Concern is rising about violent antigay mob violence in Jamaica — violence that has been supported by some of the island nation’s antigay Christian pastors.

As a result of authorities’ and churches’ refusal to take action against the violence, the gay-affirming Metropolitan Community Church has called for a possible tourism boycott against that island nation.

While claiming to offer compassion and a cure for homosexuality, Exodus Global Alliance — a worldwide network of ex-gay activists — has offered no public condemnation of the violence.

Indeed, the organization appears to support criminalization of homosexuality in the region.

Consider the following Exodus Global Alliance flier for a 2006 conference in Barbados — click the banner to view the full flier.

The Exodus-Project Probe slogan, “Some say decriminalise homosexuality …… we say lets offer solutions” (sic), markets fraudulent ex-gay therapy as an alternative to decriminalization.

Throughout recent media coverage of violence in Jamaica, Exodus Global Alliance has declined to announce an unambiguous public policy opposing antigay violence or reversing its nod to criminalization.

This should not be a tremendous surprise: The organization’s newsletters claim, in country after country, that “sexual freedom” is unilaterally harmful and must be stamped out in places as far-flung as Barbados, Brazil, China and Ethiopia — where Exodus blames sexual freedom for AIDS.

Exodus Global Alliance apparently believes that, even with proper education, people cannot be trusted to manage their own lives — that they need the harsh hand of authoritarian law to control their sexuality. And when Exodus responds to mob violence with silence, it joins Jamaica’s local police in offering a cold shoulder to gay people as mobs bash gay residents and loot their homes.

• Portland Fellowship, an Exodus affiliate program in Portland, Oregon, has launched a web site to recruit churches to the ex-gay cause. Supporters are asked to pick a church, write a recruitment letter, and send $25 per church. The $25 apparently buys each church an ex-gay CD-ROM and a Starbucks $5 gift card. One critic noted that Starbucks is among the top gay-inclusive companies, according to Human Rights Campaign. Obvious question: Were the cards purchased by the Fellowship or donated by Starbucks?
• Randall Harp is a supporter of the antihomosexual agenda — that is, an agenda that opposes the supposed gay agenda (whatever that is). Harp attempts to separate gay people from their agenda their freedom by appealing to fear and strawman arguments.
• A middle-aged British woman asks whether she has become ex-straight.
• Box Turtle Bulletin fact-checks ex-gay propaganda that was provided by Exodus and NARTH (a reparative-therapy advocacy group) and recently marketed to the American Fork High School PTSA in Utah.
• Beyond Ex-Gay, a support group for survivors of ex-gay programs, celebrates its first anniversary. Congratulations!

Addendum: Portland Fellowship confirmed to TWO that Starbucks gift cards are purchased with the $25-per-church contribution. Starbucks was chosen for its availability.

At its “Freedom Conference” this weekend in Fresno, California, Exodus XScape sold freedom (from sexuality) to the under-25 set as a solution for homosexuality.

According to The Fresno Bee, a dozen protesters held a vigil outside, organized by a local church. The vigilers included a former ex-gay who said that, contrary to claims by Exodus president Alan Chambers, ex-gays generally do not go on to have healthy heterosexual relationships. (Read More)

Humbled Infidel has the complete speech by ex-gay activist Stephen Black at a pro-bigotry rally held April 2 on behalf of Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern.

Black is the executive director of First Stone Ministries, an Oklahoma-based Exodus member “ministry.”

A point-by-point analysis of Black’s speech finds appeals to conformity, false and unsourced statistics, and sweeping dehumanization of sexual strugglers. Instead of healing strugglers and reuniting families, Black’s rhetoric divides families and alienates Americans whom he has falsely maligned.

(Read More)

PFOX — Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays — was co-founded by ex-gay activist Anthony Falzarano and the Family Research Council in 1996. When Falzarano complained in 1999 that the ex-gay movement was being exploited and underfunded by religious conservatives, he was ousted and replaced by antigay parents of adult gay individuals. Contrary to the organization’s name, few PFOX members appear to have ex-gay relatives.

