The idea that one’s sexual orientation can be changed through therapy is a dangerous lie, and has been discredited by medical and counseling organizations. Please join the Southern Poverty Law Center, GetEqual, and Truth Wins Out to learn from experts about this fraudulent practice, share stories about “conversion therapy,” and understand how we can protect LGBT rights. This is an event that you will not want to miss!
BALTIMORE, MD
Thursday, Dec. 15
6-8 pm · 2640 Co-op
2640 Saint Paul Street
TWO’s Wayne Besen will be joined by “ex-gay” survivor Chris Camp. Free Refreshments Provided
splcenter.org/conversion-therapy
RSVP appreciated but not required. Call 855.841.8356 or email ashley@splcenter.org
Help expose the lies behind “conversion” therapy and help other LGBT people who have undergone or are considering “therapy” to “cure” themselves.
Occasionally it’s good to check in and see what our favorite anti-gay hate groups are up to when they’re not hating gay people. Lest we fail to understand that the fights for LGBT equality and reproductive rights are inextricably linked — they are both about the ability of fundamentalist Christian men to control the bodies and sex lives and autonomy of anyone who doesn’t look like them — let’s take a look at the “personhood amendment” being debated in Mississippi right now.
If you’re not familiar with a “personhood amendment,” it goes like this:
Garden variety “pro-life” people tend to be concerned with stopping abortion, and favor using the law to enforce that, rather than actually fighting for things like economic freedom for poor women and sex education, things which have been proven to reduce the need for abortion. [Those are the things the pro-choice movement works toward.] However, there is a subset within the activist anti-choice movement which seeks dominion over all female bodies, and will go to any length to achieve it. A “personhood amendment” would codify in a state’s Constitution that human life begins at the point of fertilization and grant that embryo all the rights of an actual human being. This is patently insane to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the human reproductive process. By this definition of “personhood,” millions of people “die” every day when embryos which haven’t yet implanted simply don’t turn into actual pregnancies. They aren’t even miscarriages.
The result of such an amendment would, of course, go around Roe v. Wade and ban all abortion in a state, but it would also put in danger lots of other things 99% of women take for granted in the United States. Irin Carmon has a great piece in Salon today which exposes what Mississippi is trying to do right now:
[T]he Personhood movement hopes to do nothing less than reclassify everyday, routine birth control as abortion. The medical definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg successfully implants in the uterine wall. If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.
On the chopping block: the morning-after pill, IUD’s, most forms of in vitro fertilization and, according to some, the regular old birth control pill. Moreover, the door would be open to investigating women who have recently miscarried. It happens in lots of countries.
You may be reading this and thinking, “that is insane. Nobody is that insane.” Have you met Fundamentalist Christian men before?
But a Colorado-based Personhood activist, Ed Hanks, is more than willing to publicly take things to their logical conclusion. He wrote on the Personhood Mississippi Facebook page that after abortion is banned, “the penalties have to be the same [for a women as well as doctors], as they would have to intentionally commit a known felony in order to kill their child. Society isn’t comfortable with this yet because abortion has been ‘normalized’ — as the Personhood message penetrates, then society will understand why women need to be punished just as surely as they understand why there can be no exceptions for rape/incest.”
[...]
At several public forums organized by the secretary of state to discuss ballot initiatives, resident Scott Murray’s statement was typical: “I know there is an issue with pregnancies, unmarried pregnancies, but I tell you the greatest prevention is God, and we’ve got to return to God.” So was Stephen Hannabass’ assertion that “we’ve got to repent. We’ve got to come before God and beg for mercy for our state and for our country.”
You see, if Mississippi just “repents” and “turns back to God,” there won’t be any problems anymore! Left unmentioned by these men, of course, is the fact that Mississippi has one of the worst infant morality rates in the nation, as well as one of the worst rates of child poverty. For these people, life truly begins at conception and concern for it ends at birth, especially if you happen to be a woman.
