#2572: Sue Bohlin

Sue Bohlin is associate speaker and Web Site Administrator with Probe Ministries and married to Ray Bohlin, whom we have already covered. Sue is herself a fundie and a wingnut, and predictably hateful and bigoted – her views on homosexuality, for instance, are precisely what you’d expect (“homosexuality is no more right, holy or acceptable today than it ever was in Bible times”). She has written a number of publication for Probe ministries, including ‘Homosexuality Q&A’, ‘Homosexual Myths’, ‘Ten Lies of Feminism’, ‘The Value of Suffering’, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Can Homosexuals Change?’, ‘5 Lies the Church Tells Women’, ‘A Short Look At Six World Religions’, ‘Worldproofing Our Kids’ [no kidding] and, of course, ‘Creation & Evolution Q&A for Kids’. Now, we haven’t bothered to look at, much less read, any of this, but we think we can reasonably infer a number of things from their titles and a general knowledge of Bohlin’s stances on things – she has for instance written quite a bit on evolution with her husband, Raymond, and we do know his views, e.g. on ‘The Grand Canyon and the Age of the Earth’.

 

Now, what should kids know about evolution, according to Bohlin? Well, they should apparently know that there are gaps in the fossil record, that there are no vestigial structures (we just don’t know what the functions are), that there are no genetic mechanisms for gradual evolution over cosmic time, and that there are things scientists can’t completely explain yet, so you are free to reject it all in favor of whatever you like.

 

A large part of her work consists of responding to questions from readers (or at least questions described as being from readers), and those answers are one reason she warrants an entry here. Telling her readers sternly that they cannot attend their neighbour’s gay wedding is just an example. We can’t be bothered to go through much of it but yes, that’s the standard.

 

Perhaps the main reason for including her, however, is her career as a speaker at various gay conversion camps, both in the US and internationally – indeed, Bohlin is on the Board of Directors for Living Hope Ministries, a deranged conversion therapy cult. According to Bohlin, the latest research shows 80 to 85 per cent of lesbians were sexually abused in the past. She does, of course, not provide any references. Moreover, women who weren’t nurtured or breastfed by their mothers end up sexually attracted to females because: “they want to rest in another woman’s arms; they want to suckle at a breast. They want to gaze into the eyes of another woman like a baby would a mother” (po-mo pseudo-Freudan pseudo-psychology is a major strand of fundie wingnut thought). Part of the blame lies also with popular culture, in particular a “disgusting” new generation of US TV shows and movies that glamorize same-sex relationships.

 

Diagnosis: An abomination, through and through. Undiluted evil, hate and bigotry, augmented by stupidity, ignorance and conspiracy theories.