DATE CHANGE FOR AFTAH BANQUET!

 Charlene Cothran and David Parker: two heroes for truth coming to Chicago.

Folks, you won’t want to miss Americans For Truth’s first annual banquet, on Friday, Oct. 5 at 6:00 PM, outside Chicago, Illinois. This surely will be one of the most compelling and exciting evenings for defending truth in the area of homosexuality that you will ever experience!

Our dynamic speakers represent both sides of pro-family advocacy on this issue: the loving Gospel message of hope through Christ in overcoming unwanted same-sex desires — and the bold defense of truth in the public square, in this case parents’ right to protect their children from manipulative, pro-homosexual lessons in taxpayer-funded public schools. Here are the details:

WHAT: Americans For Truth Dinner Banquet: Celebrating Truth and the Freedom to Be Moral

 

WHEN: Friday, Oct. 5: Silent Auction 6:00 PM, Dinner 6:45 PM

 

WHERE: Lombard, Illinois, west of Chicago, location TBA; call AFTAH’s Banquet Coordinator at 312-315-6152 for information on room reservations for those coming from out of state. (It is easy to get cheap flights into Chicago’s O’Hare or Midway airports.)

 

WHO:  Keynote Speakers:

Charlene Cothran
Former lesbian who, after her dramatic Christian conversion, retooled her Venus Magazine from a publication for fellow “gay and lesbian” African Americans to a Christian magazine seeking to help men and women overcome homosexuality through Christ 

 

David Parker
Caring father who became a nationally known parents’ rights crusader after being arrested at his 1st-grade son’s Lexington, Mass., elementary school for insisting that he and his wife be notified before their son was exposed to any pro-homosexual teachings

ADMISSION:  $50 per person; table of ten, $500. Pay online HERE.

 

PAYMENT AND RESERVATIONS:  E-mail Americans For Truth at americansfortruth@comcast.net; or call AFTAH’s Banquet Coordinator at 312-315-6152 to reserve your seats. SEATING IS LIMITED SO DON’T DELAY.  Pay using your credit card using AFTAH’s new and improved Online Donation Page (designate “Banquet” in the comments section). Or send checks payable to “Americans For Truth” at $50/person to: AFTAH, P.O. Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522.  You may also pay by credit card by calling 312-315-6152.  

 

WHY:  At this special event, pro-family leaders will celebrate God’s power to transform men and women struggling with homosexuality; and expose the relentless attack on children’s innocence, parental rights and religious freedom by a “gay/transgender” lobby that seeks to discredit and silence the voice of faith in America.   

There are many practical, secular-oriented arguments against creating legal rights based on aberrant sex and gender-confused “identity.”  I encourage you to read my friend John Biver’s excellent series, “Bad News for the Gay Rights Movement,” on the Family Taxpayers Network (FTN) website.  John (info@familytaxpayers.net) is FTN’s president, and a very smart guy who is not religious but would risk going to jail to defend my religious freedom to oppose homosexuality.  I’d do the same for him.

We who are religious should understand that you do not have to be a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Jew, to see the absurdity of revolutionizing civil rights law to accommodate historically taboo and destructive sexual behaviors that can be changed.  Please share these articles with your friends. — Peter LaBarbera 

Click on the individual links below for each article:

Bad News for the “Gay Rights” Movement

 

Get over your Moralityphobia

 

Right and Wrong isn’t Dead Yet

 

Privacy v. Revolution

 

Successes, Parades, and Leaven

 

The Broken Window Theory

 

Psychology and Morality

 

The Plight of the TriSexual  (A Parody)

 

Gender Identity Disorder

 

Friends, Family, and Children

 

Health Realities

 

Resetting the Proper Context

 

Morality and the “Gay Rights” Debate

 

Liberty Counsel

NEWS RELEASE; Contact: PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPARTMENT – 800-671-1776

August 3, 2007

Judge Forces Idaho To Fund Estrogen Treatment for Man Who Thinks He Is A Woman 

Boise, ID – Federal district Judge Mikel Williams ruled on Friday that the Idaho Department of Correction must provide an inmate with estrogen therapy. The judge will consider continuing treatment when the issue goes to trial. The inmate believes that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body. The man, who castrated himself using a disposable razor blade while in prison, demanded female hormone therapy. He also changed his name from Randall Gammett to Jenniffer Spencer. The man is serving a 10-year sentence for escape and possession of a stolen car.

