January 16, 2012

Contact: Peter LaBarbera; americansfortruth@gmail.com

Raleigh pastor Dr. Patrick Wooden rejects the comparison of black civil rights to sinful and unnatural homosexual behavior.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama – A coalition of African American pastors and pro-family Christian and Jewish leaders is holding a press conference at noon tomorrow (the day after Martin Luther King Day) outside the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center — to protest the SPLC’s smearing of pro-family groups that oppose homosexual activism as “hate groups”:

WHERE:  Outside the SPLC headquarters, 400 Washington Ave., Montgomery, Alabama

WHEN:  Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012, noon, Central Standard (Montgomery, AL) Time

WHO:  Scheduled speakers:

• Peter LaBarbera, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), Chicago, IL (the SPLC has smeared AFTAH as a “hate group”);
• Dr. Patrick Wooden, pastor, Upper Room Church of God in Christ (COGIC), Raleigh, NC;
• DL Foster, founder, Gay Christian Movement Watch, Atlanta, GA;
• Matt Barber, Director of Cultural Affairs, Liberty Counsel, Lynchburg, VA;
• Tim Johnson, Fredrick Douglass Foundation, Washington, D.C.;
• Rachel Conner, representing Abiding Truth Ministries (smeared by SPLC as a “hate group”)
• Pastor Glen Sawyer, New Mt. Zion Church of God in Christ, Elizabeth City, NC
• Pastor Wil Nichols, Victorious Praise Fellowship COGIC, Durham, NC
• Pastor Jon Robinson, Kingdom C.O.M.E. Ministries, Clairton, PA
• Pastor Kenneth Jefferson, Greater Harvest COGIC

The following pro-family leaders and groups will issue supporting statements:

• Rabbi Yehuda Levin, Rabbinical Alliance of America;
• Laurie Higgins, Illinois Family Institute (smeared as “hate group”)
• Arthur Goldberg, author, “Light in the Closet: Torah, Homosexuality, and the Power to Change”;
• Linda Harvey, Mission America, Columbus, OH
• Brian Camenker, Mass Resistance, (smeared as “hate group”)

Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth, which is sponsoring the press event, recently interviewed Pastor Wooden, who said that the SPLC’s gambit of labeling mainstream pro-family groups that oppose homosexual activism as “hate groups” is seriously damaging the SPLC’s credibility. Wooden also debunked the “civil rights” analogy used by “gay” activists, saying it is wrong to compare “my beautiful blackness” with homosexual perversion.

LaBarbera said the SPLC is engaged in a thinly-veiled, one-sided campaign to demonize adherents of traditional Judeo-Christian morality. He noted that despite the considerable hatred and anti-Christian bigotry emanating from homosexual activists (e.g., Dan Savage’s vile hate-site, Santorum[dot]com), the SPLC has never labeled a “gay” organization or website as “hateful.”

Click on graphic to enlarge. Homosexual web activist website "All Out" lobbies PayPal to drop AFTAH and other pro-family groups as alleged "anti-LGBT extremists." The petition reads, "PayPal must act immediately to shut down their accounts and ban all sites that promote anti-LGBT hate."

TAKE ACTION NOW: a new homosexual web campaign is urging the internet payment company PayPal to drop AFTAH and other pro-family organizations as so-called “extremists” that “promote anti-LGBT hate.” Please help defend Americans For Truth from being dropped by PayPal in response to this anti-Christian pressure campaign.

1) Go to PayPal’s website and make a much-needed gift to AFTAH to support our work. Or do so through the AFTAH website at www.americansfortruth.com/donate/. Mail a check to AFTAH, PO Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522.

2) Write or call PayPal and urge them to STAND FOR FREEDOM and NOT give in to this intolerant pressure campaign by homosexual activists; use PayPal’s online “Comment Card” HERE, or post a note to the PayPal blog.  Or use their Contact Page HERE (note, the latter seems to favor comments by people holding a PayPal account).  Here is the Contact Page for PayPal’s parent company, e-BAY Inc.

Please THANK PayPal for initially siding with religious freedom so far [as reported HERE by the homosexual website Pink News] and not abruptly caving to All Out’s demands.  Urge them NOT to punish Christian and pro-family advocates – which could potentially alienate millions of potential PayPal customers.

3) Also, sign the LifeSiteNews petition to PayPal defending AFTAH and other pro-family targets by going here: http://www.profamilyfreedom.net/

4) Send this message to your friends and contact list to educate them on the anti-Christian and censorious nature of the homosexual movement. “Gay” activists no longer want “Tolerance”; now they want Dominance even if it means smearing pro-family people as “haters” and destroying our cherished religious freedoms.  

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By Peter LaBarbera

Dear AFTAH Reader,

Every day brings more evidence that the Homosexual Lobby is all about kicking pro-morality people (mostly committed Christians) who disagree with homosexual behavior OUT of the public square. More and more observers are seeing this for what it is: homo-fascism. Last week we learned of a homosexual web campaign called “All Out” that is targeting the payment service company PayPal for doing business with Americans For Truth and nine other groups — which it smears as ”extremists” who “promote anti-LGBT “hate.” Here is the wording of their All Out petition:

PAYPAL: END THE ONLINE HATE TRADE
Tell PayPal: Put Hate Out of Business

“PayPal officially states that its users ‘may not use the PayPal service for activities that [...] promote hate, violence, racial intolerance’ but PayPal has become a favorite payment service for anti-LGBT extremists all over the world. PayPal must act immediately to shut down their accounts and ban all sites that promote anti-LGBT hate.”

In an adjoining article, the grammatically-challenged All Out writes:

Thanks to PayPal, its [sic] easier than ever to send and receive money across currencies and continents – but it is also PayPal’s responsibility to make sure this technology doesn’t fall in the wrong hands. Anti-LGBT extremists all over the world are currently using PayPal to fundraise for their dangerous cause.

Not only is it against PayPal’s rules to promote promote [sic] “hate, violence, [and] racial intolerance,” hate groups also damage PayPal’s brand and credibility. We ask that PayPal join the fight against online hate and immediately shut down the accounts of anti-LGBT extremist groups using the service.

Already, All Out boasts that 35,000 people have sent web-generated letters to PayPal using All Out’s user-friendly web form. Among the other targeted groups beside AFTAH are Scott Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries [Lively will be a speaker at AFTAH’s banquet outside Chicago on Oct. 15^th] and the Catholic group Tradition, Family, and Property. Also on the list is Brazilian expatriate and pro-family hero Julio Severo [Julio’s blog is written in Portuguese].

Here is All Out’s description of AFTAH:

Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (United States): This groups [sic] claims homosexuality is a “lethal behavior addiction,” a “dangerous” practice that is “neither normal nor benign.” 

PayPal cites religious freedom but takes complaints

The British “gay” website Pink News reports that in response to All Out’s pressure campaign, PayPal is declining to immediately revoke the pro-family groups’ payment accounts on the grounds of religious freedom:

“PayPal does not allow the use of its service for activities that promote hatred, violence or racial intolerance. We take very seriously any cases where a user has incited hatred, violence or intolerance because of a person’s sexual orientation.

“However, we also take into account the rights of free speech and freedom of religion. Balancing these conflicting rights is often difficult, and so we assess possible infringements objectively against our Acceptable Use Policy.

Pink News reports this continuation of the statement by PayPal – made more ominous by the fact that both AFTAH and Severo have already received e-mails from PayPal requesting more information about their accounts:

“While we can’t comment on any specific accounts because of customer confidentiality, we regularly review organizations and websites that use our service, and stop working with those that break our Acceptable Use Policy. We also enable people to report suspected breaches of this policy on our website.”

AFTAH will be following this story closely, and we are grateful that the pro-family news site LifeSiteNews is launching an online petition campaign of its own, www.ProFamilyFreedom.net, to defend Americans For Truth and the other targeted organizations against this homosexual pressure campaign.

______________________________

Facts and thoughts on this latest homosexual intimidation campaign:

1) Homosexual activists are doing all they can to push Bible-believing Christians and moral-minded people who believe homosexuality is wrong OUT of the public square;

2) “Gay” militants are in the vanguard of the Left’s war on biblical Christianity and religious freedom in the United States.  By labeling Christians as “haters,” they cruelly demonize people of faith – and encourage the outrageous idea that longstanding Christian and Bible-based beliefs are “extreme” and beyond the pale;

3) One of the tactics that homosexual militants are using is to pressure corporations and politicians to distance themselves from allegedly “hateful” groups (read: groups that rightly condemn homosexual practice as sinful or disordered — yet changeable — behavior);

4) Encouraged by media sycophancy and a lack of press accountability that feeds their success, homosexual militants are now working overtime to sell the public on the absurd notion that groups like AFTAH that adhere to traditional, biblical teachings on homosexuality are the hateful equivalents of racist fringe groups like the KKK or Neo-Nazis. This propaganda tactic gained significant traction when the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center – long known for exposing racist hate groups like the Klan – last year labeled AFTAH and other mainstream pro-family groups like the Family Research Council “hate” groups;

5) Predicated on such spurious analogies, the current “All Out” campaign against PayPal claims that groups like AFTAH foment violence against homosexuals. However, Americans For Truth has from its inception condemned violence and (real) hatred against homosexuals. We believe Christians should reach out to homosexuals with the Gospel truth, in the love of Christ. We believe that ALL people have dignity as human beings, but that persons should not be defined by immoral, unnatural – and changeable — sexual and gender behaviors;

6) AFTAH has condemned unbiblical and nasty messages like Fred Phelps’ (Westboro Baptist Church) “God Hates Fags.” And we have noted the contrast between Christians, who encourage men and women to abandon the homosexual lifestyle (as so many have) and “fundamentalist” Muslims who advocate the death penalty for homosexuals. (Not all Muslims hold this view.)

7) It is no longer advisable to laugh off, dismiss or ignore the activist homosexual/liberal lobby’s escalating campaign to demonize Christians and punish groups like Americans For Truth. That is because everyday Americans are being influenced by the liberal media, which enable groups like the SPLC and All Out by failing to call into question their preposterous analogies, lies and hateful smears against Christians. We must fight back with the Truth and engage our politically enemies in a dogged, “house-to-house” battle to preserve our liberties and our ability to operate freely in the public square. To do so, contact PayPal and see the “Take Action” steps at the top of this article.

Thank you for standing with Americans For Truth. God bless you.

 – Peter LaBarbera (americansfortruth@gmail.com)

The SPLC's Mark Potok oversees the organization's de facto "campaign of defamation" painting groups like AFTAH that oppose homosexuality as "hate groups." Potok admits that the SPLC has never identified a single "gay" group as hateful even though militant homosexual organizations like ACT UP and Bash Back! have targeted churches with vicious attacks.

TAKE ACTION: Contact the Senate Judiciary Committee (members listed HERE; Senate Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121) — and the House Committee on Homeland Security (202-226-2616; members listed HERE; House Switchboard: 202-225-3121) and urge them to investigate the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) working relationship with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. The leftist SPLC is now slandering conservative, Christian and Tea Party groups by mislabeling them as “hate groups” on a par with genuine, fringe hate groups like the KKK.  American taxpayers should insist that the federal government have no role in legitimizing the SPLC, which has politicized “hate” and turned it into a fund-raising business to demonize conservatives – including mainstream pro-family groups that oppose homosexual activism. To read an in-depth report exposing the SPLC’s unethical practices, go HERE.

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Below is a useful article by Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute — on the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) preposterous smear-job against mainstream pro-family groups (including AFTAH, IFI, Family Research Council, and AFA) as “hate groups” because we oppose homosexuality and LGBT (“gay”) activism. Technically, the SPLC would argue that AFTAH and the other groups opposed homosexuality in the wrong way, but let’s be honest: ideologically speaking, the SPLC is so deeply committed to pro-”gay” advocacy that it considers suspect any organization that opposes pro-LGBT activism. Predictably, the left-wing, pro-homosexual echo chamber is using the SPLC’s “findings” to discredit pro-family groups.

Indicative of the SPLC”s tendentious and polemical “hate reporting” is its description of this writer as a “longtime gay-basher.” Using such semantics, that would make SPLC staffers like Mark Potok “longtime Christian bashers.” To read an excellent set of reports on the SPLC’s escalating “campaign of defamation” against conservatives and traditionalists, read this special Social Contract Journal edition.

As Barb Anderson of the (potential future “hate” group?) Minnesota Family Council and I discussed in Part One of our AFTAH Radio Hour interview [click HERE to listen], the SPLC’s cynical “hate” dragnet is growing so wide that we have almost reached the point where if a pro-family group is NOT INCLUDED on the SPLC’s “hate” list, it must be slacking off in resisting the destructive homosexual agenda. I write “almost” because some of our good friends such as Liberty Counsel and Campaign for California Families have not yet officially been designated “haters”; their time will come. Of course, the truth is, nobody “hates” like the American Left — especially militant homosexual activists.

I like Laurie’s reference to the “Morality Police”; how ironic that the Left has become the mirror of what it hates:  the societal “moral” scold. Remember that the dogmatists on the Left once screamed against the “Religious Right”: “Don’t impose your morality on the rest of us!” Now it’s the pro-”queer” Left that works diligently to “impose its immorality” on America using every dirty tactic ever conceived by Saul Alinsky (e.g., “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”; see this piece). I half expect Potok or SPLC co-founder Morris Dees to show up in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming to “have in my hand the names of 57 newly designated anti-gay hate groups….”

Prior to Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s “graduation” to full-fledged SPLC “hate” group, we were labeled a “hate” website by the SPLC — after a very… well, bigoted and hateful Marxist homosexual organization, the Gay Liberation Network (GLN), “reported” us to the Alabama-based SPLC. (You know those Communists are all about love, tolerance and honesty … one GLN leader, Bob Schwartz, a self-described Trotskyite, told me at a Chicago protest that he’d push me into oncoming traffic if it weren’t for the cops standing nearby; Schwartz has never denied making the threatening remark. I hereby report the GLN to the SPLC as a “hate” group for targeting sincere Christians with its slanderous and bigoted vilifications and protests.)

No hateful homosexuals?

You will recall that earlier this year SPLC Intelligence Project director Mark Potok confirmed to me via e-mail that no “gay” advocacy group has ever made the SPLC’s “hate” list — despite the fact that miltant homosexual organizations like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) have engaged in numerous planned assaults against churches and other political opponents. (In 1989, as part of a huge protest againset then-Cardinal John O’Connor, ACT UP members stormed St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City during a Sunday mass; it was a particularly ugly, anti-Catholic attack in which protesters screamed and tossed condoms in the air, and even stomped on a consecrated wafer believed by Catholics to be the Body of Christ. More recently, in 2008, the homosexual activist group Bash Back! staged an invasion of a large evangelical church in Lansing, Michigan; the church was specifically targeted for its outspoken belief that homosexual practice is sinful and that “gays” can leave that lifestyle through faith in Jesus Christ. [Regarding that point and the SPLC's #10 "myth" below, we must ask: does the Southern Poverty Law Center "hate" former homosexuals?] A thorough investigation into the pro-homosexual “hatred” unleashed against Prop 8 supporters in California – especially churches — is in order.)

In the ensuing months since I corresponded with Potok, the SPLC appears not to have made even a token move to identify homosexual activist hate groups and websites (gay activist Dan Savage’s shockingly evil “Santorum.com” comes to mind [Warning: highly offensive content] — while it greatly expanded its list of alleged pro-family alleged “hate groups.” This contradiction alone demonstrates the SPLC’s extreme bias and the folly of taking seriously its self-appointed role as an objective, impartial hate-monitoring organization.

