DR. BROWN…A LITTLE MORE INFO

Okay…in the interest of full disclosure…and on the heels of yesterday’s blog…I will admit that this is not my first encounter with Dr. Michael Brown. In fact, my previous encounter(s) with him and his group were heatedly adversarial. It’s hard to have rational discourse with persons who have built walls of dogma to surround themselves.

I had been participating in Charlotte, NC Pride events for several years. It was always held in Marshall Park, a fairly wide expanse which could accommodate lots of people and was grassy and family and pet friendly. As representatives for NC TG Unity, we were the only trans presence other than drag queens. We were the only ones disseminating literature that might help and educate. And, invariably, we were always set up nearest to where evangelical protestors chose to demonstrate. Needless to say, it wasn’t pretty.

2005 was the year that Michael Brown’s group along with Operation Save America came with over a hundred protestors all clad in red. Their message? We were an abomination to all civilized peoples. Our presence was evidence of mankind’s sin and it’s need to repent. They said they loved us, but they hated who we were. Yeah…the same old and tired rhetoric.

For a while, you say to yourself…okay…they’re bigots…they’re nuts…they’re zealots. But, and this is the frustrating part, you eventually can no longer sit there and take the verbal abuse. You MUST respond, or so it feels at the time. And I wish I HAD kept my mouth closed, because it was like talking to a wall. The protestors had a stock reply for every inconsistency or epithet they hurled. We might have just as well engaged robots in discourse, for all the colloquy which ensued. Faith is one thing, but unquestionable dogma does nothing but obscure the truth….and reality.

After that, Charlotte Pride was renamed and PRIDE Charlotte moved to a smaller and more confined location which was effectively harder to protest. But Dr. Brown’s minions always had some kind of representation.

My next encounter with Dr. Brown and his supporters was at the HRC dinner in Charlotte in late winter 2007 where they occupied the street between the hotel and the event. They used the same tactics…bait and attack. This time I was smart enough to ignore their shenanigans, but not everyone one could resist. A few in our group (the first full trans table at a Charlotte HRC dinner) could not walk by without being drawn into their circular and unarguable argument.

In the summer of 2009, Dr. Brown hoped to gather a thousand people for the “God Has A Better Way” pray-a-thon in which they would “pray out the gay”. This has been well documented by Matt Comer, current editor of Q Notes and, at the time of the pray-a-thon, publisher of InterstateQ.com. A link to his column and the extended discourse between Matt and Dr. Brown, by way of comment, follows.

I won’t go back into a review of Dr. Brown’s philosophy, as stated in his writings and public appearances. Matt’s column really addresses much of it. What had me peeved for many years was his sanctimonious and arrogant belief that he not only knows better, and that he has some paternalistic mission to spread what he knows, but that his world view cannot be disputed because it’s founded upon dogma which is irrefutable. Sheeesssh!!

The hubris and condescension are intolerable.

And then he had the gall to appropriate one of Robert Hunter’s and the Grateful Dead’s most quoted lyrics. He’s not only a charlatan and a windbag but a plagiarizing thief! Maybe someone needs to explain to Mr. Brown that “What a Long Strage Trip Its Been” is a reference to dosing, that is, taking LSD. And it just occurred to me that maybe Dr. Brown is really having a flashback to the days when he used to take acid because it seems like a really bad trip he’s on today. Or maybe he really needs to dose again and reacquaint himself with reality.


Matt Comer’s column