Douglas Whaley

When I heard that one of the many candidates running for president on the Democratic side was an openly gay man who was the mayor of a small Indiana city I dismissed him as a dreamer with no attachment to reality.  This dismissal was shored up on learning he’s only 37 and has an unpronounceable last name [Buttigieg].  But then I was startled to learn that polls have this man as number three in the huge pack of possible candidates (behind two elders: Biden and Sanders), and that he is climbing in the estimation of more or less everyone.  Hmm. Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg (yes, all of that), most commonly known as “Mayor Pete,” turns out to be a formidable candidate in spite of the supposed problems noted above.  He is reputed nationally as a “mayor’s mayor,” widely regarded as one of the finest municipal executives in the country, and much beloved by the people of South Bend, Indiana, who reelected him with 80% of the v...

It is estimated that over 700,000 people currently living in the United States have undergone some form of gay conversion therapy (about half were teenagers at the time) designed to change them from homosexual to heterosexual.   Many of the groups offering this miraculous transformation are religious in origin, the premier one in this country being “Love In Action,” now renamed “Restoration Path” and still going strong in 2019.   A leading organization having offshoots all over the world was “Exodus International,” which handled many thousands of such cases before folding in 2013 [see Related Posts below]. These gay conversion groups have many methods to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals.  In the recent movies “Boy Erased” and “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” (both available for viewing on the internet) the young people—a male in the first and a female in the second—are placed in an environment very like a summer camp and rigorously tra...