Higgins deftly exposes the shoddy “research”  of the SPLC (as we at AFTAH have personally experienced; the incompetent researchers for SPLC’s “Intelligence Report” initially confused me with Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute). All this would be comical except that the SPLC is taken seriously by the liberal media and is used as an informational resource by the federal government’s Department of Homeland Security, so please take the action steps above.

Always remember: defending biblical morality is not ”bigotry” and disagreeing with homosexual activists is not “hate.” Thanks for standing with AFTAH for truth amidst all the politically correct lies. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org; write us at americansfortruth@gmail.com

Laurie Higgins writes:
_____________________________________________________

The Morality Police at the Southern Poverty Law Center

Evelyn Schlatter, Southern Poverty Law Center author of "hate groups" article

By Laurie Higgins, Illinois Family Institute

Oh, for the good old days when the term “hate group” referred to groups that actually hated someone. Now the term “hate group” refers to any group that expresses political, philosophical, moral, or theological beliefs with which the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) disagrees.

Last week, the SPLC released the winter issue of Mark Potok’s ironically named “Intelligence Report.” The article, “18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda,” by Evelyn Schlatter lists 18 organizations as “anti-gay” groups with 13 of those to be added to their formal list of “hate groups.” The American Family Association, Family Research Council, and the Illinois Family Institute are three of the 13 that will be included on a list with neo-Nazi organizations.

Schlatter explains that the “propagation” of “known falsehoods” about homosexuality will result in organizations being included on the SPLC’s “anti-gay” list and perhaps also their “hate groups” list. Here are the “known falsehoods” that she and co-author Robert Steinback cite in the companion article “10 Anti-Gay Myths Debunked”:

1. If an organization claims that homosexuals “molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
2. If an organization says that “same-sex parents harm children,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
3. If an organization claims that “people become homosexual because they were sexually abused as children or there was a deficiency in sex-role modeling by their parents,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
4. If an organization claims that “homosexuals don’t live nearly as long as heterosexuals,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
5. If an organization claims that “homosexuals controlled the Nazi Party and helped to orchestrate the Holocaust,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate-groups” list.
6. If an organization claims that “hate crime laws will lead to the jailing of pastors who criticize homosexuality and the legalization of practices like bestiality and necrophilia,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
7. If an organization claims that “allowing homosexuals to serve openly would damage the armed forces,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
8. If an organization claims that homosexuals “are more prone to be mentally ill and to abuse drugs and alcohol,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
9. If an organization claims that “no one is born a homosexual,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.
10. If an organization claims “Gay people can choose to leave homosexuality,” it goes on the SPLC’s “hate groups” list.

Under each of these “myths,” Schlatter and Steinback offer analyses and evidence of such poor quality that their arguments wouldn’t pass muster in many high school English classes in which there are actual standards for logic and use of evidence. I will examine just a few of the many problems in their analyses, which in turn will reveal the intellectual and ethical vacuity that pervades the SPLC.

Same sex parents harm children

The SPLC thinks that the belief that same sex parents harm children constitutes hatred. The first problem is that Schlatter and Steinback fail to define harm. If one believes that homosexuality is morally flawed, then a household centered on a morally flawed relationship cannot be beneficial.

It is entirely possible that a brother and sister in an incestuous relationship or that polyamorist parents could raise children, providing for their physical needs, comforting them, and teaching them their ABCs. But most of society believes that such relationships would harm children because they would teach children that incest or polyamory are morally permissible. Would Schlatter and Steinback include organizations on their “hate groups” list that propagate the belief that incestuous parents or poly-parents harm children?

The SPLC and many homosexuals are outraged over any comparison of homosexuality to adult consensual incest or polyamory because they view homosexuality as moral and incest and polyamory as immoral. But no one is obligated to accept the SPLC’s flawed comparison of homosexuality to race or to accept their moral assumptions. After all, who is the SPLC to impose their moral views on all of society? Why are IFI’s moral beliefs about homosexual acts hateful and the views of those who oppose incest or polyamory legitimate? Why do IFI’s moral beliefs about volitional homosexual acts land us on the “hate groups” list, while the moral beliefs of those who oppose incestuous parents or poly-parents do not land them on the “hate groups” list?

Homosexual parents teach their children that gender is irrelevant to marriage and to parenting. They teach them that homosexual acts are inherently moral. And they deliberately deprive children of either a mother or a father. Those corruptions of truth and essential human relationships harm children.

Childhood molestation, innateness (“born that way”) and homosexuality

The one point about which many on both sides of the homosexuality debate agree is that the causes of same-sex attraction are not known. Many believe that same-sex attractions result from a complex interaction of biologically shaped predispositions and environmental factors. If we do notknow the causes of same-sex attraction, and if some of the factors that contribute to it are environmental experiences, how can anyone declare that childhood molestation never contributes to the development of same-sex attraction? And if childhood molestation may contribute in some cases to the development of same-sex attraction, how can it constitute hatred to say so?

Oprah, an inveterate promoter of all things homosexual, recently did two powerful programs about men who were molested as children. One of her guests was a therapist who has treated hundreds of men who were molested as children. He stated that one result of the sexual molestation of boys is “sexual orientation confusion.”

Schlatter and Steinback also assert that it’s hateful, false, and mythical to say “no one is born homosexual,” and then virtually their entire analysis reveals that there is no research proving that people are “born homosexual.” Schlatter and Steinback write, “a great many studies suggest that it is the result of biological and environmental forces.”

Following their repeated assertions that there is no proof that homosexuality is congenital, Schlatter and Steinback suggest the false dichotomy that if people do not choose their same-sex attraction, they must be “born that way,” completely ignoring two essential truths. First, the fact that people do not choose their feelings does not mean that such feelings are biologically determined. Second, freely chosen behaviors that emerge from feelings shaped by biological influences are not automatically moral.

IFI has consistently said that although no one chooses their feelings, people do choose how to respond to them. Saying that people ought not to act upon same-sex attraction is no more hateful than saying that people ought not to act upon unchosen, powerful, persistent attractions to pornography, multiple people, or their siblings. All moral beings have to decide which of their unchosen, powerful feelings are morally legitimate to act upon.

Homosexual men and shortened life spans

Under the “myth” about the shortened life spans of homosexual men, Schlatter and Steinback made the following statement:

Bob Unruh, a conservative Christian journalist who left The Associated Press in 2006 for the right-wing, conspiracist news site WorldNetDaily, said shortly before the federal law was passed that it would legalize “all 547 forms of sexual deviancy or ‘paraphilias’ listed by the American Psychiatric Association.” This claim was repeated by many anti-gay organizations, including the Illinois Family Institute.

Either because of Schlatter’s and Steinback’s poor research or lack of ethics, they failed to include the fact that exactly one week after making the error regarding the DSM, writer Kathy Valente posted a correction which is still on our website. It reads as follows:

In the article entitled “Hate Crimes Bill Moves to Senate” (5/5/09), we mistakenly stated that the American Psychiatric Association’s actual definition of “sexual orientation” includes paraphilias. The APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) classifies “sexual orientation” as heterosexual, homosexual, and bi-sexual. The 547 mental disorders called paraphilias specifically involve non-human objects, physical pain, or unwilling partners as in pedophilia. IFI apologizes for the error.

I hope and assume that Schlatter and Steinback will demonstrate the integrity and professionalism that Ms. Valente did by publishing a correction and apology.

In their argument that talking about the shorter life spans of homosexual men constitutes an act of hatred, Schlatter and Steinback focused on research by Paul Cameron, while completely ignoring research by the well-respected International Journal of Epidemiology that found the following:

[W]e demonstrated that in a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 21 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality continued, we estimated that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years would not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871.

The authors of this article, upset that conservative groups disseminated this troubling fact, issued an update that said, “if we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of gay and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths from HIV infection have declined dramatically in this population since 1996.”

Though mortality rates have dropped due to improved treatment protocols, HIV infection rates for “men who have sex with men” (MSM) are soaring. According to the CDC, “While CDC estimates that MSM account for just 4 percent of the U.S. male population aged 13 and older, the rate of new HIV diagnoses among MSM in the U.S. is more than 44 times that of other men.”

I wonder if Schlatter and Steinback are planning on publishing an addendum to their article in which they address HIV infection rates for homosexual men, or perhaps they’re going to include the CDC on their “hate groups” list.

Nazism

Schlatter claimed erroneously that I “compared homosexuality to Nazism,” which makes me wonder if she even bothered to read the articles in which I referred to Nazism. Here’s an excerpt from one:

Although genocide and homosexual acts are both sins, in man’s economy–and my own belief system–genocide is a far greater sin. And although I believe that all sin represents rebellion against God, I believe that homosexuality and genocide are by nature distinct….I never posited that homosexuals were the moral equivalents of Nazis. Rather, I compared the rationalizations church leaders offered for the silence of the church in the face of the evil of Nazism to the rationalizations church leaders offer for the silence of the church in the face of the evil of using public schools to promulgate destructive, erroneous views of homosexuality….The feckless or deceitful claim that I said homosexuals are equivalent to Nazis makes no more sense than claiming that someone who says the church should address both the sin of murder and the sin of gossip are saying that murderers and gossips are morally equivalent.

Sin in the closet

The SPLC believes it’s an act of hate to say that homosexuality should remain in the “in the closet.” Ms. Schlatter quoted an article in which I said, “There was something profoundly good for society about the prior stigmatization of homosexual practice…. [W]hen homosexuals were ‘in the closet,’ (along with fornicators, polyamorists, cross-dressers, and ‘transsexuals’), they weren’t acquiring and raising children.”

Many people believe that immoral behavior should be concealed from the public rather than paraded about or publicly celebrated. For example, many people–perhaps most–do not want polyamorists’ or cross-dressers’ behavior to be public where children can see it. Does the SPLC view those who don’t want their children to see manifestations of polyamory or cross-dressing as haters?

And many people believe that children have a fundamental right to be raised by the biological parents who procreated them. Many people, including Roman Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and Protestants as well as people who follow no faith tradition, believe it is immoral for homosexuals to adopt or use in vitro fertilization and surrogacy to acquire children. Do they all deserve to be labeled “haters”?

My belief that it would be better for society if homosexuality were not publicly affirmed, normalized, or celebrated no more constitutes hatred of homosexuals than does other people’s belief that polyamory should not be publicly affirmed, celebrated, or normalized constitute hatred of polyamorists.

Ex-gays

The SPLC states that saying people can choose not to act on same-sex attraction or that they can leave a homosexual lifestyle constitutes hatred of homosexuals. Following that logic, what does it mean when someone says people can leave a polyamorous lifestyle or that they can choose not to act on their powerful attractions to multiple people? And what does it say to the hundreds of men and women who have abandoned their homosexual lives that the SPLC says discussing such a path is an act of hatred?

Conclusion

No longer is hate defined as, well, hatred. Anyone who finds the SPLC’s analogies faulty; their research selective; their concealing of inconvenient facts troubling; or their unproven, non-factual moral beliefs wrong, is now guilty of hatred.

The SPLC holds the unproven, non-factual belief that homosexuality is moral and arrogantly demands that all of society agree, or be silent, or be labeled a “hate group.” That strikes me as a strange manifestation of tolerance or respect for speech rights and diversity. Ironically, the SPLC has become the oppressor.

The SPLC hopes that their smear campaign will silence conservatives so that only the SPLC’s moral views will be heard in the public square. No one should allow the unprincipled bullying tactics and specious reasoning of the SPLC to intimidate them into silence. The SPLC’s ontological and moral beliefs about homosexuality are not facts, and dissent from the ethically impoverished SPLC’s beliefs does not constitute hatred.

Please take time to read this comprehensive indictment of the SPLC from the Social Contract Journal, which dedicated its spring 2010 issue to exposing the SPLC.

And if that’s not enough, click HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Psychologist Mike Campion was vindicated when the City of Minneapolis settled with him for $211,000 rather than try to prove in court their false charge that he was an anti-gay bigot who could not professionally do his job of evaluating police and firefighter candidates -- due to his past affiliation with a Christian pro-family group.

“Former City Council Member Scott Benson, who is gay and a lawyer, sent a note to then-interim Police Chief Tim Dolan and asked, ‘How did Dr. Michael Campion, who was a board member of the Illinois Family Institute (a notoriously discriminatory anti-gay group) become the psychologist for the Minneapolis Police Dept. for screening new hires etc?’

“The same month the city suspended work with Campion and hired another firm to do screening, citing better ‘diversity and transparency’ issues at the firm.” – Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Minneapolis settles suit with fired psychologist for $210,000″

By Peter LaBarbera

The City of Minneapolis just admitted its guilt and, in effect, shameful anti-Christian bigotry by settling with psychologist contractor Michael Campion for $210,000 rather than go forward with a U.S. District Court trial that it surely would have lost on First Amendment grounds. See the Minneapolis Star-Tribune article reprinted below. 

I know Mike Campion and his wife Kathy. He is a good and decent Christian man whom compassion-challenged liberals put through the grinder merely because he supports the objective truth that homosexuals can change their lifestyle (as countless have). His firm, Campion, Barrow & Associates, is one of the most professional in its field and evidently the City of Minneaopolis could not find anyone who would testify that Mr. Campion had mistreated or discriminated against them on the basis of “sexual orientation.”

In other words, unlike the liberals who sought to destroy him, Campion is no bigot. Pathetically, some city officials even tried to smear Campion as a racist to achieve their goal. End justifies the means, right?

Note the comment by homosexual activist Scott Benson above: a “gay” politician, working with pro-homosexual city officials, gets Campion fired because he was once a board member with a “notoriously discriminatory organization,” the Illinois Family Institute (IFI).

Most of AFTAH’s readers know of IFI, where I served as executive director from 2003-2006. This fine group and its followers merely defend the historic Christian and biblical teaching that homosexuality is outside of God’s expressed will. They believe that this sinful behavior is changeable through trusting in Jesus Christ, who in His grace and love and truth offers forgiveness to all sinners. Neither Mike nor IFI “hate” or “fear” homosexuals, and such spurious accusations — now tossed recklessly at any Bible-believer who expresses disagreement with sodomy, is itself a manifestation of reactionary, anti-Christian prejudice. 

Are you seeing the folly and frightening potential of this Orwellian sexual agenda: all across America and the world, homosexual activists are smearing Christians or even working aggressively to get them FIRED (or arrested) – in the name of “fighting discrimination”! The bald-faced hypocrisy of the pro-homosexual Left is exposed — and anyone not blinded by politically correctness (which unfortunately covers many in the media) can see it.

Truth is — as lesbian activist and Obama-appointed E.E.O.C. Commissioner Chai Feldblum asserts — there is a “zero-sum game” between homosexualist ideology/”sexual orientation”-based “rights” and our First Amendment freedoms. To the committed homosexualist, it doesn’t matter if you are black, white or brown – it only matters whether or not you affirm homosexuality. And if you don’t or, God forbid, you belong to a church or organization that questions the cherished myths of the powerful “Gay” Lobby, watch out! You could be in trouble with the Sexual Thought Police. (Read Julea Ward’s story HERE; Crystal Dixon’s story HERE; and Elaine Huguenin’s story HERE.)

How dare the liberal Left lecture us about ”rights” as they take away others’ rights and promote a vicious, new form of discrimination that cynically equates God-honoring moral convictions with “hate” and punishes them accordingly.

A new civil rights movement

The encouraging news is that the seeds of a new civil rights movement are growing — made up of Americans and citizens of all creeds and colors worldwide demanding that their freedom to live by their religious and moral beliefs be respected and made inviolable. This noble freedom-of-conscience movement will rise up against any and all attempts — government and corporate – to punish people for their deeply-held moral convictions. It will stand aggressively against laws and policies that belittle and demonize traditionalist and religious views – and which demand that our morality be shoved into some personal closet or church away from the workplace and public square.