Irin explains that this measure [which was once supported by most Mississippians, until they actually heard the details of it] didn’t really have legs until one of our favorite hate groups got involved. Yes, the American Family Association is an anti-gay hate group, but it’s also an anti-woman and anti-family hate group:
It was the American Family Association endorsement that put media muscle behind the movement in Mississippi, with email blasts, radio PSAs and interviews, promotions on its own website, and combined with the grass-roots energy, the state’s anti-choice groups took notice. Suddenly, people who had previously focused on incremental change – parental consent laws, waiting periods, ultrasound laws – were ecstatically heralding an end of the “murders.” Mike Huckabee keynoted a fundraiser and even presumed GOP front-runner Mitt Romney to endorse the concept on his show.
Ta-da! When they’re not letting Bryan Fischer lie shamelessly about gay people and screaming and crying about hardware stores being mean to them, the AFA is quietly working to take away most of women’s fundamental rights over what they can and cannot do with their bodies. I cannot imagine what the next step would be, should something like this ever pass. Once they have women’s reproductive systems firmly in their hands, will they move on to controlling what they eat or when they speak? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Please, do yourself a favor and read Irin’s whole piece. The part about how this could affect the treatment of ectopic pregnancies will make you sick. There is a good chance that, as the details of the Personhood Movement, and their true goals, come to light, that this will go down in history as one of the patriarchy’s grand overreaches. I hope so. Again, 99% of women think birth control is just great.
And remember — groups like the American Family Association don’t just hate you as an LGBT person. They hate you in any way you might be different from their poorly conceived, bastardized fundamentalist “Christian” view of how people should live.
UPDATE: Two more things. First, here is the video from Freda Bush, a proponent of the amendment, who is also an OB-GYN. Watch as she lies through her teeth about what this bill is about.
Her lies are solidly refuted in Irin Carmon’s piece.
Peter has shared some words about Jim Swilley, the Georgia megachurch pastor who has shown himself to be a man of integrity and honesty, by coming out to his congregation and the world as a gay man. Peter obviously doesn’t really “do Bible interpretation” beyond whatever pop-up version he keeps in his basement dungeon, having sharpie’d “NO GAYZ” all over the thousands of verses about caring for the poor, etc. Anyway, Peter says:
“This so-called ‘Bishop’ Swilley is a very confused man,” laments Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH). “He thinks he’s being honest about — quote — ‘who he is,’ but actually, he’s compromising the Word of God and he’s Christianizing sin, which is impossible.”
“Bishop” Swilley…if that is his REAL NAME…
LaBarbera contends Swilley should step down from his ministerial position, stop preaching the Word of God, and repent of his sin and the advocacy of it. Swilly [sic] has shared that his congregation has been supportive of his coming out for the most part, but the AFTAH president is not surprised that some members of his church have left.
So Peter concedes that Swilley is preaching the word of God. Interesting.
“There’s no doubt in the Bible about whether homosexual practice is a sin,” the conservative advocate points out. “He says he knew he was — quote — ‘gay’ since he was a boy. Most boys don’t think about sex, much less homosexuality, so we’re wondering what happened in his early life. Obviously, he’s a confused man.”
Most boys don’t think about sex?! Uh. Actually? What world did Peter grow up in where boys don’t start thinking about sex the second their bodies start changing? My goodness.
Scott Lively made his career by perpetuating the revisionist lie that the Third Reich was a homosexual movement, claiming that only burly macho male homosexuals were capable of committing the heinous genocide of the Holocaust. Last year he went to Uganda and told that audience that not only was the Holocaust perpetuated by homosexuals, but that the Rwandan genocide was also likely the work of male homosexuals. For these and many other reasons, most any group affiliated with Scott Lively in any way has earned a spot on the SPLC’s list of anti-gay hate groups. Perhaps the American Family Association is angling for such a designation itself. I can’t imagine why, since they surely know, privately, that virtually no one under 35 in this country supports people like them. This is why they’re all pathetically trying to “reach out to millenials,” a group which is blessedly out of their grasp, for the most part, as a voting bloc. But as long as they allow Bryan Fischer to speak, we can only deduce that the AFA has completely jumped the shark into full-on Fred Phelps/Scott Lively territory, and that they should be addressed as such.
So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn’t the Germans, didn’t the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Browshirts, were male homosexuals.
