Religious-rightists on Monday lost one phase of their campaign to give California doctors a blank check to practice bigotry against any class of patient for supposed religious reasons.

While anti-family activists explicitly sought to deny medical care to same-sex-attracted Californians and unmarried women, an unlimited religious “right” to discriminate against entire classes of patients could give bigoted doctors the right to discriminate against Jews, Asian-Americans — anyone whose existence was contrary to a medical group’s choice of supposed religious beliefs.

According to The Washington Post, the California Supreme Court ruled that physicians’ constitutional right to the free exercise of religion does not exempt businesses that serve the public from following state law that prohibit discrimination.

Jennifer C. Pizer, a lawyer with the gay rights group Lambda Legal who is representing [Guadalupe] Benítez, said that while the law protects doctors who refuse certain treatments on religious grounds, it does not allow them to do so on a discriminatory or selective basis.

In other words, a doctor may refuse to provide fertility services for religious reasons, but may not cherry-pick patients for whom to provide those services.

Despite the legal setback, right-wing political activists continue to maintain that the U.S. Constitution gives them a blank check to violate any law that they deem to be in conflict with their religious whims — and to use their own religion to infringe upon the freedom of others.

According to the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow propaganda service:

Attorney Mailee Smith of Americans United for Life (AUL), spokeswoman for the Christian Medical & Dental Associations and several other faith-based groups who presented amicus briefs in the case, said the ruling takes away a federally protected Constitutional right of physicians to freely exercise religion.

The case of Guadalupe Benitez will revert back to trial court where it will be determined whether Benitez was denied medical care due to her marital status or her sexual orientation.

In recent decades, some concerned critics say, portions of U.S. conservative Christianity have been overrun by an army of little so-called antichrists.

These “antichrists” are said to be smug and willfully ignorant people who worship a god of warfare and death. When they aren’t justifying wars, obsessing over demons, and rejecting the scientific method, they vote for egocentric autocrats and special interests who favor Armageddon-like living conditions — deteriorating seas, poisoned skies, melted ice caps, runaway ethnic cleansing, no privacy, and large-scale religious conflict. Some of these would-be antichrists — doomsayers Timothy LaHaye and Hal Lindsey come to mind — have earned tens of millions of dollars by writing best-selling books that call other people “antichrists.”

In promoting sales of his own new book, ex-gay activist Anthony Falzarano this week decisively associated himself with this supposed army of believers in a god of death.

Falzarano’s latest message to a sexually-honest former Exodus leader is basically this:

Falzarano’s god is a sadistic tyrant that kills individual people with cancer in order to punish other individual people for petty reasons — and in order to bolster the wobbly egos of Biblically illiterate and impenitent ministers like Falzarano.

I won’t repeat the full text of Falzarano’s latest meme here. It is linked above; it has been repeated by other major bloggers; and we at TWO have already allowed Falzarano to spout his memes here in the past week.

Right-wing religious demagogues spread these memes, sugar-coated with godtalk, for the following reasons:

1. to make money when they are ill-qualified for productive employment

2. to inflate their unstable egos by degrading and bullying other people

3. to intimidate practitioners of traditional, modest, and minority religious creeds, replacing those faiths with egocentric, cynical, and authoritarian cult-like movements that are insulated from any dangerous persons who might express faith in a genuinely loving, graceful, life-affirming, self-sacrificial — or non-existent — higher power

4. to promote conflict, bloodshed, and destruction in a “fallen” world that they admittedly hate

5. to victimize other people, putting them perpetually in a defensive position

It’s a bit difficult for me to imagine anything more anti-life, or antichrist-like, than the culture of death and defamation that Falzarano affirms in his recent messages to TWO and to a former Exodus ministry leader.

But I’ll try: (Read More)

Focus on the Family leader James Dobson released his attack dogs today, viciously smearing me because I have shown him to be dishonest and distort research. In a screed on the group’s website it referred to me as an, “infamous homosexual activist” and urged his listeners to vote for him, so he could be in the Radio Hall of Fame:

“This attack is yet more evidence of why Dr. Dobson deserves a spot in the Radio Hall of Fame,” said Gary Schneeberger, vice president of media and public relations at Focus on the Family.”For 32 years, he has been willing to take the unfriendly fire of the Wayne Besens of the world because that is the price to be paid for championing family values and defending biblical principles in the public square.”

What I found interesting is that Focus on the Family failed to mention the seven respected scientists who accused Dobson of distorting their work - which is the main reason Truth Wins Out launched its campaign in the first place. It seems that Dobson and his henchmen rather smear the messenger than legitimately answer why Dobson has distorted research and cherry picked the results to suit his political agenda.

Please vote against James Dobson today and SIGN OUR PETITION.

Also please consider a tax-deductible contribution for Truth Wins Out. Help us fight right wing propaganda and the “ex-gay” myth. Our work - the research, media advocacy and videos below cost money. We can’t do this without your help. We hope you will join our work by contributing today.

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.