America is a freedom-loving nation. We must not let it become a freedom-crushing nation, especially in the name of a misnamed ”tolerance” that will not tolerate dissent and a (non-diverse) “diversity” that punishes and maligns adherents of moral truth. (See my expulsion and then crude demonization by the curiously-named DiversityInc magazine and its hateful publisher, Luke Visconti.) In the spirit of our Founding Fathers, we will not tolerate government-enforced tyranny, and certainly not in the name of “rights” based on sexual misbehavior or any errant secularist cause that seeks to recast our God-given liberties to affirm worldly trends.

We understand that many social liberals hate us for defending biblical and moral truth, but that hatred does not allow them to steal way our rights. So, like past patriots, we WILL fight back against the Liberal, Pro-Gay Thought Police at every turn. Because our freedom — like Mike Campion’s — is non-negotiable.

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Star-Tribune article on Campion’s victory:

Minneapolis settles suit with fired psychologist for $210,000

Michael Campion was fired because of concerns over his ties to an “anti-homosexual” organization

By ROCHELLE OLSON, Star Tribune

September 3, 2010

A psychologist who screened potential Minneapolis police officers will receive a $210,000 settlement from the city over his firing, which stemmed from his affiliation with the Illinois Family Institute and his support for treating the “problem” of homosexuality.

The City Council unanimously agreed Friday after a closed-door session to pay Michael Campion of Campion, Barrow & Associates of Illinois Inc. (CBA) rather than go forward with a U.S. District Court trial scheduled to start Sept. 13 before U.S. Judge Joan Ericksen.

Council Member Gary Schiff, who is gay, said, “It was clear the settlement was in the city’s best interest.”

The Family Institute has stated that it opposes the “gay lifestyle.”

If the city had lost at trial, it could have been made to pay Campion’s attorney’s fees. Schiff said the settlement amount includes legal fees.

In reaching the decision, Schiff said, the council leaned heavily on an 18-page pretrial ruling from Ericksen, in which she wrote, “The court observes, at this preliminary state, that plaintiffs’ First Amendment interests appear to be strong.”

Jim Campbell, of the Alliance Defense Fund of Arizona, said the settlement “reinforces that the government cannot penalize Christian contractors for their beliefs.  The court had already issued a decision finding that the City of Minneapolis removed Dr. Campion because of his constitutionally protected involvement with a Christian organization, noting that Dr. Campion’s constitutional rights were strong.”

Schiff said the council realized that Ericksen’s ruling signaled an uphill legal fight.

CBA began working for the city in 2004, about a year after a federal mediator came to town to address concerns about biased policing and low numbers of minority officers. In 2006, members of the Police Community Relations Council, which grew out of the federal mediation, raised concerns about racial bias in CBA’s work. Another firm reviewed the work and found no such evidence.

Campion met with the community council in August 2006 and concerns were raised about his affiliation with the Family Institute, founded by James Dobson, and the “anti-homosexual” nature of the organization, the judge’s order said.

Former City Council Member Scott Benson, who is gay and a lawyer, sent a note to then-interim Police Chief Tim Dolan and asked, “How did Dr. Michael Campion, who was a board member of the Illinois Family Institute (a notoriously discriminatory anti-gay group) become the psychologist for the Minneapolis Police Dept. for screening new hires etc?”

The same month the city suspended work with Campion and hired another firm to do screening, citing better “diversity and transparency” issues at the firm.

CBA sued, claiming the city violated Campion’s First Amendment rights by taking action against him because of his association with the Family Institute.

The city argued that the decision to part ways with CBA stemmed not from Campion’s speech but by “concerns about bias.”

Campion’s business, based in Champaign, Ill., has performed psychological testing for 35 years for more than 100 law enforcement agencies, including St. Paul. A portion of Campion’s testing was developed through a U.S. Department of Justice grant in which he sampled St. Paul residents on what characteristics were important in an officer.

Before receiving the psychological exam, applicants are given a conditional job offer. If they are rated unqualified, they generally are not hired.

Campion has not commented on the case. His lawyers didn’t return a phone call.

Rochelle Olson • 612-673-1747

Ryan Sorba speaking at the Truth Academy.

Part Two of our interview with Ryan Sorba, a young conservative who spoke at AFTAH’s Truth Academy outside Chicago Aug 5-7. This aired August 28, 2010. In this segment Sorba discusses how some leading lights on the American Right are pulling back from the fight against the organized homosexual agenda. LaBarbera reads from a column by blogger and commentator Matt Lewis about how young conservatives support sassy pundit Ann Coulter speaking before the homosexual Republican group GOProud. Lewis quotes pundit S.E. Cupp, who asserts that “Conservatism and gay rights are actually natural allies.” Sorba says Cupp, as a purported “conservative,” is involved in a self-contradiction and has a false conception of liberty.

“Homosexual acts are unjust,” says Sorba, and “sodomy is contrary to Scripture.” He says there is no more a “constitutional right” to sodomy than there is a “constitutional right” to drop acid in the privacy of your own home. He compares the twisted, contradictory idea of “homosexual marriage” to a “square circle,” and says it has nothing to do with true conservatism, which is designed to preserve what is good and noble. Sorba and LaBarbera also say pro-family advocates should stop using the word “gay,” which suggests intrinsic identity rather than changeable behavior.

HOW TO LISTEN: This is an mp3 file.  Left click once on the link below to play.  (Please be patient, depending upon the speed of your internet connection it may take a moment or two to load.) OR right click the link then “save target as” to download the whole show.

8-28-10, Ryan Sorba, All

Laurie Higgins fought the teaching of the pornographic homosexual-authored play "Angels in America" as a high school writing instructor.

Our interview with Laurie Higgins, a writer with Illinois Family Institute, aired on May 8, 2010. Higgins is a relative newcomer to the pro-family scene but has distinguished herself with her brilliant and cogent analyses of  homosexual activism and with her “deconstruction” — to borrow a leftist term — of “queer” argumentation and concepts (e.g., “sexual orientation”).

Higgins is a former writing instructor at Deerfield High School in the northern Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Illinois. In Part One of this two-part interview, she describes how she was demoted at the school after speaking out about the promotion of homosexuality to students. She objected to the teaching of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, a pornographic and blasphemous play by homosexual activist playwright Tony Kushner, to senior English students, and it was all downhill from there.  In the end, after she had left Deerfield, Higgins learned that the district superintendent, George Fornero, a homosexual, had helped to spread malicious misinformation about Higgins and her family to other educators.

For a sample of Higgins’ writing, go HERE and HERE and HERE.

This is an mp3 file.  Left click on the link below to play.  (Please be patient, depending upon the speed of your internet connection it may take a moment to load.)  OR right click the link then “save target as” to download.

5-8-10, Laurie Higgins, All

Matt Barber's brutally honest description of homosexual sodomy was too much for Exodus International.

By Peter LaBarbera

Folks, a few days ago we ran a story about CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) allowing a homosexual activist group to be a co-sponsor, in which I quoted my friend (and AFTAH Board Member) Matt Barber offered a colorful description of homosexual sodomy and same-sex “love.” It was appropriately dismissive toward this “detestable” act (Leviticus 18:22) once known as a “crime against nature,” and you can read it HERE.  The point was: no true “conservative” can support or celebrate homosexual perversion.

Well, thanks to the politically correct overreaction of Randy Thomas and Alan Chambers of Exodus International (an ex-”gay” umbrella group), Liberty Counsel (Barber’s current employer) issued an apologetic statement that was not fully accurate in that it left out a key fact: Matt’s ownership of the bold sodomy description. This could create the  impression that Barber might not have made the comment, which he did.

Today Matt issued his own clarification (emphasis added):

“This is for clarification only. As affirmed in Liberty Counsel’s statement, neither I nor anyone with Liberty Counsel ever publicly ‘wrote or made’ the comment in question – an unapologetically direct and accurate depiction of the sin of sodomy (a sin that God directly and accurately calls both an ‘abomination’ and ‘detestable’). Some years before I began working with Liberty Counsel, I made the comment in private conversation with Peter LaBarbera. At the time, Peter asked if he could ‘quote me on it’ and I said yes.

“On a personal note, let me take this opportunity to share with those caught-up in this particular sin lifestyle that I am no less a sinner and no better a person than they. None of us are. The good news is that, through Christ’s earth shattering sacrifice on the cross, we are redeemed. We need merely believe, call upon His name, repent and make every effort to ‘go and sin no more.’

“Unfortunately, however, we live in a society where this particular sin is embraced, promoted  and even celebrated. People erroneously equate this unnatural and sinful behavior with ‘identity’ and ‘orientation’ even taking ‘pride’ in an objectively deviant lifestyle. My hope and prayer is that this silly faux ‘controversy’ might actually make people reflect –– if only for a moment –– upon the emotionally, spiritually and physically destructive nature of homosexual conduct. ‘Gayness’ is about what people do, not who people are. It’s about feelings and behaviors alone. But those feelings and behaviors don’t make those caught-up in them any less precious to God, to me or to anyone I know.

“Scripture tells us that the ‘wages of sin is death.’ It breaks my heart that so many ‘gays’ and ‘lesbians’ continue in a lifestyle that ultimately results in spiritual and, yes, even physical death. I’m very grateful for ministries such as PFOX, Exodus and others that reach out to those who seek to escape the homosexuality snare. In the meantime, I will push forward, undeterred, on the front lines of the ongoing culture war, fighting the militant homosexual activist organizations that enable and encourage those trapped in homosexuality to continue down that changeable path of destruction. Shame on them and shame on those who support them.” – Matt Barber

Exodus published two blog posts by Randy Thomas (first THIS ARTICLE and then THIS FOLLOW-UP pegging off the LC statement) highly critical of Barber’s remark and this writer for using it. Predictably, these Exodus articles have been exploited by homosexual activists such as Wayne Besen — who typically exaggerate the story in their zeal to embarrass Americans For Truth and by extension the pro-family movement. (Besen is also a malicious liar whose life ambition is to discredit ex-”gays”; he revels in ad hominem attacks on Barber, me (he came up with and continues to use the nasty smear “Porno Pete”) and others in the pro-family movement. Needless to say, he despises and maligns Exodus on a regular basis. By the way, the hateful Besen is also a strong contender for AFTAH’s “Gay Grinch of the Year” 2009 award due to — among other mean-spirited acts — his bullhorn harassment of Boston’s Park Street Church, which was holding an ex-”gay” conference.)

Below is a reprint of my original response to Liberty Counsel”s statement — which I published as a comment on Randy Thomas’ Exodus blog.  AFTAH will continue to work with Exodus even though occasionally we have philosophical and semantic disagreements with them about the proper approach toward homosexuality and the “Gay” Activist Lobby. The reality of our movement — like all coalitions — is that different groups take different approaches, hopefully all with the same end goal in mind. Exodus has a problem with re-stigmatizing homosexual behavior; we believe doing is essential to turning back the GLBT Lobby’s gains.

We also appreciate the work of Liberty Counsel and look forward to partnering with them as always in the fight against the aggressive and anti-Christian homosexualist movement.

This episode made a mountain out of a molehill and we regret that Exodus chose to draw more attention to it and to condemn us in such a self-righteous manner. If you would like to read my four responses to Randy’s posts (and to a comment by another writer critical of AFTAH) on the Exodus blog, go HERE to see all four posts. I look forward to reading Randy’s responses to my questions if he can find the time to answer. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org

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Peter LaBarbera’s first comment on Randy Thomas’ Exodus blog post, “Liberty Counsel Responds to Crass Quote Attributed to Matt Barber”:

December 18, 2009 at 2:00 pm

This is Peter LaBarbera. The quotation in question by Matt Barber — a brutally honest and necessarily accurate description of homosexual sodomy — is printed verbatim and was made in conversation between the two of us years ago — long before he went to work for Liberty Counsel. I asked Matt at the time if I could quote him on it and he gave me permission to use it, and ultimately I did — in the context of showing how CPAC or any organization that defends sodomy (as GOProud and countless other GLBT organizations implicitly and explicitly do) cannot call itself “conservative.”

I presume and hope that what Mat Staver and Liberty Counsel meant to say was that Matt Barber’s quoted words were not uttered or published under the auspices of Liberty Counsel — as they were made several years ago in private conversation long before Matt came to work there.

Frankly, I am appalled at Randy’s “spiritualized” condemnation of Matt Barber’s phrase. Sorry, Randy, I disagree with your self-righteous take on Christ-like compassion. Philosophically, I believe that you are conflating behavior with a supposed “identity” — “sexual orientation”/”gayness” — found nowhere in the Bible. Sin is what we do in our fallen nature, not who we are. Is Tiger Woods’ serial infidelity part of his “core” identity? I think not.

Would Randy be upset at a similar, direct condemnation/description of other sinful sexual behaviors condemned in the Bible, like pornography, adultery or incest? We’re talking about behavior here (sodomy) that God calls an “abomination.” Using the same logic, is Randy going to get on God’s case next for His very unambiguous (you might say harsh) classification of homosexual sodomy as detestable? Is Almighty God demonstrating “insensitivity” toward “gay” men with such language?

Let me ask you, Randy: how would you accurately and honestly describe the act of sodomy, and are you opposed to forcefully condemning it?

There is so much to disagree with regarding Randy’s posts that I will leave that for a formal reply on my site (Americans For Truth: http://www.americansfortruth.org). But I do want to clarify that Matt Barber’s candid description of homosexual sodomy — typical of his bold, entertaining and decidedly non-PC style –  is completely accurate; that he stands by it; and that he did indeed give me permission to use it years ago — which has nothing whatsoever to do with Liberty Counsel today.

Next time please shoot me an e-mail and we’ll clear this up easier.

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Randy Thomas responds to Peter LaBarbera’s comment:
December 18, 2009 at 3:02 pm

Peter, I have tried to dialog with you in person and via email in the past and it hasn’t cleared up anything before. You nod, say nice things and then go do something else that stigmatizes people who struggle with or embrace homosexuality. This time you wrote a hateful public quote attributed to someone else and contextualized it as a current reaction to the GOProud situation. We went through the direct and appropriate avenue to follow up with the person you alleged made this quote and got the above response.

Do what you got to do Peter.

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Peter LaBarbera responds to Randy Thomas’ “snippy” answer:
December 18, 2009 at 4:26 pm

Nice snippy non-response, Randy.  Talk about presumption. Perhaps you are correct: dialogue between us is not very productive as you seem to have one foot still in the “gay” camp (at least sympathy-wise) and another in the Christian pro-family camp. I sometimes wonder if you are more troubled by conservative pro-family groups like AFTAH than you are by homosexual activists. According to your loaded and misguided definition of “hate,”  I suppose you could make the case that the God of the Bible is a “hater” because He calls sodomy “detestable.” Matt and I and others are re-stigmatizing homosexual behavior, Randy — not people. Please, I beg you, show me anything close to “sexual orientation” in the Bible!  If you cannot, then stop defining people by destructive behaviors and treating homosexuality like some sort of special sin that deserves more deference than all the others. In fact, if criticizing bad sexual behavior is truly “hating” people, then much of the country is hating Tiger Woods right about now. (Do you “hate” Tiger? I don’t, and yet it makes me sick what he has done.) The practice of anal sodomy — or the infamous “crime against nature,” as that “hater” Noah Webster defined it — has caused untold physical destruction in this country, and across the world: I make no apology for agreeing with Matt’s dismissive and bold condemnatory description of it.

