As you all know, Apple pulled the bigoted Exodus iPhone app after our petition drew over 150,000 signatures from customers demanding that the company treat anti-gay apps the same way they would racist or anti-Semitic apps. In reality, it never should have been approved in the first place, but mistakes are made sometimes, and Apple has corrected it. Unfortunately, a writer at another gay blog seems to have a problem with that, so I’d like to take a few minutes to set the record straight by responding to any misunderstandings they may have about what this was and was not about, starting with our old, original logo, with its completely wrongheaded accompanying caption:
Here is the oh-so-cute caption they placed beneath that graphic: “…But only if opposing viewpoints are effectively silenced?”
Um, no. The entire Religious Right has a louder voice in this country than their numbers would suggest, and no one is taking anything from them that falls under the category of “freedom of speech.” But more on that later. Let’s have a look-see at the article:
So why are we not exactly celebrating here at AfterElton? First, we’re bracing for the inevitable: complaints from groups like Exodus, AFA and NOM that this is yet another example of “gay activists” bullying and trying to silence Christians.
Yes, that’s what they say every single time their fee fees get hurt, on every loud speaker they can find. Their views, somehow, are never silenced, especially by Truth Wins Out and the other gay news sources which actually are experts on the Religious Right, who make a daily practice of quoting these people’s words verbatim. If we were trying to “silence” their voices, we’d hide under a rock and hope that makes them go away. Moving on:
Second, and more importantly, as vehemently as we might disagree with Exodus International’s mission and beliefs, we think they should be allowed to express them.
And they do. Moving on:
Exodus International’s smartphone app was basically a platform for their blogs, podcasts, latest news and FAQs – essentially the same material you could find if you went to their website. It’s not as if the thing was marketed as some sort of magical/religious gay cure in and of itself.
AND what does Exodus International do for a living?! They market “freedom from the homosexual lifestyle!” If one spent any time with the app itself, one would have found that the app opened up a world of false information and defamation of LGBT people. Indeed, Dr. Gary Remafedi specifically wrote a letter to Apple, stating that the Exodus app featured misrepresentations of his own scientific research, and that therefore they should remove the app.
And even if it was, anybody offended and yes, disgusted even, by the Exodus International app could of course choose not to download and install it.
Ah, yes. Freedom of choice. Just like you can choose not to go to a website you don’t like/are disgusted by. We’re winding up to the smackdown here, folks, give me two more paragraphs.
But honestly, how many people were offended by the application itself? How many people even saw the thing? Certainly not 150,000. It’s more likely that most of the people signing that Change.org petition simply didn’t like Exodus International and all that they stand for.
Would 150,000 people signing a petition against a KKK app need to actually see/download it to express their outrage?
Apple says the app was removed because it was “offensive to large groups of people.” But lots of things are offensive to large groups of people. Does the GLBT community really want that to be the standard for what is allowed on Apple’s increasingly pivotal app store? How soon until Apple gets a petition to remove Grindr? What if The Trevor Project tried to release an app to assist gay teens?
Indeed, and I wish Apple had worded that better, but the reason we petitioned for its removal is because it went against Apple’s own corporate policies in that it was defamatory against an entire minority group, and moreover, it spread false information about that group. So, if a bunch of wingnuts whine and start a petition against Grindr, they’re going to have to prove that Grindr defames them in some way, and it doesn’t. There are thousands of Christian apps available, and it’s important to note why we petitioned against this app. It has nothing to do with “opposing viewpoints,” and it certainly doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the First freaking Amendment.
Speaking of gay teens, Truth Wins Out claimed that a key rationale for the petition was “stopping a virulently anti-gay organization from peddling false speech at the expense of vulnerable LGBT youth.” This has an ironically familiar ring to it. The right is forever saying it is teens and children who should be protected from gay content. With this precedent established those Christian activists can now make the exact same case in opposing any gay apps they don’t like.
Oh, well, I don’t know how much time you spend covering things like gay teen suicide and the damage religious extremists do to gay teens and young adults, because I don’t read your blog, but we’re sort of the experts on that, seeing as it’s in our Mission Statement. So you might think it sounds “ironically familiar,” but whereas the Right doesn’t have the moral authority or the concrete evidence to show that they have a good reason to protect youth from gay people, we have both the moral authority and the concrete evidence, and the statistics on bullying and suicide, and a treasure trove of testimony and reporting on the effects of so-called “reparative therapy,” and unlike the Religious Right, we can back up our assertions with the findings of every single major medical and mental health organization in the United States.
