Huffington Post pointed out today that Focus on the Family’s California affiliate, the California Family Council, opposes efforts in that state to protect marriage.
While the organization emphatically opposes the right of two people of the same gender to choose lifelong marriage, regardless of their religious beliefs, the group supports heterosexual divorce.
Making divorce illegal would be “impractical,” said Ron Prentice, the executive director of the California Family Council. The CFC led a coalition of religious conservative groups to qualify that state’s Proposition 8 in which religious voters overrode the civil right of persons not sharing those religious beliefs to marry.
In 2010, it is hoped, California will vote to protect marriage from Focus on the Family and its apologists for divorce.
John Marcotte, a married father of two, is proposing the 2010 California Marriage Protection Act. The following mock PSA makes a strong case for why voters should protect marriage from Focus on the Family.
From a string of scandals at its Love In Actionresidency program in Tennessee, to its association with patient-cuddler and parent-basher Richard Cohen, to its collaboration with human-rights opponents in Uganda, the ex-gay leadership of Exodus International has an entrenched tendency to ignore early warnings and refuse to pre-empt a scandal from occurring.
Then, when it’s too late, Exodus leaders informally apologize not for harm done, nor for lack of accountability which enables scandalous behavior, but rather for the fact that anyone’s feelings are hurt when Exodus leaders and associates — acting alone, Exodus says — use the fame that comes with Exodus leadership to repeatedly flout community mores, undermine individual freedom, injure would-be counselees, and betray family values.
The result is always the same: No one at Exodus is disciplined, leaders continue to act contrary to common decency, and Exodus continues to defend its leaders’ “right” to act autonomously even as they use Exodus’ name and soapbox to grant legitimacy to their agendas.
By allowing its leaders to violate the organization’s supposed values of love, family, and “freedom” year after year, Exodus in effect apologizes not for abuses just committed — but for abuses that it is going to continue to commit.
The following video parody from The Onion exemplifies the Exodus tactic of issuing “apologies” for scandals that it had no intention of preventing: scandals that it intends to repeat.
