America’s Survival Special Report Documents FOX News’ Growing Pro-Homosexual Bias and Gay Journalists Group’s Record of Advocacy

Unfair, Unbalanced and Afraid:

Fox News’ Growing Pro-Homosexual Bias and the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association

 

This is a Special Report published by America’s Survival, Inc.; www.usasurvival.org; 443-964-8208 (Cliff Kincaid, president), and authored by AFTAH President Peter LaBarbera, in advance of ASI ‘s August 20, 2013 conference, “The Crisis in American Journalism and the Conservative Response.” Following is an HTML version of the ASI report, or see the PDF version here: Fox_Report-PDF. The Endnotes contain live web links. Click on photos and graphics to enlarge.

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Unfair, Unbalanced, and Afraid: Fox News’ Growing Pro-Homosexual Bias and the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association

By Peter LaBarbera, exclusive to America’s Survival

Twitter: @PeterLaBarbera; for a printable PDF version of this report, click HERE

It is difficult to overstate the impact of wide-scale liberal media bias in the advancement of the pro-homosexual and pro-“transgender” revolution in American society. In the last two decades, media imbalance (and de facto censorship) on the issue has morphed into frequent media celebration of homosexuality — thus leaving citizens starved for impartial and accurate information on this critical topic. “Journalism” has become pro-homosexual propaganda, with many media stories appearing as if they were written by LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) activists. By effectively joining the “gay” activists’ crusade, major media outlets – and even “conservative” Fox News — have contributed greatly to the growing pro-homosexual political correctness in U.S. culture. This in turn has fueled even more aggressive militancy among pro-LGBT groups and bloggers who are lobbying the media to block social conservatives from TV appearances, etc., on the grounds that such anti-homosexual-agenda voices are “hate groups.” The result is the further degradation of journalism that has contributed to Republican and conservative ambivalence on issues like same-sex “marriage” and allowing open homosexuals in the military. So bad is the media groupthink on homosexuality that even self-described “conservatives” like Glen Beck and Tucker Carlson have either endorsed or made positive soundings on “gay marriage,” or gone silent on LGBT issues.¹

The degree to which the “mainstream” media have become promoters of the homosexual- and transgender activist movements is astonishing. Below is a graphic from a recent Pew Research Center study analyzing media coverage surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing in March 2013 of two cases related to homosexual “marriage.” Pew labeled a story as “supportive” of homosexual “marriage” if it included at least twice as many pro-“gay marriage” statements as opposing statements – and vice versa for stories labeled “opposing”²:

Note the extreme one-sided bias in favor of homosexuality-based “marriage” in most of the categories – and the finding that all media (including Fox News) except conservative talk radio were heaving biased toward “gay marriage.”

With pro-“gay” attitudes dominating newsrooms, few journalists seem willing to pursue stories that might offend America’s powerful and well-funded homosexual activist lobby.³ This would include investigating:

• how escalating “gay power” represented by pro-LGBT “nondiscrimination” laws subject even very young children to inappropriate pro-homosexual “lessons” in school, thus undermining both children’s innocence and parental rights⁴;
• the growing HIV crisis among “gay youth” (a study of young “men who had sex with men” in 21 cities found that one in 10 tested positive for HIV in 2008);⁵ and
• how pro-homosexual laws including legalized “civil unions” and homosexual “marriage” negate Americans’ cherished religious and First Amendment liberties.

On the latter point, there is now a large and growing body of evidence that pro-homosexual laws and corporate “diversity” policies oppress Americans’ freedom of conscience to oppose homosexualism and live out their religious and moral beliefs, including the once universally-held Western idea rooted in the Judeo-Christian teachings that marriage is between one man and one woman (see below).

 

Schieffer gets a lesson on the growing ‘gay’ tyranny

A recent appearance by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” exposed how ill-informed the major media are when it comes to the threat that government-backed “gay marriage” (and pro-homosexual “sexual orientation”) laws pose to religious liberty. Perkins writes that with the Supreme Court’s de facto invalidation of California’s Proposition 8 amendment defining marriage as one-man, one-woman [emphasis added]:

“…people are about to experience (if they haven’t already) the profound loss of liberty that accompanies this march down the same-sex “wedding” aisle. … “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer — like so many Americans — was surprised to hear that business owners (and wedding vendors in particular) are being persecuted, and in some cases prosecuted, for refusing to participate in a same-sex “marriage” ceremony. .. “I must say this is under my radar,” Bob told me. “I haven’t — I haven’t heard this.” And he’s not alone.”[6]

Perkins writes that “the media isn’t covering the stories of these victims — not because they don’t exist — but because liberals recognize their potential to swing the debate.” See this footnote for the examples he provided of moral-minded Americans whose freedom has been jeopardized by their opposition to homosexual “marriage” and State-enforced “gay rights.”[7]

This report for America’s Survival, Inc., documents the rampant and often egregious media bias in favor of the homosexual-bisexual-transgender activist agenda. It puts special focus on the growing (and sometimes radical) pro-homosexual bias of Fox News personalities like Megyn Kelly and Bernie Goldberg. Why concentrate on Fox? Because Fox News has inordinate influence with conservative Americans and with the Republican Party — which is also retrenching its opposition to “gay rights.” And because Fox holds itself to a high standard of being “Fair and Balanced” – i.e., not sharing the notorious bias of the dominant liberal media.

This report will also investigate the role of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA; motto: “We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re on Deadline”) in distorting and molding news coverage on homosexuality- and transgender-related issues. Like other major media, Fox News through its parent company, News Corp., is a long-time funder of the NLGJA.

What are the implications of Fox News failing to live up to its motto, repeated nightly by Fox “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier, of being “fair, balanced and unafraid” – on this particular issue, which is more politically correct than almost any other? Liberal networks like CNN and MSNBC now exhibit open contempt toward conservatives and Christians opposed to homosexuality. If Fox News too joins the pro-homosexual drumbeat by increasingly skewing coverage in favor of homosexuality and gender confusion (transsexuality), it signals the near-total corruption of the major media on this moral question. This leaves citizens without a powerful media voice to report the “other side” of this vexing issue – including important facts like the rising HIV incidence among “men who have sex with men” and the threat to freedom of conscience posed by “sexual orientation” legislation and “gay marriage.”[8]

 

Christians = KKK?!

In the last decade, the dominant “mainstream” media have to a large degree accepted and institutionalized the insidious, socially-left notion that there is no legitimate, conservative (or Judeo-Christian, moral) “other side” to the homosexualist agenda. This is the objective of radical homosexual activists and their allies who now routinely denigrate “religious-motivated bigotry” in their aggressive demonization of outspoken opponents of the LGBT agenda. Thus many in the media – assuming the role of partisan advocates rather than impartial journalists — have accepted and promoted the “gay-rights-equals-civil-rights” paradigm advanced by both the homosexual activist lobby and the NLGJA.

In major media, homosexual journalists are often assigned to cover LGBT-related stories. It is legitimate to ask whether “out and proud” homosexuals are simply too invested personally in the “gay” issue to be able to cover such news fairly and objectively. The culture fostered by the NLGJA would indicate a resounding “Yes” to that question: although the “gay journalist” group’s annual conferences provide ample professional development help for its members (which are, of course, non-political), when it comes to discussing homosexuality- and transgender-related issues, NLGJA sessions are, naturally, usually weighted entirely to the pro-LGBT side, as will be shown below. Its speakers and exhibitors are all “gay”-affirming – homosexual militants like Michelangelo Signorile who contemptuously heap vitriol on pro-family opponents like this writer,[9] and LGBT organizations like Lambda Legal and GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).[10] Thus NLGJA members who work for “mainstream” media (as opposed to those who work for LGBT media) are subjected to only one side of the issue – the side that affirms their self-interest bias.

 

Journalism Professor Says Newsrooms Need More Christians

So great is the sea change wrought by the NLGJA’s brand of “out and proud” homosexuals in the newsroom that even liberals are recognizing the rampant pro-homosexual media bias. Howard Kurtz (who has been hired by Fox News) recently devoted a segment on his CNN program “Reliable Sources” to the pro-homosexual-slanted media coverage following the Supreme Court June decision on homosexual “marriage.” As NewsBusters writer Noel Sheppard reported, Kurtz interviewed George Washington University Prof. Steve Roberts, who makes this startling observation:

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: I want to be clear about this. A little more than 20 years ago, many, or if not most gay journalists were in the closet, they were afraid to come out publicly….Even four, five years ago, many television journalists who we now know are openly gay, felt it might damage their careers. So I’m glad that these people got a chance to talk about something so important to them, but if you put them on back-to-back-to-back, are you tilting the coverage, that’s my question?

STEVE ROBERTS, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: Yes. And this is another thing that this coverage reveals. What’s missing often in TV newsrooms: there are plenty of gays, there are very few people of faith and very few evangelical Christians who in their own beliefs would be against gay marriage. And this has always bothered me.

Kurtz observes that “even on Fox News, there wasn’t a lot of people … denouncing these rulings … saying that this could lead to, for example, federal government nationalizing the issue of marriage, taking it away from the states.”[11] Indeed, true “diversity” is lacking in American newsrooms – and gone are the days when conservatives could count on Fox News to break from the liberal media pack by offering information that counters liberal groupthink. 

 

Getting a quote from “Reverend [Sh-t]bag”

In such an atmosphere it is hardly shocking to learn that NLGJA conferences have featured more than a few ugly potshots at religious and other critics of homosexuality – such as the NLGJA’s 1998 conference when one panelist, Kevin Hayes, then with the New York Daily News, mockingly referred to a hypothetical critic of “gay rights” as “Reverend [Sh-t]bag.”[12]

There is nothing close to “two sides” at NLGJA conferences – which are stacked with pro-homosexual advocates — just like there is rarely a fair presentation of “two sides” in America media stories dealing with LGBT issues. This systematic bias has fueled the culture’s pro-“gay” zeitgeist and pronouncements that the “gay” side has already won (see TIME story below), which in turn fuel further pro-homosexual bias. The NLGJA itself has fostered one-sided “advocacy journalism” by encouraging its members to question whether there really are two legitimate sides to the homosexual debate. In fact, a former NJGLA president (and page designer for the New York Post), Eric Hegedus, writing on the organization’s website, compares seeking out conservatives to get a balancing opinion on homosexual-related stories to soliciting remarks from “white supremacists” on race and immigration stories. Which begs the question: why is a media organization like Fox News that purports to be “Fair and Balanced” financing a media organization that advocates for one side of the homosexual issue? And why is Fox moving away from being “fair and balanced” in its news and commentary? 

 

Flawed racism analogy and ‘Do we really need the other side?”

A consistent theme raised over the years by NLGJA members, leaders and media allies has been to compare opposition to homosexuality with past racism against black Americans. In addition to outraging many blacks,¹³ this analogy is insulting to white Christian conservatives like this writer, who believe that both racism and homosexual behavior are sinful.¹⁴ The passage below is taken from an online NLGJA article, “Covering LGBT Rights Objectively,” from the organization’s online “Journalists Toolbox” [emphasis added]:

Journalists must consider when including an opponent of gay rights is necessary. “A feature story on the rise of gay tourism in Fort Lauderdale shouldn’t include ‘the other side’ unless there is some special controversy that elevates it because the newspaper then would be creating controversy where none exists,” [Scott] Wyman [reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel] says….

Sometimes it’s helpful to step back and ask yourself what you would do if you were writing the story about a different minority group, Wyman suggests. If you’re doing a story about an increase in tourism among African-Americans, would you go out of your way to get an “other side”?[15]

Thus the NLGJA (which claims not to be an “advocacy” group, mimics the tiresome campaign by (other) homosexual activists to equate their movement – revolving around sexual behavior historically considered aberrant and immoral – to unchangeable skin color, a mere inborn and morally neutral trait. This homosexuality-race analogy, which has outraged many African Americans, has in recent years been ratcheted up a notch – as pro-homosexual leftists led by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have listed various conservative pro-family groups opposed to the homosexual activist agenda as “hate groups” on a par with racist fringe groups like the KKK.[16]

 

Moral Disagreement Is NOT ‘Hate’

Over the last decade, some NLGJA members — and NLGJA-supporting “straight” journalists like MSNBC host Contessa Brewer — have cynically echoed this SPLC theme by asserting that giving equal time to moral opponents of homosexuality is like “giving fair coverage to racists,” to quote Brewer.[17] It is only through sympathetic media’s “protection” of leftist and pro-homosexual advocacy groups that such an outlandish claim as the SPLC’s “hate group” smear against pro-family conservatives is able to flourish.

The Left’s “Christians-as-haters” narrative can have deadly real-world consequences: only the heroic actions of a security guard prevented a potential mass-murder in 2012 at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of Family Research Council (FRC), where armed “gay” fanatic Floyd Corkins planned to go on a shooting spree against FRC employees. News reports revealed that Corkins obtained FRC’s name (and that of another Christian pro-family organization) straight from the SPLC’s “hate group” list.[18] Precious few media have taken the SPLC and the Left to task for their spurious claims putting conservative pro-family groups in a “hate” league with the KKK.[19]

As will be shown below, the NLGJA itself has echoed these same preposterous analogies between committed people of faith and racist, fringe pariahs. By using their power as “sexual minorities” strategically inside newsrooms, NLGJA members – some acting more like pro-homosexual informational “gatekeepers” than impartial journalists – have played a key role in marginalizing pro-family voices. Thus the NLGJA, working in tandem with outright homosexual special interest groups like GLAAD, has helped to build “gay” power in society and achieve LGBT agenda victories.

(Note: this is not to say that openly (or closeted) homosexual journalists are incapable of being fair – although aggressive, “out and proud” homosexual ideology would seem to militate against it. In fact, it is this writer’s experience that reporters at homosexual publications like the Washington Blade sometimes cover conservative critics of LGBT activism more accurately and inclusively than “mainstream” journalists.[20] However, this probably testifies more to the rampant unprofessionalism and pro-homosexual bias of “mainstream” journalists – who routinely dismiss pro-family critics — more than anything else. Moreover, “gay” media are far less influential on the American public than “mainstream” media.)

 

Modes of Pro-LGBT Media Bias

As a longtime critic of media bias and 20-year critical observer of the homosexual activist movement, I offer the following as salient and common modes of pro-homosexual and pro-“transgender” bias in the dominant “mainstream” media, along with few examples of media bias. There is some overlap in these categories:

• The “civil rights” presumption: over the last two decades years the media has adopted and strengthened a problematic “civil rights” narrative to its coverage of homosexual and transgender issues. This approach downplays the crucial difference between homosexuality-based advocacy and the noble Black civil rights movement – i.e., the historic Judeo-Christian moral opposition to same-sex behavior. Obviously, if people think homosexuality is a mere innocuous (inborn) trait as opposed to wrong and changeable behavior, they are far less likely to oppose it and the larger LGBT agenda. The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association has played a critical role in this development by establishing homosexuals in the newsroom as a “minority” analogous to racial and ethnic minorities – and then using that strategic role to sway coverage. NLGJA founder Leroy Aarons considered this one of NLGJA’s great achievements. Consider his 2003 exchange with a “young journalist of color”:   Q: “Do you think that NLGJA has had an impact on coverage of gays and gay issues?” Aarons: “It’s had an enormous effect. It’s been accepted in the same way as the other minority journalism organizations have.”[21] 

There is tremendous opposition among Black Americans to the idea of homosexual “marriage” and – and as well to the idea of equating it to past laws banning interracial marriage. So it is odd to hear white, socially liberal reporters like Fox News’ Megyn Kelly strain to make this dubious analogy, as she did in August 2012 interviewing a conservative evangelical pastor (emphasis added):

“This country has a long history of discrimination against certain groups. Eventually we wind up getting it right. Right? Against women, against blacks, the civil rights movement and so on. And in justifying that discrimination when it was in place, some folks turn to the Bible and turn to their religious beliefs and said we have to have slavery because it’s in the Bible. Women have to be second-class citizens because that’s in the Bible. Blacks and whites can’t get married because that’s in the Bible. That wound up in a case. A judge wrote that in an opinion, which the Supreme Court ultimately struck that down, saying that’s not right, judge – the Equal Protection clause says you can’t do that. Why is gay marriage any different?”[22] 

• Egregious lack of balance between pro-homosexual voices and critics of the homosexual activist movement – succumbing to LGBT pressure campaigns. In fact, it is not uncommon anymore to find purported “news” stories that read like press releases from LGBT activist groups – bereft of any serious representation of conservative critics, or none at all. For example, a June 26 Fox News Latino story on the Supreme Court’s homosexual “marriage” rulings quoted two pro-homosexual-“marriage” advocates celebrating the decisions, but no pro-family spokesmen.[23] 

• Media cooperation with and capitulation to LGBT pressure campaigns designed to block, discredit and marginalize conservative voices:  this is precisely the goal of homosexual media activists like GLAAD (the group formerly known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) – which lobbies major media not to include pro-family (including ex-“gay”) leaders opposed to homosexual activism as on-air guests.
  • 

    In 2010, the homosexual activist group GLAAD targeted then-CNN anchor Kyra Phillips because she included ex-“gay” therapist Richard Cohen in a “gay”-related CNN segment. Unfortunately, Phillips – who at first did the right thing by including both sides in the debate – ended up rewarding GLAAD.

    Kyra Phillips bends to GLAAD: For example, in 2010 GLAAD ran a campaign targeting then-CNN anchor Kyra Phillips for including former homosexual Richard Cohen (author of “Coming Out Straight”[24]) in an on-air debate about a piece of pro-“gay” legislation — opposite the Democratic California Assemblywoman who sponsored it.[25] Responding to GLAAD’s outrage, the next day Phillips interviewed another pro-homosexual advocate — this time with no conservative opponent. Her guest was from the American Psychological Association and he sought to discredit the idea that people (like Cohen) can change away from homosexuality. After the interview, Phillips issued a special on-air statement about the GLAAD campaign touting her “unswerving support for all communities in the battle for human rights, including gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals.” In the statement, she conceded, “Richard Cohen was not the most appropriate guest to have on,” earning plaudits from GLAAD.[26]

  • Carol Costello ignorantly says homosexual health risks are “just not true”: Another, more egregious, case of  a major journalist cooperating with homosexual activists to demonize a pro-family conservative occurred during a CNN Carol Costello interview with Bryan Fischer of American Family Association. Costello came loaded for bear for the October 2012 interview – relying on prep material from GLAAD and the SPLC (which Costello erroneously called the “Southern POLICY Law Center”) to confront Fischer on air for his past comments. After repeatedly cutting Fischer off, Costello – CNN’s morning anchor — reads back a quote he had made about how “Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers….” (Sexual deviants were heavily involved with the Nazis, e.g., Ernst Rohm, the head of the thuggish Nazi “Storm Battalion” militia, who was Hitler’s closest associate until Hitler assassinated him, was a flagrant homosexual.) Fischer attempts to back up his comment by citing the work of secular German historian Lothar Mochtan (author of The Hidden Hitler; Mochtan is a respected historian who makes the case that Hitler was homosexual), but Costello dismisses him.[27] She says regarding Fischer’s past Hitler comment: “That by many people’s standards, would be hate speech.” Fischer then accuses the SPLC of being the “real bullies” by trying to “destroy” groups like AFA and “silence any view that would criticize the normalization of homosexual behavior.” He says, “We know from the CDC and the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] – not part of the vast right-wing conspiracy – that homosexual behavior has the same health risks associated with it as–. At this point, Costello abruptly cuts him off and says, “OK, that’s just not true….I’m gonna end this interview now, sir, I’m sorry, because that’s just not true.” She ends the segment sardonically: “Mr. Fischer, um…thanks for sharing your views, I guess.” For her disdainful interview, Costello was applauded by homosexual activists and liberals alike. Homosexual activist John Becker of Truth Wins Out said Costello’s treatment of Fischer was “awesome” and called Fischer’s health-risks assertion “another false claim.”[28] When Fischer later accused Costello of acting like the “Gay Gestapo,” she proudly owned the label, as Huffington Post reported: “Fischer called Costello “the
    

    CNN’s Carol Costello is now openly contemptuous toward conservatives opposed to homosexuality. She kicked one guest off the air for raising the issue of homosexual health risks. Costello ignorantly claimed his statements were “just not true.”

    gay gestapo” for “cutting [his] water off just as soon as [he] started to talk about the health risks of homosexual behavior.” [Costello said:] “Well Mr. Fischer, if that’s the definition of ‘the gay gestapo,’ then I am a proud, card-carrying member.”[29] Several months later, Costello would evince the same dismissive, unprofessional and contemptuous approach toward a Christian conservative in her scoffing interview with Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council — about the Boy Scouts’ “gay” policy. Clearly, Costello has crossed the line – or, more accurately, leapt over it – from journalist to brash “gay” advocate, and can no longer be expected to treat social conservatives opposed to homosexuality with anything approaching fairness.

