(Weekly Column)

A February 2008 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 16 percent of America’s 225 million adults are unaffiliated with any religion. According to the report, “When ‘childhood religion’ is compared against ‘current religion,’ the unaffiliated show a net increase of 8.8 percentage points, compared to a 7.5 point loss among Catholics, for example, or a 2.6 percent loss among Protestants.”

It is my belief that outrageously hypocritical behavior by conservative religious authorities is directly responsible for the surge in non-believers or those who shun organized religion. The ubiquitous scolds who dominate cable TV and Republican politics are too often conservatives of convenience, who believe they are exempt from practicing the strident rules that they preach.

For example, South Carolina’s First Lady, Jenny Sanford, filed for divorce last week after her husband, Gov. Mark Sanford (R), admitted an affair with a woman from Argentina. Until the scandal broke, Mark and Jenny posed as a beacon of Christian family values.

I can understand Jenny’s disgust with her husband, who left his four sons to cheat with his mistress on Father’s Day. But one can’t masquerade as a Bible-thumper when it comes to gay rights and other issues, and then say that the Bible is suddenly irrelevant when it comes to divorce.

Both Jenny and Mark profited from their charade, yet jilted Jenny wants to conveniently abandon biblical absolutism and utilize liberal divorce laws because her feelings are hurt. Sorry Jenny, but a mistress does not negate your marriage vows. Anyone can embrace the “sanctity of marriage” in good times. A true person of fundamentalist faith stays with the vows even when the relationship sours.

To highlight such hypocrisy, John Marcoa, a Sacramento Web-designer, has drafted a 2010 parody ballot measure that would ban divorce in California. Tellingly, the right wing organizations that fought to save marriage from gay couples have not lined up to support it.

From mega-churches to suburban strip mall ministries, fundamentalist youth rail against the secular culture, even as they ape it. They sport gaudy tattoos of Jesus, wear earrings in their noses and play imitation rock. On their fingers are silly chastity rings, when they really need chastity belts.

A recent New York Times magazine article points out that “More government money has been spent on the cause of sexual abstinence in Texas than any other state, but it still has the third-highest teen birth rate in the country and the highest percentage of teen mothers giving birth more than once.”

Former beauty queen Carrie Prejean is the perfect spokesperson for liberal bashing libertines. She moralized over same-sex marriage, but expected forgiveness and understanding when, thanks to tabloid pictures, America got to know her in the biblical sense.

Perhaps the most amusing part of studying conservatives is their absurd claim that America is a Christian nation, which is impossible, because no two people can define what it means to be Christian. A new Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report entitled,  “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” concludes that people are now choosing to “blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs”. Who knew crystals and Christ went so well together?

Last month, Watergate felon Chuck Colson joined a batch of wing nuts to write “The Manhattan Declaration”. This supposedly conservative manifesto began by shamelessly co-opting historical liberal successes. The Declaration reads:

“It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery…Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement…The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians…

It is true that Christians played a role in these movements. However, it was non-believers teaming up with liberal Christians to overcome the opposition of conservative Christians. The anti-gay signers of The Manhattan Declaration are the ideological heirs to those on the wrong side of history. It was remarkable how efficiently they scrubbed their own embarrassing past and replaced their monumental failures with liberal accomplishments.

Social conservatives are a loud bunch, but their power is slipping. I think back to Middle school, when I attended a Houston Rockets basketball game with my father. During a time out the “Voice of God” announced that a gay rights measure had been crushed. The enthusiastic crowd burst out in to loud cheers, which was quite devastating to a thirteen-year old coming to terms with his sexual orientation.

On Monday, Houston voters elected openly gay Annise Parker as mayor. Unlike my youth, I watched a Houston crowd cheer for progress instead of prejudice. No doubt there were countless social conservatives across the city slamming beers, ogling women who weren’t their wives and betting on sports – while bemoaning the city’s fallen values.

This is the lifestyle of today’s conservatives of convenience. They are all creed and no deed.

Be warned: Those new National Organization for Marriage anti-GLBT  actor auditions videos Wayne reported about this week are gone. NOM noticed that its evil ruse had been exposed and demanded that YouTube take them down. Even a clip of a recent MSNBC Rachel Maddow clip that included the audition tapes is gone. NOM’s reason:  copyright infringement.  

YouTube has to develop a bigger pair. The fact that a national organization is working to deny equality under law to millions of certain citizens makes the story newsworthy.  Showing at least excerpts is fair use — under law. 

