I was reading the newspaper this morning and came upon a shocking story. It turns out that members of the International Criminal Court gathered in Kampala, Uganda, to consider whether to amend the Court’ statute to allow it to exercise jurisdiction over the crime of “aggression.”

Huh???????

What the hell are human rights advocates doing meeting in Uganda while the nation is still considering its deplorable, violent Anti-Homosexuality Bill? To discuss human rights in such a barbaric setting is nothing short of a sick, twisted joke. We are talking about a nation that is seriously contemplating genocide against LGBT people. How can human rights be legitimately discussed in a nation that boasts of how it physically and psychologically abuses a good portion of its own citizens?

Since they are already in Kampala, The International Criminal Court can make good use of its time by immediately arresting David Bahati and Martin Ssempa for “aggression” against LGBT people. Both men should face trial and jailed once convicted.

Let’s be honest. To hold a conference in such a brutal and backward nation is a slap in the face and undermines the basic concept of human rights for all people.

Current TV’s Vanguard program aired a documentary last week about the U.S. evangelical and ex-gay role in fomenting antigay hate and violence in Africa.

If you live outside the United States, or who wish to have a permanent digital copy of the documentary, you’re in luck: The program is now available as an mp4 file download.

You may also be able to watch the documentary in short clips online. International viewers: Please let us know whether either method works for you.

Here are the first 10 minutes of “Missionaries of Hate”; parts 2 through 4 are not yet available online:

Here’s an extended interview with David Bahati, the mastermind of the Uganda antigay genocide campaign: (Read More)

The Associated Press reports that Malawi’s president has pardoned a same-sex couple who had been sentenced to 14 years in prison. However, President Bingu wa Mutharika’s announcement was far from encouraging for the broader picture of LGBT equality in a region that has fallen woefully behind the rest of the world.

“These boys committed a crime against our culture, against our religion, and against our laws,” President Mutharika said. “However, as head of state, I hereby pardon them and therefore order their immediate release without any conditions….We don’t condone marriages of this nature. It’s unheard of in Malawi and it’s illegal.”

Malawi had faced international condemnation for the conviction and harsh sentencing of Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza, who were arrested in December, a day after celebrating their engagement. After the pardon, activists were searching for a safe house for the couple, fearing they could be attacked upon release.

This horrific treatment of LGBT people in much of Africa must end. While anti-gay hatred is constantly portrayed as an African value, many African leaders are really upholding homophobic colonial traditions. Worse, the tense atmosphere is exacerbated by American “Colonial Christians” who poison Africa with noxious forms of religious views.

While there is much to be done worldwide for LGBT equality, at lease one couple caught a break and can hopefully resume their lives — although they seem to be potentially in harms way. As for Malawi, it was a very wise move by Mutharika. Had this couple remained in prison, it would have put a searing spotlight on this otherwise invisible nation. This would have harmed Malawi’s reputation, undermined its economy and retarded growth.

Once again, Exodus International is lying about what it offers potential clients. In this slick video promoting its upcoming road show in Irvine, California, Exodus peddles false hope when it asks, “Is freedom from homosexuality possible?” The group is playing semantic games at the price of the mental health of desperate and vulnerable people Exodus purports to assist.

The organization’s leaders, in rare moments of candor, answer the question of “freedom” by saying that one can, with great difficulty, alter behavior but the underlying gay feelings will always stay the same:

Alan Chambers
“One thing we can expect as Christians is a life of denial. I don’t think we’re afraid to tell people that they may have a lifetime of struggle. Freedom isn’t the absence of struggle, but the life of struggle with joy in the process.” (Christianity Today, Sept. 13, 2007)

“By no means would we ever say change can be sudden or complete.” (Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2007)

Sexual orientation “isn’t a light switch that you can switch on and off.” (Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2007)

“And so every single morning — this is a ritual for me — I wake up and I say, “Dear Lord, I can’t make it today without You. I choose to deny what comes naturally to me.’” (Love Won Out, Phoenix, Feb. 10, 2007, www.boxturtlebulletin.com)

Chambers told One News Now that he had never met someone who had a “sudden or complete change when it came to homosexuality.” He told the news service that he believes that God gives people the ability to overcome on a daily basis, rather than “a complete transformation in an instant.” (One News Now, June 22, 2007)

“I don’t think change is going from gay to straight. Just saying that doesn’t sound like an accurate representation of what Exodus facilitates or proclaims.” (Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, pg. 35, Haworth Press 2003, interview taped March 11, 2001)

