On January 25, I accused the “ex-gay” organization Exodus International of endemic sloth.

With an alleged one-million dollar budget and 13 staff members, Exodus had essentially gone into hibernation. It had not updated its tired website since Nov. 16, 2009. The only peep from the organization comes from periodic posting on the group’s vanity blog by Vice President Randy Thomas.

I guess my criticism lit a fire under President Alan Chambers’ derriere. On January 26, one day after my charges were leveled, he cleared the cobwebs and took a break from praying away his gay to update Exodus’ site.

A new work ethic had been born!!

Well, not exactly.

Since January 26, Exodus has not bothered to update its site. That’s right, we are nine days into February and Exodus is peddling old news, just like it hawks outdated ideas. Likewise, the group’s Exodus Youth site has not been updated since Dec. 1, 2009. The Exodus Church Association site hasn’t changed since August 2009.

While the group’s slogan is “Freedom is Possible”, apparently hard work is another story.

Finally, why is Exodus still not promoting San Diego’s March 6, “Love Won Out” conference on its main site’s front page? They supposedly bought the “ex-gay” road show from Focus on the Family last year. San Diego is its first foray without Focus – yet there has barely been a word of promotion.

In one year’s time, Exodus’ online properties have gone from robust to just plain bust. It is worth considering that the worldwide economic meltdown has affected Exodus more than it’s activist leaders are letting on. It is implausible that the group is still fully staffed and functional, yet unable to carry out the basic online functions it succeeded at only one year ago.

What is really going on at Exodus, Mr. Chambers?

We knew that, after unceremoniously being stripped of your designation as an SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group last year, you would take that as a signal that you simply hadn’t been applying yourself.  Well, Laurie Higgins, you got that message, didn’t you, and you put in the necessary hours of abject, irrational hatred in order to retake your place on the roster of extremist hate groups. Brava, Laurie!  You are now again officially recognized as the bona fide hate queen you always were in your heart, and have taken back your rightful place in the hallowed halls of organizations which are dangerous to the fabric of this great country!  Now, go take your seat next to the Ku Klux Klan.  They’ve missed you!

(h/t Jeremy)

The complete text of the 2009 Uganda antigay genocide legislation.

(Read More)

Some bloggers are repeating a rumor to the effect that Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill exposes family members and friends of LGBT Ugandans to the death penalty.

Not true.

The death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” is defined in Part II of the legislation to include “serial offender,” but the offense in this context is defined narrowly as “homosexuality” and not related offenses. Related offenses and their penalties are addressed in Part III of the legislation.

Part III, Section 14, states:

Failure to disclose the offence.

A person in authority, who being aware of the commission of any offence under this Act, omits to report the offence to the relevant authorities within twenty-four hours of having first had that knowledge, commits an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding two hundred and fifty currency points or imprisonment not exceeding three years.

In other words, the bill punishes the pastors, families, and friends of LGBT people to 3 years in prison for failing to report a loved one to police for life imprisonment or execution.

Clause 13 of the legislation punishes, with a sentence of at least 5 years, any speech by friends, families, pastors, medical and academic professionals, media, or politicians which might be perceived as less than all-out condemnation of homosexuality, or which might be perceived by ideologues as assisting LGBT people by educating them about disease prevention — activities which are vaguely described as “related activities,” “related practices,” and “promoting homosexuality.”

Jesse Taylor of Pandagon asks it succinctly:

[I]f the anti-choice position is so true, so mainstream and so critical to the future of our nation, why did Focus on the Family spend $2.5 million to avoid saying anything whatsoever about it?  Pam Tebow’s lines were all oblique references to her choice not to have an abortion, but if FotF felt the need to couch her story in such coded and oblique terms that it could have been an ad for Wii Family, doesn’t that say something incredibly telling about how weak and radical their position actually is?

Yep.  They had to water it down to make it palatable, in the hopes that they would simply look like an organization that “embraces life,” much as one might embrace puppies and flowers!

