The Chicago media treated the recent “Gay Games” as if it were a serious sporting and cultural event, but few spectators showed up to watch. Writing for Illinois Family Institute, I called the “Games” a flop. Now we learn that despite all the hype and corporate subsidies (and free publicity), the “Gay Games” was a financial flop, too. Click on the links in the story below for photos and local coverage of the event from June.–Peter LaBarbera

Excerpted from Gay Games Plans Final Event, by Joel Nosh, published Oct 12, 2006, in Chicago Tribune:

Paraphernalia sale intended to help eliminate shortfall

… With a $200,000 budget shortfall on an event organizers predicted would at least break even, everything must go.

By shedding these assets and soliciting donations, organizers who ran the Games on a $10 million cash budget say they will get back to zero or maybe even generate a slight surplus by the spring.

…[Kevin] Boyer said letters were sent to potential donors two weeks ago in an effort to raise $100,000. Another $100,000 has already been pledged in matching funds, he said. More money will come in from the sale of thousands of items large and small later this month.

For the last 12 years, the Gay Games, an international event staged every four years, has been financially troubled.

The 2002 Games in Sydney and 1998 Games in Amsterdam both finished more than $1 million in the red. The 1994 New York Games declared bankruptcy with a $350,000 shortfall, and the 1990 Vancouver Games ended $100,000 in the hole.

In each case, local governments, businesses or both absorbed the ultimate financial blow.

…Gay Games organizers have been chipping away at their debts, Boyer said, and getting creative when able. Equipment has been accepted in place of cash, and in some cases they have asked for bills to be lowered or forgiven.

Chicago Park District spokeswoman Jessica Maxey-Faulkner said the Gay Games has given $17,000 of equipment, including softball equipment and fencing, to chip away at its balance. Gay Games, which still owes nearly $30,000, also has been sending in money on a payment plan, she said.

Continue reading in Chicago Tribune…

Excerpted from Studds, 1st Openly Gay Congressman, Dies, by Jay Lindsay, published Oct 14, 2006, by Associated Press:

Former Rep. Gerry Studds, who became the first openly gay member of Congress when his homosexuality was exposed during a teenage page sex scandal, died early Saturday. He was 69.

Studds died at Boston Medical Center several days after he collapsed while walking his dog, his husband said. Doctors determined his loss of consciousness was due to a blood clot in his lung, [said] Dean Hara …who married Studds shortly after same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts in 2004.

In 1983, Studds acknowledged his homosexuality after a 27-year-old man disclosed that he and Studds had had a sexual relationship a decade earlier when the man was a teenage congressional page…

At the time, Studds called the relationship with the teenage page, which included a trip to Europe, “a very serious error in judgment.” But he did not apologize and defended the relationship as a consensual relationship with a young adult. The former page later appeared publicly with Studds in support of him…

Hara said Studds was never ashamed of the relationship with the page.

“This young man knew what he was doing,” Hara said. “He was at (Studds’) side.”

…In 1996, Congress named the 842-square-mile Gerry E. Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary after him in recognition of his work protecting the marine environment.

Continue reading at My Way News…

Excerpted from For Gays, a Loud New Foe, by Rone Tempest, published Oct 14, 2006, in Los Angeles Times:

Organizers of the annual Rainbow Festival [sponsor list]were prepared for trouble.

The Q Crew, a local “queer/straight alliance,” distributed cards telling people what to do if approached by hostile demonstrators. Sympathetic local church groups formed a protective buffer along the festival ground’s cyclone fence. Mounted police were on patrol.

Jerry Sloan manned a table for Stand Up for Sacramento, a recently formed gay self-defense organization.

“So far, so good,” he said. “No Russians.”

The festival, held last month amid the gay bars, restaurants and shops of midtown’s “Lavender Heights” neighborhood, went off without conflict. But the elaborate security preparations reflected growing tensions between Sacramento gays and the city’s large and vociferous community of fundamentalist Christians from the former Soviet Union.

Over the last 18 months, Sacramento Russian-language church members have picketed gay pride events, jammed into legislative committee meetings when gay issues were on the agenda and demonstrated at school board meetings.

Incited by firebrand Russian Pentacostal pastors and polemical Russian-language newspapers, the fundamentalists turn out en masse for state Capitol protest rallies.

