Rachel Maddow Takes on 'Cure the Gays' Author Richard Cohen
By Heather Thursday Dec 10, 2009 6:00amRachel Maddow takes on this shyster who claims he can 'cure' homosexuality and confronts him about the way his book has been used to spread anti-gay propoganda around the world -- in particular by the members of C-Street pushing the kill-the-gays bill in Uganda. Rachel made sure to point out that Richard Cohen is not licensed by any accrediting body and when he cited his marriage as proof he'd been cured of his homosexuality, let viewers know that Mr. Cohen continued to have sex with men after being married.
Cohen defended himself saying that they don't think they can 'cure' or 'pray away the gay' and said they don't use those words. They just offering 'counseling' for those with 'unwanted same sex attraction'.
MADDOW: The subject of the interview tonight is the head of a group called the International Healing Foundation, and all reporting on a proposed law to execute people for being gay in Uganda. We turned up evidence of strong links between conservative U.S. politicians who are part of the secretive religious group, The Family, a.k.a. C Street, and people in Uganda who introduced and are pushing the kill-the-gays bill.
But we also turned up more direct connections between the kill-the-gays bill and other American activists. In March, the International Healing Foundation, which is based in Maryland, sent one of its staffers to Uganda to speak to parliament there and to speak at a conference organized by the main promoter of the kill-the-gays bill.
His message was that gay people are gay by choice and a gay person who wants to be straight can be straight. That speech to parliament and the anti-gay conference took place in March of this year.
After the conference in April, the conference organizer arranged for an anti-homosexuality petition to be delivered to the Ugandan parliament. And within a month, on April 29th, the kill-the-gays bill had been introduced with the anti-gay conference organizer sitting in the gallery for that occasion.
Here is that conference organizer and the lead proponent of the kill-the-gays bill, Stephen Langa, praising the influence and authority of our next guest.
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he knows it now!
have a haircut that makes him look like a lesbian?
Oh I remember this guy, he beat up pillows with a tennis racket.
While screaming like a gay little boy.
I think she won the Edward R. Murrow award before. But this kind of segment can win the award again. She was tough and classy, and very very clever. Awesome work! And her show is now better than Keith's! And Steven King agrees in his Entertainment Weekly column (he's a huge fan).
I love this woman! "I'm reading it from your book, dude!" That was hysterical. I think he soiled himself.
That was hysterical
how she expects to get any more guests after this sublime beatdown.
Wow.
Laser sight passion and fury.
The best part is near the end when she reveals that his own cure didn't work for him as he continued gay relationships after he had married.
A product of his own failure and a complete fraud.
We Americans like our shysters.
hypocrisy.
I wouldn't be surprised if he does himself in.
There is a chronic lack of testicular fortitude in the MSM. Rachel reminds us what things could be, if the world was right side up
She'd make howdy doody look like the tool he is.
Oh God yess Please, Betsy Fischer if your reading this PLEASE let Rachel Maddow host a MTP show, PLEASE. I know we will watch, DVR, PODCAST, and youtube it.
Let her help pick the guests so we get a real view and discussion going on topics that real people are so concrned about.
I think this would be a huge thing for MTP
Rachel = swoon!
She sliced and diced the guy.
And she does it with class and her own style.
Rachel broke that charlatan down like a shotgun.
Ya see him shakin towards the end of that smackdown?
Also...that man is SO in denial of his own sexuality.
If he really does have a wife and kinds...I feel sorry for them.
Now if we can only find a cure for stupidity.
. . . "cure". We provide counseling for people who want to live a "smart" life.
I think they guy is a conflicted bi-sexual.
He doesn't understand he is not gay and not straight. (and that's okay)
Rampant bisexuality among the Christian Right is the reason they insist that homosexuality is a choice.
I like the way you think.
is that this huckster will have blood on his hands soon.
I assume he probably already has blood on his hands. Hate is like that.
How many people do you think killed themselves after "failing" his program? That's definitely on his hands...
I just read the chapter "Cracking the Enigma" in the The Code Book by Simon Singh. Now this was before Cohen was even born, but I think it suggests an answer to your question. The chapter describes the WWII work of Bletchley Park and their role in winning the war by cracking German codes. Alan Turing was probably the individual at Bletchley who made the greatest contribution to this effort.
