Maine’s governor (pictured) signed a freshly passed bill Wednesday approving gay marriage, making it the fifth state to approve the practice and moving New England closer to allowing it throughout the region.
New Hampshire legislators were also poised to send a gay marriage bill to their governor, who hasn’t indicated whether he’ll sign it. If he does, Rhode Island would be the region’s sole holdout.
The Maine Senate voted 21-13, with one absent, for a bill that authorizes marriage between any two people rather than between one man and one woman, as state law currently allows. The House had passed the bill Tuesday.
Democratic Gov. John Baldacci, who hadn’t previously indicated how he would handle the bill, signed it shortly afterward. In the past, he said he opposed gay marriage but supported civil unions, which provide many benefits of marriage.
It usually takes a bit longer before self-righteous, anti-gay marriage activists are exposed as hypocrites. In the case of Miss California Carrie Prejean, she was disgraced 13 minutes into her 15 ticks of fame. See the naked truth for your self. This is the woman who wants to preach and tell gay couples how to live? And the fundamentalist Christians and conservative Republicans wonder why they are losing clout and support in America.
The House approved a bill (89-58) that would legalize same-sex marriage. The state Senate voted to approve the legislation last week by a vote of 20-15. The measure will now land on Gov. David Baldacci’s desk. As a reporter in Maine, I had interviewed Baldacci and also eaten at his family’s Italian restaurant in Bangor. He was a nice guy, a smart politician and I hope he does the right thing in this instance.
Unfortunately, the day was partially soiled by the remarkably ignorant views of Rep. Bernard Ayotte, a Republican. Ayotte said that he couldn’t support the legislation because it would provide legal protections to people whom he said suffered from hormonal imbalances causing same-sex attractions.
“By all indications, homosexuality in human beings seems to be generated by imbalances in the human body,” he said. “As legislators, it is important that we do not base our statutes on genetic aberrations. Ayotte added, according to the Washington Blade, that his lack of support for the legislation shouldn’t be interpreted as discrimination against gay people.
Even by the low standards set by anti-gay activists, this level of ignorance was shocking. What evidence does Ayotte have to support his unfounded claims? If he does not have proof, why would he use his public platform to spread harmful misinformation?
Truth Wins Out applauded the Irish Association of Social Workers (IASW) today for condemning “reparative therapy” — a fringe and discredited practice that claims to “cure” homosexuality.
“The actions taken by the Irish Association of Social Workers will save lives,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “So-called ‘reparative therapy’ is nothing more than stereotypes disguised as science. This false doctrine is promoted by ideologues that twist science to fit their sectarian views.”
“There is no evidence that conversion therapy is effective, though there is evidence of mental health risks associated with the use of such approaches with gay, lesbian or bisexual people,” Declan Coogan, a spokesperson for the IASW told the Irish Examiner.
At its conference, IASW delegates voted to oppose use of reparative therapy in Ireland. Mr Coogan said IASW discouraged social workers from making referrals to agencies that claim to “cure” homosexuality.
Last month the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Britain issued a statement saying there was no sound scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed. It also criticized “so-called treatments of homosexuality” as recommended by NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.
“It is encouraging to see a worldwide rejection of the quack-like theories promoted by NARTH,” said Besen. “This disreputable organization is on the far-reaching fringe of acceptable medical and mental health practices.”
The Southern Baptist Convention extends its battle against freedom of religion among Southern Baptists.
The antigay National Organization for Marriage exploited Miss California pageant winner Carrie Prejean last week when it created an ad around her and falsely claimed that Prejean had lost a Miss USA crown (she never had the crown — she wasn’t even a front-runner) due to her false and uneducated answers to simple questions about marriage for gay people. After a week of interviews in which Prejean touted Christian values, criticized liberal values of individual freedom, and demonstrated an absence of critical thinking and pro-family insight regarding marriage, now NOM is embarrassed by the revelation of recent nearly-nude pictures of Prejean, who — like her gay nemesis Perez Hilton — appears willing to say or do almost anything to generate controversy and fame for herself. Now she will likely lose the Miss California crown — as she should: Her amorality, partisan politics, and poor judgment are a poor reflection upon America. But don’t blame Prejean or ask her to demonstrate personal responsibility. Blame the homosexuals who made her act intellectually vacant, politically intolerant, and oversexed.
Joseph Nicolosi, ex-gay therapist and former president of NARTH, declares that 75 percent of his patients have been cured of homosexuality — though, when consulted independently, these patients seem neither to agree that they have been cured, nor to agree with Nicolosi that their parents caused any trauma that would result in their ongoing homosexual attraction. Nicolosi refuses to document his claim.