Today the Virginia-based organization is led by executive director Regina Griggs, whose son is openly gay. Its board includes antigay federal civil rights attorney Estella Salvatierra, who spends various weekends at Northern Virginia public fairs, inciting arguments with bewildered passers-by. With the help of FRC’s Peter Sprigg, PFOX has fought against popular efforts by parents in Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs to establish factual and comprehensive sex-ed programs and to reduce discrimination against gender-variant Marylanders.

In a racially charged rant that was distributed April 1 via PFOX’s online discussion board and official e-mail address, PFOX’s unidentified site administrator parrots an article which ignores established wisdom about gender identity disorder. Specifically, the article fails to make important distinctions among transsexuality, transvestism, biologically or genetically intersexed individuals, and other transgender conditions.

Instead, PFOX’s article reprint lumps a variety of different biological and psychological gender variances together — and then ridicules them all with the unexplained rationale that taxpayers who experience gender variance, for biological or psychological reasons, should not be granted the same access to public facilities that is granted to persons of color or other taxpaying demographics. (Read More)

Prof. Warren Throckmorton, a prominent pro-exgay pundit, has proposed an antigay Golden Rule campaign to compete with local antiviolence advocates’ Day of Silence in various U.S. schools, scheduled for April 25. The ex-gay network Exodus subsequently provided marketing support for the campaign this week through its Exodus Youth “Voice” newsletter.

In the National Day of Silence, students pledge to remain silent for a day at school. Some may carry a card briefly calling upon classmates to actively oppose antigay bullying and thus end the silence.

Antigay industry leaders including the American Family Association have rallied antigay parents to keep their students home from school, in defense of gay-specific intolerance and in opposition to antiviolence programs which explicitly recognize gay and gender-variant victims of violence.

Throckmorton proposes what he considers a fine line that navigates between antiviolence advocates and paranoid parents. Specifically, he advises conservative Christian students to pass out cards in school that quote the Bible:

I pledge to treat others the way I want to be treated.

Will you join me in this pledge?

“Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31)

But a serious analysis of Throckmorton’s campaign finds little substance: It trivializes the Golden Rule while doing nothing to stop bullying: (Read More)

Against freedom: An antigay Catholic group is upset that many Catholic universities permit freedom of speech and freedom of association among their gay-tolerant students and faculty. Styling itself as “The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property,” the group claims that, out of 211 U.S. Catholic universities and colleges, at least 96 have pro-tolerance clubs on campus. Patrick Reilly of the Cardinal Newman Society equates tolerance of homosexual persons and their constitutional rights with promotion of homosexual activity, and he insinuates that sexual honesty is incompatible with “students’ moral formation.” Focus on the Family appears sympathetic to both Catholic antigay groups. (Focus)

Freedom from crime a “special right”: In its ongoing war against young victims of violence, the antigay American Family Association of Michigan has targeted state Sen. Valde Garcia, a Republican, for his support of legislation to protect students from bullying. Gary Glenn of AFA/M asserts that protection from bullying amounts to “special rights” if youths’ specific at-risk demographics are acknowledged. But Garcia says he had already threatened to withdraw his sponsorship of the legislation unless a list of protected demographics was removed. However, Garcia then contradicted himself — admitting he would hypothetically support legislation granting explicit anti-crime protections if they were limited to seniors, children and police. According to Sean Kosofsky of The Triangle Foundation, “If it’s not specific, it [anti-bullying legislation] will end up having little impact.” Kosofsky added, “There’s nothing gay about this bill whatsoever. It protects all students.” (Daily Press & Argus)

Gay genetics study: ABC News oversimplifies research into ties between genetics and homosexuality by falsely suggesting up-front that researchers seek a single gene that might explain sexual orientation. That’s not the case. According to the fine print in ABC’s own news story, the hypothesis is more complex:

Dr. Alan Sanders, a psychiatric geneticist at Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute, is currently heading the biggest study ever undertaken on sexual orientation. He’s looking at the genetic makeup of more than 700 sets of gay brothers.