I also believe that they intended to make the ad lame and benign in order to score a cheap point against those of us who were raising very real concerns about their true message.  (Look at dem mean abortionists!  All I see is a big miracle baby tacklin’ his mama!)  Women like Pam Tebow wouldn’t be heroes in any sense if it weren’t for Roe v. Wade.  Those of us on the pro-choice side of things are the ones who actually support women like Pam Tebow, because we want them to be able to make these choices for themselves, with their doctors.  If her story is true (which is in question) and she made a conscious choice to tough it out and things turned out well, then we’re happy for her!  But the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t always turn out that way, and pro-choicers believe that women should be able to weigh the pros and cons of their own individual circumstances and decide what’s best.  And yes, sometimes a safe termination of a pregnancy is the best option.  Sometimes it’s not.  The point is that it’s not up to the men who run Focus on the damn Family!

Sheesh.

If you missed the ad (you didn’t miss much), here it is.

Harold Ford Jr., a former Tennessee congressman and MSNBC commentator rejected the “ex-gay” myth in Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column:

On his embrace of gay marriage, he observed: “There were pastors in my Tennessee district who said you can minister to someone and change their sexual orientation. I just never accepted that. I’m a heterosexual. I don’t know what anyone can say to me to make me sexually be with a man.”

Ford is considering a primary challenge against Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY). While representing Tennessee, Ford had clashed with the LGBT community on several occasions. According to the Gay City News:

While his two votes backing an amendment to the US Constitution that defined marriage as “only the union of a man and a woman” and effectively barred any state or federal constitutional claim to marriage for same-sex couples might be enough to cost him gay support, earlier votes cast by Harold Ford in the House may further alienate gay and lesbian voters.

Since moving to New York, Ford has changed his stance on marriage equality. Some would call this a cynical move (same for Gillibrand who grew more liberal when she left her conservative New York district to become a U.S. Senator). Still, it was nice to hear Ford explicitly reject the false premise that people can pray away the gay.

(via Joe.My.God)

For more on the public stand Scott has taken for gay equality, click this clicky.

You see, behind every obnoxious book is a secret gay author!

Dianetics?  Richard Simmons.

Atlas Shrugged?  J. Edgar Hoover.

Twilight?  That would be Bruce Vilanch.

Jewel’s book of poetry?  Wanda Sykes!

This is the world according to gay-obsessed Scott Lively, who’s most known around these parts as the man who went to Uganda and told an audience there, among other grotesque and dishonest things, that gays were responsible for the genocide in Rwanda, essentially handing David Bahati one of the proverbial guns he needed to get the genocide going.  Now he’s popped up again, e-mailing a blogger named Benzion Chinn, who had been writing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to let him know that there’s a theory out there that maybe it was written by George Bernard Shaw!  Here’s Lively’s e-mail:

At the Library of Congress is an obscure book by Samuel Igra which makes the case that “The Protocols…Zion” was actually written by George Bernard Shaw. I don’t remember the title, but I read a portion in DC when I was researching another book by Igra and I remember thinking at the time that his case seemed quite plausible, though I don’t remember the details now.

It is common knowledge that Shaw was a close friend of the homosexual poet Bruce Douglas, the “translator” of the Protocols.
Regards,

Dr. Scott Lively

He’s just sayin’!  Here’s a thought, you know, maybe it was written by one of my super-homosexual boogeymen!

Chinn, of course, handily disposed of this notion after doing a bit of research on Lively’s obsession with blaming gay people for every evil that’s ever befallen the world:

Samuel Igra, Lively’s source, seems to have been one of the main originators of this Nazism and homosexuality link with his 1945 book, Germany’s National Vice. According to Igra, Hitler was a homosexual prostitute in Vienna and then in Munich from 1907-1914. (See Gregory Woods A History of Gay Literature: the Male Tradition pg. 251-53.) Obviously there were Nazis who were homosexual. The most famous example is Ernst Rohm of the SD. While an early member of the party, Rohm was killed off in the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934. Considering the very real persecution of homosexuals under the Nazi regime, saying that Nazism was a homosexual movement (as opposed to individual Nazis being homosexual) strikes me as the height of perversity.

