If Attorney General Bill McCollum is able to escape the Rick Scott onslaught and face Alex Sink in the fall, he’ll have to answer to Sink on a number of issues. But one he probably never expected to have to defend was his decision to pay $120,000 to an “expert,” Dr. George Rekers, to testify against gay adoption during the 2008 trial in Miami-Dade County.
Activists in the gay community were outraged by Rekers’ testimony and his excessive payday. But most of Florida only learned about it in May after Miami New Times broke the story about his European vacation with an openly gay male escort whom Rekers reportedly found through the website rentboy.com.
The fallout from that revelation led Rekers, the co-founder of the Family Research Council, to resign from the board of NARTH (the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality), an organization that offers conversion therapy to change homosexuals into heterosexuals. On his website, professorgeorge.com, he writes, “Dr. Rekers found his recent travel assistant by interviewing different people who might be able to help, and did not even find out about his travel assistant’s Internet advertisements offering prostitution activity until after the trip was in progress.” Rekers denies that any “inappropriate activity” took place, and also declares on the site that he is not gay.
Bill McCollum’s only comment since the Rekers/rentboy story broke was to say that there was a lack of available expert witnesses who would testify to the dangers of gay parents adopting children.
