Andrew Sullivan Weighs in on George Rekers...

I have been wondering when  Sullivan was going to  opine  on  this particular saga.   He had previously expressed his concern  over the  "outing" of  Rekers  male escort companion, but not  on the  broader implications of the  the whole sad sordid  situation.   I also reacently  read about  Rekers'  torture of  "Kraig",  the 4 year old boy  who George Rekers  would eventually drive  to  attempt suicide, and  had been wondering  what  Sullivan's thoughts on that were... 

(via The Daily Dish )
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What Rekers Represents

Andrew Sullivan
19 May 2010 10:27 am

I have not dwelled on the Rekers scandal, because the man is a human wreck. But the wreck is instructive. Sometimes I wonder how much of the most aggressively anti-gay campaigning is done by closeted and tortured gay men, who seek to extirpate from others something they could not banish from themselves. The list of the closeted gay-baiters is long. From Roy Cohn and J Edgar Hoover all the way to Larry Craig and George Rekers. I have no doubt that the primary anti-gay forces in the Vatican are gay themselves, and working out their tortured psyches by demonizing others more honest and principled than they are.

These are men terrified by their own inherent orientation, who equate it with emasculation, and end up, in some cases, raping children and in others, merely abusing them, to keep their own demons at bay. This is one exercize that Rekers imposed on a child who was acting effeminately:

In 1974, Rekers, a leading thinker in the so-called ex-gay movement, was presented with a 4-year-old "effeminate boy" named Kraig, whose parents had enrolled him in the program. Rekers put Kraig in a "play-observation room" with his mother, who was equipped with a listening device. When the boy played with girly toys, the doctors instructed her to avert her eyes from the child.

According to a 2001 account in Brain, Child Magazine, "On one such occasion, his distress was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him... Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room."

Rekers's research team continued the experiment in the family's home. Kraig received red chips for feminine behavior and blue chips for masculine behavior.   The blue chips could be cashed in for candy or television time. The red chips earned him a "swat" or spanking from his father. Researchers periodically entered the family's home to ensure proper implementation of the reward-punishment system.  After two years, the boy supposedly manned up. Over the decades, Rekers, who ran countless similar experiments, held Kraig up as "the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy."

At age 18, shamed by his childhood diagnosis and treatment, Rekers's poster boy attempted suicide, according to Gender Shock, a book by journalist Phyllis Burke.

This kind of stuff kills people. And it's based on a lie. It's time we took a stand against tortured gay men abusing children to vent their own demons. In saying that, by the Wieseltier rule, I am dangerously propagating anti-gay tropes. But when the tropes are true in some cases, they are simply true.
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I would  take issue with Sullivan on one point;  Rekers is not  a  "human wreck",  he is a twisted  sadistic self loathing , EVIL man.   His escapades with  Gay male escorts  make it clear  Rekers had no  intermal  moral debate over  his sick double life.   His personal war against  LGBT Americans  waged from the deep dark depths  of his own personal closet was done for one  reason.  It made him feel good.  

To  call  Rekers a  "human wreck"  is  giving  him too much credit.   There is nothing human about  him.  George Rekers is just a wreck.