The silliness of anti-gay activists keeps plunging to new depths. Just this week, the clownish Matt Barber (left) wrote a child-like spoof (‘Gay’ penguin flies straight’) for a series of homophobic publications. His article was about the San Francisco zoo’s gay male penguin couple, that apparently broke up – with one partner opting for a female bird.
“Male Magellan penguins Harry and Pepper have been together since 2003. The pair nested together and even incubated an egg laid by another penguin in 2008, but their relationship hit the rocks earlier this year when a female penguin, Linda, befriended Harry after her long-time companion died. Zookeepers say Harry and Linda are happy and were able to successfully nest this year,” reported KTUV-TV.
Barber immediately jumped on the news as evidence that people could pray away the gay. Interestingly, Barber failed to note that:
1) The apparently bisexual penguin did not have to waste thousands of dollars on reparative therapy
2) There is no evidence that a distant father made Harry gay in the first place
3) The penguin was not delivered from “the demon of homosexuality”
4) There is no evidence that the bird found “freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ.”
Actually, the real reason Barber churlishly exploited this issue, is because he has no real life human ex-gays to trot out that are not on the payroll of anti-gay political organizations. Barber and his ilk also have no research to back up their false claims of sexual conversion. Instead, the rely on bogus sham studies by NARTH – a group that actually uses turn of the century (19 century) research and repackages it as new.
Interestingly, Barber is the Dean of Liberty University School of Law, founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. Barber convienntly fails to mention that Falwell’s personal ex-gay leader was Michael Johnston. For those who do not remember, Johnston had to step down from his ex-gay minsitry after hooking up with multiple dudes on the Internet. Why doesn’t Barber have the honesty and integrity to mention the failings of the minstry he represents?
Barber’s column was picked up by other anti-gay sites including Americans for Truth, founded by Porno Pete, (aka Peter LaBarbera), the creepy, sodomy-obsessed activist who keeps showing up at gay S&M parties to conduct “research”.
Um, Pete, at what point will you have your elusive lab sample? It’s kind of odd that you’ve been working on the same “project” for two decades. Is there a new conclusion to draw, or do you just like looking at hairy leathermen in assless chaps?
On Porno Pete’s website, he has a picture of me standing outside of a Boston church (on public property) with a megaphone. Inside the building, the ex-gay organization Exodus International is holding a seminar to help people pray away the gay. What the slippery LaBarbera omits was my chant in front of the building:
“Uganda, Uganda, Uganda.”
I was reminding the activists of Exodus that they cannot advocate genocide, or play a supporting role, without vehement opposition. Just weeks earlier, Exodus board member Don Schmierer attended a conference in Kampala with holocaust revisionist Scott Lively. At the event, a new group was formed to advocate “wiping out” gay people.
I am very proud of the fact I and others in the group stood up to such tyranny and advocacy of violence. Indeed, at about the same time Exodus met in Boston, the persecution of gays in Uganda began. In the service of honesty and truth, Porno Pete should tell the entire story and admit his role in cheerleading such potentially genocidal actions by his cohorts.
To get back to the penguin theme, it is clear that those who push the “ex-gay” myth are birdbrains with therioes that just won’t fly.
Three decades ago, co-founder Gil Alexander-Moegerle intended Focus on the Family to help strengthen Christian couples and parents. But his associate James Dobson had other ideas.
Beneath a thin non-profit veneer of cozy advice for conservative Christian couples, Dobson built a book-and-video empire devoted to antigay bigotry and phony antiabortion rhetoric.
Timothy Kincaid of Box Turtle Bulletin has discovered that Focus now admits its focus is no longer the Christian family.
Sonja Swiatkiewicz, Focus’ director of issues response, spoke with Everyday Christian:
She said gay marriage issue is now one of the largest for Focus.
“I would not consider gay marriage as something we are just keeping an eye on,” Swiatkiewicz said. “Protecting the institution of marriage as between a man and a woman is one of our primary goals. We receive about 250,000 communications a month from folks who have very deep hurts on this issue and request resources. We know the impact it has on the breakdown of the relationship between men, women and children.
