GLSEN’s Day of Silence is still a month-and-a-half away, but Exodus International is already mobilizing antigay teens in schools across North America with Exodus’ misnamed “Day of Truth” campaign.
The DOT mobilizes antigay churches and students to harass LGBT students and their friends, and — under the guise of so-called “conversation” — to lobby schools to exclude LGBT students from schools’ antibullying policies.
In a press release last week, Exodus applauded its past successes in convincing antigay youths to be ignorant, misinformed, and sanctimonious toward their lesbian and gay “friends.” (If you’re wondering why Exodus doesn’t mention transgender students, it’s because the organization effectively denies the existence of people who are not conventionally male or female, equating them with drag queens.)
“One girl in particular asked me if it was hard because I have a friend that is a lesbian. I told her that “yes” it is hard, but I’m not going to give up on her. I think that God has so many awesome plans for that girl and for the rest of us. The Day of Truth is something that is so awesome!” – A high school freshman in Arizona
“I was so glad to hear about the Day of Truth. My daughter is a freshman.. and we have both been in shock that the school counselor would promote a club to encourage gay lifestyles. We need to pray for these kids and people encouraging this sinful and deadly lifestyle and give our kids a voice to proclaim the truth.” – Pam, a parent
“I still disagree with your views, and I always will. However, you’ve expressed your views in a polite and forthright manner, without being confrontational, and I wanted to tell you that I very much appreciate that.” – An adult who does not support Exodus International’s views on homosexuality
Please note that Exodus lacked sufficient integrity to identify these people for purposes of confirmation; that none of these people indicate any knowledge of specific truths about their friends and children; none of them acknowledge the violence and harassment that is happening against their LGBT classmates; none of them admit the truth that Exodus ex-gay counseling programs are a dismal failure; and that the two antigay poster-persons view the task of having gay friends or relatives as a chore — or worse, a threat. That’s Exodus-style “love” for you.
Truth Wins Out urges schools and GSAs around the country to become alert to Exodus’ possible formation, in coming months, of affiliate student groups that intend to harass and ostracize religious and sexual minorities — and to sabotage nascent efforts by parents and friends of assaulted youths to make schools safer for LGBT students.
A fundamentalist Christian couple are accused of murdering their adopted daughter and severely injuring another through a Fundamentalist Christian “parenting method” in California:
OROVILLE — A fundamentalist religious philosophy that espouses corporal punishment to “train” children to be more obedient to their parents and God is now being investigated in connection with the death of a young Paradise girl and serious injuries to her sister.
(…)
Ramsey said he is also exploring a possible connection to a Web site that endorses “biblical discipline” using the same rubber or plastic tube alleged to have been used to whip the two young ridge girls by their adoptive parents.
In court Thursday, a judge granted a two-week postponement before the children’s parents, Kevin Schatz, 46, and Elizabeth Schatz, 42, enter a plea to murder and torture charges that could carry two life terms in prison.
Oy. Here’s the thing. If we were like the anti-gay public mouthpieces we deal with on a daily basis, we would immediately use this as an example of how the Fundamentalist Christian Agenda is dangerous for children. But we are not they. Should we be?
Prosecutors allege the two victims were subjected to “hours” of corporal punishment by their parents on successive days last Thursday and Friday with a quarter-inch-wide length of rubber or plastic tubing, which police reportedly recovered from the parents’ bedroom.
Police allege that the younger girl was being disciplined for mis-pronouncing a word during a home-school reading lesson the day before she died.
Wow. But no, we won’t take the dishonest angle Fundamentalist Christian mouthpieces use to smear gay parents, because we are better than they are. And of course, if we did, we’d be missing a larger discussion.
In my experience with Fundamentalists (and I have quite a lot), I find that most of them actually mean well. They may be highly misled as to the facts, on many issues, but most of them feel that they are acting out of love. But this, to me, is an example of how extremist rhetoric, and an extremist worldview, can permeate and percolate throughout a religious community, to the point that certain people take it to an entirely new, entirely violent level. Because though these parents may claim that they were merely adhering to their deeply held religious beliefs, they are sadists. Only sadists would “discipline” their children this way.
The article points out that there is disagreement over corporal punishment in the Fundamentalist Christian world, and I’ll grant that. I don’t personally believe in spanking, but at the same time, I don’t believe that all parents who spank their kids are necessarily scarring them for life either. Normal, well-meaning people of all stripes can have honest disagreements about this sort of thing. But here’s where it gets sketchy: You take two parents who believe in spanking, and then you combine that with an authoritarian worldview where “Father Knows Best” (whether the human father, the version of God the father that the religion sells, etc.) and children are meant to be obedient soldiers to their parents’ orders, and in some cases, you’ll have a recipe for a situation like this one. Among your garden variety Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, the ones who truly are well-meaning, the most extremist elements of the religion won’t manifest. (Yes, they can still hurt people, as the LGBT community well knows, but I’m getting to that.) But there will be certain mentally unstable people, sick people, who take the dogma in its most literal form and run with it.