• Ignore “gay” negatives, e.g., the massive health risks: Carol Costello is obviously ignorant of the special health risks linked to homosexual behavior. Because most in the media now choose to view the homosexual issue as a “civil rights” cause, they fail to cover the behavior-related crises that continue to emanate from the LGBT subculture. America’s Survival has reported on the homosexual health crisis, with particular focus on the current “gay”-led lobby effort to remove the FDA ban on homosexual men giving blood.[30] The great and sad irony is that despite the advancement of homosexual “rights” in society, the “gay” health crisis, especially among homosexuality-practicing men, continues to escalate. And with little accountability from the sycophantic media, reckless homosexual promiscuity is again on the rise – including the common practice of “barebacking” (condomless anal sodomy) and the proliferation of homosexual bathhouses and sex clubs nationwide in cities like Cleveland, Chicago and even Atlanta, home to the Centers for Disease Control.[31] 

• “Humanizing” only one side of the debate (and never successful ex-“gays”!) – The media routinely produce in-
  

  Homosexual activists are desperate to keep happy FORMER homosexuals out of the media. Here ex-homosexual Richard Cohen is pictured with the family he never would have had if he had remained in the “gay” lifestyle. Why doesn’t Fox’s Sean Hannity or “Fox & Friends” do a segment on happy ex-“gays”?

  depth, sympathetic stories about LGBT advocates or interviews with leading LGBT advocates like “Chaz” (formerly Chastity) Bono. Such feature articles usually lack a critic’s perspective to balance the piece. And rarely is there a corresponding sympathetic portrayal of pro-family advocates by the same media, e.g., happy former homosexuals. For example, in the last two years CNN’s Piers Morgan has conducted two friendly, in-depth interviews with Bono,[32] who went from being Sonny and Cher’s beautiful little daughter on TV in the ‘60s, to becoming a lesbian — to ultimately transforming into a “transgender” man pursuing “sex reassignment surgery” (SRS) operation to be the “male” Chaz. It is a heartbreaking story and one crying out for “the other side” to be told. This writer has urged Morgan to provide some balance on the transgender issue by interviewing Walt Heyer, a man who is without a penis after going through male-to-female SRS before abandoning the “trans” lifestyle altogether and renewing his Christian faith. Heyer now urges men and woman not to go through the body-disfiguring “sex change” surgery through his website, SexChangeRegret.com.[33] Why do the media humanize and lionize “Chaz” Bono but not people like Walt Heyer who have pursued healthy change away from LGBT lifestyles?+

• Regurgitating LGBT propaganda myths as facts – even those long discredited. Here are two outrageous examples, one of media bias, the other of its effect (recall that since the 1970’s homosexual activists have spread the myth that “10 percent” of society is “gay”):

Twenty-five Percent of America is “gay”?! — The Atlantic magazine in 2012 reported on how stunningly misinformed Americans now are due to the deluge of “gay” propaganda they are receiving from media and popular culture: “In surveys conducted in 2002 and 2011, pollsters at Gallup found that members of the American public massively overestimated how many people are gay or lesbian. In 2002, a quarter of those surveyed guessed upwards of a quarter of Americans were gay or lesbian (or “homosexual,” the third option given). By 2011, that misperception had only grown, with more than a third of those surveyed now guessing that more than 25 percent of Americans are gay or lesbian.” A shocking 52 percent of those polled in 2011 thought that 20 percent or more of the population was homosexual[34];

More like less than 2 percent: To its credit, The Atlantic reported the actual numbers of the homosexual/bisexual population in America: “The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a gay and lesbian think tank, released a study in April 2011 estimating based on its research that just 1.7 percent of Americans between 18 and 44 identify as gay or lesbian, while another 1.8 percent — predominantly women — identify as bisexual. Far from underestimating the ranks of gay people because of homophobia, these figures included a substantial number of people who remained deeply closeted, such as a quarter of the bisexuals. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of women between 22 and 44 that questioned more than 13,500 respondents between 2006 and 2008 found very similar numbers: Only 1 percent of the women identified themselves as gay, while 4 percent identified as bisexual.”[35]

• 

  TIME magazine gratuitously helps desensitize Americans to perversion and shills for homosexual “marriage.” (We blocked these covers for the sake of decency.) In the cover story, reporter David von Drehle uses revisionist “gay history” to imply that Christianity once sanctioned homosexual unions.

  TIME’s and Von Drehle’s Glaring Omissions: TIME magazine (April 8, 2013) in its woefully biased cover story (featuring indecent, dual covers of two women or two men kissing), “Gay Marriage Already Won”: Editor-at-Large David Von Drehle includes a paragraph based on the research of the late Yale historian John Boswell, a homosexual activist who has been criticized as an “advocacy scholar,”[36] and who died at 47 from AIDS in 1994. Von Drehle first puffs up Boswell as a “dashing young member of Yale’s all-star history faculty when he published Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, which went on to win the National Book Award. Copiously documented and densely argued, the book was no one’s idea of casual reading.” (Von Drehle is hardly subtle in forcing his point home that this was serious scholarship done by one brilliant fellow, clearly deserving the utmost respect!) He goes on: “In it, Boswell employed his knowledge of classical and medieval languages to investigate the history of Christian attitudes toward same-sex couples. He continued that it was not all hellfire and brimstone. In fact, Boswell found scant evidence that the early church condemned homosexuality before the Middle Ages.” Translation: Boswell, possessing significant self-interest bias – the need to rationalize his own homosexual lifestyle — was attempting to debunk the heretofore largely unchallenged historical record of Church opposition to homosexual behavior and relationships as sinful. Von Drehle continues: “Most provocatively, Boswell ventured that some Christian churches actually blessed same-sex unions during the first millennium of Catholicism.”[37] Provocative, indeed: what Von Drehle conveniently neglects to tell TIME’s readers is that Boswell’s revisionist history and activist theory of alleged ancient church blessings of “gay unions” stirred up a huge controversy and has been roundly criticized by orthodox scholars who specialize in medieval history.[38] The description of Boswell by Fordham University’s online Boswell archive might have added some context: “His work is extremely controversial, and has been from the start….[Regarding specifically Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality:] “at this stage virtually all of Boswell’s specific conclusions have been called into question.”[39] [See below for another example of journalistic malpractice by Von Drehle.]

• Ignoring/demonizing moral opponents and creating a “New Normal”: related to Point 2 above, the absence of any moral disapproval conveyed in, say, an article or broadcast story about “gay marriage” sends a powerful message that
  

  San Francisco homosexual rally compares Anita Bryant to Hitler, the KKK and Ugandan genocidal dictator Idi Amin. LGBT activists continue to smear traditionalist by equating them with haters and fringe groups like the Klan.

  religious/moral condemnations of homosexuality are no longer relevant in our “postmodern” (read: post-Christian) culture. Obviously, such coverage helps normalize (de-stigmatize) homosexual behavior in society—another goal of LGBT media insiders who also serve as personal ambassadors for the pro-LGBT cause. This report could cite countless media examples of “gay”-related articles and broadcasts that fail to include the voice of moral opponents, but one such story is an AP report appearing in the Tampa Tribune chronicling the history of “gay rights”: “In 50 years, Huge Strides for the Gay-Rights Movement,” by David Crary and Lisa Leff (June 9, 2013). The long story does not cite or quote a single opponent of the homosexual activist movement – although it does include an archive photo of a San Francisco homosexual protest in which a large placard photo of Anita Bryant, the conservative, anti-homosexuality activist and singer, is seen adjacent to placards of Adolf Hitler, murderous Ugandan dictator Ida Amin and a cross-burning.[40] The not-too-subtle message: opposing homosexuality is like being a Nazi, a mass-murderer or a Klansman. Such dirty tactics have long been used by homosexual activists and continue to this day – yet the media rarely examine the merits of such outrageous claims.[41]

• Media as pro-gay “cheerleaders” and strategists: By this I mean the tendency in the reporting on and analysis of “gay”-related political and “culture war” issues to “report” a given story from the strategic and emotional perspective of homosexual activists. An example is the reportage surrounding the recent temporary defeat of a “gay marriage” bill in Democratic-dominated Illinois. In the months when the bill was under consideration, and then after it stalled in Springfield, most major media stories were skewed to reflect the hopes and strategies — then anger, disappointment and outrage — of Illinois homosexual activists. Typical is a story by Rex Huppke in the Chicago Tribune (July 16, 2013) headlined, “Activists Seek Engagement in Renewed Same-Sex Marriage Push.” (Huppke quotes no critics of “gay marriage.”)[42] Meanwhile, there have been no major media stories in Chicago sympathetically chronicling the efforts of pro-family advocates – and the media largely missed the fascinating story of how Black, White and Latino Christians, Democrats and Republicans alike – united to stall the bill in one the nation’s “bluest” states.[43]

• 

  13-year-old Arkansas boy Jesse Dirkhising died from asphyxiation after being raped and sodomized in 1999 by two sadistic adult homosexual lovers who knew his mother. The media never came close to making a teaching example of the Dirkhising story, as they did for slain “gay” college student Matthew Shepard.

  Media coverage favors pro-“gay” victims, and “gay” rallies — in contrast to media blackouts of countervailing pro-family rallies opposed to LGBT activism. The conservative Illinois Family Institute complained that a long-planned, pro-natural-marriage rally it organized in Springfield in February (3,000 – 5,000 people attended—a large mobilization by Illinois political standards) was mostly blacked out by Chicago’s influential media, including the Chicago Tribune and the city’s TV news stations. [44] Ditto for coverage of “victims” that affect public opinion on the issue of homosexuality. It would be impossible to quantify the millions upon millions of dollars worth of publicity and promotion the LGBT Lobby received due to the media’s saturation coverage of the 1998 murder of Laramie, Wyoming homosexual college student Matthew Shepard. The case was immediately labeled as an “anti-gay hate crime” and the media advanced a narrative around that theme – as LGBT activists used the tragic murder to lobby for “hate crimes” laws. (LGBT Lobby groups like GLAAD and Human Rights Campaign also cynically blamed pro-family advocates and groups like Family Research Council indirectly for Shepard’s murder, saying anti-“gay” rhetoric creates a dangerous “climate of hate.”[45])

Not a “hate crime”? However, years later, ABC News “20/20” would cast significant doubt on the notion that Shepard was “targeted” and killed “just because he was gay.” Convicted murderers Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney told ABC that “money and drugs motivated their actions that night, not hatred of gays.” Moreover, ABC reported that not only was McKinney a meth addict (he said he was coming off a “meth binge” the night of the murder), but that Shepard too had a drug problem.[46] So the case was far from the simplistic “anti-gay hate crime” story that many in media – guided by “gay” lobby groups like GLAAD[47] – made it out to be. Meanwhile, most media were not interested in two heart-wrenching stories in which homosexuals were perpetrators of heinous crimes and not victims:

• Jesse Dirkhising, a 13-year-old Arkansas boy who in 1999 died from asphyxiation after being cruelly raped, sodomized and sadistically assaulted by two adult homosexual male lovers who were friends of his mother. (Indicative of the intense media devotion to the dubious Shepard-“hate crime” narrative, one TIME magazine writer justified the media imbalance between the Shepard and Dirkhising cases by claiming, “The reason the Dirkhising story received so
  

  Pious Chicago Catholic Mary Stachowicz was murdered by a homosexual co-worker whom she had urged to live chastely — but the national media (including AP, which didn’t even cover her murderer’s trial) saw no need to make a big story of this politically incorrect victim.

  little play is because it offered no lessons. Shepard’s murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society’s attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform….”[48]

• Mary Stachowicz, a devout 51-year-old Chicago Catholic mother of four who was brutally beaten, strangled and stabbed to death in 2002 by a 19-year-old co-worker, Nicholas Gutierrez – who reportedly was furious that Stachowicz had told him that he needed to change his homosexual lifestyle.[49] Unlike the trial of Shepard’s murderers, which became an ongoing national story, the Stachowicz trial in Chicago did not receive major national media coverage (e.g., AP did not give it major coverage). It was barely covered even by Chicago media. The liberal rationale for the stark contrast in media coverage between the Shepard case and the Dirkhising and Stachowicz cases is the “hate crime” angle in the former case – yet the ABC 20/20 report specifically negates this point.

• Shilling for gender confusion (transgenderism): Related to the previous point, the media have greatly abetted the rapid gains of “transgender” activists by dutifully adhering to the wishes of the NLGJA and other homosexual advocacy groups in referring to “transgendered” people by their desired pronoun.[50] This practice is particularly offensive when applied to young children, who are being encouraged by some adults to embrace the opposite gender—e.g., boys wearing dresses like girls, even to the point of crusading for the “right” of children to use opposite-sex restrooms and showers in public schools. Here is one politically-correct lead sentence by CNN in a Colorado story that has generated a lot of national attention: “A transgender first-grader who was born a boy but identifies as a girl has won the right to use the girls’ restroom at her Colorado school.”[51]

By simply acceding to the semantic demands of transgender activists, the media are working to “mainstream” severely gender-confused behavior that defies biology – thus running way ahead of the ongoing national debate on this issue. (Certainly, huge

numbers of Americans would object to referring to a young boy – however troubled — as “her.”) Note that transgender activists also are winning the “right” in several states and the District of Columbia to go back and alter their birth certificate to reflect their desired “gender identity” – in effect, rewriting history like the Kremlin used to do in the days of Soviet Communism. In the new D.C. law, there is no requirement that the person undergo “sex change” operations to pursue the “retroactive” gender switch.

• Use of homosexual activist terminology and polemical phrases – such as “marriage equality” (for legalizing homosexual “marriage”) and labeling homosexual activist groups “civil rights organizations.” Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly tipped her pro-homosexual hand in an interview in March 2013 surrounding the Supreme Court cases on “gay marriage” when she referred to her guest’s advocacy for “marriage equality” – a phrase (evoking racial equality) popularized by LGBT activists and their allies. Perhaps using the homosexual-activist euphemism comes naturally to Kelly, who again seemed oblivious to African Americans’ resentment of the “gay”-black-civil-rights analogy in asking pro-family advocate Maggie Gallagher this loaded question: 

“[T]here was a time in this country in which interracial marriage was not lawful. And the Supreme Court had to step in and say “that’s wrong. Under the U.S. Constitution, under the Equal Protection clause, whites can marry blacks and states are not free to tell them otherwise.” And those that advocate on behalf of this issue, Maggie, they say this is another, sort of, iteration of that.[52]

Another reporter, Lisa Ling of the Oprah Winfrey Network, went so far as to title her program casting doubt on Christian “ex-gay” efforts to overcome homosexuality “Pray the Gay Away” – a version of a mocking phrase concocted by homosexual militant Wayne Besen (a past NLGJA convention speaker) to mock those same efforts.[53]

• Media toleration of hateful extremism only when it comes from the pro-homosexual Left (e.g., homosexual sex columnist and LGBT activist Dan Savage) — as opposed to the shunning and shaming of extremists on the Right (e.g., the Westboro Baptist Church of “God Hates Fags” notoriety). Savage infamously “redefined” former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s last name as the disgusting byproduct of sodomy (see “SpreadingSantorum.com”). Fair-minded observers should ask the media: Would a conservative pundit who created a website to “redefine” the last name of, say, Nancy Pelosi, as the byproduct of anal sex ever remain in the media’s good graces?[54] Despite his extreme, vulgar and hateful antics, Savage has been celebrated by “mainstream” media nationwide in the book tour for his latest book, “American Savage” – with one fawning “fluff” interview after another.[55] 

• (Secretly or openly) homosexual journalists covering the “gay” beat: People who are practicing homosexual, bisexual or transgendered lifestyles – especially openly and proudly — have a natural self-interest in affirming them. Such is
  

  Radical homosexual activist and vulgar sex columnist Dan Savage does not appear to have paid any price in the media for his hateful antics toward Christian conservatives. His new book, “American Savage,” has been avidly promoted by major media outlets.

  the predicament of proudly “gay” or lesbian reporters or even secretly homosexual reporters like Anderson Cooper was before he declared his homosexuality.[56] If a committed pro-life advocate were assigned by a major media outlet to cover the abortion beat, liberals would be outraged. And so conservatives have a right to question the ethics of assigning a strong pro-homosexuality advocate and/or practicing homosexual to cover “gay”-related stories. Sometimes it is painfully obvious when a homosexual reporter is too close to an issue to give it responsible coverage – as when “openly gay” CNN anchor Don Lemon – a childhood victim of a homosexual predator himself – expressed sympathy on air for convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky: “[W]hen I saw Jerry Sandusky walk out in handcuffs, I did kind of feel a bit sorry for him,” Lemon said.” Sandusky received what is essentially a life sentence for his predations. [57] One of the stories that is seemingly off-limits to the “mainstream” media is an investigation into the link between childhood molestation and the victim’s later embrace of a homosexual identity. Many “gays” like Lemon and MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts were molested by adult homosexuals in their childhood.[58] 

• Sheer lazy, shoddy, LGBT-pandering journalism that insults informed Americans, fails to make elementary connections, and refuses to hold homosexuals accountable for their misbehavior: this final category is reserved for the sort of journalism that could only survive in a culture already beaten down by relentless pro-homosexual promotion and misinformation. It is corrupted by years if not decades of coddling homosexual activists.[59] Take the “gay marriage”-celebration piece in TIME cited above with its gratuitous and disturbing same-sex-kiss covers. Reporter David Von Driehle endeavors to show that the Supreme Court is finally catching up to what “Americans were already discovering daily, that gay men and lesbians were not alien from society, somehow set apart.”
  

  As the Archbishop of Milwaukee, secret homosexual Rembert Weakland shuttled predator priests to other parishes, where they would find new boys to abuse. He accused teen boys who reported their pastor-molesters of “squealing.” Yet TIME heralded him as an example of “ordinary” “gays.”

  He then lists approvingly notable open homosexuals like Ellen DeGeneres and Greg Louganis, and adds: “The Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, was gay. The person next door, in the next office cubicle, the person seated next to your at Thanksgiving dinner or Passover seder or in the pew in church could be gay. Thus did the other begin to shade into the ordinary.” Surely Von Drehle has a point, and his inclusion of Weakland probably came from a search for the most prominent “out” religious figure to demonstrate the seeming normalcy of homosexuality. But what he neglected to report is that Weakland, the then-secret homosexual presiding over Milwaukee’s Catholics, was a reckless and callous enabler of homosexual predator priests. Writes Catholic Leon Podles: “Weakland criticized and punished anyone who protested sexual predation by priests”– even threatening legal action against whistle-blowing Catholics. In one shocking interview, Weakland said [emphasis added], “What happens so often in these cases is that they go on for a few years and then the boy gets a little older and the perpetrator loses interest…That’s when the squealing comes in and you have to deal with it.” [60] When predator priests were caught, the liberal, pro-“gay” Archbishop Weakland would transfer them to other parishes, where the priests would find new boys to molest. Writes Catholic Randy Engel, an expert on homosexuality and the American Catholic Church: “It can be said of Weakland that he never met a clerical sex abuser he didn’t like.”[61] A simple fact check by Von Drehle would have shown him that Weakland’s “gayness” was nothing to celebrate – especially for Milwaukee Catholics. Instead, his subversive sexuality and misplaced, deviant sympathies brought suffering and devastation of the type no family should experience – especially at the hands of their church. The boys and families victimized by what Engel calls the “Homosexual Collective” – of which Weakland was a powerful member – would not consider him and his failure to punish the priests who molested their children “ordinary.” Once again, an American journalist – in his zeal to demonstrate the supposed normalcy of homosexuality – had failed to hold homosexuals themselves responsible for their behavior. 

Clearly, pro-“gay” liberal groupthink in the media breeds shallow, lazy journalism. This report includes only a few representative samples of unprofessional, one-sided, pro-homosexual “journalism.” Regrettably, one could fill dozens of large volumes with similar examples of jaundiced media coverage on LGBT issues, from just the last few years alone.

 

Fox News Joins the Pro-Homosexual Media Bandwagon

Conservatives of all stripes had high hopes for Fox News to offset the overwhelming liberal bias of the dominant “mainstream” media networks. But Fox – mimicking current trends in the Republican Party with which it is often identified – has increasingly adopted a libertarian brand of “conservatism” that eschews or downplays social issues, especially homosexuality, as too “divisive.” Thus Fox News’ coverage – including conservative advocacy programs like the “Sean Hannity Show”– has in recent years tended to downplay homosexual-related issues. (This is at odds with Ronald Reagan, who advocated social conservatism as one of the three legs of the conservative stool – the others being fiscal responsibility and a strong defense and foreign policy.)

