CNN Updates the George Rekers Story: Remembering Kirk Murphy

He watched the little boy through the glass, through a window.  The little boy was in a closed room alone, playing with toys.

The watching, voyeuristic eye of the adult taking notes in another room.  The professional adult.  The adult pledged by his professional code of ethics to understand.  To heal.

The voyeuristic, watching, professional adult committed to understand and heal instructed the little boy’s mother to shun him if he played with the wrong toys.  (Watching for what?  Looking to see what?  Watching why?)  To see if the little boy played with girls’ toys.  The professional adult's instructions spilled over into the life of the family, so that the boy was routinely beaten by his father when he played with the wrong toys.

The little boy grew into a man who found it impossible to accept himself.  Because he had been told from the age of five by the professional adult committed to understanding and healing that who he was was simply wrong.  Broken.

And the voyeuristic professional adult committed to understand and heal—the man who watched a little boy playing with toys and told his parents to inflict pain on him for doing so?  An ordained Christian minister, he went on to publish a tract entitled The Christian World View of the Family.  And to help found a group called Focus on the Family, which calls itself “a non-profit Christian lobbying organization.”  

And, after having enjoyed a distinguished fellowship at the prestigious Harvard University, he went on to enjoy all the rights and privileges of a full professor at the University of South Carolina, where he specializes in “family therapy and psychological consultation in business settings.”  

A university that enjoys full accreditation by the distinguished academic accrediting agency the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities whose accreditation guidelines tell us the Association exists above all to insure the integrity (trumpets sound, stars blare in the skies at that word) of accredited institutions of higher learning. And whose mission is “to enhance educational quality” in the schools it accredits, as those institutions address “the needs of society and institutions.”

For SACS, as it chooses to accredit schools, everything depends, you see, on “integrity, thoughtful and principled judgment, rigorous application of requirements, and a context of trust.”

Yes, Rev. Dr. George Alan Rekers has it made.  With his secure professional standing and cushy job at the SACS-it's-all-about-integrity-accredited university that hired him and paid his salary, he can afford to take expensive European jaunts in the company of other boys, of hired rent boys to tote his luggage and give him massages.  

And the little boy that the caring professional adult, the Christian minister, watched through the glass as the little boy played with his toys, all alone, waiting for his mother to shun him and his father to beat him?

He took his own life.

Though Rev. Dr. Rekers had published a widely circulated study still touted in many quarters for its claim that Rev. Dr. Rekers' therapy cured Kirk Murphy.