Folks, below my friend Laurie Higgins ably rebuts the spurious, ongoing “gay” activist attempt to blame Christians and religious people for tragic, violent attacks on homosexuals, like the August 1 slaughter at a “gay youth” center in Tel Aviv. Many homosexual activists apparently are compelled by their rejection of Biblical morality to lie in such a way about Christians. (At the same time, they malign us for highlighting gay-on-gay violence and for pointing out the obvious: that homosexual practice threatens longevity.)  The claim that Christian, conservative and religious speech causes “anti-gay violence” will continue to be used to advance a totalitarian homosexualist agenda, here and abroad. All lovers of freedom must fight this Orwellian agenda that has as its end game the very destruction of liberty as we know it — all in the name of “civil rights.” Please send this article to your friends. — Peter LaBarbera, www.americansfortruth.com

P.S. Unlike the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, I would support the death penalty for the Tel Aviv murderer (though Israel abolished the death penalty for such crimes). That would be far more effective than “hate crimes” laws in deterring such attacks in the future.

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Higgins writes:

Are Christians Responsible for Anti-Homosexual Bloodbath in Tel Aviv?

By Laurie Higgins, reprinted from Illinois Family Institute, 8/3/09

Yet another tragic, horrific, and utterly unjustifiable murder of homosexuals has taken place, this time in Tel Aviv, Israel at a youth center for homosexual teens. Saturday night [August 1], two were killed and thirteen wounded when a gunman opened fire in a club where homosexual teens meet. The unspeakable carnage exposes how very dark the mind of fallen humans can become.

And this recent mind-numbing crime provides yet another occasion for homosexual activists and those who support their social and political goals to lay an unbiblical, unchristian, indefensible crime at the feet of all Christians who hold biblical views on the nature and morality of homosexuality and who deplore murder.

Mourning for those young people whose lives were violently taken had not even begun before attacks on Christians could be found in the comments section of homosexual blogs. For example, last night one blog comment read, “The extremist religious people in our society, especially those like [National Organization for Marriage] and other anti-gay religious organizations (Pat Robertson, et al) are the cause of this kind of violence against the GLBT community. Members of these organizations spew their hatred on television and in their churches, and the weak-minded grab hold of their hateful words and act on them.”

Another read, “Last night I was at evening Mass in my home town. The priest began his sermon by talking about the ‘culture of death’ and his disapproval of euthanasia. How did he get from that to an attack on gays and lesbians? I don’t know, but somehow he did. He ranted about the introduction of civil partnerships for gays and lesbians in the UK and the adoption of children by gays and lesbians, and said that God had shown his attitude to ‘active homosexuality’ once and for all by his destruction of those ‘wicked people’ of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see from the events in Tel Aviv exactly where that kind of thinking leads.”

In an exploitative effort to silence Christians, homosexual activists rush in to impute culpability directly and speciously to orthodox Christian teaching on the morality of homosexual acts.

Can any homosexual activist provide evidence that those who are responsible for crimes associated with hatred of homosexuals are or were serious, committed followers of Christ who loved the Lord and His Word, knew Christian doctrine, and sought to live a life that would bring glory to God?

How specious to claim that the deaths of Nir Katz and Liz Trubeshi in Tel Aviv, Sakia Gunn, Sean Kennedy, Lawrence King, Jose Sucuzhanay (who was presumed to be but was not homosexual), Scotty Joe Weaver, or Carl Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera (who were not homosexual but called anti-homosexual epithets) were caused by the orthodox beliefs of those who desire nothing more than that all should come to Christ so that they can know “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” and the “fullness of joy.”

How specious to claim even implicitly that the convicted offenders Richard McCullough, Stephen Andrew Moller, Brandon McInerney, Hakim Scott, Christopher Gaines, Nichole Kelsay, Keith Phoenix, and the schoolyard bullies who harassed children were true followers of Christ who believed that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves.

One of the problems with the line of reasoning manipulated by homosexual activists is that they make the error of claiming that because two disparate groups of people share one idea in common, they must share all ideas in common. In other words, homosexual activists falsely claim that because orthodox Christians believe homosexual acts are wrong and anti-homosexual haters believe homosexual acts are wrong, both groups share all ideas in common and are equally culpable for the acts of violence that only one group endorses and in which only one group engages.

That would be like saying that Quakers who opposed the war in Viet Nam but rejected violence and the Weather Underground that opposed the war and endorsed the use of violence were equally culpable for the violence committed only by the Weather Underground.

Or it would be like saying that all people who oppose the exploitation of the environment are culpable for the acts of ecoterrorism engaged in by the Earth Liberation Front.

It’s exactly the same kind of charge that pro-abortionists level at all pro-lifers. Pro-abortionists offensively claim that those who oppose the killing of the unborn and reject murderous vigilantism are responsible for the murderous acts of vigilantes.

Are homosexuals who believe that polyamory, or “swinging,” or adult consensual incest is immoral guilty of creating a climate of hatred and danger to those who are in plural relationships, open relationships, or incestuous relationships? Do all moral claims about behavior constitute hatred toward people and contribute to climates of danger and fear, or is it just the moral claims with which homosexuals disagree that create climates of hatred, danger, and fear?

The kind of reasoning employed by homosexual activists is akin to the logical fallacy of “guilt by association.” Homosexual activists are attempting to coerce orthodox Christians into either self-censorship or outright rejection of the belief that homosexuality is immoral by associating it with a group with whom no one, including orthodox Christians, would want to be associated. But as one writer explains, “the fact that someone does not want to be associated with people she dislikes does not justify the rejection of any claim. For example, most wicked and terrible people accept that the earth revolves around the sun and that lead is heavier than helium. No sane person would reject these claims simply because this would put them in the company of people they dislike (or even hate).”

This line of reasoning also employs the logical fallacy of “hasty generalization” in which all members of a group are assumed to have all the characteristics of one or a few of its members.

In the book After the Ball [see MassResistance analysis HERE], homosexual tacticians Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, architects of what is referred to in the book’s acknowledgments as a “gay manifesto,” urge homosexual activists to “learn from Madison Avenue, to roll out the big guns. Gays must launch a large-scale campaign. . . .We’re talking about propaganda” which “relies more upon emotional manipulation than upon logic, since its goal is, in fact, to bring about a change in the public’s feelings.”

Kirk and Madsen’s goal is to “make homohating beliefs and actions look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from them.” What must be made clear is that what Kirk and Madsen mean by “homohating beliefs” are any negative views of homosexual acts, including even those that involve no hatred whatsoever. They go on to say that they “intend, by this tactic, to make the very expression of homohatred so discreditable that even Intransigents will eventually be silenced in public.”

Then they offer their truly pernicious tactic:

“The public should be shown images of ranting homohaters whose associated traits and attitudes appall and anger Middle America. These images might include:

• Klansmen demanding that gays be slaughtered or castrated;
• Hysterical backwoods preachers, drooling with hate to a degree that looks both comical and deranged;
• Menacing punks, thugs, and convicts who speak coolly about the ‘fags’ they have based or would like to bash;
• A tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed.”

I’m sure Kirk and Madsen would have liked nothing more than to be able to associate the Tel Aviv masked gunman’s bloodbath with orthodox Christianity.

Christians ought not to fall victim to this tactic. Christianity teaches not only that homosexual acts are sinful but also that no person shall commit murder; that hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses; that we are to love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God; that anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love; that we are to do good to those who hate us and bless those who curse us and pray for those who mistreat us; and that all are created in the image and likeness of God.

Orthodox Christians who are living out the entirety of Scripture do not hate, commit acts of murder, or endorse acts of murder.

Now is the time to pray for those who were injured and for the loved ones of those lost in Saturday’s carnage and to administer the full weight of civil justice to the guilty party: the man with the seared conscience who opened fire on a group of teens.

WARNING: Crude language, inappropriate for children

TAKE ACTION: 1) e-mail this video to your elected Republican officials at the national (202-224-3121; www.congress.org), state and local level and urge them to reject the Log Cabin’s radical homosexual agenda (which includes joining with other “gay” groups in trying to use the courts to overturn California’s pro-traditional-marriage Prop 8 vote). 2) call or write Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele at chairman@gop.com or 202-863-8700; 2) Call or write Nettelhorst Elementary’s principal, Cindy Wulbert, at Cw1411@gmail.com or (773) 534-5810.

The Log Cabin Republicans, a homosexual activist group, fielded a float in Chicago’s annual “gay pride” parade on June 28. 2009 — with a couple of crude signs: “BIG DICKS, small government” and “A Strong Military Shoots Big Loads.” If that’s not bad enough, the “gay” parade — like others across the country — saw the participation of many young children, brought by their same-sex parents or gay-sympathetic adults. A Chicago school, Nettelhorst Elementary, participated semi-officially after parents rallied to have their children be part of the first-ever grade school contingent to march in the parade.

As you can see from the video, beyond the crude signage, the “pride” parade featured sexual images and even public nudity (a woman atop a float is shown flashing her bare breasts — covered up in this video). Homosexual activists claim that same-sex parenting and “gay” adoption are good for children. Then they take their impressionable kids to annual “gay pride” celebrations that feature erotic and perverted behavior and language that are clearly inappropriate for children. They can’t have it both ways.

This video was produced by Americans For Truth about Homosexuality.  At previous Chicago “gay pride” parades, AFTAH has witnessed public nudity and even a vile gay sex act between two men, which was allowed to take place on the street directly in front of a row of Chicago cops, who stood by and did nothing.

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Watch AFTAH’s other Chicago “gay pride” 2009 video:  VIDEO: Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, Chicago ‘Gay Pride,’ and the Homosexual Cop-Haters

Related Log Cabin and “gay pride” stories:

• Homosexual Group ‘Log Cabin Republicans’ Has Measly 20,000 Members Nationwide
• Should Children Attend Lewd ‘Gay Pride’ Parades? LaBarbera Asks Biased Chicago Tribune Reporter
• [Illinois Family Institute - 2004:] Will Mayor Daley Again Allow Homosexuals to Commit Illegal Sex Acts on Chicago Streets at Upcoming ‘Gay Pride’ Parade?
• AFTAH Gives RNC Chief Michael Steele 20,000 Reasons NOT to Embrace Divisive Homosexual ‘Log Cabin Republican’ Agenda
• Tony Peraica, Christine Radogno Cozy Up to the Homosexual ‘Log Cabin Republicans’
• Log Cabin Republican Jamie Ensley Comes Out of his Bigot Closet
• Log Cabin Republicans Erase Photo of Boy-Seducing Predator Mark Foley from their Website
• Judy Baar Topinka Featured at Pro-Homosexual Log Cabin Republicans Fundraiser
• Public Nudity Tolerated as Angry Mob Assaults Peaceful Christians at Chicago ‘Gay Pride’ Parade
• San Diego School Superintendent: “Parents Don’t Have a Problem with Their Kids Being in Gay Pride Parade!”
• Coach Daubenmire Is Right: Christian Man, You Need to Observe a ‘Gay Pride’ Parade!
• San Diego City Councilman Blocks Public Display of Photos from “Gay Pride” Parade
• Ex-Log Cabin Republican Leader Takes over Pro-Homosexual-’Marriage’ Effort – Cal. Teachers Ass’n Pledges $1 Million to ‘No on [Prop] 8′

Matt Staver of Liberty Counsel (right) says the New Hampshire House vote “is clear evidence that the end game is to force clergy and religious institutions to not just accept, but to celebrate and participate in same-sex ‘marriages.’”

Liberty Counsel issued the following press release today; we added the quote marks around “marriage,” as in same-sex “marriage,” as part of our ongoing attempt to preserve the real meaning of words against the semantic onslaught of pro-homosexuality activists:

__________________________________

May 21, 2009, Liberty Counsel

Manchester, NH – By a vote of 188-186, the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted down a same-sex “marriage” bill because it contained a religious liberty protection clause. The state Senate had previously passed the bill along party lines by a vote of 14-10. Governor George Lynch, who is opposed to same-sex ‘marriage,’ said he would veto the bill unless it contained a religious liberty protection amendment. The amendment was added to the House version of the bill, and that is where it met opposition by an openly homosexual member of the House, who lobbied against the bill because of the amendment.

The religious liberty protection amendment would affirm the right of clergy and others affiliated with religious organizations to refuse to perform same-sex “marriage” ceremonies. However, an openly homosexual state Representative, Steve Vaillancourt from Manchester, led the opposition to the bill because he was opposed to the religious liberty amendment and said the House should not be “bullied” by the Governor. Vaillancourt supports the prior version of the bill that did not provide protections for clergy. The earlier bill passed both chambers, but the Governor said he would veto the prior bill because it lacked the religious liberty protection amendment. There are not enough votes to override a veto by the Governor.

Mathew D. Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law, commented: “The good news is that the same-sex ‘marriage’ bill did not pass. The bad news is that some legislators want to force clergy to perform same-sex ‘marriages.’ This bill failed to garner enough votes because it contained a clause designed to protect clergy and religious institutions from being forced to conduct same-sex ‘marriages.’ This should be a wake-up call for people who cherish freedom. The same-sex ‘marriage’ agenda being advanced is on a collision course with the values and freedoms shared by most Americans. This is clear evidence that the end game is to force clergy and religious institutions to not just accept, but to celebrate and participate in same-sex ‘marriages.’”

###

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The following release was sent out by PFOX April 7:

Contact:  Greg Quinlan, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX); PFOX@pfox.org

Gays Hating Ex-Gays

Hate Crimes Bill Introduced in Congress

A commentary by ex-gay Greg Quinlan

Washington D.C. – April 7, 2009/ What happens when ex-gays dare to come out of the closet?  When I helped staff the exhibit booth for the Ex-Gay Educators Caucus at the National Education Association conference in June 2006, Wayne Besen, the former spokesperson for the gay Human Rights Campaign, approached our booth and began to insult us for having the audacity to live as heterosexuals.  He took photos of our booth for his ex-gay bashing website which targets the ex-gay community for ridicule and harassment.  Mr. Besen and gay rights organizations do not believe ex-gays are entitled to the same rights and respect that gays currently enjoy.  They picket ex-gay conferences and protest vigorously against ex-gay equal access.

In his continuing zeal to discredit the ex-gay community, Besen likes to bully ex-gays by insisting that we still look “gay.”  When he was Director of Communications for the Human Rights Campaign, Besen delighted in telling me to “butch up” so “normal people” wouldn’t think I’m still “gay.”  See his emails for yourself at http://pfox.org/Human-Rights-Campaign-Hate-Against-Ex-Gays.pdf

At the conference, Besen stuck his finger in my face and called me a “fu*king faggot,” “fu*king cocksu*ker,” “fu*king fag bastard,” “fu*king nellie fairy,” and so on.  I guess he skipped the tolerance class where school kids learn to appreciate diversity and gays.  “You’re still having gay sex,” he yelled at me.  We had to call security to escort him out of the convention hall because we were scared for our safety.

Hate against ex-gays like me is all too common.  What’s going to happen when Congress passes the national Hate Crimes Prevention Act for gays?  It was introduced last week in the House of Representatives by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL).

With their hate officially protected by law, gay rights groups will force ex-gays into the closet.  Homosexuals will determine heterosexuality by censoring any ex-gay speech or behavior they disagree with as “hateful,” “discriminatory,” “intimidation,” “bullying,” “dangerous,” or leading to “spiritual and physical violence.”  We know because this is what they already label us.  Fighting “hate” and “discrimination” against gays has become a euphemism for attacks against ex-gays and their supporters.

Think twice, America.  Do you want to give gay activists like Besen the right to hate under the guise of a “civil rights” protection?  Besen has now aligned himself with Lambda Legal, the nation’s oldest and largest attorneys group “working for the civil rights of lesbians and gay men.”  Lambda Legal has offices and lawyers across the country.

