Children who love the Harry Potter series character Dumbledore now may be less inclined to oppose homosexuality, or see it as an important moral issue. Of course, the media had a field day with the “news.” Here, Michael Gambon plays the beloved character in ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.’  

Q:  How does Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s announcement that her beloved Dumbledore character is ‘gay’ fit in with a larger strategy to normalize homosexual behavior in the culture — even to children — through manipulative associations?

Laurie Higgins’ Answer:  In case you haven’t heard, J.K. Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter series, just announced before a large audience of fans at Carnegie Hall that one of the most beloved characters in the book, Dumbledore, is homosexual. Now some perhaps many of the children who love this character will feel ambivalent about regarding homosexuality as deeply sinful. Young children, adolescents, and even many adults fall victim to the specious syllogistic reasoning that goes something like 1. Kindness is good, 2. Homosexuals are kind, 3. Therefore, homosexuality is good. It is clearly a faulty syllogism, and yet it’s wildly successful.
 
The “gay” manifesto After the Ball written in 1989 describes a number of strategies to be used to transform cultural views of homosexuality, one of which is “conversion” (how very darkly ironic). The authors Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen write that “In Conversion, we mimic the natural process of stereotype learning, with the following effect: we take the bigot’s good feelings about all-right guys, and attach them to the label ‘gay,’ either weakening or, eventually, replacing his bad feelings toward the label and the prior stereotype.” Whether Rowling is aware of this process or not, she is employing it.
 
This is one of the most significant problems with repeated exposure to positive portrayals of homosexuals in films, television show, plays, novels, textbooks, and speakers. Unsophisticated thinkers come to believe that somehow good behaviors or traits are inherently exculpatory in regard to others. But we should no more say that the sin of homosexuality is effaced by a homosexual’s compassion, generosity, or good humor than we would say that a polygamist’s sin is effaced by his compassion, generosity, or good humor.
 
The movement is afoot to include positive portrayals of homosexuals and the transgendered in all textbooks from kindergarten on up. I have no objections to textbooks including the important invention or discovery of a homosexual or transgender person so long as their homosexuality or transgenderism is not mentioned. To mention it suggests that somehow their deviant sexual impulses are connected or relevant to their discovery, invention, or contribution to learning. And supporters of subversive sexuality know this. They know that associating the deviant sexual orientation or identity with something positive will irrationally transform society’s perception of the deviant sexuality. Concerned citizens must strenuously oppose the identification of the sexual orientation or sexual identity of figures discussed in textbooks.
 
Another problematic way by which cultural values are being transformed is through the exposure to the stories of suffering shared by homosexuals and those who experience the psychological disorder of transgenderism. It is not uncommon in public high schools for LGBT (lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) students to share their stories of suffering with their peers. The result is that children, teens, and even adults who, of course, do not want to increase the suffering of others, retreat from making moral judgments. In so doing, they fail to make the critical distinction between suffering that results from harassment or abuse, and discomfort that results from an encounter with reasonable judgments about morality.
 
Parents and concerned taxpayers must be aware of and oppose these kinds of manipulative stratagems.

Laurie Higgins works full-time in a suburban public high school writing center in the Chicago area.

Wows Americans For Truth Audience with Testimony of Leaving Behind 29 Years of Lesbianism 

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Get a DVD of Cothran, Parker Speeches at AFTAH Banquet!

All proceeds will go to help the work of Americans For Truth 

To order a complete DVD (or CD) of both Charlene Cothran’s and David Parker’s outstanding talks, make an online donation of at least $25 postpaid to Americans For Truth (please use the online form to specify ‘2007 Banquet DVD’. You can substitute an audio CD but you must request this specifically. To order by regular mail, send your check or money order specifying “2007 Banquet DVD” (or CD) to: Americans For Truth, P.O. Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522. 

Bulk Orders available (all postpaid): 2 for $40; 3 for $55; 4 for $70; add $10 for each additional DVD or contact us (630-717-7631) for large bulk order pricing. 

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NOTE:  What better occasion than the homosexual activists’ misguided “National Coming Out Day” (October 11th every year) to publish Charlene Cothran’s testimony — representing a “coming out” story that we who agree with God on homosexuality can get behind? To contact Charlene, write editor@venusmagazine.org.

By Peter LaBarbera

Folks, Americans For Truth’s banquet Friday night was a wonderful event that exceeded our expectations. We packed out our banquet room at the Embassy Suites Hotel – which was actually a fallback location for our event after another hotel had abruptly cancelled our reservation – and everything went smoothly, despite the small “gay” protest outside.

