In a CitizenLink press release issued today, Focus on the Family misdefined and distorted the proportion of reported HIV infections in 2006 that were attributable to men who have sex with men.

Focus falsely equated men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) with “homosexuality” and then inflated the percentage of cases in 2006 that were attributable to these men. The Centers for Disease Control reported that 53 percent — barely half — of new HIV infections in 2006 were attributable to MSM. Focus on the Family inflated this statistic to “almost 60 percent” and falsely attributed this exaggeration to the CDC.

The category of MSM includes men who claim to be ex-gay while closeting their sex with men, as well as ostensibly heterosexual men living on the “down low,” and bisexual men. The category does not include homosexual men who are incidentally or purposely abstinent. Nor does the category distinguish between sexually active men whose practices put them at very low risk of infection, and men who place themselves at high risk.

Focus recklessly lumps all these categories of men under a “homosexuality” banner and implies that all are at equal risk due to the honesty of some regarding their orientation, and not due to very specific high-risk behaviors. (Read More)

Amid protests over Focus on the Family’s use of its TiVo affiliation to discriminate against gay fathers, TiVo has removed the page of its own website that promoted Focus on the Family’s affiliate relationship with TiVo.

The original page currently displays a Page Not Found error. Here’s the page as it appeared a few days ago.

Is the removal is temporary? Is TiVo re-evaluating Focus’s role in TiVo’s KidZone child-safety filter? Is TiVo rethinking its association with Focus’s campaign against gay fathers? These questions remain unanswered.

Hat tip: Good As You

Focus on the Family again equated same-sex-attracted and gender-variant persons with sexual predators this week, when it condemned the signing of a new Colorado law that guarantees restroom access to gay and gender-variant persons.

Focus on the Family — de facto headquarters of the ex-gay movement through its Love Won Out roadshow and its political and financial influence over Exodus International — declared:

Henceforth, every woman and little girl will have to fear that a predator, bisexual, cross-dresser or even a homosexual or heterosexual male might walk in and relieve himself in their presence.

Despite growing disenchantment among evangelicals and repudiation by a new generation of Christian young adults, the aging and morally corrupt leadership of Focus on the Family seems unwilling to free itself from obsession with toilets, ex-gay sex, and abortion. (Read More)

Family Law Attorney Don Schweitzer appeared on the O’Reilly Factor to oppose same-sex marriage. When pressed, he could not come up with a cogent or lucid reason why Californians should vote against granting gay people marriage equality. Watch the video to see how intellectually bankrupt our opponents truly are.

Also, opponents of same-sex unions were pondering a range of legal and legislative challenges to Gov. David A. Paterson’s new policy of having state agencies honor same-sex marriages that have been performed outside New York. However, such challenges are likely to fail and face an uphill fight, legal experts said.

Finally, the Los Angeles Times had an excellent editorial on this topic:

Surely the trailing edges of society will soon reflect on the resistance to this phenomenon with chagrin and more than a little embarrassment. It is bracing, after all, to realize how recently much of this nation blanched at interracial marriage, and thrilling to recognize how quickly most of us buried that prejudice, first in law, then in custom.

Focus on the Family — the Colorado Springs-based, $100-million-per-year hub of the U.S. antigay, ex-gay, and anti-family movement — lashed out this week at a Colorado bill that would ensure equal access to state public accommodations by gay, bisexual, and transgender Coloradans. The legislation specifically exempts places of worship.

Instead of informing its readers and radio listeners of the legislation’s actual wording and purpose, and its protection of the religious freedom of all, Focus opted to lie — calling the legislation a bill of rights for “sexual predators … in any public bathroom they come across.”

“SB 200 threatens public safety and tramples religious freedoms,” [Bruce Hausknecht, Focus “judicial” activist] said. “This bill needs to be vetoed and sent back to the Legislature with instructions to come back next session with something that all Coloradans can be proud of.”

Neither Exodus International nor any other ex-gay activist has yet to object to Focus’ attack on the right of gay and transgender people to go to the bathroom. Nor have they objected to Focus’ effort to undermine the religious freedom of any Coloradan whose religious beliefs dictate that society at large must treat gay or gender-variant neighbors and taxpayers with equality and respect.

At the University of Toledo in Ohio, administrators apparently made the mistake of hiring a bigot to administer university hiring policies which forbid discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation.