Earlier this month the Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision ruled that the Westboro Baptist Church had a First Amendment Right to wave their vile “God Hates Fags” signs outside of military funerals.
And the court got it exactly right.
Of course, you can distinguish the Westboro decision from the facts here in that Westboro was spewing their hateful message in a public space. Apple’s online app store is a private space, and thus they have the right to include/exclude whatever organizations and applications they want.
Well, if I had known you were going to win my side of the argument for me, I wouldn’t have wasted all this time.
But it seems clear that Apple’s dominance in the smartphone and tablet markets means that their App store has become a substantial channel for communication. How confident are you that the next public outcry and petition that Apple responds to won’t be to kick off a pro-Gay app?
We’re not very confident at all.
Are you scared? I mean, we’ll be there to fight it if that happens, but I’m a bit stunned that a blog purporting to represent the interests of the LGBT community is so willing to defend an organization with a proven track record of hurting gay people and their families. Yes, the App store is a “substantial channel for communication.” It’s also a private corporation, and as long as their policies are what they are, we will fight for people to recognize that true defamation against LGBT people has no place where racism, anti-semitism and other forms of bigotry would otherwise not be tolerated.
It is really that simple. I will allow that Apple often applies its policies inconsistently, and that this is a situation that will probably be revisited at some point in the future, for some reason, but that is not an excuse to tuck tail and run when something as egregious as this slips by their filters. Obviously over 150,000 petition signers agree.
UPDATE: If anyone is not quite clear on who the victims of reparative therapy are, what it does to them, and why Exodus’s “ministry” is really just a front for a hate organization against the LGBT community, please read this in its entirety. An excerpt:
Being an ex-gay survivor myself and personally speaking with over 1,500 fellow survivors, I can say that [Exodus's Jeff] Buchanan is correct on one point—Exodus has no cure to offer. Instead they issue a curse for those who submit or are forced to submit to their teachings. They offer harm—psychological, emotional, and spiritual damage. They tamper with their clients’ relationships, careers, personal development, and finances. They make a mess of our lives in Jesus’ name.
So what exactly does Exodus do? They now publicly admit that no one changes from gay to straight. They claim they don’t offer a cure. They say they don’t therapize. What services do they provide? Basically they will undermine your sense of self as they reinforce the notion that you are not good enough as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer person. They will demonize your desires, and will not even be satisfied if you choose to be celibate yet insist on honestly calling yourself lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. To add insult to injury they have fought to deny happy homosexuals and transgender people legal rights and protections. They malign LGBTQ people, our relationships, our desires, our dreams, and then they export this message to Uganda, South Africa, Croatia, Singapore, Costa Rica and beyond.
As I said, read it all.
UPDATE DEUX: I just took a gander at AfterElton’s homepage, seeing as, as I said before, it’s never a blog that’s seemed remotely useful to me in any way. As I expected, their piece on this was the only one which even approached an attempt to speak about something of actual import to the LGBT community outside of pop culture or Lady GaGa or Glee or whatever the hell else. Ya know, there are some who can do both. Joe does. Andy does. But then there are some who can’t and shouldn’t try, those who should leave it to the grown-ups.
This amazing piece at The Good Men Project paints a scenario that would, for the Religious Right, be absolute hell. Not only is the gay kid in school not bullied, berated, or verbally/physically abused, the popular athletic boys talk to him and make friends with him:
Consider the scene: Tom, a small, shy, openly gay high school student, sat at the back of the school bus on his own. He saw three of the most popular, athletic boys get on the bus, fresh from soccer practice. As they made their way down the aisle, they saw Tom alone and moved toward him.
What happened next?
Not what you’d expect. The boys, in fact, sat down to talk with Tom. “I didn’t really know him well,” one later told me. “I knew he was the gay kid at school, that’s all. … He was all on his own. I mean, I couldn’t just let him sit there alone. Nobody should have to sit alone.”
