At least two antifamily, pro-harassment organizations — Mission: America and the American “Family” Association — continued to lobby antigay parents today to shield their teen-agers from anti-bullying messages by keeping them home from school on April 25, which has been designated an annual Day of Silence by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network.
The Day of Silence commemorates GLBT youths who were victims of school violence and murder, by reminding classmates that violence and harassment silence GLBT youths and their families.
The boycott against freedom of speech and nonviolence in schools is co-sponsored by the ex-gay Abiding Truth Ministries, American Family Association, Americans for Truth, Concerned Women for America, Exodus Mandate, Illinois Family Institute, Indiana Voice for the Family, Liberty Counsel, Mass Resistance, Mission: America, Parents’ Rights Coalition, the ex-gay Stephen Bennett Ministries, and Exodus conference speaker Ken Hutcherson’s pro-violence group Watchmen on the Walls.
In inland California, anti-tolerance organizations hope the boycott will prove financially costly to public schools and taxpayers, as school funding is said to be determined in part by attendance. A pro-discrimination group, Capitol Research Institute, has organized a counter-event euphemistically called a “Day of Learning” for antigay parents and students that participate in the pro-harassment boycott. What exactly will participants “learn”? According to The Press-Enterprise, they will learn how to gather signatures “to repeal a state law that prevents discrimination in schools based on sexual orientation.” Meanwhile, the antigay Alliance Defense Fund has declared April 28 to be an annual day when antigay students verbally harangue gay classmates with defamatory, egotistical, and hypocritical religious messages.
GLSEN has released the following ad featuring Lance Bass to counter pro-harassment, pro-silence propaganda that is being fed to students by antigay political organizations:
Meanwhile, pro-exgay pundit Warren Throckmorton continues his campaign against the anti-bullying day. Throckmorton’s proposal creates an artificial division between the Golden Rule and explicit opposition to antigay violence and harassment. Throckmorton may view his own campaign to supply students with misinformation as a lesser evil than that of the boycotters. But, in pandering to the worst elements of the pseudo-Christian religious right, Throckmorton trivializes both Christian values and the growing problem of antigay violence and harassment in schools.
Focus on the Family falsely claimed on Friday that the American Psychological Association believes sexual orientation “is likely developmental in nature.” Focus downplays emphasis by the APA and researchers on biological factors including birth order, genes, and hormones.
Amid news of the widespread failure of antisex education and virginity pledges to reduce sexual activity and pregnancies, recentdiscussions have asked whether “abstinence-only” advocacy actually forces more teen-agers and young adults to have abortions than would have been necessary with comprehensive sex education.
Having suffered spikes in youth sexual activity and unwanted pregnancies as a result of “abstinence only” programs, at least 15 states now refuse federal funding to pay for outside groups to teach “abstinence only” in school.
But hard research into any correlation between abstinence-only advocacy and abortion is still lacking.
The following family-friendly cartoon — appropriate for schools — refutes the ex-gay myth with humor as well as fact.
Compare that presentation to antigay reparative-therapy advocates Julie Harren Hamilton and David Blakeslee, whose ex-gay video presentation peddles the unfounded myth that bad parenting, bad perceptions of parenting, and sexual abuse play a significant role in the development of sexual orientation in most gay individuals. PFOX promoted this ex-gay video via official e-mail this week.
Why might these particular antigay Christians be so antifamily — so desperate to blame family members — and so eager to believe the ignorant guesswork of one particular 19th-century secular psychotherapist named Sigmund Freud?
Watch the video: Truth Wins Out and local GLBT equality advocates protested against Focus on the Family’s ex-gay roadshow in Mountain View, California, on April 12, 2008.
Lisa Miller and her partner, Janet Jenkins, exchanged vows in a civil union ceremony eight years ago in Vermont. Through artificial insemination, Lisa conceived and gave birth to Isabella in 2002. In 2003, Lisa adopted an ex-gay sexual identity, took Isabella and fled to Virginia, where she found an activist judge willing to violate Vermont child-custody and visitation orders.
From Vermont’ perspective, Lisa is now a law-breaking fugitive who has turned her daughter into a political pawn in the culture wars.
Since then, Lisa has flouted Vermont family law and constitutional precedent in which states (such as Virginia) may not override other states’ jurisdiction and court rulings in matters of family law. Even as she violated the law, lived as a fugitive in Virginia, and sought to sever Janet’s ties to Isabella, Lisa won child support from Janet.
On Thursday (April 17), the Virginia Supreme Court will rule hear arguments in the custody dispute.
Focus on the Family has weighed in, supporting Lisa’s violations of Vermont family law and implicitly favoring a “special right” of antigay states to disobey the court rulings of states that have jurisdiction over a marriage, civil union, or child custody.
Between 1933 and 1945, approximately 50,000 gay Germans were incarcerated and as many as 10,000 were slaughtered in the concentration camps.
But that horrible fact has been declared politically inconvenient by the religious right, and so Kentucky’s General Assembly has removed mention of gay victims from a new law making additional Holocaust-education curriculum materials available to eighth-graders. (Read More)
In 1998, fifteen socially conservative groups launched a huge “ex-gay” advertising campaign that was billed as the “Normandy Landing in the cultural wars.” The attack began with full-page ads in The New York Times and USA Today. Now, ten years and several scandals later, it appears that the right wing may be reconsidering its strategy.
Last Saturday, TruthWinsOut.org, joined local organizations at the Billy DeFrank Center in San Jose to counter Love Won Out, Focus on the Family’s ex-gay road show. The anti-gay conference only drew 700 participants, down from past events, which drew thousands of mainly confused parents who were dealing with children who had come out.
More important, this was the second consecutive symposium where Focus on the Family chose not to market to the general public. As in Memphis, the group’s usual “ex-gay” billboards did not hover over major highways. The group also did not solicit press from major media outlets until days before the event. Instead, they concentrated their marketing efforts in right wing churches.
The subdued atmosphere of Love Won Out follows a decision by the largest “ex-gay” group, Exodus International, to recall their Washington lobbyist. It is too early to know if the right wing is rethinking the “ex-gay” issue or simply regrouping to launch another major ad blitz. Perhaps, the twin disasters of Sen. Larry Craig and Rev. Ted Haggard may have severely eroded the already shaky credibility of the ex-gay industry.
In 1988, I was fresh out of college and working as a full-time volunteer for Catholic Charities in Nashville, Tennessee.
I was also a quietly celibate gay man who was living with fellow Christian volunteers.
By day, I helped illegal aliens apply for legal residency through Catholic Charities while my housemates worked with prisoners and the homeless.
When we weren’t working, my unpaid housemates and I spent evenings at home in low-income East Nashville, sitting in front of our portable black-and-white television watching “Facts of Life” and a new show called “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” We shared meals of low-budget jambalaya, chatted on weekends with acquaintances (on their dime, if possible) at the Vanderbilt University Fuddrucker’s, and explored various churches and neighborhoods around Nashville. As my one-year volunteer placement wound down in mid-1988, I sought religious sponsors who might help me work for Nashville CARES or for similar AIDS treatment and support organizations in other cities.
This was my gay lifestyle.
Across town, Exodus executive vice president Randy Thomas was, by his own new account, living a very different lifestyle: bar-hopping, using drugs, seemingly oblivious (then and now) to liberal Christian outreach to society’s outcasts.
In a heartbreaking moment of vulnerability, Randy remembers the day when he learned his former partner had died from AIDS: (Read More)
