Mike Airhart posted a blog entry on TWO’s Facebook page earlier, and as I am wont to do, I clicked on it, and found a blog writer I had never heard of, saying really sane things about our very recent fight to have the Exodus app removed from Apple’s store. I recommend that you read all of it, but here was the piece that hit me (the bolded part):
Taking their stance of being able to provide a “gay cure” and laying it in front of you – it doesn’t take much of a leap to see that it rings bells with other bigotry in the history of our not so peaceful planet. How fast would Apple have pulled the app if it stated to be a Jew cure? A black cure? A Muslim cure? Of course, the creators of this software probably would like to release all of those apps as well, as is their mentality. Small minded, petty fools who believe that there is nothing in this world worth living for apart from their misguided indoctrination into hate of everything and anything that doesn’t exist in (their understanding of) a book that calms their nerves when they think of their own mortality. A book that was rewritten many times through the ages and, no doubt, has the creative input of a few closet homosexuals added into the mix of gospels they so revere today.
I’m not going to ramble on about this, as hopefully most of the people who have made it this far have the intelligence to be equally as appalled as I am and are adding their names to the petition to kick Apple up the arse.
I’m not gay, black, Muslim, Jewish or even pro-Christian but, as no god is my witness, wouldn’t Earth be a far bleaker place without the more fulfilled people who live on this rock that are genuinely happy to say “I may not be, but I’m blessed to stand alongside those that are.”
If you need to invest in an iPhone app that goes one step to curing crimes against nature – I would suggest you start with Angry Bigots. There’s nothing more satisfying than catapulting them full force into pigs in glass houses.
Indeed.
Go give the writer some love, because he gets it. Whoever is reading this, you may not be. You may not be Christian. You may not be atheist. You may not be gay. You may not be transgender. You may not be Muslim. You may not be Republican. You may not be liberal. You may not be Jewish. You may not be a democratic socialist. You may not be a die-hard capitalist. You may not be bisexual. You may not be…
You get the damn idea.
There are a lot of unrepentant assholes, of all stripes, who disrespect the dignity of all human beings. But there are also people of all stripes who do love people, regardless of what category they fit into. [Hint: If it's the Christian fundamentalist form of "love," it's false, fake love. We're talking about the real thing here.] So go give some love to the people in your lives, no matter what labels apply to them, who actually get it, and tell them that you respect their dignity as they respect yours. (And that is the key, dear, sweet wingnuts who might read this and get their own ideas: this is about TRUE mutual respect, and none of you Christian extremist wingnuts have it.)
Sarah Posner reports on the findings of Southern Illinois University sociologist Darren Sherkat, who has compiled the General Social Survey results over the last couple of decades on public support for marriage equality. I’ll let her set it up for you:
Sherkat tells me:
There are no other scientific surveys which have asked questions about same sex marriage over a long period of time. The only other remaining scientific general population surveys are the National Election Surveys, and I don’t think they ever asked a question about that (or if they did it was only in the 2008 version). I can’t stress this enough.
In other words, the GSS is the only survey that shows these trends over time, using face-to-face surveys of respondents (as opposed to telephone polls).
And here’s what support for marriage equality looks like, from 1988 to the present day:
Stunning.
Sarah also addresses the notion that young Conservative Christians are becoming more tolerant. Apparently that is not the case, but it IS true that the younger generations in general are much more tolerant of LGBT equality. That can only mean one thing, and it’s something we already knew: the wingnut churches are driving their young away in droves. Anecdotally, I graduated from a small-ish private Christian school and grew up in a fairly conservative area, and I can think of very few people from that time who still attend church on a regular basis. Surely, there are some who do, but the overwhelming feeling I get is that many stay tangentially involved in church, perhaps when they’re with their extended families, but otherwise, it’s not that big of a deal in their lives. Moreover, I know others who are still very much Christian, but who shun the conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist labels like the plague. I’ve even heard the term “recovering Fundamentalist” thrown around in my age group.