Exodus International president Alan Chambers — not content to foster vigilante violence in Uganda — is now referring to U.S. gay people as God’s cripples. Or, to be more precise, God’s hell-bound and “handicapped” children — but with a wink and a nudge that says a bit too much.
A poll analysis released last week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life confirmed what Iraq-war critics suspected: White conservative evangelicals, and persons who attend church weekly, were more likely than the general U.S. population to violate New Testament ethics forbidding violence and torture.
While the effectiveness and reliability of torture against terror suspects to prevent mass casualties is hotly debated, conservative evangelicals appear to have the fewest reservations about torture regardless of individual circumstances:
Nearly 20 percent of white evangelicals and white Catholics favor torture “often,” with little regard for the severity of the alleged past offense, the reliability of the allegations, or the proximity of a given suspect to any plans for future attacks.
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, former president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, finds this deviation from New Testament values — by those who claim to be most devout — worthy of concern. Writing in The Washington Post, Thistlethwaite comments:
One possible way to interpret this extraordinary Pew data is cultural. White evangelical Protestants tend to be culturally conservative and they make up a large percentage of the so-called Republican “base”. Does the approval of torture by this group demonstrate their continuing support for the previous administration? That may be.
But I think it is possible, even likely, that this finding has a theological root. The UN Convention Against Torture defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person…” White Evangelical theology bases its view of Christian salvation on the severe pain and suffering undergone by Jesus in his flogging and crucifixion by the Romans. This is called the “penal theory of the atonement”–that is, the way Jesus paid for our sins is by this extreme torture inflicted on him.
For Christian conservatives, severe pain and suffering are central to their theology. This is very clear in the 2002 Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ. Evangelical Christians flocked to this movie, promoted it and still show it in their churches, despite the fact that it is R-rated for the extraordinary amount of violence in the film. It is, in fact, the highest grossing R-rated movie in the history of film. The flogging of Jesus by the Romans goes on for fully 40 minutes. It is truly the most violent film I have ever seen.
The message of the movie, and a message of a lot of conservative Christian theology, is that severe pain and suffering are not foreign to Christian faith, but central.
Of course, this is an interpretation of Jesus life, death and resurrection that I reject. It is also an interpretation that I believe has done a lot of harm through the centuries.
The writer is being charitable: Conservative evangelicals’ broad acceptance of pre-emptive torture is heresy. It constitutes an assault upon morality and human dignity. And as Exodus International has relegated itself to a far-right fringe of the evangelical movement, it has become a participant in terror and torture.
Since board member Don Schmierer co-keynoted an antigay, pro-terror conference in Uganda in March, Exodus International has applauded Schmierer’s action and has refused to officially condemn any portion of the conference and ensuing antigay terror campaign.
In unofficial personal statements, Exodus President Alan Chambers and spokesman Randy Thomas have:
defended a supposed right of Ugandan churches to wage vigilante terror and violence against gay Ugandans;
denied responsibility for their role in knowingly encouraging Schmierer to participate in the March conference, after they were warned by pro-equality and human-rights advocates;
resorted to elliptical statements of what they don’t believe, rather than what they do believe, regarding the specifics of their role in Ugandan human rights violations and more generally regarding criminalization, imprisonment, and forced ex-gay therapy for homosexuals
Until Exodus punishes its rogue leaders and officially condemns human rights atrocities, imprisonment, forced “therapy,” Exodus must be regarded as a hate group — one that seeks to intimidate, injure and kill gay people even as it destroys Christian families and churches with poisonous misinformation about parenting, sexual orientation, and true faith.
Exodus International was founded in 1976 by gay Christian men who, at the time, were unhappy with their sexual orientation and eager to believe antigay activists’ Freudian habit — unsupported by reputable and unbiased research — of blaming parents for the formation of politically incorrect sexual orientation, and of telling gay men to pretend to be straight by butching up their behavior, taking a leap of supposed “faith” into a doomed heterosexual marriage, and proclaiming their heterosexuality loudly enough to drown out all signs to the contrary.
Within a few years, the wiser of Exodus’ co-founders left the organization, acknowledging that they had never been heterosexual and that ex-gay dishonesty had damaged their spouses and families.
But in 1979, a glimmer of hope emerged for would-be “ex-gays” when gynecologist William Masters and psychologist Virginia Johnson released a book, Homosexuality in Perspective, that they claimed was a result of years-long research. Conversion therapy was one focus of this work.
According to psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jack Drescher, M.D.:
In their study of 151 homosexual men and women with “sexual inadequacy,” they divided the latter term into two categories: “the sexually dysfunctional and the sexually dissatisfied.” The latter were defined as “men and women who expressed the desire to convert or revert to heterosexuality” (p. 240).
