Two Facebook groups have been created by U.S. and Ugandan evangelicals to espouse antigay violence and promote legislation requiring the execution of Ugandan same-sex-attracted persons.

They are:

Speak Loud for Family: Support anti-homosexuality bill ‘09

We are Ugandans and we do not support Gay

Acting on behalf of the LGBT Ugandans who must already remain in hiding, and who face execution starting in January 2010, Facebook members who favor equality and human rights have — since last week — reported the groups, and individual members who espouse violence.

Thus far, Facebook has taken no action. Please continue to report these groups and individual members who espouse violence or execution. If no action is taken, please write to abuse@facebook.com.

George Oundo, the poster man for a campaign launched by U.S. ex-gay political leaders to promote vigilantism and arrest against same-sex-attracted persons in Uganda, has reportedly been expelled from his ex-gay organization due to sexual scandal.

Earlier this year, Oundo was a frontman for Martin Ssempa, a violently antigay African pastor who allegedly received substantial sums of money from U.S. global anti-AIDS programs begun under the Bush administration. Instead of combatting AIDS or promoting faith-based health assistance to Africans, Ssempa used the money to launch a string of violent antigay vigilante campaigns monitored by Human Rights Watch.

Hosted by Ssempa, Oundo and fellow ex-gay activists Stephen Langa and Paul Kagaba spent months accusing Uganda’s handful of native-born pro-equality advocates of conducting a massive Western youth-molestation conspiracy against the country. Unskeptical, antigay news media in Uganda lapped up the two ex-gay activists’ gossip and defamed not only gay Ugandans, but also the popular heterosexual Catholic priest Anthony Musaala, a rival to Ssempa. How did Kagaba know that Musaala was gay? Because, Kagaba said, Musaala “regularly holds parties for gays at his residence in Gayaza near Kampala.” Violence by antigay vigilantes, antigay arrests, and antigay hit lists ensued.

GayUganda said today that Oundo has been expelled from Ex-Gay Uganda:

According to Paul Kagaba, Ex-Gay Uganda Chairman, Oundo was taking boys to be ‘sodomised’ to his house. What I could have told Kagaba, and I have known for a few weeks, is that Oundo has been going around asking kuchus for ‘forgiveness’.

We await confirmation from other sources, and given Kagaba’s false accusations against gay Ugandans, his circular firing squad against Oundo must be viewed with some skepticism. However, it also seems quite feasible that Oundo was, all along, projecting his own alleged pedophilia onto innocent gay Ugandans, with the support of Martin Ssempa, U.S. taxpayer dollars, and Exodus International officials Alan Chambers and Don Schmierer.

As Truth Wins Out and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission have previously pointed out: Exodus board member Schmierer keynoted the vigilantes’ Kampala launch conference in March; Chambers approved of Schmierer’s trip beforehand, and applauded Schmierer’s speech afterward. Schmierer’s speech blamed parents and abuse for the formation of homosexual orientation. His co-speaker Scott Lively blamed homosexuals for the Nazi Holocaust and Rwandan genocide, while Ugandan ex-gay conference organizer Stephen Langa angrily complained that Uganda’s life-imprisonment sentence for homosexuality was far too lenient. A fourth speaker, U.S. ex-gay activist Caleb Lee Brundidge — a protege of former PFOX leader Richard Cohen — promoted magic rituals as a means of converting homosexual persons into heterosexuals.

A prominent board member of the “ex-gay” group Exodus International spoke at a conference in Uganda last week, where activists vowed to “wipe out” homosexuality through police action, forced re-education, life imprisonment, and vigilantism.

Exodus President Alan Chambers (pictured) enabled the hate by doing nothing to stop the conference. The following is a timeline of the call for human rights abuses that took place on Chambers’ watch.
(Read More)

One man carried a sign which proudly proclaimed:

“Dan White is A Hero For Killing a Queer”

Another sign stated that “Homosex Is Evil and Unnatural”

A church group emphatically stated that gay people were in control of banks and the media — the same argument that Hitler used against the Jews.

