Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

On a piece crossposted to Exgay Watch and Talk To Action, Mike Airhart describes a bizarre recent effort that in Airhart's judgement seeks to splinter the civil rights movements. Writes Airhart:

There has never been just one civil rights movement; there have been numerous movements: for Jews and other religious minorities, for blacks, for women, for Japanese-Americans after World War II, and for gays since approximately the 1950s.

Nevertheless, it has become a mantra among the religious right that certain groups are "hijacking" the one solitary civil rights movement. Meanwhile, in the small universe of web sites that advertise the existence of "former homosexuals," there are many exgay sites that join the religious right in promoting antigay discrimination -- but few sites that offer sound, clinically proven advice to people who strive to overcome or moderate unwanted sexual attractions and behaviors.

The year-old exgay web site WeAreThinking.com is marketed via Wikipedia as "Ex Gay Political PAC, Focused on Ex Gay Civil Rights." But WeAreThinking has no declared owners, operators, or sponsors, no specific entity to accept responsibilty for its content. In short, the public is not intended to know the identity of "We" in the site name "We Are Thinking."

Here's another irony: The site does not propose an exgay civil rights movement; it undermines existing civil-rights movements.

[ editor : Talk To Action guest contributor Mike Airhart is the editor of Ex Gay Watch ]