Having watched the court proceedings on television, I was pretty certain that the California Supreme Court was going to uphold Proposition 8, the ballot initiative to overturn an earlier court ruling allowing gay couples the freedom to marry.

Still, knowing that a punch to the gut is coming does not make it hurt any less. The 6-1 ruling was degrading, humiliating and a shameful day that will live in infamy. The decision upheld tyranny of the majority and promoted the idiotic idea of mob rule.

What next?

Can the voters of California now decide whether I can eat bacon and eggs for breakfast? Are they able to choose if I can own a cat or a dog? May they regulate my weight or pick what career I choose?

These are serious questions. The fact is, banning my potential marriage is more an imposition and hardship than if the voters had chosen to enact the above examples. Any non-biased person would agree that the idea of the public banning the possibility of their marriage would be both invasive and traumatizing. Yet, the voters of California, backed by the Supreme Court, upheld this Orwellian idea.

Really, what are the limits to such insanity? Are we unique individuals with inalienable rights or public property with provisional rights granted or eliminated by the whims of the fickle electorate?

In his dissent, Justice Carlos Moreno was correct to write, “Denying gays and lesbians the right to marry, by wrenching minority rights away from judicial protection and subjecting them instead to a majority vote, attacks the very core of the equal protection principle.”

There are now calls from gay and lesbian leaders to place the marriage question back on the ballot in California. The competitive side of me says, “bring it on, let’s win.” But, another side believes that the gay and lesbian community should simply boycott all votes relating to rights — and take our outrage to the streets and the halls of Congress. After all, why are we the only minority in the history of this nation that has had to explicitly win public approval for our most basic needs? (Read More)

Court Favors Mob Rule By Allowing Majority to Dictate Basic Rights

NEW YORK — Truth Wins Out expressed deep dismay over the California Supreme Court’ split 6-1 ruling today that upheld Proposition 8, a ballot measure which abolished the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. The court did, however, allow the 18,000 marriages that took place in California, while marriage equality existed, to stand.

“This was a shameful day that will live in infamy,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “It was a heartbreaking loss that established the tyranny of the majority as the law of the land in California.”

Today’ ruling defies a string of marriage equality victories and a trend of societal acceptance. In the past few months, Vermont, Maine and Iowa granted same-sex couples equal marriage rights. New Hampshire’ legislature also passed a bill supporting marriage equality. According to the Human Rights Campaign, twelve states plus Washington, D.C. have laws providing at least some form of state-level relationship recognition for same-sex couples.

“Our movement is resilient and stands ready to fight on until full equality is achieved,” said Besen. “This ruling is merely a speed bump that will not deter us from ultimate victory. We must turn disappointment into determination and pain into progress.”

In recent years, the reparative-therapy lobbying group NARTH has taught outdated information, distorted valid scientific data, supplied false information to antigay Catholic authorities, misrepresented the policies of mainstream mental-health organizations, and published strawman arguments about its critics.

At his web site, Michael J. Bayly — who happens to be executive coordinator of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities — offers an excellent overview of NARTH’s efforts, culminating in the latest unraveling of one of NARTH’s foundations: the misguided work of Masters and Johnson.

In an article published May 22 by Focus on the Family’s political wing, FOTF Action, Focus protests a new Colorado law that ensures gay government employees enjoy the same family benefits as heterosexual employees.

In Focus’ view, state governments should tax gay residents while granting special benefits solely to heterosexual government workers.

Focus whines, “Taxpayers will foot the bill for the benefits, which include health care.”

Focus wants gay government workers and their families to be underpaid, denied health care — or just plain fired.

In Omaha, Nebraska, a child’s parents and therapist have determined — after years of struggle, extensive counseling, and careful consideration of their unique circumstances — that it is best, at least for the time being, to allow their child to live as the opposite gender.

WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Fla., has an in-depth story and video about the child’s background and struggle.

According to KTIV-TV,

[Therapist] Ellie Hites says the brain is sometimes wired differently than the body is.

She says many of her transgender clients have suffered from nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts and deep depression because they’ve been forced to hide their true identity.

Hites tells KETV-TV in Omaha, “I wish that society was open and loving enough to let that child be who that child perceives himself to be.”