I only point this out because wingnuts are likely to try to scapegoat gays and feminism and the lib’rul culture or whatever else for the fact that their young just don’t buy what they’re selling the way they used to. The fact of the matter is that they did it to themselves, when they made the decision to dig their heels in and refuse to assimilate into modern culture. It’s increasingly difficult to keep young people in churches that teach young earth creationism when the internet is full of actual science. It’s increasingly difficult to keep them hating gay people, and thus worshipping at the altar of Fundamentalism, when their college roommate is gay and they realize that their parents and pastors have been lying to them all these years.
Anyway, we’re winning, is the point. The sharp rise in support shown on the graph is evidence of the tipping point Wayne and I have talked about a lot over the past year. There just comes a certain point where there is too much correct information out there, too much education, for people to keep their fingers in their ears any longer. It will only get better.
“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.
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.
Eight religious-right organizations — three of them, identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center — are escalating a war of words against antibullying programs in U.S. schools.
Exodus International, Focus on the Family, Americans for Truth, Liberty Counsel, Mission: America, MassResistance, Illinois Family Institute, and Abiding Truth Ministries are leading three campaigns to smear the Day of Silence, which is an April 17 event planned at 8,000 U.S. schools to “just say no” to verbal, sexual, and physical assault.
All eight organizations oppose antibullying programs unless they exclude gay youths. Instead, these organizations want same-sex-attracted youths to be compelled by abusive peers and school faculty to be admitted — or worse, involuntarily detained — in amateur-operated and unsuccessful ex-gay boot camps.
Because of these organizations’ callous indifference to violence, youths are dying and parents are suing school districts for negligence, reckless endangerment, and complicity in violence committed by the children of antigay parents.
Exodus this year has assumed responsibility for a Day of (Un)Truth which encourages antigay students to ignorantly and mistakenly assert that anyone can change their sexual orientation and therefore — Exodus reasons — no antiviolence programs are necessary in schools. Exodus defines organized opposition to antigay violence as a sinister promotion of the “homosexual agenda.” Exodus claims that its event, scheduled for April 20, aims to promote conversation in schools. But in fact Exodus refuses to engage in discussion of antigay violence either in North America or in Uganda, where Exodus continues to be complicit in a campaign to promote vigilantism, involuntary ex-gay detention, and imprisonment against gay Ugandans.
Focus on the Family, meanwhile, is collaborating with Exodus to espouse one-way tolerance of antigay students in a “True Tolerance” campaign which redefines tolerance to permit 1) privileges for antigay evangelical bullies to relentlessly insult and threaten classmates during school hours on school property, combined with 2) character assassination and official efforts to silence those who oppose antigay violence and who, therefore, are accused of promoting a supposed “homosexual agenda.”
Six other far-right organizations are, if nothing else, honest about opposing conversation in schools: They support a “walkout” — a pseudo-Christian excuse for antigay students and misinformed or negligent parents to play hooky on the day when their peers are taking positive steps to stop on-campus violence. Scott Lively’s “Abiding Truth Ministries” headlines the recent Uganda ex-gay conference which launched a campaign of antigay vigilantism in that nation. Americans for Truth is a nameplate for antigay activist Peter LaBarbera, whose sexually graphic website produces offensive homoerotic pornography for consumption by antigay donors and antigay private-school assemblies.
Box Turtle Bulletin offers a detailed analysis of each campaign by self-styled Christians to defend antigay violence and oppose positive steps to restore safe learning in schools.
Students at Kentucky’s Murray State University engaged in “live homosexual acts” in public on Friday to raise “awareness about the lifestyle of gay members of the Murray State campus,” according to a campus newspaper.
The live outdoor acts consisted of studying, reading, and talking — behind a sign that starkly advertised “live homosexual acts.”
Antigay and ex-gay activists were strangely uninterested in taking pictures of real gay people engaging in real homosexual activities. Here was a prime opportunity for Fred Phelps and Peter LaBarbera to hold up No Studying, No Talking, and No Sexual Honesty signs – and they missed it entirely.
