Huffington Post pointed out today that Focus on the Family’s California affiliate, the California Family Council, opposes efforts in that state to protect marriage.
While the organization emphatically opposes the right of two people of the same gender to choose lifelong marriage, regardless of their religious beliefs, the group supports heterosexual divorce.
Making divorce illegal would be “impractical,” said Ron Prentice, the executive director of the California Family Council. The CFC led a coalition of religious conservative groups to qualify that state’s Proposition 8 in which religious voters overrode the civil right of persons not sharing those religious beliefs to marry.
In 2010, it is hoped, California will vote to protect marriage from Focus on the Family and its apologists for divorce.
John Marcotte, a married father of two, is proposing the 2010 California Marriage Protection Act. The following mock PSA makes a strong case for why voters should protect marriage from Focus on the Family.
Although her subordinate Eric Goosby seemed to defend no-strings aid to Uganda last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this afternoon said international efforts to criminalize homosexuality are “unacceptable.”
It remains unclear to what extent this policy will affect U.S. foreign aid for HIV/AIDS prevention. Human Rights Watch and other critics have complained that this aid has been misused by recipient African evangelical organizations and government officials to persecute and kill gay and HIV-positive Africans, particularly in Uganda.
Clinton’s remarks came on the eve of World AIDS Day.
“Obviously our efforts are hampered whenever discrimination or marginalization of certain populations results in less effective outreach and treatment. So we will work not only to ensure access for all who need it but also to combat discrimination more broadly,” she said during a press conference in which the officials also announced that the XIX International AIDS Conference in 2012 will be held in United States for first time since 1990. “We have to stand against any efforts to marginalize and criminalize and penalize members of the LGBT community worldwide.”
Specifically at issue is pending legislation in Uganda that would extend the punishment for engaging in gay sex to life imprisonment and introduce the death penalty for those who do so while HIV-positive – an act termed “aggravated homosexuality” within the bill.
Mark Bromley, Chair of the Council for Global Equality, said he was pleased to see Secretary Clinton take a firm stand against antigay bigotry.
“The United States must make it absolutely clear to Uganda that the passage of the bill, which includes a death penalty provision and criminalizes those who fail to report suspected homosexuals to the authorities, would substantially impact our bilateral relationship and our health investments in that country,” he said.
As Truth Wins Out and other sites previously reported, the United States in late October pledged to provide Uganda with nearly $250 million in development assistance next year. (Read More)
On his blog, Andrew Sullivan writes about Rick Warren’s silence on the impending pogrom against gays in Uganda, despite the fact Warren has deep ties in this country. According to Sullivan:
“He [Warren] lies. He has taken sides, whenever possible, to stigmatize, demonize and now physically threaten the lives of gay people in his own country and abroad. And his silence on this issue means the deaths of others. Warren needs to come out and condemn this law as evil, which it is. And to stop hiding his own enmeshment with the most virulent forms of fundamentalist hatred under the veil of media-savvy benevolence”
The prime ministers of Britain and Canada last week protested, in the strongest terms, Uganda’s plan to execute its sexually active LGBT and HIV-positive citizens — and to imprison their families, doctors, clergy if they fail to turn in patients and loved ones to the police.
The two nations’ top leaders implied that Uganda might lose foreign aid and membership in the Commonwealth if it proceeds.
Compare these condemnations to the official statement of the highest-ranking U.S. executive-branch official, Eric Goosby. He is the head of the U.S. State Department’s foreign-aid program for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, known as PEPFAR.
My role is to be supportive and helpful to the patients who need these services. It is not to tell a country how to put forward their legislation. But I will engage them in conversation around my concern and knowledge of what this is going to do to that population, and our ability to stop the movement of the virus into the general population.
Update: Goosby’s statement is much softer and more generous to Uganda than a U.S. embassy officer’s prior statement:
“If adopted, a bill further criminalizing homosexuality would constitute a significant step backwards for the protection of human rights in Uganda,” the embassy’s public affairs officer Joann Lockard said in an email. “We urge states to take all necessary measures to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests, or detention.”