As if becoming neutral (or shallow) on crucial Culture War issues wasn’t disappointing enough, some leading Fox News’ hosts, such as Bill O’Reilly, Shepard Smith and Megyn Kelly, have emerged as on-air, pro-LGBT advocates – seemingly defying Fox’s core audience demographic of staunch Republican conservatives.[62] That said, perhaps Fox’s identity struggle parallels that of the Republican Party with which it is so identified: in 2011, Pew Research Center found a stark divide in how Libertarians versus “Staunch Republicans” and “Main Street Republicans” view the homosexual issue: “a large majority of Libertarians (71%) say that homosexuality should be accepted by society. By contrast, 68% of Staunch Conservatives and 60% of Main Street Republicans say that homosexuality should be discouraged by society.”[63]

If Fox is siding with the Libertarians, its emerging pro-LGBT bias is all the more troubling in that many conservative leaders are reluctant to criticize the network publicly because it is the only major secular TV network in the nation sympathetic to the Right. Conservative pundits and issue-experts fear that if they criticize Fox News, it might jeopardize their getting invited on the network as a guest to promote their particular cause.

Thus, Fox’s “avoid-the-social-issues” drift tragically has contributed to the further isolation of social conservatives – whose worthy endeavors opposing a powerful deviant-sex- and gender lobby increasingly have been “sacrificed” to the goal of building a more “inclusive” conservatism and Republican Party. In this sense, Fox’s failure to live up to its own slogan of being “fair, balanced and unafraid” has had devastating repercussions for principled conservatism on such hot-button issues as legalizing “gay marriage” and allowing open homosexuals in the military.[64]

 

Pew Research Center Confirms Fox’s Pro-“Gay Marriage” Bias

It was hardly surprising that a recent Pew Research Center report on media coverage of the Supreme Court hearing two homosexual “marriage” cases found significant pro-“gay” bias in the liberal-dominated media (although Pew chose to downplay the bias factor by calling its report, “News Coverage Conveys Strong Momentum for Same-Sex Marriage”). Overall, Pew found a 5-1 ratio of pro-homosexual-“marriage” stories compared to stories biased against “gay marriage” in the weeks surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing of the two cases. (This, of course, helps explain the pro-homosexual side’s “momentum.”)

What is eye-opening in the Pew report, however, is the evidence of Fox News’ strong pro-homosexual-“marriage” bias, although Fox was the least biased of the three top cable news channels (Fox, CNN, and MSNBC). The bar graphic below illustrates the pro-“gay marriage” bias factor of the three top cable news channels:

Pew reports that while MSNBC was the most biased network, “Fox News, on the other hand, had the lowest percentage of supportive stories (29%) and the highest level of neutral (63%). Despite being the best of a biased lot, conservatives need to know that almost one-third of Fox News stories on homosexual “marriage” in the critical period measured were biased toward the homosexual activist viewpoint, while only 8 percent were weighted against it. That is nearly a 4-1 bias in favor of “gay marriage.”

 

A Rundown on Fox News Personalities

The following is a rundown of several prominent Fox News on-air TV personalities and their coverage of homosexuality-related issues (this list is not comprehensive):

 

Bill O’Reilly

Fox icon and cable star Bill O’Reilly’s gradual embrace of “gay rights” typifies the pro-homosexual metamorphosis of the network he helped to build with his popularity. In a moment I will get to O’Reilly’s much-publicized “Bible-thumping” comment criticizing the supposedly over-religious arguments used by opponents of “gay marriage” (as well as O’Reilly’s self-serving analysis of that controversy). But first it deserves mentioning that O’Reilly seems to have a special “animus” (to quote the Supreme Court) toward Bible-believing Christians who adhere to a Scriptural stand against homosexual conduct – especially those who warn that unrepentant homosexuals will go to hell.[65] Perhaps this stems from the inconvenient fact that O’Reilly’s approach toward the homosexual issue dishonors the Roman Catholic religion that he publicly professes. (Catholic doctrine teaches that homosexual behavior is “intrinsically disordered” and proscribes any advocacy for homosexuality or legal rights based on the same.)[66]

 

Picking on an EX-“gay”

This writer, like many in the pro-family community, was shocked a decade ago at the fierceness with which O’Reilly castigated Stephen Bennett, a former homosexual who appeared on his program (September 3, 2002). Bennett’s story of overcoming his “gay” lifestyle of 11 years (he had over 100 homosexual partners), embracing Christianity, marrying girlfriend Irene and becoming the father of two children should have been something to celebrate on Fox News. After all, the network often devotes time to covering fascinating human interest stories that are otherwise ignored or downplayed by the liberal media. [67]

But Bennett had made the mistake of criticizing O’Reilly for endorsing “gay rights” leading up to publication of O’Reilly’s exclusive interview with The Advocate, a national magazine for homosexuals.[68] In the September 2002 Advocate interview, O’Reilly supports pro-“gay” non-discrimination laws and homosexual adoption, and (presaging his “Thump the Bible” remark more than a decade later) refers to religious people who oppose homosexuality pejoratively as “Holy Rollers” and “fanatics.” The Advocate reports:

“The only heat I take on the gay stuff is from very, very religious-driven people,” he insists. “I don’t take any heat from Republicans or Democrats. This is where you guys have it wrong: 90% percent of Americans don’t care what you do; 10% are fanatics. They think you’re going to hell, and they want you to go to hell. All right? Ignore them.”

And what does he mean by religious fanatics? “I mean, people who think you are going to hell and are going to quote from Revelation that you’re going there. I think that’s a little ridiculous, don’t you? Those are the people. The guys waving the [Bible] saying, ‘God hates you.’ How do they know? Let God sort it out. I have no idea whether God hates you or not.”

So “religious fanatics” would include [Jerry] Falwell, [Pat] Robertson, and the like? “Look, I’m not naming names because I don’t know where they are–maybe they’re evolving. I don’t know. But anybody I see saying, ‘This group is going to hell’? I mean, come on.”

These are strange comments from a self-described “traditionalist.” O’Reilly also told The Advocate in the 2002 interview that he “couldn’t care less, to tell you the truth…You want to get married? Knock yourself out. Go to Vegas; have a good time.” Asked if he would oppose homosexual “marriage” if it were legalized, O’Reilly said, “If you can get that changed, I’m not going to jump up and down and say I think it’s wrong, because I don’t.”[69]

O’Reilly responded to Bennett’s criticism by petulantly calling him an “idiot” in his radio lead-up to his TV interview, and then blasting Bennett on air as a “religious fanatic.” Their discussion devolved into a religious debate. But in his anger at Bennett for correctly pointing out that the Fox News host was not being faithful to the teachings of his own Catholic Church, O’Reilly managed to demonize a man whose redeemed life gives the lie to of homosexual activists that people cannot leave the lifestyle. (In the interview, Bennett began by telling the Fox host, “What I would like to say is that I’ve come out of the homosexual lifestyle. I lived that way until I was 28 years old … with over a hundred men sexually, many whom are dead today from AIDS.”)[70]

Bennett says he received hundreds of sympathetic letters from people who were upset at O’Reilly’s belligerent mistreatment of him. But what is shocking about the episode is how O’Reilly’s attacks as a supposed Catholic “traditionalist” paralleled those routinely wielded by secular progressives and homosexual activists against the likes of Bennett. Even if Bennett was naïve to attempt to go toe-to-toe with O’Reilly in a religious discussion, it was unseemly for Fox News to become the platform for demonizing an ex-homosexual Christian – especially in a larger liberal media environment in which journalists and media corporations have cooperated with LGBT activists to marginalize and ridicule the idea of healthy change away from homosexuality.[71]

In the years that followed, O’Reilly would invite on as a repeat guest homosexual activist Wayne Besen – one of the most strident and vicious activists in the LGBT movement – who dehumanizes people like Bennett by denying and mocking the possibility of ex-“gay” change. (Typical of Besen’s hateful antics is his nicknaming of this writer “Porno Pete” for exposing homosexual perversions.[72]) Ironically, O’Reilly’s interviews with Besen were civil as opposed to his caustic encounter with Bennett. (Note: after complaints by conservatives to the highest levels at Fox, Besen has not been invited back on the O’Reilly show in the last several months.)[73]

 

O’Reilly’s refreshing (conservative) side

O’Reilly’s steadily escalating embrace of the homosexual activist agenda seems to have paralleled the media’s increasing one-sided treatment of the issue. However, there are areas where the Fox host has not followed the politically-correct liberal media pack:

• O’Reilly has strongly opposed pro-homosexual indoctrination in schools, and radical sex and gender messages directed at youth –such as “GLEE’s” recent promotion of a “transgender youth” theme;[74]
• He has led the media in aggressively advocating stronger laws to punish child molesters;
• O’Reilly has defended religious freedom and criticized homosexual activists for their “bigot branding campaign” against religious opponents;[75] and
• He denounces the idea that homosexual “marriage” is a “fundamental right,”[76] and he strongly condemned the Supreme Court’s June 2013 decisions against DOMA and California’s Proposition 8 – noting that the latter disenfranchised the state’s voters.[77] 

 

O’Reilly sells out on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

But despite those areas in which the “traditionalist” O’Reilly actually lives up to the label, in the core areas of “gay” activist advances he invariably rolled over like a reluctant social “progressive.” Most prominently, that would include treating homosexuality as a civil rights issue – i.e., accepting “gay” personhood and de-emphasizing opposing it as deviant, immoral, unhealthy and changeable behavior. This major ideological concession lays the foundation for O’Reilly’s and most media elites’ surrender on the homosexual issue. For example, appearing on the “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno July 26, 2010, O’Reilly seemed to be pandering as he called on President Obama to issue an Executive Order to allow open homosexuals in the military, predictably earning the applause of left-wing homosexual activists like Dan Savage. [78] Thus O’Reilly: 1) Showed lack of respect for the rule of law and Separation of Powers by implying it was OK for Obama to “legislate” from the Oval Office;[79] and 2) trivialized a major pro-family conservative issue that just years earlier had been so pivotal that it helped to ignite a Republican congressional landslide after President Bill Clinton first had proposed opening up the military to homosexuals.

Here again, we behold the troubling reality of Fox News’ stars becoming the “Amen Corner” to the liberal social agenda of media and Hollywood elites. Was this what Roger Ailes envisioned for Fox?

By 2009, O’Reilly – clearly tiring of the homosexuality debate – wrote in his weekly column:

Your humble correspondent doesn’t really care much about gay marriage because I believe it is no danger to the republic and the deity can sort all this stuff out after we’re dead. I take a libertarian position on issues like gay marriage because I want all Americans to be able to pursue happiness equally… So the gay marriage debate is just about over.[80]

Three years later, O’Reilly – still not caring enough about homosexuality-based “marriage” to live up to his “traditionalism” — returning to his Advocate interview position of supporting it, albeit unenthusiastically: “I’ve got nothing against gay marriage, it’s not my issue. All right, I want homosexual Americans to be happy and to pursue happiness.” (December 3, 2012)[81]

The liberal New York magazine happily chronicled O’Reilly’s pro-“gay” evolution on the issue, declaring confidently in March 2013: “O’Reilly’s views on gay marriage have been shifting, in fits and starts, for years now. Bill O’Reilly is America.”[82]

The Fox News anchor’s years of secular-liberal “evolution” on homosexuality put his recent “thump the bible” comment in its proper perspective. Rather than a new discovery or a sudden jump to the Left, it was just more of the same. Once O’Reilly had caved on principle by accepting the homosexual activists’ “civil rights frame” of the debate – a worldview that rebels against Judeo-Christian moral tradition — it was only a matter of time before he found little “compelling” on the traditional side of the debate. Nevertheless, O’Reilly touched off conservative outrage when he made this remark during his March 26, 2013 interview with Fox afternoon host and legal analyst Megyn Kelly:

“The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals. That’s where the compelling argument is. We’re Americans. We just want to be treated like everybody else. That is a compelling argument. And to deny that, you’ve got to have a very strong argument on the other side. And the other side hasn’t been able to do anything but thump the bible …. I support civil unions, I always have. All right, the gay marriage thing, I don’t feel that strongly about it one way or the other.”[83]

The next day, O’Reilly – smarting from being heavily criticized on the Right (including by Rush Limbaugh) for his “Thump the Bible” remark — had Kelly on again as a guest to assess the controversy. Kelly’s remarks would give another indication of her emergence as one of the most pro-homosexual voices at Fox and, given her strategic position, one of the LGBT Lobby’s most valuable media allies.

Not only did Kelly deny that O’Reilly’s “thump the Bible” was pejorative toward Christians – a ludicrous observation as “Bible Thumper” has a long history as a secularist putdown of believers. But Kelly strangely accused O’Reilly’s conservative and religious-minded critics of being “haters,” as The Blaze reports [emphasis added]:

“At no point did I think that you were being pejorative of the religious right or people who believe in their religious ideals in terms of opposing gay marriage,” she said. “Now the haters are always going to hate on you and they’re going to perceive everything you say in a way that’s least favorable to you and most controversial.”[84]

Since liberals were happy with O’Reilly’s remark, the “haters” to whom Kelly refers are social and religious conservatives. In Left vs. Right politics, it is typical for those on one side to accuse their ideological polar opposites of “hate” (although even then, the word is used far too cavalierly). But rarely does one use the charge against those ostensibly sympathetic to one’s own side! Kelly’s use of the “hate” smear, presumably against the faith-based Right, adds to the pile of evidence that she has become a pro-“gay” partisan whose on-air judgments on LGBT issues are clouded by ideology and demeaning to moral-minded viewers. Below we will discuss further Kelly’s playing of the “hate” card against critics.

 

Megyn Kelly: New hero to the ‘gay’ lobby?

Viewers should remember that it Kelly – who reportedly will be hosting her own primetime show in the Fall in the coveted 9:00 PM slot — who set up O’Reilly’s “Thump the Bible” hubbub by stating that in her prior interview with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, she did not hear any “compelling” arguments against same-sex “marriage.” This led O’Reilly to enthusiastically agree and make his famous remark (which many Christians and conservatives found pejorative).

But again we must question Kelly’s judgment: what is odd about the O’Reilly-Kelly exchange is that pro-family advocates – especially veteran Washington, D.C. spokesmen like Perkins – generally avoid “bible” arguments against “gay marriage” (and other liberal agendas) — in favor of practical, secular talking points such as the harmful effect that legalized homosexual “marriage” would have on religious liberty.[85] As one who worked for Family Research Council 15 years ago, I can assert that it has been this way at FRC for a long time.

This and a growing list of tendentious, ill-informed statements on LGBT issues by Kelly beg the question: is her obvious bias in favor of the LGBT cause as an apparent “straight ally” so strong that she is incapable fairly covering the issue? Is she no longer trustworthy as a reliable arbiter of what constitutes “effective” arguments by pro-family advocates? Is her cavalier use of the “hate” label evidence of anti-Christian bigotry — or at least bigotry against conservative Christians?

Surely Kelly would bristle at the notion that she is evincing bigotry of her own, but we must ask – especially given Fox News’ immense influence in conservative circles – will Fox News continue to allow Kelly to marginalize and discredit religious conservatives? Time will tell, but given her growing advocacy for the homosexual-transgender agenda, one thing is clear: she is far from “fair and balanced” on these matters. In fact, were Kelly a judge rather than a rising media star at Fox News, she would have to recuse herself from ruling on these issues.

 

Exhibit A: Megyn Kelly Channels Rachel Maddow: In the same “Thumping the Bible” interview with O’Reilly, he protests that should the Supreme Court not rule in favor of California’s Prop 8 defenders (seeking to defend their victorious constitutional amendment 2012 ballot victory preserving the definition of marriage as one-man, one-woman), the state’s voters would be effectively “disenfranchised.” Kelly responds dismissively, “Yes, they are….but they’ve had a couple years to live with that.” This is a monumental cave-in by Kelly: for years, conservatives have been arguing against activist courts and that at minimum, states – and not the federal government, or activist judges — should be allowed to decide marriage law. In California, voters twice passed statewide ballot measures affirming the natural definition of marriage. Hence for a Fox News host to so cavalierly dismiss the twice expressed will at the ballot box of millions of Californians who defended traditional marriage is quite stunning. In fact, it is what you might expect to hear from MSNBC host (and lesbian) Rachel Maddow.[86]

Later in the same O’Reilly interview, Kelly takes a shot at social conservatives’ procreation argument, claiming that denying “gay marriage” on the basis of homosexual couples’ inability to produce children is like “telling 55 year olds they can’t get married” based on the same argument. Here she sounds more like a hardened “gay” activist (or a liberal “loon,” as O’Reilly might say) than a smart attorney and impartial journalist. Only the rise of “gay” militancy could produce such an absurd polemic as equating two men or two women – who because of their deviant sexual relationship can never produce a child by themselves — to (normal) opposite sex couples who happen to have little or no prospect of producing children. (Would any serious person claim that Patrick and Shelley Buchanan’s marriage is “wrong” or “unnatural” — or not worthy of recognition — because they are childless?) To paraphrase Kelly, such an argument is far from compelling.[87]

 

Exhibit B: Kelly as “Transgender Advocate” for “Chaz” Bono

As revealing of Kelly’s escalating pro-homosexual bias in the O’Reilly interviews is, it pales when compared to her arrogant and belligerent 2011 interview with Dr. Keith Ablow, in response to his excellent FoxNews.com article urging parents not to let their impressionable children watch the aforementioned “Chaz” Bono on “Dancing with the Stars.”[88] In his column (which to its credit FoxNews.com published and did not take down under pressure), Ablow writes:

It is a toxic and unnecessary byproduct of the tragic celebration of transgender surgery that millions of young people who do watch “Dancing with the Stars” will have to ponder this question: Maybe my problems really stem from the fact that I’m a girl inside a boy’s body (or a boy inside a girl’s body). Maybe I’m not a tomboy; I’m just a boy! Maybe I’m not just being bullied because I’m a sensitive, reflective young man interested in flowers, not football. Maybe I’m not just uncertain about my sexuality. Maybe I’m a girl! Maybe all this angst and suffering I’m feeling as I emerge into puberty and pass through it isn’t just because I’m changing, but because I should change completely—and have my breasts removed or my penis amputated!

It would be wrong to think that gender dysphoria cannot be kindled by celebrating those who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery. Human beings do model one another—in terms of emotion, thought and behavior. By broadcasting, applauding and mainstreaming the journey of a very disordered person who endured, and likely will continue to endure, real suffering based on extraordinarily deep psychological problems, we suggest that that journey is a smart—even heroic—one to take.[89]

In her interview with Ablow, Kelly reads from the psychiatrist’s column and then asks snidely, with extra emphasis as if to ridicule Ablow: “Do you really believse that children are going to turn transgender from watching Chaz Bono?”[90]

Kelly mentions that the current president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) takes issue with Ablow. She fails to give her viewers context — demonstrating no awareness of past and present politicization of the mental health field. (In 1973, “gay’ militants essentially bullied the APA into removing homosexuality as a mental disorder.)[91] Then she cites Dr. Jack Drescher, a homosexual psychiatrist and psychoanalyst – and a “gay” activist who has led the way in attacking “ex-gay therapy” — to press her narrative against Ablow. Kelly makes no mention of Drescher’s LGBT self-interest bias nor his radical homosexual activism. (Drescher is an ally of “Truth Wins Out” founder Wayne Besen – a radical and sometimes hateful homosexual activist who has led the crusade to ban pro-heterosexual Reparative Therapy for youth; Drescher is featured in a special 2008 YouTube interview with TWO and Besen. [92] Drescher also was a leader in the “gay” activist campaign that shut down a scheduled 2008 APA panel initiated by a homosexual psychiatrist that was intended to encourage dialogue between people holding opposing views on homosexuality and the possibility of change.)[93]

Twice Kelly touts Drescher as a man who – “unlike yourself” — has credentials in the “gender dysphoria” field, and who claims Ablow is “really being irresponsible here.” She presses her guest for a reaction. Ablow responds by explaining how organized psychiatry has “yielded to political pressures.” He says it is “too simplistic to suggest that the American Psychiatric Association — which embraced lobotomies for a time — has to be right about this issue.” Kelly cuts him off and the interview continues as follows (note how she purports to speak for Fox’s viewing audience):

Kelly: OK, but here’s what’s not simplistic. I think the viewers get this. I think they get that our children are no more likely to turn transgender from watching Chaz Bono than they are to turn gay from watching ”Will & Grace.” You either are or you’re not:…

Ablow: I don’t think that’s true–

Kelly: Really? How many kids turned gay from watching ‘Will & Grace’?!

