Instead of engaging in true conversation through schools’ Gay-Straight Alliances or the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network’s annual Day of Silence, Exodus continues to con its youth groups into a phony, egocentric conversation amongst themselves.

Exodus’ DOT website now hosts two new videos featuring what it calls “man on the street” interviews at an unidentified school:

The interviewees are reasonably diverse, but ignorant of antigay violence and bullying — and kept ignorant by Exodus. Besides sidestepping the focus of the Day of Silence, the videos also perpetuate Exodus International’s relativist habit of encouraging people to define reality to be whatever they want it to be — not what medical, statistical, and psychiatric facts dictate.

Besides fact-deficient videos, the DOT offers:

a “survey” in which antigay youths and faculty are encouraged to invent their own reality.
a “supplies” store where people can buy posters, shirts, and cards that, again, are free of any troubling doses of factual reality.

Until Exodus supports and interacts with existing channels such as GSAs and GLSEN, its DOT must be regarded as a campaign to deliberately suppress public awareness of antigay violence, to sidestep real conversation, and to insulate self-identified “Christians” from reality.

Focus on the Family blasts the Day of Silence — GLSEN’s annual antiviolence vigil and conversation-starter in schools — as a sinister manifestation of the “homosexual agenda.”

Focus is alarmed that the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network encourages schools to acknowledge the existence of LGBT youth — such acknowledgment being an obvious prerequisite to stopping violence against those youth.

Instead of acknowledging that gender- and orientation-variant youth exist and should not be assaulted and intimidated with impunity, Focus claims that the ex-gay activist group Exodus International offers “redemptive truth” as an alternative to nonviolence.

Exodus’ Day of Truth, purposely scheduled one day prior to the Day of Silence, condemns LGBT youth to hell and urges “Christian” youths to view their LGBT-tolerant classmates as inferior prior to any “conversation” about violence that the Day of Silence might otherwise prompt.

Violence does not concern Focus; “lesbian, gay and bisexual materials in the classroom” do.

Focus and Exodus are purposely ignorant of the New Testament’s repeated admonitions against violence toward ethnic and gender minorities; and where Focus and Exodus claim to be knowledgeable, the knowledge is false. “The biblical truth for sexuality” — as interpreted by their mentor James Dobson — isn’t Biblical at all. It is a 1950s TV sitcom fantasy of heterosexual marriage at age 18 followed by premature child-raising and lives of suffocating gender-role conformity. This myth of white suburban Americana rejects the Bible’s conflicting affirmations of celibate evangelism, polygamy, rape, and same-sex relationships; ignores the ethnicity and modest living standards of Biblical characters; and applauds the Bible’s ignorance of crucial scientific and historical facts.

Do Focus or Exodus offer Biblical truth? No. Redemption? No. Freedom from violence? Absolutely not. What they do offer is little more than a cocoon of smug self-satisfaction, ethnic and sexual ignorance, and the sort of hypocritical moralizing and intimidation that Jesus of Nazareth reputedly condemned.

I’m usually the snarky one who’s not fazed by wingnut nonsense, but this is disgusting:

If you’re a high school in Mississippi and you really don’t want your students bringing same-sex dates to the prom, what are you to do?

Well, you could try to ban them from coming to the prom, although that’s illegal. Or, if you’re the Itawamba Agricultural High School, you can cancel the prom altogether and punish everyone. That’s right. No gay couples. No straight couples. No prom.

Isn’t it amazing the depths folks will go in order to continue homophobic policies? That this school wanted to stop a lesbian student from bringing a same-sex date to the prom was outrageous enough. But to cancel the entire prom just to take aim at this student is punishing every single person in the school. So much for school’s acting in the best interests of their students.

The school is called Itawamba Agricultural High School. So I have two questions for the Itawamba County School Board:

1. Exactly how many self-loathing closet cases are on your board? Because this is extreme, even for Mississippi.

2. What’s wrong, Mississippi? Were you worried that Virginia was out-wingnutting you this week, and you had to do something grotesque to prove that you’re the dumbest, most unreconstructed bigots in the Union?

Later in the above quoted piece, we hear from the lesbian student:

The student at the heart of this case is a senior named Constance McMillen. Reached by the Clarion Ledger, McMillen said she was absolutely disgusted that her school would try to punish her by canceling the prom for everyone.

“Oh, my God. That’s really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one,” she said. “A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this, so in a way it’ really retaliation.”

Oh, but we’re supposed to believe that the Wingnut Right really cares about bullying of LGBT students? No, as Timothy Kincaid pointed out last year, some of their leading “pro-family” voices indeed view bullying LGBT students as a Christian duty.

