Once again, “ex-gay” propaganda has been used to keep gays from achieving equal rights. The New York Times reported on a gay activist in Nepal, Sunil Babu Pant, who is the only openly gay member of the newly elected Constituent Assembly. He is working to convince this conservative society that homosexuals are just like any other people.

According to the article, merely a decade ago gay life was difficult in Katmandu because the police were brutal. People were driven from their homes, and others endured torture in police custody, said Pant. “I thought nothing would improve unless we organized,” he said.

He tried to found an advocacy group to fight for the rights of gay men, lesbians, the transgendered and others. But government officials said they would register the group only if it devoted itself to converting homosexuals into heterosexuals.

To get around that, Mr. Pant said only that the group was dedicated to defending human rights in general and working on health issues and H.I.V./AIDS. Today, the group, the Blue Diamond Society, has offices in 20 districts and has 120,000 registered members.

Well, folks, there you go. The repressive ideas promoted by Exodus International and Exodus Global Alliance have spread around the world and they are being used to persecute people everywhere. Harmful notions are loudly broadcast by these sexual engineers (with no record of success) and they have a way of filtering down to bullies, whether on school yards, Congress or in foreign nations. The primary purpose of the “ex-gay” myth is to allow people to rationalize and justify despicable behavior and discriminatory actions that keep gays “in their place.”

Sexual engineering groups, such as Exodus, would argue that they don’t approve of some of the more extreme actions in foreign nations – and this is true, yet irrelevant. They simply cannot deny the deleterious effects of their message, that are heard throughout the world or easily accessed on the Internet.

In short, the “ex-gay” message causes much pain and suffering worldwide. What is tragic about this, is that for all of this drama and trauma, no one is going from gay to straight. It is a cruel hoax that is perpetuated for the sake of an extreme political agenda, where people are cast aside, as if their lives hardly matter.

It is time that Exodus stops burying its head in the sand and admit the misery it has brought to so many good people.

‘We Will Stop Focus on the Family’s Destructive Lies Wherever They Are Spread,’ Says TWO

Truth Wins Out (TWO) announced today that its founder, Wayne Besen, would appear in Anchorage to oppose Focus on the Family’s notorious “ex-gay” Love Won Out road show on Sept. 13. Besen is the author of “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the ‘Ex-Gay’ Myth.” TWO shadows this anti-gay seminar across the nation to ensure that the public is armed with the facts and aware that Focus on the Family is deliberately disseminating misinformation about gay and lesbian people.

“We appear wherever Focus on the Family spreads lies and fear,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “Love Won Out distorts gay life and conflates stereotypes with science, while selling false hope to vulnerable people. We are looking forward to working with Alaskan advocacy groups to counter Focus on the Family’s false and destructive messages.”

More details about Besen’s trip will be forthcoming. The Love Won Out conference will take place on Sept. 13 at the Abbott Loop Community Church.

We need your help to make this happen. Please consider a tax-deductible contribution to help us fight the right in Alaska. To Donate online CLICK HERE.

Or – send a check to: Truth Wins Out; P.O. Box 25491; Brooklyn, NY 11202

By Wayne Besen

The last few weeks have shown that so-called pro-family organizations are some of the most useless, money-sucking scams in the world. With real families suffering from economic hardship in America, a declining birthrate in Europe and Google doubling the price of daycare for employees, the only thing right wing family groups want to discuss is their bizarre and all-encompassing fagela fetish.

Recently, The Brooklyn Paper, had a huge headline, “SPLITSVILLE: Brooklyn divorces up 30%.” The article cited a number of reasons including, “when the economy tanks, so do many marriages.”

One would think this would alarm so-called pro-family organizations and they would be out in force repairing marriages — or at least looking for economic solutions to take the stress off couples. Unfortunately, as I walked around my Brooklyn neighborhood, I saw not one representative from the American Family Association.

Well, I take that back. I did encounter one of the group’s representatives on CNN Headline News as we debated a Heinz mayonnaise ad in the United Kingdom that featured two men kissing. I’m sure the children of these broken marriages in Brooklyn will feel much better knowing Heinz pulled the ad and they can have gay-free mayonnaise at both mommy and daddy’s separate houses.

A new study by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University showed that in 2006, for the first time in U.S. history, a majority of births to women under 30 — 50.4 percent — were out of wedlock. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert points out that, “By comparison, when John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, just 6 percent of all births were to unmarried women under 30.

One imagines that this report might have startled “pro-family” organizations and they would have put their millions of dollars towards stopping this trend. No such luck. Instead, they are investing huge piles of money and manpower to pass anti-gay marriage amendments in Florida, Arizona and California. The upshot for “pro-family” groups is that if heterosexuals keep screwing up marriage, by the time gay people finally win the right nationally, we won’t want to use it.

“Evangelicals of the older generation have become obsessed in almost a technical psychological sense in opposing gay rights,” David Weddle, a professor of religion at Colorado College told the Colorado Springs Gazette. “The irony is that homosexuality is not a biblical theme.”

Right wing organizations and their flocks want to be taken seriously, but their priorities and actions are reprehensible. For example, a middle school teacher was fired in Mount Vernon, Ohio last month after preaching in the classroom, refusing to remove his Bible and burning crosses onto the arms of pupils. You read that correctly — he seared crosses on the body parts of impressionable students, as if it were a gang ritual.