“We work to protect or restore marriages as closely as we do on the sanctity of life beginning at conception and protecting religious liberties.”
James Dobson is no longer the leader of Focus on the Family; he has been succeeded by Jim Daly as president and CEO, and by retired Air Force officer Patrick Caruana as chairman. (Caruana, interestingly, is an investor and executive for space- and land-based war contractors.)
Yet Dobson’s spirit — not “God’s will” — lives on in the organization’s devotion to hurting faithful gay couples while doing nothing to strengthen the conservative Christian evangelical family.
As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on hate-crimes legislation, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council ratched up their efforts to undermine religious freedom and to treat violent crimes more leniently when they are intentionally committed against LGBT persons.
Nothing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of, the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The legislation does not create a new class of crimes, but rather adds sexual orientation and gender identity to pre-existing federal law that punishes violent felonies committed on the basis of the victim’s race or religion. Excluding sexual orientation from existing law results in antigay hate crimes being punished more leniently than the same crimes committed against victims on the basis of race or religion.
Here’s the Family Research Council, lying about the hate-crimes legislation’s protections for religious speech:
The “hate-crimes” bill, being considered as an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, would create a new class of crimes based on a victim’s “actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.” And, pastors who preach against homosexuality could end up prosecuted if they are found to have “induced” a hate-crime against a self-identified homosexual by preaching from the Bible.
Focus on the Family lies about the continuing rise in antigay hate crimes:
“The latest numbers from the FBI from 2007 show us there’s no dramatic increase in hate crimes across the country — and, specifically, no dramatic increase over the years in sexual-orientation hate crimes, either in raw numbers or percentages,” Horne said. “So, this bill is a solution looking for a problem.”
That’ untrue: While overall hate-crime violence declined in 2007, according to the FBI, antigay hate crimes rose six percent. (Source: USA Today.) The FBI says that violent antigay hate crimes have been occurring with growing frequency since 2005.
The Senate legislation is restricted to violent felonies. Focus on the Family falsely claims that similar laws have been used to punish speech.
Focus and FRC appear committed to undermining religious freedom by lying about federal laws that clearly protect religious liberty, and by favoring inequitable punishment for violent crime.
Focus on the Family is promoting a biased Republican survey which finds that two-thirds of those surveyed believe they have a right to deny constitutional equality and religious freedom to gay Iowans.
“Public opinion on marriage is consistently a 65-70 percent issue,” said Bryan English, director of public relations for the Iowa Family Policy Center. “The numbers tell us that Iowans want the right to vote on the Iowa Marriage Amendment. How the political class responds to these numbers will help separate the wheat from the chaff among those who seek office in 2010.”
English is quoted saying that “citizens” are “not comfortable” with courts that defend constitutional rights and religious freedom from conservatives who feel they know what’s best for everyone.
Exodus International yesterday announced a merger with Transforming Congregations, an ex-gay ministry affiliated with the United Methodist Church, and OneByOne, a similar outreach affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Transforming Congregations and OneByOne work to stigmatize gay Christians within their denominations and to promote the unscientific myth that sexual orientation is determined by parenting and abuse. The three organizations claim that the ex-gay myth is “Biblically orthodox” even though there is no Biblical support whatsoever for ex-gay reparative therapy, a practice that traces its origins to mistaken conjecture by 19th-century psychotherapist Sigmund Freud.
The three organizations also continue to shun thousands of former ex-gays who have passed through their ministries with their sexual orientation unchanged.
According to Charisma News Online, the organizations all but admit that the merger is in retaliation against the growing influence of spiritually and emotionally mature gay Christians:
In recent decades, both denominations have seen increasingly vocal segments of their memberships lean toward a more liberal theology that embraces homosexuality. But Exodus leaders say the merger could help the ministry better reach those groups with more effective resources that promote a biblically orthodox view of sexuality.
Transforming Congregations and One by One will function essentially as departments within Exodus’ church-equipping ministry.