They are the true sick people. Not happy, healthy LGBT people. We’re fine.

When Family Research Council spokesman Peter Sprigg told MSNBC on Tuesday that LGBT people should be thrown in prison for their alleged private behavior, it escaped the attention of the news media that Sprigg is also a board member and spokesman for an FRC offshoot called Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays, which distributes antigay propaganda in public schools.

Sprigg is also one of the few local citizens to serve on a citizens’ advisory board for Montgomery County Public Schools in Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs.

Just two days after Sprigg proudly declared that LGBT people of all ages should be imprisoned, the school district sent students home with PFOX brochures. The brochures tell students that if they are same-sex attracted, it is OK to be of two minds, to conceal one’s attractions from friends and family, to be dishonest, and proclaim one’s so-called heterosexuality. And while PFOX opposes any right to self-determination for persons who wish to be honest about their orientation, it doesn’t acknowledge this in the brochures; instead, PFOX portrays students who seek to be sexually honest and free from bullying as if they are oppressing those students wish to hide in shame and to bully or imprison others.

Neither the literature nor the school district tell students any of the following truths: (Read More)

In an article at ChristianExaminer.com, ex-gay activist Greg Quinlan asserts that one cannot be gay, monogamous, and Christian; repeats his unproven claim to have volunteered for the Human Rights Campaign; and projects his own past “shallow, lust-filled and immature” lifestyle onto all sexually honest persons living today.

Quinlan says these things during a visit to San Diego for the National Education Association’ convention on behalf of the antigay parents’ group P-FOX and its “Ex-Gay Educators’ Caucus.” He also consults for the New Jersey Family Policy Council, an affiliate of Focus on the Family. (P-FOX recently gave up its affiliation with Exodus International.)

Quinlan is pushing for access to teachers in an effort to oppose the union’ push for same-sex marriage rights to ease the social and economic burden on children of gay couples, and the union’s push for a curriculum that opposes antigay stereotypes and bullying.

Quinlan hopes to change public schools’ curricula by opposing comprehensive sex education and by changing science lessons so that they conform to the ex-gay myths of P-FOX mentors Richard Cohen and NARTH.

He blames his own past homosexual behavior on an “abusive ‘Archie Bunker-type’ father,” followed by an inability to reconcile his sexual behavior with his faith and identity in a healthy and responsible fashion.

Instead of life improving at home, the father’ abuse toward him worsened. Eventually he filled his desperate need for affection at the hands of a young teen boy who introduced him to sex. Quinlan said he became a willing molestation victim.

Unfortunately, Quinlan now works to deny gay youths the safe and affirming support that might have protected him from “willing molestation” at the hands of an older boy.

Because his own same-sex attractions allegedly faded during counseling for his father’s abuse, Quinlan campaigns to coerce sexual change in persons whose same-sex orientation is not derived from environmental factors such as abuse or parental neglect.

For a trend toward increasing sexual honesty among gay youths in the schools, Quinlan blames Christians who are not emphatic enough in silencing gay youth and coercing change.

“We’ve allowed this to happen,” he said. “There are so many Secret Service Christians who need to come out of the closet, but we also need to know how to argue and debate persuasively. This conspiracy and its wheel have been around for decades.”

Quinlan has yet to demonstrate that he can argue and debate persuasively, however — his past efforts have been hindered by anger, stereotypes, strawman arguments, and disrespect for those who are sexually honest. Are we now to believe that a kinder, gentler Greg Quinlan is emerging?

Addendum: Almost one year after Quinlan was caught lying about mainstream professional mental-health consensus regarding ex-gay therapy, and in particular lying about the human-genome research of Dr. Francis Collins, Good As You noted last week that Quinlan is repeating the same lies in order to rationalize his opposition to federal legislation that would equalize punishment for antigay hate crimes.

“True Tolerance,” a campaign of Focus on the Family that enjoys promotional support from Exodus International, may be having an impact upon public schools:

As many as 107 Tennessee public school districts recently began blocking student access to gay health, science, family, and education resources. Instead, students who seek accurate information are being confined to ex-gay resources that have been rejected as inaccurate and harmful by professional medical and mental-health organizations.

Banned resources include:

• Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)
• The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN)
• Human Rights Campaign (HRC)
• Marriage Equality USA
• Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry
• The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)
• Dignity USA (an organization for LGBT Catholics)

“True Tolerance” is an antigay response to the Day of Silence, GLSEN’s national campaign to discourage violence in public schools. The antigay project espouses tolerance of outspoken on-campus activism by antigay Christians — and intolerance of those who oppose antigay violence or who disagree with discredited ex-gay propaganda. Without offering evidence, “True Tolerance” accuses antiviolence advocates of waging a “monopoly” and a “pro-gay agenda.”

