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Stories tagged with “Richard Cohen”

LGBT

Ex-Gay Therapist Offers Duplicitous ‘Apology’ To Attract New Gay Clients To Harmful Treatment

By Zack Ford on Oct 31, 2011 at 11:04 am

Richard Cohen demonstrated some of his ex-gay therapy techniques for CNN.

Richard Cohen is one of the most public purveyors of reparative ex-gay therapy, promoting and lecturing about the scientifically-unsound belief that gays and lesbians can change their sexual orientation. The American Counseling Association permanently expelled Cohen in 2002, but his bizarre reparative techniques have attracted mainstream media attention from outlets like CNN and MSNBC.

On Friday, Cohen’s counseling organization, the International Healing Foundation (IHF), announced that it was offering a “sincere, heartfelt apology to everyone in the LGBTQ community,” and shifting its focus from “Change Is Possible” to “Coming Out Loved”:

Beginning today, IHF’s doors are wide open to everyone in the LGBTQ and straight communities. The new mission, “Coming Out Loved,” is the catalyst of true tolerance, real diversity, and equality for all. IHF staff will assist anyone who is conflicted about their sexuality and other challenging issues that arise for many in the gay community. [...]

Cohen asserts everyone should be loved and accepted for who they are. “By opening our doors to everyone in the LGBTQ and straight communities, we are expanding upon our mission and broadening the scope of our services,” he says.

Unfortunately, nothing at IHF seems to have actually changed. In fact, despite the sugar-coated rebranding, the organization is still promoting services geared toward people with “unwanted same-sex attractions,” citing NARTH guidelines and Cohen’s absurd mythology about the “causes” of same-sex attraction. NARTH is the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a disavowed organization of mostly religious leaders that promotes the idea sexual orientation can be changed, in defiance of all reputable research.

If IHF is still promoting these harmful ideas to clients, then the organization is perhaps more dangerous than ever with its new duplicitous branding. The fact that Cohen’s apology did not specifically address the harm done by reparative therapy is telling. Ex-gay survivor Peterson Toscano has been recently wrestling with the “apology” of another ex-gay leader, John Smid. He suggests that if these individuals wish to recant the harm they’ve done to the gay community and make amends, “they need to speak to their own people and leave queer folks alone.”

Special Topic

Gingrich: ‘There’s A Frightening Level Of Anti-Semitism’ At 99 Percent Protests

By Ali Gharib on Oct 28, 2011 at 1:30 pm

99 Percenters shun rare instances of anti-Semitism

Many of the Republican presidential candidates were initially disdainful of the 99 Percent Movement. Then as the movement grew, spurring hundreds of thousands into the street, they changed their tune. But not Newt Gingrich. Instead, he’s taken the less-than-committal position that while people have a “reason to be angry,” there are also more insidious elements — “left-wing agitators” who “trash the place” — among the “sincere middle-class” protesters.

Now, In an interview on CBS, Gingrich escalated his attacks on unnamed percent of the 99 Percent that he’s not so keen on, decrying a theme of anti-Semitism in the protests:

My question for the Occupy Wall Street group is, What’s their message?

Frankly, if you look at some of the signs, if you listen to some of the interviews, there’s a frightening level of anti-Semitism in some of these gatherings.

Watch the video:

Gingrich must’ve watched some of the fear-mongering television ads by hedge fund-bankrolled far right-wing pressure groups.

It’s unlikely that Gingrich has visited any 99 Percent Movement protests, let alone gone to Zucotti Park in Lower Manhattan. While there have been a small handful of signs displaying anti-Semitic sentiments (though some of those highlighted by neoconservatives are strictly pro-Palestinian) and a few interviewees at protests have made similar comments, those demonstrators have been shunned by the masses (the rest of the hundreds of thousands). In Tablet, a mainstream Jewish website, journalist Michelle Goldberg called the anti-Semites a “tiny fringe,” and her colleague Marc Tracy wrote that in several visits downtown he has “witnessed zero anti-Semitic signs or chants.”

