Marxist Hate Group ‘Gay Liberation Network’ Protests AFTAH Banquet, but Their Facts Are Wrong

Vicious GLN exemplifies left-wing hatred; refused to condemn 2011 brick attack against AFTAH

The radical “Gay Liberation Network is again targeting AFTAH’s banquet this Saturday for one of its protests. GLN’s leaders are so hateful that they refused to condemn the 2011 “gay” activist brick attack against AFTAH.  The above notice is filled with misinformation. To view it on GLN’s site, go HERE. To view GLN’s Facebook entry about its protest, go HERE.

Special Note from AFTAH President Peter LaBarbera:

Folks, as you can see from the graphic above, copied off the website of the Chicago group Gay Liberation Network (GLN), we just received word that radical homosexual activists are again planning to protest our annual banquet (this Saturday, Nov. 16^th; see AFTAH banquet information page; get a printable PDF banquet flier HERE).  The GLN banquet protests have become sort of an annual tradition for AFTAH. But it appears that this year in their rush to publicize their protest, this motley crew of left-wing fanatics got their facts wrong. (Imagine that: the Left caught fibbing.) So I’ve taken the liberty to correct GLN’s mistakes below:

1) YES, Americans For Truth is holding its fund-raising dinner banquet this coming Saturday evening at Christian Liberty Academy (CLA), 502 W. Euclid Ave., Arlington Heights, IL. Doors open at 5:30; dinner is served at 6:30 PM. Tickets are $25 at the door or just $20 if you buy them online by midnight Thursday (tomorrow). And you can still sponsor a Table of 10 for $200.  AFTAH banquets are wonderful, informative celebrations of truth, so please come and support us, and bring your friends and family!

(Interesting fact: AFTAH holds our annual event at CLA because several years ago, when we used to hold banquets in hotels, the petty homo-fascists at GLN would harangue the hotel about hosting a “hate group.” Twice we were booted out of hotels based on these malicious misinformation campaigns. Now we hold our banquet at CLA – and even there we were targeted with a glass-shattering brick attack by homosexual militants in the early morning of our banquet in October 2011 [more on this below]. Nobody is more “intolerant” than homosexual activists.)

This poor fellow stood outside Christian Liberty Academy during one of GLN’s protests against Americans For Truth. The Chicago media pretty much give the GLN a free pass by not exposing its extremism.

2) NO, this is NOT a joint fund-raiser between AFTAH and Illinois Family Institute. As much as we love our good friends at IFI and applaud them for all the great work they do throughout the state, they just had a fund-raiser last month! But we understand: all “homophobes” look alike to “progressives” like the GLN. (Of course, I jest: “homophobe” is the smear-term of choice for “gay” activists and their elitist fellow travelers on the Left – meant to deride and demonize their (mostly Christian) opponents as irrational, fearful bigots. The jaundiced term homophobe itself is so discredited that even the liberal-leaning Associated Press has largely given up using it in AP news stories.)

3) YES, our keynote speaker, Sandy Rios, claimed that the (media-hyped) Matthew Shepard “story was a fraud,” but she did so only after interviewing this writer on her AFR Talk program, “Sandy Rios in the Morning.” We discussed the findings of an amazing book by openly homosexual author Stephen Jimenez, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard. In the book Jimenez reveals that, YES, pretty much the entire, convenient “Matthew-Shepard-was-murdered-just-because-he-was-gay” story was fraudulent. And what a coincidence: this “hate crime” tale was cynically exploited to demonize religious conservatives and link defenders of traditional sexual morality with “hate” and even violence toward homosexuals.

The bogus Matt-Shepard-hate-crime story was also repackaged as a tendentious play (The Laramie Project) that has been used to propagandize hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren and young adults in the same false “gay”-activist narrative. In fact, exploiting the false Matthew Shepard story has become big business on the Left.

