Capitol Correspondent
JACKSON –
Marc Adams was allowed to watch only one television program as a child, Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour. And even then, he said, he was allowed only to watch the first half hour. The second half was Falwell's preaching, something his fundamentalist Baptist minister father thought was too liberal.
By accident, one night Adams had a chance to catch some of the forbidden fruit of Falwell's "liberal" sermon and the television minister was railing against the evils of homosexuality. "Jerry started talking about it as a sin, and if you really believed God was all powerful, God could certainly change someone's behavior from homosexual to heterosexual," Adams told a gathering of 30 people in Jackson last Friday. "I heard hope. I could change my life and become straight."
That message had a lasting impact on Adams. He decided then and there that he would attend Falwell's Liberty University. He said he knew his parents wanted him to go to a religious university, it was expected of him and his classmates of the Christian high school they attended. But when he announced his plans to attend Liberty the response was not good.
"That didn't fly. I could have come out to them and had a better reception at that point," Adams said with a laugh. "They told me if I wanted to go to that place, they would not be paying for any of that."
But he was determined to go there. So determined in fact that he completed high school at age 16 and enrolled in Liberty. He got a job and found a boyfriend. The relationship lasted only six months, and afterwards, Adams said, he realized he had been sidetracked from his plan to become straight.
The problem was that he could not talk to anyone at Liberty about his sexuality, the mere implication a person was homosexual was enough for Liberty officials to kick the alleged homosexual out of the university.
Enter reparative therapy.
"I was never promised I would be cured of my homosexuality. I was told I would have to fight this everyday for the rest of my life," Adams said. "They guaranteed I would fall off the wagon and do the wrong thing, but the true test was how quickly I got back on the wagon."
Adams said the program was, at its core, a 12-Step program. He felt he had no other choice but to do the program. "The alternative was to kill myself or change myself."
"It's sounded easy – change your behavior," Adams said. "You can stop biting your nails if you have the right motivation. The fear of burning forever in a lake of fire was enough to motivate me."
"But as I thought about it, and started being honest with myself, I realized I was doing it for the same reason everyone was. Not for God to accept me, but for others to accept me," he said. It was that realization that lead him to Los Angeles and a coming out process that culminated with his book "The Preacher's Son." It also lead to the creation of HeartStrong which was created to battle what he called "faith based bullying."
"We believe our work is a rescue mission," Adams said of HeartStrong. "We cannot go far enough, fast enough because this is saving people's lives."