This week, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote about his trips to Zucotti Park to witness the protests:

This was my second visit to the Occupy Wall Street site and the second time my keen reporter’s eye has failed to detect even a hint of the anti-Semitism that had been trumpeted by certain right-wing Web sites and bloggers, most prominently Bill Kristol. He is a founder of the Emergency Committee for Israel, which has been running cable TV ads alleging a virtual hate rally at the Occupy Wall Street site and calling on President Obama and other important Democrats to denounce what is — as it happens — not happening there. The commercial ran on Fox News the very day I was at the site.

Kristol’s cri de wolf (a French term of my own invention) was taken up by Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s conservative blogger, who noted the Kristol group’s “eye-popping ad.” Citing an article from Israel Today that linked a single statement by someone named Patricia McAllister in Los Angeles with some vitriol on the American Nazi Party’s Web site and a reference to the editor of Adbusters, she fashioned a veritable pogrom out of pretty close to thin air and demanded, “Where is the outrage?” I have a better question: Where are the anti-Semites?

Cohen’s right to ask — and to point to Kristol and Rubin‘s attempts to smear the 99 Percent movement. (Rubin is close to the Emergency Committee for Israel, having taken a trip to Israel last year paid for by the group.) But Gingrich, shamefully, is taking the manufactured message of pervasive anti-Semitism at 99 Percent protests from the neoconservative fringes straight to the mainstream.

Media

Cohen: Online News Reading is Undermining My Sexist Stereotypes

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 16, 2008 at 12:13 pm

A colleague observes to me that someone needs to tell Richard Cohen that you can read newspapers on your BlackBerry:

A BlackBerry is of limited utility. You cannot have a hearty family breakfast with everyone gathered around the BlackBerry. But with a good newspaper, the president could read the hard-news section, the first lady could adhere to gender orthodoxy and read the softer sections, and the kids could chuckle at the comics. Just as in the old movies, papa could explain things, like what’s the purpose of NATO anymore. (I’m dying to know this myself.) Not all newspapers have comic sections, but even those that don’t usually have sports pages and business columns.

A high-quality newspaper is a repository of leaks. Presidents don’t care for leaks, but like awful-tasting medicine, leaks are good for presidents. Leaks are an important way that one part of the government can communicate with another. An assistant Cabinet secretary cannot pick up the phone and call the president. His boss won’t let him. His boss might block something the president should know. This is where leaks come in. The low-level guy leaks the information to a newspaper and the president reads about it at breakfast. This cannot happen with a BlackBerry.

If the case for newspapers is that they help bolster gender orthodoxy, I think it’s probably a good thing that print is doomed.

Media

I’m a Brilliant, Original, and Idiosyncratic Thinker But Don’t Ever Disagree With Me

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 25, 2008 at 8:39 am

Richard Cohen

Much like Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, I write for a living. Primarily about U.S. politics and public policy. I write about these things because I think they’re important. And, obviously, the essence of the matter is that people have strong feelings about these important issues and disagree in crucial ways. Thus, though my understanding and expectation is that my audience consists largely of people who agree with my basic political orientation, I hardly expect each and every reader to agree with each and every thing I say. I like to think that some of the time I persuade people to change their minds about issues on which we disagree, but I don’t flatter myself that I’m so enormously convincing that this will happen 100 percent of the time. Nor do I flatter myself to think that I’ll be right all the time. Because of all this, it doesn’t surprise me that my comment section and my inbox are often full of people disagreeing with me. It’s all in the game, and even though criticism is often annoying it’s also often helpful — it’s how I learn. And I would assume that if I were given a much more prominent platform for an important national newspaper, then the volume of criticism would get larger, which is at it should be. Cohen, though, doesn’t see it that way:

“I used to get a lot more on the right,” said columnist Richard Cohen, who broke with liberals when he supported the Iraq war. More recently, the left has picked apart columns that are perceived as being favorable to John McCain.

“If you’re a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face,” Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics “were born too late, because they would have been great communists.”

It’s extraordinary how commonplace these kind of sentiments are among prominent media figures. Cohen clearly relishes his self-conception as an independent thinker. And presumably the whole reason he’s glad to be a Washington Post columnist in part because that gives him a large audience of people who care about politics. Given all that, of course people will sometimes disagree with him! But that’s now how he sees it, and certainly he sees no need to engage with his critics on the merits — instead, they’re just like Communists!

The whole mindset is bizarre but also bizarrely widespread. You’d think that people who write for a living about public affairs wouldn’t be so thin-skinned.

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