After prison officials refused estrogen therapy, but instead offered testosterone therapy to replace the hormones lost to castration, the inmate sued, alleging he was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment and other constitutional violations.

State officials said the inmate was in prison for several years before demanding treatment. In 2004, he survived an attempted suicide. Two months later he tried to castrate himself, failing in the first attempt but later succeeding. He was diagnosed with an unspecified sexual disorder and bipolar disorder.

Liberty Counsel is a nationwide legal organization with experience in litigation of transsexual legal issues. In June 2004, Liberty Counsel won a case on behalf of a Florida woman against the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which represented a woman who, after watching an MTV program and so-called “sex reassignment surgery,” changed her name from Margo to Michael, began testosterone treatment, and then had a total mastectomy and hysterectomy. This person then wanted to be considered “male” for purposes of Florida’s marriage laws. Although a trial court judge wrote an 809-page opinion claiming that gender is primarily a “state of mind,” Liberty Counsel got the ruling overturned on appeal. The appeals court ruled that “the common meaning of male and female . . . [refers] to immutable traits determined at birth.”

Mathew D. Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law, commented: “Hormones and plastic surgery do not change a person’s sex, which is an immutable trait fixed at birth. Plastic surgery and hormone treatment to alter a person’s sexual appearance is no more warranted than is liposuction for an anorexic. The state should not be compelled to fund so-called sex reassignment surgery, especially when such treatment is not widely accepted, is experimental, and has not been shown to resolve the disturbed mental behavior.”

Why is the “pro-family” Bush Administration voting to accredit international homosexual activist groups  — from Quebec and Sweden — that will use their new status to undermine traditional moral values in Third World Nations — in the name of “human rights”? We wonder why the President would alienate his conservative, pro-family base at this critical juncture. This continues Bush’s misguided policy of recognizing homosexuality-based “rights” organizations at the U.N.

TAKE ACTION:  Read the C-FAM alert below and contact the White House using their comment page or call the White House comment line today (202-456-1111).  (You also can e-mail a comment to the U.S. State Department HERE or call their comment line at: 202-647-6575.) Respectfully urge the President to stop using the authority and goodwill of the United States of America to promote the normalization of homosexuality abroad. Tell the Administration that you oppose the USA voting to approve coveted United Nations consulting status for organizations whose mission is to push a pro-homosexuality agenda — including radically redefining marriage and promoting dangerous GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual) “identities” to vulnerable youth — on unsuspecting nations.

 

HATE CRIMES/ENDA ALERT:  While you’re at it, e-mail or call your U.S. Senators (202-224-3121) and urge them to oppose the “hate crimes” bill and the pro-homosexual/transsexual employment ENDA bill — which we’re calling the “Transgender Bathrooms for Businesses Bill” — which threaten to federalize “sexual orientation” law, thus curtailing your “freedom to be moral.”  Call 202-224-3121 or visit http://www.congress.org/.

Certainly, we as a nation can and should support true human rights without crusading for the acceptance of immoral lifestyles. Genuine human rights — and civil rights — are not based on sex, especially deviant sex. Countries should have the right to regulate homosexual sodomy — as we did in America from our inception until 2003, when the Supreme Court reversed a 17-year-old precedent in the Lawrence v. Texas sodomy law case. We should be careful as the world’s most powerful nation not to push the American Secular Left’s decadent values — abortion, homosexuality, condom “sex ed” — on poor countries. Radicals used to call that cultural “imperialism.”

Having America become a leading promoter of immoral-sex-based rights masquerading as “human rights” is a far cry from President Reagan’s vision for this nation being a “shining city on a hill.” Write or call President Bush today: 202-456-1111.– Peter LaBarbera

________________________

Friday Fax, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM)

July 26, 2007 | Volume 10, Number 32
Dear Colleague,

Radical homosexual groups are flooding the UN accreditation process for non-governmental organizations and they seem poised to cause serious problems for traditionally minded countries.

Spread the word.

Yours sincerely,

Austin Ruse
President, C-FAM
 
Controversial UN Procedures Lead to UN Status for Homosexual Groups

By Samantha Singson

(NEW YORK — C-FAM) Overturning a prior decision by the NGO accrediting committee, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) voted to grant official consultative status to the Coalition Gaie et Lesbienne du Quebec (CGLQ) and the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (RFSL) in Geneva last week.