Bruce Douglas was the young lover of Oscar Wilde’s, whose father got into a libel suit with Wilde, which eventually brought about the downfall of Wilde in English society. Douglas did do one of the first English translations of the Protocols in 1919, nearly twenty years after it was first written. The Protocols came out of Russia, and while it was plagiarized from many sources, including one French anti-Semitic tract, it is clearly a product of reactionary Russian circles. Personally I find the idea that George Bernard Shaw would have written the Protocols to be offensive. I would have no problem accepting Shaw as an anti-Semite along the lines of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But to think that Shaw would have written such a piece of garbage as the Protocols, boggles the mind. If Shaw had wanted to write a book about Jews plotting to rule the world, this book would have been a model of wit and would have me convinced to become an Elder.

Heh.  And what is Chinn’s expertise?  Oh, just Jewish History.  In other words, Chinn sort of knows what he’s talking about.

So anyway, that happened.

But wait, there’s more!  Lively got a bur in his britches over Chinn reprinting the e-mail on his blog and sent another e-mail, wherein he called the (conservative!) Jewish History teacher an anti-Semite!  Really.  No, seriously, really. You cannot make this stuff up:

Dear Mr. Chinn,

I offered privately what I thought would be a helpful research tip regarding a source you were not likely to have discovered, not a personal conviction to be publicly ridiculed. It was a friendly gesture to a stranger. Your incivility is unbecoming a man of letters.

If anti-Semitism is the dehumanization of people because of their beliefs and values, I’m sorry to say you have become your own case-in-point.

It’s very strange, though, that Lively would be bothered by this.  He has, after all, made a career based on just cold making things up about gay people in order to make us look like murderous maniacs, pedophiles and what-have-you.  This fits right in with his pattern.

You really should go read Chinn’s entire response to this.  It’s fair to say that there are things in there that, in another situation, I would disagree with fervently.  Bear in mind that this is a conversation between a conservative religious person and an irrational, insane,and most importantly, malevolent homophobe.  I’m willing to grant that there is a difference.  But Chinn seems like an honest broker.  Not so, Mr. Lively.

So anyway, there you have it.  If you’re interested, the discourse just keeps going and going…  Somewhere in the second link, Lively tries to defend his work in Uganda, but you know, we have the video, and it says otherwise.  As I said before, it’s a discourse between a conservative Jewish man who I could spend hours debating (but will not, because there comes a point when it’s boring) and the extremely disturbed, delusional homophobe Scott Lively.  So it gets a bit tiresome.

I think we’ve covered the parts of this that are important.

Left Behind series?  Ghostwritten by RuPaul, but I’m sure you figured that…

(h/t Wendy Leigh for tipping me off to this)

When Family Research Council spokesman Peter Sprigg told MSNBC on Tuesday that LGBT people should be thrown in prison for their alleged private behavior, it escaped the attention of the news media that Sprigg is also a board member and spokesman for an FRC offshoot called Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays, which distributes antigay propaganda in public schools.

Sprigg is also one of the few local citizens to serve on a citizens’ advisory board for Montgomery County Public Schools in Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs.

Just two days after Sprigg proudly declared that LGBT people of all ages should be imprisoned, the school district sent students home with PFOX brochures. The brochures tell students that if they are same-sex attracted, it is OK to be of two minds, to conceal one’s attractions from friends and family, to be dishonest, and proclaim one’s so-called heterosexuality. And while PFOX opposes any right to self-determination for persons who wish to be honest about their orientation, it doesn’t acknowledge this in the brochures; instead, PFOX portrays students who seek to be sexually honest and free from bullying as if they are oppressing those students wish to hide in shame and to bully or imprison others.

Neither the literature nor the school district tell students any of the following truths: (Read More)

An article in yesterday’s Washington Post reveals that, due to a ruling which requires schools to distribute materials from any non-profit organization, Regina Griggs has decided to abuse high school kids directly with fliers from PFOX: (Read More)