Think of the difference between conservative Muslims and those who actually strap on bombs and blow themselves up; think of the difference between regular “pro-lifers” and those who pick up a gun and murder abortion providers. And, of course, think of the difference between regular old “pro-family” people who simply want to “protect marriage,” and the disturbed people who end up beating/maiming/killing LGBT people. Do you see what I’m getting at? The common thread is that these are ideologies which lend themselves to this kind of violence, for certain people.
In the aftermath of Prop 8, the Religious Right has been bitching and moaning about supposed “violence” that’s been done to them by the big bad gay community, but the worst thing they’ve come up with is an old lady who got knocked over in a mob of people. Oh, and there was that one time a lady who ran a restaurant lost some customers because they learned that she voted yes. (Boo…hoo?) But there’s a reason that most of their tales of woe and lamentation are sort of boring — because we all know that it’s highly unlikely that the LGBT community is going to start beating or killing Fundamentalists. It’s just not gonna happen!
And why? It’s quite simple. The entire point of coming out is living with integrity; the entire point of fighting for our equality is bringing us up to the same level as everyone else! We’re not seeking to take anything away from anyone. Our motivation isn’t a distaste for anyone else, but rather a love for ourselves and a belief in our inherent dignity. The endgame of the LGBT civil rights movement is displayed proudly on our sleeves, for god’s sake. We simply want to live our lives with the same rights, responsibilities and freedoms as everyone else.
But this is not so in the Fundamentalist world. They want to take away women’s rights to make their own reproductive decisions. They want to take away children’s rights to be educated in actual science, in order to prop up their creation myth. They want to keep LGBT people in the closet (or worse), in order to not disrupt the tenuous grasp the patriarchy still holds in Western society, where the man of the house is elevated above all others. Children free to learn and grow as individuals, women with minds of their own, and all consenting adults living freely and passionately with those that they love? That’s just a bridge too far for them.
I’ve said it a million times, but the elevated place in society held by Fundamentalist Christians is not merited. They have done nothing to earn it. They are not paragons of moral virtue. In fact, they’re no better than the rest of the population. They’re not producing our great thinkers, our great artists, our great writers, or anything else “great.” And they know it. They know the jig is up. They’re watching their young adult children leave their shackles in droves, and they’re looking everywhere but inward for someone to blame. As their influence wanes (slowly — they’re so politically entrenched that it will be a long time before their political influence matches their dwindling numbers), they’re going to turn up the volume on their rhetoric and on their actions.
We’re already seeing this in the LGBT community, as certain Religious Right figures don’t seem all that bothered by the anti-gay legislation in Uganda, while others, like Bryan Fischer and Peter Sprigg of AFA and PFOX are openly calling for the criminalization of homosexuality. We’re seeing this in the aftermath of George Tiller’s assassination, as Randall Terry of Operation Rescue is loath to actually denounce Scott Roeder’s actions, and in fact, lends them rhetorical support every time he opens his mouth in public. We’re seeing this in Texas, as a band of Fundamentalists seek to destroy children’s educational opportunities by intentionally altering their textbooks to reflect a worldview that reflects a fantasy world of their own creation.
And as the rhetoric grows, there will, unfortunately, be more and more people who are pushed to the breaking point of insanity, and they’ll do more and more to hold on to the thread that is their completely debunked worldview. The tough thing is that it’s hard to tell who’s going to snap. It’s hard to tell which Fundamentalist parents will become so overwhelmed by fear and dogma that they literally control their children to death. It’s hard to tell which rejected men will translate their rage against women into a pulled trigger and the death of another abortion provider. It’s hard to tell which frightened, closeted person will try to kill off that which they hate in themselves by killing a gay person. It’s just hard to tell.
But it does represent a teachable moment, because again, I may take some flak for this (and you might be surprised to hear it from me, the resident atheist), but I do believe that the majority of Fundamentalists are well meaning people. And really? The ball’s in their court. They’re not going to listen to us anyway. But to any who might be reading this from that side of the fence, I say only this: You need to weed your backyard. You need to fumigate your rhetoric. And you need to control your own. Because again, over on this side of the fence, we don’t pose any threat to you. Oh, occasionally, little radicals pop up here and there, but the difference between this side and that side is that we marginalize the hell out of our extremists. (Bash Back, I’m looking at you.) But it seems that these days, Fundamentalists marginalize their freaks less and less. And that’s scary, not just for the LGBT community, but for civil society. Religiously-motivated murderers, abusers, rapists, etc. — they don’t exist in a vacuum. They have to be propped up by someone, whether it’s whatever crazy Fundamentalist website that motivated the couple in California, or MassResistance or the American Family Association or Liberty University or whoever. Someone motivates the people who commit these acts of religious violence.