Americans must take urgent action to let the State Department know that it IS their job to prevent the misuse of taxpayers’ HIV/AIDS dollars to slaughter gay people, enrich evangelicals, and deny Africans access to condoms.
Please write letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanding a hold on Uganda’s PEPFAR funding until strict human-rights, privacy, and free-speech controls can be imposed upon all PEPFAR aid. PEPFAR aid must not be given to sectarian religious interests, especially those with violent and inhumane intentions.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
(202) 647-4000
Please THANK Rep. Tammy Baldwin for her support and urge her office to continue fighting against The Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 by e-mailing Amber Shipley:
Amber.Shipley @ mail.house.gov
Please THANK Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for her support via phone call or letter and urge her to continue using her position in the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs to hold Uganda accountable.
Cobus Fourie of South Africa’s Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has helpfully translated an article that appeared yesterday in South Africa’s Sunday As It Is tabloid.
Since the entire article is one big ex-gay profanity, I am taking the liberty of publishing the entire translation here for the purpose of educating readers as to how ex-gay proponents and their media helpmates communicate messages when they let their guard down — or assume that the Afrikaans/English language barrier will protect them. Bracketed remarks below are contextual observations by Fourie.
–Mike Airhart
PRAY HIM ‘STRAIGHT’
FAGGOTS CAN BE CURED BY PRAYER
That was the message last week from an actor to who placed his own gay life behind him. Now he is chasing the pleasures of the female body.
Dries Botha – an actor who was already on “Inherited Sin” on SABC2 [B-grade TV] — was for many years a screaming queen who chose sex with men over the bodies of voluptuous Eves.
But now he is walking a path with God and now looks with new, lustful eyes at women. And he realised he was not born gay.
“I have a penis and the penis is made for a vagina,” the 29-year-old said on Sunday.
And to shut the closet’s mouldy door still more he said: “I do not preach to other gays, but I want them to begin to listen to my arguments. I still have gay friends, and I do not judge, but God did not make a groom and a groom…”
He said being gay is like smoking – you will have an urge every now and then. “I still find myself sometimes looking for a man, but I try to control lust. I steer my thoughts in another direction,” he said. Almost sad.
“The more you hang out with faggots, the greater the chance that you will be gay. I was definitely not born gay.”
“I was exposed to gay men in high school for the first time. The gay community is much freer and have other moral codes. I enjoyed the freedom of being gay. I have always regarded women as useless objects.” (Read More)
In the first step toward a global index of stigma against HIV/AIDS, a new British report finds that, years after HIV/AIDS education programs were gradually shelved, prejudice and discrimination are returning.
Researchers found that one in five people with an HIV diagnosis had been harassed, threatened or verbally assaulted in the past 12 months. Many reported ignorance and prejudice from within the medical profession, particularly from GPs and dentists. One in five reported being denied medical treatment because they had HIV.
In findings to be unveiled in parliament tomorrow, The People Living With HIV Stigma Index, a two-year research project funded by the Department for International Development and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, found that only 39% of people felt confident that their medical records were being kept confidential, with 18% saying their HIV status had been revealed without their consent.
Lisa Power, head of policy at the Terrence Higgins Trust, said that the public was more ignorant about HIV than a decade ago. “This research is really important because it’s about people’s perception of the prejudice they face.”
Musician Annie Lennox will be one of several high-profile speakers at a briefing on the subject of HIV stigma at the Houses of Parliament on Monday.
The Stigma Index is designed as a global initiative, but the UK results are the first to be obtained.
It is hoped that the initiative will be both a catalyst for creating and fostering change in the communities in which it is used, by empowering both the individuals and communities most affected by the epidemic.
Amid growing public criticism of federal funding for antigay violence in Africa, Eric Goosby — chief coordinator for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) — has finally spoken out regarding U.S. taxpayers’ support for the pogrom in Uganda.
My role is to be supportive and helpful to the patients who need these services. It is not to tell a country how to put forward their legislation. But I will engage them in conversation around my concern and knowledge of what this is going to do to that population, and our ability to stop the movement of the virus into the general population.