While you still can, please stand up for the equal rights of the ex-gay community.  Unpopular minorities like former homosexuals deserve the right to be free and out in society.  The violence and hate spewed against heterosexuals after they voted against genderless marriage last fall is proof that a politically powerful and wealthy group like homosexuals can scare us into silence.  Let’s not be silent.

###

See http://pfox.org/about_us.html for more information about the ex-gay community. Greg Quinlan is a director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX). Mr. Quinlan is available for media interviews; contact: PFOX@pfox.org

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FOX Bill O’Reilly segment (April 21, 2009) in which Wayne Besen labels opposition to “gay marriage” as “bigotry”:

Send To Phone

April 3, 2009                    Contact: Peter LaBarbera: 630-717-7631

CHICAGO– Today’s Iowa Supreme Court decision imposing “same-sex marriage” as a constitutional “right” is an assault on not just the Judeo-Christian moral foundations of that state, but also on the God we ask to “Bless America” — and the common-sense, pro-family values of the Midwest, said Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality.

LaBarbera, who is also on the board of Protect Marriage Illinois, issued the following statement regarding the court’s reckless decision:

“Today Iowa becomes the first state not on either of the nation’s two liberal coasts to impose counterfeit, homosexual ‘marriage’ or its mischievous twin, ‘civil unions,’ on its citizens through judicial tyranny. To call this decision bankrupt is to understate its perniciousness. The evil genius of the pro-sodomy movement is that it targets noble institutions like marriage and adoption in the name of ‘rights,’ and then perverts and uses them to normalize aberrant and destructive behaviors.

“Homosexual ‘marriage’ is wrong because homosexual behavior itself is wrong and destructive – as proved by its role in the needless, early deaths of countless ‘gay’ men. We must shake loose of the secularists’ and libertarians’ amoral nonchalance regarding ‘same-sex marriage’ by asking questions like this: how exactly would two men consummate their ‘gay marriage”’ Answer: by engaging in what one Founding Father, Noah Webster, writing in saner times, rightly defined as a ‘crime against nature.’

“’Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,’ said abolitionist Wendell Phillips, and the evidence keeps pouring in that the entire homosexualist agenda is at war – not just with our nation’s Biblical heritage – but with the freedoms that made the United States of America great and blessed among nations. When the courts order society to effectively pretend that changeable sexual misbehavior is a ‘civil right,’ the law itself becomes perverted by punishing people of faith for their proper opposition toward deviant sex. The battle between ‘gay rights’ and religious freedom is a ‘zero-sum’ game – as even lesbian Georgetown law professor Chai Feldblum admits.

“I’m afraid that the pro-family movement – eager to provide secular, public-policy arguments against ‘gay marriage’ – has failed to convey the monstrous evil of expanding, state-sanctioned homosexualism in our midst.  Our Creator is pure, perfect and holy, and homosexual behavior is diametrically opposed to His will for people’s lives and His purpose for sex within the healthy boundaries of marriage, for the procreation of children. This same God graciously provides a way out of this sinful lifestyle through His son Jesus Christ, a path many former homosexuals have taken – including those now living in real (man-woman) marriages.

“It is high time for pastors, in Iowa and across the land, to shake off their stifling, politically correct timidity and again become the prophetic voices for Truth they were called to be: by boldly warning Americans – Christian and non-Christian alike — about the perils of our growing accommodation with the sins of proud homosexuality, and sex outside marriage in general.”

The Georgia Republican Party has distanced itself from homosexual activist and Georgia Log Cabin Republicans president Jamie Ensley’s vicious comments calling Americans For Truth a “domestic terrorist group” and comparing us to Nazis, WorldNetDaily.com reported Friday. Conservatives and pro-family Republicans across the nation have expressed outrage at Ensley’s bigoted remarks, but some homosexual groups like the leftist Gay Liberation Network have commended them.  

[UPDATE ON THIS STORY: WorldNetDaily.com reports that the Georgia Republican Party has issued the following statement on the Jamie Ensley-Log Cabin Republicans controversy: "While a healthy debate on the issues can help strengthen us as a party, to use the word 'terrorist' to describe those that disagree with you is not appropriate." Georgia GOP spokesman Doug Reineke emphasized to WND that the Log Cabin Republicans "are an independent group not officially associated with the Georgia Republican Party." See the full WND story HERE and the AFTAH article containing Ensley's hateful e-mail to GOP Chairman Michael Steele HERE.]

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Log Cabin Republican Jamie Ensley Comes Out of his Bigot Closet

By Laurie Higgins, reprinted from the Illinois Family Institute website.

An un-righteously indignant James Ensley, President of Georgia Log Cabin Republicans, has sent a vitriolic tirade against Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth to the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele. For those unfamiliar with Log Cabin Republicans, they are a homosexual political action group that is committed to subverting the Republican Party position on issues pertaining to “gay rights.”

Once again, the hypocrisy of the claims of homosexual groups’ commitments to tolerance is laid bare in all its ugliness in Mr. Ensley’s letter. He has charged Mr. LaBarbera and anyone else who shares the orthodox Christian, mainstream, historical view of homosexual behavior as immoral with being bigoted, anti-American, anti-Christian, fringe, radical, extremist domestic terrorists who shouldn’t have a voice in the Republican Party [see AFTAH piece HERE].
Here are some inconvenient truths upon which Mr. Ensley and other like-minded dogmatists might spend some time ruminating:

• There is no research proving that homosexuality is biologically determined: none.
• There is no research proving that homosexuality is ontologically equivalent to race or biological sex: none.
• It is no more anti-American to believe that homosexual behavior is immoral than it is to believe that polyamorous or incestuous behavior is immoral. I think it’s safe to assume that most, if not all, of our pro-American Founding Fathers believed homosexual behavior to be immoral. It would be fascinating to see what evidence Mr. Ensley would provide to justify his rather remarkable claim that beliefs about the immorality of homosexuality constitute anti-Americanism, particularly since those arguments tend to rely on the erroneous and unproven presupposition that homosexuality is ontologically equivalent to race.
• There is a body of thought emerging from the homosexual community called “queer theory” that holds that homosexuality is neither inherent nor immutable.
• Although homosexual feelings are not chosen, homosexual conduct is.
• Even behaviors that emerge from feelings that may be shaped in some way by biological influences are not automatically moral. All humans experience feelings that are likely shaped in some way by biology, but that existential reality does not mean that it is always and automatically morally legitimate to act upon those biologically influenced feelings.
• The view that homosexual conduct is moral is an unproven, ethical belief —not a fact.
• The belief that homosexual conduct is immoral does not constitute incitement to violence or hatred. It no more constitutes hatred of homosexuals than does the belief that polyamory or selfish behavior is immoral constitute hatred of polyamorists or selfish people.
• The belief that volitional homosexual behavior is immoral is not an extreme position. Throughout history, it has been the dominant cultural view and remains so both in this country and many other countries throughout the world.
• Ensley’s comparison of those who believe homosexuality is immoral to Nazis is a classic association fallacy, best known as “guilt by association.” He is implying that because conservatives believe that homosexuality is immoral and Nazis believed it’s immoral, then conservatives are equivalent to Nazis. It’s a fallacious and absurd non-argument. Surely, Mr. Ensley recognizes that he likely shares in common some views with some Nazis. The fact that conservatives believe that volitional homosexual behavior is immoral and that some Nazis believed that also does not prove that the belief itself is evil.
• It is not bigotry to believe that homosexual behavior is immoral. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines a bigot as a person who is “obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.” Clearly, there is a distinction between bigotry and moral views. Bigotry cannot simply refer to holding opinions or being in possession of moral precepts, for if it did, everyone but sociopaths would have to be considered bigots because everyone but sociopaths holds certain behaviors as moral and others as immoral. Moreover, “prejudice” refers to “an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.” As such, opinions formed, even negative opinions, after careful consideration do not represent prejudice.

It appears that James Ensley just came out of his bigot closet, hurling pernicious charges —with no evidence—at not only Mr. LaBarbera but also at countless others who share the view that homosexual behavior is immoral behavior. In the future, it might behoove the ad hominem-hurling Mr. Ensley to study the art of argumentation.

Laurie Higgins is the Director of School Advocacy for the Illinois Family Institute and a frequent contributor to Americans For Truth.

“There are over 200 weekend-long BDSM [bondage & discipline, dominance & submission, sadism & masochism] events that take place every year in America – we bring in a lot of revenue in these hard times. We like to stay at hotel chains where we have been welcomed when we’re traveling on personal or business travel.” – National Coalition for Sexual Freedom Alert sent out in response to AFTAH and pro-family efforts to stop a “Winter Wickedness” deviant-sex event at a Holiday Inn Hotel in Worthington, Ohio

Dear Readers,

We received an interesting email – our first ever from an “ex-sadomasochist” – which contained an e-alert from the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), a group devoted to: normalizing “BDSM” (bondage & discipline, dominance & submission, sadism & masochism); creating legal rights based on sadomasochism; and advocating for sexual “swingers” and practitioners of “polyamory” (multiple-partner relationships).

The NCSF message by spokeswoman Susan Wright blasted AFTAH as “religious extremist group” and rallied NCSF  followers to defend a sadistic, deviant-sex event called “Winter Wickedness” that was held at a Holiday Inn Hotel in Worthington, Ohio, Friday and Saturday.

Perversion Stimulus?
Taking advantage of tough economic times, Wright hailed the sadistic celebrations as good for the hotel business, saying that over “over 200 weekend-long BDSM events” take place annually across America.  Appropriating the tendentious language of homosexual and social left activists, she accused opponents of “Winter Wickedness” of “hate and ignorance.”

Below is the anti-NCSF message sent to Americans For Truth by “John Doe,” who sympathize with our efforts against the “Wickedness” event, followed by Wright’s NCSF Alert:

I am writing this e-mail to you as an insider who has recently turned their life around after being subjected to the horrifying world of BDSM. I am attaching a post and I will offer you further posts [on] this group. I hate this group. I want you to make [public the activities of this] group and others like it in [Ohio] because they are expanding.

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Following is an e-alert sent out by the sadomasochist advocacy group National Coalition for Sexual Freedom:

From: Susan Wright
To: ncsf-announce@ serve101.org
Sent: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 3:49 pm
Subject: NCSF Action Alert – Support Winter Wickedness Action Alert
National Coalition for Sexual Freedom

Support the Holiday Inn Worthington, the Host Hotel for Winter Wickedness

Please make a phone call now to support the Holiday Inn Worthington, the host hotel for Adventures In Sexuality\’s (AIS) Winter Wickedness Event taking place February 6-8th (www.adventuresinsex uality.org/ wicked09. html). The religious extremist group, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, along with a local religious radio station in the Columbus, Ohio, area are running a smear campaign against this pansexual BDSM event. Peter [LaBarbera] of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality calls the event \”a freakish sadomasochistic perversion-fest\” and urges people to call the hotel\’s corporate headquarters to pressure them into canceling \”for the sake of decency and public health.\” (www.aftah.org).

Bob Burney, a religious extremist Talk Radio DJ, devoted an entire segment of his show slamming Winter Wickedness and attempting to link the event with non-consensual and criminal activities. He urged his listeners to call and mount a campaign against the hotel. (Tuesday, Part 3 starting at 10 min 42sec: http://www.home. wrfd.com/ WRFDInsiderPage. htm) It will only take a minute for you to help! It doesn\’t matter where you live or if you\’re not going to attend this event. Please call the Intercontinental Hotels Group Corporate Customer service line at 800- 621-0555, then press option 1, then option 5, and thank them for not discriminating against groups, and for being willing to face minor adversity for the sake of our freedom. You can also call the Holiday Inn Columbus-Worthingto n today at 614-436-0700 b they\’ll be very glad to hear a friendly voice to counter the hatred of the religious extremists.

Suggested points to make:

1. Thank you for upholding the Fair Accommodations Act and choosing not to discriminate against legal events.
2. Please don\’t let a small number of religious extremists manipulate you by drumming up fear with their misinformation campaigns.
3. There are over 200 weekend-long BDSM events that take place every year in America b we bring in a lot of revenue in these hard times. We like to stay at hotel chains where we have been welcomed when we\’re traveling on personal or business travel.
4. Organizers of BDSM events such as Winter Wickedness at The Holiday Inn comply with state and local laws prohibiting public sexual intercourse and other forms of sexual intimacy. Demonstrations, lectures and discussion groups as well as dinners and evening parties compose the variety of offerings to guests, nothing different from any of the other hundreds of conventions hosted by your franchisees on a weekly basis.
5. Thank you for standing strong against hate and ignorance. Please pass this on to your friends to call now! February 4, 2009

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom is a national organization committed to creating a political, legal, and social environment in the United States that advances equal rights of consenting adults who practice forms of alternative sexual expression. NCSF is primarily focused on the rights of consenting adults in the SM-leather-fetish, swing, and polyamory [multiple-partner] communities, who often face discrimination because of their sexual expression. National Coalition for Sexual Freedom 822 Guilford Avenue, Box 127 Baltimore, MD 21202-3707 917-848-6544 media@ncsfreedom. org www.ncsfreedom.org

See our adjoining story: National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Talks of ‘Moral Leadership’ while Honoring Homosexual S&M Pornographer

Rea Carey of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force says her movement shows “moral leadership” to the nation — even as the Task Force presented its “Leather Leadership Award” to a homosexual pornographer. The Task Force’s “Creating Change” conference in Denver ran supportive workshops on: transsexuality; prostitution (“sex workers’ rights”), “polyamory/nonmonogamy”; and – most disturbing – pushing a “sexual freedom” (read: sexual license) agenda on youth.

Dear AFTAH Reader,

If you are reading this website, you are seriously concerned about the homosexual activist agenda.  So I have an assignment for you.  Please print out the enclosed “State of the Movement” speech by the Rea Carey, the new executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and read it all the way through (it’s about 8 printed pages with my introduction).  Now, why would a Christian pro-family organization send out a speech by a radical homosexual activist?  Because we need to know what our Culture War enemies are saying and this speech is very instructive for OUR cause of defending traditional morality and marriage in America.

If you can’t find time to read the whole “Creating Change” speech, at least read the parts of it that we have bolded below.  Note how Ms. Carey talks about “moral leadership” even as the Task Force gave its ‘Leather Leadership Award” to a hard-core homosexual pornographer at the same “Creating Change” conference.  (Talk about chutzpah!)  And note also how she refers to the Bush administration as the “Evil Empire” – Ronald Reagan’s famous description of expansionist Soviet Communism – just as Iraqi citizens were preparing to vote in another free election made possible by the U.S. liberation of their country from the grip of dictator Saddam Hussein.  Nobody lies like the Left, yet the liberal media rarely challenge groups like the Task Force on their many falsehoods and slanders.