Focus calls a bill prohibiting violence on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity “pro-gay” and criticizes the proposal for not only prohibiting violence, but also inserting lessons against such violence into the curriculum.
Focus instead wants any antiviolence program to deny the existence of gay and transgender students.
In its last word on the subject, the Exodus blog on Oct. 26 opposed the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to an existing federal hate crime law.
Exodus executive vice president Randy Thomas previously had equated punishment of violent crime with punishment of “thought crime.” Now Thomas said that he didn’t feel that thousands of violent crimes, which are committed each year against Americans because they are assumed to be gay, lesbian or transgender, “rises to the level of passing bad federal public policy” — even though Thomas and Exodus refuse to support repeal of the same policy as it’s applied to violent crimes against black or Christian persons. Instead of clearing up this self-serving inconsistency, Thomas thanked the Christian Right’s litigation-happy Liberty Counsel for opposing equal punishment of violent felonies committed against GLBT Americans.
In 2007, according to the FBI, 7,621 violent incidents were reported by local law-enforcement agencies that chose to cooperate with monitors. They involved 8,999 offenses, 9,527 victims, and 6,962 offenders. 1,460 reported hate crime offenses were based on sexual-orientation bias, or 16.2 percent. Of these offenses, 96 percent were classified as anti-homosexual. Antigay victims, as a percentage of all hate-crime victims, constituted double the percentage of LGBT people in the general population. No hate crimes were reported against “ex-gays.”
Just days after the Hate Crimes Protection Act was signed by President Obama, three men in Long Island were accused of beating two men who were dressed in drag for Halloween, as the assailants yelled antigay slurs. One assailant who was apprehended, Robert Bellamy Jr., 23, said, “God made me hate gay people.” Bellamy was charged under a state hate-crime law, rendering federal intervention unnecessary. But in many other states and localities, law-enforcement agencies have let violent thugs know that they may batter or kill LGBT people with impunity; in their view, the notion of religious freedom includes a right to commit acts of Biblical extrajudicial punishment against sexual and religious minorities.
Just two days after the Long Island assault, World Net Daily and Gary Cass of the “Christian Anti-Defamation Commission” on Nov. 3 implicitly called for acts of violence to be committed against GLBT people in order to test the new law, with a goal of weighing the law’s opposition to felony violence against its explicit protection for religious freedom.
As with the thousands of other similar violent crimes and violent threats each year, Exodus offered no objection to this chain of events — and continues to offer no support for equal punishment of violence against GLBT Americans. Perhaps this is because, in Exodus’ view, orientation and transgender biology do not exist and must not be recognized, no matter how many bodies pile up in hospital ERs and morgues.
James Dobson and his Focus on the Family empire rose to fame on a philosophy of authoritarian parenting that consisted of generous doses of spanking to ensure agreement, conformity, and obedience.
That philosophy was often criticized for its frequent outcome: Aggressive behavior, youth-on-youth violence, anxiety disorders, and externalization or projection of one’s problems. Christian Rightists countered that the benefits of harsh discipline outweighed these costs.
However, two new studies by Prof. Murray Straus at the University of New Hampshire find that children who are spanked suffer reduced intellectual capacity. The research was presented Friday at the 14th International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, in San Diego, Calif.
The Michigan state senate voted Wednesday to reject a measure that would protect students from violence committed on the basis of sexual orientation. Opponents of the bill do not object to legislation protecting students on the basis of race or religion; their sole objection is to the protection of gay students from violence.
Democratic Sen. Glenn Anderson said:
It is imperative that we compel public schools to protect students from bullying in the academic environment by adopting a policy to deal with this destructive behavior.
Anderson’s measure lost on a vote of 21 to 16, according to the Michigan Messenger.
This move by the senate is the second recent example of Michigan officials protecting antigay violence.
In recent months. former ex-gay Patrick McAlvey has come forward to accuse Exodus member activist Mike Jones of sexually accosting him during “ex-gay” therapy sessions. Jones’ ex-gay activist website is hosted by Michigan State University. The university has refused to withdraw its taxpayer-subsidized hosting of Jones’ “Corduroy Stone” website, and both Jones and Exodus president Alan Chambers refuse to respond to the allegations.
Worse, perhaps, than the senators who support antigay bullying are those Republicans who say that protecting any student from bullying is too expensive. According to the Messenger:
[Some] Senate Republicans took a different tact in the floor debate Wednesday. They argued the bill could result in numerous lawsuits against public schools across Michigan.
“[The bill] is written in such a way as to guaruntee lawsuits against employees or the school,” said Sen. Alan Cropsey, a Republican from DeWitt. “This will turn every incident of bullying into a lawsuit, and cost the schools hundreds of millions.”