Why are people so afraid of the anti-equality crowd? It’s so obvious that the organized fundies are the ones to fear. NOM was willing to lie, manipulate, and terrify the ignorant segment of the public, low-info types who can be compelled en masse to do what is right for their brand of Christianity, but wrong for anyone who really believes in basic American ideals. The tactic is cynical, selfish, immoral, and destructive. And it works: Remember Proposition 8?

At HuffPo, Lambda Legal’s Evan Wolfson provides a description opf the ads and refutes their vicious claims, so that at least some of those unable to view the outrage can see clearly the threat with which we are dealing. It’s a long excerpt, but it is an important one:

Consider what the actors in the NOM ad pretend to be:

A doctor who wants to discriminate against her patients, despite civil rights laws and medical ethics that the California Supreme Court upheld – in a case having nothing to do with marriage.

An officer of a New Jersey group that for years voluntarily operated a beachside pavilion with special tax-breaks that required it be open to the public – but then tried to turn down a lesbian couple. The case did not turn on marriage, since New Jersey doesn’t yet allow gay couples to marry, but, rather, basic civil rights laws about open access to public accommodations.

A Massachusetts parent who sought to dictate public school curriculum about the diverse families children will need to be aware of to thrive in a diverse world, and then wanted to remove her child from classes in a way that would have disrupted class and imposed unreasonable burdens on the school and other kids.

The law in California, as elsewhere, is that doctors can’t discriminatorily refuse to treat patients — Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, gay or non-gay; that has nothing to do with marriage, and yet NOM incites fear. The law in New Jersey, as elsewhere, says that organizations running public accommodations such as restaurants or rental halls cannot discriminatorily exclude people — African American, Latino, or Asian, gay or non-gay; that has nothing to do with marriage, and yet NOM says that the discriminators are somehow the victims. The law in Massachusetts, as elsewhere, of course allows parents to teach their kids whatever they want, and even to send them to private schools or do home-schooling. The law also rightly sets rules for determining public school curriculum without having every parent, or special interest with an agenda, coming in and imposing their views on everyone else’s kids — yours or mine, gay or non-gay.

I encourage you to read Wolfson’s entire piece — he has worked on the front lines of this fight and knows the terrain.  And he’s a lawyer.

National Organization for Marriage may believe that its copyright trumps our right to know the truth, but the group is wrong. Here is an opportunity to dtake action and do some good: Anyone with a thirst for a truly equal US will share descriptions of the ad — along with the truth about marriage equality and the fact that is is no threat to anyone, save those who need legal supremacy — with everyone they know. It is particularly urgent that we talk with those who question the need for civil-marriage equality. If we can’t trust YouTube to stand up to transmit the truth, we must do it.

Here is a debate between NOM’s Maggie Gallagher and Human Rights Campaign Joe Solmonese on CNN’s “Hardball,” where the HRC chief handily obliterates his opponent’s position using truth and fact.

HRC\’s Joe Solmonese on Hardball 04/08/09

Another soldier in the anti-GLBT Christian army has left the battlefield. Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, is dead.

From the foundation’s blog:

Paul M. Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and first president of The Heritage Foundation, died this morning around 1 a.m. He was 66 years old. Weyrich was a good friend to many of us at Heritage, a true leader and a man of unbending principle.

Sadly, when he walked this earth, Weyrich was not such a good friend to his GLBT brothers and sisters. His “unbending principle” led him to work long and hard — using any means necessary, even deceit — for the continued stigmatization of the inclusive gay community.

As leader of the neoconservative Heritage Foundation, Weyrich became the point person for the fundamentalist/radical-Right takeover of the Republican Party. He personally served as a social-issues watchdog whose primary job was keeping anti-GLBT and anti-choice issues in the public eye. His reported ties to Nazi collaborators and neo-fascist organizations gave him dangerous access to federal agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Through the Free Congress Foundation, which he led until his death, Weyrich played a huge role in formulating the plan to play upon ignorant people’s unfounded fears about gays and in using the GLBT community as the hook in fundraising, spreading propaganda and terrible lies, motivating the Christian masses to become grassroots activists, and recruiting right-wing candidates for public office. His work and collaborations with the late Rev. Jerry Falwell led to the establishment of the Moral Majority in 1979 and to the political polarization of the US between red and blue states.