Ablow: First of all, I have no idea what the statistics would show, nor I am proposing that they do become homosexual from watching “Will & Grace.” However, I will tell you that the idea that you would suggest to a child who may come to have questions about his or her gender that a very defensible path, and one that has been celebrated in the media — and in which people have given standing ovations to the folks who have undergone these transformations – is gender reassignment surgery – I think is really irresponsible…–

Kelly: Isn’t it just tolerance? Isn’t it just tolerance?…

Albow: No, it’s not–

Kelly: There’s so much hate. There’s so much hate out there, There’s a lot of hate for gays and lesbians and transgendered people.–

Ablow: [talking over each other] But the APA came out for frontal lobotomies, too, but I would have spoken out against them–

Kelly: Well, the thing is, doc, you seem to be adding to the hate. You went out there and compared [on the Howard Stern show] Chaz Bono to somebody who thinks they’re a zebra, and a farm animal….This person struggled mightily with a disorder that a lot of people have….and here you make those remarks [and] you sound cruel–

Ablow: Megyn, you gotta’ review the transcript. I was on Howard Stern. And I said to him, “Listen, if you tattooed yourself like a zebra, I’m not gonna’ throw a rock at you—I’d take a rock for you if someone threw it at you. But if you ask me are you are a zebra, I’m gonna say, ‘No.’” And I’d say to Chaz Bono if he asked me, “Am I a man?” And I’d say, “No, brother, you’re not!”[94]

Note how Kelly mimics the standard polemic of LGBT activists when they attempt to ridicule the common-sense idea that deviant sexuality and gender confusion can be promoted to children and “learned” by them — i.e., in schools. Kelly seems to adopt the position that “transgenderism” is an innate, fixed condition – which is curious because the “transgender” revolution is all about the elasticity and “social construction” of gender.[95] (In fact, Bono herself embodies the shifting “orientations” and “genders” of the radical LGBT movement, transitioning from lesbian to transgender “man.”) In other words, like a schoolgirl regurgitating a recent “gay awareness” lecture, Kelly is simplistically applying the already-controversial “born gay” platitude to “transgenders,” which is even more implausible.

For decades, conservatives have argued that the media and Hollywood possess tremendous influence over youth and society, so it is hardly extreme to apply such thinking to sexual and gender confusion. Ironically, Bono herself writes that as a young teenager she was greatly influenced by the lesbian-love-story movie “Personal Best” to “come out” as a lesbian– testifying (per Ablow’s thesis) to the power of media and pop culture to influence young people and their identities.[96]

 

Kelly plays the Left’s “hate card”

The low point in Kelly’s hostile interview with Dr. Ablow — who naively quips that he is gratified to be able to explain himself on the ostensibly friendly “home team” of Fox News — is when she accuses him of “adding to the hate” against transgenders. Thus Kelly stoops to echoing the ubiquitous, hackneyed polemic of pro-LGBT activists who recklessly and routinely accuse those who publicly disagree with them of “hate.” (At least she did not call Ablow a “transphobe.”) To the contrary, Ablow in both his column and the interview above disavows hatred towards homosexuals and transgenders. He writes:

The truth is that Chaz Bono should be empathized with and treated with dignity. Any contribution he makes to the world should be applauded as it would be for any other person.

But Chaz Bono should not be applauded for asserting she is a man (and goes about trying to look like one) any more than a woman who believes she will be happier without arms, has them removed and then continues to assert that she was right all along—her self-concept was that of a double amputee. Now, all is well….

It would be wrong to think that gender dysphoria—discomfort with one’s gender—must always end either in misery or sexual reassignment surgery. It can end with coming to terms with deep psychological conflicts that are fueling the gender dysphoria.

“Dancing with the Stars,” starring Chaz Bono, takes the opposite view. Its position is that Chaz Bono’s chemically and surgically altered appearance is a blessing to us all, a triumph of autonomy and self-possession on par with the triumphs achieved by the heroes of the Civil Rights movement.

That’s very nearly insane. It’s a psychologically destructive myth and can erode our children’s evolving senses of self.[97]

Whoever would have thought that condemning the glamorization of transgenderism and one of the most radical acts a human being can undertake – mutilating her or his body to appear like the opposite sex – would be a point of controversy at Fox News?[98]

Needless to say, Kelly’s politically correct attack-interview with Ablow was widely by celebrated by liberal bloggers and media such as Huffington Post and Democratic-oriented groups like Think Progress.[99] But contrary to the Left’s glowing reviews of her performance, Kelly failed to shed much light on the issue at hand but rather touted only pro-transgender advocates while dishing out emotion-laden polemics at Ablow. In fact, so intent was Kelly on discrediting Ablow that she talked right over his highly relevant mention of Johns Hopkins University Professor of Psychiatry Paul McHugh, who closed down the university’s “sex reassignment surgery” department in 1979 after assessing the harm SRS was doing to patients. Writes McHugh: “Quite clearly, then, we psychiatrists should work to discourage those adults who seek surgical sex reassignment…I have witnessed a great deal of damage from sex-reassignment.”[100]

Kelly’s caustic and politically-correct interview with Ablow puts in proper context her complaint to Bill O’Reilly about conservatives allegedly lacking “compelling arguments” against “gay marriage.” Sounding more like a paid LGBT activist than a “fair and balanced” journalist, Kelly would do well to interview ex-transgenders like Walt Heyer or ABC News editor Don Ennis, who went from male to (faux) “female” and then back to male again. In May, Ennis arrived in the newsroom in a “little black dress and an auburn wig” as a transgender “woman,” who asked to be called “Dawn.” But on August 2, Ennis notified his fellow employees that he is a man after all: “I am writing to let you know I’m changing my name . . . to Don Ennis. That will be my name again, now and forever. And it appears I’m not transgender after all.,” he wrote in a newsroom memo. “I’m asking all of you who accepted me as a transgender to now understand: I was misdiagnosed.”[101]

By expanding her horizons beyond the politically pro-“gay” environs of New York City – and moving away from the mindset that only “gay”-affirming advocates and practicing  homosexuals like those represented by the NLGJA are credible on the homosexual issue, Kelly would become a better journalist. As it is, she may be winning liberal applause as a Fox renegade for scolding the likes of Dr. Ablow — but in the process she is damaging both her own credibility and the Fox News’ brand as an alternative to liberal-biased media.

 

Is New York City Elitism Hurting Fox?

There is another aspect to the Kelly-Bono-“Chaz” story (and other examples of creeping social liberalism at Fox News) that deserves mentioning: there was a time not too long ago in America when it would be universally accepted that a woman having her healthy breasts surgically removed to appear like a “man” – and then demanding to be treated like a man – is sheer lunacy, and certainly not something to promote to impressionable children. Ditto for the idea that it is a good thing to place children in homosexual households with “two mom” and no dad or vice versa. Hopefully most Americans still think that way — but especially in the heartland of Red State America, “Chaz’s” mutilated metamorphosis would not go over well. These are the Americans to whom Dr. Ablow (and others, like Fox’s Gretchen Carlson) gives voice – and they are the same Americans that Fox News has sought to serve with non-liberal-tinged news and commentary.

Enter Megyn Kelly with her LGBT friends, New York City connections, “gay journalist” fundraisers, and her jingoistic “lesbian/gay/transgender” talking points — which are winning praise in the most un-Fox-like places, e.g., the hard-left homosexual website “The New Civil Rights Movement,” which recently praised Kelly for another interview in which she said: “Now, there is data, in the scientific community, to suggest that children of homosexual couples who are happily married and good parents fare no worse than children of heterosexual couples.”[102] What you end up with is just another New York City liberal elitist talking down to flyover country – lecturing those of us who are supposedly not sophisticated enough to know that a little girl can actually grow up to be a bearded, flat-chested “man.” Are Kelly, O’Reilly, Dana Perino and other pro-homosexual Fox personalities becoming politically correct snobs – woefully out-of-touch with everyday, grassroots Americans? One wonders how much of Fox’s liberal “message drift” stems from its staff simply losing touch with churchgoing Americans and that old-fashioned, Bible-believing morality that once was the backbone of conservatism.

 

Sean Hannity: afraid of ‘gay’ issue?

This writer, like many conservatives, has long appreciated Sean Hannity for his great contributions in covering subjects that liberal media ignore or distort, such as his Jeremiah Wright-Obama coverage in the 2008 presidential campaign. That said, veteran pro-family activists who fight the LGBT agenda are frustrated that Hannity generally avoids discussing homosexual-related issues outside of “gay marriage” — despite labeling himself as a social, “Reagan conservative.” Even on homosexual “marriage,” Hannity could do so much more: one of the interesting findings from the Pew Research Center study on media coverage of same-sex “marriage” is that in the critical period surveyed surrounding the Supreme Court’s March hearing of two “gay marriage” cases, Hannity’s radio talk show “did not address the subject in the sample studied.” Contrast this with another conservative powerhouse, Rush Limbaugh, who aired nine segments on “gay marriage” (all opposing it) in the same period.[103]

When it comes to liberal media bias, Hannity declares, “Journalism is Dead.” But it appears that he is not willing to risk criticism from the powerful “Gay” Lobby by using his considerable national influence to aggressively defend natural marriage and oppose the multi-faceted homosexual agenda.[104] Hannity deals with issues like “gay marriage” mainly in political/tactical terms — as opposed to explicating the principled conservative arguments and deconstructing this oxymoronic moral evil. In this respect, Hannity, like Bill O’Reilly and some others on Fox, toes the current “establishment” Republican Party line of avoiding the homosexual issue (and other social issues) as too divisive.[105] Is it asking too much of self-described social conservatives like Hannity (and self-styled “traditionalists like O’Reilly) to actually explain to viewers what is wrong with government-sponsored homosexuality (or invite a guest on the show who can) – just as they enthusiastically explain the harm of tax hikes and bloated federal spending? Apparently it is. One can only imagine the amount of good Hannity could do for defending biblical sexual morality if he would only take his finger off the “self-censor” button.

Perhaps it is time for socially conservatives Fox viewers to lobby Hannity to do on-air interviews with former homosexuals; or expose the massive homosexuality-related health risks – or how about a segment on the Homosexual Lobby’s selfish campaign to lift the “gay blood” ban? – to test his commit to Reagan’s brand of well-rounded conservatism. [106] Or, if there are larger and more sinister forces at work – e.g., an internal edict from Fox News higher-ups to downplay or ignore focusing on the homosexual agenda – conservatives could lobby Fox News itself to live up to its “Fair, Balanced and Unafraid” slogan.

Finally, it would be unfair to single Hannity out for criticism, since: 1) Many self-professed and influential conservative leaders have chosen to avoid the homosexual issue; and 2) At least Hannity has not capitulated wholesale on the homosexual agenda like notable conservatives and libertarians such as Tucker Carlson, who said in 2007: “marriage has been a great thing for me, and I think it’s a really civilizing force, and I think it would be a civilizing force for gay people too.”[107]

 

Shepard Smith: the next Anderson Cooper?

Shepard (“Shep”) Smith – Fox’s late afternoon news anchor — now appears to be in the same position that CNN’s Anderson Cooper was a couple of years ago. Just like Cooper, he has now been listed annually in the homosexual magazine OUT’s “top 50” most powerful homosexuals – even though Smith is not an open homosexual.[108] Just like Cooper, Smith has not publicly taken issue with OUT for including him on their “powerful gays” list. Last year, Cooper announced his homosexuality, ending years of speculation about it.

Another thing Smith and Cooper have in common is their pro-“gay” politics – the key difference being that “Shep” works for a conservative network and Cooper for a liberal one. Before he “outed” himself, Cooper demonstrated his pro-homosexual bias – on one occasion even bringing a homosexual general to a CNN-sponsored Republican presidential primary debate as a way to put the GOP contenders on the spot about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”[109]

Smith, rather than attempting such elaborate stunts, merely utters an occasional liberal line to signal where he stands on the cultural issues he is “reporting.” For example, when President Obama flip-flopped (again) in 2012 by embracing homosexuality-based “marriage,” Smith said that the “president of the United States [was] now in the 21^st Century.”[110] The liberal Huffington Post applauded Smith’s pro-homosexual remark, just as it celebrated Megyn Kelly’s hostile interview with Keith Ablow. But Rush Limbaugh blasted Smith for it.[111]

On another occasion, Shep snarkily referred to the nationwide, massively-attended 2012 “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” — called by his Fox colleague and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to support Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy’s right to oppose “gay marriage” – as the “National Day of Intolerance.”[112] It was petty and highly unprofessional insult to the conservatives, Christians and Tea Party Americans who make up much of Fox’s viewership, and Smith owes them an apology. Worse, Smith completely got it backwards regarding Huckabee’s peaceful day of support for Chick-fil-A: it was the pro-homosexual Left, not religious conservatives, that was being intolerant – with Democratic politicians in Chicago and Boston working to ban Chick-fil-A from doing business in their cities simply because CEO Cathy opined against same-sex “marriage” (the company does not discriminate against homosexuals). Once again, liberals praised Smith for bucking the Fox News line, although Huffington Post later reported that he was on “thin ice” at Fox for his liberal outspokenness.[113]

What follows are some brief summaries of where other Fox News personalities stand on “gay rights.” What is stunning is how most are now supportive of the homosexual activist agenda, including “gay marriage.”

 

Bernie Goldberg’s bigotry: twisting the Bible to make Jesus pro-‘gay marriage’

Frequent Bill O’Reilly guest, media critic and Fox Contributor Bernie Goldberg is a strong pro-homosexuality advocate, viewing it as a civil rights issue and positing criticism of homosexual behavior as “bigoted” attacks on “gay people.” Goldberg’s self-serving formula leaves precious little room for legitimate criticism of homosexual behavior, since that becomes an attack on “people.” In decrying a conservative lobby campaign to dismiss open lesbian Ellen DeGeneres as the spokesman for JC Penney, Goldberg blasted the “strain of bigotry on the right.”[114]

Goldberg seems to be riding the culture’s pro-homosexual wave with bolder pronouncements for the cause of “gay rights.” On July 1, just days after the Supreme Court rulings on DOMA and California’s Prop 8, he let loose with a pro-homosexual-“marriage” column on his blog that shockingly suggests that Jesus Christ Himself would be in favor of marriage between people of the same sex:

There’s a lot of good to be said about religion.  People of faith do a lot of good things for poor people and others who need help.  But I’m afraid religion can also make people closed-minded; it can keep them locked in their old ways as the world around them moves forward.  It can make them forget that it was Jesus who aligned himself with those society shunned?  It was Jesus who was on the side of the “outcast.”  I wonder how Jesus would feel about a marriage between Adam and Steve.

The polls show that more and more younger people are accepting gay marriage and also rejecting religion (for many reasons besides same-sex marriage).  The Church knows this but won’t compromise on its principles.  Neither will the supporters of same-sex marriage.

On this issue, religious conservatives are on the wrong side of a very powerful force.  They are on the wrong side of history.  The French writer Victor Hugo said it best:  “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”[115]

There is not space in this report to fully debunk Goldberg’s condescending and biblically illiterate assertion that the same Jesus Christ who affirmed the Genesis account of male-female creation and preached against sexual sin would support same-sex “marriage.”[116] Nor does Goldberg comprehend that sexual morality is based on absolute truth and is not dictated by polling numbers. To add insult to injury, he accompanies his column with a “Would Jesus Discriminate” graphic (see above) that is riddled with discredited “gay theology” claims, some of which misconstrue deep brotherly (platonic) love for homoerotic love. Goldberg’s use of the tendentious graphic insults Bible-believing Christians the world over – and demonstrates contempt for his Fox News viewers. To read up on Christian responses to the graphic’s absurd biblical claims, this writer recommends Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Prof. Robert Gagnon’s website (www.RobGagnon.net).[117]

It is safe to presume that social conservatives should not look to the radically pro-“gay” Goldberg to critique the media’s overwhelmingly pro-homosexual media bias any time soon.

 

Chris Wallace: Probing Ron Paul’s ‘homophobia’

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace is yet another Fox News “star” who demonstrates a strong pro-homosexual bias and conflates the genuine and noble civil rights movement for Blacks with the homosexual activist notion of “rights” based on changeable homosexual conduct (“orientation”). Here is a revealing Wallace quotation about the Boy Scouts possibly allowing openly homosexual Scouts, from an interview he did with talk show host Mike Gallagher; note how a “conflicted” Wallace clearly is searching for a way to equate opposition to homosexual behavior with racist bigotry:

“I think the world is changing,” Wallace said. “I think — you know, and our attitudes toward gays are changing. You know, one of the questions I asked — here’s a legitimate question, I don’t know, was there ever a racial — and I don’t know the answer to this — discrimination between whites and blacks in the Boy Scouts? There have been for instance in marrying. So then I say to myself, ‘Well, you know there was time when people wouldn’t have accepted blacks and whites marrying and now we think of that as completely bigoted and benighted. So you know, how would we feel about this? It’s up to the individual scout troop as to whether or not they’re going to do it and in some places they will accept it, and in some places they won’t accept it. There’s just not going to be a ban on it anymore, and in a community where there’s a feeling that they’re comfortable with that, I don’t know that they should be banned from allowing gays from being in the scouts. I very much doubt they’re going to jump on each other in the tent.”[118]

Gallagher, who is one of the most pro-homosexual talkers in the top tier of conservative talk show hosts, was flabbergasted by Wallace’s answer, calling him an “idiot” and saying, ““You sound like you’re vying for a job over at MSNBC, I swear.” Gallagher opined that if the Scouts were to vote to allow homosexual boys (as they ultimately did), “the Scouts are going to get destroyed by this.” When Wallace responded by calling that “baloney” and saying that the military was not destroyed by ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Gallagher shot back: “We’re not talking about minor children in the military.’

In the above exchange, once again we see the perils of looking at the issue of homosexuality mainly through the “progressive” glasses of “civil rights.” Homosexuality is about changeable and immoral behavior – not intrinsic identity — and Wallace is utterly naïve not to understand the ramifications of allowing homosexually-identified boys in an organization like the Scouts. In such a scenario, there are plenty of opportunities for sexual adventurous boys to recruit or seduce others (especially younger boys) into perversion, or merely to spread idea that homosexuality is acceptable in an organization that was once dedicated to godly and wholesome values.

Contrast Wallace’s shallow and naïve assumptions with the clarity offered by John Stemberger, the leading pro-family conservative critic of the Scouts’ proposed (and later approved) pro-homosexual policy — regarding the heightened potential for predation with openly homosexual Scouts:

[Boy Scouts of America claims:] “The BSA would never consider a proposal that increased risk to young people.” 

[Stemberger, CEO of OnMyHonor.Net, responds; emphasis added]: 

Based upon personal and candid conversations with BSA officials at the highest levels, the BSA is fully aware that this proposed resolution will absolutely increase the risk of boy-on-boy sexual contact in Scouting and yet of there has been no discussion or risk analysis done on this topic in any of the resolution reports or presentations. It is just short of dishonest for pro-resolution BSA officials to suggest that there will be no “increased risk.” BSA’s own Youth Protection videos indicate that “70% of abuse to boys is by teenagers.” Two-deep leadership will have to be at least three-deep for units with homosexual youth. Openly gay Boy Scouts who will likely want to be treated like everyone else will instead need to be tented separately and thus singled out and treated differently. The complexity of sleeping arrangements will create a myriad of social and legal liability challenges. Sexual awareness and harassment training will be required in all Scouting units. The BSA leaders setting forth the proposed policy clearly did not have the safety and security of the boys as their paramount concern. Enacting this resolution will result in more ugly litigation and will further the public scandal to the BSA, not to mention the tragedy of countless boys who will experience sexual, physical and psychological abuse.[119]

 

Is Ron Paul a ‘Homophobe,’ or is Chris Wallace just another uninformed liberal?

