Vicki Nantz and her partner, Mary Meeks, shot this wonderful video at our press conference yesterday – where we spoke out against Focus on the Family’s “ex-gay” Love Won Out road show. The two women also filmed a documentary about Ryan Skipper, a man who was murdered in Florida because of his sexual orientation.

We have commented many times on the atrocious human-rights record of the global ex-gay network Exodus Global Alliance: It supports imprisonment of homosexual persons in Barbados and refuses to condemn documented antigay violence from the Caribbean and Latin America to Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. In Ecuador, as previously noted, the Exodus alliance co-exists with ex-gay torture and incarceration centers without voicing so much as a hint of opposition.

That trend of silent support for violence continued this week with the apparent murder on May 26 of Bahamian musician and AIDS activist Wellington Adderley. Exodus’ response was to show callous and immoral disregard for the latest murder of a gay humanitarian leader.

The Exodus alliance met earlier this month in Toronto. It said not one public word about global antigay violence; instead, Exodus implied that the solution to any gay problem is for gay people to stop being gay.

The Exodus Global Alliance views violence and imprisonment as useful methods of coercion to force gay people around the world to submit to its missions’ quackery, its false piety, and its brutal distortions of Christian faith.

Daniel D’Orsi, 22, is yet another victim of violent assault apparently motivated, in part, by the perpetrator’s hatred of people perceived to be gay.

According to Bay Windows, D’Orsi was robbed and attacked May 6 while the alleged perpetrator yelled anti-gay slurs. Police say the suspect may have tried to attack a woman in the same neighborhood about a week earlier — and therefore, police reason, the attack on D’Orsi was not a hate crime. Bay Windows does not indicate whether the woman might have been perceived to be lesbian.

Eleven days later, on May 15, three men assaulted a 23-year-old Sacramento gay man just hours after the California Supreme Court ruling on marriage rights for gay Californians.

According to the San Jose Mercury News:

A 23-year-old Sacramento man was sitting with another man in a car near the station’s restroom when the three suspects asked if he was a homosexual, Sacramento Police Officer Michelle Lazark said. The man said he was. When he got out of the car, the three men beat and kicked him, Lazark said. He did not require medical treatment. It was not immediately clear if the suspects were reacting to the court’s ruling, Lazark said. ‘It’s a gay-bashing. Gay slurs were used before they commenced to beating him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if these guys were looking for someone or are just ignorant.’ … The victim of the Sacramento beating, who police would not name, identified his attackers, who were arrested near the gas station. Their cases are being reviewed by Sacramento County prosecutors, spokeswoman Tanisha Worthy said.”

How have ex-gays responded?

While refusing to acknowledge the ongoing wave of antigay violence, Exodus executive vice president repeated his claim May 16 that so-called hate crimes represent “freedom of conscience and religious liberty,” and that Exodus opposes laws that limit supposed speech — even, apparently, if that “speech” occurs (in Boston) in the form of a kick to the face, a broken cheekbone, and reconstructive surgery.

A 21-year-old Indiana student and four friends were physically attacked May 9 in the latest apparent antigay hate crime to be ignored by ex-gay activists.

Last month, in a declaration that antigay violence is a non-issue, Exodus and Focus on the Family voiced opposition to a national Day of Silence which commemorates antigay violence and seeks to establish specific school policies to reduce violence and harassment. Pro-exgay pundit Warren Throckmorton sought to compete with the Day of Silence through a Golden Rule initiative, while Exodus featured speaker Ken Hutcherson organized a antigay protest purposely intended to disrupt public-school classes at a school in Washington state where the Day of Silence was being observed by some students. Exodus and Focus supported a so-called Day of Truth three days later. The DOT was a national religious-right campaign that sought to:

• oppose school programs that offer specific measures to reduce antigay violence
• vent antigay religious judgmentalism and sexual insults against gay and gay-tolerant students while they are at school trying to learn

Since the February killings of California gay student Lawrence King and Florida gay youth Simmie Williams, reports of antigay assaults and killings stretching from Tennessee to Illinois to New Jersey and elsewhere have been met by the ex-gay movement with ongoing silence and a refusal to act — except to silence survivors and hold rallies for bullies.