The campaign does not claim responsibility for Internet restrictions in Tennessee specifically, but the web site encourages antigay activists to pressure schools to silence the allegedly “unbalanced” messages of the antiviolence crowd and to silence “vulnerable children” (teen-agers) who seek to be honest about their sexuality.

If pressure tactics don’t work, then True Tolerance lobs legal threats against antiviolence efforts. First, the campaign warns against schools’ fears of “legal liability for not making their school ‘safe.’” True Tolerance dismisses the simple fact that antigay violence is making schools unsafe, and that parents of bullied youths are suing. Instead, True Tolerance offers to arm antigay activists with unspecified “legally accurate facts” in opposition to mandatory “diversity” policies. It would seem that, in the view of Exodus and Focus, “true tolerance” in schools cannot and should not be diverse enough to include bullied youths, their friends, or their parents.

Official efforts to “protect” mature students from the facts about gay health, science, family issues, and education are having a negative impact on Tennessee schools.

Karyn Storts-Brinks, a librarian at Fulton High School in Knoxville, points out:

Students who need to do research for assignments on current events can only get one viewpoint, keeping them from being able to cover both sides of the issue. That’ not fair and can hinder their schoolwork.

Box Turtle Bulletin reports:

The ACLU is giving the districts until April 29 to come up with a plan to provide access to LGBT sites or any other category that blocks non-sexual websites advocating the fair treatment of LGBT people by the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year.

It’s been a heady couple of weeks for gay activists — and it keeps getting better. There were twin marriage victories in the unlikely states of Vermont and Iowa — doubling the number of places where gay people can get hitched. If that wasn’t enough, the New York Times reports that New York Gov. David Paterson will unveil plans this week to introduce marriage equality legislation.

On New York City’s Upper West Side, The Jewish Alliance for Change presented a benefit concert on Monday evening for marriage equality that featured a stunning array of stars. I spoke at the event and followed Linda Lavin — who played the lead in the television show “Alice.” It was exhilarating to be among the Broadway glitz and glamour. Most important, the event encapsulated what the movement has worked decades to achieve: broad mainstream support and cultural acceptance.

Unfortunately, while our movement bathed in the well-deserved spotlight, not everyone felt its warm glow. There are still gay people — particularly of school age — who feel the cool sting of homophobia. They are teased, harassed, humiliated and beaten on a daily basis. They enter the schoolyard in sheer terror — as if it were a prison yard ruled by fearsome gangs. (Read More)

On April 25, antigay activists — among them, Exodus and Focus on the Family — sought to disrupt antiviolence vigils in schools across the country. They sponsored walkouts and demonstrations in which religious activists, parents, and bullies sought to change the topic of the day from stopping violence in schools to venting prejudices and hostility toward gay youths. They followed up their efforts to shout down antiviolence vigils with a religious-right “Day of (Un)Truth” in schools on April 28; that day was dedicated exclusively to broadcasting religious rightists’ antigay prejudices and arrogant religious judgmentalism in public schools during school hours.

Because of antigay authorities’ refusal to stop antigay violence in schools, support for Days of Silence continues to grow. Plans are afoot for Days of Silence are afoot in Russia, Poland and Slovenia — regions where U.S. antigay pastor and Exodus speaker Ken Hutcherson has fueled antigay violence through his co-leadership of the Slavic hate group called Watchmen on the Walls. (Read More)

The April 25 national Day Of Silence unites students in a silent vigil against violence in schools, and in commemoration of the lives of Lawrence King and thousands of other youths who have been killed or assaulted because of their sexual orientation or gender expression.

The April 28 Day of Truth is something entirely different:

It is a pernicious effort by Exodus, the antigay Alliance Defense Fund, Focus on the Family, ex-gay activist Scott Lively, ex-gay activist Stephen Bennett, Mission: America, and other pro-bigotry organizations to divert public attention from school violence in order to discuss their fixation with homosexual sex on public-school property during school hours.

(Read More)

Teach The Facts, a group of Montgomery County, Maryland, parents and educators, offers a run-down on PFOX ex-gay literature that was distributed last week to local high-school students. TTF’s main points:

• The PFOX literature falsely claims that PFOX promotes tolerance, but PFOX’s web site is loaded with literature opposing tolerance.
• The PFOX literature illogically asserts that ex-gay self-denial, self-deception, and failure serve as proof that GLBT youth can and should seek help from unlicensed ex-gay therapists and political groups.
• The PFOX literature falsely insinuates that ex-gay activists who seek to silence and suppress gay students support self-determination, while advocates for academic freedom, tolerance, learning, and nonviolence oppose self-determination and happiness.