Main Line 'Sports Camp' will help you repress your gay tendencies

If you are experiencing homosexual tendencies, it's probably just because you can't do sportz good, right?

That's part of the idea behind the upcoming "Sports Camp" at Wynnewood's St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. For the 14th straight year (see what I did there?), an apostulate group of the Catholic Church called Courage will hold the creatively-named retreat for men who need to learn more about sports. You know, so they won't act on their homosexuality any more.

Ahead of last year's retreat, our Kathy Boccella wrote about some of the beliefs/research/totally reasonable notions that help to motivate the folks running Sports Camp.

Therapist Paul Kleponis of the Institute for Marital Healing in West Conshohocken has said at Courage conferences that he believes homosexuality was rooted in childhood rejection and trauma and that through therapy people could develop an attraction for the opposite sex. He declined to comment for this story.

Some of that rejection, at least for men, can be linked to failure at sports, the group maintains. Robert Fitzgibbons, a therapist who runs the Marital Institute and has written extensively about what he calls healing homosexual attraction, said in an article on the Catholic Education Resource Center that boys who are rejected because they can't play sports "begin to identify with the female instead of the male." [Philly.com]

If this sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch, that's because it is. Ben Affleck played a sexually repressed counselor at a "Pray the Gay Away" camp just a few days ago. "Hetero is better, yo."

The camp starts this Thursday and runs through the holiday weekend. It's 2013 and Minnesota has legalized same-sex marriage while the some Main Line folks are really still trying to "cure" gays with sports. Ugh. [h/t Queerty]