Mass exodus?

It appears that there will soon be a mass exodus of Exodus International applications from iPhones - an application which Apple initially approved.

I've been reading about the whole application here: http://exodusinternational.org/

It appears that Exodus International is an organisation which promotes certain strands of Christian teaching and one of those areas regards conservative interpretations of Scripture on homosexuality. (I won't go into my take on these, as I've done it about 100 times already).

The picture being created is of a homophobic and hateful organisation promoting the 'curing' of people from their homosexuality through many means, one of which is an iPhone application. If this picture is correct, then Apple are correct in withdrawing it: irrespective of one's personal beliefs, it is entirely irresponsible to promote an application which could be damaging and hurtful to thousands of people on the basis of an element of their nature which they neither chose nor invented. Such an application would be as unacceptable as one attempting to cure people of their skin colour.

However, it seems that this isn't quite the case. The organisation quite clearly acknowledges that one cannot be 'cured' of one's sexual orientation and claims to approach the subject with compassion and consideration.

What the organisation attempts to do therefore is to encourage those with conservative Christian beliefs and homosexual orientations to seek to discipline themselves not to act on them.

Do I agree that what Exodus International encourages is correct? Absolutely not. Do I think that they are taking the right approach? Probably not. Do I think that their beliefs are agreeable on the whole? Not really.

But, despite their beliefs being highly conservative and some of their claims regarding homosexuality highly questionable, it is not entirely clear that their views are hateful and homophobic. For that reason, it does not strictly seem to be necessary that the application is

withdrawn.

And, unfortunately, the result of such an action is invariably the protests of conservative religious believers that the devil is at work, persecution of Christians is on the rise and most Western citizens are on their way to hell. Oops, no sooner had I said it....