Dear Mr. Hudson:

This letter is in regard to your Nov. 17, 2006, article , “Wal-Mart faces anti-gay boycott“, published in Washington Blade, Southern Voice, SoVo.com, and Houston Voice.

ITEM ONE

You wrote:

“Working with conservative groups Americans for Truth and the American Family Association, Benham is planning a nationwide boycott and demonstration against Wal-Mart during the Thanksgiving weekend shopping free-for-all.”

There are two problems with that sentence.

First, according to the Americans for Truth post: “AFA is calling for a boycott of Wal-Mart on the Friday following Thanksgiving, which is typically the biggest shopping day of the year.”

Americans for Truth has not formally called for a boycott of Wal-Mart. Americans for Truth simply reported that American Family Association had called for a one-day boycott.

Second, Flip Benham has not engaged in any conversation with anyone from Americans for Truth on any subject . In fact, I cannot recall having ever met or spoken with Flip Benham, so I was surprised to read that Benham is “working with…Americans for Truth.”

ITEM TWO

You wrote:

“By working with the NGLCC [National Lesbian & Gay Chamber of Commerce] and other gay groups, Wal-Mart is giving a ‘show of support to help homosexuals legalize same sex marriage,’ according to the Americans for Truth website.”

The Americans for Truth post clearly cites American Family Association as the author of that sentence — and you should have, too.

ITEM THREE

You wrote:

“The site claims that Wal-Mart is forwarding 5 percent of the value of online sales from walmart.com to the Washington D.C. Center for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender People.

“David Tovar, director of communications for Wal-Mart, disputed that claim. He noted that the gay center receives only a percentage of sales from people who click on walmart.com from a link on the gay center’s website — not all online sales.”

There are two problems with that statement.

First, the Americans for Truth website post clearly notes that the percentage is only on sales via the DC Center’s website:

Title of AFT post: “Wal-Mart Contributes 5% Of Online Sales Via D.C. Homosexual Community Center Website”

Text from AFA: “The cash donation will come from all online purchases made at Wal-Mart through the homosexual group’s web site.”

Americans for Truth did not state/did not imply that DC Center was getting a percentage of ALL online sales.

Second, although Mr. Tovar of Wal-Mart seems to dispute the 5% figure (of online sales deriving from the Center’s website), the DC Center’s own website, which is linked in the Americans for Truth post, confirms that number:

“The percentage of each sale donated to the Center is indicated next to each store… Wal-Mart [5%]”

We would appreciate a public correction on these points. And next time, please call to verify the facts first.

Sincerely,
Peter LaBarbera
President, Americans for Truth

On Tuesday, November 28, TBN will be airing the exciting new special, “Our First Liberty” that highlights how ADF is defending and protecting the First Liberty — religious freedom — of ordinary Americans.

The special will be aired at 12:30 a.m. EST (11/29), 11:30 p.m. CST, 10:30 p.m. MST, and 9:30 p.m. PST.

Find your local TBN channel here.

Watch “Our First Liberty” Trailers
Quicktime (2.9 MB)
Windows Media Player (8.8 MB)

A Breakpoint Commentary by Chuck Colson, published Nov 21, 2006:

Well, it may finally be time to send for the guys with the white coats to wrap me up and cart me off.

It used to be, in the old days, that the biggest decision new parents had to make was the name of their baby. The one thing they didn’t have to decide was the kid’s sex—that decision had been made for them, all they have to do is take a peek. That would be that.

Well, not any more, at least not in New York City.

You see, under a proposed Board of Health rule, “people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates.” They would need only to provide “affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex.” They would also have to promise that “their proposed change would be permanent.”

The proposed rule isn’t aimed at people who have had “sex-change surgery.” They are already permitted to do this. Instead, it’s directed at people who “had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years . . . ”

Read those words carefully: adopted and especially gender, instead of sex. It is a big hint that there’s some major postmodern mischief at work here. “Sex” is what scientists call “binary”: You either have an XX (that is, female) or an XY (that is, male) chromosome.