“To say that Exodus is a great healer and the place for people to become straight, I would think that is not right. If there are Exodus ministries that do that, we need to change that. We need to work on that.” (Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, pg. 35, Haworth Press 2003, interview taped March 11, 2001)

“Put me in a bathhouse, would I find people attractive or would it stir me, it probably would. I’m not a raging heterosexual where I have to worry about if a lady walks in the room and I have to turn my head, while some guys are like that.” Anything But Straight, pg. 58, Haworth Press 2003, interview taped March 11, 2001)

Joe Dallas, Speaker, Focus on the Family’ Love Won Out tour
“No one has ever left therapy saying, “Wow, I have absolutely no homosexual thoughts.” (Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1990)

Jeff Konrad, Author, You Don’t Have To Be Gay
“Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t lust for women as some men do; that is not healthy behavior either.” (“You Don’t Have to Be Gay,” Pg. 280, Pacific Publishing House, 1987)

Alan Medinger, Author, Growth Into Manhood
“If an attractive man and an attractive woman enter a room, it is the man I will look at first.” (The Wall Street Journal, April 21, 1993)

There you go folks – the real truth behind the fancy video. Exodus is selling false hope. The group is asking people to pay hard earned dollars so they can “help” you spend your life lonely and sexually frustrated. Please consider the simple fact that one can accomplish this for free, without paying the salaries of Randy Thomas and Alan Chambers.

Ever wonder why Exodus does not keep statistics? It is because they have an astronomical failure rate. If they told the truth about their batting average, they would have struck out decades ago.

Don’t be fooled. Don’t be bilked. Don’t be suckered. Don’t be defrauded. Ask questions and think for yourself.

Sometimes even moderate to liberal religious believers bristle at the claim that most organized religion is inherently misogynistic, asserting that their policies which just so happen to subjugate women are merely tradition, or giving long theological explanations for why obvious subjugation isn’t subjugation at all, but is somehow a reflection of Christ, or some such blather. I remember this from growing up in a Shi’a Presbyterian church, where women weren’t allowed to hold any positions of authority over men, to the point that the female Sunday School teachers were only able to teach adults if their husbands were co-teachers.

Well, the Catholic Church in Phoenix has excommunicated a nun named Sister Margaret for the sin of saving a woman’s life. Oh, but look:

We finally have a case where the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is responding forcefully and speedily to allegations of wrongdoing.

But the target isn’t a pedophile priest. Rather, it’ a nun who helped save a woman’ life. Doctors describe her as saintly.

(…)

Sister Margaret was a senior administrator of St. Joseph’ Hospital in Phoenix. A 27-year-old mother of four arrived late last year, in her third month of pregnancy. According to local news reports and accounts from the hospital and some of its staff members, the mother suffered from a serious complication called pulmonary hypertension. That created a high probability that the strain of continuing pregnancy would kill her.

“In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother’ life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy,” the hospital said in a statement. “This decision was made after consultation with the patient, her family, her physicians, and in consultation with the Ethics Committee.”

Sister Margaret was a member of that committee. She declined to discuss the episode with me, but the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmsted, ruled that Sister Margaret was “automatically excommunicated” because she assented to an abortion.

“The mother’ life cannot be preferred over the child’,” the bishop’ communication office elaborated in a statement.

But you have to understand: that fetus might have had a penis.

I really appreciate that the bishop’s office elaborated by explaining that women’s lives aren’t worth all that much to them. It’s a refreshing and surprising moment of honesty from a church which doesn’t usually have a close relationship with the truth.

If you read the whole account, you’ll see that terminating the pregnancy was the ONLY ethical thing to do in that situation, and that furthermore, Sister Margaret was known as the “moral conscience” of that hospital.

This is just another in a long line of examples proving that the idea of the Catholic Church as the moral arbiter of anything is a crying joke, at best.

The entire abhorrent, morally reprobate screed from the Bishop’s office is here. Would that they be so indignant about their child-raping clergy.

(h/t Timothy Beauchamp)

The other day, I posted video of Bryan Fischer using an extremely revisionist, anti-semitic, homophobic version of history to claim that the Nazis were a movement of gay men. I pointed out that, though he didn’t mention Scott Lively by name, that that man’s lying paws were all over Fischer’s statements.