Exodus lobbyist Randy Thomas sidesteps the failure of the organizations’ ex-gay ministries to change anyone’s sexual orientation, and further sidesteps the damage done to former ex-gays’ spiritual and emotional lives by Exodus’ fundamentalist rhetoric and ostracism against gay Christians.
“While the culture war has taken us into a polarization of either condemning the sin or condoning the behavior, Exodus and these groups are speaking into it redemptively and we’re saying we can hold on to truth but at the same time have compassion, have grace, have mercy and have resources available to those who do want to overcome homosexuality,” he told Charisma.
The three organizations glamorize or reject the Bible’s inconsistent and sometimes murderous messages regarding homosexuality:
Exodus leaders say navigating the fine line between loving homosexuals and communicating to them the truth of Scripture is the real challenge facing Christians.
And the organizations expose their ultimate goal: The destruction of healthy gay couples, with antigay marriage laws that deny the religious freedom of gay and gay-affirming people of faith.
Complicating that even further are concerns that with six states now allowing same-sex marriage, gay rights will one day trump religious liberty, leading to laws that punish those who preach that homosexual practice is sinful.
Instead of defending religious liberty for all regardless of orientation, Exodus and its partners claim that their freedom includes a supposed right to take away the religious liberty of others.
Speakers at Exodus’ anti-freedom press conference included representatives of the three ministries as well as Ron Dennis, founding board member of Exodus International and now current Board Member of Transforming Congregations, and Bob Stith, the Southern Baptist Convention’s “national strategist” for “gender issues” which, not coincidentally, consist of antigay activism and efforts to repeal women’s equality.
Ex-gay activist James Hartline has convinced San Diego council member Ruth Sterling to retract her support for San Diego LGBT Pride.
Without substantiation and without attending an event, Sterling wrote to the event organizers: “Never having seen one of your parades/celebrations I was shocked and shaken to my core to learn of the lewd and lascivious behavior and unconscionable activities portrayed.”
The mayor and pro-equality activists subsequently criticized Sterling for caving in so easily to Hartline’s unsubstantiated bigotry.
After speaking at the Campus Progress National Conference in Washington, DC, on July 8, the former president was asked if he supported same-sex marriage. Clinton, in a departure from past statements, replied in the affirmative.
“I’m basically in support.”
The former president joins a string of prominent Democrats who have recently switched their position on the issue, including former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean, New York Senator Charles E. Schumer, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd.
It seems to me, that Obama may be the last Democrat to run for President who gets GLBT support, yet is not in favor of equal marriage rights. As more mainstream Democrats step out front, the days of opposition appear numbered. Any serious candidate who wants to secure the nomination in the future must be for true equality.
I vividly remember the first time I was introduced to the phrase “Family Values.” It was the early 1990′ and I was driving in my car. I looked out of the window and saw the strange verbiage promoting a new subdivision on a towering billboard above the highway.
The sign didn’t perturb me, but I was puzzled by the slogan. Having grown up in a series of subdivisions, it went without saying that the existing cul-de-sacs were always brimming with families.
So, what made this development so different? Did they forbid singles from living behind the gates? What if a divorce occurred, did the broken family have to move? Did offspring have to eventually leave if they had not married by a certain age? Were gay people forbidden from living there?
What I found most bewildering was the idea of promoting family, as if it were a prefab product that could be marketed, packaged and came with 2 ¬? bathrooms. That seemed as forced and unnatural as the wax fruit placed on the coffee tables of model homes in such developments.
At that time, my parents had been together for more than 20 years (They celebrate their 40 year anniversary in August). Their lifetime together was just an organic experience that didn’t need to be trumpeted. They never had to say, “look at us, aren’t we just the healthiest, happiest family you’ve ever seen? Check out our wonderful morals and values. Aren’t we special? And, by the way, vote for a specific political party to keep us together.”
Aside from politicians kissing babies and posing with their brood, I always imagined the value of family to be a private affair. It was an intimate bond between two people and their children. The ostentatious commercial worship of this unit seemed jarring and exploitative. Indeed, it seemed anathema to actual healthy families. If one’s family were so wonderful, after all, why would it need a special subdivision?