If Wallace is unrealistic about the potential for predation and promiscuity by allowing open homosexuals in the Boy Scouts, he appears to be downright ignorant of the massive health risks associated with unnatural “gay” male sex. In a late 2011 interview with GOP presidential contender Ron Paul, Wallace shows his liberal, pro-homosexual bias by asking Paul “about some newsletters that came out under your name in the 1980s and 1990s in which there were comments made that were, quite frankly, racist and homophobic.”[120] One can view the offending quotes on The New Republic website (see endnote). Mostly they deal with the dangers of homosexual behavior; for example, here is one that scandalized the liberals at The New Republic:

The September 1994 issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report states that “those who don’t commit sodomy, who don’t get blood a transfusion, and who don’t swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay.”[121]

The question for Wallace is: why call this “homophobic”? Most readers today are probably unaware that the term “homophobia” was coined in 1972 by a pro-homosexual psychologist, George Weinberg, “to propose that those who harbor prejudice against homosexuals, and not homosexuals themselves, are suffering from a psychological malady, an irrational state of mind.”[122] In other words, it is a term invented by the Left to erode support for the historic Judeo-Christian moral understanding of homosexual behavior. Last year, Associated Press, recognizing the inaccurate and tendentious nature of the term, dispensed with the use of “homophobia” in its Style Book (in most cases), saying through an editor that the politicized term is “just off the mark. It’s ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don’t have.”[123]

Turning to Paul’s 1987 book, Freedom Under Siege, Wallace hones in a statement the Congressman made pointing out that homosexual behavior is higher risk: “The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim – frequently a victim of his own lifestyle – but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care.” He asks Paul, “Do you still feel that way?” Paul responds and the following back-and-forth ensues:

Ron Paul: Well, I don’t know how you can change science. I mean, sexually transmitted diseases are caused by sexual activity, and when it’s promiscuous, it spreads diseases. That’s been known for 4, 5 hundred years on how these diseases are spread. So if a fault comes of people because of their personal behavior, in a free society people do dumb things, but it isn’t to be placed as a burden on other innocent people. Why should they have to pay for consequences? That’s sort of a nationalistic or socialistic attitude. But in a free society, people are allowed to act the way they want, but they’re responsible for that. They should be rewarded …

Chris Wallace: Congressman, do you think that someone who suffers from AIDS should not be entitled to health insurance as opposed to, let’s say, somebody who has a heterosexually transmitted disease?

Ron Paul: No, I never said that, I’m just saying that people who …

Chris Wallace: But when you talk about how they victimize other people by making us pay for them, what do you mean, sir?

Ron Paul: Well, it depends on what the insurance company does. They’re the ones who determine that. But there shouldn’t be a law that says they’re denied that, there’s no way, I mean, the market should handle this. People who are pregnant for 9 months can’t go in and buy insurance, so insurance is supposed to be insurance. So, if people are smokers, don’t they have to pay more? Sometimes you get your insurance cheaper if you’re a non-smoker? That’s all I’m talking about, let the market sort this out and let insurance sort this out, but not having dictates by the government and saying, “Thou shall or though must do this”, and your behavior doesn’t matter. If you drink too much and you go out and you do harm to somebody, you have to suffer the consequences. It’s the same way with health matters. You don’t have a right to demand that somebody else take care of you because of your habits. But that doesn’t mean that that you don’t have laws …[124]

Although the clear implication from Wallace’s line of questioning is that all of Paul’s past writings (including his book) he cited are “homophobic,” a more rational and reasoned analysis suggests that Paul was correct back in the 1980s. In a sense, society is “victimized” by the pro-homosexual movement because all citizens pay (disproportionately) with their tax dollars to treat diseases that are caused by mostly bad, high-risk behaviors, e.g., homosexual sodomy and IV drug abuse. Then, rather then discouraging such behaviors through public policy (e.g., banning “gay bathhouses), liberals promote the normalization of the very misbehaviors that are causing disease.

Take, for example, HIV — which is largely a “gay disease,” as some homosexual activists have started to admit again.[125] HIV/AIDS receives a far disproportionate share of federal health-oriented resources compared to other common – and less behavior-driven – diseases (not linked to morality). The FAIR [Fair Allocation in Research] Foundation, which advocates for “fair and equitable distribution of bio-medical research funds by our government for all diseases,” came up with the pie chart above to educate the public on the huge disparity of federal (National Institutes of Health) research funds going to HIV/AIDS.[126]

Thanks to media and academic bias, the U.S. public is ignorant of the many manifold health risks surrounding homosexual behavior; for an excellent report on this subject, see Dale O’Leary’s report for America’s Survival: “Asking for Trouble: How Admitting Open Homosexuals to the U.S. Military Will Undermine Military Readiness, Order and Discipline.”[127] The following is just a smattering of “gay” health risk data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the “Gay Men’s Health Crisis,” a pro-homosexual organization – which buttress Paul’s argument. Wallace and other liberal reporters should consider facts like these before accusing people of having an “irrational fear” and presuming there is equivalence between homosexual and heterosexual behavior:

• HIV and MSM: Although MSM [Men who have Sex with Men] represent about 7% of the male population in the United States, in 2010 MSM accounted for 78% of the new HIV infections among males. (Note: most conservatives would question the CDC’s 7% figure for MSM as a percentage of the total male population] (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)][128]
• Gay men as unknowing HIV carriers: “Recent data from the [CDC] show that 1 in 5 sexually active gay and bisexual men in America are HIV-positive but that 44% of them don’t know it….More than 8,000 self-identifying gay and bisexual men [MSM] were tested by CDC workers in the 21 American cities with the highest infection rates.” [TIME, reporting on CDC study][129]
• Syphilis and MSM: In 2006, 64% of the reported P&S [primary and secondary] syphilis cases were among men who have sex with men (MSM).[CDC][130]
• Anal cancer: “Among men who have sex with men (MSM), and especially HIV-positive MSM, the incidence of anal cancer is significantly more prevalent and increasing annually.” [Gay Men’s Health Crisis][131]
• “Gay Men 44 Times More Likely To Get HIV.” …”The …[CDC] today released new statistics on incidence rates of HIV and syphilis among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM). The data, which identified MSM as men who have engaged sexually with another man within the last five years, revealed that MSM are over 44 times more likely than other men to contract HIV, and over 40 times more likely than women to contract HIV. Further, MSM were over 46 times more likely to contract syphilis than other men, and over 71 times more likely than women to contract syphilis.” [GMHC][132]

Wallace owes Paul an apology. One wonders: if the Fox News Sunday anchor were to view the pie chart above, and familiarize himself with some of basic facts surrounding the many health risks associated with homosexual behavior, would he still classify Ron Paul’s views as “homophobic”?

 

Dana Perino and “The Five” on Fox: Five-for-five pro-homosexual

Fox News weekday afternoon program “The Five” features four conservatives (usually: former Bush press secretary Dana Perino, Greg Gutfeld, Eric Bolling and either Andrea Tantaros or Kimberly Guilfoyle – joined by a lone liberal (usually either Bob Beckel or Juan Williams). Perino and the rest of the conservatives are typical of Fox commentators in that they have a libertarian bent, like to focus on economic and foreign policy issues, and are more liberal and incompetent on social issues, especially homosexuality. Some, like Gutfeld, openly mock religious conservatives opposed to homosexuality. In that sense they are adhere to the course that “establishment” Republicans and secular libertarians would like to take the Party. A telling edition of the “The Five” that drew the approving attention of the left-wing “Media Matters” occurred on January 21, the day of President Obama’s Second Inaugural address to the nation.

Media Matters reports how Obama in his speech equated civil rights to “gay rights” by comparing “Selma to Stonewall “ — the latter being the name of a “gay” bar in New York City that was the site of a violent homosexual riot against police in 1969. Homosexual advocates now claim Stonewall as the birthplace of the modern “gay rights” movement. Media Matters below notes with surprise how Perino and other Fox commentators muted their criticism of Obama’s pro-homosexual references [emphasis added]:

Fox wasted no time in criticizing Obama’s speech, railing against the president’s “liberal agenda” and falsely accusing him of ignoring economic issues.

Yet, when it came to Obama’s support for marriage equality [homosexual “marriage”], the network shied away from the anti-gay talking points one might expect to hear on Fox.

During the January 21 edition of Fox’s The Five, for example, co-hosts Dana Perino and Eric Bolling admitted that they agreed with the president on same-sex marriage, opting instead to half-heartedly criticize Obama for changing his position on the issue:

Perino: I like that. I agree with it. What I think is strange is that he didn’t talk about that in 2008. Now maybe because he had the evolution of his thinking and he had the announcement in June and now he’s able to say it – I mean I think that’s good and fine. That’s why I keep going back to the 2008 speech versus this 2012 speech is just so different.

Bolling: Yeah. You’re 100 percent right, Dana. Remember, about a year ago he evolved to seeing things this way on gay rights. Look, we’re all in agreement. We agree. I don’t think there’s anyone here that disagrees with anything President Obama said on that issue. However, does it really need to be in the inaugural address?

The Five returned to the topic of marriage equality the next night when Bob Beckel accused his co-hosts of being “out of the mainstream” on the issue of same-sex marriage. Greg Gutfeld corrected him, saying, “I was for gay marriage before Obama!” and Perino denied that the Republican party was opposed to marriage equality, asking, “Who talks about gay marriage anymore?”

Even “Fox & Friends” co-anchor Brian Kilmeade shied away from anti-gay talking points when discussing the president’s position on gay marriage, instead arguing that Obama wouldn’t have made his comments had Vice President Joe Biden not “ram rod[ed] him into it on a Sunday comment that popped up.”

Fox’s muted criticism of Obama’s support for marriage equality is a far cry from how the network has typically dealt with the issue of same-sex marriage….

The network’s garbled response to Obama’s second inaugural address seems to be more evidence of Fox’s uncomfortable balancing act in covering LGBT issues.

The network has largely moved past its days of attacking same-sex marriage, preferring instead to sweep major LGBT victories under the journalistic rug. At the same time, the network continues to appease its anti-gay viewers by offering contrived criticisms of Obama’s stance on gay rights and fear mongering about homosexual indoctrination in schools.[133]

 

The Left senses Fox’s weakness on homosexuality

The Left smells blood at Fox News, and has picked up on the disturbing defensiveness and capitulations at Fox whereby most on-air commentators now rarely tackle the substance of the debate by defending the traditional conservative position against homosexuality. Instead, they focus on style and political questions, as “The Five” commentators did here. The writer was stunned to see Perino’s matter-of-fact dismissal of homosexual “marriage” as a political issue for Republicans. She and the other “conservatives” have simply adopted the cowardly (establishment) GOP posture of de-emphasizing the principled defense of natural marriage as between a man and a woman. Meanwhile, the pro-homosexual Left surges ahead with its aggressive push for same-sex “marriage” in all 50 states. Perino’s and “The Five’s” cave-in on traditional marriage (and the rest of the homosexual agenda) is all the more pathetic in that pro-natural-marriage amendments have passed in 31 states — including key swing states like Ohio and Florida in which their passage greatly helped Republicans – including her former boss, George Bush.

It is long overdue for Fox News to start recruiting some effective social conservatives to appear on programs like “The Five” – since the libertarian-minded commentators currently dominating the network too often “punt” on homosexuality – or cave in altogether to “progressive” thinking. 

 

Fox News rolls over on homosexuals in the military

Looking more and more like a mere moderate version of the liberal media rather than a “conservative”-oriented network, Fox News’ leftward drift has dealt a blow to social conservatives’ ability to respond to leftist talking points. Fox essentially helps dictate what constitutes a “major issues” for conservatives and Republicans by what it chooses to cover – or ignore. On the question of allowing open homosexuals in the military – a key agenda item of President Obama – Fox signaled through its paucity of serious coverage that preserving the military’s prohibition on open homosexuality was NOT of much importance to conservatives. And once again, the Left took notice.[134]

A February 2, 2010 segment of Fox News “Special Report with Bret Baier” – coinciding with a critical congressional hearing on the issue — illustrates the lack of both moral leadership by Fox and “balance” among its chosen commentators. Both “conservative” members of the panel (not including moderator Baier) — Charles Krauthammer and Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard — favored Obama’s plan to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and allow open homosexuals in the military: Evidently, no effort was made by Fox to put forward a conservative, such as Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, who could have ably defended the homosexual exclusion policy. (Donnelly was not given much air time on various Fox programs to comment during the “gays in the military” debate in Obama’s first two years.)

Of course, the leftist group Media Matters happily noted the Fox “All Stars’” endorsement of homosexuals in the military, as well as Bill O’Reilly’s non-interest in defending the military’s exclusion policy. O’Reilly, on his January 28, 2010 program, brought his self-styled “Culture Warriors,” Margaret Hoover and Cheryl Casone, on his show to discuss the homosexuals-in-the-military issue. (Isn’t it curious how often O’Reilly’s “Culture Warriors” take the Left’s side in the “war”?) Predictably, Hoover used the occasion to cheerlead for “gay rights”—while once again social conservatives went unrepresented on Fox, as there was no serious presentation of their viewpoint:

O’Reilly: Does anybody care about “don’t ask, don’t tell” anymore, do you think?

Hoover: Wow. I’m so psyched you just phrased it that way. When you have Australia, the United Kingdom and Israel all allowing gays to serve openly in their military, I think you’re right. I think that the issue has been acculturated so differently with folks in my generation as opposed to in 1960s when my dad enlisted in the Army.

Cheryl Casone (Fox Business anchor): But these are people — these are people that are willing to protect me, stop terrorists from coming into my backyard and coming after me. And you’re going to kick them out because they say they’re gay? Give me a break.

Hoover: Yes. And translating Arabic, by the way. The one dearth we have is people who actually speak Arabic, and you’re kicking out Arabic translators.[retrieved from the Nexis database][135]

See this endnote for an article by Donnelly tackling the “Arab linguist” talking point.[136] Also see the America’s Survival report by Dale O’Leary: “Asking for Trouble: How Admitting Open Homosexuals to the U.S. Armed Forces Will Undermine Military Readiness, Order and Discipline” (available at http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Asking_for_Trouble.pdf).

 

“Silence = Death” for conservatism, and Fox News is AWOL

Few would dispute Krauthammer’s assertion in attempting to justify allowing homosexuals in the military – that “the mores in the country have changed, certainly in the last 16 years [after Clinton imposed the DADT ‘compromise’ on the military despite Congress’ passage of a outright ban on homosexuals serving], and certainly among the young.” But the question is: what is driving the change? Surely a dearth of media coverage unfavorable to Social Left activists, and a surplus of media coverage very favorable to those same activists, is a huge factor in the cultural transformation. The Left doggedly works the media, academia and Hollywood to achieve its desired “change” – in this case putting forth “persecuted” homosexual Armed Services members who talked about their “patriotism” and their desire to serve their country. (Remember that pre-DADT these men and women, as homosexuals, were not supposed to enter the military.)

Meanwhile, the Right often seems oblivious to the immense forces at work shaping politics. After Clinton’s DADT scheme — widely billed as a “compromise” – was put in place,  conservatives essentially ignored the homosexuals-in-the-military issue for years. This explains how they lost the battle to a much better organized Left, which used DADT as an incremental, partial victory and had the sympathetic liberal media as a powerful ally. And what was Fox News’ role? Even after Obama’s electoral victory, the network and its array of commentators were ill-inclined to offset liberal media bias on the homosexual issue – instead going along with the Left’s cultivated momentum, and ultimately surrendering to it. Thus social conservatives were left stranded, informationally-speaking, much like in the pre-Fox News days.

In politics, to quote the radical AIDS group ACT UP, “Silence = Death.” Favorable media attention helps win the day — and conversely the side that is so defensive that it is afraid to even debate the merits of an issue is likely to lose. In this regard, there appears to be a symbiotic relationship between “moderate” Fox News — with its increasingly libertarian, pro-LGBT tone and retrenchment on social issues — and “moderate” Republican politicians who likewise hope to avoid discussing, much less fighting, the homosexual agenda (and other liberal social agendas). Thus the pro-“gay”/libertarian drift of the GOP – which is driving true conservatives from the Party – parallels that of Fox News.

Here is the troubling question: why is it that homosexual and transgender activists and their allies on the Left never roll over on principle — like “The Five” commentators or O’Reilly or Krauthammer did? As Fox’s libertarian-minded “conservatives” provide cover to socially “moderate” Republicans of the same ilk, there is one group that loses: truly conservative, pro-family Republicans – especially principled advocates of sexual morality, many people of strong faith, whom the GOP still counts on to help it win elections.

 

Will Glenn Beck join the “gay” crusade?

And Fox is not alone in the “cave in” department: witness the August 13, 2012 article on Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze, headlined, “Meet the U.S. Military’s First Openly-Gay General,” and written by Billy Hallowell — who gives a “hat tip” to the New York Times, and who — surely like the Times — offers zero criticism of the lesbian Brig. Gen. Tammy Smith in his story. The Blaze article even matter-of-factly reports that Smith and her female partner (a homosexual activist) “got married” in 2011 in Washington, D.C. (There are no quotation marks around the word “married” in The Blaze article–so much for “conservative” alternative media.) The only criticism of homosexuality is found in the Comments section to The Blaze piece. Here is one string of disappointed readers:

DISABLEDVET: “I’m so glad I am retired.”

PROGRESSIVESLAYER: “Same here we’ve fallen so far it’s ridiculous.”

RJJINGADSDEN: “Same here. Am hearing this from many who plan to retire very soon. Some say that things have gotten very weird too.”

LUVSYESHUA: “I third that. I’ve been out for only a couple of years, but even since then the US military has dove even further and further into the abyss. I want absolutely nothing to do with it. We, as a nation, haven’t merely turned our backs to God, we are running from Him with our middle finger in the air. There WILL be judgment for it.”[137]

 

What about young people being pro-“gay”?

Lastly, what about the “inevitable” argument – that with young people increasingly embracing “gay marriage” and homosexual “rights,” this issue is a long-term loser? If this widely-touted pro-homosexual drift of America’s youth is the reason for the Fox/Republican cave-in, wouldn’t truly noble institutions seek to educate and correct the liberal misinformation imbibed by younger generations — rather than bend toward immorality ostensibly to win elections? Defending God’s truth and core, timeless principles should be the way of the conservative, as opposed to the amoral politics of pandering.

Young people are often liberal on a host of issues. Conservatives routinely blame this on “indoctrination” in overwhelmingly liberal-biased schools and colleges (and Left-biased media and pop culture). So the question becomes: why would conservatives treat the homosexuality issue any different from a host of other debated subjects on which youth need to be exposed to conservative principles?

 

Long-term Consequences: The Decline of American Civilization

Young and old people alike – and “opinion leaders” of the sort that appear on Fox News every day – need to go deeper on the issue of homosexuality and understand that the societal embrace of sexual immorality (of all types) brings about the downfall of civilizations – and America will be no exception. Brian Fitzaptrick writes:

To understand the danger posed by homosexual “marriage,” you must join the great scholars in asking some fundamental questions. Why do some civilizations flourish? Why do others perish?

Perhaps the definitive work on the rise and fall of civilization was written back in the thirties by an Oxford anthropologist. In Sex and Culture, a study of 86 human civilizations ranging from Rome to Tahiti, J.D. Unwin found that a society’s destiny is tied inseparably to the limits it imposes on sexual expression. They highest levels of social development are reached only by cultures that practice what Unwin called “absolute monogamy,” in which marriage is limited to one man and one woman, sexual outside marriage is not tolerated, and divorce is prohibited.

Absolute monogamy promotes cultural growth by solving what anthropologist Margaret Mead termed the “central problem of every society,’ to “define appropriate roles for men.” Monogamous civilizations require men to choose either lifelong celibacy or the responsibilities of a husband: fidelity, breadwinning, and fatherhood. Most marry, to their good fortune, because married men tend to be healthier, happier, and more productive than bachelors. Joseph Schumpeter, the great economist, attributes the success of capitalism not to the entrepreneur’s lust for money or status, but to his love of family. The central pillar of any healthy civilization is the self-sacrificing married man who doesn’t spend his income on himself, but prefers “to work and save primarily for wife and children.”

Civilizations cease to grow, found Unwin, within two to three generations after retreating from absolute monogamy. Moral standards erode when a society’s members chafe at the discipline imposed by monogamy, and begin to gratify their personal impulses without regard for the consequences inflicted on others. According to sociologist Robert Nisbet, “What sociologists are prone to call social disintegration is really nothing more than the spectacle of a rising number of individuals playing fast and loose with other individuals in relationships of trust and responsibility.

If individualistic selfishness and self-seeking are not checked, Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin warns us, a society will lapse into “sexual anarchy.” In The American Sex Revolution, Sorokin wrote that “both men and society are degraded” as a culture becomes “sexually obsessed.” “The members of such a society are habituated to look at the opposite sex as a mere instrument for pleasure…to these individuals, talk of human dignity, religious and moral commandments, and rules of decency is just bosh…the society degrades the values of womanhood and manhood, of motherhood and fatherhood, of childhood and venerable age, of marriage and family, and even of love itself.” Divorce, desertion, and deviance become commonplace, when “what used to be considered morally reprehensible is now recommended as a positive value; what was once called demoralization is now styled moral progress and a new freedom.” Sorokin describes this as “moral schizophrenia.”….

