Anti-Gay Gay Preacher’s ‘Therapy’ Drove Man to Suicide

Religiously motivated anti-gay child abuse
US News • Views: 30,848

You may recall our story from last year about fundamentalist Christian leader George Rekers, who founded the politically active and virulently anti-gay Family Research Council with Dr. James Dobson — and then was caught on vacation with a “rent boy.”

It wasn’t the first case of an anti-gay preacher busted doing exactly what he preached against, and it won’t be the last, but this one was especially nasty because Rekers was also the founder of the bizarre and twisted “Feminine Boy Project,” a program that purported to “cure” boys as young as 4 years old of “effeminate tendencies.”

As I wrote in this post:

It’s religiously-motivated child abuse and quack pseudo-science serving the cause of hatred and bigotry.

Tonight on CNN at 10 pm ET, Anderson Cooper has a special show about the very young children whom Rekers abused with his brutal Pavlovian therapies during the 1970s — and the story is absolutely appalling: Therapy to change ‘feminine’ boy created a troubled man, family says.

Los Angeles (CNN) — Kirk Andrew Murphy seemed to have everything to live for. He put himself through school. He had a successful 8-year career in the Air Force. After the service, he landed a high profile position with an American finance company in India.

But in 2003 at age 38, Kirk Murphy took his own life.

A co-worker found him hanging from the fan of his apartment in New Delhi. His family has struggled for years to understand what happened.

“I used to spend so much time thinking, why would he kill himself at the age of 38? It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Kirk’s sister, Maris Murphy. “What I now think is I don’t know how he made it that long.”

After Kirk’s death, Maris started a search that would uncover a dark family secret. That secret revealed itself during a phone conversation with her older brother Mark, who mentioned his distrust of any kind of therapy.

“Don’t you remember all that crap we went through at UCLA?” he asked her. Maris was too young to remember the details, but Mark remembered it vividly as a low point in their lives.

(Hat tip: Penn Bullock, one of the producers.)

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Last updated: 2023-04-04 11:11 am PDT
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