The voting process was mired in confusion over unclear language. Several delegate requests for clarification interrupted the roll-call vote and led Pakistan to call for a point of order and ask for a re-vote. No re-vote was taken. The motion to grant ECOSOC status passed with 22 countries voting in favor, 13 against, 13 abstaining and 6 absent.

 Will the Church of England be forced to hire John Reaney, a homosexual man, as a youth worker despite its beliefs about sex and marriage?

We’ll have much more on this case and other cases evincing the growing threat of homosexual legal activism to basic religious freedoms:

Bishop Loses Gay Employment Case

BBC, July 18, 2007 

A gay man has won his case for unlawful discrimination after he was refused a youth official’s job by a Church of England bishop.

The employment tribunal said John Reaney, 42, was discriminated against “on grounds of sexual orientation” by the Hereford diocesan board of finance.

Mr Reaney, from Colwyn Bay, Conwy, said he was “delighted” at the decision.

The Bishop of Hereford, the Rt Rev Anthony Priddis, said he was “naturally disappointed” and may appeal.

During the tribunal in Cardiff in April, Mr Reaney said he was questioned by Bishop Priddis on his previous gay relationship during a two-hour meeting on 19 July 2006

It came after he was told he had emerged as the outstanding candidate for the job during an eight-man interview, the hearing heard.

Mr Reaney, whose case was supported by Stonewall, also told the tribunal he was left “very embarrassed and extremely upset” following the meeting and said he felt like “a total waste of space”.

During his evidence, Bishop Priddis said he had made clear to Mr Reaney that a person in a committed sexual relationship outside of marriage, whether they were heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transgender, would be turned down for the post.

But the tribunal found that the bishop should only have considered the present lifestyle of Mr Reaney, who is single, and he should have not questioned his future relationships.

Delivering the judgement, the tribunal said the case would now be listed for a remedy hearing.

“The respondents discriminated against the claimant on the grounds of sexual orientation,” said the judgement.

To read the full BBC story and watch related BBC videos on the case, click HERE

TAKE ACTION:  Call your Senators at 202-224-3121 or e-mail them at www.congress.urg and ask them to reject the “Hate Crimes” amendment that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) cynically added to the National Defense Authorization Act.   

 Mary Stachowicz: not the right kind of victim to the media

We favored the death penalty for alleged homosexual Nick Gutierrez for murdering Mary Stachowicz — and then effectively blaming her for “attacking” him (see story below) — just as we called for the death penalty for Matthew Shepard’s killers. But isn’t it interesting how the media have devoted so much coverage over the years to the heinous crime against Matthew, and so little to that against Mary? (Associated Press failed to even cover Gutierrez’s trial.)

How can reporters, producers and editors justifty their double-standard? These days it can be presumed that the Fourth Estate will lavish coverage on “gay” victims, while pious victims like Mary often get ignored. And it seems the media have even less interest in the latter when the murderer is a homosexual — imagine AP ignoring a story about a ‘christian’ who killed a lesbian and stuffing her in his crawl space? I cannot.

In a way, the media’s blatant pro-homosexual bias in covering terrible crimes shows the perils of the “hate crimes” concept in general — both affirm a politically correct hierarchy of victims that is unjust and un-American, no matter how well-intended. Surely, press bias also helps to perpetuate the lopsided prosecution of “hate crimes” against approved classes of victims (like Shepard) by mobilizing government resources through the pressure-generating power of the media spotlight. 

The homosexual lobby named its “thought crimes” bill the “Matthew Shepard Act” — even though he wasn’t killed “just because he was gay,” as the liberal myth goes. But there will never be a “Mary Stachowicz Act” because in the eyes of the same liberals, she was not the right kind of victim.

Call your Senators at 202-224-3121 or e-mail them at http://www.congress.urg/ and ask them to reject the “Hate Crimes” amendment that Sen. Ted Kennedy tacked on to the Naional Defense Authorization Act.  — Peter LaBarbera

____________________________

Nicholas Gutierrez, murderer of Mary Stachowicz, deserves death penalty but gets life in prison 

By Allyson Smith, Americans For Truth

CHICAGO — Nicholas Gutierrez, who in November 2002 gruesomely murdered Mary Stachowicz, a devout Chicago Catholic mother of four, was sentenced July 3 to life in prison, even though his crime made him eligible for the death penalty. The sentence was handed down by Cook County Circuit Judge William Lacy following sentencing arguments made by defense and prosecution attorneys the previous week.

