Will the United States become a magnet for foreign homosexuals?

Pro-family Christian Julio Severo fled his home country of Brazil to avoid state prosecution and harassment on "homophobia" charges. Would Severo be granted U.S. asylum like Brazilian homosexual Augusto Pereira de Souza?

By Peter LaBarbera

Homosexual websites are celebrating that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has granted asylum to 27-year-old Brazilian homosexual Augusto Pereira de Souza, who claims he would face torment and violent attacks if forced to return to his country.

I wonder what would happen if Julio Severo (right), the outspoken Brazilian Christian advocate who fled his country due to escalating oppression against critics of homosexuality, were to apply for applied for U.S. asylum. An article in the “Queerty” blog claims that Brazil is “one of the world’s most violently anti-gay countries … with 180 reported LGBT murders in 2008 alone.” I do not know the accuracy of this information. But here is the problem: already Queerty and other pro-homosexuality activists are citing the case of Souza (whose asylum claim was secured by three students at Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic,” Queerty reports) as good news for Ugandan homosexuals who might want to make similar claims.

Is the United States of America under President Obama going to become the magnet for foreign homosexuals and “queer” activists the world over? AFTAH has condemned draconian punishments against homosexuals (such as “solutions” prescribed by radical Islamists). However, America and the West have no right to impose their decadent, perversion-celebrating values on the rest of the world, and other countries certainly have the right to criminalize homosexual behavior just as it was criminalized in the United States prior to the Supreme Court’s activist Lawrence v. Texas decision. (Anti-sodomy laws remain on the books in many states and laws that do not solely ban homosexual sodomy have NOT been struck down; here is a Wikipedia article which — despite that website’s strong pro-homosexual bias — describes the sodomy law situation in all 50 states.)

“Rather than taking the biblical ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ approach to sexual immorality, these false prophets preach counterfeit Christianity, devoid of the faith’s core tenet: redemption.”–Matt Barber on Fred Phelps of “God Hates Fags” notoriety

"Rev." Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church clan are taking their twisted "God Hates Fags" to soldiers' funerals.

Folks, long before Fred Phelps started picketing soldiers’ funerals and “thanking God for IEDs” [improvised explosive devices], his ugly “God Hates Fags” message was proving to be a boon to the Homosexual Lobby and to liberal reporters working to make Christians look like kooks.

Do Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church have a “right” to stage their demented protests at servicemen’s funerals? The Supreme Court will decide. Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, I thought Ann Coulter was very persuasive when she noted that courts have blocked “free speech” rights for pro-life counselors in “bubble zones” surrounding abortion clinics — so why not protect grieving families of soldiers who died for our country?!

Personally, although I accept that there are good people and First Amendment-lovers on the other side of this issue, I would put this in a similar class with rejecting the supposed “free speech right” to burn the American flag. Having sad that, it would be foolhardy to ignore that there are plenty of homosexual activists and leftists who seriously would love to see the government censor all speech opposing homosexuality.

Let me echo Matt Barber’s observation about the Hard Left: with all their name-calling and nasty smears of religious opponents, pro-homosexual militants like Joe Jervis (of the blog “Joe.My.God.“); Pam Spaulding, the “Jeebus”-[Jesus]-hating lesbian and creator of the “Pam’s House Blend” blog; Rachel Maddow with her crude and cruel “Teabagger” rants, and Wayne (“Anything But Straight”) Besen, proud creator of the “Porno Pete” slur directed at yours truly, have more in common with Fred than they’d ever admit. — Peter LaBarbera, Americans For Truth

ACTION STEP: To make a donation to the father of slain Lt. Cpl. Michael Snyder, Al Snyder, who is battling the Westboro Baptist Church clan in court after his son’s funeral was protested by Phelps, go HERE.

Matt Barber, AFTAH Board Member, writes after the jump (some links were added that were not in the original piece):

Anything it takes: Truth Wins Out writer Evan Hurst slanders Mission America's Linda Harvey (above) -- and ALL Bible-believing Christians -- as "anti-Semitic at their core."

UPDATE: Evan Hurst of Truth Wins Out has issued a clarification in which he says he was mistaken to use the word “all” in his online statement: “Then again, all fundamentalist Christians are anti-semitic at their core, considering the fact that they actually believe their apocalyptical horseshit.”

Try as I might, I don’t think I could ever match the hatred that flows so naturally from the fingertips of “Truth Wins Out” (TWO) writer Evan Hurst. Granted, Hurst has a tall order rising to the Hate Quotient set by his boss and all-around Bad Boy of Buggery, Wayne Besen, but he’s really working hard to match Besen’s bluster. (By the way, Besen, who founded TWO, was an easy winner of AFTAH’s debut, 2009 “Gay Grinch of the Year” contest but due to unresolved copyright issues we never announced the winner; belated congrats, Wayne.)

Here’s Hurst turning a rant against my friend and Mission America founder Linda Harvey (and pro-family veteran Scott Lively) into a general attack on ALL Bible-believing Christians as “anti-Semitic.” Note the bold portion (our emphasis) in this comment found in the post, “TWO Exclusive: Linda Harvey’s Extremism On Display In Michigan”:

[Comment] # 14. Oh, and Linda, “Holocaust revisionism” does not only apply to direct anti-semitism. Of course, it could be argued that Scott Lively is anti-semitic since he co-opts the Holocaust in order to lie about gay people, to satisfy whatever mental illness he suffers from. In fact, yes, now that I think of it, his work IS anti-semitism, because it belittles the reality of the Holocaust in order to score points. And by supporting him, you are supporting that strain of anti-semitism.

