In its latest defense of untruth, Focus on the Family today falsely portrayed James Dobson as sole founder of Focus on the Family and affirmed Dobson’s distortions of scientific research.
(Read More)

By Wayne Besen

(Jim Adkisson, Conservative Frankenstein, Left)

This week, I attended the Commercial Closet’s Images In Advertising Awards in Manhattan, which honored corporations that produced gay affirming ads. The pro-gay plugs showed genuine progress and highlighted that many leading companies “get it.” The work of Commercial Closet is vital because images matter and repeated exposure to messages shape our views and create positive change in society. The cleverness and creativity in these ads imparts to millions of people that homosexuality is nothing to be feared and that GLBT people are part of the human family.

The awards ceremony was a welcome respite from reality, where there is no shortage of reminders that the world is still a very dangerous place. In Knoxville, Tennessee, a homophobic loser burst into a Unitarian Church where a children’s play was being performed and unleashed a fusillade of gunfire, killing two people and injuring six. According to police, Jim D. Adkisson, “had targeted the church because of its liberal leanings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country.”

The New York Times reports that the killer was raised in strict a Christian home and was openly anti-gay. He may have targeted this particular church because his former wife - who he had threatened to shoot and then commit suicide - had occasionally attended. He may also have been agitated by the church’s affirming stand on GLBT equality.

The far right’s dirty little secret is that they depend on the threat of violence to retard the advancement of the GLBT movement. Without the fear of physical attack, the number of people who are out of the closet would quickly multiply. Gay couples would hold hands in every city in the nation. On each block, from San Francisco to San Antonio, gay and lesbian people would be visibly present. (Read More)

Anthony Falzarano - the founder of Parents and Friends of ‘Ex-Gays’ (PFOX) - was a leading “ex-gay” spokesperson in the late 90’s. His media-friendly story was quite unique, in that he claims he was Roy Cohn’s rent boy and partied each night like it was 1999.

Falzarano’s entry into the ex-gay scene in the early 80’s has always been a little murky. In one version of his tale, God told Falzarano to go straight before the AIDS crises hit. In another version, after many of his friends had passed away, God told him to become ex-gay. In yet a third version, one of his sexual conquests felt guilty after their encounter and introduced him to Christ. Obviously, these colorful versions are contradictions and they can’t all be true.

If there is one thing about Falzarano - he is not opposed to telling a good story, the facts be damned. So, his fictional book, “Such Were Some of You: One Man’s Walk Out of the Gay Lifestyle,” is sure to be entertaining and certainly much better than Exodus’ Alan Chambers depressingly trite tome, “God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door.”

Falzarano holds to the empty and unsupported belief that homosexuality is caused by a young person being molested - and he pulls bogus figures out of thin air to bolster his case. Indeed, he is known to invent new percentages on the number of gay people molested from one interview to the next. The man has no scruples and honesty is just an inconvenience in his bizarre universe.

He is also a proponent of spiritual warfare, once telling CBS News, “AIDS comes from the devil, directly from Satan. He uses homosexuals as pawns and then he kills them.” Another time, he called hate crime victim Matthew Shepard a “predator to heterosexual men.” (Read More)

On Tuesday, Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart was booted out of office by voters in his district, finishing third in a three-way primary. Rinehart came under scrutiny this month when he mailed a 16-page cartoon book as part of his re-election campaign that makes fun of gays and criticizes his political opponents. The book featured an angel who supports Rinehart and Satan, who supports his critics. It also included a gay man in a toga chasing a Boy Scout.

Rinehart is set for trial in September on several felony campaign corruption charges. He is accused of circumventing state campaign finance laws by having donors give money to a political action committee formed by his campaign manager, promising those funds would be used in his quest to be elected county commissioner in 2004.

Rinehart is Exhibit A of why the right wing is losing power. They are corrupt and then hide behind the Bible when they bamboozle the public.

Goodbye Rinehart. I guess you’ll feel better about your crushing defeat knowing it was God’s will.

This month, with the ten-week public Internet voting period nearly over, he got wind of a more troubling protest. A state­ment arrived from the gay advocacy group Truth Wins Out, along with several hundred e-mails, demanding that the list be purged of a nominee no one had mentioned up to that point: Focus on the Family, the radio ministry of right-wing pundit James Dobson.

This is not a controversy DuMont needs. He’s been struggling for years to reopen the Museum of Broadcast Communications, which he founded in 1987 and ran from 1992 to 2003 at the Chicago Cultural Center. The museum’s new home at State and Kinzie has been stalled out in mid-rehab since May 2006. DuMont, who blames the state for with­holding $6 million he says it promised him, continues his fund-raising efforts, and the $500-a-plate hall of fame induction dinner, scheduled for November 8 this year, is one of them. So he watched with concern as TWO rallied opposition to Dobson in the gay community and Dobson, who can reach 2.5 million supporters with a single e-mail blast, fought back.

The contest closed July 15 with more than 70,000 votes cast. When they were tallied, Focus on the Family had won the nationally syndicated broadcasters category, beating out Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Bob Costas, and Howard Stern. DuMont announced that the public had made its choice and the hall of fame would stand by it.

But it wasn’t over for the anti-Dobson forces. They’ve mounted a new campaign to get the museum to disqualify Focus on the Family before the induction.