As the California State Supreme Court heard oral arguments from both sides regarding the Proposition 8 marriage ban this morning, the arguments on the streets of downtown San Francisco were loud and angry. Thankfully there was no violence, as the Far Right once again showed what it really stood for: hate and inequality.

One man turned to a male-to-female transgender person and proclaimed: “Why don’t you dress like a man?” The man, who claimed to be a Christian, stated that her clothing “affected me and my children personally.”

Another “gentleman” approached a family, proud parents who stood with and in support of their gay teenage son. “All your son cares about is getting d— up his a–.” The irate father was furious, and a police officer had to stand between them.

I’m sad to report that this was largely the kind of rhetoric that came from the Yes on 8 people when I went to San Francisco Civic Center today. There was so much hate in the air, the air reeked from it.

All the hate was coming from people who claim to be Christians. Fred Phelps and his followers were nowhere to be found — this was coming from others.

Make no mistake about it, friends. They hate us. They want to hurt us. Some of them want to kill us.

Regardless of how the court rules, it’s imperative that we come together as a unified community, standing tall and proud in support of each other.

Truth Wins Out (TWO) expressed its hope today that James Dobson resigning as chairman of Focus on the Family would eventually lead the anti-gay organization in a new direction. Dobson has created an entire industry that distorts the lives of gay and lesbian people for political gain, says TWO.

“James Dobson’s legacy of lies has caused significant pain for gay and lesbian people and their families,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “We hope his departure will eventually signal a shift in tone and end Focus on the Family’s destructive attacks against gay and lesbian Americans.”

The Associated Press reports that Dobson, 72, will still be a powerful presence. He will continue to host his daily radio show, which reaches 1.5 million listeners in the United States. A Focus on the family spokesman also said he will “continue to speak out as he always has – a private citizen and not a representative of the organization he founded.”

“It is time for Focus on the Family to abandon the politics of polarization and choose moderate leaders who are not fixated on culture wars,” said Besen. “This would also be a good time for the organization to consider abandoning its failed ‘ex-gay’ ministry, Love Won Out.”

In Nov. 2008, Truth Wins Out protested Dobson’s selection into the Radio Hall of Fame. In the past two years, TWO has found eight researchers in three countries who say that Dobson has distorted their work. Videos and letters that these scientists sent to Dobson can be viewed at www.Respectmyresearch.org.

Dobson’s rhetoric is so divisive that former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) said that, “Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies.” Focus on the Family co-founder Gil Alexander Moegerle said that, “I believe Dobson-style politics have been inept, simplistic, exclusionary, divisive and alarmingly sectarian…James Dobson’s political style has been one of relentlessly demonizing his adversaries.”

Dobson told The Daily Oklahoman on Oct. 23, 2004 that, “Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth.” Dobson also told the Daily Oklahoman that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is “a God’s people hater. I don’t know if he hates God, but he hates God’s people.”

Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that defends gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people against anti-gay misinformation campaigns. TWO also counters the “ex-gay” industry and educates America about gay life.

Emproph, of the Genocide for Jesus blog, has transcribed and critiqued the hate ad that was released by the anti-family “Family Policy Council of West Virginia.”

Emproph points out that the state network of religious-rightist family-policy groups offers resources for pastors — assembled by a senior executive for the Family Research Council — which promote a “Biblical” definition of marriage that tolerates and excuses the Bible’s support for marital incest, polygamy, and murder.

Even before the latest ad emerged, it seemed that the Family Policy Council, FRC, and SBC were vying to be included in the SPLC’s growing list of hate groups — organizations whose beliefs or practices attack or malign an entire class of people.

But in the context of this ad and its related resources for pastors, it seems that gays are not the only enemy of ‘Biblical’ marriage; so are married couples that oppose incest, polygamy, and murder.

Hate groups are defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as groups with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people.