The book claimed to offer observations from the research participants as well as followup regarding short-term and long-term failure rates, although Masters and Johnson admitted that their followup methods were unsound since they relied upon subjective claims of conversion-therapy participants and not objective measures of the subjects’ attraction and orientation.
The data was impressive and served as a basis for much ex-gay literature. But it now appears that much of the key data may have been falsified by Masters.
Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977, according to research I’ve done for my new book Masters of Sex . . .
When the clinic’ top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these “storybook” cases, Masters refused to show them to him. Kolodny‚Äîwho had never seen any conversion cases himself‚Äîbegan to suspect some, if not all, of the conversion cases were not entirely true. When he pressed Masters, it became ever clearer to him that these were at best composite case studies made into single ideal narratives, and at worst they were fabricated.
Eventually Kolodny approached Virginia Johnson privately to express his alarm. She, too, held similar suspicions about Masters’ conversion theory, though publicly she supported him. The prospect of public embarrassment, of being exposed as a fraud, greatly upset Johnson, a self-educated therapist who didn’t have a college degree and depended largely on her husband’ medical expertise.
With Johnson’ approval, Kolodny spoke to their publisher about a delay, but it came too late in the process. “That was a bad book,” Johnson recalled decades later. Johnson said she favored a rewriting and revision of the whole book “to fit within the existing [medical] literature,” and feared that Bill simply didn’t know what he was talking about. At worst, she said, “Bill was being creative in those days” in the compiling of the “gay conversion” case studies.
Maier has published a book, Masters of Sex, about Masters and Johnson — their personal relationship, their studies, and the impact of their work. Says Drescher:
Apparently Masters and Johnson may be just the latest in a long series of conversion therapy proponents, who when pressed, have been unable to substantiate their findings to outside sources.
When will Exodus International remove its praises of Masters & Johnson from its website and publications? And when it does, will it admit that the articles were false, or will it leave a decade’s worth of readers with misinformed and unchanged minds?
This is from “Christianity Today.” The brain trust of the social conservative movement has spoken:
Q: In the last month, same-sex marriage has become legal in Iowa and Vermont. What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?
JTP: At a state level, it’s up to them. I don’t want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it’s wrong. People don’t understand the dictionary–it’s called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It’s not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we’re supposed to do–what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we’re supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they’re people, and they’re going to do their thing.
Uganda President Yoweri Museveni and his nation’s official media continue to encourage the antigay pogrom that was co-launched March 5 by Ugandan ex-gay activist Stephen Langa, Exodus International vice president Don Schmierer, U.S. ex-gay activist Scott Lively, and Caleb Lee Brundidge, who is an associate of U.S. ex-gay activist Richard Cohen.
The President further observed that African culture was under threat from Western influence. He advised lawyers to research on African jurisprudence, addressing issues that had been left out by the adopted Western legal systems.
“There are some Western things that we cannot accept, for example homosexuality,” he noted.
“Europeans are saying it is a right and we are saying it is a deviation. You don’t kill them, but you know it is abnormal. But the Europeans come and say it is an alternative way of life,” Museveni added.
Museveni advocates toughening Ugandan laws that already subject gay people to life imprisonment — laws that Langa and Lively say are too lenient.
Box Turtle Bulletin reports:
Current law already provides a maximum lifetime sentence for conviction of participating in same-sex relations. This latest efforts appear aimed at making the condition of homosexuality itself illegal.
Heard this: At a conference about HIV, when some African activists were being asked about the persecution of gays in their countries, one government official was riled by all this emphasis on “rights’ for homosexuals. He stood up, and said, “They should be thankful. The law says we should stone them to death, but (in my country) we have not done that for years.’
Yeah, right.
The ex-gay campaign began March 5 with U.S. and Ugandan conference speakers presenting a united front in favor of forced ex-gay “therapy” combined with long prison sentences for all who fail to be changed into heterosexuals through ex-gay quackery. The nature of the involuntary “therapy” became apparent when Schmierer and Brundidge used their speech time to proclaim, without reputable substantiation, that parents are to blame for sexual orientation and that sexual orientation can be changed if effeminate men butch-up and if strong women properly domesticate themselves.
Since then, the campaign has resulted in vigilante “news” articles published by major Uganda media, featuring pictures of Uganda equality advocates — pictures that are accompanied by explicit and scurrilous accusations about advocates’ private sexuality, insinuating that gay people are a threat to their neighborhoods.
As the murder campaign targeting Iraqi gays intensifies, a leading Arabic television network last week revealed the use of a horrifying new form of lethal torture against Iraqi gay men – anti-gay Shiite death squads are sealing their anuses with a powerful glue, then inducing diarrhea, which leads to a painful and agonizing death. The use of this stomach-turning new torture was first reported by the Al Arabiya network, which is headquartered in the United Arab Emirates and was alerted to the story by a leading Iraqi feminist and human rights activist.
Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), told Al Arabiya that the torture substance “is an Iranian-manufactured glue that, if applied to the skin, sticks to it and can only be removed by surgery. After they glue the anuses of homosexuals, they give them a drink that causes diarrhea. Since the anus is closed, the diarrhea causes death. Videos of this form of torture are being distributed on mobile telephones in Iraq.”
Al Arabiya said its reporter confirmed the use of this anal torture by “visiting the Baghdad morgue in Bab-al-Moazaam in central Baghdad, where Neman Mohsen, the medical examiner, confirmed they have the bodies of seven homosexuals in the morgue. He said, ‘We were not able to identify the culprits, who dumped the bodies in front of the morgue and fled without being seen.’” A two-person team from Human Rights Watch (HRW) currently in Iraq to investigate persecution of LGBT people has also confirmed the use of this form of torture. In a widely-circulated email from Iraq, the head of HRW’s LGBT desk, Scott Long, said he and his colleague had gathered evidence which confirms the Al Arabiya report and that HRW would make its own detailed report after the organization’s two staffers return to the United States next week.
Yesterday, MSNBC’s World Blog posted additional information:
Iraq’ gay population is being targeted by militia groups in a wave of killings that has claimed the lives of up to 25 young men and boys in the past month.
“They know I am gay. I don’t know if I am going to be killed, this is up to God,” said Moyad, a 38-year-old Baghdad resident who would not give his last name out of fear for his safety.
Visibly frightened, he said that he has many friends who have been sadistically tortured, some even murdered. “They are sticking glue up their anuses; some hospitals refuse to treat them. Is it a war waged against homosexuals?” he asked.
Most of the attacks have happened in Baghdad’ Shia neighborhoods, and many believe that religious leaders have used Friday sermons in Sadr City as a platform to incite hatred and violence toward homosexuals. The bodies of three gay men were reported to have been found in Sadr City in April with pieces of paper bearing the word for “pervert” attached to them.
The language used by the perpetrators in Iraq is much the same as that used by Exodus International and its allies in March when they launched the current campaign of intimidation and violence against same-sex-attracted persons in Uganda:
Posters and leaflets have been distributed in the Baghdad neighborhoods of al-Shola, al-Hurya and Sadr City with orders to, “Cleanse Iraq from the crime of homosexuality.”
In Uganda, the campaign co-launched by Exodus International board member Don Schmierer vowed to “wipe out” homosexuality, while Exodus continues to promise U.S. antigay heterosexuals “freedom from homosexuality” — and, it logically follows, from homosexuals.
MSNBC continues:
Baghdad police didn’t respond to inquiries from NBC News about the attacks, but the surge in violence has gained attention by the international media.
In a letter to Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki in April, Amnesty International called for “urgent and concerted action” to stop the killings of men because of their sexual orientation.
Amnesty International expressed concern at the government’ failure to “publicly condemn the killings.” It urged the government to make sure that the killings are “promptly and effectively investigated, and to see that the perpetrators are brought to justice.” The letter also condemned statements from one senior police officer that,”appear to condone or even encourage the targeting of members of the gay community in Baghdad.” An Amnesty spokeswoman said there had not yet been a reply from Iraqi authorities.
The message of Exodus and NARTH, that homosexuality is a mental illness to be treated or eliminated, resonates well beyond U.S. borders and nations such as Uganda that are served by the Exodus Global Alliance. According to Towleroad:
English language newspaper The National, based in Abu Dhabi, reports on the recent executions of gay men in Iraq.
They interview a man they call Abu Muslim, who claims to be involved in the actual killings:
“We see this [homosexuality] as a serious illness in the community that has been spreading rapidly among the youth after it was brought in from the outside by American soldiers. These are not the habits of Iraq or our community and we must eliminate them…We had approval from the main Iraqi tribes here to liquidate those [men] copying the ways of women. Our aim is not to destabilise the security situation. Our aim is to help stabilise society…Although the Mahdi Army is today limited and in fact stalled, we cannot sit by with our arms crossed while these homosexuals flout the rules and ethics that must be followed under the Islamic religion. These homosexuals think that Iraq is changing and becoming a non-Muslim, liberal society but our tribal and religious customs allow us to punish them in the most severe way.”
Change is possible — social change, that is. But violent antigay religious leaders in Iraq, elevated and empowered by an incompetent U.S. occupation, are determined to use any means necessary to stop change.
Maine’s governor (pictured) signed a freshly passed bill Wednesday approving gay marriage, making it the fifth state to approve the practice and moving New England closer to allowing it throughout the region.
Today was a wonderful day in Maine.
Truth Wins Out applauded the Irish Association of Social Workers (IASW) today for 
