Del Martin, Left, Marrying Phyllis Lyon

Truth Wins Out mourned the loss of GLBT hero Del Martin, 87, who passed away in San Francisco today. Her final moments were spent with Phyllis Lyon, her wife of 55 years.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of Del Martin and our sympathies are with Phyllis Lyon in this difficult time,” said Wayne Besen, Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director. “Through her bravery and persistence, Del gave people like myself the opportunity to live openly and honestly and I thank her for her enormous contributions to the GLBT community. She is a genuine hero and a person future generations will look up to with admiration and pride.”

This weekend I attended the National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association meeting in DC. On Friday evening I went to an exciting party. There were no closeted right wing hypocrites in line for dry martinis – as Mike Rogers and Michelangelo Signorile were in the house!

Patrick of western New York has what neither Exodus International nor any other premium-priced exgay-for-pay organization can offer:

A cure for fear of one’s sexual orientation — for just $12.99!

Blogger Norm!, a critic of the ex-gay movement, writes:

I followed a Google ad link from a gay blog to this hilarious website entitled “Cure HOCD with EFT”. It seems too ridiculous to be true, but yes for a $12.99 payment I can receive an electronic book from an anonymous author/publisher Patrick to cure my HOCD. The website doesn’t explain what HOCD is (Homosexual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?), but makes bold promises about how EFT (emotional freedom technique) will cure HOCD. Patrick is even certified and has an impressive 100% success rate:

. . . So I decided to use EFT on my remaining programming. Within a matter of a a couple weeks my inner and outer behavior had been cleared of HOCD. I was free to be me. Free to flirt and date girls. Free to fall in love, and most of all free to enjoy my life. I decided when I was finally free of this that I would share it with the world so everyone else with these struggles could release and overcome them. I became a certified EFT practitioner, and have healed 7 of 7 HOCD sufferers. The longest client took 3 weeks.”

The domain record for hocdfree.com is only a month old, so the site seems to be brand-new. Let’s hope PayPal shuts this scam down pronto.

People who are acting out unwanted sexual behaviors — or who are obsessed with whether they’re sufficiently “heterosexual” — don’t need to pay Exodus boot camps hundreds of dollars per week, and they don’t need to pay $12.99 to down-on-their-luck anonymous dudes from suburban Buffalo.

Effective professional treatment is much less costly, financially and spiritually, than the quackery of Exodus and NARTH — and celibacy doesn’t cost a penny.

Was it the rain?

Caught in the downpour of Tropical Storm Fay, Exodus spokesman Randy Thomas writes with clarity and compassion about a troubled friend.

Freed from an obvious connection to sexual orientation and its requisite sugar-coated Dobsonspeak, Thomas demonstrates that he can still perceive people and situations for what they are, without resorting to politically correct language, pre-packaged answers, or trite dismissals.

This is the Randy Thomas that many people once knew. That Randy is missed.

Note: At this writing, Wayne Besen is at NLGJA in Washington, while I’m moving from Hartford to Providence this weekend. So TWO blog posts will be a bit sporadic for a few days.

TWO Executive Director Wayne Besen appeared on a panel on Friday morning at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. The talk Included Dr. Jack Drescher, an expert on the harm of so-called “ex-gay” therapy. The panel focused on where the media often gets it wrong and ways they can improve their stories on this topic. Journalists and leading opinion makers from across the nation asked questions and discussed the way this issue is covered.

Religious-rightists on Monday lost one phase of their campaign to give California doctors a blank check to practice bigotry against any class of patient for supposed religious reasons.

While anti-family activists explicitly sought to deny medical care to same-sex-attracted Californians and unmarried women, an unlimited religious “right” to discriminate against entire classes of patients could give bigoted doctors the right to discriminate against Jews, Asian-Americans — anyone whose existence was contrary to a medical group’s choice of supposed religious beliefs.

According to The Washington Post, the California Supreme Court ruled that physicians’ constitutional right to the free exercise of religion does not exempt businesses that serve the public from following state law that prohibit discrimination.