Well, told you so. Fischer’s “explanation” for his comments leaves much to be desired:

Scott Lively’s well-documented book, “The Pink Swastika,” exposes…

No, Bryan, you idiot. Scott Lively’s book is a joke. The man is not a scholar, but rather a psychologically disturbed, rank bigot who is at least partially responsible for inspiring the gay genocide legislation in Uganda, and who is associated with several known hate groups, one of which is connected to anti-gay violence and murder in California.

Actual historians and scholars fairly universally repudiate the book as a work of malevolent fantasy.

From the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on the book:

Written by fundamentalist activists Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika says that rather than being victimized by the Nazis, gay men in Hitler’s inner circle actually helped mastermind the Holocaust.

“While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism,” write Lively and Abrams. “To the myth of the ‘pink triangle’ ‚Äî the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted ‚Äî we must respond with the reality of the ‘pink swastika.’”

Historians agree that this “reality” is utterly false. But many anti-gay crusaders have used the “gay Nazi” myth as proof that gay people are immoral and destructive.

(…)

The myth that Nazis condoned or promoted homosexuality sprang up as a slander against Nazi leaders by their socialist opponents in the 1930s. Only one of the half-dozen leaders in Hitler’s inner circle, Ernest Rohm, is believed by credible historians to have been gay.

The “gay Nazi” slander stuck, though, partly because German laws against homosexuals remained in place for a quarter of a century after World War II ended. That effectively silenced many homosexual victims of the Holocaust from telling their stories. A landmark survivor’s memoir, The Men With the Pink Triangle, began to break that silence in 1972.

There is no question that the Nazis saw homosexuality as one aspect of the “degeneracy” they were determined to extinguish. When it came to power in 1933, the Nazi Party moved quickly to strengthen Germany’s existing penalties against homosexuality. On Oct. 11, 1936, Hitler’s security chief, Heinrich Himmler, went further, announcing that homosexuality was to be “eliminated” in Germany, along with miscegenation between the races.

In 1942, the death penalty was instituted for homosexuality. Offenders in the German military were routinely shot. “That wasn’t a punishment,” Himmler explained, “but simply the extinguishing of abnormal life. It had to be got rid of, just as we pull out weeds, throw them on a heap, and burn them.”

Now, let me suggest something further. If (and I do mean “if”) there is any credible scholarship suggesting that Hitler had male lovers, while simultaneously including homosexuals among the groups that needed to be eradicated from the earth, then this is not a story Religious Right men like Bryan Fischer should want to be telling, because it wouldn’t reflect poorly on normal, well-adjusted LGBT people. It would reflect poorly on right-wing, closet cases like many of the men who are leaders of the Religious Right. Have you ever heard of George Rekers? His methods of eradicating homosexuality certainly aren’t to the level of Hitler, but that’s mostly because it’s hard to pull that kind of action off when you need to hire supple young male buttcheeks to lift your luggage. But he’s a shining example of a man who’s spent his life trying to eradicate in others the thing he hates most in himself.

If you’re interested in reading a long, detailed refutation of Lively’s and his co-writer Kevin Abrams’ work, click here. In that essay, the writer calls the historical revisionism, contortions, lies, and damned lies employed by Abrams and Lively “emotional and ignorant,” and she even details exactly where Abrams completely changed the words to his source text in order to keep his bigoted train of thought on track.

Toward the end of Bryan Fischer’s piece (it’s not worth quoting at length, because all he does is vomit back what Lively first vomited into his brain), there’s this curious line:

Even today in America, it is chic in some homosexual circles for individuals to wear replicas of Nazi Germany uniforms, complete with iron crosses, storm trooper outfits, military boots and even swastikas.

Raise your hand if you have any idea what the hell he’s talking about. Because I’m fairly familiar with most of the different sides of the LGBT community, and I have never seen anything resembling this. Unlike Bryan Fischer and Scott Lively, though, I only hang out with gays who are out of the closet, so it’s possible that Fischer and Lively have anti-semitic closeted gay friends that I don’t know about.

Anyway. Keep digging that hole, Bryan Fischer.

“Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming”

(h/t Pharyngula)

Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Murphy totally shoved it down everybody’s throats, and they didn’t even let the GOP establish a safeword first!

The amendment in the House passed 234-194, with five Republicans voting yea and at least 25 Democrats voting nay. Among the Republicans reportedly voting yea were Paul, Ros-Lehtinen, and Djou. Presumably the other two were Michele Bachmann and Steve King, as a joke. The other two were Cao and Biggert.