He doesn’t specifically cite Scott Lively, but again, we know where that particular lie came from, so Lively’s work is obviously informing Bryan Fischer. The problem here is this: Scott Lively is completely fringe and respected by very few people in the United States, and instead has to run off to foreign lands to spread his bile, places where people might not Google him quite so quickly. Fred Phelps has no credibility with anyone, anywhere. But there are still many Evangelical churches where the American Family Association is considered just a normal, run-of-the-mill Christian organization like any other. We who have been paying attention to their radicalization know otherwise.
In my opinion, this should earn the AFA a hate group designation on two fronts: Both as an anti-gay group and as an anti-Semitic group. It is my strongly held belief that anyone who seeks to obfuscate or revise ANY part of the well documented history of the Holocaust for their own purposes is engaging in fierce anti-Semitism. This should not be a surprise coming from a Fundamentalist Christian source, as I explained fully here. To use that very real event and scare-monger people into believing that the perpetrators of the greatest genocide in recent memory were such monsters due to their alleged homosexuality is beyond the pale, and it’s nothing short of a modern-day blood libel. (Again, not surprising coming from a fundamentalist strain of Christendom, since Christendom frickin’ created the blood libel. And I don’t want to hear any fundamentalist Evangelicals giving me any crap about how that was Catholics, because a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist. I don’t care what strain of that virus you’re infected by, because the behaviors and the end result tend to be the same.)
When Wayne went to the extremist Awakening conference, Matt Barber and Andrea Lafferty acted as if there was much ado about nothing, since all Wayne had seen was “Christian compassion” overflowing within those walls.
So, in the interest of sharing their “Christian compassion” with a wider audience, let’s watch the aforementioned Andrea Lafferty on CBS, abusing the Human Rights Campaign’s Alyson Robinson, a transgender woman, on the subject of ENDA. Drink every time she says the words “mental disorder” to Alyson’s face.
The new definition of “Christian compassion,” apparently, is “malignant lying spewed by the leader of a Southern Poverty Law Center-certified hate group.”
“Progressives” are like pig farmers. In an effort to bury opposing viewpoints they sling pejorative slop, labeling as “bigot,” “hater,” “wingnut” or “racist” those with whom they disagree. It’ the height of intellectual sloth.
Except for when they’re, you know hateful racists, or bigoted wingnuts. It’s actually okay to point out that some people are not motivated by facts or evidence, but by bigotry, racism, hatred or some other form of wingnuttery. See: Entire Religious Right. Also? Pigs need slop to live, so in this utterly failed analogy, we are the farmers, they are the pigs, and we are FEEDING THEM.
Real America for the win!
The ad hominem approach — chief among logical fallacies — undergirds an effort to both marginalize conservative viewpoints and avoid arguing on the merits the controversies of the day. For liberals, to set sail in fair debate is to navigate treacherous waters.
I guess we can discount all of the ad hominem attacks levied by Matt Barber throughout his career, then. Wait, then he would have no career.
We’ve seen this tired tactic abused ad nauseum in recent days by the mainstream media and Democrats.
Bam Bam, lay off the Latin expressions until you learn how to spell them.
Aided by hard-left outfits such as the Southern Poverty Law Center — all too eager to provide “expert analysis” tailor-made for jaundiced journalism — liberal elites have been desperate to throw poison on bourgeoning grassroots opposition to Obama’ careening Marxist agenda.
“Burgeoning.” It’s “burgeoning.” And Marxism has an entire definition and a history that is easily accessible to people with internetz. You can’t just use loaded phrases that your readers are too stoopid to understand in order to scare them. (Oh wait, I forgot this was posted at TownHall. My bad. Spelling errors and specious scare terms are a GO!)
It’ straight out of the “progressive” playbook: Saul Alinsky’ “Rules for Radicals.”
The one all the teabaggers have been reading?
Hence, in the face of zero supporting evidence, “Tea Party” conservatives, Constitutionalists, pro-life and pro-family Americans, and generally any patriot who disagrees with the Obama administration are smeared with “hate’” broad brush.
Grandma and Grandpa; your fireman neighbor; school teachers; pastors; butchers; bakers; and candlestick makers are now “potentially violent right-wing extremists.”
Interesting that he goes straight to a nursery rhyme about naked dudes just cold tubbin’ it up together. Now we know where they strategize.