(Click HERE to read about how Gay Liberation Network and other homosexual activists – obsessed as they are with smearing Americans For Truth – are now lying about our banquet numbers, saying that as few as 30 people attended our banquet (do I hear 20?…) when our room was actually packed out with more than 110 attendees.)

Our two keynote speakers, Charlene Cothran and David Parker, were riveting and held the audience in rapt attention until the evening’s end – as I have rarely seen at such an event. Charlene’s heartfelt testimony (portions of which are excerpted below) about how God drew her from her (very “successful”) lesbian lifestyle had so many wonderful lessons to teach: the faithfulness of God; the answered prayers of a faithful mother; the possibility of radical change in the life of even a longtime homosexual (Cothran had lived 29 years as a lesbian); and the need of loving Christians to reach out to homosexual strugglers trying to leave the lifestyle.

Charlene had the Americans For Truth audience laughing right off the bat when she said:

If you had told me two years ago that I would be a featured speaker at the Americans For Truth about Homosexuality banquet, I would have laughed in your face! Because I was one of those girls who would have been outside across the street with the gang trying to prevent this from happening. But God has a way of bringing us full circle, doesn’t He?  

Full circle, indeed. As a leading African-American homosexual activist and the most successful minority publisher in the “gay” world with her Venus Magazine – which she now uses to spread the Gospel of Christ — Cothran once partnered with a host of homosexual activist groups to advance that cause: Human Rights Campaign (back then it was called Human Rights Campaign Fund); the National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum; the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; and PFLAG (Parents, Friends and Families of Lesbians and Gays), to name a few.

Many of those groups do everything they can to hide the truth from the public that men and women like Charlene are walking away from homosexuality.

Cothran continued:

“It was right here in Chicago … back in 2003 at a ‘gay pride’ event – out in Bryant Park, on a sunlit afternoon where I should have been the proudest lesbian out there….At any other pride event, I was always very proud to be there. … But on this day a shame fell on me, and something spoke in my spirit and said: ‘This is that road that’s leading to destruction, and you are on it.’ And it was such a loud voice that I could no longer ignore that what I was doing and how I was living was wrong.

 This FOX News Channel ad ran in the program guide of the recent National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association conference in San Diego. 

The following is Allyson Smith’s first installment on the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) conference in San Diego — which she attended representing Americans For Truth. Note the casual mixing of homosexual media with “mainstream” media – all sharing and strategizing around a pro-gay perspective — and the complete lack of opposing voices present at the NLGJA panels. (Allyson tells me that at one panel on “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell,” the moderator said that opponents of homosexuals in the military were invited to speak but declined to attend.)

All this begs the question of whether homosexual reporters working in establishment media can truly be objective — i.e., fair and balanced —  especially when they are assigned to cover homosexual-related issues. Also, note that for ease of reading, we have not put quote marks around the word “gay” as we would normally do. – Peter LaBarbera

By Allyson Smith

Gay Activists & Journalists Mingle and Strategize Together at National Gay Journalists Conference: Day 1 at the NLGJA

On Thursday, August 30, I attended the first of three days of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention, held at the Westin Horton Plaza Hotel in downtown San Diego. Although I have been to many homosexual conferences and events since the dawn of the millennium, at times using my real name and at other times an assumed name, this would be my first time to attend such a convention as a totally “out” Christian conservative reporter under the auspices of an organization many homosexual activists hate: Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), headed by longtime pro-family activist Peter LaBarbera.

Approximately 500 journalists, editors, producers, travel writers, bloggers and other communications workers from homosexual and mainstream media outlets gathered August 30 – September 2 for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) annual conference.

As at past NLGJA conferences, conservative-leaning Fox News Network was among the sponsors and recruiters.

Titled “Breaking Stories, Breaking Waves,” the convention, held in downtown San Diego’s Westin Horton Plaza hotel, featured a one-day LGBT media summit, six receptions, and more than 50 sessions and workshops ranging from “Covering LGBT Conservatives” (oddly, the Christian-conservative-bashing Wayne Besen was a panelist), to “Will Gays Matter in ’08?” to “Sex Writing for Fun and Profit.”

Attendees included print and broadcast professionals from top U.S. mainstream news agencies such as CNN, Associated Press, ABC/Primetime, NBC, CBS, Fox News Network, Hearst Newspapers, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bloomberg News, Newsday, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, CNBC, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Time Warner/Turner Broadcasting, Washington Post, Hartford Courant, People Magazine, NPR, Clear Channel Communications, Wired Magazine, Cox Enterprises, and USA Today.

