Some thoughts regarding One Nation Under God (1993)

I just watched One Nation Under God (1993) which is about “ex-gay therapy.” It’s available for instant play on Netlfix.

Of course I’ve heard the religious condemnation all my life, and of course I was aware that the medical establishment thought of and treated homosexuality as a disease until the ‘70s, but it was horrifying to hear these seemingly rational, intelligent people try to give “ex-gay therapy” a scientific basis in 1993 by rehashing all this stuff about emotionally absent fathers, overbearing mothers, a need to connect with your innate masculinity, etc. Those theories were out of date twenty years earlier, and the people interviewed in the film were espousing them as if those theories were an undisputed fact. Even the psychologists and psychiatrists who were talking that way decades before should have followed their training as scientists and questioned their assumptions. To have these supposed professionals channel quackery from the 1950s as if no one had called into question the psychoanalytic model is inexcusable.

I think the pseudo intellectuals and fake scientists fool a lot of people. They hear all the five dollar words and the seemingly complex reasoning processes, and they assume the person talking is smarter and knows more than they do. But these “ex-gay therapists” don’t know anything. They’re offering theories about a fantasy world that only exists inside their heads. They are the ones who are crazy. They are out of touch with reality.

One of the things I learned from having a parent who suffered from schizophrenia is that just because a “theory” or a thought process has internal logic does not mean that it actually pertains to anything that exists in the real world.

To someone who doesn’t know any better, Esperanto may sound like just another language like French or Japanese, but it’s an artificial language. There is no Esperanto literature or poetry that reflects the culture of native speakers. There’s no Esperanto love songs that people listen to on the radio on the way home from work. It’s all fake, just like the homosexuality that the “ex-gay” theorists talk about. They assume their mumbo jumbo is correct, and they ignore anything that would dissuade them. That’s not intelligence or science at work there, no matter if they do manage to ape the language of science well enough to fool the average person.

And then to have Sy Rodgers come on as the president of Exodus, this person who was supposedly successful in transforming himself… It was just so bizarre and surreal listening to him preach about how you don’t have to be different, you can choose to conform to expectations. The organization he represented goes around telling people that their god made everyone straight, and you’re either male or female, no room for grey. Rodgers is about as grey and as ambiguous as you can get. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but to preach against it when anyone with eyes in their head can clearly see that your rhetoric doesn’t match who you are is insane.

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   In the film, it was said that in the 1950s and 1960s, gay male patients were shown pictures of men like this and they were shocked if they looked at him too long.