They are, as Mark Potok, Huffington Post columnist and SPLC director puts it, “…shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism,” and are widely linked to “hate” and “vigilante groups.” (Knock it off, Mark. With the exception of your fellow moveon.org-types, the vast majority of Americans aren’t biting.)
Ooh, Mark, Bam Bam told you to “knock it off,” and if you haven’t heard, he has a totally macho “right hook.”
Nonetheless, every once in a while, as it goes, “even a blind squirrel finds a nut.”
What the hell are you doing with a blind squirrel in the bathtub? Rub-a-dub-dub, indeed.
While I rarely agree with the Mark Potoks of the world, today, on at least one issue, I find myself doing so. Cult leader Fred Phelps and his Westboro brood of “God hates F-gs” fame are infused to the marrow with pure, unadulterated hate.
Agree. Wait, let me guess, he’s about to say he and his boyfriend Peter LaBarbera are different from Phelps somehow. Watch this, this is the “right hook” I was talking about:
I pray that Phelps and Co. will both repent and seek Christ’ redemption for the harm they’ve caused people like the Snyders. I also pray that liberals will repent. By lumping together with Phelps those who recognize traditional, biblical sexual morality, homosexual activists and the left-wing media trivialize true hate.
See, instead of lumping people who hate gay people together in the same boat (spare us the B.S. about “loving the sinner and hating the sin,” because it’s unscientific, dishonest, and utterly in denial of reality), we should lump the anti-gay haters who are most honest about their bigotry in with…liberals! Surprise right hook land on liberals!
Indeed, many Americans — perhaps most — adhere to the biblical notion that all sexual conduct outside the bonds of marriage between one man and one woman is sexually immoral.
Oh, really, Bam Bam? How do you then explain the fact that 95% of Americans have had premarital sex? Are they all acting outside their belief systems, or is it that most people really don’t buy into that Religious Right asshattery anymore?
(Sorry liberals, that’ just the way it is; nothing personal. Despite disingenuous bleatings to the contrary, such beliefs are typically as far removed from hate as Phelps is from cuddly. Every major world religion, thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology hold this to be true. And as with all absolute truth, it just is.)
Nope, I just proved you wrong. Also? “Thousands of years of history” actually don’t show that people don’t have sex out of wedlock, and human biology doesn’t say a word about “premarital sex,” so really, what the hell is Bam Bam talking about? “Absolute Truth”? Ha. Prove it.
Oops, forgot what kind of audience he’s writing for again. Made-up crap pulled out of one’s abundant nether regions that serves to regurgitate wingnut food back into wingnut mouths is a GO!
So, Fred Phelps aside, every time you hear some lefty like Anderson Cooper or Keith Olbermann despicably refer to Bible-believing Christians as “homophobes,” or who call grandma a “teabagger” (slang for a vile homosexual act), consider who the real haters are.
Um, the ones who write columns full of ad hominem, fact-free, link-free nonsense that target all LGBT people as immoral god-haters, maybe? Also, I had no idea that “teabagger” (a name they gave themselves, remember…that’s how old these people are, that none of them had any idea what it actually meant) was a gay term. Does it have something to do with the fact that ladies are discouraged from using their mouths for any reason in Fundamentalist circles?
Whenever Mark Potok, Rachel Maddow or some liberal politico in Congress attempts to equate conservative Joe to a “right wing extremists” or a “domestic terrorist,” contemplate who the true bigots are.
Usually we reserve those terms for the people throwing bricks through the windows of Congressional offices, the ones who phone in death threats to liberal congressmen, and, you know, Christian militias who want to kill police officers. The fact that mediocre wingnuts like Barber are so upset about the usage of the words is more revelatory about them than it is about us.
The palpable irony is that leftists — with their slanderous name-calling, harsh judgments and ad hominem attacks — are, in truth, more like Phelps than those they falsely accuse.
Oh, something is palpable, but I don’t think it’s irony.
Anyway, Bam Bam, sorry your bestest fwiend is still on the hate group list, quite deservedly, and that the SPLC is sticking by it. Wingnuts tend to think that if they bellyache enough that people will roll over to serve the psychological needs of their parallel reality, and sometimes it works, but the American people are starting to wake up to the harsh reality that fundamentalist Christians are actually not very nice people, in the way they meddle and want to take away rights and liberties from people they’ve never met, and who never want to meet them, but who they live amongst as a consequence of living in a secular, open society.