Last June, urging readers to attend a massive rally, the Russian newspaper the Speaker told them:

Make a choice. It’s your decision.

Homosexuality is knocking on your doors and asking:

“Can I make your son gay and your daughter lesbian?”

…The Sacramento community…s overwhelmingly evangelical — Baptist and Pentecostalist. The charismatic Pentacostal church, introduced in the Ukraine in the 1920s by missionary and martyr Ivan Efimovich Vornaev, includes speaking in tongues and washing of feet. The churches’ social views are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.”The main issues in the Russian community here,” said Vitaly Prokopchuk, a Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy, “are gay issues, abortion issues and family-definition issues. To these people, these issues are very cut-and-dry in the Bible.“…Leaders of the religious right…celebrate the Russian efforts as a revival.

“My hope and my prayer,” said Mark Matta, a former legislative aide who heads the Christian Public Awareness Ministries, “is that they will become a voice in the wilderness for the rest of the country.”

“It’s not only about homosexuality. It’s also about drinking, about premarital sex and about drugs,” Prokopchuk [Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy]said. “Some of these people even regret coming here because they have a feeling they are losing their kids.”

“Honestly, I’m scared for the kids,” Bugriyev [a mother] said. “We have a 5-year-old and a 1-year-old. I’m scared that when they go to school they will be in a class where they are taught it is OK for a man to sleep with another man. We are thinking that after another five years, we will move back to Moldova.”

“We feel the American church already lost the battle 20 years ago by remaining silent,” said Victor Chernyetsky, 47, a Soviet-trained engineer who serves as administrator for the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church. “We can’t remain silent. There are a lot of sins.”

Continue reading in Los Angeles Times …

Click to listen to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered:

“Gay” Republicans Feel Heat from the Foley Scandal

by Ari Shapiro

October 13, 2006 – It’s an open secret in Washington that gay men play an active role in Republican Party politics at every level. In the wake of the recent Congressional sex scandal, gay Republican politicians and their staffers are finding themselves attacked from the right and from the left.

This column by Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media is a gold mine of information on the Mark Foley scandal. Note House Speaker Denny Hastert’s close friendship with (“outed”) homosexual Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) and the tragic effects of the GOP’s flirtation with ‘Log Cabin Republican’ homosexuality. Did you know that Hastert flew to Arizona to campaign for Rep.Kolbe against a conservative, pro-family Republican primary opponent? (Since then, Kolbe has announced his retirement from Congress.)

The Republican Party’s “Big Tent” strategy can never work: you can’t be pro-homosexuality and family-friendly at the same time. How ironic that a scandal arising in part from a “pro-family” party’s toleration of homosexuality (with the added baggage from its sordid cousin, pederasty) may bring down the GOP next month.

At Americans For Truth, we pledge to put principles over politics every time. God does not approve of Republican homosexuality anymore than the Democratic variety! Thanks for standing up unapologetically for the truth in your daily life.–Peter LaBarbera

Republican Gays are Closeted Dems

By Cliff Kincaid
October 12, 2006
So if the gay Republicans are not really Republicans, what are they?

WASHINGTON, D.C.–The complex nature of the “dirty trick” against the Republicans over the Mark Foley scandal is beginning to emerge. It doesn’t involve a George Soros-funded group or emails that had been in the possession of the media or shopped around by Democratic operatives. Instead, the GOP has played a trick on itself. The party brought so-called gay Republicans into positions of power in Congress only to realize that the confidential information they held about a secret gay network was political dynamite that could backfire.

At this point in the scandal, the issue is not whether there was such a network, but how big it is. CBS Evening News correspondent Gloria Borger reported the emerging belief that “a group of high-level gay Republican staffers were protecting” Foley. A New York Times story by Mark Leibovich confirmed that gay Republicans have occupied “crucial staff positions” in Congress and “have played decisive roles in passing legislation, running campaigns and advancing careers.”

The mystery man at the center of the scandal, Jeff Trandahl, is supposed to be a “lifelong Republican” who is gay. But Trandahl, who supervised the congressional page program as House clerk and knew about the controversial Foley emails many years ago, has a strange way of showing his Republicanism. A search of Federal Election Commission (FEC) records over the last six years shows no financial contributions to the Republican Party or Republican candidates. Instead, Trandahl in 2000 gave $1,200 to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which gives over 80 percent of its political campaign money to Democrats.