Jennifer C. Pizer, a lawyer with the gay rights group Lambda Legal who is representing [Guadalupe] Benítez, said that while the law protects doctors who refuse certain treatments on religious grounds, it does not allow them to do so on a discriminatory or selective basis.

In other words, a doctor may refuse to provide fertility services for religious reasons, but may not cherry-pick patients for whom to provide those services.

Despite the legal setback, right-wing political activists continue to maintain that the U.S. Constitution gives them a blank check to violate any law that they deem to be in conflict with their religious whims — and to use their own religion to infringe upon the freedom of others.

According to the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow propaganda service:

Attorney Mailee Smith of Americans United for Life (AUL), spokeswoman for the Christian Medical & Dental Associations and several other faith-based groups who presented amicus briefs in the case, said the ruling takes away a federally protected Constitutional right of physicians to freely exercise religion.

The case of Guadalupe Benitez will revert back to trial court where it will be determined whether Benitez was denied medical care due to her marital status or her sexual orientation.

I’m not female, I don’t live in a depressed area, and my parents don’t live in my basement.

But the plight of a middle-aged woman hit home, nevertheless: Her friends have drifted apart, and she wonders how to find new friends or maybe a companion. (Read More)

Focus on the Family plucked a video from its Web site today that urged people to pray for “rain of biblical proportions” during Barack Obama’s Aug. 28 appearance at Invesco Field at Mile High to accept the Democratic nomination for president. This, of course, would be about as effective as their attempts to have people “pray away the gay” at their “ex-gay” Love Won Out freak shows.

“If people took it seriously, we regret it,” Minnery said Monday.

Who is Focus on the Family kidding? They are a nasty group that portrays God as a right wing bully who is molded in James Dobson’s dictatorial image. The only joke here, was that Focus on the Family is covering up their true colors by portraying their ugliness as a parody.

You can only feel bad for people who have such an authoritarian, hideous view of spirituality. I hope, even pray, that they get the help they need to escape this miserable mindset in which they are trapped.

Accepting that one is same-sex-attracted is equivalent to being addicted to pornography, according to Exodus President Alan Chambers.

In his August 2008 “President’s Letter,” Chambers writes:

While my friend John hasn’t battled same-sex attractions, he personally understands sexual addiction as he was embroiled in a deep struggle with pornography for a few years. At one point his wife found out. Unfortunately, like many, they didn’t tell anyone because of fear and shame. That’s the same reason why I waited so long to share my struggles.

A couple of years ago that all changed for my friend John and his wife Joy when they began sharing their story of freedom.

Exodus cheapens true freedom and erodes serious discussion about sexual addiction when it conflates unrelated issues — and when it refuses to specify the kind of “freedom” that it offers to “ex-gays”:

“Freedom” to Exodus means freedom from sexuality, freedom from honesty, freedom from intimate relationship, and freedom from having openly gay neighbors or co-workers.

‘We Will Stop Focus on the Family’s Destructive Lies Wherever They Are Spread,’ Says TWO

Truth Wins Out (TWO) announced today that its founder, Wayne Besen, would appear in Anchorage to oppose Focus on the Family’s notorious “ex-gay” Love Won Out road show on Sept. 13. Besen is the author of “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the ‘Ex-Gay’ Myth.” TWO shadows this anti-gay seminar across the nation to ensure that the public is armed with the facts and aware that Focus on the Family is deliberately disseminating misinformation about gay and lesbian people.

“We appear wherever Focus on the Family spreads lies and fear,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “Love Won Out distorts gay life and conflates stereotypes with science, while selling false hope to vulnerable people. We are looking forward to working with Alaskan advocacy groups to counter Focus on the Family’s false and destructive messages.”

More details about Besen’s trip will be forthcoming. The Love Won Out conference will take place on Sept. 13 at the Abbott Loop Community Church.

We need your help to make this happen. Please consider a tax-deductible contribution to help us fight the right in Alaska. To Donate online CLICK HERE.

Or – send a check to: Truth Wins Out; P.O. Box 25491; Brooklyn, NY 11202