no means even close to a panacea.
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