When I started researching the gendered behaviors of 16- to 18-year-old male students at Standard High in the U.K. in 2008, I expected to document the ways that homophobia and aggression continued to stratify young men into a competitive, damaging hierarchy. This is, after all, what decades of research has told us: boys and men use homophobia to “prove” their heterosexuality, and in doing so they simultaneously marginalize other men who are more feminine, or less popular than themselves. This then causes a stratification of men with the athletic heterosexual boys at the top and gays at the bottom. Because this so accurately described my own school experience, it was with some trepidation that I first entered Standard High, the co-educational high school where I spent six months collecting data.
However, on first entering the social area where students socialized in their free time, the difference from my own school experience was palpable. In that large open space, full of students eating lunch and socializing, I was immediately struck by the physical closeness of the male students, and the affection they had for each other. These young men weren’t just close to each other, they were gently touching—and they were doing this as a sign of platonic love.
You will want to read all of this, as Mark McCormack details what comfortable, happy heterosexual teen guys are like, when they’re not taught from an early age that homosexuality is evil or less-than, when they know that gay men are not a threat to them; likewise, it’s very different for the gay kids, under this framework.
In all seriousness, the reason this is such a horrific picture for the Religious Right is that this is a picture of a more harmonious school [it's in the U.K.], and one of the primary reasons it’s more harmonious is that the Religious Right’s message of hatred, exclusion and the [ha ha] “love of Christ” seems to be entirely absent. Moreover, it’s a terrifying picture for them because it shows how much better things work out when they don’t try to help.
Also absent are the traditional strictures of the patriarchy, which encourage the social strata in high school as most of us remember it. In this school, the jocks aren’t necessarily the most popular kids and being dorky isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, McCormack identified the main components to popularity at this high school as being “charisma, authenticity, emotional support, and social fluidity.”
It’s fascinating what happens when kids are raised and schooled to value the important things, rather than worn out, failed notions of superiority and male privilege.
In the Perris Union High School District in Southern California’s Inland Empire, the problem of anti-gay bullying and discrimination seems to be institutional:
Students and teachers at a Menifee high school say there is a pattern of bullying, harassment and discrimination against gay and lesbian students on campus.
In one instance, a Paloma Valley High School student alleged a teacher wrote an “S” on her hand and called her “a sinner.” In another, a student group says it was barred from doing an activity for gay and lesbian history month, though an ethnic student group could. An openly gay senior says he was unfairly disciplined after a dispute with a classmate who he says harassed him.
Teachers and students took their concerns to Paloma Valley administrators, the school board and the ACLU. District officials say they are addressing the complaints.
“We take them very, very seriously,” said Leslie Ventuleth, spokeswoman for the Perris Union High School District and its chief human resources officer.
Other students say they’ve endured anti-gay bullying from other students over the years, which is unsurprising when the adults in charge are unable to conduct themselves as professional adults. Fortunately, it seems that other teachers were the ones who were led to get the ACLU involved, so it’s not all bad apples:
Concern over their students’ welfare prompted Machado and teacher Elizabeth Darovic to speak out. Darovic helped form the Paloma Valley Gay Straight Alliance several years ago and is still an adviser.
“It’s your responsibility as a teacher to support kids,” said Darovic, an English teacher.
About 30 to 50 students, not all of them gay, attend weekly alliance meetings after school. Students have grown increasingly frustrated about the southwest Riverside County school’s climate, the teachers said. Some have filed formal complaints with the school district. Others spoke publicly at school board meetings.
“It doesn’t feel like a safe place to them,” Darovic said, but nothing happens when they complain. “There have been no consequences.”
Teachers and students cited several issues and incidents that have occurred recently, most during the current school year. In one instance, a teacher drew an “S” on a student’s hand and repeatedly referred to the student, who was wearing a T-shirt that read “Gay is Good,” as a sinner throughout class, according to a complaint with the district provided by a teacher.
It is unbelievable the way wingnuts conduct themselves in public, really.
Ashley Horne and Candi Cushman of Focus on the Family have the answer! Unfortunately the video isn’t embeddable, presumably because it’s embarrassing. The video is about Focus’s “Day of Dialogue,” in which they seek to deflect public attention from the blood all over fundamentalist Christian hands when it comes to the bullying and, all too often, suicides among gay teens.