Several observations about Carey’s speech:

• The sheer organization of the anti-Christian Left:  thousands of left-wing, grassroots activists attend these annual “Creating Change” conferences; there is no parallel on the social Right for this scale of people and groups working closely together toward common goals.  There are precious few organizing and political “how-to” conferences for pro-family conservatives.  The Left eats and breathes politics; the Right is more distrustful of government, worse at politics, but more oriented toward God, family and church (the latter is obviously a good thing).  All this helps explain why so much destructive social “change” has come to America, where political organization is rewarded in our democratic system.  (That said, we would not see such a progression of evil in our nation were our culture not so deceived, and its once-Christian character so worn down by faithless secularism.)  In the coming days, we will shed more light on the extremist Task Force agenda, which now includes sadomasochism, prostitution (“sex workers’ rights”), “polyamory/nonmonogamy,” and – most disturbing – pushing a “sexual freedom” (read: sexual license) agenda on youth;
• We must acknowledge homosexual-agenda “victories” before we can move forward:  the pro-family movement must take a sober look at where we are in the battle over homosexuality, and it’s not pretty.  While it is tempting to point to pro-marriage victories in November (California, Florida, Arizona) as evidence that our movement is healthy, underneath the surface we are losing the critical public-policy and cultural argument over the legitimacy of and government endorsement of same-sex relationships.  Homosexual activists are making steady, incremental advances, often with little pro-family opposition – e.g., passing “domestic partner” legislation like the bill currently moving through New Mexico’s legislature – as part of a longterm strategy for bigger victories ahead.  Many of the “gay” gains came in states targeted by homosexual moneymen like Tim Gill, who has successfully knocked out pro-family state legislators in Iowa, Colorado and other states.  This begs the question: why do such hardball efforts seem to succeed only on the Left and not the Right?  When will the pro-family Christian “Tim Gill” step forward to help our side?
• The dedication of evil:  if Christians were as devoted to defending God’s truth about sex and marriage as homosexual and transsexual activists are to promoting their destructive lies, we would be in a much better place.  The sad reality is that many Christians remain opposed to engagement in politics and public policy and are ambivalent about this cultural battle.  Some Christian leaders have made key concessions to pro-homosexualist ideology – or declared their neutrality on the issue – while they point judgmental fingers at the few groups that are trying to resist the “gay” juggernaut.  Meanwhile, there are no corresponding doubts on the Secular Left, which works unapologetically to radically redefine family and marriage and destroy the Judeo-Christian moral consensus that helped make this country great.  Ultimately, if the Left succeeds, Christians could see their faith-based freedoms to disagree with sexual sin disappear.
• Stealing “morality” (why not? The homosexual activists already stole the word “gay” and are trying to redefine “marriage,” “family,” “equality,” and “civil rights”):  Homosexual activists realize that to achieve total victory, they must separate Christianity from traditional (Christian) morality.  They aim to redefine right and wrong apart from God’s will for people’s lives, as clearly revealed in Scripture and nature with God’s beautiful, complementary design for man and woman united sexually in marriage to produce children.  “Queer” theologians are busy redefining the Bible and now brazenly claim that homosexuality is a “gift from God.”  The homosexual militants’ game plan is to reinvent Christianity by spouting religious-sounding yet subversive ideas for a nation that is still very religious, but largely ignorant of the Bible;
• The progression and unity of sexual sin … Face the evil:  at Americans For Truth, we’ve come face-to-face with homosexual extremism and have no problem labeling the overall GLBT movement as evil.  But many people are in denial about the nefarious homosexual agenda.  We need to admit that the media “soft sell” of homosexuality does not match what the GLBT Lobby has in store for our nation.  We ask: why does Rea Carey advocate for abortion (seemingly a non-issue for homosexuals) and against “useless” abstinence-focused education?   Why does the Task Force – which receives lots of corporate support — give an award to a purveyor of hard-core homosexual porn?  Why do they teach gender confusion (“transsexuality”) and “sexual freedom” to youth?  (The latter is a code term for no-limits sexuality including S&M.)  Why does the Task Force champion “nonmonogamy” even as it seeks to homosexualize “marriage”?  Because the Left unites around “mainstreaming” perversion and an anti-life, anti-nature, anti-God agenda.  Homosexuality.  Abortion.  Pornography.  Casual and deviant sex outside marriage.  The Task Force supports them all in its decidedly anti-moral quest.  This isn’t about “civil rights” but using the government to promote destructive, immoral and changeable behaviors.

Christians and moral traditionalists need to wake up: the other side is dead serious about “transforming society,” to quote Carey, and “imposing its morality” on us all.  It’s time for us to get serious in the Culture War, too.  God bless you.

Sincerely in Christ,

Peter LaBarbera
www.americansfortruth.com

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THE FOLLOWING IS THE SPEECH BY REA CAREY, HEAD OF THE HOMOSEXUAL “TASK FORCE”:

Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009
Subject: State of the Movement Address by Rea Carey, Executive Director, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
From: “The Task Force”  …

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Executive Director Rea Carey delivers State of the Movement address at 21st National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change

DENVER, Jan. 30 — National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Executive Director Rea Carey presented the annual State of the Movement address today at the 21st National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change, where 2,000 activists have gathered to strategize on how to advance LGBT equality in this new political climate. What follows below is the text of her speech:

I know many of us may be questioning the state of our movement, and I’ll get to that in a bit, but first, I can’t resist saying that we now live in a country with a community organizer in chief and since the Task Force literally has the trademark on Creating Change, we know that our moment has arrived!

I am honored to serve as the executive director of the Task Force following my friend Matt Foreman. In fact, pretty much since I came out at the age of 16 here in Denver I have watched, learned from and been inspired by the Task Force, so I consider myself to be incredibly fortunate to be part of it. I have come up through this movement and many of my teachers are here with us today, including a couple of former Task Force executive directors — Urvashi Vaid and Lorri Jean.

You’ve already met Russell Roybal, and I want to call up to the stage my other new partner in running the Task Force — a woman who you will be hearing a lot from — our new deputy executive director, Darlene Nipper.

I want to thank each and every one of you for being here. These are incredibly tough economic times and the fact that you have spent your precious time and limited dollars to be here — to gather with your fellow activists and allies from across the country and others who have joined us — speaks to your commitment to social change, to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, and most importantly, to each other.

This gathering is the public square of the LGBT movement and our time together is made richer and more valuable because each of you is here.

First, let’s talk about the past year. You know, there are years when our movement for full equality jumps by leaps and bounds and other years when we toil to gain every inch of ground. This year has been a bit of both in which we made progress on the local and state level and our country elected its first person of color to the presidency! Yet our love for each other was attacked again by the majority at the ballot box; our right to marry was taken away in California; our transgender brothers and sisters were denied much needed protections; and federal policy continued to elude us under the evil empire — I mean the Bush administration.

It has been a bittersweet year, but the state of our movement is engaged!

This year, we made many gains — gains made because of your hard work, your strategic thinking, your long hours, and your dollars funding state and local efforts. With all of the attention paid to marriage, it would be easy to miss the progress made at the local and state level that improves the lives of LGBT people. And so much of this progress has happened not on the coasts, but in the middle part of the country.

This weekend we will invite you to text to screen all the accomplishments you’ve had this year but I will mention just a few of the many achievements for LGBT people in 2008:

Here in our host state of Colorado, Amendment 46, a Ward Connerly initiative that would have ended affirmative action in public employment, public education or public contracting was defeated.

In Arizona, voters rejected Proposition 202, which would have penalized businesses that hire undocumented workers. And in Oregon, voters rejected an English-only proposal.

In three states — California, Colorado and South Dakota — voters considered initiatives related to reproductive freedoms. And we won in every state.

Also, here in Colorado we expanded progress by passing a law protecting LGBT people from discrimination in housing and public accommodations.

Eight localities passed and held onto nondiscrimination laws: Gainesville and Broward County, Fla.; Columbus and Oxford, Ohio; Kansas City, Mo.; Detroit, Mich; Columbia, S.C.; and Binghamton, N.Y.

We also — with incredibly hard work — successfully defended one of our victories from last year: a transgender rights ordinance that passed in Montgomery County, Md., where the combined efforts of the Task Force, Equality Maryland, Lambda Legal and a host of other organizations came together to defeat the referendum and prevent it from even reaching the ballot.

In the area of family recognition, Connecticut joined Massachusetts in becoming a freedom-to-marry state and then beat back efforts that would have threatened it. Those of you from Connecticut and our great partners Love Makes a Family and Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, congratulations and thank you.

We won marriage in California and over 18,000 couples are now legally married — and we plan on keeping them married. Even though we lost that right temporarily, our community and allies rose up in the days after the election to say, “Enough!”

We have with us today one of the founders of Join the Impact, Willow Witte, who along with her fellow organizer Amy Balliett, used the power of online organizing to fill the streets! We’re proud that some of the Join the Impact crew cut their organizing teeth at Creating Change in Portland, Ore., a few years ago and are now sharing their skills with thousands across the country.

Cities and towns in many states including Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and Utah, established domestic partnership or similar registries in 2008. There were domestic partnership expansions in Washington state and Washington, D.C. Maryland established limited domestic partnership recognition and New York has decided to respect out-of-state same-sex marriages. Maine had an unprecedented year of victories in 2008 culminating in an Election Day action that surpassed their wildest dreams. After waiting in line for an hour to vote, voters were waiting in line to sign pro-marriage postcards. When EqualityMaine ran out of 30,000 postcards, voters signed scraps of paper, jotting their names and addresses down on anything they could find.

Building on the momentum, EqualityMaine and its coalition partners recently introduced a marriage bill and they have a solid plan for winning marriage in the Legislature in 2009 and then protecting it in the inevitable referendum campaign.

And finally, this last year’s accomplishments include a record 450 out [homosexual] elected officials serving in local, state and federal offices including Colorado’s very own Jared Polis, who became the first openly gay man to run for and be elected to Congress, joining Reps. Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin in the House.

For each and every one of you in this room who contributed to any of those victories and the many others we had, thank you!

What we continue to accomplish as a movement is electrifying. And, yet, some of this year’s results were bitter — extremely bitter — pills to swallow.

At the outset, let me say that I tend to be a glass-half-full person, so I can’t help but see this year’s anti-marriage and anti-family ballot measures as deeply painful but temporary defeats that demonstrated just how far we’ve come. But, it isn’t just my gut feeling that this is temporary, it is based on the concrete progress we have made. For example, just four years ago, we lost 13 anti-marriage ballot measures by huge margins — by an average of 67 percent, and as high as 86 percent. In California alone, the last time we faced a similar anti-marriage measure, we lost by over 20 points. This year, we lost by less than four. I know it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, but this is progress.

However, this was a particularly painful year because we lost the fundamental right that we had worked so hard to secure — the right to marry in California.

In the days and weeks after the election, so many in our community were searching for a quick answer as to why we lost in four states. My fellow activists, there is no easy answer.

The days and weeks after the election were some of the most painful I’ve experienced in my 24 years in this movement. I know they were painful for many of you and for our colleagues around the country, particularly in California, Arizona, Florida and Arkansas.  It was hard and painful enough to have lost four statewide ballot measures. But pain turned the corner into agony when we all started lashing out at each other, our allies and our would-be allies and didn’t let up.

Did the other side run excellent, although lie-filled campaigns? Yes it did. Could we all have done more or done things differently that might have moved us closer to defeating the four measures? Certainly. We at the Task Force are a particularly analytical and reflective group and we’ve been taking a hard look at what we could have done better to fight against these measures.

But our winning on any of the four statewide measures was always far from being a slam dunk. We need to learn what we can from this last year and we must move forward, as we have before in times far worse than this.

I want to specifically address the blaming of African-American voters for the passage of Prop. 8.

Sadly, shamefully, an incorrect statistic was put forth in the media and many people both in and outside of our community ran with it. I want to be clear — the blaming of African-American voters was wrong, despicable and inexcusable.

The Task Force released a study with authors Ken Sherrill and Pat Egan that included actual voting data that showed that party affiliation, conservative ideology, frequent church-going and the voter’s age trumped all other factors in the Proposition 8 vote — including race. The Task Force was criticized by some for being “politically correct.”

It is not politically correct to conduct sound research. It is not politically correct to challenge racism.

Have we done enough as a community to deal with our own racism and to make sure that our movement is one that reflects the true diversity of LGBT people? We sure haven’t. But the finger pointing and scapegoating was an affront to the many people of color and others who worked on and with the campaign and to our allied organizations. Furthermore, it avoids the complexity of the work we still have to do to win equality.

I have had enough. WE have had enough. Let us dig deep in ourselves and show others that we will not stoop to scapegoating, we will not turn our backs on our allies, and we will not give up.  There is a big difference between blaming and learning. Let us be learners so that we may be leaders.

As we look back on this year, our confidence has been shaken and our anger has been roused — but now is the time to turn our anger into action and our action into long-lasting change. We must now refocus on regaining marriage equality in California and winning across the country. But we need to remember that these anti-marriage ballot measures are fundamentally about the larger right-wing assault on the ever-expanding diversity in the United States, our freedom to live openly and to create and define our sexuality, our selves and our families.

I urge us not look at our movement as if it is only about this last election or only about marriage equality. Let us recall that our movement for liberation and equality has created much change since the police brutality in New York and other cities gave rise to the Stonewall riots, the activism of black and Latino gay men, and the birth of the modern LGBT movement.

If we do not come together again to fight another day, we can’t win our full equality. As the magnet on my grandmother’s fridge says, “Fall down seven times, get up eight!”

The state of our movement is resilient and we will win!

So, where are we headed as a movement? In order to take a look at where we are headed as a movement, we must first take a look at the broader social and political context in which we work for full equality. This context has now shifted radically.

The most obvious change is that for the first time in our nation’s history, we have as president, a black man, Barack Obama.  Candidate Obama recognized and affirmed a grassroots hunger for change. This year saw record numbers of young people, people of color and progressive people coming out to vote and we are now a better country for it.

This does indeed feel like a new political era for our country and our movement.  I believe the power of this historic moment is the seismic shift in this country from a culture of “I” to a culture of “We.” Obama ran with a mantra of “Yes we can!” Obama didn’t say, “Yes I can” or “Yes YOU can.” He said, yes WE can.

This mantra, of course, carries on the organizing legacy of the United Farm Workers and Dolores Huerta. This unifying WE invites each of us into the work ahead; into the reclaiming of a government that has turned its back on so many; into challenging the long held beliefs and practices of who holds power; how power is used; and who benefits from the use of power.

Obama’s “WE” challenges the culture of “I” that has been so core to this country’s identity — the image of rugged individualism, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. This imagery has been bolstered and perpetuated by scenes like Ronald Reagan riding his horse and by George Bush clearing brush on his ranch. This iconic imagery is finally being challenged. We are now off the ranch and have moved back into the WE of urban energy and creativity, the WE of close family ties and community in rural areas, the WE that has been at the center of the farm workers, civil rights, feminist and labor movements.

We are only just beginning to see the manifestations, the benefits of this cultural shift. And, our community — the LGBT community — is expert at showing the nation just what is possible when WE come together. This historic moment plays to our strengths.

After all, our community built an entire infrastructure of service and support for people with HIV when our own president did not have the decency to speak the syndrome’s name.  Our community overturned sodomy laws in a nation that possesses an intense fear of sexuality.  And our community put gender identity legislation and family protections on the political map.  WE have much to offer this country.

So, now it is our time to contribute again — to express moral leadership and creative fortitude. It is our time to hold steady as we are attacked at the ballot box and on the streets. To hold steady as we share our talents and ideas and are pushed back. To hold steady as we assert how we create family.

The state of our movement is expansive.  In fact, the success of our aspirations will only be limited by the expansiveness of our vision and the assertion of what is in our hearts. There are a few things we must do to make the most of this moment in history and to navigate the waters of this new era.

First, this moment calls for a new kind of leadership in the LGBT movement — not the leadership of one, but the collaborative leadership of many. Don’t get me wrong, the Task Force and I will assert leadership — but at the Task Force, we believe that strength comes not from hoarding power but by building power and sharing power and using power for good. It is why so much of our work is done through coalitions or convenings like Creating Change.

We are leaders in what is good and right and just in this country.  When we insist that LGBT people be involved in the policy conversations about the economy, about health benefits, about tax policy, about immigration — as we have been doing with the Obama transition team and administration — we assert our community’s moral leadership.

When we win marriage equality in Maine, Iowa, New Jersey and other states — and we will — we assert our community’s moral leadership.

When we pass a gender identity-inclusive ENDA — and we will — we assert our community’s moral leadership.

When we continue to work to get rid of useless abstinence only education, we assert our community’s moral leadership.