But Turing was gay. In the words of his Bletchley colleague, Jack Good: "Fortunately the authorities did not know that Turing was a homosexual. Otherwise, we might have lost the war."
Several years after the war, Turing's secret became public.
comes again, but while I was an evangelical, I am ashamed to say that at the time I felt ashamed about my bisexuality, and in my early twenties I was attracted to a younger girl. I actually sought some prayer help, and at one point had fooled myself that I had stuck to the "correct" team. But, I eventually realized that no, I am bisexual, I was created that way, I will always be that way, and there is nothing wrong with it. This was just before I left the church altogether.
Tragically, there are probably plenty of GLBT evangelicals who still buy into Cohen's crap, and feel like failures because of who they are. So there are probably suicides...
was born an asshole or if it was a matter of choice...the latter, I think.
Dude, if you enjoy bumping uglies with both the guys and the gals you are probably bisexual.
And there ain't nothing wrong with that.
tells me there is something queer about this fellow.
I understand today's kits come with an adaptor that turns it into an E-meter if you pass your sidewalk IQ test.
Yeah, but can he cure heterosexuality?
Well, obviously.
I think you're on to something
This guy seems to have kinda cured his gayness and now he has to work on curing his stupidness.
you must be recruited away from it.
Next thread is better. Green Balloon Boy is the topic.
Rachel was all like "Dude! I'm reading it from your book!" LOVE IT!!!
Thank God for Rachel Maddow!
Her professionalism slipped just a little, but she had to cut the bullshit.
She's awesome.
all over the place (check YouTube) and the onscreen ID shows him as "Richard Cohen, Psychotherapist." He's unlicensed and been barred for life from an American Psychological org. He picked up his wife while he was a Moonie and he still makes videos for the Universal Peace TV outfit.
Guess who's going to be well positioned to bid on Uganda's "forced reorientation" program. Steven Langa already uses Cohen's book like a "bible" when he speaks to groups to drum up support for Kill the Gays. Ughhhhh
. . . but the Bible is also used like a "bible" to drum up support to kill the gays.
My own father-in-law has this guy's book and others, and is hoping to "pray away teh ghey" in his new position as apprentice minister in a church founded to promote homophobia. This particular church shall remain nameless because it's the Anglican Mission to the Americas from Rwanda. Oops. Anyway, he hasn't been too successful, in no small part because you don't really attract too many gays to "cure" by starting out calling them "sinners" and "wrong-headed".
I thought there was something Moonie-ish about this guy.
ever got through that interview I will never know.
I've been through 7 decades of poisonous attitudes with very little progress and that greedy little turd is determined to turn the clock back...for fun and profit.
At any rate, Rachel was at her best. Her manner of "interrogation" is wondrous to behold.
Then again, talk about a soft target! Mr. married with 3 kids could have been just as easily snickered off the set.
mr sedum
"Then again, talk about a soft target!"
Is that some kind of a flaccid joke?
lol
Are there any gay counselors who provide a program to counsel and comfort straight people who don't want to be straight?
If homosexuality is a choice that a person makes, then obviously they had the choice to be straight, too. It follows, therefore, that being straight is also a choice. And why is that choice the right one?
Since Mr. Cohen can state without proof that being gay is a psychological problem due to (e.g.) too little affection as a child, then can one also state that being straight may be the result of too much love? Why couldn't a person come to the conclusion then that their parents were too loving, they had too many same-sex friends in childhood, and this "straightness" was caused by these adverse experiences and needs to be "cured" or "counseled away" or whatever they want to call it?
So all straight people had good relations with their mom and dad? Damn, I must be gay because I had horrible relations with my mom. All this time I thought I was a straight woman. Wait until I tell my husband of over 23 years that I am, according to this dude, a gay woman.
Oh shit! I just remembered something. My husband had a bad relationship with his dad. God, he's gay too.
When Cohen described the kind of relation that gay men had with their fathers it was like he was describing me. Never knew I was gay.
I didn't have a father around to have any sort of relationship with, but I like tits and I don't like anal. What's going on here? Does this bisexual Cohen fella want me to only find post-op m-to-f transsexuals?
Bill Clinton's horn dog heterosexuality?
He's OBVIOUSLY over compensating for his gayness.