The repeal compromise, of course, passed out of the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier today by a vote of 16-12. Jim Webb, the only Democrat to vote against it, is apparently quite a moron. Susan Collins, however, crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats, proving that she has a shred of a soul left. It will now go to the full Senate.

To celebrate this next step in the repeal of the bigoted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, a repeal supported by almost eight out of every ten Americans, I’ve posted this video of Louie Gohmert and other poorly educated bigots in the Republican party weeping and wailing on the House floor about how scared they are of gay dudes, so that you may fix a drink and sip it while you laugh.

(h/t John Aravosis)

The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) has dumped George “rent boy” Rekers from its “Pediatric Psychosocial Development Committee”. Until now, the organization was one of the few anti-gay groups to stick by the disgraced charlatan.

This is an important development because The American College of Pediatricians recently launched an anti-gay website, Facts About Youth, that was bereft of basic truth and objective reality. The ACP also sent letters promoting their propaganda to more than 10,000 school superintendents across America. According to a ACP press release:

The College reminds school superintendents that it is not uncommon for adolescents to experience transient confusion about their sexual orientation and that most students will ultimately adopt a heterosexual orientation if not otherwise encouraged.

For this reason, schools should not seek to develop policy which “affirms” or encourages these non-heterosexual attractions among students who may merely be experimenting or experiencing temporary sexual confusion. Such premature labeling can lead some adolescents to engage in homosexual behaviors that carry serious physical and mental health risks.

For the unacquainted, the ACP is a small, mostly southern anti-gay advocacy group consisting of notorious activists and angry doctors who have an axe to grind with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). They are upset because the group has a pro-gay (and scientific) stance that claims:

Therapy directed specifically at changing sexual orientation is contraindicated, since it can provoke guilt and anxiety while having little or no potential for achieving changes in orientation.

In contrast to the small and controversial ACP, the AAP has 60,000 members who conduct genuine studies that are subject to peer review. The average person, however, may not know the difference between the two groups. This transparent form of identity theft is the likely intention of the ACP, which hopes to confuse people in order to siphon off the credibility of the real pediatric group.

The ACP’ new anti-gay website essentially replaces facts with quacks. It is packed with members of the discredited reparative therapy organization, The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).

This organization pushes the canard that all gay men have distant fathers and making friends with straight men can turn one heterosexual. NARTH encourages male clients to become more masculine by drinking Gatorade and calling friends “dude”.

Remarkably, former NARTH officer Arthur Abba Goldberg sits on the ACP’ Pediatric Psychosocial Development Committee. In late February, Truth Wins Out and South Florida Gay News revealed that Goldberg was a disbarred Wall Street con-artist who served hard time in prison for massive bond fraud. His presence as a putative “expert” on the Facts About Youth site is all you need to know about the group’ “integrity.”

One researcher has already spoken out against the site, claiming the ACP’ work is shoddy and that his study had been misapplied. In a blistering letter to the American College of Pediatricians, University of Minnesota researcher, Dr. Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H., (pictured) wrote:

Knowingly misrepresenting research findings for material or personal gain is a flagrant violation of this code of conduct. Implicating me in this chicanery is doubly damaging to my professional reputation and career by holding me accountable for misstatements and by associating me with a cause that most ethical Pediatricians will recognize as misguided and hurtful to an entire class of children and families.

The Minnesota City Pages has an article about Ramafedi’s tremendous efforts and courage to stop habitual right wing distortions of his work. The researcher is so frustrated by the dishonest tactics from groups such as the ACP, that he has contemplated lawsuits.

“I’ve considered litigation,” he says. “It was libelous. On a personal level, when I’m dead and buried, I don’t want my work to be associated with these types of organizations and ideas.”

More on this issue from Dr. Warren Throckmorton, who continues to do superb work holding members of NARTH and the ACP accountable for their actions.

Remember how Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association went on the radio the other day and told the story of Phinehas, who found favor with God (quote unquote) by murdering two people he found engaging in some sort of sexual intercourse that was not Phinehas-approved, and then encouraged his listeners so that each one of them could “be a Phinehas” in our modern world?

Well, surprise, it’s the Bryan Fischer game, where he says something awful, honest people report exactly what he said and their implications, and then he claims we’re “smearing him.” No, no, no, he says, I didn’t mean to kill people! I just meant be like Phinehas, who found favor with God by impaling people, but don’t really impale them, just be like Phinehas, who again, impaled people, blargh blargh blargh.

Kyle has covered Fischer’s latest jack-assery in full, so I have nothing to add.