Scaring them straight.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Republican agenda and gay rights

When I saw the Exodus International full page ad in The New York Times Toward Hope and Healing for Homosexuals, my first thought was that it must not be going well for conservatives if they have to throw away good money to advertise for straight people. All those institutions--marriage, churches, the military, schools--aren't doing their job, I guess.

My next thought was, "This is my country on drugs."

Friends of mine were dismayed, but I was thrilled. No more whisper campaigns. Let's get it all out in the open.

My eighty-nine-year-old father is always a bit skeptical when I describe the forces ranged against lesbians and gays. But with meteorologist Pat Robertson, Trent "Twelve-Stepping" Lott, and now Exodus, I've got evidence.

Their poster girl is Anne Paulk, wife (graciously submitting to her ex-gay husband, I hope, unless he wants to go to Disneyworld), mother, and former lesbian. Paulk says that when she was four years old, a teenage boy molested her. That eventually made her a lesbian, she says, but only God can make a tree. And instead of going to Exodus International, wouldn't Anne have been better served by a "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Little Girls"?

Despite the lesbian community's six degrees of separatism, no one I know dated Anne in college, where she says her sexual attraction to women blossomed with the help of the campus gay/lesbian group. Note to gay/lesbian campus groups: You're in for a rough year.

In the ad, Anne bows to Reggie White and Angie and Debbie Winans. She says when she was living as a lesbian she hated to hear prominent people refer to her life as a sin. For a second there, I thought she was going to say, "So I joined my local lesbian SWAT team and staged a sit-down strike in the editorial offices of our paper until they agreed to more balanced coverage of gay issues." But no. Instead...