A year after it helped launch the Uganda genocide legislation, Exodus is teaming up with Robert Knight, Matt Barber, and an attorney who affirmed child abduction by her ex-gay activist client. Joining with NARTH’s leading political activists “therapists” at Liberty University’s School of Law, their objective is simple: Convince the public that the Constitution’s Bill of Rights cannot survive so long as LGBT people have any rights at all.

Exodus International President Alan Chambers will headline a two-day conference and symposium Feb. 12-13. The events will criticize sexual honesty, reject mainstream psychiatry, deny the existence of sexual orientation, and assert that conservative Christians’ rights are incompatible with the rights of sexual and religious minorities.

According to the Liberty Counsel, a Christian Right legal-attack squad, the February 12 conference is titled “Understanding Same-sex Attractions and Their Consequences.” On February 13, the Liberty University Law Review will host a legal symposium entitled “Homosexual Rights and First Amendment Freedoms: Can They Truly Coexist?” Liberty University was founded by fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, and it is operated as a veritable police state where no dissent from the late Falwell’s ideology and lifestyle are permitted.

Chambers will tell fundamentalists — as he has done many times before — that same-sex attractions are caused by bad parenting and abuse, that public honesty about one’s orientation is sinful, and that recognition of the equality of religious and sexual minorities is demonic. (Read More)

I had wondered, since he had been strangely silent on the issue, most likely because his friend Scott Lively has been so intimately involved in the situation.

But for the record, Peter thinks the genocide is A-OK, and that Americans are arrogant for thinking it’s okay to interfere. Oh, he doesn’t say it that explicitly, but from the entire tone of the piece, it can be ascertained that Pete hasn’t lost much sleep over the plight of dark-skinned gays in a land that he couldn’t identify on a map even if you were threatening to hit “delete” on his file folder full o’ Folsom photos.* He adds some throwaway line at the end about supposedly not having studied the legislation in Uganda, but what part of “death penalty for gay people” requires further study, Pete? Do you need to get out your magnifying glass or something?

Elsewhere in his post, before he quote Robert Knight’s dishonest, genocide-defending screed in full (which I tore apart here), Peter takes some time to complain (yet again) that Warren Throckmorton has discovered his soul and is trying to work against some of the more violent and hateful forces for which he used to apologize. This is to be expected because, much like a wealthy white person who defends the rights of the poor and minorities is often viewed by her peers as a class traitor, Peter is probably more burned by Throckmorton’s “betrayal” than he ever could be about something so quaint as mass murder against an entire sector of the Ugandan population.

Also, Peter issues a “challenge to accomodationists” like Throckmorton wherein he will “stand corrected” if somebody can show him where sexual orientation “as this concept is currently understood and posited in academia, the media and society” is mentioned in the Bible. I don’t know why this is really a challenge, because nobody claims that the Bible accurately describes sexual orientation. The Bible also fails to accurately describe microbiology, climatology, Keynesian economic theory, Ugg boots, iPhones, Jersey Shore and Snuggies, but that’s not an argument for their nonexistence. Or maybe it is in Peter’s world. Maybe he just hasn’t written a column called “Blankets don’t have sleeves and Wayne Besen is mean for saying they do!” yet.

So now we’re caught up on what Peter thinks about Uganda. We can go back to grown-up stuff now, until next time.

Alvin has more here.

*Say that five times fast.

UPDATE BELOW

I’m fighting the temptation to type out a bunch of exclamation points and various other characters, paste the hyperlink, and hit post.

But no, let’s look at this. Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries, and former Concerned Woman for America, has written a piece in which he claims that the New York Times editorial “Hate Begets Hate,” which correctly points out that American Evangelicals Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundige and Don Schmierer helped feed the culture of hatred against gays which has led to the awful “kill the gays” legislation in Uganda, is merely a smear piece focused on “crucifying Christians.” Well, get up off the fainting couch, Bob, because we need to have a discussion.

First let’s look at Knight’s complaints about the NYT piece:

This humdinger of a self-descriptive screed has it all: wild, unsubstantiated charges; villains; hysterical calls for action and a smug, holier-than-thou tone that would put Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady to shame.

(…)

I don’t know Mr. Brundidge, but I do know Mr. Lively and Mr. Schmierer. Both are honest and courageous men who, out of Christian compassion, dare to tell the truth about homosexuality. For this, the Times brands them as hatemongers.

While Mr. Lively has written perceptively and passionately about countering the homosexual activists’ political and cultural agenda, there is no evidence of “hate.” Trying to steer someone away from destructive, immoral, changeable behavior is an act of love, not hate.

(…)

And it is beyond absurd to label as a bigot a man like Don Schmierer, who supports AIDS ministries and reaches out to sexually conflicted people with the life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ. Casting the gentle, soft spoken Mr. Schmierer as a “hater” is like calling Mother Teresa a foul-mouthed harpy.

Honest? Christian compassion? The truth? Perhaps, you’ve missed the news, Bob, but we now have video evidence that your compassionate, honest friend Scott Lively, who has spent his entire career smearing gay people as serial killers, murderers, and Holocaust instigators, indeed told that Ugandan audience that gay people were responsible for the Rwandan genocide! I don’t know in what possible world that could be considered honest, compassionate, or anything resembling the truth, but if that’s the world where you live, Robert Knight, I hope never to visit it. In case you’re not aware, no credible historian supports Lively’s specious and evil claims.