It must suck having every pretense of your worldview summarily disproven, but them’s the breaks. Get a new worldview that’s supported by reality, and maybe we liberals won’t be so goshdarn mean anymore.
Progress demands a vigorous, open and honest debate. “Progressives” should quit the empty name calling and stop running-scared from true progress.
True progress, in this instance, is best defined as “a return to the Christian Dark Ages,” before thinking people started discovering things and learning, etc. And I’m not sure how to end this, because that’s how Matt ends his column, abruptly and without any resolution or proven thesis whatsoever, so, um…
Here’s a really good song by Jill Sobule about people like Matt Barber and Peter LaBarbera. I have it on good authority that she really, really loves that sissy picture of Bam Bam at the top of this post.
It is clear that he is about to humiliate himself with his upcoming book, “The Gay Gene Hoax”. Although I have not read much of his polemic, what I have so far seen is as insufferable as it is inaccurate.
Sorba is a dilettante who has no understanding of the topic matter and essentially footnotes bad information hoping his audience is too uneducated to notice.
His book is also a poorly orchestrated hit job on activists, such as myself, who have shown the notion of “ex-gay” to be a myth.
For example, on page 77 of his sophistic screed Sorba writes, “In all likelihood, the man (Wayne Besen)is a calculating and manipulative liar.” (Needless to say, the unbalanced minds at Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX) chortled over this attack.)
Interestingly, a few pages later (89) the presumably honest and forthright Sorba quotes the debunked 1979 Masters & Johnson book, “Homosexuality in Perspective” to support his flimsy arguments.
It seems that Sorba is shockingly unaware that the book he quotes was disavowed last year by Virginia Johnson in Thomas Maier’s groundbreaking book Masters of Sex.
Indeed, the results were said to have been entirely fabricated.
Virginia Johnson actually argued in 1978 that “Homosexuality in Perspective” should never have seen the light of day — but it was already too late in the publishing process to undo the damage.
For someone who fancies himself an expert, it is incredible that Sorba was not informed on this major development, considering articles were published on Maier’s book in major newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Maybe Sorba was so busy watching FOX News and reading The Washington Times that he missed the widely publicized information. To help bring him up to speed, here is an excerpt from the Washington Post:
He (William Masters) was also the driving force behind the team’s controversial embrace of conversion therapy for gays. In “Homosexuality in Perspective” (1979), he and Johnson claimed they could straighten out gay men or women in a matter of weeks, with a “failure rate” of only one-third. Buttressed with phony case studies, the book’s findings were quickly denounced by the medical establishment and seized upon just as quickly by the religious right as evidence that gay lifestyles were a choice, not an orientation.
So Masters and Johnson bear some of the blame for the “ex-gay” ministries that currently litter our cultural landscape…
The very foundation that Sorba uses to back his case is a house of cards that had already fallen. Clearly, Sorba is profoundly ignorant of his subject matter, irredeemably truth challenged or so contemptuous of his conservative readers that he believes they will take his erroneous words at face value.
I found this glaring error in about five minutes of research. I can only imagine the treasure trove of embarrassing gaffes to be found with a full-length reading. Even a cursory five-minute glance at Sorba’s sloppy research shows that he is not ready for Prime Time.
We knew that, after unceremoniously being stripped of your designation as an SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group last year, you would take that as a signal that you simply hadn’t been applying yourself. Well, Laurie Higgins, you got that message, didn’t you, and you put in the necessary hours of abject, irrational hatred in order to retake your place on the roster of extremist hate groups. Brava, Laurie! You are now again officially recognized as the bona fide hate queen you always were in your heart, and have taken back your rightful place in the hallowed halls of organizations which are dangerous to the fabric of this great country! Now, go take your seat next to the Ku Klux Klan. They’ve missed you!
The idea that one’s sexual orientation can be changed through therapy is a dangerous lie, and has been discredited by medical and counseling organizations. Please join the Southern Poverty Law Center, GetEqual, and Truth Wins Out to learn from experts about this fraudulent practice, share stories about “conversion therapy,” and understand how we can protect LGBT rights. This is an event that you will not want to miss!
Poor
by Virginia Johnson in Thomas Maier’s 
