Christine O'Donnell: In Bed With the Ex-Gay Movement?

She's the politician making headlines across the country, after knocking off an entrenched Republican in Delaware's GOP Senate primary last night. But for those just getting familiar with Christine O'Donnell, who hopes to take over Joe Biden's old Senate seat in Delaware, it might be high team to look beyond the victory headlines, and get a real sense of the work that O'Donnell has done in her adult life.

MSNBC aired a video last night talking about O'Donnell's work with a hardcore abstinence-only organization, the Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT). And though that name sounds even more over the top than the anti-vampire religious academy on True Blood, SALT was very much a real organization, and a group to which O'Donnell dedicated a huge chunk of her life toward getting off the ground.

As a leader with SALT, O'Donnell went on national television to preach against masturbation, saying that it was a sin against God.

"We choose sexual purity in our lives," said O'Donnell. "Masturbation is part of sexuality. But it is important to discuss this from a moral point of view." She then goes on to say that masturbation is against the Bible, and that masturbation is akin to committing adultery.

If that's the case, then I think the world's population of adulterers just went up by about 99.9 percent.

But while O'Donnell's comments on masturbation seem well outside majority opinion, it's her ties to the ex-gay movement that ought to be turning heads, too. As it stands, O'Donnell believes that LGBT people can be cured, and that through reparative therapy, gay people can learn to lead lives as straight people.

That position puts her squarely at odds with every major scientific and medical body, which consistently say that ex-gay therapy is destructive, abusive, dangerous, and ineffective. But hey, why let a little thing like science get in the way?

Truth Wins Out points out this morning that O'Donnell's ties to the ex-gay movement run deep. As President of SALT, O'Donnell helped facilitate an ex-gay program within the group, even bringing on a staff member to work exclusively on ex-gay issues. That staff person was Wade Richards, who was brought in to serve as the poster boy for homosexuality conversion.

But it didn't really work out that way. Instead, Richards would eventually come out of the closet (in an Advocate interview, no less), and denounce the ex-gay therapy work of SALT.

“I’ve been through so much in my life already," Richards said in the interview. "But the one constant is I’m gay. I just want to spend some time being who I am."

Wise words. But being openly gay and proud about it was incompatible with SALT and the work of O'Donnell. And to this day, O'Donnell still purports the idea that gay people can be cured through therapy and Bible study. And that has the executive director of Truth Wins Out, Wayne Besen, calling her and her campaign out for supporting such unscientific and dangerous work.

"Christine O’Donnell is an extremist and was a staunch supporter of the lie that people can ‘pray away the gay’,” said Besen. “It is time that she apologize for harming people with her failed ‘ex-gay’ program and for pushing a lie that obviously did not work.”

The Tea Party is celebrating this morning, after knocking off yet another entrenched candidate. But the mantra, "Be careful what you wish for," speaks volumes today. Because now the new face of the Tea Party is a woman who believes masturbation is the devil, and that gayness can be prayed away. Is that really the right person to carry the Tea Party to the next level?

Most pundits and prognosticators don't think so. They're already writing O'Donnell's political obituary in Delaware, suggesting that her now general election opponent, Democrat Chris Coons, will wipe the floor with her. That remains to be seen.

But if average Delaware voters get the whiff that O'Donnell wants to go to Washington to fight masturbation and homosexuality, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which she can pull in enough mainstream support to win in November.

Photo credit: Christine O'Donnell for Senate