“I think the judge was fair, but as the daughter of the victim, knowing what he [Gutierrez] did to my mother, he absolutely, 100 percent deserved the death penalty,” Angie Ruffolo, Mrs. Stachowicz’s daughter, told the Chicago Tribune.

Last November, Gutierrez, who had worked with Mary Stachowicz at the F. J. Sikorski Funeral Home on Chicago’s Northwest side, was convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering her. Days after her murder, authorities found Stachowicz’s raped, battered, stabbed and strangled body in a crawl space beneath the floorboards of Gutierrez’s apartment above the mortuary.

We hope that openly lesbian Detroit News Columnist Deb Price is correct and that her homosexual activist comrades have much to fear in the direction of the Supreme Court. However, it is frightenng to think that so much is riding on decisions of swing Justice Anthony Kennedy — who in his opinions (e.g., Lawrence v. Texas) has often seemed more interested in pleasing the editorial writers at the New York Times than being faithful to the Constitution.– Peter LaBarbera

From Price’s column July 16:

Court threatens to burn fragile protections

In 1992, vacationing on the big island of Hawaii, I walked toward a river of blood red lava shooting over a cliff and into the sea. I recall looking for a sign, rope or “Hawaii Five-O’s” Steve McGarrett to warn me to stop.

But a giant caution sign wasn’t necessary. The instant I knew not to step a hair’s breadth farther was when I felt the soles of my tennis shoes starting to soften.

A similarly red hot warning — “Tread closer at your own peril” — poured out from the U.S. Supreme Court this term to gay Americans.

The Roberts court — whose votes in nongay cases strongly signaled that Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito can be expected to join Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in opposing almost any imaginable gay-rights plea — is moving frighteningly close to having the five votes it would need to weaken the groundbreaking rulings of 1996 and 2003 acknowledging that gay Americans are protected by the Constitution….

“This term confirmed a lot of our fears,” says Jon Davidson, legal director at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

What alarmed gay rights litigators? A string of 5-4 decisions against the powerless or minorities: Rulings blocking workers from suing over sex discrimination if it’s not discovered immediately; ignoring public school students’ free-speech rights, and hampering efforts to create racially diverse schools.

To read Price’s full column, click HERE

Reprinted with permission from the website of Concerned Women for America; published July 5, 2007

__________________________________________________________________________________

Homosexual “Marriages” in Massachusetts  

2004                        2005                      2006                     2007 (through April)  

6,121                      2,060                     1,427                              87 

__________________________________________________________________________________

By J. Matt Barber 

Getting married isn’t even on the radar screen for the vast majority of homosexuals. 

The homosexual lobby has fine-tuned its rhetoric in recent years. Through the hyperbolic and repetitive use of such concocted expressions as “marriage equality” and “gay rights,” the left has dishonestly but effectively framed the debate over homosexual behaviors.

By co-opting and misapplying the language of the genuine civil rights movement, homosexual activists — along with kindred leftists in the media, government and elsewhere — are making considerable strides toward reshaping our culture. They’ve enjoyed much success in attaining official government recognition of a disordered and empty, though demonstrably mutable, sexual lifestyle.

They yearn for a society created in their own secular humanist image wherein all are compelled to not only accept, but to celebrate high-risk, unnatural and fruitless homosexual behaviors as both normal and equal to natural expressions of human sexuality. Their ideal is a society in which inherent gender distinctions are eliminated and God’s express design for human sexuality is replaced by morally relative and surreal notions of sexual androgyny.

Nowhere are the dumbing-down of sexual morality and the blurring of gender lines more evident than in the left’s effort to radically redefine marriage. Massachusetts is the only state that currently allows “same-sex marriage.” Nine other states permit some form of “civil unions” or “domestic partnerships,” which, in truth, are simply “gay marriages” by another name. (Those states are Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Maine, California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii.)

But despite the feigned and fevered cries of liberals for “marriage equality,” it’s becoming abundantly clear that the arguments conservatives have been making against “gay marriage” are spot-on. The vast majority of homosexuals don’t desire “marriage;” rather, militant homosexual activists desire to use “same-sex marriage” as both a tool to normalize homosexual behaviors and as a weapon to tear down the institution of legitimate marriage.