But the activists of Focus on the Family and the Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha will hear nothing of it. It is still considered politically correct for members of conservative political institutions to ridicule sissies and tomboys and to dismiss any child development issue as something that can be cured with a good spanking and strict conformity. Focus’ Jeff Johnston — who has no professional mental-health credentials — ignorantly diagnoses that the child must have “gender identity disorder” and further declares, “Many boys who are troubled with gender-identity disorder grow out of it,” he said. “Good parental, pastoral and therapeutic support can help.”

In other words, Focus on the Family declares that its political activists — not a child’s parents or therapist — know what’s best for all children. And it deems itself qualified to blame parents and therapists for the failure of some children to conform to the dictates of Colorado Springs evangelicals. Meanwhile, the Catholic archdiocese in Omaha has been just as smug, ignorant, conformist, and superficial: It has thrown the child out of Catholic school.

According to WJXT,

The mother, a life-long Catholic, thought making the transition in their parish would be the best place for their child to continue friendships, with a support system that included other parents and children.

“The child is welcomed to come, but it would not be acceptable to change the child’ gender and present as a girl,” said Omaha Archdiocese’s Chancellor, the Rev. Joseph Taphorn.

Instead of utilizing this moment to teach its school children about gender, tolerance, and respect, the conservative archdiocese politely told the family to get out. This is the sort of sweetly worded ostracism that conservative Catholics and Focus on the Family try to market as “love” these days.

Focus on the Family and its religious-right therapeutic mentor, NARTH, have a long history of advocating ridicule and harassment of children as a means of imposing traditional gender roles and identities by force. This latest situation suggests that Focus has not yet learned how to approach issues of youth and gender with sensitivity, grace, patience, and respect for parents’ authority and first-hand knowledge.

It’s much easier for a conservative organization to humiliate a family and to dictate comforting, self-satisfied, and politically partisan stereotypes, than to support Christian families with intelligence and compassion in unique and difficult circumstances.

Evangelical antigay lawmakers in South Carolina have amended a bill originally intended to stop teen dating violence, so that the legislation excludes gay teens.

The bigots’ reasoning: Any effort to discourage domestic violence in gay teen relationships would implicitly acknowledge the existence and dignity of gay teens and would lessen the pressure upon teen-agers to pretend to be heterosexual or ex-gay.

Exodus International has two activist organizations and two member churches in the state — none of which have protested the exclusion of gay teens from antiviolence legislation, and none of which support antibullying programs in the state’s schools.

If you live in South Carolina, please let these activists know, politely, that those who tolerate or affirm violence against gay youth in your state betray fairness, justice, morality, and Christian values.

Contact New Song, the so-called Truth Ministry, Christian Assembly of God, and Westminister Presbyterian Church.

GayNZ.com has added the ex-gay movement to New Zealand’s list of endangered species.

Following the failure of several organizations, the web site reports, “Auckland’s Exodus houses the only ‘exgay’ outfit in New Zealand. It has no newsletter, no website, and apparently restricts itself to elderly conservative religious gay men who experience sexual identity crises.”

Former Exodus International leader Sy Rogers still resides in the western Pacific island nation, but apparently spends much time marketing conservative-Christian pop music and inflicting sex-and-gender ambiguity and confusion onto innocents in Malaysia. (Watching Rogers and Exodus’ Randy Thomas pose as experts on masculinity is about as convincing as the notion of Gwen Stefani or Pink posing as Amish Christian homemakers.)

GayNZ.com comments:

In effect, the exgay movement has failed largely because the New Zealand Christian Right has remained stubbornly unable or unwilling to develop counselling or psychotherapeutic skills. Most mainstream New Zealanders accept that sexual orientation constitutes a durable source of social identity and cannot easily be changed. These organisations have dwindled in the face of growing lesbian and gay community organisation, assertion and social inclusion, leading to exgay ‘enclavism,’ largely restricted to individuals who have lived most of their lives in fundamentalist social networks, isolated from mainstream New Zealand society.

Exodus International clearly senses that this grim future is on the horizon back in the United States — which is why the organization has smartly sidelined support to its member ex-gay ministries in favor of a focus on political networking among prejudiced antigay churches and religious-right organizations.