In an April 18 article in the Toledo Free Press, Crystal Davis Dixon, associate vice president for human resources for the university, declared her support for discrimination on all three counts:

• she was willing to enforce her own antigay religious views upon university employees and students possessing less-homophobic, more-genuine religious beliefs,
• despite university hiring policies to the contrary, she denied that gay people have civil rights or that discrimination victimizes them, and
• she implicitly denigrated gay African-Americans.

Dixon also denied the natural existence of intersexed and gender-variant people who might apply for jobs at the university — and threatened God’s wrath against such people:

She concluded: “My final and most important point. There is a divine order. God created human kind male and female (Genesis 1:27). God created humans with an inalienable right to choose. There are consequences for each of our choices, including those who violate God’s divine order.

Dixon was fired for flouting the policies that she was hired to enforce, and religious-right media have been in an uproar ever since — accusing the university of discriminating racially and religiously against Dixon because it would not permit her to deny religious freedom to others, nor to arbitrarily violate campus hiring and employment policies with impunity.

Two ex-gay activists have now leapt to Dixon’ defense with a bizarre assertion that antigay African-Americans somehow enjoy a special racial and religious right to discriminate against others on the basis of victims’ religion and sexual orientation, whatever local laws and employer hiring policies may say to the contrary.

(Read More)

At least two antifamily, pro-harassment organizations — Mission: America and the American “Family” Association — continued to lobby antigay parents today to shield their teen-agers from anti-bullying messages by keeping them home from school on April 25, which has been designated an annual Day of Silence by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network.

The Day of Silence commemorates GLBT youths who were victims of school violence and murder, by reminding classmates that violence and harassment silence GLBT youths and their families.

The boycott against freedom of speech and nonviolence in schools is co-sponsored by the ex-gay Abiding Truth Ministries, American Family Association, Americans for Truth, Concerned Women for America, Exodus Mandate, Illinois Family Institute, Indiana Voice for the Family, Liberty Counsel, Mass Resistance, Mission: America, Parents’ Rights Coalition, the ex-gay Stephen Bennett Ministries, and Exodus conference speaker Ken Hutcherson’s pro-violence group Watchmen on the Walls.

In inland California, anti-tolerance organizations hope the boycott will prove financially costly to public schools and taxpayers, as school funding is said to be determined in part by attendance. A pro-discrimination group, Capitol Research Institute, has organized a counter-event euphemistically called a “Day of Learning” for antigay parents and students that participate in the pro-harassment boycott. What exactly will participants “learn”? According to The Press-Enterprise, they will learn how to gather signatures “to repeal a state law that prevents discrimination in schools based on sexual orientation.” Meanwhile, the antigay Alliance Defense Fund has declared April 28 to be an annual day when antigay students verbally harangue gay classmates with defamatory, egotistical, and hypocritical religious messages.

GLSEN has released the following ad featuring Lance Bass to counter pro-harassment, pro-silence propaganda that is being fed to students by antigay political organizations:

Meanwhile, pro-exgay pundit Warren Throckmorton continues his campaign against the anti-bullying day. Throckmorton’s proposal creates an artificial division between the Golden Rule and explicit opposition to antigay violence and harassment. Throckmorton may view his own campaign to supply students with misinformation as a lesser evil than that of the boycotters. But, in pandering to the worst elements of the pseudo-Christian religious right, Throckmorton trivializes both Christian values and the growing problem of antigay violence and harassment in schools.

Focus science coverup: While acknowledging his role in cultural warfare, Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family declines to acknowledge that his employer covered up numerous false claims in a widely distributed and uncorrected press release about the alleged anthropology of marriage. Instead, he admits that publication of the release was premature, but he offers no retraction. Stanton has agreed to dialogue with an anthropologist on a watchdog blog, safely out of view of Focus’ subscribers and media contacts.

Investor activism: With the help of other religious conservatives, Exodus conference speaker Ken Hutcherson has launched a religious-right investor activist group to steer companies toward policies that discriminate against their workers who happen to be same-sex-attracted, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. visited Exodus speaker Ken Hutcherson at his Seattle-area megachurch recently and today offered observations about Hutcherson’s betrayal of his own victory over discrimination — and Hutcherson’s exploitation of “ex-gays”. (Read More)