After the passage by antigay Californians of antifamily Proposition 8, peaceful rallies for gay equality and the freedom to marry were held in more than 300 U.S. cities.
Religious rightists ignored the peace, unfortunately, and looked for excuses to portray themselves as victims of those who lost the freedom to marry.
Antigay activists pointed to one incident (on video), in which protesters in San Francisco’s Castro district pushed antigay “Christians” out of the neighborhood, accompanied by a heavy police escort. Antigay activists’ complaint: Castro homosexuals are intolerant and inhospitable to peaceful Christian believers.
Ex-gay advocate Warren Throckmorton was among those who pandered to religious-right victimology and baselessly alluded to gay violence. (Throckmorton did, in fairness, acknowledge the hard feelings of those who unsuccessfully defended California’s freedom to marry from people like Throckmorton.
As facts emerge, however, the fairy tale of innocent Christians and intolerant gay people is being not only refuted but reversed.
Joe.My.God has discovered that some of the “Christians” were actually Christian Dominionists belonging to “Joel’s Army.” Joel’s Army — led by Focus on the Family rally organizer Lou Engle — advocates that gay Americans be stoned to death and teaches a religious mandate to violently overthrow the U.S. government and the nation’s non-fundamentalist places of worship. After executing, incarcerating, and silencing millions of supposed infidels and seizing the nation’s churches and temples, these hateful egotistical zealots would replace the Constitution and representative democracy with their own fundamentalist reinterpretation of the Bible.
Given that information, it appears that the Castro crowd was more than hospitable in its efforts to chase away provocateurs who have vowed to kill gay people if given an opportunity.
At least two antifamily, pro-harassment organizations — Mission: America and the American “Family” Association — continued to lobby antigay parents today to shield their teen-agers from anti-bullying messages by keeping them home from school on April 25, which has been designated an annual Day of Silence by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network.
The Day of Silence commemorates GLBT youths who were victims of school violence and murder, by reminding classmates that violence and harassment silence GLBT youths and their families.
The boycott against freedom of speech and nonviolence in schools is co-sponsored by the ex-gay Abiding Truth Ministries, American Family Association, Americans for Truth, Concerned Women for America, Exodus Mandate, Illinois Family Institute, Indiana Voice for the Family, Liberty Counsel, Mass Resistance, Mission: America, Parents’ Rights Coalition, the ex-gay Stephen Bennett Ministries, and Exodus conference speaker Ken Hutcherson’s pro-violence group Watchmen on the Walls.
In inland California, anti-tolerance organizations hope the boycott will prove financially costly to public schools and taxpayers, as school funding is said to be determined in part by attendance. A pro-discrimination group, Capitol Research Institute, has organized a counter-event euphemistically called a “Day of Learning” for antigay parents and students that participate in the pro-harassment boycott. What exactly will participants “learn”? According to The Press-Enterprise, they will learn how to gather signatures “to repeal a state law that prevents discrimination in schools based on sexual orientation.” Meanwhile, the antigay Alliance Defense Fund has declared April 28 to be an annual day when antigay students verbally harangue gay classmates with defamatory, egotistical, and hypocritical religious messages.
GLSEN has released the following ad featuring Lance Bass to counter pro-harassment, pro-silence propaganda that is being fed to students by antigay political organizations:
Meanwhile, pro-exgay pundit Warren Throckmorton continues his campaign against the anti-bullying day. Throckmorton’s proposal creates an artificial division between the Golden Rule and explicit opposition to antigay violence and harassment. Throckmorton may view his own campaign to supply students with misinformation as a lesser evil than that of the boycotters. But, in pandering to the worst elements of the pseudo-Christian religious right, Throckmorton trivializes both Christian values and the growing problem of antigay violence and harassment in schools.
Students at Kentucky’s Murray State University engaged in “live homosexual acts” in public on Friday to raise “awareness about the lifestyle of gay members of the Murray State campus,” according to a 
