Trouble in Let's-Convert-the-Gaysville:

...Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, President of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) has stepped down amid a cloud of controversy stemming from a polemic justifying slavery found on the group's Web site. The Encino-based NARTH had also taken heat in recent months for advocating child abuse against gender variant children....

Trouble began mounting for Nicolosi after Canadian doctor Joseph Berger, who serves on NARTH's "Scientific Advisory Board" wrote on the organization's website that gender variant children should be sent to school in opposite-sex clothing so they can be "ridiculed" into conforming.

But criticism of NARTH reached a crescendo after "Scientific Advisory Board" member, Dr. Gerald Schoenewolf, penned a polemic on the group's website that seemed to justify slavery and said that African-Americans taken away in chains on slave ships "were in many ways better off than they had been in Africa."....

Gee, and I thought it was just my nasty liberal prejudice that made me think that those who want to convert gay people are doing so out of hate.

The Schoenewolf essay (PDF) is a simple-minded denunciation of "political correctness"; to the good doctor, advocates of gay rights are just the latest in a long line of fascists who, like feminists and advocates of racial equality, derive their totalitarian techniques from the Father of PC, Karl Marx. (I'm not exaggerating this at all.) How bad are anti-racists? This bad:

There is no attempt by civil rights leaders to see both sides of the conflict, to understand the complex sources of the problem, to view people on both sides as having both good and bad in them. There is no attempt to negotiate a win-win situation that would benefit all society; instead a win-lose scenario is forced on all of society, whether they like it or not....

With all due respect, there is another way, or other ways, to look at the race issue in America. It could be pointed out, for example, that Africa at the time of slavery was still primarily a jungle, as yet uncivilized or industrialized. Life there was savage, as savage as the jungle for most people, and that it was the Africans themselves who first enslaved their own people. They sold their own people to other countries, and those brought to Europe, South America, America, and other countries, were in many ways better off than they had been in Africa.

Wow.

The Berger essay encourages "normal" kids to treat "gender-variant" kids the way, er, Dr. Schoenewolf thinks liberal fascists treat everyone else. According to the L.A. Times,

Berger said that instead of teaching tolerance, schools should "let the other children ridicule" boys and girls who don't conform.

"It is a mistake for various interfering, ignorant and biased busybodies to try to 'counsel' the other children into accepting the abnormal," Berger wrote. "It is very healthy to be able to draw the line between what is healthy and what is sick."

Schoolyard bullying and demonization of the outsider: ah yes, those are the hallmarks of a truly healthy society.

NARTH will go on, of course (a new president has already been named), as will the notion that gay people can be flipped. Alas, I haven't been able to determine whether Dr. Nicolosi's offer of NARTH help to Ted Haggard was ever accepted.

(Via DU.)