In a desperate bid to prevent sexual orientation from being added to existing federal hate-crime laws, Focus on the Family on Friday equated the gay victims of felony violence with pedophiles.

The actual legislation is available to read online: Senate Bill 909, and the recently passed House bill H.R. 1913.

The bills make penalties (sentences) that already exist under federal hate crimes available to be applied to those already convicted of existing crimes of felony violence. Until now, felony violence committed against heterosexual or homosexual persons has been sentenced less harshly under federal hate-crime law than violence committed on the basis of what the perpetrator assumes to be the race or religion of the victim. Both bills correct that injustice, by 1) ensuring that heterosexuals and homosexuals receive equal treatment, and 2) ensuring that when a perpetrator assaults a heterosexual person based on the perpetrator’s mistaken assumption that the victim is gay, the felony is not punished less harshly.

Instead of linking to or quoting the actual legislation, Focus on the Family falsely states that the legislation “would create a new class of crimes” and falsely states that the legislation punishes speech by antigay pastors.

Worse, Focus on the Family abandons any pretense (borrowed, perhaps from its “Love Won Out” ex-gay roadshow?) of loving same-sex-attracted persons. Focus equates same-sex-attracted victims of violent crime with pedophiles. Focus states:

Even more concerning, the legislation could create special protection for pedophiles.

Sexual orientation is already defined in law and in psychiatry as an attraction to men, women, or both — not to children. Focus on the Family falsely insinuates that sexual orientation can be interpreted as an attraction to children.

Those complicit in Focus’ declaration of hate against the victims of violent antigay crime included James Dobson; Focus’ top lobbyist Tom Minnery; Gary Bauer; Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex.; and Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.

As reported yesterday, several religious-right organizations have falsely claimed this week that the American Psychological Association has changed its position regarding the factors that influence or determine sexual orientation.

The reason for the false claim became apparent today when antigay activists Peter LaBarbera and Matt Barber cited the false claim as a reason for antigay bigots to call their senators and oppose the inclusion of sexual orientation in existing federal laws that punish felony violence against targeted groups of people.

LaBarbera’s reasoning — and perhaps that of his source, NARTH former president A. Dean Byrd — was simple: If Americans can be misled into believing that sexual orientation is readily changeable, then (they contend) there’s no reason for U.S. lawmakers to provide gay people with the same protection from felony violence that other groups already enjoy.

Instead of aiding their readers with a link to the actual federal antiviolence legislation, Senate Bill 909, LaBarbera, Barber, and the American Family Association directed readers to far-right web sites which claim that punishing antigay felony violence punishes free speech and protects pedophiles.

The notion that a single gene might determine sexual orientation was briefly proposed and swiftly rejected in the early 1990s.

That hasn’t stopped antigay activists from circulating the myth that, because numerous researchers in the past decade have found a mix of biological factors and possibly other unknown factors in the formation of sexual orientation, therefore these experts must believe in the existence of a single “gay gene.”

After spending more than a decade hearing and repeating their self-generated lies about a “gay gene,” this week several evolution-denying religious-right groups are crowing over a year-old reiteration of well-known facts by the American Psychological Association.

WorldNetDaily, LifeSiteNews, Virtue Online, and Peter LaBarbera’s Americans for Truth all parroted A. Dean Byrd of NARTH, who repeated his previous false assertions that “activist researchers” have contended anytime in the past decade that there is a gay gene.

The antigay activists (Byrd included) illogically contend that, because there is no single gene that determines sexual orientation, therefore sexual orientation is caused entirely by the environment — lousy parents, in particular — and therefore, they insist, anyone can “change” their sexual orientation with sufficient right-wing Christian brainwashing.

Not so, said the APA last year:

Many [researchers] think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.

Byrd falsely cites three limited studies as proof that anyone can change and that ex-gay therapy causes no harm, even though at least two of the cited studies — by Dr. Robert Spitzer and Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse — excluded potential subjects who reported being harmed or who reported that the ex-gay program failed to change them.

Spitzer, in particular, has repudiated the mischaracterization of his study by NARTH and other ex-gay activist groups, saying that he believes change of attraction and orientation are exceedingly rare and that most people cannot “change” their orientation.

More about Dr. Robert Spitzer here at Truth Wins Out.
Hat tip: Good As You