Schools across the nation are already being sued by parents of battered gay students; the parents accuse school faculty of failing to protect their children. So long as Michigan singles out gay youths and young adults for abuse, the lawsuits in that state are likely to escalate.
Scott Lively is the western Massachusetts-based ex-gay activist most famous for claiming that Nazi Germany was run by a hypermasculine homosexual conspiracy.
Lively co-founded the east European organization Watchmen on the Walls, which applauds violence against gay people and has been certified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.
Lively also joined with Exodus International board member Don Schmierer in Uganda to co-keynote a March 2009 ex-gay conference, the purpose of which was to launch a nationwide campaign of antigay vigilantism — led by at least one alleged ex-gay child-molester — and to impose a death penalty upon that nation’s LGBT population.
In an article on his ex-gay organization’s web site dated for release tomorrow, Lively equates Christian compassion with less-than-desirable effeminacy — and violence with true “masculine Christianity.”
Unfortunately, the modern American church, along with the majority of its leaders, has rejected masculinity in favor of an effeminate Christianity.
Lively addresses his audience as “brethren,” as if his female readers were irrelevant:
Brethren, this is not an attack on femininity. If anything, the church should be commended for its appreciation for and fulfillment of the feminine aspects of its role. The vital compassion-based ministries — feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and soothing the broken-hearted — are prospering today. These ministries are very much a reflection of the feminine side of Christ’s complete personality.
In Lively’s brutal worldview, it is unmanly to be compassionate, charitable, graceful, humble, or nurturing. Lively idolizes Biblical hyperwarriors, some of whom are guilty of indiscriminate slaughter against the women and children of rival tribes in the ancient Middle East.
The defining characteristic of each of these examples is the conquest of evil by God’s people — mostly men. … The church and this nation cry out for a revival of masculine Christianity, which is to say that we church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues.
Lively concludes with a sociopathic call to war against those who might educate the Christian Right’s children and young adults in alternatives to violence, bigotry, and rejection of religious diversity, history, science, and community values:
We have reached that split-second of decision in which we must choose whether to rush forward into battle on the chance that we can defeat the invaders, or to surrender and look on in resignation as our children are marched off into slavery in a foreign land.
Violence and deliberate ignorance: True markers of “masculinity” among the ex-gay Christian Right. According to Lively, this machismo is under mortal threat not only from uppity women, but also from the same educated, lazy sissies who operated the supposedly hypermasculine Nazi regime.
Talk To Action is keeping a tally of nationally known Christian rightist pastors who pray for the death of the president of the United States. That count is now three: Steven Anderson, Wiley Drake, and Peter Peters.
Drake is a former vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention who also served as Alan Keyes’ American Independent Party running mate in the 2008 election. Drake prayed for the death of abortion doctor George Tiller and, after Tiller’s murder, declared that his prayers had been answered.
Peters leads the LaPorte, Colorado, Church of Christ and has been associated several times with white supremacists, including those who killed Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg.
Jamaica is a nation where antigay vigilantism is culturally accepted; authorities leave violence unpunished; and no GLBT organization can meet in public, hold events, or advocate publicly for justice and equality. In Jamaica, it takes courage to simply say “no” to violence.
Columnist Diane Abbott of The Jamaica Observer on Sunday wrote a column citing numerous recent reports of antigay murder and vigilantism. She warned that public denial of the severity of such violence harms Jamaica’s reputation.
Because attitudes to homosexuality in Jamaica are so hostile, it is not sufficiently understood how damaging its stand on the issue is outside the country.
A U.S.-based, pro-equality boycott against Jamaica was put on hold earlier this year when J-FLAG, Jamaica’s GLBT organization-in-hiding, withheld its support.
Nevertheless, Abbott says Jamaicans should learn from the boycott and from numerous reports of antigay violence:
The boycott has so far been unsuccessful. But a country dependent on tourism cannot afford to ignore the fact that attitudes to homosexuality in other countries have moved on. There are probably as many people in Britain who are privately judgemental about homosexuals and lesbians as there are in Jamaica. But the British take the view that what people do in the bedroom is their affair. So gay marriage is legal and leading politicians in both the government and opposition parties have publicly acknowledged their sexual orientation and married their partners. It is difficult to imagine such a state of affairs coming about in Jamaica any time soon.
But Jamaica could do more to stress that despite the blood-curdling lyrics of much of its popular music, it is a more tolerant society than people think. And violence against gay people should be universally condemned.
Lively co-founded the east European organization 
Jamaica is a nation where antigay vigilantism is culturally accepted; authorities leave violence unpunished; and no GLBT organization can meet in public, hold events, or advocate publicly for justice and equality. In Jamaica, it takes courage to simply say “no” to violence.