When we stand shoulder to shoulder with our friends in labor and women’s groups as the Task Force did yesterday morning at the White House for the signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — we assert our community’s moral leadership.

When we promote, sustain and maintain people of color leaders — we assert our community’s moral leadership.

The second thing we must do is to think differently about who our playmates are. I was a Girl Scout when I was growing up and there was this song “make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.”

We will certainly keep our LGBT organizational friends. But, it is time for us to make new, substantive and strategic friendships with non-LGBT organizations with which we share common concerns. The time for isolating ourselves as a movement is over. We will never win on our own.

So, in the coming years, you will see the Task Force partnering with some perhaps surprising organizations. We will ask them to show up for us and we will show up for them, as we have in our work with AARP on national policy and with Planned Parenthood and NAACP on ballot measures.

Third, so many of our straight friends and family are with us and we must find ways for them to make a difference in our pursuit of equality. They are near and dear to us. They’re willing to work with us; they’re wanting to work with us; they’re waiting to work with us. Among the most striking experiences for me in the last year have been my conversations with straight people across the country, not the least of which was with my own 92-year-old grandmother who has been my cheerleader and was crushed when she was not able to make it to our wedding.

Next week the Task Force will be a partner in launching a new campaign called, “Tell 3″ headed up by the ACLU and Join the Impact, along with other organizations. This campaign is simply about talking to the people in our lives about issues that matter to us as LGBT people.

We ask each and every one of you to go to our Web site next week and take part in what could be — with your help — the most massive friends and family education effort ever launched. If every one at Creating Change has meaningful, real conversations with three people about our lives, about the things we care about, we will have made progress in changing the hearts and minds of thousands of people — people who will be voting on our rights next year and the years after that.

Finally, organize, organize, organize — however you do it, walking door to door, talking to friends, going to meetings, sending tweets — I just did — connecting on Facebook or MySpace, or getting people elected.

Just organize!

For 35 years, the Task Force has been the home for people like you, like me, like hundreds of thousands of people across this country who know that we are part of a larger community of people reaching for full equality.

As you experience the Creating Change conference, you can’t help but see and hear and feel and know in your heart that the state of our movement is engaged, it is resilient, it is expansive and expanding, and it is stronger and more inspirational than ever before!  With all of us together –

We will win complete equality!
We will protect and defend our families!
We will change our communities and
We will transform society!

Thank you.

____________________________________________________________

Help Support Americans For Truth!

Will you help Americans For Truth stand as boldly for the Truth as homosexual activists do for their lies?  We appreciate your support:

TO GIVE TO AFTAH: Go to our user-friendly giving page — www.americansfortruth.com/donate/ — to make your tax-free donation using PayPal or your MasterCard or Visa.  Regular mail: AFTAH, PO Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567.

TRUTH TEAM MEMBERSHIP:  To sign up as a Truth Team member by pledging $25, $50, $100, $250 or more per month to sustain AFTAH’s critical work, go HERE or copy http://www.americansfortruth.org/membership.php on your web browser.

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Joe Solmonese (left) went from helping to elect pro-abortion-on-demand Democrats at EMILY’s List to advancing the pro-homosexuality/ -transsexuality agenda as president of the Human Rights Campaign. The twin evils of homosexuality and abortion share a common foundation: the elevation of self over transcendent truth and God’s revealed will for men and women. Homosexual activists have been in the forefront of “defending” abortion centers against pro-lifers whose aim is merely to save innocent babies from destruction and persuade women NOT to make a decision that will haunt them the rest of their lives. Below is a photo of a fetus’ feet at 10 weeks.

Folks, the issues of defending life and sexual morality are joined at the hip: each of the evil movements they oppose — the abortion and homosexuality lobbies — elevates mankind’s selfish desires over God’s will. Is it any wonder that the two greatest sin lobbies of today have as their sworn enemies the preservation of life and natural marriage and the God-ordained family? And this is not just theoretical: front-line, pro-life veterans such as Joe Scheidler tell me that over the years homosexual activists have been in the forefront of defending abortion “clinics” (killing centers) — to block the life-saving efforts of people trying to witness the truth about life to pregnant girls and women going into the death-centers to abort their own children.

Curiously, homosexual groups like Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force have incorporated abortion-related advocacy in their agendas. In fact, HRC’s president, Joe Solmonese, is the former CEO of EMILY’s List, described by Wikipedia as “one of the nation’s prominent pro-choice Democratic political action committees.” After helping to advance abortion, homosexuality and gender confusion, I don’t know what’s next on Joe’s career path — perhaps Chairman of the Board for a major porn distribution company?

The life issue is close to my heart, as my younger brother, Jimmy, has Down syndrome –placing him in a group of people who are singled out for extinction in the womb by doctors because they are, well, not perfect. Thankfully, my mother never even considered the prenatal test that could have been the prelude to an abortion, and Jimmy has blessed the lives of me and my extended family, and many others, for decades.

Below is a note from Mark Harrington, executive director of Center for Bioethical Reform (CBR) Midwest. one of the many pro-life heroes in America who works tirelessly and bravely to speak up for the unborn — who cannot speak for the themselves against the violence of abortion. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org

P.S. President Obam[a is reportedly preparing to sign a pro-abortion Executive Order that overturns a 1984 pro-life policy implemented by President Ronald Reagan, thus allowing U.S. taxpayer dollars to be used to provide and promote abortions oversees. [We mistakenly reported that he was signing the order today, January 22; he did not.] I find this hard to reconcile with Obama’s campaign pledge to reduce the number of abortions. Also, Obama has promised that he would sign the radical “Freedom of Choice Act,” which would codify the wicked “Roe” decision and eviscerate pro-life reform laws across the nation.

_______________________________

CBR Midwest writes:

On Roe Anniversary: Think Abe Lincoln

Columbus, OH – January 22, 2009 – Today, America remembers the inestimable loss of unborn human life on this 36th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision of Roe v. Wade. Many pro-life advocates are in despair that we have not succeeded in protecting the pre-born. There is much to grieve today; however, this is also a time of hope.

Today, all across America citizens are raising their voice like a trumpet. At state houses, at our nation’s capitol, on the streets, and in our churches men and women who believe in the God given principle of the sanctity of human life gather together to make a difference for the defenseless.

The truth is, after thirty long years, “we have not grown weary in doing good.” The fact is we will never give up as long as babies are dying.

Many believe the battle is lost. It would serve us well to read the words of another great social reformer Abraham Lincoln who wrote in July of 1858:

“I have not allowed myself to forget that the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain was agitated a hundred years before it was final success. Remembering these things I cannot but regard it as possible that the higher object of this contest may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life. But I cannot doubt either that it will come in due time.  Even in this view, I am proud, in my passing speck of time, to contribute my humble mite to that glorious consummation, which in my poor eyes may not last to see.”

Legal protection for the pre-born will come. Press on!

CLICK HERE TO HELP CBR MIDWEST CONTINUE THE BATTLE

For more information contact Mark Harrington at  614-759-5195  or mark@cbrinfo.org
Mark Harrington is the Executive Director of CBR Midwest, and President of Pro-Life Institute.

Who could not have been moved by FOX News commentator Juan Williams (left) tearing up as he described how he never thought he would see this day when a fellow African American would rise to the highest office in the land? President Obama is a testimony to America as a land of freedom and opportunity, but he is wrong to oppose pro-life laws restricting abortion and to equate his radical pro-homosexual agenda — already posted on the White House website — with genuine “civil rights.” 

By Peter LaBarbera

Today we get back to dealing with policy but yesterday we celebrated America. Our differences with President Barack Obama are significant [read AFTAH Board Member Matt Barber's statement on Obama's newly published, radical "LGBT" agenda HERE]– and many of the claims being made about him are ridiculous, such as when one TV commentator said yesterday that Obama “transcends the culture wars” — but in this moment we cherish what is good and great about the United States.

It is astonishing to behold — in a nation that once allowed the shipment of slaves from Africa, bound in shackles and shipped across the Atlantic like cargo, then sold in auctions like cattle — the induction of the first man of African ancestry as President of the United States. Who can doubt that this is truly a land of freedom and opportunity, where anyone who works hard can succeed and where goodness (in this case, the triumph over centuries of racism) can prevail through struggle and democratic reform?

We don’t walk in their shoes, so it is impossible for white people to understand the joy of Blacks in seeing history made yesterday. Who could not be moved by FOX News commentator Juan Williams tearing up as he described how he never thought he would see this day when a fellow African American would rise to the highest office in the land? It was a patriotic moment.

On Election Day 2008, I served as a Republican poll-watcher in Aurora, Illinois, and I will never forget the beaming faces of African Americans, especially older people voting for the first time. One woman who appeared to be in her late thirties or early forties excitedly inquired as to how to cast her ballot; she was a first-time voter and could barely contain her happiness and pride. Later, a black man stepped in front of the election judges and proclaimed: “I’m here to vote for BARACK OBAMA!” For a moment ideology went out the window and my heart was warmed by these citizens of color seeing their American dream fulfilled in a way they never thought possible.

Most of us have seen racism in action and many have also experienced it. Yes, racism is a two-way street, but whites who are occasionally treated rudely or otherwise mistreated by Blacks cannot compare that to the history of institutional oppression that Blacks have had to overcome in America. (That’s no excuse of black racism.) In college, one of my roommates, who is white, fell in love with a beautiful African-American girl. On his wedding day, his best man boycotted the ceremony because of her skin color. Today, my college buddy and his wife have a wonderful family — and they would reject the notion that somehow their interracial marriage should in any way be compared to or used to rationalize homosexual “marriage.”

Are we like past racists?

This brings me to the argument — or we should say a slander — put forth by the Social Left that opponents of homosexual agenda (i.e., the “Religious Right”) are the “racists” of today — as if pro-family advocates would be defending Jim Crow in an another era. (Occasionally in moments of weakness and doubt, some on our side buy into this nonsense.) One liberal publisher of a magazine that purports to promote corporate “diversity” even equated this writer with a 19th Century preacher who used the Bible to justify slavery. This is a calumny against people of faith, including African Americans, who favor the natural, created moral order — based upon the complementarity of the sexes.

We’ve said it many times and will keep on saying it: homosexual behavior — changeable, sinful and unhealthy — has nothing whatsoever to do with race. Racial/ethnic diversity is good; sexual “diversity” is wrong when it attempts to legitimize unnatural sex and sex outside of marriage. If the race-homosexuality (or racist-”homophobe”) analogy were correct, how does one explain my great satisfaction in that portion of Obama’s ascendancy that thrusts a spear into the heart of racism? And I am not alone; in my 20-plus years as a conservative activist, I have only rarely met a fellow conservative or Christian (or religious person) for whom race — rather than ideology or policy — is a deciding factor in assessing politicians. In fact, if anything, most pro-family friends I know are eager to support Black conservatives.

As a kid growing up in mostly white middle-class suburbs of Chicago and then Detroit, I came to hate racism — due partly to being educated on slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement but also due to a type of “liberal white guilt.” By that I mean the part of me that cheers racial progress and roots for the underdog. I became, like many educated whites, a bit of a bleeding heart on race. One of our family’s favorite movies is “Remember the Titans,” starring Denzel Washington, which uses football to teach about racial harmony. It’s embellished history, but I love it. There is a terrific scene where the two defensive stars in a forcibly integrated Virginia school — one black, one white — finally put their racist attitudes aside and gel as a defensive unit. Ultimately, they become close, lifelong friends. In another scene, Washington, playing the black coach, lectures his white assistant coach for coddling the black players but not the white ones. Thus, even this movie makes the point that true equality will come only when Blacks do not receive special treatment but are treated like everybody else.

We’re probably not even close to living in an America where race doesn’t matter. Surely race affected the liberal media’s coddling of Obama, but much of their love affair with the Obama derives from his liberal agenda. (His “coolness” helped, too.) The question in my mind is: when will the media and liberals get over their own biases and bigotry and give black Christian conservatives a fair shake? Can you imagine a Republican black conservative candidate for president getting the kid glove treatment from media that Obama received? Remember how the media savaged Clarence Thomas?

Homosexuals grab the “civil rights” mantle

The American maturation on race — e.g., the growing acceptance of interracial couples — is a good thing. So it’s no surprise that homosexual activists would seek to grab the “civil rights” mantle for themselves. But there is a key difference between their cause and the genuine civil rights movement: the latter strove against a sin: racism; the former promotes sin — i.e., the acceptance of homo-sexual behavior (which God calls “detestable”) — and radically redefining marriage and family.

But what about “gays”? Don’t they experience discrimination? The problem arises when homosexual activists falsely claim that — like skin color — their sexual desires are unchangeable and the basis for government-backed rights. The whole concept of “sexual orientation,” which seeks to take responsibility away from people for their sinful choice to embrace homosexual practice, violates Scripture, natural law, and thousands of years of Judeo-Christian history. And now we are facing a battle between “gay rights” and the rest of Americans’ freedom of religion, which includes the right to act on one’s belief that homosexual behavior is wrong.

It’s so uncool to say so in the Age of Obama, but it’s still true: a healthy society “discriminates” against homosexuality and other destructive sins; a deteriorating culture promotes sin. Thankfully, thousands of men and women have successfully abandoned the homosexual lifestyle, giving true hope to men and women struggling with this sexual sin.

Egalitarian “gay” activists demand that their (relationships be treated exactly like normal marriages. Give us “marriage equality!” they cry. Problem is, there is no “equality” between the natural family and traditional marriage — and the homosexual variety, which is missing one of the sexes. Homosexual sex, especially between men, is much riskier than normal sex — so much so that our federal government bans blood donations from men who’ve engaged in gay sodomy — and even women who have had sex with a ‘man who has had sex with a man.’ To pretend that homosexuality is equivalent to civil rights in the law only encourages men and women to embrace this destructive and immoral lifestyles. To do so in our schools only leads impressionable children into immoral and risky behaviors.

Thus, it is entirely consistent from a moral, justice and faith perspective to both oppose racial injustice and support the primacy in law and culture of the natural, mother-father family and God-ordained marriage.

It is not consistent with Christianity, however, to equate racism with “homophobia,” as the Left in its arrogance and ignorance now does as a matter of faith (in much the same way that it marches in lockstep for unrestricted killing of unborn babies abortion-on-demand). That activst term “homophobe” has become a catch-all to demonize anyone who opposes the homosexual political and cultural agenda — including African Americans, who surveys and election results show have a greater moral opposition to homosexuality and “gay marriage” than whites.

So I am happy that Barack Obama shattered the presidential color barrier and I will be praying for him. But in the spirit of true racial equality I am going to fight his no-hope campaign to repeal pro-life laws restricting abortion and his administration’s attempt to enact the homosexual lobby’s bogus “civil rights” agenda — in exactly the same way I would if Obama were a white liberal.

Come to think of it, isn’t the current homosexual legal effort to overturn Prop 8 — the California marriage amendment that passed Nov. 4– decidedly Democracy-Phobic? I wish those spoiled-brat Voter-Phobes would stop using liberal judges to cheat the citizens.

Essays like this lift my soul: I believe there is still a vast, silent majority of Americans who would agree with Rev. Perryman’s common-sense and clear-headed thinking. — Peter LaBarbera, www.americansfortruth.com

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Am I Homo Phobic?

By Rev. Wayne Perryman
The dictionary defines homosexuality as: “Having a desire for someone of the same sex [gender] or the act of having sex with someone of the same sex [gender].  In other words it is a sexual behavior carried out with someone of the same gender.  It did not define it as two people of the same gender who happens to love one another.  Simply put, both homosexuality and heterosexuality are about sex.  One sexual expression is perfectly in line with how nature has designed our bodies for reproductive purposes (it called heterosexuality) and the other is not (this one is called homosexuality). Neither sexual expression has anything to do with love.  Both are sexual behaviors expressed through physical contact between two or more people.

