For all the back and forth, these issues are incredibly easy to understand if one is inclined toward understanding.
Step One: Concede that if any candidate had active and accepted support within his or her campaign from the leader of a white supremacist organization it would be a one-sided issue. There would be no talk of a big tent or sophisticated persuasion.
Step Two: Visit http://www.metanoiaonline.org/about.htm and familiarize yourself with the programs offered... not mere opinions or ideas, but programs. The Metanoia ministry acts nationally, organizing gay-cure programs, dispatching gay-cure speakers.
Step Three: Ask yourself, "do I see this as meaningfully different from a white supremacist organization?"
That's all there is to it.
Many people do not see white-supremacists and gay-cure advocates as equivalent because many people believe, deep down, that race is something you are born with, and for which one must be held blameless, while GLBT people are willful, making a choice to defy convention... a choice with obvious consequences that should be anticipated by those who chose to be gay. It is common to draw a distinction between compassion for gays, since they're suffering from "sexual brokenness", and acceptance of sexual variation. ("Hate the sin, love the sinner.")
And many people see the gay-cure movement as somehow more legitimate or acceptable because it is supported by religious beliefs. This view is, however, backward. Every human evil one can think of was supported by religious convention in its day, because religious convention tends to dove-tail with societal morality. The two inform and enforce each other. The Bible says menstruating women should be put in a little hut reserved for unclean people. Nobody promotes that as a religious value because it runs so counter to the historical progress of liberalism. The Bible has no problem with slavery, but no mainstream religious people today argue for slavery despite the inarguable fact that it is part of God's plan. The Bible hasn't changed, but society has. We do not tolerate slavery these days, so religion defers to the ethics of liberal democracy.
There is only one moral-majority style "values" issue Jesus Christ really, really cared about. It is the very first pronouncement he makes in the Bible. Jesus thought that divorce is WRONG. He was a fanatic on the topic. Any even remotely Christian society would ban divorce, and consider divorce and remarriage adultery. Yet the favorite President of the most extreme Christians is Ronald Reagan, the only divorced President we have ever had!
The fact that we hear religious arguments against non-majority sexual identities merely means that society in aggregate is not yet sufficiently supportive of the human rights of GLBT people to shout down the religious argument, in the way religious arguments for slavery or second-class status for women have been shouted down.
Recognizing the validity of the sexual identity component of human rights is merely to concede the humanity of GLBT people; to hold that people are blameless for their sexual identity, and that variation in sexual identity is not intrinsically wicked. Recognizing the legitimacy of human rights for gay people is not the same as favoring same-sex marriage as a Democratic Party platform plank in 2008. The civil rights movement didn't end with the recognition that people of all races are human beings entitled to the same rights. It BEGAN with that recognition. After enough people recognize what it right, then a political process follows.
But outfits like Metanoia Ministries reject the core human integrity of the sexual identity of all non-heterosexual people. The disease model of homosexuality is like saying black people are black because they are too willful and sinful to chose to be white. It is, in its way, the most pernicious anti-minority movement yet devised, in that it holds the individual personally responsible for his differences, and dangles false-hope that he may elevate himself to majority status through sufficient self-denial. It is like telling African-Americans, "you're not black, you just need to wash your face harder."
So please do not defend this stuff, or trivialize it by equating the gay-cure movement with DOMA in tit-for-tat fashion. DOMA is discriminatory. The gay-cure movement is quasi-genocidal. DOMA is about the rights of GLBT people in society. The gay-cure movement is a challenge of the right of GLBT people to EXIST.
The best analogy for the gay-cure movement is the "back to Africa movement." Rather than arguing about relative rights within society, it suggests that society should be, one way or another, entirely free of the minority group in question.
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