See? It really is just a matter of finding the right person.
So now these jokers are going to Africa to have the gay jailed and killed. Is there any doubt whatsoever that these assholes are pure evil?
They better hope there is no hell because eternity is a looooooooooong time.
smirk . . wuz up wit dat?
tore him a new one.
"gay people are gay by choice and a gay person who wants to be straight can be straight" . .
Isn't that's like saying . . straight people are straight by choice and a straight person who wants to be gay can be gay?
....my "gaydar" is particularly fine tuned, and this guy may be married with children, but he is dreaming of a high, hard one. (Not that there is anything wrong with that for those that chose)
Rachael may just be the best journalist of our time. Always fearless, always consummately prepared for the debate.
...how she was so nice to this guy. People who answer a simple question by telling you that "you already know" have always bugged me.
"The things that I wrote are not in the book that I wrote! That's ridiculous! But, if they are, I'm sure it's a gay conspiracy..."
is using outdated faux-pseudo-Freudian nonsensical psychoanalysis to try and get rich. His methods are so laughable by any real therapist, using bonding to parents as a ploy to describe our outcomes, it is like listening to Sean Hannity discredit all or modern science on global warming. He tried to put a good face on for the camera, but Rachel is too fiercely clever.
If only there were a cure for stupidity .
"So... despite your marriage and kids, you have continued to have sexual relationships with other men..."
Can he cure the Rod?
I like when he talks passionately about the 'thrust' of his text...
I watched this on my iPod and frankly I was proud and gleefull not that this guy was getting trounced by Rachel. I was so happy to see Rachel standup and say all the things I wanted to ever say to this "Author"!?
I know Rachel may be feeling a bit taken back by it because from what I can see as a consumate viewer of her show is that she never wants to be seen as bias in any way. She treated him fairly and called him out for the work he has done and how its is being used as a text to define a method to strip human rights from people because of their sexual orientation.
This guy deserved what he got and I was glad that it was Rachel that gave it to him.
Rachel is always fair, honest, up front, and dam accurate in her reporting and that makes a great reporter and News anchor/showperson.
Thank you Rachel for keeping the truth in the forefront of your work.
Thank you for standing up for the rest of us that have no voice anymore in this country.
Thank you for being there to help us through the tough times and make us laugh too.
You are a gem of a person, a rarity in todays public world.
... a lesson to those who claim to be 'journalists' as she, unlike them (O'Reilly, Hannity, van Susteren, et al, allowed the guest to speak his opinion, and then hit him back with facts and his own words.
I missed the talking-over, screaming and screeching and 'cut-his-mic'.
bulldoze these folks' arguments in a polite, almost friendly fashion, and doesn't have to resort to yelling, talking over them, or cutting their mics. It's really a breath of fresh air.
Maybe he's a huckster who saw a way to get TV fame and a book bought in bulk by funders of right wing think tanks and publications.
Still, on the other hand, being really gay is not a hindrance to such a scam.
He keeps insisting he is innocent and promotes love and tolerance, however, he's saying gay people can be "cured". For the crowd that hates gays, that's all they need to run with.
Don't want to be killed? Well it's your own fault for being stubborn-- convert.
He says there is a "cure" so people that refuse to accept the "cure" can, without remorse or guilt, be killed. Like they asked for it.
1) Isn't it weird that no one here seems at all angry that Cohen appears to be not the least bit horrified, upset or, well, anything that Ugandans are using his book as justification for killing people? If I wrote a book and people were using it as justification for murder, I'd be extremely upset and would be yellling my outrage to the world. Cohen's complete lack of recognition, his utter moral imbecility is what a lot of people mean when they refer to the banality of evil. (Hannah Arndt meant something different, at least according to one author I've read, so I'm leaving her out. Put her back in if you like.)
2) If gay is a choice, wouldn't that be a good thing? I mean, most of our biggest problems, such as global warming, stems from the fact that there are just way too many people on the planet. If we could have whoop-de-doo time w/o fear of reproduction and be OK with it, it sure would bode well for our future on the planet, no?
I guess I'll go out, find a sailor and see if it works.
Read my post above. I don't always vent on the internet: there are enough people to do that already.
The guy is a hack. I went to his website. The initial, get-started, book package sells for about $500, but he's only acting out of love.
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