But if nature can’t be twisted and shaped to suit our ideological predilections, words, especially in the hands of postmodern vandals, can be. If the goal is to separate “anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman,” then the use of the word gender is a must.

You see, “transgender” activists can get away with saying that gender is just “socially constructed” and more than “the sum of one’s physical parts” because gender is a word that most people don’t regularly use.

Substituting an obscure word, in this case, gender, for the more common one, sex, is intended to confuse and obscure. It’s the kind of verbal tactic George Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” compared to a cuttlefish squirting ink to confuse its predators.

Of course, what makes this squirting necessary is the denial of the obvious: “Living as a woman,” whatever that means, no more makes you a woman than hiding a pot of gold makes you a leprechaun.

These verbal parlor games may wow them in the faculty lounge, but nature is unimpressed. They remind me of the hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal. He submitted a paper to a leading postmodern journal filled with postmodern gibberish like “physical ‘reality’ . . . is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”

After the paper was published, he revealed the hoax, that it was all gibberish, adding that those who believe that physics really is a “social construct” should test their beliefs from his twenty-first floor window.

Christians should not be shocked at any of this. Romans 1 tells us that God’s truth is made plain in creation, and to deny this truth—in this case, “male and female created He them”—is to exchange the truth for a lie, which Paul illustrates by an example of men lying with men, in other words, rejecting their God-given gender, which is a challenge to God’s created order. Well, today we have renewed that old lie—that we can create ourselves the way we want, and peeking doesn’t make any difference.

(Additional resources are offered on the Breakpoint site.)

From our good friends at Mission America…

An eyewitness describes the “Healing the Hurt“ GLSEN conference for youth held two weeks ago in White Plains NY:

“On Nov.14, I attended the 8th Annual Healing the Hurt Conference, in White Plains, NY. What I thought was a bad situation in our schools, I observed to be worse than I could have imagined.

“Over 500 kids, gay and straight, were given a day off from academics to be indoctrinated with an agenda that clearly normalizes homosexuality, undermines parental control, and encourages in some subtle and not so subtle ways, rebellion against traditional religious beliefs and governmental laws that do not propagate the homosexual agenda.

“The theme of Dani Newsum‘s keynote address was the ‘Ally’ concept, getting straight kids to support and fight for homosexual ‘rights.’ She states that heterosexist thinking (that all people are born heterosexual) is ‘sick, unhealthy, not accepted.’ She called Colorado’s Amendment 2- ‘obscene violence to the Constitution.’ She added, ‘Southern Baptists will apologize in 100 years to LGBTQ people.’

“In a later workshop, ‘Seeking the Inclusive Spirit – Journeys into Faith,’ an ordained, openly homosexual minister, stated, ‘I am not waiting 100 years,’ referring to an apology. He called Jesus a ‘felon,’ in his attempt to encourage rebellion against existing authorities, and states he will not settle for civil unions but only marriage for gays. He says he was ordained not to be ‘part of an institution,’ but to change it. And this was the underlying message of the conference: a rally for students to take up the cause to change the laws.

“Another workshop,‘Youth speak out on being LGBT in School,’ was an open mic format where I discovered that many of the students attending this workshop were there and their parents did not know it. One girl confessed to forging the permission slips, and many students laughed and clapped for her determination to attend the conference.

“The LGBT current events and activism workshop, ‘Red Cross, ROTC, and Rainbows, Oh MY!,’ promoted activism for gay issues and called for the high school kids to rally with college kids for the cause of homosexual ‘rights.’ The moderator stated, jokingly, ‘I do not want to turn you into anarchists, but cheers.’ The kids were told, ‘Canada is a good place to be’ and to push for DASA (Dignity for All Students Act) and gave the website: Empire State Pride Agenda.

“Parents, be aware of this presence in your schools and beware of its influence. Conservativism is viewed as homophobic. Parents, you are a bigot and a heterosexist if you do not agree with them.

‘Malicious and cultural bigots injecting their bigotry into our lives’ — Dani Newsum

Hence the push for a ‘cultural shift.’ They call for the students to be ‘freedom fighters,’ but lead them into bondage. And they have an elementary and middle school agenda already in a school near you. Confer, speak up and do something before it is too late.