Paul Weyrich may be gone, but the culture war that still rages and keeps GLBT Americans under society’s boot has much to do with everything he did during his career. After all, he fired the opening shots. We’ll hear much about his status as a “great American” and “conservative icon” over the next few days, but GLBT Americans are painfully aware that in terms of real American values — honesty, equality, justice for all — there was little that was great or iconic about him.

‘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

This month, with the ten-week public Internet voting period nearly over, he got wind of a more troubling protest. A state­ment arrived from the gay advocacy group Truth Wins Out, along with several hundred e-mails, demanding that the list be purged of a nominee no one had mentioned up to that point: Focus on the Family, the radio ministry of right-wing pundit James Dobson.

This is not a controversy DuMont needs. He’s been struggling for years to reopen the Museum of Broadcast Communications, which he founded in 1987 and ran from 1992 to 2003 at the Chicago Cultural Center. The museum’s new home at State and Kinzie has been stalled out in mid-rehab since May 2006. DuMont, who blames the state for with­holding $6 million he says it promised him, continues his fund-raising efforts, and the $500-a-plate hall of fame induction dinner, scheduled for November 8 this year, is one of them. So he watched with concern as TWO rallied opposition to Dobson in the gay community and Dobson, who can reach 2.5 million supporters with a single e-mail blast, fought back.

The contest closed July 15 with more than 70,000 votes cast. When they were tallied, Focus on the Family had won the nationally syndicated broadcasters category, beating out Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Bob Costas, and Howard Stern. DuMont announced that the public had made its choice and the hall of fame would stand by it.

But it wasn’t over for the anti-Dobson forces. They’ve mounted a new campaign to get the museum to disqualify Focus on the Family before the induction.

To Read Full Article CLICK HERE

Dr. Gary Remafedi Says ‘Ex-Gay’ Group Manipulated His Study And Should Immediately Take The Distortions Off Its Website

NEW YORK – TruthWinsOut.org published exclusive comments today by Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, who claimed the “ex-gay” organization PFOX distorted his research findings.

On its website, PFOX expressed its displeasure with The Washington Post for publishing what it called “a sympathetic article about a 15-year-old boy named Saro who described his homosexual feelings and how Gay Straight Alliance student clubs help such gay teens to deal with discrimination and bullying in high school and middle school.”

“What the article failed to describe,” said PFOX Executive Director Regina Griggs, “is the danger of young sexually confused teens self-identifying as gays at an early age. Research has shown that the risk of suicide decreases by 20% each year that a person delays homosexual or bisexual self-labeling.* Early self-identification is dangerous to kids.”

Dr. Remafedi’s study was the one cited by PFOX to back their unfounded conclusions. Today, Dr. Reamafedi released the following comments to Truth Wins Out:

“My work has been cited by PFOX in response to a Washington Post article on gay-straight alliances (GSA),” wrote Dr. Remafedi. “PFOX misuses one of my studies on suicide attempts in gay youth to argue that people should not identify their sexual orientation at young ages. Our findings do not support the contention that young people choose their identity or the timing of events in identity formation. Nor is there any evidence that the availability of GSAs influences those developmental processes.” (Read More)

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.

Read full Guardian article HERE

Wayne Besen, an executive director of gay advocacy group The Truth Wins Out, appeared on a CNN debate in the US last week discussing the Heinz ad.

In the debate he raised issue of how the AFA, a powerful American lobby group, had played a role in the strong stance Heinz US had adopted over the ad.

“They are a very powerful constituency, a very powerful lobby group. They are one of the top groups in the religious right in America,” Besen told MediaGuardian.co.uk.

He added that the AFA had gone after companies including Disney and Ford in the past.

“They have a lot of experience mobilising campaigns and boycotts. They are like a puritanical national nanny,” Besen said.

If Mohler and Throckmorton really wanted to have a debate, and if, as they say, they are not afraid of open debate, why don’t they just host it themselves?

There certainly must be enough room for this panel (or one like it) to speak at Mohler’s Baptist Theological Seminary, or at the Focus on the Family headquarters (Mohler is on the Board), or perhaps at a Love Won Out conference?

If they do not issue invitations for APA views to speak at their centers, then perhaps it is actually they who are afraid to debate in front of a wide audience? And, perhaps what everyone is saying, that they are just looking to make publicity to cast APA in a bad light is true. Maybe they are afraid that if their flocks are presented with real scientific views it will be more difficult to manipulate and brainwash them?

So, right wingers, when are the invitations coming?