Right to Personal Truth Trumps Political Correctness, but Not on the Campaign Trail

The Chicago Sun-Times’ Deborah Douglas weighed in on the uproar in the gay community over the Obama campaign’s hiring of Donnie McClurkin — a self identified ex-gay gospel singer — to entertain fundraiser guests.

She argues that McClurkin, “doesn’t have to stay gay if he doesn’t want to.” She goes on to describe how McClurkin’s childhood of sexual abuse led him to be, “confused about the role of sex and sexual identity.”

I agree with Douglas that if McClurkin wants to be ex-gay, that’s his right. He can live his life, explain his choices and develop his personal truth about God, sex and the world any way he wants. But his choices do have political ramifications when he makes those choices public. The ex-gay movement might work for McClurkin — I’ll believe it if he’s not caught having sex in an Iowa men’s room any time in the next 20 years — but it doesn’t work for a lot of people.

In fact, it more than doesn’t work. It leads a lot of gays and lesbians who would otherwise be openly living their lives and accepting themselves into lives of self-hating misery.

When a presidential campaign hires a vocal advocate for such a movement for his campaign, he gives a tacit endorsement of that advocate’s position. As nuanced and relatively tolerant as that position may be in this case — McClurkin doesn’t condemn gays quite as vehemently as some — it is still an endorsement of a position that causes many people immeasurable pain.

The gay community was quite reasonable to sit up and howl at Obama’s association with McClurkin.