Among major homosexual media outlets represented were the Washington Blade, Dallas Voice, San Diego’s Gay and Lesbian Times, GO Magazine, Gay News Watch, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Bay Area Reporter, IN Los Angeles Magazine, Sirius OutQ Radio, CBS News on LOGO, and here! Networks.

Other organizations who sent employees to the convention, according to an attendee directory distributed with the registration package, included Cirque de Soleil; MGM Mirage; USC Annenberg School of Communications; Human Rights Campaign (HRC); Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund; Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN); Arizona State University Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication; JetBlue Airways; Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; several Canadian tourism agencies; Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN); Lambda Legal; Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation; Out and Equal Workplace Advocates; Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau; and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The convention included plenary sessions on the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and immigration issues affecting homosexuals, as well as a general session featuring a conversation with Larry Kramer, founder of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP), a radical, “in your face” demonstration group that made headlines in December, 1989, for disrupting a Catholic Mass and destroying a consecrated Communion host at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

The Canadian Tourism Board was the presenting sponsor for the convention. Other sponsors included JetBlue Airways, CBS News, CNN, ESPN, General Motors, Toyota automobiles, Orbitz, Bloomberg, Coca-Cola,  the Gill Foundation, Sony Pictures and Television, visitBritain, ABC News, Fox News Network, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Washington Post.

Among “Career & Community Expo” participants were the Associated Press, Dow Jones, Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, MGM Mirage, Reuters, Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, the New York Times, Fox News Network, and NBC Universal.

Other events occurring during the convention included a student projects, a documentary film screening, a “not so silent” auction, 12-step meetings, and a “San Diego Night Out.”

Americans For Truth sent reporter Allyson Smith to the convention for three days, where she attended more than a dozen sessions and raised issues of concern to pro-family advocates — including the biased manner in which “mainstream media” covers homosexuality-related issues. A full report about the sessions that Smith attended will follow in coming days.

UPDATE: after Donna Garner sent the message below, she did some more research on Wal-Mart’s “Gay & Lesbian” books section of its website and found that the corporation had not changed as much as she thought. Here is her subsequent ‘Correction’:

TAKE ACTION: Contact Wal-Mart by phone at 1-800-WALMART or through their online feedback page; thank them for moving in a pro-family direction but ask them to stop marketing offensive books that promote homosexual behavior, especially to youth. There are plenty of places to get these books: a “pro-family” corporation need not aggressively pursue this market.

Donna Garner writes: Now I am really sorry that I gave Wal-Mart a “pass” on their online offerings.  Last night when I was searching, I typed in the words “homosexuality” and “homosexuals” into the Wal-Mart search box. This is the same way that I had searched last summer and found so very many. 
 
This morning someone who is far wiser than I am has written me back and said these horrible teen homosexual books are still online at Wal-Mart [examples: The Best Gay Love Stories 2005, It’s in Her Kiss (see cover above), Queer Cowboys, Best Lesbian Love Stories 2005, etc.] and can be located by going through the following or by typing in the word “gay” into the search engine.  I should have thought to do that.  Please forgive my ignorance.

We still need to hold Wal-Mart responsible, and I will send my letters to the Wal-Mart executives as soon as I have time to get them written.
 
Here is what the wiser person wrote to me this morning: 
 
“In the Search box, choose Books from the drop down menu, but don’t type a search term in the menu.  Then click Find.  When it brings up a new screen, look on the lefthand side under SHOP BOOKS.  You will see in the list Gay & Lesbian.  Click on that.  In the next screen, it says Featured Categories.  Right under that is a section Gay & Lesbian Fiction, with a photo of a book Walk Like A Man.  Just below that book, just below the Add To Cart button, it says See all fiction.  Click on the word fiction.  It will take you to the Gay and Lesbian Fiction listings.”

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Donna Warner’s original message: Super-activists like Donna Garner and pro-family organizations like American Family Association — which led the charge against Wal-mart’s pro-homosexual drift — had a lot to do with this hopeful marketing shift. — Peter LaBarbera

TAKE ACTION: Contact Wal-Mart by phone at 1-800-WALMART or by through their online feedback page, and thank them for moving in a pro-family direction. 

By Donna Garner

Not only has Wal-Mart actually stopped funding Planned Parenthood and has been taken off the Life Decisions International Boycott List, but I believe the Wal-Mart online bookstore has been cleaned up also.
 
