Activists Step Up Campaign Against Award to “America’s #1 Hater of Gays”

CHICAGO — The November 8th visit of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson to this city is being met with a wave of revulsion from a who’s who of local gay organizations and activists, with the three main LGBT papers in the city running full-page signature ads against Dobson in this week’s editions.

The Chicago Free Press, Windy City Times and Gay Chicago each have ads denouncing Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communications for honoring Dobson with an award on November 8th. The signatories encourage the LGBT community and its allies to protest at 5:30 PM that night in front of the building where the award will be given, the Chicago Renaissance Hotel, 1 W. Wacker Drive, Chicago.

“It is unconscionable that any public institution would honor someone who has devoted his life to denying a whole section of the community legal equality, and promotes slanders against that community,” said Bob Schwartz of the Gay Liberation Network, which along with TruthWinsOut.com, are the principal organizers of the protest. “Someone who does that is a hater, pure and simple, no matter how much they try to excuse their pro-discrimination rhetoric with so-called ‘Christian’ rationalizations.”

A pdf of the ads can be found HERE

For more information about the ads, call the Gay Liberation Network (www.GayLiberation.net) at 773.209.1187 More information can also be found at www.DumpDobson.com and www.TruthWinsOut.com

It has been 10 years since Matthew Shepard was savagely murdered. Shepard was the University of Wyoming student who was brutally beaten and left to die on a fence in a frozen Wyoming field – simply because he was gay. Truth Wins Out Executive Director Wayne Besen was the featured speaker at a memorial rally in Chicago hosted by the Gay Liberation Network. The march drew an estimated 400 people and it was covered by the local NBC and ABC television stations.

“This senseless violence does not happen in a vaccum,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “There is a multi-million dollar anti-gay industry that dehumanizes us every day. They pump millions of dollars into making GLBT people appear to be moral monsters and then act surprised when hate crimes occur. We marched to speak out against this poisonous rhetoric that has harmed so many families.”

Besen amd GLN’s Andy Thayer were also on the popular “Feast of Fools” podcast to discuss the march.