well… that has to be rather awkward…
When the leader of a powerful Religious Right movement that thinks homosexuals can be cured with enough religious indoctrination and prayer, George Rekers, takes a European vacation, he travels in style. Not only is he hitting all the hotspots of art and culture in the Old World, but he’s doing it with his own personal assistant, a young, good looking, athletic fellow. Who Rekers found through a gay escort site on which his companion for the trip very explicitly advertised the nature of what buying his company entails in rather obvious ways. Talk about getting caught with your pants down; the man who pretty much founded today’s anti-gay movements trekking across Europe with a guy he sought out on a website used by gay men in search of a happy ending, if you pardon the cliché. If you needed one more reason to take Focus on the Family even less seriously than you already should, well… there you go.
To hear Rekers tell it, he was just looking for an assistant and spent much of his time telling his escort about the wonders of religion, accepting Jesus into his sinful heart, and giving him some of his high quality science on homosexuality that he’s been spreading over the last few decades, probably something about a sneezing gay man infecting everyone around him with Super-AIDS, or whatever other baseless mess of accusations he’s been passing off while trying to pray away the gay like the UK’s Phillipa Stroud. But I have to wonder whether all that purely scientific and theological sharing happened before of after his massage, and when did he realize he booked a gay escort, since he was apparently shocked to find out how he could’ve possibly stumbled into one on a gay site specializing in offering exactly that until after the trip was in progress? And at this rate, how does Rekers rent a car? Does he go to Hertz, fill out all the paperwork, get his vehicle, drive it around for days, then wake up at night in cold sweat, realizing that he was actually driving a car he rented? Is he suffering from very selective short term amnesia? Or maybe he’s just a desperate liar caught deep in a twink.
George, face it. You got caught and the assistant story is just not going to work. Nobody is going to look for an assistant to carry luggage based on how good he looks without his shirt and the size of his penis, highlighted in the candidate’s profile as an asset. And while it may seem just embarrassing to the Religious Right, they’ll come up with some ridiculous charade to waive it off and come up with more and more pseudoscience to get some sort of a justification about their pathological hatred of gays. They’ll just dispose of Rekers and give his mantle to another homophobe with theological inclinations waiting in the wings. No, what really hurts here is the realization that the man who formulated much of the Religious Right’s modern crusades against anything homosexual is enjoying rubdowns from twinks offering their company for a fee. That’s kind of like discovering that a Hassidic Jew wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is why so many in the gay community want every detail to be aired in the open, so they can peel back the often whitewashed veneer of the God Squad so everyone can take a look at the festering mix of confusion, hatred and hypocrisy writhing underneath. Rekers’ disciples have been fed pseudoscience and lies since the 1940s, and one could only hope that this incident will make them stop and realize it. But then again, hatred rarely cares about how valid or true it is…