Such selfish, undisciplined societies meet ugly fates. In his Social and Cultural Dynamics, Sorokin studied 1,623 “internal disturbances in Greco-Roman and European history,” and found that sexual permissiveness almost always precedes or accompanies “an explosion of sociopolitical disturbances.” Unwin found that every society, without exception, that rejects absolute monogamy either becomes a stagnant cultural backwater or collapses altogether.

What does all this mean for homosexuality and “gay marriage”? No sector of our society is more obsessed with sex, or more promiscuous, than the homosexual subculture. To accept the practice of homosexuality is to make irresponsible sexual behavior easier for our society. To permit homosexual relationships to be formalized is to establish a dangerous precedent that people may form sexual unions outside the healthy one-man, one-woman framework. In effect, we’d be rejecting Unwin’s “absolute monogamy” model for good, because rights are very difficult to withdraw once they’ve been granted.

What of Mead’s “central problem” in society, defining the duties of the male? Homosexuality does nothing to channel men into the husband/father/provider role that so benefits society. Male homosexuality entices men away from that role, by offering a sexual outlet with no strings attached….Lesbianism eliminates male responsibility altogether….

According to Unwin “the historical evidence [suggests] that homosexuality is a habit that appears in a society … that has been absolutely monogamous, and is relaxing.” If Unwin is correct, then the increasing prominence of homosexuality in our culture confirms ominously that America has strayed too far from the straight and narrow morality that invigorates cultures. To give homosexual couples the right to marry would be like taking another giant, virtually irrevocable step down the road to sexual anarchy and cultural ruin.[138]

Would not this make for a fascinating discussion on Sean Hannity’s program or on Glenn Beck’s TV network? When was the last time you heard a media debate that focused on the morality of homosexuality – or the health consequences of celebrating behavior condemned by the same Judeo-Christian teachings upon which our nation was founded? Don’t hold your breath waiting for it in today’s faux “conservative” media culture. Such a discussion would likely be passed over as “too controversial,” “homophobic, or “anti-gay.”

John Stossel: why such little interest in religious liberty?

Fox News reporter John Stossel is an outspoken (agnostic) libertarian who seems to go out of his way to irritate social conservatives by affirming that homosexuality is OK.[139] He is in favor of homosexual-“marriage” and has no problem with it leading to legalized polygamous marriage: “[S]o what? I don’t care if there are three fathers and six mothers. If it’s a stable relationship and the kids are connected with their parents, that’s great,” he wrote in 2011.[140] Stossel, like O’Reilly, also once practiced very poor journalism on the issue of “ex-gays” — by slamming, in a 2001 ABC 20/20 “Gimme’ a Break” segment, the idea that people can leave homosexuality behind. As Accuracy in Media noted, Stossel was intent on dismissing the idea of change and made no effort to seek out and interview the many successful former homosexuals. AIM speculated that Stossel produced the woefully biased segment to shield himself from liberal critics who wanted him fired from ABC.[141]

What is troubling about libertarians like Stossel is their utter hypocrisy in so rarely examining how government “gay rights” laws undermine individuals’ religious and moral freedoms. For example: is it right for government to force an Orthodox Jewish businessman to pay marital-type benefits for his employee’s “civil union” — if he believes homosexual practice is an abomination before God? Should Christian small businesses be forced by the State to use their talents and resources to celebrate homosexuality (e.g., like the Walders, a Christian family in Paxton, Illinois, who are being sued under the state’s “civil union” law for their refusal to allow a homosexual “civil union” ceremony on their bed-and-breakfast property).[142] Should public schools teach young kids “gay rights” and what rights do parents have to prevent the pro-homosexual indoctrination of their children?[143] One lesbian legal activist, Chai Feldblum, said there is a “zero-sum game” between homosexual “rights” and the religious freedom of people to not support homosexuality, and she believes homosexuals will win most of those battles.[144] Most libertarians are more reflexively pro-“gay” than serious on the homosexuality issue and its far-reaching implications for the culture, so it follows that the more Fox News cozies up to libertarians, the less serious it too will be on that issue. 

 

Elizabeth Hasselbeck: New Fox News “star” calls pope’s opposition to “gay marriage” “inhumane”

With the addition of Elizabeth Hasselbeck of ABC’s “The View” to Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” morning line-up (replacing the more conservative Gretchen Carlson, who moves to an afternoon slot), the network adds yet another high-powered, pro-homosexual voice to its bevy of commentators. Hasselbeck has in recent years caved on her former conservative moral opposition to homosexuality and now enthusiastically defends homosexuality-based “marriage,” – saying, like so many “progressives”: “Love is love.” [145] Commenting with the ladies of “The View” on then-Pope Benedict’s statement that same-sex “marriage” undermines the family and humanity’s future, Hasselbeck said: “Gay marriage doesn’t affect my marriage…For people to actually say that gay marriage is harming marriage and the idea of marriage is inhumane.”[146] (See below for more on Hasselbeck’s “gay” conversion.)

 

Greg Gutfeld, Sally Kohn and a few other Fox News personalities

Here are short summaries of where a few other Fox commentators stand on the homosexual issue:

• 

  Fox’s resident “out” lesbian liberal, Sally Kohn, uses her unlikely perch at the network to promote a variety of left-wing causes, including abortion, “gay rights” in the Republican Party and assailing the GOP for its alleged “war on women.”

  Sally Kohn… is a lesbian, pro-homosexual, and pro-abortion activist who was hired by Fox News in January 2012 as a liberal commentator. Predictably, she has used her perch – including her FoxNews.com columns — to shill for “gay rights,” abortion-on-demand and other liberal causes. One of her recurring themes is assertion that the Republican Party cannot win if it remains opposed to the homosexual agenda.[147]

• Mike Huckabee: The former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate is solid social conservative on “gay marriage” and the homosexual agenda. He gave a passionate response to the Supreme Court ‘s June decision on “gay marriage” on his Sunday evening Fox show. Huckabee gets slammed regularly by the Left for articulating the very real threat to freedom and religious liberty posed by legalized homosexual “marriage.”[148] This writer hopes that Huckabee would use future shows to highlight men and women who have overcome homosexuality, as well as educate on homosexual health risk and other politically incorrect facets of this debate.
• Greg Gutfeld… is a regular on “The Five” who also hosts the late-night Fox show, “Red Eye” – which is significantly more socially liberal and edgy than the usual Fox News fare. Gutfeld is a wise-cracking libertarian with a certain gift for eviscerating political correctness – except when he is embracing it, of course (such as when he gratuitously boasted to Bob Beckel on “The Five” that he was for homosexuality-based “marriage” before Barack Obama; see section on “The Five” above). Unfortunately, Gutfeld used his “Red Eye” monologue to mock this writer and my group, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, trotting out the twin left-wing canards of labeling us: 1) “gay-haters”; and 2) secret homosexuals — due to our opposition to what was once known, in less hip times, as the “Crime against Nature.” After receiving complaints from conservatives, Fox apparently yanked the “Red Eye” video containing Gutfeld’s nasty rant.[149] Along the same lines, a recent episode of “Red Eye” featured a guest, Daily Beast cultural news editor Michael Moynihan, who mocked Bryan Fischer of American Family Association for arguing that legal homosexual “marriage” will lead to legal polygamy. Moynihan dismissed Fischer – a leading pro-family conservative – as “the ultimate troll who has a religious show.”[150] What is curious (and cowardly) is that Gutfeld’s Fox program attacks social conservatives from afar rather than bringing them on the show to defend their position. That is neither fair nor balanced. Hopefully, Gutfeld and “Red  Eye” will resist the temptation to make principled conservatives the butt of future jokes.
• 

  In 2011, Greg Gutfeld used his late-night Fox “Red Eye” monologue to smear Americans For Truth About Homosexuality and pro-family activists who oppose the LGBT agenda as “gay-haters” and secret homosexuals.

  Kimberly Guilfoyle: The ex-wife of radical San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Guilfoyle is pro-homosexual social liberal with roots in the bay city’s feminist network.[151] As a guest on Gutfeld’s show, “Red Eye,” she reacted to a proposed pro-family conservative boycott of the 2011 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) by saying CPAC should simply ignore the social conservatives.[152] Guilfoyle has shown her support for the homosexual activist agenda by attending functions put on by the pro-homosexual media pressure group, GLAAD, before and after she was hired by Fox in 2006.[153]

• Liz Wiehl: The Fox legal analyst irritated Bill O’Reilly by defending the California courts’ override of the state’s citizens’ Prop 8 vote against homosexual “marriage.” In her shallow analysis, Wiehl said the “right” of homosexual “marriage” had been “bestowed” by the California courts – and though judges had overridden the expressed will of the state’s voters — “once that right has been bestowed, you cannot take away the right!”[154]
• Gretchen Carlson… is an assertive moral conservative of the type that Fox needs more of. As a mom, she is vigilant about radical sexual and gender agendas being foisted on children in schools and promoted by pop culture. As a guest on O’Reilly’s show, Carlson strongly disagreed with a “Glee” story line that affirmed a young male-to-female “transgender” character: “I wholeheartedly believe, in today’s society, that kids are experimenting with homosexuality. We see it in celebrities who maybe just do it on the side, and it may be drug-fueled.” Opposing Carlson on the segment was Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro, who supported the pro-transgender-youth “Glee” episode (taking much the same approach as Megyn Kelly above).[155]
• Todd Starnes: a Fox News Radio reporter and commentator, Starnes is an old-fashioned, strong Reagan conservative who might be said to represent the “old, pre-politically-correct Fox News.” The author of Dispatches from Bitter America: A Gun Toting, Chicken Eating Son of a Baptist’s Culture War Stories, his stories routinely earn him denunciations in the leftist blogosphere. Media Matters recently labeled Starnes “Fox News’ resident anti-gay mouthpiece.”[156]

Also, the author is happy to report that Margaret Hoover, the radically pro-homosexual-“marriage” libertarian who used to be a frequent guest on the “The O’Reilly Factor,” has moved on from FOX News after a contract dispute. Hoover had used her position as a FOX commentator to advocate for homosexuality, including in the GOP as a means for the party to burnish a more “tolerant” image.[157]

 

FoxNews and Big Media Subsidize NLGJA

Fox News Channel, like other major media, has provided tens of thousands of dollars in support to the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), which was founded in 1990 by journalist and committed pro-homosexual activist Roy Aarons. NLGJA officials claim that theirs is not an “advocacy organization,” which is dubious because much of the NLGJA’s work is  about advocating for more favorable treatment of homosexuality – which has been regarded as sexual sin and a perversion throughout Judeo-Christian history (and by other non-Western cultures). Of course, this is precisely what sets the NLGJA apart from other minority journalists’ organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists: homosexual behavior is a moral and behavioral (and health) issue, while race and ethnicity are merely innocuous, inborn traits with no moral component. (There is no such thing as an “ex-Black,” but there are many people like Charlene Cothran, who happens to be African American, who once lived a homosexual lifestyle but then abandoned it.)[158]

Like other major media corporations, Fox has sent recruiters to NLGJA conference job fairs, as well as Fox on-air personalities to lend moral support to NLGJA events. This writer and other conservatives for years have urged Fox News and its parent company, News Corp., to stop funding the NLGJA – because it is a pro-homosexual organization. (News Corp. apparently does not provide funding to conservative- or Christian-oriented media groups.)

In the last few years, with the steady losses in journalism jobs exacerbated by the deep recession, NLGJA’s budget and staff have shrunk dramatically. Revenues plummeted from over $1 million in the previous decade to $373,000 in 2011, and the organization now listed just one paid staffer, executive director Michael Tunea.[159] Historically, much of NLGJA’s funding comes from media companies like Fox and NBC, but since those companies have cut back in their giving, the homosexual journalists group has increasingly secured grants from non-media corporations like Eli Lilly & Company, General Motors, Jet Blue and Sara Lee.[160]

The following are examples of financial and moral support that Fox News has provided to the NLGJA:

• In 2006, Fox donated $10,000 to the NLGJA as a sponsor of its annual conference; the next year, Fox again joined other media as a sponsor of the NLGJA conference, in San Diego.
• Megyn Kelly and Geraldo Rivera were listed as Special Guests at the NLGJA’s 2010 fundraiser in New York City, joined by these other Fox staffers: Kimberly Guilfoyle; Jamie Colby; Kelly Wright; and Rick Reichmuth. Fox News was listed as a Silver Sponsor of the event. (See photo above of Kelly photographed with an NLGJA backdrop.)[161]
• Fox News was again listed as a Silver Sponsor at the NLGJA’s 2011 Fundraiser. Fox’s Kimberly Guilfoyle and Jame Colby attended it and posed for a photo with the NLGJA backdrop.[162] The event, as in the previous year, was sponsored by Mitchell Gold & Bob Williams. Gold is a radical homosexual activist who assails “religious-based bigotry” against homosexuals – claiming that homosexuals, not Christianity or religion – have the moral authority on this issue. Presenting at a 2011 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force “Creating Change” workshop, he blamed “outdated” Judeo-Christian teachings that homosexual behavior is sinful for harming gay young people, and said within 20 years such teachings will be regarded as an “aberration” just like past Church statements in support of racism are now considered an aberration.[163]
• Again in 2013, Fox News sponsored the NLGJA “Headlines & Headliners” fundraiser March 21, 2013 in New York City.[164]
• In 2009, Fox News and Fox Business Channel serves as “Gold Sponsors” of the NLGJA “Headlines & Headliners” fundraiser in New York City.[165] Fox’s Allison Camarata attended the benefit.
• Fox News is listed as a Silver Sponsor for the NLGJA New York City fundraiser, with morning host Martha MacCallum listed as a Special Guest in attendance.[166]
• In 2012, Luz Pena, Fox News Channel University (FNCU) reporter and Ailes Rising Apprentice (and Hoftra University student), interviewed NLGJA President David Steinberg at the UNITY conference in Las Vegas. [167] UNITY purports to advance “diversity” in the media but that seems to mean – with the inclusion of the NLGJA in 2012 — only the politically correct, pro-homosexual definition of the word. In the short, friendly interview, Steinberg – a copy editor at the San Francisco Chronicle — heralded NLGJA’s membership in UNITY. Pro-family advocates have for years advocated for full intellectual and worldview diversity to be represented in media, corporations and other societal institutions. Another fascinating angle to the UNITY story is the 2012 pullout from UNITY by the National Association of Black Journalists, which once opposed the NLGJA’s membership in UNITY (see endnote).[168]

 

NLGJA: Newsroom ‘Gay’ Advocates and ‘Coming Out’

This writer through my organization, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, has either attended of overseen a reporter’s coverage of several NLGJA conventions. My colleague Brian Fitzpatrick has covered three of the NLGJA conferences. At these events, naturally, a very pro-“gay” atmosphere exists not unlike the homosexuality-affirming environment at “political” homosexual activist conferences, such as the annual “Creating Change” conference put on by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (several of which I also have attended). Though most professional “mainstream” journalists affiliated with the NLGJA would likely dispute that it is an “activist” organization, clearly it is. The NLGJA has its own “Hall of Fame” that, naturally, honors militant homosexual activists that malign religious conservatives –  like Michelangelo Signorile, Richard Goldstein and the late Marlon Riggs (who died in 1994 at age 37).[169] The NLGJA invites only pro-homosexuality groups to be Exhibitors at its conference, and LGBT activists representing “gay” groups like GLAAD as speakers. (This writer’s request on behalf of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality to exhibit at the NLJGA convention in Boston August 22-25, 2013 – to gain access to professional journalists — was rejected. As it has in the past, the NLGJA said it will allow this writer to attend the conference, but as a paid “member.” At a previous NLGJA convention in Dallas in 2001, NLGJA’s leaders did allow this writer to organize an NLGJA panel along with two other pro-family conservatives.[170] That is likely the only time such a “Pro-Family Opponents” panel has been allowed.)

The NLGJA lobbied successfully for “domestic partner” coverage in media corporations – precisely the sort of activism that other LGBT organizations lobby for. At the 2009 convention in Montreal, then-NLGJA President David Steinberg boasted that due in part to NLGJA’s lobbying efforts, “most major [media] companies offer domestic partner benefits.”[171]

 

The Power of ‘Coming Out’ in the Newsroom

“Many of our [NLGJA] members have said that once they come out at work suddenly they’re treated like the go-to gay in the newsroom whenever there is a question about LGBT issues.”— NLGJA newsletter, 2008[172]

The power of the NLGJA lies in founder Leroy Aarons’ “coming out” vision, which also has been the most successful approach used to “normalize” homosexuality and grow homosexual influence in society over the last five decades. “Coming out” in the advocacy sense envisioned by LGBT militants like Signorile is the act of declaring one’s homosexuality (or bisexual or transgender “identity”) to family, coworkers, and friends, and essentially putting the onus on them to deal with it (or else lose the relationship). Because society’s once-biblically-based moral standards have deteriorated – and because most people are relational and do not like confrontation – many friends, coworkers and family of the “out gay” person tend over time to accommodate their thinking to his or her (proud yet aberrant) “identity.”

NLGJA touts the value of “peer-to-peer” discussions in the newsroom to advance what it considers “fair coverage” in the newsroom. It also encourages members to report “problematic coverage” on homosexual-related issues to NLGJA so that its “Rapid Response Task Force” can take action by contacting the media outlet to push for better coverage from a pro-homosexual perspective.[173] As we will show below, despite NLGJA’s denials, this constitutes a form of “gay advocacy” in that the NLGJA is hardly a neutral organization and is too close to the homosexual issue to be an impartial arbiter of fairness on the issue.

Nevertheless, “coming out” has become the main vehicle of escalating “gay” power in the culture – hence Aaron’s genius in using that (emotionally manipulative) power in the media. Homosexual marketing strategists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, writing in their 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90s, discuss the importance of “coming out” in “converting” straights (yes, like a proselytizer) to pro-“gay” thinking. Keep in mind that the radical authors regard even religious-based opposition to homosexuality as “homohatred” and “bigotry”) [emphasis is authors’]:

First, coming out helps desensitize straights. As more and more gays emerge into everyday life, gays as a group will begin to seem more familiar and unexceptional to straights, hence less alarming and objectionable….

Second, coming out allows more jamming of the reward system for homohatred. Jamming … means interrupting the smooth workings of bigotry by inducing inconsistent feelings in the bigot. … As gays come out, they and their friends will be free to play a more vigorous role in jamming, openly showing their disapproval of homohatred. … Thus, when gays come out, they help transform the social climate from one that supports prejudice to one that shuts homohaters up. And when bigots fall silent, they cannot as easily pass their social disease on to the next generation.

Third, coming out is a critical catalyst for the all-important ‘conversion’ process, as well. Conversion is more than merely desensitizing straights or jamming their homohatred” it entails making them actually like and accept homosexuals as a group, enabling straights to identify with them. This becomes possible when a heterosexual learns that someone he already likes and admires, such as a friend or family member, is homosexual. The discovery leads to an internal showdown between the straight’s personal affection on the one hand and his bigotry on the other. When the gunsmoke finally clears—and it can take years to do so—the stronger sentiment emerges more or less victorious. If it is the stronger, affection for the friend wins out and subdues bigotry, the straight’s concept of gays is modified for the better, and a favorable conversion takes place. Imagine: all that, just because you decided to come out.”[174]

Beyond the psychological and emotional manipulation described above, one can easily see the power of Aaron’s NLGJA “coming out” strategy: by getting fellow newsmen to identify with them as homosexuals (and against supposed anti-gay prejudice), NLGJA-identified journalists enjoy the benefits of “coming out” writ large. Rather than influencing and “converting” perhaps a few dozen people in their lifetime, they are converting the most influential opinion-molders in the culture – with a media-assisted reach into millions of households. And note the wider, media application of “shutting up” people opposed to homosexuality: as we will show below, many homosexual journalists and their straight allies in the newsroom, no longer consider the voices of anti-gay-agenda opponents worth including in their stories.

Here we also see the critical importance of Fox News’ support of the NLGJA and its shift to the left on LGBT issues. Predominantly religious and conservative Americans – Fox’s core audience demographic — are the last remaining bastion of opposition to the “gay” movement. So if Bill O’Reilly — the man of the “folks” whom countless American conservatives have been relying on for decades to tell them the news that media liberals are ignoring and distorting — says homosexual “marriage” is no big deal, then maybe it isn’t! And if Megyn Kelly conflates opposition to “Chaz” Bono’s surgical mutilations to achieve a semblance of “manhood” with “hate,” then (a Fox viewer might think) maybe there’s something wrong with me if I perceive Bono as a bad role model for kids. Thus guilt is transferred from those practicing immoral behaviors to those opposing them. 

