Truth Wins Out executive director Wayne Besen appeared on CNN Headline News today to defend a British TV ad which featured gay men in parental roles, serving Heinz mayonnaise.
Besen criticized U.S. foodmaker H.J. Heinz for succumbing to homophobia and withdrawing the ad under pressure from the right-wing American Family Association. About 200 viewer complaints were received by British regulators.
Here’s the ad:
Truth Wins Out defended the ad:
The Headline News segment included Randy Sharp of the AFA, who claimed that the ad promoted a homosexual lifestyle: “What does mayonnaise have to do with homosexuals and their lifestyle?” Sharp claimed that 70,000 AFA supporters in the United States disagreed with the ad.
Business marketing analyst Dan Hill said Heinz was right to pull the ad. Hill said:
“In business you can never afford to forget that the bottom line is that ‘family values’ means ‘my family, not your family,’ and I think in the UK most households have traditional family structures.”
Besen responded that gay couples are well-accepted in the United Kingdom and that gay soldiers have been allowed to serve in British armed forces with great success.
The parents of PFLAG reached out June 7 to attendees of “Love Won Out,” Focus on the Family’s ex-gay roadshow in Orlando, Florida. The parents offered a message of unconditional love and hope to counter the conditional love and damaging stereotypes of the ex-gay conference.
Earlier, Truth Wins Out participated in a press conference with Dr. Kathryn Norsworthy, licensed psychologist; Joe Saunders, Equality Florida; Rev. John Middleton, Joy Metropolitan Community Church; Pastor Brei Taylor, Oasis Ministries; and Linn Possell, Hope Unites United Church of Christ. The press conference was hosted by the Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Community Center of Central Florida.
Amid protests over Focus on the Family’s use of its TiVo affiliation to discriminate against gay fathers, TiVo has removed the page of its own website that promoted Focus on the Family’s affiliate relationship with TiVo.
Is the removal is temporary? Is TiVo re-evaluating Focus’s role in TiVo’s KidZone child-safety filter? Is TiVo rethinking its association with Focus’s campaign against gay fathers? These questions remain unanswered.
Ruling on a technicality, the Virginia Supreme Court on June 6 rejected “ex-gay” activist and veritable fugitive Lisa Miller’s use of the state as a shelter from Vermont family court rulings. The court upheld an appellate ruling which recognized Vermont’s jurisdiction and implicitly acknowledged ex-partner Janet Jenkins visitation rights with daughter Isabella, whom they jointly agreed to conceive.
(At left, Janet, Isabella, and Lisa Miller-Jenkins prior to dispute)
The dispute began in 2003, when Miller — dissatisfied with her civil union to Jenkins — took Isabella and fled to Virginia. She acknowledged Vermont’s jurisdiction by dissolving the civil union there and seeking child support. But Miller did not count on Vermont recognizing Jenkins’ visitation rights.
By 2004, Miller was claiming to be “ex-gay” and violating Jenkins’ visitation rights. (To this day, Miller has deceived the public and capitalized upon religious-right support by claiming to be ex-gay while declining to state whether she has any attraction to men whatsoever.)
In exchange for legal representation of questionable competence, Miller gave exploitation rights over Isabella to the religious-rightist Liberty Counsel, which has sought to use Miller’s flight from justice to undermine both Vermont family law and the federal Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act which protects children from parents who cross state lines to evade custody rulings.
A Virginia Court of Appeals ruling (PDF) eventually reversed a lower Virginia court’s violation of Vermont and federal law. Miller and the Liberty Counsel then waited too long to appeal and missed a deadline. Miller continued to violate Vermont visitation orders. When Jenkins sought to file a final Vermont court order for enforcement in the Virginia courts, the Liberty Counsel saw an opportunity for a fresh round of litigation. In the view of New York Law School professor Arthur S. Leonard, the Virginia Supreme Court was not fooled by the Liberty Counsel’s second round of litigation; it was clearly the same old dispute being reopened ad nauseum.
According to The Rutland Herald:
Miller’s attorney, Mathew Staver, said his client “has not lost her courage or her resolve” and will pursue other legal options. Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of the law school at the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, said he hopes to raise the issue of Virginia’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex unions in a new proceeding.
Liberty Counsel’s ongoing defense of ex-gay kidnapping underlines a religious-right commitment to fundamentalist lawlessness and subversion of family values.
Focus on the Family has joined with TiVo to turn Father’s Day 2008 into a back-door political attack against gay fathers.
The TiVo “SuperDad” campaign invites people to nominate fathers as SuperDads; Focus’ involvement ensures that gay fathers and their families will be excluded. TiVo’s ties to Focus on the Family are no accident, according to a TiVo representative who spoke with Joe.My.GodAverage Gay Joe. The Family Equality Council is organizing a letter-writing campaign to TiVo in support of gay fathers.