Sexual activity may be an expression of love, but sex itself is not love.  All mature adults know that sex and love are two different things. Pure love most often is not expressed in a sexual manner. Loving parents who love their children will give their life for their child, but they never have sex with that child.  Soldiers have been known to give their lives for a fellow soldier (of the same gender), the ultimate expression of love according to the Bible (St. John 15:13), but they never have sex with that individual. Brothers and sisters have sacrificed their lives for their siblings by donating their organs to save the life of the other, while others have left their entire estate to their siblings, but in both cases these expressions of love never included sex. The act of sex is merely a physical behavior that is most often expressed in the privacy of ones home and therefore should not be protected under Civil Rights Laws. Its proper place of protection should be covered by privacy laws, not Civil Rights Laws. Our laws should be designed to discourage criminal behavior, not endorse private sexual behavior.  When gays said they were born this way and compared themselves with African Americans, one black child wrote:

My sexual act did not make me black
This is something the gays cannot say.
For it is a fact that their sexual act,
Is why they call themselves gay.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality is a sexual behavior expressed, it is not a physical status like black or white skin.

Having said that, Am I Homo-Phobic if I do not like, accept or feel comfortable with the gays’ sexual expression (behavior)? Homo-Phobic meaning:  fearing or hating the gay person or the homosexual individual who engages in such behavior? Before answering this question, please let me share with you other behaviors that I am uncomfortable with.

• I do not like (or I am uncomfortable with) heterosexuals who affectionately make out in public when they can do it in the privacy of their homes – Am I Hetero-Phobic and hate heterosexuals?
• I do not like (or I am uncomfortable with) individuals who cheat on their spouse – This means I must have a Spousal Cheater-Phobic and hate or fear spouses that cheat.
• I do not like it (and I feel uncomfortable) when my sons sag their pants like gang members – Perhaps I hate or fear my sons .  Shall we call this Sons-Phobic?
• I do not like it (and I am uncomfortable) when drivers cut other drivers off on the freeway – Am I Driver-Phobic and hate or fear drivers?
• I do not like it when my African American brothers and sisters use the “N” word. This must mean I am Afro-Phobic and fear and hate my African American brothers and sisters?
• I do not like and I am uncomfortable with a lot of my own bad habits – Am I Self –Phobic and hate and fear myself?

I guess you get my point.  Just because I do not like certain behaviors or that I am uncomfortable with certain behaviors, does not mean that I fear or hate the person who engage in such behavior.

We must not allow others to label us or put a guilt trip on those of us who do not like, accept or feel comfortable with the gay lifestyle. I’m sure that even within the gay community there are certain behaviors that they do not like among their own group, but does that mean they fear or hate the person demonstrating such behavior? Do I hate or fear gays? Absolutely not! If I ever saw anyone attempting to physically harm a gay person, as a Christian, like the “Good Samaritan in the Bible, I would be one of the first to come to their rescue, not because they are gay, but because they, like myself are loved by God (St John 3:16).

Final thoughts:  As stated before, gays often compare their experience with the African American experience, but African Americans have never had the option of putting their black skin in the closet to escape or avoid persecution – and we were never hated because of our behavior, we were hated simply because we were black.

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About the Author

Rev. Wayne Perryman (e-mail: doublebro@aol.com; website: www.wayneperryman.com) is a former newspaper publisher, radio talk-show host, and corporate employment relations consultant, and the author of several books including his latest, Unfounded Loyalty, in which he reveals the startling history — unknown to many Blacks (and probably most Americans) — that the Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. See a good review of Unfounded Loyalty HERE. In the book, Perryman writes, “On the issue of slavery, the Democrats literally gave their lives to expand it; the Republicans gave their lives to ban it. … In my research, which covers the period from 1832 to 2002, I found two familiar strains running through the cultural development of the American Black: the positive and powerful role of Christianity and the little known and debilitating role of the Democrats — from slavery through the Clinton Administration. There is also a critical analysis of our current black leadership.”

Rev. Perryman devotes much of his time serving his community. In addition to serving as Minister in Charge of Church Administration for Mt. Calvary Christian Center Church of God in Christ, in Mercer Island, Washington, Rev. Perryman heads up his own consulting firm. His company specializes in conducting fact-finding investigations on behalf of inner-city discrimination plaintiffs who are unsuccessful in obtaining representation through law firms and community agencies. For his ongoing work as a community activist, Rev. Perryman has received commendations from members of the United States Congress, former Washington State governor Booth Gardner, and former Seattle mayor Charles Royer. In addition to this recognition, Perryman’s work with children, professional athletes, gang members, and major corporations has resulted in local, national and international media coverage.

According to his website, in 1993, Rev. Perryman challenged major Christian publishers with his research book entitled, The 1993 Trial On The Curse of Ham. In his book, he proved that the publishers were wrong when they stated that, according to the Bible, the Black race was cursed. The curse theory was used to justify slavery, establish Jim Crow Laws, and promote racial discrimination. Perryman’s book forced two major Christian publishers and the Encyclopedia Britannica to remove this false theology from their publications – a theory that had existed for over three hundred years.

Please take the time to read carefully this superbly crafted column by my friend (and former boss) Bob Knight of the Culture & Media Institute. Bob is an expert in dissecting the lies of the Left, but I particularly enjoyed this piece setting the record straight on the Democrats’ and the Washington Post’s shameful mistreatment of Elaine Donnelly, a national leader in keeping radical sexual agendas out the military.

Post columnist Dana Milbank’s snideness is answered below by Bob’s classy — and very instructive — piece. As you know, AFTAH has been on the receiving end of a mountain full of cheap, spurious and ad hominem attacks of the sort leveled at Elaine — who deserves our thanks for decades of faithful service to the nation. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org

TAKE ACTION: Spread the word by asking your family, friends and contacts to call their Congressman and U.S. Senators to voice their opposition to homosexualizing the U.S. military. Call 202-225-3121 (House) or 202-224-3121 (Senate); or go to www.congress.org.

A summary of Donnelly’s testimony and the statement of Brian Jones is available on the Center for Military Readiness’ website. Her full-length statement, with supporting footnotes and links, is posted on the House Armed Services Committee website. (Question: where were all the Republican men who should have been defending Donnelly?)

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Bob Knight writes:

A Lady Under Fire

A Washington Post columnist claims a supporter of the ban on gays in the military exhibited “rage” in Congressional testimony — but The Hill reveals that the rage was on the other side.

By Robert Knight
Culture and Media Institute
July 25, 2008

Elaine Donnelly reported for duty Wednesday. She went to a battlefield where most men who agree with her were AWOL.

Like her mentor, Phyllis Schlafly, she did not let others’ cowardice or indifference interfere with what she needed to do. Mrs. Donnelly, President of the Center for Military Readiness, told the truth at risk of ridicule or worse, keeping the faith that telling the truth matters no matter what.

Donnelly was one of two witnesses testifying before a House subcommittee in support of the military’s ban on homosexuality. The other three witnesses were pro-gay, as were most of the questions from the lawmakers.

Surrounded by hostile faces in the gallery, hostile faces of the liberal congressmen who dominated the “hearing,” and the skeptical faces of reporters from liberal media, Mrs. Donnelly listened stoically while other witnesses trashed her personally during their testimony. Because of the rules, she was not able to respond until called late in the proceedings for her own testimony.

When she got her turn, Mrs. Donnelly carefully laid out the case for the law that Congress passed in 1993 and which has been upheld by multiple courts. She explained that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) is not actually the law, but a watered-down policy dreamed up by Bill Clinton’s Pentagon staff, something the media continue to get wrong. She also explained why allowing open homosexuality in the military would have a multitude of effects, up to and including a probable increase in sexual harassment and sexual assaults, and a profoundly detrimental effect on the morale of service people who hold traditional values.

Amid the scribbling scribes was Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist who specializes in character assassination of conservatives and even Democrats who get in the way of his preferred political figures.

In the July 23 edition, he used his entire Page A-3 column, “Sorry We Asked, Sorry You Told,” to paint Mrs. Donnelly as a clownish figure who “amused” lawmakers. He wrote, “It was tempting to think that Donnelly had been chosen by Democrats to sabotage the case against open military service for homosexuals. But Republicans had consented to the witness panel….” He might also have mentioned that Donnelly has a sterling reputation earned over years of public service, but that would have conflicted with his purpose: to discredit political adversaries through ridicule.

Speaking of the GOP, the most outspoken Republican on the panel was Christopher Shays (Conn.), a reliable water carrier for homosexual activism. Shays denounced the military’s DADT policy as “unpatriotic” and even “absolutely cruel.” Milbank reports this comment while noting that Shays’ voice was “rising with Yankee indignation.” That must make pushing open homosexuality on the military a righteous cause.

Milbank began his column by sarcastically introducing Mrs. Donnelly only as someone “who has been working for years to protect our fighting forces from the malign influence of women.”

Donnelly, who served on the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Armed Services and a presidential commission examining the role of women in the military, has worked for years promoting policies that support military families, and resisting the liberal campaign to lift the combat exemption for women. To Milbank, who apparently wants to shove our daughters into harm’s way as soon as possible, that’s “maligning” women.

Milbank goes on to describe Donnelly’s testimony and responses to questions as “an extraordinary exhibition of rage.” Anyone who has seen Mrs. Donnelly under fire knows that she does not do “rage.” What she does do is to demolish the other side’s arguments with logic and documented materials. She also went out of her way to recognize the service to their country by co-panelists on the other side. Every inch a lady, albeit a lady tough as nails, Mrs. Donnelly does not sink to the level of her opponents.

Milbank even criticized the way Donnelly dressed, saying she was “severe in a black jacket with a flag pin.” Well, at least he got the flag pin right. The suit was Navy blue. And she wore pearls and a pink blouse. Now that’s severe.

Then Milbank quoted a number of liberal Democrats who were aghast at Donnelly for daring to disagree with their plan to homosexualize the military: “Just bonkers” and “dumb” (Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark.), “embarrassed” (Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, D-N.H.), “shocked” (Rep. Ellen Tauscher , D-Calif.) It’s the constituents of these “congresspersons” who should be shocked and embarrassed.

Milbank also threw in: “At the witness table with Donnelly, retired Navy Capt. Joan Darrah, a lesbian, rolled her eyes in disbelief.” The Hill, a newspaper that specializes in covering Capitol Hill, also reported in its far superior story on the hearing, “Lawmakers grill critic of gays in military,” that Tauscher repeatedly rolled her eyes during Donnelly’s testimony.

Well, of course. Eye-rolling is standard procedure for some gay activists and their allies confronted with inconvenient truths. And projecting hysteria and anger on to conservative opponents is also par for the course.

I’ve experienced this sort of projection myself. A few years ago I was debating the topic of “gay marriage” at an Ivy League college with a prominent lesbian activist. At one point, she lost her cool, got off message and started loudly denouncing the Bush Administration’s Iraq policies and people like me. Finally, the moderator reigned her in. I never raised my voice. I stayed on point. Afterward, when we talked in a student lounge, she exclaimed that she didn’t know what had happened, but that “both of us just started yelling at each other.” No, she had been yelling at me. She projected her anger on to me, which is something I see certain gay activists doing quite often, accusing their opponents of hate where there is none.

The Post’s Dana Milbank projected on to Mrs. Donnelly the “rage” felt by gay activists at the hearing.

This is what military personnel who oppose homosexuality as immoral can expect to face in a new climate of politically correct enforcement of pro-homosexual sentiments if the ban is lifted.

After the hearing, Mrs. Donnelly took Milbank’s and her opponents’ comments in stride. “I know what it’s like to be bullied by powerful men. I kept my composure,” she said. “What they’ve done is to make my main point, which is that if the ban is lifted, people who believe in traditional sexual morality will be abused and have no recourse, no defenders.”

That pretty much sums up the hearing itself, at which most of the Republicans fled and none challenged the assertions of the pro-gay witnesses and the liberal lawmakers who attacked Donnelly. Other than her co-panelist, retired Army Ranger Brian Jones, who also did a creditable job in his testimony, Donnelly stood alone.

Other commitments prevented my attending the hearing on Wednesday. I figured I would later write a piece on how the media have behaved. In retrospect, I should have carved out time for the hearing. Peter Sprigg, a Family Research Council vice president, found time in his schedule to be there. Given the gravity of this issue, lots of people should have been there.

A brave lady like Elaine Donnelly should not be left to the tender mercies of Christopher Shays, Ellen Tauscher and Dana Milbank.

Then again, it’s Shays, Tauscher and Milbank who might feel the need to stack the deck against people as formidable as Mrs. Donnelly and Sgt. Jones.

Robert Knight is director of the Culture and Media Institute, a division of the Media Research Center.

Phone: 800-244-6227; or: 630-623-3000
Fax: 630-623-5004

McDonald’s Plaza
Oak Brook, IL 60523

AFTAH has endorsed AFA’s McDonald’s boycott. McDonald’s has an 85% ranking on a radical homosexual group’s corporate scorecard. Laurie Higgins of Deerfield, Illinois, wrote the following open letter to McDonald’s:

By Laurie Higgins

In a recent letter, “Global Chief Diversity Officer,” Pat Harris, wrote that, “McDonald’s is associated with countless local and national affinity groups here in the United States. We have a well-established and proud heritage of associating with individuals and organizations that share in the belief that every person has the right to live and work in their community free of discrimination.” What precisely does GCDO Harris mean by claiming that homosexuals have a right to live and work “free from discrimination”? Does he mean that they should be able to live and work without being harassed? If so, we’re in complete agreement. No one should be harassed anywhere anytime.

Or, is he asserting that they have some sort of right to community approval of their sexual practices? If so, from where does that right derive? And is every group that is defined by anomalous sexual desires and practices owed that same right? Will McDonald’s stand in unity with all these “affinity groups”? Will McDonald’s cheerfully associate with the national affinity group NAMBLA [North American Man/Boy Love Association]?

What Harris neglected to articulate is whether McDonald’s believes that community members have the right to discriminate between moral and immoral conduct. Everyone I know believes that those who self-identify as homosexuals have a right to live and work in their communities free from harassment. Everyone I know believes that those who self-identify as homosexuals are equal in dignity and worth to heterosexuals. No one I know hates homosexuals. But many believe that homosexual conduct is immoral.

Just as every human has a right to live and work free from harassment, every human has a right to hold and articulate beliefs about which behaviors, sexual and otherwise, constitute moral behaviors. The most prevalent belief throughout history and in virtually all societies has been and continues to be that homosexual conduct is profoundly immoral and destructive to the lives of individuals and the fabric of society. McDonald’s can ensure a workplace free from harassment without supporting organizations whose central mission is not to end harassment but to impose radical views of deviant sexual practices on America through demagoguery and censorship.

What the “global diversity officers” at McDonald’s don’t seem to grasp is that by embracing the philosophical commitments of the LGBTQ community, they repudiate the philosophical commitments of Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and many Protestants. One would expect that McDonald’s, as a business enterprise, would refrain from taking positions on arguable, divisive cultural issues. The thickheaded diversity officers don’t seem to grasp the simple truism that no individual or organization can embrace mutually opposing principles. It is a logical impossibility. The solution should be obvious: conduct business and leave the transformation of public sentiments on controversial moral issues to others.

As long as McDonald’s affirms the destructive deceit that homosexuality is morally equivalent to heterosexuality, my family will not be financially supporting McDonald’s.

By the way, someone may want to inform GCDO Harris that diversity simply means variety or multiformity; it does not denote the beatified triumvirate of “race, gender, and sexual orientation.”