 

Fox News’ Elizabeth Hasselbeck: a pro-homosexual ‘convert’

It is fascinating and appropriate that Kirk and Madsen used religious language to describe pro-homosexual “conversion,” for pro-homosexuality enthusiasts (straight and “gay” alike”) often display religious-like zeal for their cause. An example is Fox News’ new acquisition, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who has made the pro-LGBT metamorphosis described in After the Ball. She offers a telling example of the power of personal homosexual interaction and “conversion” by interacting with people personally to change their beliefs about homosexuality. Homosexual Jeffery Self tells about his “boyfriend” Patrick’s interaction with Hasselbeck – who once opposed homosexual “marriage”– as an audience member during a taping of “The View.” During a commercial break, Patrick, who adores Hasselbeck, was able to ask her a question. Self tells the story, starting with Patrick’s question [emphasis added]:

“Elisabeth, as a gay man, I just want to thank you for being a constant champion of equal rights. My question to you is: what is the greatest lesson you’ve learned at The View?”

Elisabeth put her hand on her heart and thanked him for saying that. She told him, “Bringing it back to what you said on gay rights, when my conservative friends first approached me about gay marriage, I’d always ask them if they actually knew anyone who’s personally gay. The ones who said, ‘Yes, I do,” were the ones who always supported gay marriage, because they recognized, as you and I both know, that love is love. Those who opposed the issue were the same ones who said they did not know anyone who was gay. That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned: to not have an opinion on something you don’t know anything about.”

After the show she called Patrick to the stage and gave him a huge hug and told him how much what he said about gay rights meant to her. She blew him a kiss, and Patrick hasn’t stopped smiling since.[175]

What is curious about Hasselbeck’s remarks is that she presumes that because she knows someone who is “gay,” she is therefore knowledgeable about homosexuality – to the point of negating her own faith creed on homosexual “marriage.” This is akin to saying that until and unless one knows a woman who has had an abortion, he or she is unqualified to speak out against abortion. Through decades of activism, homosexuals – who are merely people who struggle with a perversion (religious people would call it a sin) – have established themselves as the “experts” who alone are qualified to assess the nature and morality of homosexuality. This illogical and ahistorical proposition is at the root of homosexual power in society – power greatly augmented by the “gay” “coming out” strategy.

A Fox News website article about Hasselbeck’s move to the network describes her as an “outspoken conservative,” [176] but she denies that label and her gushing comments supporting homosexual “marriage” indicate that since her “conversion,” as Kirk and Madsen would call it, she is now a committed pro-“gay” advocate—despite her professed Christianity.[177])

Fox News also molds the culture by ignoring and downplaying politically incorrect stories that undermine pro-“gay” ideology. If, for example, Fox News doesn’t give a voice to – and help “humanize” — the many men like Stephen Black[178] and women like Charlene Cothran who have overcome homosexuality and gone on to live happy lives consistent with the natural design of their bodies, it could provide a huge boost to educating Americans that post-“gay” change is possible. The media-viewing public and especially Fox’s audience demographic of conservative and religious Americans would benefit from such information. Fox routinely gives a voice to politically incorrect black conservatives – and should be commended for this. So why is the network not giving a voice to successful former homosexuals, who are similarly ostracized by liberal media and who by their mere existence debunk a myriad of LGBT activist myths?[179]

 

‘Gay’ Advocacy: The Essence of the NLGJA

Roy Aarons: self-acknowledged homosexual “activist”

The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association follows in the footsteps of its founder, former Oakland Tribune executive editor Leroy (“Roy”) Aarons, who understood that when he organized homosexual journalists – and encouraged them to “come out” in newsrooms as openly “gay” – he was engaging in activism.

Aarons, who died in 2004, writes in his 1996 book, Prayers for Bobby: A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son: “I was comfortable being an out gay man [at the Tribune] but, as a journalist, had no intention of every being involved as a gay activist, beyond going to gay pride parades as an observer.”

Then Aarons describes how the head of ASNE (American Society of Newspaper Editors) asked him to oversee the organization’s first-ever survey of “gay and lesbian journalists on their attitudes toward workplace conditions and news coverage of gay issues.” When Aarons agreed, he knew his life would change and the next year, he formed the NLGJA.

Just as the NLGJA’s current executive director, Jan Christensen, insists that it is not an “advocacy organization,” Aarons claimed that his newfound advocacy on behalf of fellow “gays” did not compromise his journalistic integrity. But such contentions fly in the face of common sense, not to mention the evidence: Aarons’ own “reporting” — like that of other LGBT journalists who are simply too close to the issue to be impartial — predictably parallels  and celebrates “gay” ideology and activism, while giving short shrift (or totally ignoring) critics of the LGBT activist agenda.

Consider, for example, the following tendentious paragraph from Prayers for Bobby, about a homosexual high school boy, Bobby Griffiths, who committed suicide:

The struggle [against homosexuality] ostensibly revolves around varying interpretations of fewer than a dozen of the Bible’s thirty-one thousand versus. At a deeper level, some argue, run currents of sexual phobia endemic to American culture. “Most devout, heterosexual church people are surprised, confused, and overpowered by their own sexuality, which they tend to see as dirty, as sin,” wrote Duke Robinson, the liberal pastor of a Presbyterian church in Oakland, California. “While they regularly feel guilty about and confess to God their sexual thoughts…they ignore and refuse to confess as sin their hatred and demeaning treatment of homosexuals.[180]

A few observations about this passage:

1. Aarons sophomorically trivializes the Scriptural proscriptions against homosexual behavior as sinful and their authority to believers;
2. Although Aarons sought unsuccessfully to interview the pastors at Bobby Griffith’s church, he did not publish a countervailing quotation to balance the liberal pastor’s (absurd) idea that heterosexuals oppose homosexual behavior due to “sexual phobia” and some puritanical notion that sex is “dirty”; and
3. Similarly, it would have been easy for Aarons to obtain a quote from the other side debunking the liberal pastor’s loaded contention equating opposition to homosexuality as “hatred and demeaning treatment of homosexuals.”
4. It is quite apparent from this passage and other parts of the book that Aarons shares the hostility toward organized religion (especially biblical Christianity) of many of his fellow homosexuals. The Judeo-Christian Scriptures — the Bible — remains the single most important source de-legitimizing homosexuality in the culture. For that it has earned the opposition of a modern movement that seeks to reclassify homosexuality as acceptable, innocuous and intrinsic to a person’s identity. A whole wing of the LGBT movement now seeks to use “moral” and religious rhetoric to discredit the age-old biblical understanding of homosexual behavior as sinful.[181]

Also, is it a mere coincidence that all of the organizations recommended by Aarons in his book as resources – groups like PFLAG (Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays) are pro-homosexual advocacy groups?[182] Of course not: Roy Aarons was a committed homosexual advocate and effective “gay” activist who was far from objective and impartial on the issue that was so close to his heart. (See more on “Coming Out” below.)

 

NLGJA events celebrate homosexuality

The tenor of NLGJA events – is undeniably one of celebrating “out and proud” homosexuality – by “gays” and straight allies alike. On March 21, 2013, this writer joined America’s Survival founder Cliff Kincaid in attending an NLGJA fund-raiser in New York City, where we witnessed journalists who are “straight allies” of the NLGJA champion “gay rights”—and sounding more like they paid staffers for a homosexual lobby group than impartial journalists. Below are excerpts from the event’s keynote speech (see the endnote for the lesbian kissing joke that Morales opened up her talk with) by NBC “Today Show” host Natalie Morales at the NLGJA fund-raiser (emphasis added):

What a difference a year makes. Think about where we were just even a year ago – all that has happened in the news for the LGBT community in particular: the repeal of the military’s ban on gays and lesbians; the widening support for same-sex marriage. The world seems to be evolving slowly but surely – from the President changing his position [on same-sex “marriage”] last year, to most recently this week…former Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton now saying gays and lesbians are full and equal citizens and deserve the rights of citizenship. And last week of course Republican Senator Rob Portman said he now supports gay marriage because he wants his son, who is gay, to have the same rights to love equally. I mean this of course is 2013 but it is happening….

Many of us here in this room — the media – we are responsible for opening the world’s eyes to these issues and the stories that have brought about such change. When you think 18 years ago when this organization was founded – think of where the country was back then. And now, 50 percent – according to the Pew poll that we talked about on the news today – support gay marriage, and … some other polls put that number even higher. [This] reflects a change in attitudes in this country.

Many here in this room also, you know, you’ve enjoyed the benefits [of these changes]. You’ve been putting a face out there for everyone to see, and to make sure that they understand the issues. A lot of our great friends – Thomas Roberts just got married to his [male] partner last year; Sam Champion also came out and got married; Anderson Cooper as well. So imagine all those kids who struggle with their sexual identity, who look up to these guys and say, you know, “There’s somebody that I can hold on to, I can identify with. And they made it through some very tough times, and they’re OK.” So you all have an important job to do. 

As I said, coming here to this event every year, it feels like a big family reunion. … We’re all united in this cause. And I am very grateful that NBC Universal has been such a great supporter of this organization, NLGJA, for as long as I can pretty much remember. And tonight NBC Universal is the lead sponsor of this event.[183]

Morales is only the last in a long line of major media VIPs who have addresses NLGJA events at which they also championed homosexual “rights” (perhaps not all as effusively as Morales). The list reads like a ‘Who’s Who” of major media, including:

• Leslie Stahl (Las Vegas convention – 1998): Stahl reportedly condemned ex-gay “change therapy” during a Q&A after her talk, and criticized the comments of one her interview subjects from a “60 Minutes” segment she had done recently on the possibility of people changing away from homosexuality. She called the remarks of a mother who refused to accept her son’s homosexuality “just horrible.”[184]
• Thomas Roberts and Don Lemon – Both are high profile, openly homosexual TV anchors – Roberts for MSNBC and Lemon for CNN.
• Former NBC “Today Show” host Ann Curry and current host Matt Lauer; the show’s producer, Javier Morgado, organizes the NLGJA’s annual New York City fundraisers.
• Jill Abramson, executive editor, New York Times – which is now notorious one-sided in favor of homosexuality — will be a plenary speaker at the upcoming NLGJA convention in Boston, August 22-25, 2013.
• Bill O’Reilly (by video); Philadelphia convention, 2002.

 

The NLGJA Discredits and Demonizes Pro-Family Conservatives

Former NLGJA president compares quoting conservatives in “gay”-related stories to quoting “white supremacists” in race- or immigration stories

In the years of this writer covering NLGJA conferences, the theme voiced by MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer early this year equating opposition to homosexuality to white racism (see above), too hateful and extreme to be quoted as the “other side” – has been a common theme. This proposition also happens to be the main line of attack against conservatives advanced by LGBT lobby organizations such as GLAAD and by leftist gay-allied groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center with its preposterous “Hate Map.”

The average American is probably unaware of how LGBT organizations have ratcheted up their rhetoric against religious conservatives who oppose homosexuality. Consider this item by GLAAD about Josh Duggar taking a job at Family Research Council Action (emphasis added):

Now that Josh Duggar has accepted a position at such an anti-gay organization, he has become a full-fledged anti-gay activist. What does this mean for TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting? Will TLC allow it to become a mainstream outlet for FRC’s dangerous message? What about the Duggar family’s appearances in other media? Will his work with one of the most vile anti-gay organizations in America be legitimized there?

“If Josh Duggar wants to make a living dehumanizing and denigrating LGBT people and their families, that’s his business, but FRC’s lies and stereotypes need to be treated as such,” said GLAAD Spokesperson Wilson Cruz. “Josh’s new boss Tony Perkins has actually accused LGBT equality advocates of being pawns of the devil.  Fans of his family’s reality show ought to know that.”[185]

FRC as a “vile” organization? This is not the language of a civil debate but a propaganda war. The problem is that “mainstream” journalists – aided by the NJGJA — essentially get easy and wide exposure to one side of that war – the homosexual activists side. Thus they lose perspective and become tools in the hands of LGBT militants who themselves “dehumanize and denigrate” people of faith by smearing them as “vile” haters, etc., in order to advance their goal of denying conservatives a voice in the media.

Is “hate” a one-way street? Intemperate and injudicious statements have been made on the “Religious Right, “ to be sure – but they have also been made on the “Gay Left.” Yet only one side – conservatives – gets regularly banished from inclusion in everyday media stories – in the name of tolerance, no less!

So the question is – given NLGJA’s active cooperation with GLAAD and other like-minded groups — not if but rather to what degree it promotes the insidious narrative of “anti-gay haters” to the wider media? Perhaps the closest thing to an “official” NLGJA endorsement of the view that speaking against homosexuality is akin to advocating racism is a 2006 essay – excerpted below — by Eric Hegedus, former NLGJA President and a design editor for the New York Post. Hegedus’ piece originally appeared in the “official newsmagazine of the NLGJA,” according to the website, and is posted permanently on the NLGJA website in its “Journalist Toolbox” section.

Hegedes initially cites conservative WorldNetDaily (WND.com) editor David Kupelian’s reference to the NLGJA convention in 2000, in San Francisco [emphasis added]:

Kupelian referenced convention attendees’ opinions about issues of balance and handling homophobia in coverage.

For instance, the author quoted NLGJA member Ramon Escobar: “This whole issue of ‘balance’ that we as journalists are supposed to achieve … When we cover the black community, I’ve never seen a newsroom where you’re covering one side and then you have to go run out and get the Klan’s point of view.”

And Kupelian quoted [NLGJA] member Jeffrey Kofman: “The argument [is]: why do we constantly see in coverage of gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues the homophobes and the fag-haters quoted in stories when, of course, we don’t do that with Jews, blacks, etcetera?”

Lastly, Kupelian cited Paula Madison, then-vice president of diversity for NBC, who agreed with Kofman. “I don’t see why we would seek out … the absurd, inane point of view just to get another point of view.”

Kofman’s follow-up, as related by Kupelian: “All of us have seen and continue to see a lot of coverage that includes perspectives on gay issues that include people who just simply are intolerant and perhaps not qualified as well.”[186]

Responding to Kupelian’s observation that the news media “have worked in tandem with the [LGBT] movement’s public relations machinery for years now,” Hegedus -– making a seriously flawed and bigoted analogy – writes [emphasis added]:

To that, I say nonsense. LGBT journalists — including members of NLGJA — simply want to ensure fair and accurate coverage that has historically been done with derision and a lack of respect and understanding. This is about fairness, something one expects of journalists covering any minority community.

Certainly, news organizations have written extensively about white supremacists and other hate groups. For instance, in October we saw a flurry of stories about 13-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede, who use entertainment to promote the supremacist movement (“Young singers spread racist hate,” said a headline on the ABC News Web site).

But I doubt that any journalist is adding them to a source contact list for bringing “balance” to future stories about reparations, interracial marriage, the Holocaust or immigration. That same ethic needs to extend to LGBT coverage, too.

The bottom line is that all journalists must take greater care not only in how they frame their own questions, but also in determining who they’ll interview.

Thus a past president of the NLGJA is on record comparing groups opposed to homosexual activism to “white supremacists and hate groups” – in the name of fairness.

Other NLGJA advice is not quite as over-the-top as Hegedus’ but nevertheless still falls in the category of identity-group advocacy – echoing the claims and approach of a myriad of homosexual activists and LGBT organizations. Here are some other examples (emphasis added):

• Bible doesn’t necessarily condemn homosexuality: “Some reporters, for example, have written that the Bible condemns homosexuality. But a variety of experts disagree that the Bible makes such statements when taken in context. Others note that many biblical laws are ignored in modern life.” – Randy Dotinga, “Religion & Homosexuality,” NJGJA online “Journalists Toolbox”;[187]
• Don’t focus too much on homosexual pedophilia: “Journalists covering clergy sex-abuse scandals should exercise caution. Some religious leaders might tell you that gay men are more likely than straight men to abuse children, but that contention doesn’t belong in a news story unless you can provide research to support it. … If you write about sexual abuse involving homosexuality, consider exploring the larger picture. How does the church treat gays and lesbians in the pews and in the leadership? And what about gay and lesbian victims of abuse? “There’s a reluctance to talk about that,” [liberal homosexual Catholic journalist Chuck] Colbert says.”[188] – Dotinga, NLGJA on “Religion & Homosexuality”
• 

  New Mexico photographers Elaine and Jon Huguenin were fined more than $6,000 for politely refusing to shoot photos at a lesbian commitment ceremony, due to their Christian faith. The suit was filed under New Mexico’s “sexual orientation” law. They are appealing the decision. Reporters need to examine how pro-homosexual “nondiscrimination” laws and pro-LGBT corporate “diversity” policies actually discriminate against people of faith.

  One-sided advice on “nondiscrimination” laws: An another NLGJA “Tip Sheet on LGBT Coverage” focusing on “Covering Nondiscrimination Laws” cites only pro-homosexual advocacy groups (Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force) versus no conservative groups. Moreover, the article says nothing about the religious freedom controversies linked to pro-homosexual “nondiscrimination” laws. For example, the Boy Scouts of America were first challenged by homosexual activists under New Jersey’s “sexual orientation” law (the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where the Scouts won). And a similar law in New Mexico is at the center of a controversy involving a Christian couple who own a photography business who have been sued because they politely refused to take photos at a lesbian commitment ceremony because it would violate the dictates of their faith. Here the NLGJA violates a basic rule of journalism by focusing on only one side of the story.[189]

• Public sex – not necessarily news? An NLGJA member writes: “[T]he annual quest for broadcast ratings supremacy can sometimes result in inaccurate or unbalanced stories about sexual minorities….Consider the public sex stories that some TV stations have run during sweeps in February or November. Or newspaper stories about police arrests for public lewdness or similar charges. Is the fact that men meet for sex in a public restroom really newsworthy? Or is it sensationalism? …Public sex may or may not be a story, Connors says. “If the public bathroom is in the middle of a park where children play and these acts — gay, straight, whatever — are taking place in the middle of the day with children nearby, and this has resulted in angry parents raising it as an issue, it sounds like a story.” – Carl Sullivan, “It’s Good for Ratings, but Is it News?” in NLGJA’s online “Journalists Toolbox”[190]  [Author’s Note: While this writer understands homosexual activists’ desire not to expose the public to homosexual promiscuity and perversions like “public sex” in restrooms -– certainly it is bad PR for homosexuality — such reckless behavior clearly is newsworthy. If anything, the media should focus more, not less, on high-risk “gay” sexual excesses, e.g., anonymous sex venues like “gay bathhouses” – where men go for indiscriminate hook-ups and orgies. Historically such hyper-promiscuity helped spread the AIDS epidemic.[191] Of course, it is also newsworthy for the media to expose heterosexual perversions and debauchery such as “swingers” clubs.] 

• NLGJA lobbies AP on ‘husband and wife,’ says homosexual “marriages” not fundamentally different from normal marriages: NLGJA, though it claims not to be an “advocacy group,” became a key player in joining other “gay” activist groups to lobby the Associated Press to change its Style Book references on homosexual “marriages.” AP had issued an internal advisory that said, “Generally AP uses couples or partners to describe people in civil unions or same-sex marriages.”[192] Homosexual activists were outraged. On February 14, NLGJA president (and former CNN.com writer and producer) Jan Christensen sent an open letter to AP Stylebook Editor David Minthorn, asking AP to “revise the style advisory to make it clear that writers should use the same terms [i.e., ‘his husband’ and ‘her wife’] for married individuals, whether they are in a same-sex or opposite-sex marriage.” Christensen fretted [emphasis added], “Language choices like these have an impact. Such reporting can reinforce the idea that marriages between same-sex individuals are fundamentally different from marriages between a man and a woman.”[193] Notice the NLGJA’s “advocacy” giveaway: are media now obligated to press the ridiculous idea that homosexual relationships somehow are not “fundamentally different” from regular (real) marriages? In fact, homosexual “marriage” is so fundamentally different from normal marriage that untold billions on the planet do not even regard the former as “marriage.” On February 21, a week later, AP made the change, and homosexual activists, including Christensen, celebrated. The new AP Stylebook entry reads:  “husband, wife:  Regardless of sexual orientation, husband or wife is acceptable in all references to individuals in any legally recognized marriage. Spouse or partner may be used if requested.” Conservative media critic Tim Graham accused AP of “re-writing the gender dictionary” and caving in to “overwrought pressure from the usual gay “anti-defamation” lobbyists.[194] For background on this AP change, see endnote.[195] 

• 

  The NLGJA’s “Stylebook” offers a tendentious definition of “sexual orientation” that advances the “born gay” theory. Homosexual activists often seek to absolve themselves of any moral responsibility for their sexual choices and behaviors — and the best way to do that is to assert that they were “born that way.” Studies show that people who believe homosexuals are innately “gay” are more likely to support the homosexual activist agenda.

