More on the story of the Christian rightwing “expert” George A. Rekers, who has spent a lifetime demonising gay people, only to be caught in April returning from a vacation with a male hooker. When confronted by the media, he claimed the young man he had with him was only hired to help him carry his bags.
It turns out that a few years ago, Rekers had been paid a five-figure sum to testify for the State of Florida defending the state’s law that banned adoption by gay couples.
The Attorney General’s Office hired Dr. George Rekers, a Miami psychologist and co-founder of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group, to defend the ban. Rekers considers gays immoral deviants, doomed to an early death and thereafter to eternal damnation. So it understandably caused a stir when the Miami New Times busted Dr. Rekers for going on a 10-day European vacation with Lucien, a 20-year-old male prostitute who advertised on rentboy.com.
[snip]
The Attorney General’s Office paid Rekers $60,900 for his expertise. Attorney General Bill McCollum said last week that his agency did a “thorough search” to find him. He said Rekers had a Ph.D. from UCLA and experience testifying in similar cases. Rekers did testify in Arizona in opposition to gay foster parents. But the judge there called his testimony “extremely suspect and of little, if any, assistance to the court.” So much for a thorough search. McCollum then admitted the obvious about hiring Rekers: “There wasn’t a whole lot of choice.” It’s almost impossible finding a credible mental-health expert who supports a blanket ban on gay adoption. Research shows that it’s parent quality that matters, not parent sexual orientation.
The above extract was from an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel by columnist Mike Thomas. Read the full version here.
But what else was the Attorney-General McCollum to do? He was obliged to defend the law when a citizen challenged it in court. The law, having been written to promote the Christian Right’s agenda, had not one professional expert in all of the United States prepared to defend it. The only person available was Rekers (who pretended to be an expert, and pretended to be heterosexual) from – you guessed it – the Christian Right. He was so “credible” a witness that the judge in the Florida suit ruled against the State and overturned the law.
Update: A second rentboy has announced that he too had been hired by Rekers.
Not enough? Want more? Yet another article: The Christian Right’s gay problem.
Yawning Bread 
Well, reading the opinion piece, I am pretty amused — to say the very least — by Rekers’s statement regarding Lucien’s job.
“We agreed that my travel assistant did in fact lift my luggage each time it was necessary, that I did not lift my luggage, and my travel assistant did all the lifting.”
His repeated emphasis seems only to support the contrary…
It just keeps getting better…
There is deep-seated hypocrisy within the Christian religion.
I would like to recount my experience. Years ago, I was in a local university. Due to loneliness, I was foolish enough to join a Christian group in the university, one of the only evangelical Christian groups in the university. They were both set up for different purposes, one was to instill discipleship, the other was more for evangelising purposes. I was not openly gay at that time, never had any sexual experience and pretended to be a social male in front of peers.
Why I chose to join a Christian group? Well, compared to the other religious groups, they were the most active in promoting their activities. They were always outside schools, handing out pamplets, saying that Jesus will be your saviour. So I thought, without knowing much about the religion, they will be most willing to reach out to’lost’ souls..
Well, they accepted me with walm hands. That was because they think I am young male university student. They were very friendly, friendlier than any people. But soon, I discovered that was not to be. There was always this deliberate social pressure exerted by each othe on each other for them to attend Christian activities. If you thought they were doing it for the sake of religion NO, it was not. It was out of insecurity. If you decided to spend more time on your studies and absent yorself from some of the activities, they would be questioning why they could do so and should do so when you did not. In other words, it was due to kiasuism. They were afraid to lose out in the great paper chase.
Well, they did teach you to be like Jesus. But I soon realised they were less open than other university students because they feared being judged harshly by their religious peers because they themselves judge others more harshly. Although they refrained from criticising people in public, but they are more likely to show dispproval for example at some girls who wore heavy make-up or wear short skirts so much so that There was a rich girl in the group who would often struggled with issues like whether she should buy expensive things, even though she could sfford it.
So they liked the simple lifesytle. Simple lifestyle means you should lead a more honest life,,I thought naively the. After a year with them, I felt confident to reveal myself slowly and tactically. It soon became a cat-and-mouse game with gossipd spreading within the group. Yet, there were people within the group that I felt close to. I finally came out my closet. But what a shock I had! The shock was not on me but also on them. After having lived in Singapore for most of their lives and having seen gay classmates before, having a gay person in the group was a very shocking for them. It was like discovering that one of them had commited adultery, another shock bomb for them them They did not know how to react. The only thing they as with people who they consider to bemoral failures is to distance themselves form him.
I also had a shock. I pretended to be a social male again That was not successful. They realised that there is some concept called gay person and gay men are just not straight men, no matter how much you pretended to be one. Therein lies the hypocrisy. If your religion tells you to accept people as they are and you know that you cannot change some people and yet, you choose to reject them, then you are staying true to your religious principles and you are therfore a hypocrite. At that time, sex was not even an issue. It was the known fact that I have a different sexual orientation.
That period was a rather confusing period for me. I started to question my personhood and even thought that I had a disease. I went foolishly to churches for the hope of curing this ‘disease’ but even before I opened my mouth, I would hear hurtful remarks like sins. To a Christians, having an illness is something you can cure. Having sins means you are suddenly in cahoots with the devil and you are most likely going to hell.
Your website saved me. I began to feel proud of my gay identity. I recovered and became a much happier individual. Sometimes, I go into restaurants and see Christian groups, I continuously see hypocrisy. Well, there are some Christian groups that have “reformed” gays among them Gays who turned “straight” and had either wives or girlfriends and would be holding the hands of their wives or girlfriens inorder to show to the public that they are now “normal” men because outwardly, they still looked like gays(because there is something known as the “gay look”). The irony is that you see the way their fellow Christians interact with them, you realise that they are not men. There is no brotherliness between the so-called reformed gay and his Christian male friends and you also realised that the Christian felt a greater affinity toward this individual. IN fact, they interacted as thogh he was one of them.In other words, he is still a social female to them because unconsciously, they wer intteracting with him according to his true nature. How then can two social females be in a sexual relationship? this is the lie that the Christians present to the the world and just because they cannot accept the truth, they expect the world to accept this lie.