According to a new study by the SPLC, U.S. hate groups have grown in number by 54 percent since 2000, and in 2008 alone they grew in number by 4 percent.

According to CNN:

Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who studied the issue of hate crimes, said people in hate groups can feel paranoid about a specific group of people. This panic leads them to feel threatened, and they may react with violence, he said.

Alternately, individuals in a hate group may sometimes transplant their own personal rage onto a particular group that has no real connection to the cause of that rage, he said.

“Their thinking is very distorted,” Poussaint said.

After the passage by antigay Californians of antifamily Proposition 8, peaceful rallies for gay equality and the freedom to marry were held in more than 300 U.S. cities.

Religious rightists ignored the peace, unfortunately, and looked for excuses to portray themselves as victims of those who lost the freedom to marry.

Antigay activists pointed to one incident (on video), in which protesters in San Francisco’s Castro district pushed antigay “Christians” out of the neighborhood, accompanied by a heavy police escort. Antigay activists’ complaint: Castro homosexuals are intolerant and inhospitable to peaceful Christian believers.

Ex-gay advocate Warren Throckmorton was among those who pandered to religious-right victimology and baselessly alluded to gay violence. (Throckmorton did, in fairness, acknowledge the hard feelings of those who unsuccessfully defended California’s freedom to marry from people like Throckmorton.

As facts emerge, however, the fairy tale of innocent Christians and intolerant gay people is being not only refuted but reversed.

Joe.My.God has discovered that some of the “Christians” were actually Christian Dominionists belonging to “Joel’s Army.” Joel’s Army — led by Focus on the Family rally organizer Lou Engle — advocates that gay Americans be stoned to death and teaches a religious mandate to violently overthrow the U.S. government and the nation’s non-fundamentalist places of worship. After executing, incarcerating, and silencing millions of supposed infidels and seizing the nation’s churches and temples, these hateful egotistical zealots would replace the Constitution and representative democracy with their own fundamentalist reinterpretation of the Bible.

Given that information, it appears that the Castro crowd was more than hospitable in its efforts to chase away provocateurs who have vowed to kill gay people if given an opportunity.

Hat tip: Box Turtle Bulletin

Sporting a fog machine for its smoke and mirrors routine and an extravagant stage that would make The Rolling Stones blush, the “ex-gay” group Exodus International held its glitzy annual conference in Asheville, North Carolina. I was in town all week to partner with regional and state organizations to oppose the meeting and its dizzying array of distortions.

A dark cloud hovered over the Exodus event, with violent hate crimes unsettling the local GLBT community. At the very moment ex-gay televangelists were railing against homosexuals in the foothills, news broke of an 18-year old boy in Anderson, South Carolina whose father, “yelled, cursed, swung a baseball bat, prayed and tried to cast the demon of homosexuality out of him.”

In nearby Greenville, South Carolina, Stephen Moller, an anti-gay thug who murdered 20-year-old Sean William Kennedy outside a gay bar, just learned that he would spend approximately 10 months in jail for his ferocious crime. In this gross miscarriage of justice, the message was sent that murdering gay people was tacitly acceptable, if not encouraged. While in town, I spoke to Sean’s grieving mother, Elke Kennedy, who rightfully called the sentence, “a joke and a slap on the wrist.”

Meanwhile, on the opening day of the Exodus conference, an anti-bullying bill was stalled in the North Carolina legislature. Into this backdrop of brutality stepped the ex-gay activists Alan Chambers and Randy Thomas, who were determined to show the progressive residents of Asheville that Exodus did not stigmatize gay and lesbian people. Unfortunately, they kept tripping over reality and revealing the true nature of their duplicitous, deceptive and depraved ministry.

For a week, western North Carolinians were dazzled with disingenuousness. The audacity of the lies was breathtaking and the sheer nerve was mind numbing. By the end of the conference, everyone who had paid attention learned that Exodus leaders are shameless charlatans who lack even a modicum of morality. (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)