U.S. radio-station conglomerate Clear Channel refuses to warn its audiences that youth callers to a show’s helpline were misled to seek help from a network of sexually and emotionally abusive activists.

Tom Lang of Know Thy Neighbor has protested the “Dawson McAllister Live” show’s “Hopeline,” which until last week counseled youths with sexual concerns to contact Exodus International, a network of “ex-gay” activists that has a well-documented history of treatment failures, involuntary detentions, and sexual abuse.

The Hopeline bowed to pressure and removed Exodus from its referral list — but retained Focus on the Family, which also refers youths and young adults to Exodus’ abusive local programs and promotes the damaging myth that homosexual orientation is caused by bad parenting or molestation.

Lang tells Truth Wins Out that Clear Channel’s Boston affiliate, KISS 108, has since banned Lang from Matty in the Morning, the Facebook page of its most popular show, leaving audiences largely unaware of both the past bad referrals and the ongoing risk of abuse and verbal harassment by bigoted allies of Focus on the Family.

McAllister’s show airs nationally on XM Satellite Radio and from 10 p.m. until midnight or later, local time, in 130 cities.

In each city, youths are encouraged to call between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. CDT to share their personal problems with McAllister’s counselors. The advice that youths receive seems rooted more in conservative conventional wisdom than in sound mental health.

Instead of addressing critics’ well-documented concerns about client abuse, Exodus responded by attacking the critics and crediting McAllister as a spiritual godfather of the ex-gay movement: an arbiter of the political correctness which Exodus passes off as “truth”:

Dawson McAllister’ show is not overtly religious, just truthful. McAllister may know the source of all truth but he does not promote Christianity on his show.

However, if a listener calls in the HopeLine, he may be prayed for. He may be counseled to seek God. He may be directed to a Christian ministry like Exodus International, for it is only in Christ that we have any hope.

In other words, McAllister drives youth away from mental health professionals and into the hands of evangelists with an axe to grind. To them, youths are little more than chits on a scorecard of “saved” souls.

So long as McAllister’s advice is rooted in the philosophy of James Dobson, and so long as he refers youths and their parents to abusive and ignorant ex-gay activists at Focus on the Family, his show poses a health threat.

Please listen to the program, then call in seeking advice, and finally contact your local affiliate and demand that they stop airing McAllister’s show until he halts youth referrals to unaccountable and abusive activists at Focus on the Family. (Many affiliates have Facebook pages, but calls directly to the station may have a stronger impact.)

Do not accept station referrals to Clear Channel or to Premiere Radio; it is the responsibility of the local station to vet its shows for content that may harm families and communities. McAllister is entitled to free speech like anyone else; but free-speech rights do not require that a private media corporation give one man an exclusive slot on a national radio show.

Families deserve access to reputable mental health professionals — not hucksters who blame parents, put youths at risk, and damn people to Hell if they don’t comply with Focus on the Family’s rigid and self-serving ideology.

At minimum, if Clear Channel is committed to diversity as it has often claimed, then McAllister should include mainstream mental-health professionals frequently in his programs regarding sexuality, and should provide referrals to PFLAG and local gay-straight alliances.

In an undated interview with conservative radio show host Jesse Lee Peterson, “ex-gay” activist Charlene Cothran shares her thoughts. In the audio message below, Cothran:

• says that she is “no longer gay” even though she is celibate, same-sex-attracted, and not attracted to men
• recalls that when she was the editor for a lesbian magazine, she opposed marriage for gay people and obstructed her colleagues’ support for marriage. She had felt that gay people should settle for second-class citizenship in the form of domestic partnership.
• accuses educators who are tolerant of gender variance in pupils of being “trapped in the same bondage” to Satan as the pupils supposedly are. She accuses “most” tolerant educators of being secretly homosexual and using their own heterosexual marriages, churches, and children as a cover to promote homosexuality. Cothran says “gays are gifted people” and have “overwhelmingly” entered the schools as educators and administrators. She believes that anti-bullying and pro-tolerance policies are enacted because school systems are controlled by homosexuals.
• claims that marriage is just a stepping stone for political activists to have sex “in the middle of the park with no clothes on, you know, that whole thing.”
• accuses married gay couples of causing Europe’s heterosexual couples to stop marrying
• advises listeners that the cure for homosexuality is to forget oneself and one’s own thought processes, blindly accept the Bible as absolute truth, and falsify scientific discussion of biological roots to sexual orientation — namely, by falsely claiming that the “gay (controlled) media” assert the existence of a gay gene.

Peterson, the host, falsely states that the Alameda, Calif., school district voted to promote homosexuality in kindergarten through Grade 5. According to KTVU and Alameda C.A.R.E., the curriculum (and others like it) actually oppose bullying and teach students that different types of families exist; the curriculum does not teach students about sexual behavior.

Cothran claims to trust the Bible, but she does not cite any Bible verses to support her case. In fact, the most common “ex-gay” cures for homosexual orientation, reparative therapy and prayer, are offered nowhere in the Bible as cures for homosexual or bisexual orientation.

Hat tip: Good As You

Writer Matt Comer performed an excellent and difficult task for LGBT North Carolinians last week when he exposed a pattern of hate and incitement to violence by antigay activist Michael Brown.

Brown, who is a rising star on the ex-gay and antigay conference circuit, has organized a Christianist rally of 1,000 people to surround gay North Carolinians during pride celebrations this weekend.

Please listen to Comer’s appearance online July 23 on Michael Brown’s Christian radio talk show, appropriately titled “Line of Fire.” [Audio link updated July 24.]
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The U.S. radio airwaves are government property, owned by the taxpayers and licensed to private entities on the condition that broadcasts will somehow serve the public interest.

Since 1987, protection of taxpayer property has been eroded by reactionary and politically partisan interests who have steadily bought up licenses with the intention of denying access to the public airwaves to an honest, equitable, and balanced cross-section of the American public.

With the demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and protections against defamatory personal attacks in 2000, media conglomerates have filled the publicly owned airwaves with ethnic, religious, and sexual slurs from divisive, profane, and sometimes anti-Semitic egotists like Howard Stern, Michael Savage, and Rush Limbaugh.

Focus on the Family now defends this cesspool of indecency — fearful that President-elect Barack Obama and a new Congress will restore regulations requiring that the taxpayers’ airwaves be used fairly and not abused by potty-mouths.