Shortly after I saw this billboard, President George Bush and his vacuous Vice President, Dan Quayle, brought the “family values” mantra into the political arena. Religious scolds, who worked to transform marriage from a private institution to a very public one, championed this moral marketing campaign. The GOP soon recast itself as the great defender of family and assiduously catered to this crowd, who eventually took over the party.
In reality, of course, strong families don’t need to be defended. If a husband and wife are busy cuddling, they don’t need candidate crusaders. If parents are taking their children to soccer practice, they don’t need James Dobson socking imagined enemies. (Read More)
In a brazen effort to preempt an American Psychological Association report on human sexuality, scheduled for release in August, an anti-gay organization unveiled its own report, which amounts to rubbish in the guise of research.
The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality’ (NARTH) “new” study, “What the Research Shows: NARTH’ Response to the American Psychological Association’ Claims on Homosexuality”, is so embarrassingly slipshod that no scientist would take it seriously.
But, the goal, of course, is not to impress researchers who would cackle at the kookiness. The real aim, according to Dr. Jack Drescher, a renowned psychiatrist and author, is to confuse the public and gullible media into believing the APA and NARTH are equally credentialed scientific bodies engaged in a legitimate dispute over homosexuality.
The truth, however, is that NARTH is a fringe group held in ill repute by anyone who has even a rudimentary knowledge of science. The organization is best known for encouraging male clients to drink Gatorade and call friends “dude” to increase masculinity.
The first clue that this study was utter trash was the fact that NARTH and Focus on the Family referred to it as “new”. Indeed, not one iota of fresh research took place. Not one moment was spent in the lab, nor were any subjects recruited to broaden the base of knowledge on the etiology of sexual orientation.
The study was basically a compilation of everything negative ever written about gay people, no matter how invalid, idiotic or biased the conclusion. NARTH essentially blasted sh** out of a cannon, hoping at least some would stick to the wall. (Read More)
One of the Pacific Rim’s leading evangelical voices regarding abuse and “sexual brokenness” is profiled in a new article by former ex-gay Anthony Venn-Brown. (Copies available here and here.)
Venn-Brown, now a gay Christian leader in Australia, has written an analysis that is concise, insightful, fair, and well-balanced.
Sy Rogers rose to prominence in the United States as executive director and later board member of Exodus International through the early 1990s. He appeared in a documentary of that period, “One Nation Under God,” in which — at odds with the statements and experiences of the movie’s featured gay and former ex-gay individuals — Rogers repeated Exodus’ mantra that homosexuality is caused by inadequate parenting and abuse which result in gender confusion. Rogers’ assertions were, in short, projections of his own transgender confusion on to mainstream homosexuals who experience no such confusion.
By 1996, Christianity Today cited Rogers as a leading up-and-coming young evangelical.
After Exodus, Rogers departed with his wife for Asia and rose to prominence as an evangelical speaker on abuse and sexual brokenness to audiences in Singapore and New Zealand. His speeches and self-help programs remain popular to this day. But his central themes remain unnecessarily — almost purposely — ambiguous and prone to deception, ripe for abuse by his ex-gay former colleagues. (Read More)
The silliness of anti-gay activists keeps plunging to new depths. Just this week, the clownish Matt Barber (left) wrote a child-like spoof (‘Gay’ penguin flies straight’) for a series of homophobic publications. His article was about the San Francisco zoo’s gay male penguin couple, that apparently broke up – with one partner opting for a female bird.
ed up by other anti-gay sites including Americans for Truth, founded by Porno Pete, (aka Peter LaBarbera), the creepy, sodomy-obsessed activist who keeps showing up at gay S&M parties to conduct “research”.
Sy Rogers rose to prominence in the United States as executive director and later board member of Exodus International through the early 1990s. He appeared in a documentary of that period, “One Nation Under God,” in which — at odds with the statements and experiences of the movie’s featured gay and former ex-gay individuals — Rogers repeated Exodus’ mantra that homosexuality is caused by inadequate parenting and abuse which result in gender confusion. Rogers’ assertions were, in short, projections of his own transgender confusion on to mainstream homosexuals who experience no such confusion.