“The Lord, He is still good.”

Jeanne S.

Published Nov 21, 2006:

Mr. Stone importunes Illinoisans in his commentary “Gays Kept Separated” (Nov. 19, 2006) to legalize same-sex marriage, arguing that maintaining sexual complementarity as an essential criterion for marriage represents discrimination and the imposition of faith practices.

My understanding is that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was intended to prevent the establishment of a state religion, not to prevent religious values from informing political decisions. Since people from many religious faiths and no religious faith have long agreed upon the essential place of sexual complementarity in the nurturance of the next generation, laws that reflect those convictions hardly seem a violation of the Establishment Clause. One could argue that those who attend houses of worship that support legalized same-sex unions are similarly attempting to enshrine in law their religious beliefs.

The idea of a separation of church and state no longer points to the importance of protecting religious freedom from the intrusive power of the state but instead refers to coercively eradicating religious expression from the public square. Only secularism, a worldview as shaped by myopic, dogmatic, unproved assumptions (as some argue religious views are), will be tolerated.

Mr. Stone expresses concern with what he perceives as discrimination. Illegitimate discrimination refers to unfavorable treatment of others based on ignorance. Discrimination, however, can also refer to discriminating between right and wrong, in which case it is an essential personal and civic activity. Conflating the two meanings of discrimination, or asserting that all negative judgments reflect prejudice, represents demagoguery. Principled opposition to homosexuality no more embodies illegitimate discrimination than does principled opposition to polyamory or adult consensual incest.

The analogy between race and homosexuality is specious at best. Science has in no way proved that homosexual attraction is biologically determined. Even “queer theory” which emerges from the homosexual community denies that sexual orientation is inherent and immutable. But most important, the contribution of biological influences to the development of an impulse is irrelevant to a moral evaluation of consequent conduct.

Clearly, Mr. Stone has no compunction against imposing morality in that he seeks to impose his moral view that gender is irrelevant to marriage, which leaves age, consanguinity, and numbers of partners as the remaining criteria. But why should he or anyone else be allowed to impose those particular moral strictures on all of society? If I love and am attracted to my brother or five people of assorted genders, why should an intolerant, prejudiced society be permitted to impose those moral views on me?

Historically, society has determined that since marriage is fundamental to the health of society, it is the right and responsibility of society collectively to define marriage. That society has made mistakes and included criteria that were not fundamental to marriage (as with anti-miscegenation laws) does not mean that society has been wrong on all criteria. Tradition, sociology, biology, psychology and, yes, religion have held that both men and women are crucial to the fulfillment of children’s needs. The importance of both sexes points to their fundamental differences which even homosexuals acknowledge when they express a preference for their own gender. Since there is almost universal agreement that men and women are fundamentally different, heterosexual unions must be of a different character than homosexual unions. And throughout history, societies have embodied in law the belief that heterosexual unions contribute something essential to civic health unmatched by homosexual unions.

Laurie Higgins
Deerfield, Illinois

TAKE ACTION – E-mail Richard Peddie, President of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, to express your concern.

Excerpted from Toronto Maple Leafs Hockey Sponsors Gay Movie Featuring Homosexual 11 Year-Old, by Hilary White, published Nov 24, 2006, by Lifesite News:

The Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team announced today that they have lent the team’s name and logo to a film depicting a homosexual Leafs player. The film portrays a Leafs player who wants to “come out” as a public homosexual, his live-in partnership with the team’s lawyer and their adopted “son,” described as “a budding queen of an 11-year-old boy.”

The film is based on the book of the same title about an 11 year-old boy who is described in an Amazon.com book review as “mincing” and “swishy,” and who has to be prevented from wearing pantyhose, eyeliner and perfume to school.

“Breakfast with Scott”, now being shot on location in Toronto and Hamilton, will go ahead with the willing cooperation of the team’s management. The Toronto Star reports that actor Tom Cavanaugh who depicts the fictional player, Eric McNally, was “shocked” that the Leafs management agreed to allow the team to be depicted in a homosexual propaganda film.