In addition to discriminating against gay fathers and their offspring, Focus and its local branches and antifamily allies in California plan this year to divert $30 million dollars from more charitable endeavors into their petty war against marriage.
Joe Brummer points out that the $30 million spent by antifamily religious-right groups to institutionalize discrimination against monogamous gay couples should instead be spent to prevent malaria in Africa, buy cell phones for soldiers in Iraq to talk with their families, sponsor a million children in Africa for a month, or send 1,000 youths to college for a year.
Variety reports that actress Sigourney Weaver will star in “Prayers for Bobby,” a Lifetime cable TV movie.
Weaver will play a devout conservative Christian woman who “winds up becoming an advocate for gay and lesbian youths after her son is driven into a deep depression by his family’s disapproval and attempts to “cure” him of his sexual orientation.”
In a new article in the conservative Charisma magazine, Exodus International youth activist Mike Ensley tells parents “What To Do When Your Child is Gay.”
Beginning with its patronizing title — parents struggle with the coming-out of older teen-agers and adult offspring, not a “child” — the article proceeds to declare that homosexuality is a disease, that family members are doomed to a lifestyle of depraved promiscuity, and that parents are to blame.
Jason Cianciotto, executive director of Wingspan and former research director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, was subjected by his parents and a “Christian lay counselor” to forced isolation, repression, and eventually abandonment when it became apparent that “change” wasn’t really possible.
Columnist Anne T. Denogean writes about Cianciotto’s difficult adolescence in an article in the Tucson Citizen:
His mother and stepfather are evangelical Christians whose attitudes on sexual orientation were honed in the pews of Southern Baptist churches.
“I was raised in the church . . . to believe that nothing else existed besides growing up and getting married to a woman and having kids,” Cianciotto said.
As he entered his pre-teen years, his friends became interested in girls. He didn’t share their excitement. When he was 13 and becoming sexually active with other boys, his parents sent him to therapy.
“My family found a Christian lay counselor, who . . . taught me I needed to go as deep in the back of the closet as I possibly could. And if I just said my prayers, went to church and told my parents what they wanted to hear, I could stop answering embarrassing questions.”
His concerned parents restricted his activities, hoping to prevent or reverse the development of a gay orientation. Cianciotto wasn’t allowed, for example, to perform in school plays or musicals.
“I could be in the marching band because I was a drummer, so maybe that was more masculine,” he said, adding, “I kind of got back at them by being a xylophone player.”
Despite dating girls for appearances, Cianciotto was gay and was sent back to counseling from age 16 to 19 by parents hoping for a conversion. At his lowest point, Cianciotto considered suicide.
“I really wanted to be what my family and what my religion told me I needed to be,” he said.
His parents threw him out, at age 19, after finding gay porn in his bedroom and learning he had attended a LGBT student support group.
“I was at work and came home and found all of my belongings in plastic bags on the front porch,” he said.
Albeit unintentionally, Cianciotto’s mother and counselor acted to crush him — his interests, his skills, his individuality — through extremist gender-role stereotypes, isolation from his peers, intentional ignorance, religious judgmentalism, and sheer bigotry. Far from redeeming Cianciotto from a destructive and suicidal lifestyle, they promoted precisely that sort of lifestyle.
Cianciotto was luckier than some GLBT throwaways; he had a tolerant father and stepmother, and was able to gain support and guidance from tolerant friends — the sort of institutional and peer support that ex-gay activists seek to deny to GLBT youths when they battle against gay-straight alliances, safe-space programs, and Days of Silence.
Lisa Miller and her partner, Janet Jenkins, exchanged vows in a civil union ceremony eight years ago in Vermont. Through artificial insemination, Lisa conceived and gave birth to Isabella in 2002. In 2003, Lisa adopted an ex-gay sexual identity, took Isabella and fled to Virginia, where she found an activist judge willing to violate Vermont child-custody and visitation orders.
From Vermont’s perspective, Lisa is now a law-breaking fugitive who has turned her daughter into a political pawn in the culture wars.
Since then, Lisa has flouted Vermont family law and constitutional precedent in which states (such as Virginia) may not override other states’ jurisdiction and court rulings in matters of family law. Even as she violated the law, lived as a fugitive in Virginia, and sought to sever Janet’s ties to Isabella, Lisa won child support from Janet.
On Thursday (April 17), the Virginia Supreme Court will rule hear arguments in the custody dispute.
Focus on the Family has weighed in, supporting Lisa’s violations of Vermont family law and implicitly favoring a “special right” of antigay states to disobey the court rulings of states that have jurisdiction over a marriage, civil union, or child custody.
Amid protests over Focus on the Family’s use of its TiVo affiliation to 
His mother and stepfather are evangelical Christians whose attitudes on sexual orientation were honed in the pews of Southern Baptist churches.