Trandahl is so much of a Republican that he joined the board of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, another gay political action committee that commits most of its funds to electing Democrats. Its latest list of “winning candidates” is all Democrats, except for Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee, who admits not voting for President Bush in 2004.

If you are getting the idea that gay Republicans may be closeted Democrats, then you are beginning to understand how the Mark Foley scandal could have been a Democratic Party dirty trick.

In response to the scandal, a representative of the Log Cabin Republicans, a homosexual activist group, has been on cable channels like CNN and MSNBC expressing the fear that the Foley scandal will be used to root out homosexual influence in the Republican Party. But the Log Cabin Republicans are so Republican that its board voted 22-2 against endorsing President Bush in 2004 because of his stand against homosexual “marriage.”

Excerpted from North PC Agenda Intact, by Tom Mountain, published Oct 4 ,2006, by Newton Tab:

…The issue of homosexuality has been the primary focus of the On-Campus Enrichment Program [at Newton North] for at least the past several years… There is no logical reason why the school chooses to focus on this topic. North is like any other high school in the state in that there is not, and never has been, a significant number of students claiming to be gay. And the North administration knows that.

It’s reasonable to speculate that there are probably more gay staff at North than there are gay students, with a handful of that staff pushing this agenda on the entire school population.

At Newton North there are no less than five days devoted to all things gay.

• To Be GLAD Day (Transgender, Bisexual, Gay Lesbian Awareness Day). This is an ongoing North tradition where the school brings in such eminent lecturers as a coach who boasted to the students that he fell in love with his sister’s husband (Jerry Springer calling?), and then there’s the former male North student who decided to become a woman, and of course, those enlightening never before revealed tidbits such as… “famous homosexuals/bisexuals” (Eleanor Roosevelt), and those “famous gender benders” Joan of Arc and – I kid you not – Bugs Bunny.

• World AIDS Day. This disease is a major problem in the gay community, many Newton educators are gay, therefore it is a major part of the Enrichment Program at North. Past lecturer’s included a man who claimed he got AIDS as an altar boy when he was raped by a Catholic priest … in 1977, well before the onset of AIDS in America. This lecture also served a dual purpose of bashing the Catholic Church among a large group of teenagers, many of whom were Catholic.

• The Day of Silence. Students are actively encouraged to stay silent all day, even to their teachers, in order to highlight the oppression of gays. The number of students participating in this is unknown, but noticeable at the school, since the role of these students and their faculty advisors is to get noticed. And lest they be ignored by too many people there is a follow-up day called…

• The Day of Action. Here these same students and their faculty advisers try to preach to whoever will listen about how awful society is towards gays like them. They generally have the run of the school that day, since anyone who dares to tell them to sit down and shut up would likely be suspended.

• Human Rights Day. This, like the No Place for Hate campaign, focuses primarily on the oppression of gays. For reasons of diversity, they may also delve into the oppression of Palestinians or Guantanomo Bay prisoners, maybe even Sudanese refugees in Darfur, especially if they can document the oppression of gay Sudanese.

Continue reading at Newton Tab…

Excerpted from State Marriage Campaigns are Targets of Intimidation Tactics, by Pete Winn, published Oct 12, 2006, by CitizenLink:

People in Colorado, Arizona, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin are just 26 days away from deciding the fate of amendments to protect marriage.

In Wisconsin, proponents of traditional marriage find themselves the target of intimidation and harassment tactics utilized by their opponents, according to Julaine Appling, executive director of the Wisconsin Family Research Institute — and a leader of the Vote Yes for Marriage campaign…

Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth…said what is happening in Wisconsin is happening in other places as well.

“Gay activism has an ‘end-justifies-the-means’ mentality,” he said. “You just have to shake it off and go on your way, because we cannot let these thugs intimidate us from doing what’s right.”

LaBarbera said threats against defenders of traditional marriage seem to come with the territory — he’s had more than his share.

“It’s very sad to me that a movement which espouses tolerance,” he said, “would harbor so many people who are willing to use ugly, evil means to achieve their goal of victory.”

Continue reading at CitizenLink…

Listen to this 1 minute audio from Dr. Albert Mohler, citing examples of public (taxpayer supported) universities promoting homosexuality.

Click HERE to listen.