Anyway, they don’t use the word “hate,” but rather use coded dogwhistles and catch phrases like “God’s plan for sexuality,” and other tripe meant to soothe the brainwashed.
Well, they don’t allow Nazi groups either! Seriously, oh my god:
And while the Ontario Ministry of Education also thinks GSAs are pretty important too, the Halton Catholic District School Board (HCDSB) takes a different view.
The board feels the groups are harmful and has issued a ban on GSAs altogether.
“We don’t have Nazi groups either,” rationalizes board chair Alice Anne LeMay. “Gay-straight alliances are banned because they are not within the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
“If a gay student requests a gay-straight alliance they would be denied,” she says flatly.
“It’s not in accordance with the teachings of the church. If they wanted to have a club outside of school, fine, just not in school.”
Alice Anne LeMay should not be charged with overseeing anything where children are involved.
This is pretty cool. Newly out country star Chely Wright teamed up with Nate Berkus to redo the youth lounge at the YES community center in New York, and then talked to the kids about her experiences. Here’s some of what she said:
“I am from a small town in Kansas,” Wright said. “I scoured my little town looking for anyone else like me and I couldn’t find anyone. I continued to hide because I had a dream of being a country music singer.”
“I hit my rock bottom and I found myself in 2006 ready to kill myself because I had painted myself into a corner. I had created an entire life where nobody knew me. I got on my knees and prayed to God, ‘Help me out of this,’ and the answer I got was stand up, tell the world who you are. And I came out for me, most of all because I wanted to live.”
“But my second most compelling reason for coming out was I didn’t want to think about another kid sitting on the edge of his bed, or another young person like Seth Walsh, I couldn’t stand the thought of somebody else feeling like there wasn’t somebody else like him or like her,” she said, referring to the 13-year-old California boy who hanged himself after suffering years of torment at the hands of his classmates.
“I came out in May of 2010 and it’s the best thing I ever did for my life,” Wright added to a warm applause.
This is not an issue of “different legitimate approaches to the same problem.” On one side, we have gay-supportive people who want to protect all children, and on the other, we have fundamentalists who somehow think they can play cute and protest the inclusion of sexual orientation in anti-bullying programs, but somehow pretend they actually care about all children. Tom Prichard of the Minnesota Family Council opens his smug, uninformed mouth again:
“We stand with the victims of bullying, whoever they are, that this needs to be addressed,” Prichard tells OneNewsNow. “It is a problem in different situations and we need to go after it — but we need to do it in the appropriate way that we don’t create more problems than already exist.”
He is uneasy about the recommendation by the Minnesota School Board Association, telling the Star Tribune that singling out sexual orientation “often leads to use of curriculum which promotes homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage.” He expresses similar concerns to OneNewsNow.
“Our concern has been there’s been efforts to utilize that as a vehicle by some of the gay activists to get into the schools and to teach and affirm homosexuality and a homosexual behavior and lifestyle,” he shares. “And we think that goes beyond just addressing the bullying issue to an advocacy role.”
Indeed, when they started specifically including race in these policies, it started us down a slippery slope to the present day, as Minnesota students are taught every single day how to be African-American. One could even say that it’s shoved down the kids’ throats.
Again: There is a reason we quote these people verbatim. Left in the murky, intellectually bereft pages of OneNewsNow, the “news arm” of the hate group known as the American Family Association, perhaps a few thousand people will read Prichard’s words. But when exposed to any sane person, any person to the left of Genghis Khan, it does nothing but help the causes of LGBT equality and protecting all our kids, because really, y’all, this is what the other side is like.
In case you forgot already, Graeme Taylor is the extra cool kid who spoke up in defense of a teacher in a school board meeting, after the teacher was suspended for…oh, just let Graeme tell the story. He’s quite eloquent for fourteen.