  NLGJA promotes “born gay” myth: in one of its sneakiest bits of advocacy, the NLGJA includes the word “innate” in its Stylebook definition of “sexual orientation” – i.e., its recommendations on what it believes is appropriate language use for reporters. Here is their definition and Style advice on three related terms: “Sexual orientation: innate sexual attraction. Use this term instead of “sexual preference.” See lifestyle.” That is followed by this entry for “sexual preference”: “Sexual preference: Avoid. Politically charged term implying that sexuality is the result of conscious choice. See sexual orientation.” Lastly, here is the NLGJA’s semantic take on “lifestyle”: “lifestyle: An inaccurate term sometimes used to describe the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Sexual orientation may be part of a broader lifestyle but is not one in itself, just as there is no “straight” lifestyle. Avoid. See sexual orientation, sexual preference.” It has been said many times that he who controls the language shapes the debate, and here we see the NLGJA moving beyond journalism to attempt to influence how people think about homosexuality. Obviously, especially with the inclusion of “innate,” the organization is pushing the idea that people practicing the homosexual lifestyle have no control over their homosexuality. But the “born gay” theory is unproven and runs counter to the evidence that environment factors cause or contribute to homosexual ideation.[196] For example, “openly gay” CNN anchor Don Lemon – a past speaker at an NLGJA convention — testifies that he was molested as a boy, beginning at age five, by an older teenage boy in the neighborhood. The molestation continued for years. Was Lemon “born gay” or did he have deviant sexual attractions imprinted upon him as a young boy (which he later embraced as a sexual identity/orientation)?[197] Moreover, some homosexuals like actress Cynthia Nixon say they chose to be homosexual.[198] In contrast to the NLGJA’s definition, here is the definition of “Sexual Orientation” provided by the (very pro-homosexual) American Psychological Association, which says nothing about innateness and cites research showing that “sexual orientation” is fluid: 

Sexual orientation: refers to the sex of those to whom one is sexually and romantically attracted. Categories of sexual orientation typically have included attraction to members of one’s own sex (gay men or lesbians), attraction to members of the other sex (heterosexuals), and attraction to members of both sexes (bisexuals). While these categories continue to be widely used, research has suggested that sexual orientation does not always appear in such definable categories and instead occurs on a continuum …. In addition, some research indicates that sexual orientation is fluid for some people; this may be especially true for women (e.g., Diamond, 2007; Golden, 1987; Peplaue and Garnets, 2000).[199] 

• NLGJA injects itself into Russia controversy.  Following Russia’s passage of a law banning homosexual propaganda, LGBT activists became enraged and sought to make an example of Russia as a “human rights” violator. Russia is hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, so that quickly emerged as a pressure point for homosexual activists (some of whom are also encouraging a boycott of Russian vodka).  In an August 6 letter to the “NBC Olympics News Team,” Ken Miguel, the NLGJA’s Vice President of Broadcast, wrote, that as part of its Russian Olympics coverage, “NLGJA strongly encourages American and international media to cover human rights concerns being raised by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Russians as well as LGBT people who will be covering, attending and participating in the games.” While giving the NLGJA’s now-obligatory caveat that it is “not an advocacy group,” Miguel wrote the following, which sounds very much like the rhetoric of … homosexual advocacy groups:

 “[M]any LGBT athletes still feel they have to hide their sexual orientation to take their place among the world’s top competitors. Competition inherently comes with fear. But for LGBT athletes participating in these games, that fear now includes persecution and possibly even violence…

“Please consider: Words matter. Athletes are among the biggest role models in our society. Research has shown that LGBT teens and young adults have one of the highest rates of all suicide attempts. Depression and drug use among LGBT people have both been shown to increase significantly after new laws that discriminate against gay people are passed. Bullying of LGBT youth has been shown to be a contributing factor in many suicides, even if not all of the attacks have been specifically addressing sexuality or gender.” 

It would require several pages in this report to adequately evaluate the above claims. However, they clearly are tendentious and of a “gay”-advocacy bent, especially since the promotion of homosexuality-based and transgender “rights” is not an internationally-recognized standard for human rights. The Russian law was very popular with the Russian people – 85 percent of whom oppose “gay marriage” in a recent survey.[200] Once again, the NLGJA reflects homosexual concerns while ignoring a whole “other side” to the story: what inspired these overwhelming votes in Russia? What part of America’s “gay’ experience are the Russians trying to avoid – homosexual “marriage”? Public displays of indecency at “gay pride”? The high homosexual-related disease rates? The hostility toward religion that flows out of homosexual activism? The promotion of aberrant sexual lifestyles and gender confusion as normative to even very young schoolchildren in schools? All of these and more are part of the Russia story, but the NLGJA’s focus is essentially a narrow “homosexuals as victim” approach that draws attention to the alleged plight of homosexuals.[201]

Surely, despite its denials, the NLGJA is engaged in “gay” advocacy, and has entered the world of moral philosophy – with its “definitions” and its journalistic advice. And it is ideology – not journalism – that guides the organization’s semantic activism in this area.

 

More Examples of Radicalism by NLGJA Members and Media Allies

NLGJA has always devoted much of its convention time to professional lectures and practical seminars of the sort you might find at any journalist convention – and in recent years, with the journalism industry in crisis, even more so. But it is the arena of homosexuality and politics and culture where the NLGJA demonstrates its bent towards advocacy. The following radical quotes and workshop descriptions – mostly targeting religious conservatives  – by NLGJA members and speakers at the “gay” journalist group’s conferences. Note how NLGJA sessions take on the ambience of pro-homosexual activism – members are surrounded by LGBT partisans (with no countervailing opponents present) and listening to paid activists and leaders from homosexual activist organizations such as Lambda Legal and GLAAD talking “gay” strategy. Remember that the NLGJA officially claims that it is NOT an “advocacy organization.” Also note that the NLGJA annual event is split into two parts: the “LGBT Media Summit,” geared towards homosexual activist publications and media, and the main convention, geared more toward professional journalists (in the “mainstream” media). Although there is a lot of overlap between the two sides, obviously from a fairness perspective only the latter is obligated to cover both sides of homosexual issues and controversies. The years and cities provided below are for NLGJA annual conventions unless otherwise noted [emphasis added]:

• “We talked to Reverend [Sh-t]bag. He said gays suck.”  – Kevin Hayes of the New York Daily News ; 1998, Las Vegas: In a panel on “How to Lobby a Gay Story (and Not Be Dismissed as ‘Pushing an Agenda’),” Hayes called religious protesters at “gay pride” parades “lunatic zealots.” Conservative Brian Fitzpatrick attended the panel and reports: “When asked what to do when a reporter requests the name of a homosexual  agenda opponent who could provide an opposing point of view, Hayes replied: ‘You are presenting this debate to the viewers for ultimate decision by them as they take in your product. I sympathize directly with you because so often I’ve seen the crossfire between one editor and another…where you search for the obligatory paragraph in which someone can condemn homosexuality, praise homosexuality, whatever, and usually the motivation is something very profound, very journalistic, and that’s that you don’t want to be the editor getting all those angry phone calls Monday morning when the story comes out and you can’t say, ‘Well, look, we talked to Reverend [Sh-t]bag. He said gays suck. It’s right there in the paper.”[202]
• KKK and Nazi Comparisons: 1998, Las Vegas: “Religious people who oppose the ‘gay’ activist movement were frequently compared to [the] KKK and Nazis – by journalists as well as political activists,” Fitzpatrick reports.[203]
• NLGJA Stacks “Pray Away the Gay” panel: 2008, Washington, D.C.: Here is an example of an NLGJA panel with: 1) absolutely no balance (e.g., a contented ex-homosexual); and 2) evinces anti-Christian hostility (“Pray Away the Gay” is a crude caricature of Christian efforts to help homosexuals leave the lifestyle; it was concocted by one of the panelists, Wayne Besen);

Hot Topics 
Pray Away The Gay? 
“Journalists who work for LGBT press have a special role: They provide coverage that’s often missing in the mainstream media. But what happens when they switch sides? Since 2006, two LGBT media journalists have “come out” as ex-gay and now say homosexuality is immoral. Are they the new face of the so-called “ex-gay movement?” Panelists: Moderator: Eric Hegedus, Page Designer, New York Post; Wayne Besen, Founder, Truth Wins Out; Jack Drescher, Pyschoanalyst; and David Foucher, CEO/Publisher, EDGE.”[204]

Here is a rundown of the panelists:

• Wayne Besen: radical homosexual activist; leading crusader against “ex-gays”; uses extreme and hateful rhetoric to demonize pro-family advocates opposed to homosexuality.
• Jack Drescher: a strong liberal critic of change therapy for homosexuals.[205]
• David Foucher, CEO/Publisher of EDGE, a homosexual publication in Boston[206] See endnote for a current EDGE article that prematurely pronounces the ex-“gay” movement dead[207]
• Eric Hegedus: Former president of the NLGJA: compared seeking quotes from pro-family conservatives for homosexual-related media stories to getting quotes from “white supremacists” for a story about race or immigration (see above).[208] 

• NBC/Universal NLGJA ad Celebrates Homosexual ‘VICTORIES’ – 2008, Washington, D.C.: “In a full-page ad in the convention program, NBC Universal declared it is “proud to support NLGJA,” under the bold headline: “YOUR VICTORIES ARE OUR VICTORIES.”[209]
  • NLGJA panel discusses “Retaking Christianity” – 2008, Washington, D.C.: Brian Fitzpatrick report: “A panel supposedly intended to foster accurate coverage of religion quickly turned into a political strategizing session aimed at “retaking Christianity” from conservatives. The moderator and organizer of the panel, furniture magnate Mitchell Gold, is the founder of Faithful in America, a pro-homosexual activist organization targeting the religious community.” [Note:Gold is also a major funder of the NLGJA.]
    • “Gold said, ‘The single biggest [obstacle] to gays having equal rights in the country is religion,’ so ‘I set myself to learn about it.’ One of the panelists, Ann Craig, director of Religion, Faith & Values for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), said, ‘We’re not getting anyplace until we begin conquering the debate” in the religious community.’”[210] 

• 2013 Panel [NLGJA LGBT Media Summit]: “Gays versus God: LGBT Media Coverage of Faith and Religion,” August 22, 2012; here is the official panel description:

“Should LGBT media pay as much attention to faith and religious liberty as they do to law and politics? Our panelists certainly think so. How then is gay media doing in coverage of religious-based opposition to marriage and transgender equality? What about reporting on faith-based support for LGBT rights and liberation? Are the stories of people of faith and their positive experiences receiving their due? Is gay media adequately monitoring the exportation of anti-gay religious-based hostility to Africa and elsewhere?”

The upcoming panel – like so many NLGJA workshops before them – is made up entirely of pro-homosexual/pro-transgender activists:

• Chuck Colbert: moderator, longtime homosexual activist and freelance writer based in Cambridge. Colbert strongly opposes Catholic Church teachings on sexuality;[211]
• Jay Michaelson, vice president of the Arcus Foundation – a major funder of LGBT groups — and author of several religious-oriented books advocating the acceptance of homosexuality.. [212]
• Marianne Duddy-Burke, a veteran activist with DignityUSA and New Ways Ministries — two renegade groups that claim to be Catholic but which campaign against against the Church’s teachings on homosexuality;[213]
• Rabbi Devon Lerner — a homosexual “marriage” advocate who served as Executive Director of the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry in Massachusetts.[214]
• Mycroft Masada Holmes — Chair, Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition’s Interfaith Committee in Boston.[215] 

• 

  The NLGJA stacked a 2008 panel on ex-gay change with four critics of pro-heterosexual change therapy, including Wayne Besen, pictured here with megaphone protesting a conference for ex-homosexuals at a Boston church.

  NLGJA panel: “On the Trail of the Radical Right”: 1995: Washington, D.C.: Panel description: “…How to keep up anti-gay ballot initiatives, attempts to take over school boards and ban books, and efforts to smear gays and lesbians. Tips, direction and potential scoops from top-notch right- [conservative-] watchers.” This panel featured four homosexual activists, including one from People for the American Way.

  • Words matter to journalists, so it is telling that the NLGJA used the pejorative term “Radical Right” to describe social conservatives in 1995 (it has fallen out of favor on the Left since then). Meanwhile, the more things change, the more they stay the same: the NLGJA’s use of the mocking gay-activist slogan “Pray Away the Gay” in 2008 evinces similar contempt for traditional Christians, who actually should be part of mainstream journalists’ stories rather than “enemy targets” of NLGJA members. [216]

• AP reporter admits to using LGBT group’s data despite “bad methodology”: 1995, Washington, D.C.: Lesbian Kim Mills, then a reporter for AP and active with the NLGJA, told the author that “she had no problem applying the ‘Radical Right’ label to religious conservatives,” according to Lambda Report. “At her workshop, Mills described how she turned the annual reports about ‘anti-gay violence’ put out by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a left-wing gay activist group, into an annual story for AP sympathetic to LGBT interests—even though she recognized that the Task Force used “bad methodology.” (Mills said her editors agreed to use the data even though they knew it was flawed because it was “all that we had” on the subject.)[217]

The average American has no clue as to how the “news” is distorted though such behind-the-scenes manipulations. Along the same theme, below is another 2008 NLGJA panel featuring a bevy of homosexual activists:

• Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics: Writing On Research
  [Program description:] “Increasingly, reporting scientific research can be like walking through a minefield. Advocacy groups are interpreting research findings for their own political ends and some are even creating research to support their positions. This session will provide advice on how to win the science spin game.”

• Moderator: Rick Moore, Director of Communications, Rockway Institute [a pro-homosexual think tank]
• Cindi Creager, Director of National News, GLAAD [“gay” media pressure group]
• Jim Burroway, Editor, Box Turtle Bulletin [homosexual activist blog]
• Neil Savage, Freelance Science & Technology Writer [pro-“gay” advocate][218] 

• Hating Huckabee and “Reverse Stockholm Syndrome: 2008 NLGJA Panel: “NBC/National Journal reporter Matthew Berger said he experienced “reverse Stockholm syndrome” while on the campaign trail covering GOP religious conservative Mike Huckabee. “Stockholm syndrome” is what afflicts hostages who come to love their captors. If Berger’s feelings changed after traveling with the Huckabee campaign, they went in the opposite direction. He acknowledged how difficult it is for a journalist to do his job when you “hate” the people you’re covering. Berger said he was happy w hen he was transferred to the “gay-friendly” Rudolph Giuliani campaign.”[219] 

• 2013: Stacked Panel on Jason Collins 

Game Changer: Out on the Playing Field and in the Press Box

[Panel description:] “When NBA center Jason Collins came out in Sports Illustrated this year he became the first guy to do it while still playing a major professional sport. Did Collins change the face of sports forever, or does the sports world remain the last closet for athletes and the people who cover them? Hear from sportswriters and athletes who can tell you what homophobia they still see in sports and where there are areas of real improvement.” Panelists: Karen Bailis; Pat Griffin; Tony Jovenitti [220]

• Griffin is a pro-homosexual “social justice education” professor who works directly with GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network. 
• Jovenitti is a freelance writer “who entered the world of LGBT activism in April 2013 when, inspired by Jason Collins, he came out in an essay on OutSports.com.,” according to his NLGJA website bio. 
• Bailis is a Newsday copy editor.

Author’s comments: This is another stacked panel that we presume will offer only enthusiastic supporters of “coming out” in sports. (And “coming out” itself is a form of advocacy.) Some diversity would make for a more interesting discussion — e.g., a sports writer (homosexual or straight) who thought the Collins story was not worth celebrating – a viewpoint probably shared by untold millions of Americans. Or a religious-minded sports journalist who could offer a philosophical counterpoint to the LGBT’s “out-and-proud” coming-out narrative. Also, use of the word “homophobia” is problematic, in that often it is used inappropriately (as the AP noted) in ascribing “phobia” (irrational fear) to people who simply disagree with or are offended by homosexual behavior.

And the list could go on and on of biased, pro-LGBT stacked panels that were part of NLGJA events. This is advocacy in action.

 

Will Fox News Be Part of the Solution, or the Problem?

So there you have it: whether it is mocking religious opponents of homosexuality as “Reverend [Sh-t]bag”; strategizing on how to neutralizing “anti-gay” Christians; straining to make the point that people of faith who favor traditional sexuality in (normal) marriage deserve to be treated like the KKK; media professionals like Natalie Morales who should be fair and objective sounding like committed “gay” activists; or a veteran journalist like Bob Schieffer only now learning that “gay rights” threatens religious freedom – the message going out to pro-family advocates is the same:

We don’t respect you, we don’t care about what you believe. (Some of us actually despise you and your bigoted beliefs.) You represent “hate,” like the racists of a different era, hence you are not worthy of our — and therefore the public’s – attention.

Thirty years ago, one of the earliest modern “gay journalists” –- Randy Shilts, who sits posthumously in the NLGJA “Hall of Fame” after dying from AIDS at 42 –- wrote this about a radically new method of reporting on homosexuality, in the Author’s Note to his biography of murdered homosexual icon Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street [emphasis added]:

Some might complain that [the book] is sympathetic to the gay point of view, because no traces of moral outrage against homosexuality are to be found in these pages. On this point I agree with [homosexual] historian John Boswell when he wrote, “What will strike some readers as a partisan point of view is chiefly the absence of negative attitudes on this subject ubiquitous in the modern West: after a long, loud noise, a sudden silence may seem deafening.”[221]

The “mainstream” media’s pernicious scrubbing of viewpoints opposed to homosexuality and gender confusion on religious, moral and practical grounds is about as legitimate as the late “gay” theologian John Boswell’s revolutionary, pro-homosexual recasting of Christian history. Which is to say, not legitimate at all. Fox News owes it to its viewers not to spike politically incorrect information about homosexuality. At the very least, Fox should balance its pro-LGBT libertarian commentators with social conservatives who are capable of defending traditional morality. For if Fox continues to go down the path of not contesting for the truth on homosexuality and “gay marriage” – or worse, treat aberrant sex and gender confusion (of the type pitiably embraced by “Chaz” Bono) as “civil rights” — it will do immense damage to its brand. More seriously, it will contribute to the moral slide of the nation (and history shows sexual immorality is the downfall of civilizations).

 

The cycle: media bias … rising poll numbers … “gay momentum”

The media are in a politically-correct cycle of grossly favoring the homosexual movement in their “reporting” – then reporting poll data that shows people growing in their acceptance of homosexuality. These poll results, in turn, are then used to justify further pro-LGBT-biased coverage by the media. Surely, the media’s propagandistic, slanted coverage is skewing public opinion towards the pro-“gay” side. A good example of this is the aforementioned Fox News Latino article on the Supreme Court’s recent homosexual “marriage” rulings. The June 26 story, headlined, “Supreme Court Grants Two Historic Rulings In Favor Of Gay Marriage,” quotes only pro-homosexual-“marriage” advocates, including two from ”gay” activist groups (it ends with a supportive statement by President Obama). Then, inside this biased story is the following:

In 2012, for the first time, Latinos said they favored same-sex marriage than opposed it, by a 52 percent to 34 percent margin, according to Pew Hispanic Center. This is a drastic change from 2006, when nearly one-third of Latinos favored same sex-sex marriage and more than half opposed it.

The shift goes hand in hand with 53 percent of the general population which, according to the latest Gallup poll, support same sex marriage.[222]

Naturally, when people consume information that heavily favors one side of a controversial issue – and that side’s argumentative “frame” — their views begin to tilt toward that position. This is what we are witnessing on a grand scale in the homosexuality debate. In this sense, the title of the aforementioned Pew poll showing flagrant pro-homosexual-“marriage” media bias is misleading: rather than, “News Coverage Conveys Strong Momentum for Same-Sex Marriage,” it should be, “News Coverage DRIVES Strong Momentum for Same-Sex Marriage.” How tragic that Fox News does not see itself as part of the “solution” to this injustice – by consciously giving pro-family conservatives a voice – or at the very least being meticulously fair — but instead is evolving into just another (perhaps more moderate) pro-homosexual network.

To build back conservatives’ trust in Fox News, and maintain the goodwill that vast swaths of America still have for the one network that was never intended to lean Left, Fox must reject the liberal media’s lead on homosexuality. Rather, a return to reason, common sense, conservative principles — and fidelity to “Nature and Nature’s God” — on this critically important moral question would serve the network well.

 

Endnotes