4) So, indeed, YES, Sandy and I have publicized Jimenez’s well-researched findings that Shepard’s tragic 1998 death was very much “drug-related” – and hence was not a “hate crime.” Jimenez reveals the following about Shepard and his killers, fellow Laramie, Wyoming residents Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, and the circumstances of the case:

• McKinney and Shepard knew each other (as opposed to McKinney meeting Matthew for the first time on the night of the murder);
• McKinney and Shepard were both involved in using and dealing drugs, especially methamphetamines (meth);
• The two had partied with each other and possibly even had sex with each other as part of the same Laramie drug and social scene; and
• Neither McKinney nor his accomplice and friend, Henderson (both are in jail for life for murdering Shepard), were known for hating homosexuals. (In fact, Henderson’s girlfriend’s mother was in a lesbian relationship and Russell lived with her for months and “there was no evidence whatsoever of Aaron or Russell expressing anti-gay feelings,” Aaron’s father, Bill McKinney, told Jimenez [p. 48].) Compare that to the liberal media/LGBT-promoted story line that McKinney and Henderson – somehow fueled by Religious Right homophobia, which fostered a “climate of anti-gay hate” – murdered Shepard “just because he was gay,” after the latter made a sexual pass at McKinney. [To order Jimenez’s fascinating book on Amazon, go HERE.]

5) Lastly, NO, Sandy Rios never asserted that there was some kind of “pro-gay” conspiracy – a “plan by liberals to kill Matt to use him as ‘propaganda’ for LGBT acceptance.” This is sheer GLN nuttiness. Nobody in his right mind (pardon the pun) would suggest that liberal activists are so diabolical that they would plot to kill the young homosexual Shepard to create a “gay” martyr and thus advance the LGBT agenda!  But within hours of the bloody assault, as the Wyoming college student was fighting for his life in a hospital bed, the crime was quickly seized upon – first by close friends of Shepard, then by homosexual advocates, then by the media – as an alleged crime of “anti-gay hate.” Thus it became a pivotal “moment” in America for the Left to advance the LGBT agenda while stigmatizing moral-minded Americans as dangerous bigots.  (Jimenez also reveals that even some Laramie police officials joined in promoting the “anti-gay hate crime” theme, perhaps as opportunists caught up in the gay-liberal media spin, or maybe to draw attention away from Laramie’s criminal drug culture.)

Truth is more complicated than leftist “hate” politics

Homosexual author Stephen Jimenez has brought truth to the highly politicized Shepard murder case.

Matthew Shepard lived a troubled and reckless life filled with drugs and promiscuity. (Jimenez documents Shepard’s penchant for making unwanted sexual advances, and reports that Shepard — himself a victim as a boy of a homosexual predator — was arrested for molesting two eight-year-old boys when he was 15 [p. 349].)  But he did not deserve to be brutally murdered. In the early days after Shepard’s death, as the “hate crime” story line was taking hold in the (“gay”-lobbied) media, I and every major pro-family leader and organization condemned the murder.

No true Christian wishes hatred or violence on anyone. But the “hate crime” narrative surrounding Shepard’s murder has become so useful to “gay” militants like GLN that they can’t seem to give it up — even when a fellow homosexual who has devoted more than a decade of his life to digging out the real Shepard story comes forward (bravely) with much inconvenient truth surrounding it. [See this press release by the Matthew Shepard Foundation, that again makes the fallacious claim that Shepard was “murdered because he was gay.”]

Lies beget more lies. For more than a decade now, homosexual activists have used the false “hate” narrative  surrounding Shepard (and other tragedies involving homosexuals) to foment hatred against Christians and spread lies about well-meaning people who simply believe homosexuality is wrong. This is typical of LGBT activists, who often rely on emotional manipulation and misleading, easy polemics rather than reason: “Why do you hate gays?” they presumptively ask critics of the homosexual agenda, including “gay marriage.” It is an abrupt and accusatory question that immediately puts people on the defensive. (I usually respond by asking if they “hate” me, or Christian conservatives in general, because we disagree with them.)  Moral disagreement is not “hate.”

