ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY PROTEST...

People from all over the country gathered this morning at Love In Action, chanting "It's ok to be Gay", and "This is what Love In Action Looks Like" to celebrate the one year anniversary of the protests at LIA's headquarters a year ago surrounding the controversy of their treatment of teenagers. Make no mistake, this isn't "the gay community" out there...these are all sorts of indivduals, of all sorts of belief systems, orientations, and genders...parents, children, former Love In Action clients, Memphians, and people who travelled up to 14 hours to show their support.
Lance Carroll, who last summer was forced into the teen program, REFUGE, traveled from Missouri with several friends to attend the protest. Lance, now 18, returning to Memphis for the first time in a year, read the following statement to the press:

In January of 2005, I came out to my parents as being gay. After an initial positive and supporting reaction they began to change their minds…I was sent to several different counselors, the last of which worked for a fundamentalist Christian church. This “counselor” informed me that I was not Gay, in fact, he said no one was really Gay…and anyone who claimed to be gay was living a lie. This pastor recommended to my parents that I be sent to Love In Action’s REFUGE program for teens.

On June 6, 2005 I left Jackson, Missouri at five o’clock in the morning to make the long trip to Memphis, Tennessee. The first things I saw at the Love in Action campus were the protesters. I spent the entire summer between my junior and senior year of highschool in Memphis, against my will, at Refuge, where I underwent many forms of “therapy” that were supposed to turn me away from being gay. These so-called “therapies” included group activities where one person was singled out and made to be ashamed of very personal occurrences in their lives. I had to participate in this activity many times. Other “therapies” included isolation, where you wouldn’t be allowed to communicate—we were not even allowed to make eye contact, with any of the other participants; making the women wear skirts and makeup to help them become more feminine; and making the men play sports in an attempt to help them become more masculine.

These are just a couple of examples of the type of “program” they use to turn people straight. Though while I was there, it just seemed to make people more depressed and self-loathing than they already were. I, myself, went through several of these depressive periods. After enduring this time in Memphis I returned home, unchanged.

My parents were very disappointed and didn’t know what to do next, feeling that they had tried everything. My mom took it upon herself to somehow change me. This began with daily bouts of verbal abuse, her telling me how ashamed she was of me. After a few months of this, the verbal abuse escalated into small episodes of physical abuse, with her cornering me and slapping me, while telling me what an abomination I was. This type of behavior continued until I could no longer stand to live at home. One day I packed up all of my belongings into my car, and told my parents that I was moving out right that minute. My mother got so angry when I told her this that she exploded and beat me into a corner, ripping my shirt and giving me scratches and bruises in the process. My dad had to pull her off of me so that I could get to my car to leave.

Fortunately I am now living with a wonderful, and supportive family who are very empathetic toward my situation. They have taken me in, and made me their son-in-spirit. Now that I am in a much-improved situation, I feel that I need to speak-out against the things that I went through. Parents should not be able to force their children to attend any type of program like the one I went to. When a child comes out to their parents as gay, lesbian, or bisexual they need the love and support of their parents. They don’t need to be made to feel that there is something wrong with them, something that needs to be fixed.

We commend Lance for speaking up, as it is the personal concern of so many concerned citizens that Love In Action is openly preying upon vunerable youth, and their parents through tactics of manipulation including an upholding of social bias and pervasive myths. As Love In Action makes the following statement on their newly designed REFUGE website:

God has admonished us to respect our parents. God has given them to us as vessels of His choosing to bring us into His world. Whether or not our parents are worthy of respect.

As concerned individuals, we feel that it is deeply dangerous for ANY organization to support a parents wishes to change their children through so-called therapies which have been widely discredited by every major medical and mental health organization. We worry about every child that enters Love In Action’s doors, and ask the important question...where is THE Love In Action when their therapies don’t work? When the miracle doesn’t work, what are the families left with? Shame? Fear that their child will fulfill the untrue stereotypes that LIA taught them? Where does this lead? In Lance's case it lead to physical abuse, putting him in the extremely dangerous and vunerable position of having to leave home in order to feel safe...where, we ask...was the LOVE IN ACTION then? Luckily Lance had people who cared for him who he could turn to, and now is able to live happily in a safe, welcoming space. We should also note that neither John Smid, or any other counselor came to ask Lance how he was, or greet him in any manner as he stood outside their facilities for an hour and a half this morning.

More to come after the 4:00pm demonstration.