Dueling gay identity events highlight change in Grand Rapids

When Love Won Out, an ex-gay ministry that teaches that people can overcome their homosexuality through prayer and therapy, scheduled a one-day conference at Sunshine Community Church in Grand Rapids for this Saturday, it’s likely that few were surprised. The Grand Rapids area has traditionally been a conservative and deeply religious community that has never been considered terribly friendly to gay rights advocates and their supporters.

But organizers of a competing one-day event at Grand Valley State University, “Religion and Homophobia: Spiritual Violence in our Community,” say that sentiments are changing quickly in Grand Rapids and they wanted to offer a different voice — one that tells gays and lesbians that it’s OK to be who they are.

The Grand Rapids area is currently in the middle of an “ongoing conversation” about gay identity and gay rights, according to Colette Seguin Beighley, assistant director of the LGBT Resource Center at GVSU. “We learned that the Love Won Out conference was coming to town and wanted to offer another part of the conversation,” she told Michigan Messenger in an interview.

GVSU has had a troubled history on gay rights and equality issues. In 2000, when the university first considered offering benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian couples as most universities do, religious conservatives in the community killed the plan. The efforts to oppose those benefits was led by Amway co-founder Rich DeVos, a major contributor and former board member at the university.

Ironically, it is DeVos that sparked the current dialogue on gay rights issues in the Grand Rapids area when he gave an interview to The Grand Rapids Press a few weeks ago where the issue of same-sex marriage came up. In that interview, DeVos underscored his opposition to same-sex marriage and warned the gay community: “Don’t ask for a concession on the marriage issue,” DeVos continued, saying marriage isn’t “vital to them” the way it is to straight people.

That statement sparked a huge flood of comments on the newspaper’s website. The response from readers was so overwhelming that The Press published a second article the next day just to highlight some of the comments and to look at DeVos’ history of supporting groups against same-sex marriage. DeVos has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations fighting same-sex marriage in Michigan and around the country.

Beighley said the dialogue within the Grand Rapids community sparked by DeVos’ comments highlights the importance of this week’s events. “This is an ongoing conversation in Grand Rapids and on our campus,” she said. “Certainly, the LGBT community has not found a welcome home in Grand Rapids, however the tide is changing. The conversation volume has been turned up recently.”

Public opinion on gay rights issues such as same-sex marriage have shifted tremendously in the last few years. Although Michigan passed a referendum banning same-sex marriage and civil unions in 2004 with 59 percent of the vote, a recent poll showed that only five years later, 64 percent of Michigan voters now support either same-sex marriage or civil unions for gays and lesbians.

Only a small percentage of the population now supports the position of Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based group sponsoring the Love Won Out event that rejects both same-sex marriage and civil unions for gays and lesbians.

Beighley said that her organization had not received any significant backlash to the event so far, but the office of Jeanne Arnold, GVSU’s vice president for inclusion and equity, was inundated with phone calls Tuesday morning after Focus on the Family sent out an “action alert” urging their members to call her office and demand that they add one of the Love Won Out speakers to the Thursday night event.

Because the GVSU panel discussion was scheduled specifically to counter the Love Won Out conference at the local church, the messages heard at the two events could scarcely be more different.

Melissa Fryrear, director of the gender issues department for Focus on the Family, said in an interview that her organization’s event is aimed at the parents of gays and lesbians who do not approve of their child’s homosexuality and that they try to counter messages of gay approval.

“Our attendees are inundated in the culture with a predominately only gay-affirming perspective and their religious beliefs don’t condone homosexual behavior,” said Fryrear, “so that’s why they’re especially interested in a conservative, Biblically orthodox perspective on issues related to homosexuality.”

Many of the speakers at the Love Won Out event claim to be former homosexuals themselves and they advocate what is often called “gay reversion therapy” to help people who feel “trapped by their same-sex attractions” to conform to what Fryrear calls the “Biblical sexual ethic” which only condones “sexual behavior between a man and a woman within marriage.”

The GVSU event, on the other hand, will feature Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, an organization that seeks to counter the message of the ex-gay movement and educate the public about gay life. Besen’s group argues that attempts to change someone’s sexual orientation are “patently offensive, discriminatory by definition, theologically shaky, uniformly unsuccessful and medically unsound.”

While Fryrear said that Love Won Out focuses on helping parents “understand how to uphold their Biblical convictions about homosexual behavior while having a loving relationship with their sons and daughters,” Besen said Focus on the Family’s real agenda is primarily about convincing gay people that being gay is an abomination and that they must suppress who they are.

“Love Won Out uses fear and guilt to shame people into trying to pray away the gay,” said Besen. “Their methods are dangerous and rejected by every respected medical and mental health organization in the nation.” He said Focus on the Family “refuses to show healthy, happy gay people who lead rich and fulfilling lives. Instead they falsely portray gay people as uniformly miserable, sexually broken rejects. What they do is dishonest, unethical and presents a skewed view of gay and lesbian people.”