GLN’s hate and Obama’s Department of Injustice

Paver brick with threatening message, “Shut down Lively,” that was thrown through the glass door of Christian Liberty Academy, the morning of AFTAH’s banquet at CLA in 2011. Obama’s Justice Department has taken no public action against the perpetrators of this “hate crime.”

GLN’s sign-carrying cadres are a small cog in the social-political juggernaut that is Big Gay Inc. — but as hard-core leftists they are particularly vicious. When AFTAH’s banquet honoring pro-family hero Scott Lively (yes, the same Lively that is now being sued for “Crimes Against Humanity“ by the pro-homosexual Left) was targeted by an extremist brick attack (complete with a threatening hate-note [see photo at right]), GLN pointedly and publicly refused to condemn the assault. (GLN leader Andy Thayer still claims that AFTAH might have staged the attack against itself for publicity — something, ironically, that  homosexual activists have done with several reported, bogus “hate crimes” over the years.)

You might also recall that the brick attack against AFTAH’s banquet was accompanied by a pro-homosexual screed published on a left-wing Chicago website [see AFTAH’s article on it]. Can you imagine if I went to the media and explicitly refused to condemn a violent brick attack against a homosexual group, and then published a manifesto railing against the “gay” agenda? Wouldn’t that be…HATE? (And wouldn’t I be serving a jail sentence?!)

Indeed, it is telling that more than two years after the leftist “gay” hate-attack against Americans For Truth’s banquet — and targeting Lively and our gracious host, Christian Liberty Academy — we’ve gotten no justice from President Obama’s U.S. Justice Department, headed up by Attorney General Eric Holder. All we know is that the FBI had a lead and has investigated the case. Can anyone with a straight face imagine Holder taking no public action for two years in a case involving a “hate crime” by conservatives targeting, say, the annual banquet of the Human Rights Campaign (the world’s largest LGBT organization)? Liberal double-standards, anyone?

The Marxist GLN is also the group that “reported” AFTAH to the Southern Poverty Law Center as a supposed “hate group,” and cheered in 2010 when we were “designated” as such by the savvy, far-left extremists at SPLC. (You will recall that in 2012 homosexual activist Floyd Corkins came close to committing mass murder at Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.; Corkins was found to be using the SPLC’s notorious and spurious “Hate Map”  listing “anti-gay hate groups” as a guide for his shooting spree. [Click HERE to view AFTAH’s listing on the “Hate Map,” which maliciously equates decent Christian, pro-family groups with evil, fringe racists like the KKK.]

The GLN and fellow LGBT activists are driven to lie because they are defending the indefensible: organized, proud homosexualism.  They need the bogus Shepard murder myth  — GLN holds an annual Shepard vigil in Chicago —  to stoke their wicked mantra that Christian pro-family advocates “hate” homosexuals — when in reality we just want them to repent of that sinful lifestyle and experience healthy, godly change, like so many EX-“gays” have.

Come celebrate Truth with AFTAH Nov. 16th

I am pleased to have Sandy Rios as a friend, and we at AFTAH are honored to feature her at our banquet, because she has used her considerable media skills to debunk lies rather than promote or indulge them. Other pro-family leaders will be on hand: Matt Barber (the AFTAH Board Member and stellar pro-family advocate who was fired by Allstate Insurance after writing an article on his own time against the homosexual agenda); Christian talk show host Janet Mefferd; former lesbian Linda Jernigan; and John McCartney, AFTAH Board Member and longtime truth activist. Come on out and support us and stand for Truth this Saturday, Nov. 16^th at Christian Liberty Academy.  For more information, go HERE.

Hateful tweet sent to AFTAH’s Peter LaBarbera in March, in response to his tweet (at top). The answer to “gay” activist hate is Christian love and the Gospel; the answer to LGBT lies is truth, AFTAH’s mission.