Also specious and evil is Robert Knight’s claim that one’s sexuality can be changed through “therapy,” an idea which is condemned by virtually every authoritative body which has weighed in on the subject. I could look around the internet for links, but there’s no need. It’s all on this little website called Truth Wins Out. Perhaps Mr. Knight has heard of it.

And as to Don Schmierer, the fact that he’s gentle and soft-spoken is quite irrelevant, and as I’ve pointed out before, Don Schmierer’s life’s mission of convincing hurting gay people that they have to change who they are in order to find favor with God is not love, but instead, intense hatred at its core. Schmierer may not feel that he’s being hateful, but because he is working within the hateful, unscientific, and verifiably harmful “ex-gay” movement, he is a party to that hatred, and any blood that is spilled is equally on his hands. Besides, people much closer to the situation than I am tried to warn Schmierer not to go. Schmierer doesn’t seem to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, in general, but when he allowed himself to be associated with this, even after being warned of the nature of the event and the character of the people involved, he signed off on it.

You can read Knight’s entire bilious screed if you want, but the quote above is really all you need to know. As he comes near to the close of his piece, he says this:

The Times’ editors need to come to terms with their knee-jerk spasms against evangelical Christians and others who defend family values. They routinely depict pro-marriage Americans as motivated solely by hatred and prejudice, never by genuine, heartfelt concerns.

Yeah, well, this isn’t about “pro-marriage Americans,” Bob. This is about three men who went to a nation already rife with homophobia and handed them the proverbial gun needed to justify their desires to go ahead and start killing gay people.

You should be ashamed of yourself, for the hatred and prejudice you euphemistically refer to as “genuine, heartfelt concerns,” and to which you are now giving aid and comfort, is on the verge of producing a verifiable bodycount in Uganda.

I’m quite sure there were apologists for the Spanish Inquisition, and I bet they had “genuine, heartfelt concerns,” too.

UPDATE: Wayne left this comment below, but I thought it deserved to be highlighted within the piece:

I stood next to Mr. Knight in 1998 at The National Press Club in Washington. He was there to tout a million dollar Pray Away the Gay advertising campaign called “Truth In Love.” Mr. Knight called this effort the “Normandy Landing in the Cultural War.”

The press conference featured John Paulk and Michael Johnston, the two ex-gay poster-boys of this time period.

In 2000, I photographed Paulk in a gay bar. In 2003, with the help of attorney Michael Hamer, we caught Johnston having gay Internet orgies. He disappeared after admitting a “moral fall”.

The bottom line is that Mr. Knight has paraded so-called “ex-gays” in front of America before. His so-called success stories did not pan out. His track record is abysmal.

Clearly, Mr. Knight has squandered his credibility on this issue and is the last person in America who should be saying that one can go from gay to straight. His own very public activism strongly suggests otherwise.

Mr. Knight must believe people are either stupid or have amnesia. However, many of us remember the fraud he perpetrated in 1998.

To try to pull the same craven and cynical publicity stunt in 2010, suggests a man with few scruples, a capacity for intellectual dishonesty and an addiction to propaganda that neatly fits into his warped world view.

Mr. Knight, is it not time you tiptoe off the public stage before you further humiliate yourself and do more harm to your cause?

Read in The Miami Herald (Steve Rothaus)

For a time after its founder D. James Kennedy recently passed away, there was hope that Fort Lauderdale-based Coral Ridge Ministries would go in a new direction.

For decades, the church had been a rabidly anti-gay organization that had employed attack dogs, such as the notorious Janet Folger. The church spearheaded the 1998 “Truth in Love” ex-gay campaign. (It ended badly after two of the campaign’s stars were caught having gay relations) But since Kennedy’s departure, Coral Ridge had been relatively quiet on divisive social issues.

Unfortunately, it seems their new pastor, Rev. Tullian Tchividjian, wants to reignite the culture wars. His General in this fight is Robert Knight, a veteran in these battles. Knight had recently been laid off from the Media Research Center’s Culture and Media Institute. He had also worked for Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council.

Already one can see Knight’s deleterious influence on Coral Ridge. The website’s homepage is packed with shameless lies about hate crime legislation and it also promotes theocracy in America. (This brings us back to Kennedy’s dishonest days when the pastor even flirted with Reconstructionsism – a brand of Christian fanaticism that calls for homosexuals to be stoned to death.)

Knight is best known for his paranoid – if not delusional – rantings about the gay movement’s secret desire to stamp out the free speech of radical Christians. He is one of the right’s most nefarious propagandists and is severely truth challenged. Knight is also known for his sexual immaturity and penchant to make crude anti-gay wisecracks. At one event I attended, he joked about chubby lesbians in beer halls. Knight is also obsessed with gay sex and is closest in tone to Peter Labarbera. The two men worked together in the late 90′s at the Family Research Council and were like bosom buddies.

It seems that preaching the Bible was not enough to sustain the congregation – so Coral Ridge has returned to anti-gay bile. On the sun-drenched shores of Fort Lauderdale, Coral Ridge Ministries is still in the spiritual darkness.