Surely, reasonable people can agree that such behavior is inappropriate in the classroom. But, oh no, some of the yahoos in Mount Vernon believe their religion places them above the Constitution – so they are holding demonstrations in the town square. I wonder if these zealots would have the same reaction if a teacher were burning a Stars of David or Muslim crescents on the forearms of students?

A recent New York Times magazine article, “Childless Europe,” explored why certain countries in Europe are losing population. The hopelessly out of touch Pope Benedict chimed in with his typically sunny advice. “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future,” the Pontiff said. “Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present.”

Instead of selfishness, as the Pope implied, it was the traditional values of the Pope that contributed to the problem. In societies that either offered a safety net or where men shared the burdens of child rearing, women were having more babies. However, when educated women were stuck at home and forced to do all the work – such as in Italy – they chose to have less children. Will the Pope now call on men to help out more at home or for countries to ensure daycare for families?

Finally, the Wall Street Wonder, Google, plans to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent. Under the revised plan, parents with two children in Google day care could see their yearly bill increase to more than $57,000 from around $33,000. This crushing blow to the family drove a few employees to tears.

Was the American Family Association in Silicon Valley raising hell and standing up for families? No, they ignored grimacing parents, so they could punish Ronald and Grimace by launching a boycott against McDonald’s for supposedly having a gay agenda. Maybe the delusional scolds at the AFA thought they saw rainbow color fries, in much the same way they once accused the cartoon character Mighty Mouse of snorting cocaine.

Right wing organizations can be considered many things – but certainly not advocates for the family. They inhale money, exhale anti-gay pollution and have done absolutely nothing for the traditional families they claim to represent. It seems the more such groups proliferate, the more the family deteriorates.

(Clownish AFA Says Ronald is Too Gay)

Well, thank God we can finally eat McNuggets in peace without the yahoos at the American Family Association annoying us at the next table. The AFA will announce a boycott today because they claim the company supports the so-called “gay agenda” and has taken sides in the “culture wars.”

“It is about McDonald’s, as a corporation, refusing to remain neutral in the culture wars,” whined the oft-offended AFA. “McDonald’s has chosen not to remain neutral but to give the full weight of their corporation to promoting the homosexual agenda, including homosexual marriage.”

The AFA – the Tupelo, Mississippi-based group that once claimed Mighty Mouse snorted cocaine – has once again gone mad. What next, they will claim that Grimace is secretly gay because he is the same lavender shade as the Teletubby Tinky Winky?

McDonalds is not promoting a “gay agenda.” They are simply supporting equality for all people in the workplace. This boycott will fail, just as AFA’s Disney Boycott fell flat. The group is all hat and no cattle and has emerged as one of the most dishonest groups on the far right fringe. They even sell a video, “It’s Not Gay” featuring failed ex-gay Michael Johnston – without a disclaimer telling AFA members that Johnston has participated in gay orgies, while claiming to have “changed.” Now, how moral is that?

I’m going to do my part this morning. I will put my yogurt back in the refrigerator, march down to McDonald’s, and buy a delicious Egg McMuffin. Yum!

Please call McDonald’s today and thank them for being a fair-minded company and let them know you would rather eat without the angry, puritanical AFA crowd.

1-800-244-6227

On May 5, at APA’s 2008 convention in Washington, the group will host a symposium, at which one of the two mental health practitioner-panelists is Dr. Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist without state board certification and an advocate for “Sexual Identity Therapy,” which he says he has successfully applied to help patients “alter homosexual feelings or behaviors” and live their lives “heterosexually” with “only very few weak instances of homosexual attraction.”

The symposium, moderated by Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Peteet, who chairs APA’s Corresponding Committee on Psychiatry, Religion and Spirituality, is titled “Homosexuality and Therapy: The Religious Dimension.” Indeed, the panel includes two prominent religious figures from radically different perspectives – New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson and the Reverend Dr. Albert Mohler. Robinson came to nationwide attention in 2003 when he became the first non-celibate, out gay person elected an American Episcopal Church bishop, for the Diocese of New Hampshire.

Mohler is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, a nationally syndicated radio host, and a board member of James Dobson’s stridently anti-gay Focus on the Family. The symposium’s primary booster has noted that Mohler has distinguished himself among Christian right evangelicals in acknowledging that homosexuality may not be a choice. Left unmentioned, however, was Mohler’s statement that “if a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use.”

Robinson’s wisdom in appearing with Mohler – and the broader debate about LGBT advocates engaging those on the other side – are not what make this story intriguing, and indeed troubling. Instead it is the embrace by a scientifically-based organization, APA, of an unlicensed practitioner who espouses controversial professional opinions about homosexuality but can point to no peer-reviewed findings that his clinical approach has merit.

Perhaps most unsettling is the fact that the same defender of the symposium who credited Mohler with some degree of enlightenment on gay issues, Dr. David Scasta – a former president and newsletter editor of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists (AGLP) – has circulated a press release for the event dubbing it “a ‘balanced’ discussion,” the sort of characterization one might expect from intelligent design proponents demanding a seat on a panel of evolution experts.