Goosby appears to be both ignorant of HIV/AIDS in Uganda, and determined to use taxpayer dollars to undermine the very same education programs that PEPFAR was created to support:
HIV/AIDS in Uganda is primarily a heterosexual phenomenon; Goosby falsely contends that it is a homosexual phenomenon that threatens the “general population.”
The Anti-Homosexuality Bill would criminalize key aspects of comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention education and imprison health-care workers who refuse to report sexually active gay patients to the police.
Goosby’s use of federal funds to subsidize the punishment of HIV/AIDS education and health-care workers, and to push LGBT Ugandans deep underground, is inexcusable.
And the silence of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, regarding her subordinates’ support for violence in Uganda, is unacceptable.
Please write letters to Clinton demanding a hold on all PEPFAR funding until strict human-rights, patient-confidentiality, and free-speech controls are imposed upon all PEPFAR aid. PEPFAR aid must not be given to sectarian religious interests, especially those with violent and inhumane intentions.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
(202) 647-4000
Please THANK Rep. Tammy Baldwin for her support and urge her office to continue fighting against The Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 by e-mailing Amber Shipley:
Amber.Shipley @ mail.house.gov
Please THANK Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for her support via phone call or letter and urge her to continue using her position in the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs to hold Uganda accountable.
The British Commonwealth’s Equal Rights Trust (ERT) has called on the Commonwealth’s Heads of Government to condemn, during their meeting this weekend, the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill and to take urgent action to repeal existing homophobic laws across the Commonwealth.
According to ERT:
Homosexual conduct is currently illegal in 43 of the 53 Commonwealth nations, despite the commitment in the 1971 Commonwealth Declaration of Principles to “foster human equality and dignity everywhere”. This Declaration has effectively been ignored by all but 10 of the member countries.
ERT offered a three-point plan to Commonwealth General Secretary Kamalesh Sharma:
establish a Ministerial Action Group to address the issue of laws criminalising homosexual conduct and advise member states of the Commonwealth on the legal implications of retaining such laws;
condemn the Anti-Homosexuality Bill which was tabled in the Parliament of Uganda in the strongest terms – and consider sanctions which would follow from adoption of the Bill;
include a political commitment to tackling homophobic laws in the final communiqué of its meeting.
ERT argues that international law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, relying on interpretation by UN human rights bodies and broadly recognized legal principles to support its case.
The ERT statement came after Stephen Lewis, United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, condemned the legislation and warned the Commonwealth not to allow Uganda to use its chairmanship of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting to put the entire Commonwealth’s “legitimacy and integrity” at risk.
The United Reformed Church of the United Kingdom said Wednesday that it is “appalled” at the “draconian measures” in Uganda’s proposed antigay death penalty. The legislation calls for the execution of gay, sexually active persons who are HIV-positive or whose partner is underage or disabled. The legislation also broadens the existing life-imprisonment sentence for consensual intimacy among gay couples; adds new punishments for pastors, friends, and family members who fail to report a gay person to the police; and criminalizes comprehensive sex education and health care which might be perceived as tolerating homosexual behavior.
PinkNews.co.uk points out that the church has asked Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, who grew up in Uganda, to condemn the legislation. As yet, neither has responded.
As Uganda continues to move toward passage of a death penalty against that nation’s LGBT and HIV-positive citizens, Canadian minister of state for foreign affairs Peter Kent said earlier this week that “Our position is that the proposed Uganda law is reprehensible, vile and hateful and it’s appalling that such legislation would be brought to the parliament of a commonwealth democracy.”
Kent said that his government would communicate its stand on the issue at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) which is taking place in Trinidad and Tobago this week.
“At the Commonwealth summit, we’ll convey Canada’s position that if that law is in fact passed, Canada would consider it unacceptable and a gross infringement of human rights in Uganda,” he said.
It remains unclear to what extent this policy will affect U.S. foreign aid for HIV/AIDS prevention. 
PRAY HIM ‘STRAIGHT’
In the first step toward a global index of stigma against HIV/AIDS, a new British report finds that, years after HIV/AIDS education programs were gradually shelved, prejudice and discrimination are returning.
Amid growing public criticism of federal funding for antigay violence in Africa, 