Cavanaugh remarked to the Star on the significance of using the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, one of the icons of Canadian culture as the background for a story about open homosexuals and endorsing child homosexuality. “There’s something instant to the viewer when you put on a Leafs jersey or any Original Six jersey.”

Olympic swim champion Mark Tewksbury, a board member of the Gay and Lesbian Athletics Foundation, said, “I think it’s really great that (the team management) are supporting it. I know it’s an iconic team, but I think it makes sense this is happening in Canada because we’ve been far ahead on these issues.”

Excerpted from Israeli High Court Orders ‘Gay Marriage’ Recognition, by Michael Foust, published Nov 21, 2006, by Baptist Press:

The land where Jesus once walked soon will recognize “gay marriage.”

In a landmark 6-1 decision, Israel’s Supreme Court Nov. 21 ordered the government to begin recognizing “gay marriages” from other countries, such as Canada. Although the decision doesn’t give homosexual couples the ability to “marry” within Israel’s borders, it nonetheless puts Israel at odds with countries such as Great Britain and the United States, neither of which recognizes foreign “gay marriages.” In fact, the U.S. government doesn’t even recognize “gay marriages” that occur within its borders in Massachusetts, the lone state where it is legal.

Four countries — Canada, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands — have legalized “gay marriage,” and a fifth one, South Africa, is expected to do so within days.

The ruling by the High Court of Justice — the name for Israel’s highest court — gives homosexual couples the same legal benefits as traditional couples, including tax breaks and the ability to adopt, The Jerusalem Post reported. The decision forces the government to register the “marriages” like it does any other marriages.

“We don’t have a Jewish state here. We have Sodom and Gomorrah here,” lawmaker Moshe Gafni told Israel’s Army Radio, according to the Associated Press. “I assume that every sane person in the state of Israel, possibly the entire Jewish world, is shocked, because the significance is … the destruction of the family unit in the state of Israel.”

By Peter LaBarbera

When it comes to chutzpah, homosexual activists have it in spades. They work their lavender tushes off revolutionizing the age-old Judeo-Christian definitions of marriage and family; fight for “gay/straight” clubs in middle- and high schools, and homosexuality-affirming lessons for all students–even toddlers; lobby for open homosexuality in the armed forces; oppose marriage-preference adoption laws based on the absurd proposition that a child having two “gay daddies” is no worse off than one having a mother and a father; make outrageous claims that esteemed historical figures like Abe Lincoln were “gay”; and radically reinterpret the Bible to change homosexuality from an abomination to a “gift from God.”

Then they turn around and ridicule the idea that there is a “gay agenda.”

Here’s an entry from lesbian blogger Pam Spaulding:

“The Homosexual Agenda is an elusive document. We’ve been looking around for a copy for quite some time; the distribution plan is so secret that it’s almost like we need a queer Indiana Jones to hunt the master copy down. The various anti-gay forces are certain that we all have a copy and are coordinating a attack to achieve world domination.” –Pam Spaulding

Memo to Pam: you don’t have to risk being chased by a giant boulder in the Amazon to find a copy of that elusive agenda; just click this link for the 1972 Gay Rights Platform. Note the last two demands under “States” in the 1972 document: “Repeal all laws governing the age of sexual consent” and “Repeal all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit.”

Or try this link for the 1987 (Homosexual) “March on Washington.” No agenda here, other than the calls for:

• “The government should provide protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, public accommodations and education just as protection is provided on race, creed, color, sex, or national origin”;
• “Anti-homophobic curriculum in the schools”;
• “The government should ensure all public education programs include programs designed to combat lesbian/gay prejudice … Institutions that discriminate against lesbian and gay people should be denied tax-exempt status and federal funding.”
• “A massive [federal] AIDS education and prevention program that is explicit, culturally sensitive, lesbian and gay affirming and sex positive”;
• “Public and private institutions should support parenting by lesbian or gay couples”;
• All people must have access to free abortions and contraceptives on demand regardless of age.” (Strangely, abortion advocacy has long been part of the homosexual activist agenda.)