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One week ago, TruthWinsOut.org published exclusive comments by Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, who said the “ex-gay” organization PFOX distorted his research findings:

“My work has been cited by PFOX in response to a Washington Post article on gay-straight alliances (GSA),” wrote Dr. Remafedi. “PFOX misuses one of my studies on suicide attempts in gay youth to argue that people should not identify their sexual orientation at young ages. Our findings do not support the contention that young people choose their identity or the timing of events in identity formation. Nor is there any evidence that the availability of GSAs influences those developmental processes.”

Today, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays was caught in another lie by Ed Brayton of ScienceBlogs.com.

Brayton (pictured) noticed that, in an article posted by the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow propaganda service in the wee hours of July 26, PFOX executive director Regina Griggs said: “Over 70 percent of young kids 13- to 24-years-old, men having sex with men, are now HIV-positive.”

Brayton, who is heterosexual, crunches the numbers from current federal Centers for Disease Control research on youth sexual health, and finds that approximately 3.1 percent of men aged 13 to 24, who have sex with men, are HIV-positive. In a worst-case scenario, Brayton finds that 5 percent of MSM in this age group might be HIV-positive.

Brayton comments:

[Griggs] also makes the ridiculous claim that teenagers can’t self-identify as straight or gay. Has she never been a teenager? I knew I was straight the moment I hit puberty and started feeling sexually attracted to girls. Every gay man I know says the exact same thing about feeling sexually attracted to boys at the same time. There wasn’t any confusion about it, you just are what you are, no choice involved.

Hat tip: Box Turtle Bulletin

U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are preparing to discuss AIDS, poverty, human rights, and the environment at an Aug. 16 forum hosted by the Rev. Rick Warren at California’s Saddleback Church.

Focus on the Family — an avowed opponent of humanitarian values and sustainable living — lobbied July 28 to replace these moral, social, health, and religious concerns with James Dobson’s two pet causes that FOTF says are at “the heart of Christianity”: Discrimination against gay couples, and imprisonment of women and doctors who choose abortion when alternatives fail.

Focus Action senior vice president Tom Minnery (pictured above) dismissed the forum’s topics as being of mere “secular” interest.

United Church of Christ minister Chuck Currie (pictured below) says:

Care of creation (for the earth on which we live) and care of the least of these - the sick, those living in poverty - are actually issues central to Scripture and of deep concern to the Christian community.

And I suspect that most Christians don’t wake up each morning thinking that today would be a great day if we could just limit civil rights for gay and lesbian people.

Focus and the Family and their founder James Dobson are at risk of being left behind and left out of political debate.  Their divisive rhetoric - the kind that has divided Americans in the past - isn’t listened to so much anymore (except on the very extreme and troubled edges of society).  That’s a good thing.

Focus on the Family may be weakening, but with a $100-million-per-year budget, it remains a dominant force in conservative U.S. politics, a hardened and congested artery in the “heart” of U.S. Christianity.

After a “victory” in the removal of a British mayonnaise commercial over its portrayal of a gay family, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly sat down once again with Truth Wins Out Executive Director and founder Wayne Besen to defend a recent ad for the Snickers candy bar that has received similar treatment.

For years, ex-gay activists have waged a self-declared “culture war” against the clear and simple meaning of Luke 4:9-13:

4:9 The devil also took him into Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. He said to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.

4:10 For it is written, ‘God will put his angels in charge of you to watch over you carefully.

4:11 With their hands they will hold you up, so that you will never hit your foot against a rock.’”

4:12 Jesus answered him, “It has been said, ‘You must not tempt the Lord your God.’”

4:13 After the devil had finished tempting Jesus in every possible way, he left him until another time.

All too often, leaders of Exodus — from its executive offices down to local member “ministries” — encourage struggling gay individuals to reject Jesus’ admonition and commit a form of blackmail against God. They advise counselees — would-be ex-gays — to make outlandish proclamations of heterosexuality in the so-called “hope” that God will be forced to make good on the believer’s premature claim of “change” by performing a miracle — either instantly or gradually — to make that phony pretense of heterosexuality become real. Some evangelicals refer to such miracle-baiting with the phrase, “Name it and claim it.” (Read More)

High gas prices inspire different reactions in Americans.

As sensible people realize that gas prices will only go higher in the coming years, some people move closer to transit, employment, or schools. Some people telecommute. Some people car-pool. Some lose weight through once-common practices known by quaint names such as “walking” and “biking.” This writer (for what it’s worth) is selling his car next month and moving to an urban center with good neighborhoods, transit, and walkable streets.

Not everyone can pick up and move, but incremental changes are possible.

On the other hand, some people just want to complain.

In a recent op-ed article, Exodus President Alan Chambers admits to central Florida that he’s mad at gas prices and polluted air. But his recollection of a recent commute across Orlando suburbs in his old Mercedes offers no sign that Chambers was taking any measures to conserve fuel, besides briefly turning off his air conditioning. He seems unwilling to publicly acknowledge a basic truth: His decision to live and work in separate, car-dependent suburbs represents an unyielding and unsustainable lifestyle choice which, repeated by millions of motorists worldwide, is the cause of both rising fuel prices and worsening air pollution. (Read More)