I went to the Wal-Mart online bookstore and typed in “homosexuality.”  Earlier this summer when I typed in that word, there were some 500+ books on the subject.  Now there are only 99 [there are actually over 400–Ed.].  I scrolled through all 99, and most of them are either about homosexuality and Christianity or homosexuality in history, art, foreign countries, etc. I wish many of them were not being sold by Wal-Mart, but I have to say that the really horrible homosexual novels and perverted books which teens might be lured into reading are no longer on the list [see note above on that]. 
 
Praise God!  I really do believe Wal-Mart has had a change of heart. The boycott did get their attention, and the Lord has answered our prayers. 
 
Thanks to all of you who joined in the boycott of Wal-Mart.  It took all of us working together to make a difference. God’s people are a mighty army!
 
Donna Garner
wgarner1@hot.rr.com

The perverse, homosexuality-themed play ‘Angels in America’ contains lines like “Holy Orifice!” and “You [f—–d] this angel?” The blasphemous and vulgar play was taught in a Chicago area high school.

Americans For Truth has learned that the vulgar, homosexuality-themed play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, was chosen for study last year at a Chicago area high school.

I must ask after reading a few profane, pornographic excerpts from Angels in America — with highly artistic lines like, “Holy Orifice!” and “You [f—-d] this angel?”: what is wrong with liberals? What good comes from foisting this blasphemous garbage on students? The use of this play in the classroom borders on mental abuse — it constitutes the corruption of minors — and I suspect that educationists could only continue with this sort of malpractice if parents remain ignorant. — Peter LaBarbera 

(emphasis added below):

WARNING: Offensive sexual language, of the sort that should not be forced on impressionable students in our schools. 

By Laurie Higgins

I have just read Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner which is currently being taught in some high schools.  I am dismayed that any high school teacher would choose this highly polemical, vulgar, pro-homosexual play. It is egregiously profane and obscene with references to “fellatio” and “blowjobs,” and casual and frequent use of profane and obscene language.

I reject the anticipated caterwauling from teachers about censorship. Parents who object to this and other offensive texts are not recommending prior restraint or removal of a text from a library. Rather, they are arguing for reasonable respect for parental values and community standards of decency when selecting texts to be taught to minors in public schools. Apparently, what teachers actually mean when they squawk about censorship is that they will never take into account vulgarity, profanity, obscenity, or the deeply held beliefs of conservatives on arguably the single most divisive, contentious issue facing American society. Evidently liberal teachers will continue to promote the normalization of what many, including virtually all Muslim traditions, Orthodox Judaism, the Roman Catholic Church, and many Protestant denominations, as well as many secularists consider sexual perversion. Do faculty members, school boards, and administrations think that Muslim families want their sons and daughters discussing oral sex and homosexuality at school at all, let alone in mixed groups? Certainly, I, as a Protestant, would not want any of my children to discuss these topics in their classes.

I find it nigh unto impossible to believe that this play was chosen simply because of how critically well received it has been within the amoral, arrogant, elitist intelligentsia of American culture who purvey cultural collapse. I believe this text was chosen in order to take on the philistines who contend that traditional values deserve respect and that there should be an end to the advocacy of liberal views on sexual orientation and identity. Choosing an odiously vulgar “gay fantasia” constitutes an insult and an aggressive, arrogant challenge to conservative parents.

What a repugnant and diabolical irony it is that teachers are often prohibited from discussing, even in an intellectual (as opposed to proselytical) way, religion, but they may ask students to read and discuss “blowjobs” and homosexuality. If nothing changes, and teachers continue to ask adolescents to read and discuss texts like this, there is no reason for public school administrations to prohibit students, staff, faculty, or administrators from using obscene and profane language or discussing fellatio in the halls of higher learning.

The curious thing is that those liberal educators who with obsessive vigilance monitor public school classrooms for violations of the separation of church and state don’t seem to object to the presence of religion in Kushner’s gay fantasia. His theology touches on the nature of God, Heaven, angelology, and theodicy. I guess it’s okay to commingle the church and state as long as religion is treated in a perverse, blasphemous kind of way.
 
Laurie Higgins who works full-time in a suburban public high school writing center in the Chicago area.