“I think the evidence is pretty convincing already that a substantial contribution to sexual orientation comes from genetics,” he said. “It’s probably the single biggest factor that we know about.”

FRC apologizes: Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council apologizes for suggesting that America export its gay citizens in lieu of granting legal immigration to their foreign partners. (FRC Blog)

Kern meets with PFLAG: Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern still says equality for gay people is a bigger threat to America than terrorists — and further calls her opinion “Biblical.” But she has also met with members of the Oklahoma City chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and stated that she opposes discrimination against gays in the workplace. That should infuriate Concerned Women for America, which defended Kern’s terror talk as something that “reasonable people can debate.” Earlier, Kern debated a gay Christian pastor on KFOR-TV. (Queerty, PageOneQ, Good As You)

In the United States, the leaders of Exodus International and Focus on the Family strive to make life dangerous for gay and bisexual Americans and their families by:

• associating equitable punishment for violent antigay hate crimes with “thought crime“
• distributing antigay literature in public schools and opposing anti-bullying programs
• opposing inclusion of sexual orientation in existing antidiscrimination laws, which already include religion as a protected category and exempt religious groups from compliance
• blaming innocent parents for their child’s sexual orientation
• promoting pro-violence activists such as Ken Hutcherson, an Exodus conference speaker who demands that employers discriminate and affirms violence against gay men and “effeminate” heterosexual men in the United States and Eastern Europe

The goal of these activities, as Exodus president Alan Chambers has acknowledged, is to compel same-sex-attracted persons to change, in defiance of biology, psychology, and sound moral conscience. Chambers admitted in 2004:

Had same-sex marriage been legal in 1990 I am certain that I would have tested that option. I met men whom I wanted to “marry.” … The law kept me from making one, if not many, huge mistakes. And while honoring and preserving the sanctity of heterosexual marriage is the bedrock of my opposition to redefining marriage to suit a few, I believe a positive bi-product of keeping same-sex marriage illegal is that it will save tens of thousands of hurting young people like me from the biggest mistakes of their lives: looking to man to meet a need that only God can meet.

In Jamaica, according to Human Rights Watch and the New York Times, “pro-family” advocates go a few steps further to discourage homosexuality:

In addition to making homosexuality illegal, public officials, the media, and ministers have incited mobs to such a degree that, on Jan. 29, one mob invaded a house where five gay people who were having a dinner party, beat them senseless and apparently killed at least one man. Last year, a mob disrupted a gay man’s funeral and trashed the church. In 2004, according to Time magazine, a teenager was nearly killed when his father learned his son was gay and urged a mob to lynch the boy at his school. And when two of the island’s gay-rights advocates, Steve Harvey and Brian Williamson, were murdered, a crowd celebrated over Williamson’s disfigured body. Time recounts numerous other mob killings in recent years.

(Read More)

The Montgomery County (Maryland) Council is considering a new gender identity nondiscrimination bill, which has angered some people - a few which have gone off the deep end. It has also generated a batch of unpleasant letters to the Council. The websites Box Turtle Bulletin and Teach The Facts report that the following letter came from Gabriel Espinosa, the webmaster for Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays: (in 40-point type)

Bill 23-07

Allowing men who think they’re women into women’s bathrooms and locker rooms?

ARE YOU PEOPLE OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS?

Hopefully, it will be one of your daughters who gets raped first!

Sincerely Yours,
Gabriel Espinosa
President
Furryllama Media Productions

As we have pointed out, PFOX’s former president and cult member, Richard Cohen, was permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association. PFOX has recently drawn controversy for either faking or greatly exaggerating “hate crimes” against members who staffed a booth for the organization. The webmaster prior to the unhinged Espinosa was a violent individual who went by the name “Burning Black Triangle.” Clearly, PFOX is a nut magnet that attracts the bizarre and unstable. It is scary that they keep trying to foist their insanity onto the public schools. This letter is representative of PFOX - a vulgar group that is nearly devoid of content. Judging from this letter, PFOX is not Pro-Family, but profanity.