The student paper at Benilde-St. Margaret’s, a Catholic high school in Minnesota, published an editorial speaking out against the Catholic archdiocese’s opposition to same sex marriage and their subsequent mailing of thousands of anti-gay DVDs to Catholic families in the state. Then they pulled the piece, because if there’s one thing that’s like Kryptonite to a religious institution like the Roman Catholic Church, it’s reasoned dissent. Hamilton Nolan at Gawker explains:
Yes, the Catholic school’s administration played their role perfectly by pulling the students’ editorial (and an accompanying piece titled “Life as a Gay Teenager”) and replacing it with a statement explaining that “The online comments regarding the editorial and the opinion piece in question were creating a disrespectful environment as well as confusion about the teachings of the Catholic Church; therefore, the administration exercised its prerogative to have the material removed from the website.”
The DVD in question manipulated Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words to make it appear as if anti-gay bigots are somehow continuing King’s legacy, and the student editorial in question laid that out for the BS it was. Hamilton continues:
Using Martin Luther King, Jr’s words to support an assertion that same-sex marriage leaves men “fundamentally dehumanized”: fine. Pointing out that that is bullshit, in a remarkably eloquent and fair editorial: unfair. Even more brilliant: use the fact that assholes were leaving disrespectful comments on a story as an excuse to pull the entire story! Good work, zealous Catholics! This’ll teach those gay-accepters to speak out of turn, or ever!
Since we on the side of fairness, justice, love and equality are no fans of censorship, here’s the student editorial in its entirety, viaa commenter at the above Gawker link:
“Staff finds DVD unsubstantiated
November 11, 2010
The Catholic Church has been a long-standing opponent of gay marriage both in civil law and the Church itself. In keeping with this teaching, Archbishop Nienstedt produced and mailed a DVD in which he explicitly endorses an amendment to our state constitution that would bar homosexuals from the right to marry under civil law.
We as a staff believe the Church has both the right to have a teaching on this issue and to deny homosexuals the right to get married within the Church itself. However, we also feel that the DVD many of our families received is inappropriate due to the civil nature of the issue, and the content is nothing more than simple, emotional propaganda.
Archbishop Nienstedt states in the DVD that gay marriage poses a threat not only to the children taken out of the foster care system and adopted by married gay couples, but to children everywhere. He warns us that if we were to legalize gay marriage, the government would start teaching children in public schools that gay marriage is okay––something that is not consistent with Catholic teachings. The DVD further equates the effects of growing up in a household with two moms or two dads to growing up in a polygamous household, or an impoverished, financially struggling, single parent home.
The DVD tells us that the legalization of same-sex marriage will result in a world that no longer cares about a one-man one-woman vision of marriage, which will in turn result in a society that is, “callous and indifferent to the suffering it imposes on its own children, and on women who are left to carry the burden of parenting, and on men who are fundamentally dehumanized.”
How gay marriage results in heterosexual divorce and poverty, the DVD fails to address. How gay marriage leads to the acceptance of polygamy, the DVD makes no mention of either.
In the end, the DVD simply tries to equate gay marriage (an institution that would actually bring families together through the adoption of children) to broken homes and polygamy, without providing any facts to back it up. And, while the struggles of raising a child without a mother or father as support are certainly real, this stems from the fact that single parents are doing the job of two people and is not a reason to deny homosexuals the right to marry under civil law.
The DVD also aimed to reject the notion that the issue of gay marriage is an issue of civil rights. They did this in the most subtle way imaginable: by having a black man quote Martin Luther King Jr. The quote in question was from “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and stated that for a law to be just it must be in line with natural law.
What the speaker fails to address is the very next line of the letter that states, “Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statues are unjust because segregation distorts the soul.” Clearly this omitted line proves that MLK would not have supported discriminatory policies against any group, including homosexuals. The fact that the Church would go as far as to evoke MLK in an issue which he clearly wouldn’t have supported speaks volumes to the argument which the DVD presents.
To close its argument, the DVD states that the civil recognition of same-sex marriage would be an attack on our religious liberties as Catholics; however, no law that would be passed for gay marriage would have any impact on the Church’s ability to control its own definition of marriage. The legislature is discussing granting civil liberties to homosexuals in a legal way, not a religious one.
We have been told through this DVD to defend the historical definition of marriage through our votes. Well, up until 1967 it was a historical precedent not to let two people of different races get married in 17 states. In previous centuries, married women were considered their husband’s properties. But these things have changed, and it’s time for the civil definition of marriage to change again to account for our gay brothers and sisters, not in the Church, but at least in the civil arena.”