Richard John Neuhaus, writing in the journal First Things (Feb. 2004), on Tony Kushner’s play, Angels in America:
 
“The theater world is abuzz with the effort to mainstream Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. The show was wildly acclaimed on the Great Gay Way that Broadway has become. It is titteringly asked whether dumb, plodding, pious, bourgeois, so very ordinary America is ready for this scintillating inversion of its old certitudes and fixed creeds, in the half-hope that the answer is in the negative, thus providing further proof of the genius and, yes, the courage of Mr. Kushner and, by extension, of the herd of independent minds who join in his contempt for our repressive society that would, don’t you know, jail him if it could. Mr. Kushner has also written a little book, Save Your Democratic Soul!: Rants, Screeds, and Other Public Utterances. Civil discourse is not his shtick. His agent says that in his many campus appearances Mr. Kushner “prefers to speak to progressive audiences open to change.” But of course. Because old certitudes are no longer certain and fixed creeds no longer so fixed, people who cannot help but know better nervously applaud the assault on what they used to call their convictions, thus appeasing the great god Progress who might otherwise be displeased. Their nervous approval is offered in the hope of avoiding the terrible judgment of the priesthood of comic inversion that they are too witless to join in the fun of trashing what, to their embarrassment, they know they believe. They are keenly aware that their every response is ruthlessly scrutinized by the queer eye for the straight guy. Their laughter is forced, however, for, try as they might, they cannot quite rid themselves of the suspicion that they are being watched also by those large and awful and unsmiling faces from beyond.”

 Michael Glatze with pro-homosexuality activist Judy Shepard in his former life as a “gay” activist, speaking at a 2005 Kennedy School forum. Glatze can be reached at michaelglatze@gmail.com.

By Peter LaBarbera 

Today, when Americans celebrate their freedom and independence, a man living in Canada is cherishing a more profound liberty — from spiritual bondage to homosexual sin. Michael Glatze, a former rising star in the “gay” movement — and co-founder of “Young Gay America” magazine — publicly “came out” of homosexuality on the web pages of WorldNetDaily yesterday. Click HERE for WND’s breaking news story about Glatze.

Concerned Women for America has a wonderful online interview with Michael Glatze, which you can listen to by clicking HERE. (The set-up page for the CWA interview is HERE. Glatze can be reached at michaelglatze@gmail.com.)

In his WorldNetDaily column, “How a Gay Rights Leader Became Straight,” Glatze writes:

Part of the homosexual agenda is getting people to stop considering that conversion is even a viable question to be asked, let alone whether or not it works.

 

In my experience, “coming out” from under the influence of the homosexual mindset was the most liberating, beautiful and astonishing thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life….

 

I believe that all people, intrinsically, know the truth. I believe that is why Christianity scares people so much. It reminds them of their conscience, which we all possess….

 

As a leader in the “gay rights” movement, I was given the opportunity to address the public many times. If I could take back some of the things I said, I would. Now I know that homosexuality is lust and pornography wrapped into one. I’ll never let anybody try to convince me otherwise, no matter how slick their tongues or how sad their story. I have seen it. I know the truth.

I suspect that most people — Christian and non-Christian alike — would cheer Glatze’s transformation, if the dominant media would dare report it fairly. But the pro-homosexuality crew at ExGayWatch is all in a tizzy. For them and all homosexuality advocates, Michael’s rejection of their lifestyle poses a problem, as it undermines the central “gay” lie (myth) of our age: that “being gay” is intrinsically “who a person is,” and that homosexuality is morally neutral. (Most argue that it is innate, and now the homosexual “christian” movement mischievously asserts that this “orientation” is a gift from God.) 

Glatze’s story is more evidence that homosexuality is what a person does, and how he lives, and that lifestyle/behavior can be changed. If God through Jesus Christ can rescue sinners from drug, alcohol and pornography addictions, how can we deny His power to rescue homosexuals?

I and others have warned Glatze of the hateful, not-so-“gay” attacks that will be coming his way, now that he’s defected from the “gay” lobby’s team, as it were, to God’s. Sure enough, in one of the posts about Glatze on Warren Throckmorton’s blog, ExGayWatch’s Timothy Kincaid uses Glatze’s Christian transformation to recollect the 1978 Jonestown, Guyana mass murder (think Kool-aid and crazed cultist Jim Jones). Thanks for that helpful insight, Tim. 

Michael Glatze told CWA that he left an outgoing message on his computer at “Young Gay America” (the magazine’s website, www.ygamag.com, was down at press time): “Homosexuality equals death. I choose life.” He made the right choice, but God, it seems, was also doing the choosing. Pray for this young man as we thank God for His gracious work in one repentant sinner’s life — a testimony of what He can do in this nation if we as a people humble ourselves, reject worldly agendas, and return to following Him.