(Then again, all fundamentalist Christians are anti-semitic at their core, considering the fact that they actually believe their apocalyptical horseshit.)

And you just parrot right along with it, because you’re too virulent to see that if your Jesus was here, he’d probably lay you out like the Pharisee you are.

Comment by Evan Hurst — March 29, 2010 @ 11:35 pm

My first impulse is to report Hurst and Truth Wins Out at once to the SPLC as bona fide haters for propounding such an obvious falsehood, but something tells me my complaint might get lost in the bureaucracy over there.

It’s easy to blame nasty and intolerant blog comments on crazed readers; after all, it’s soooo hard to keep track of each and every reader comment, we are told. But it’s much harder to explain away  “virulent” irrationality when the author is … one of your own writers! Surely Hurst is not unaware of the fact that the “fundamentalist” Christians he so obviously despises are historically a bastion of support for the State of Israel. (Probably just a cover for their internalized anti-Semitism, just as Christian conservatives’ opposition to homosexuality is a cover for their internalized homophobia.) Oh well. Something’s winning out over at TWO, but it’s not the “truth.” — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org

“When you say that your organization is no more hateful than the Catholic church, we have a rare point of agreement. You are both haters.” — Bob Schwartz, Gay Liberation Network

The Catholic Church should also be on the "hate" list, says Bob Schwartz of the Gay Liberation Network.

Bob Schwartz, a leader of the Gay Liberation Network, a Marxist “direct action” group that reportedly lobbied the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to mislabel Americans For Truth as a “hate” website, sent the e-mail below to AFTAH through our website. Schwartz describes himself as a Trotskyist (after Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, who advocated worldwide communist revolution before being assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940). Communists have such a long and storied history defending human rights and individual rights and dignity, you know.

Note that you don’t have to agree with the Catholic Church’s handing of its homosexual/pedophile crisis (most Catholics I know do not) to see the absurdity of labeling the church a “hater” because it defends traditional sexual morality and natural marriage between a man and a woman. The folly of the SPLC’s expanding “hate” dragnet is that it threatens to engulf all religious/moral opposition to homosexuality. Indeed, it would be revealing to query the top 25 “GLBT” activist across the nation and ask them if they would also label, as Matt Barber pokes fun HERE, the following as “hate groups”: Family Research Council, AFA, the Roman Catholic Church, Focus on the Family, the Southern Baptist Convention and ADF. (I posed the question to one young “gay” activist, Alex Blaze, HERE, and received no response.)

[Homosexual activists] Wayne Besen/Evan Hurst/Joe Jervis/Jeremy Hooper/Rea Carey/[insert GLBT activist here]: take up the challenge!

Yes, we’re all “haters” now (except the likes of Schwartz, despite his bully tactics and GLN’s ugly, anti-Christian bigotry). And just like ObamaCare is padding the rolls of the IRS to keep Americans in “compliance” with government “health” mandates, perhaps the SPLC needs an infusion of Obama stimulus funds to expand its already large staff and huge budget to accommodate its “reporting” on the ever-expanding “hate” network.

SPLC co-founder Morris Dees once fought the Klan. Now his group targets pro-family Christians opposed to homosexual activism. The SPLC, lobbied by a pro-Communist homosexual organization, labeled AFTAH a "hate site."

Click HERE to listen to an interview by Concerned Women for America’s Martha Kleder with Matt Barber, a Board Member of AFTAH and Liberty Council’s Director of Cultural Affairs. CWA writes (links added):

Reports surfaced this week about Democrat lawmakers receiving threatening phone calls following the vote on health care reform. Interestingly, those news reports mentioned the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which is noted for “tracking and exposing the activities of hate groups.” Also this week the SPLC named Americans for Truth about Homosexuality a hate group. With more on this overstep by SPLC and the wanton use of the term “hate” is Matt Barber, Director of Cultural Affairs for both the Liberty Counsel and Liberty Alliance Action.  Listen | Download

Pictured above is the 'hateful' and 'violence-prone' Matt Barber, Board Member of Americans For Truth, in his days as a professional boxer.

By J. Matt Barber

Though always left of center, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) once had a reputation as a fairly objective civil rights group. Founded by direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees and partner Joseph Levin Jr. in 1971, the SPLC made important and honorable contributions to many of the historic civil rights gains of the 20th Century. According to its own materials, the SPLC was “internationally known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate groups.”

Alas, “power corrupts,” as it goes, and the SPLC, having amassed tremendous power and wealth over the years, has regrettably become corrupt to its core. By way of an ever-escalating wave of “us-versus-them” money-grubbing schemes, Today’s SPLC has morphed into a far-left political activist outfit, famous for promoting a panoply of extreme liberal causes.

Ken Silverstein, writing for Harper’s Magazine, addressed this untoward metamorphosis in 2000:

“Today’s SPLC spends most of its time – and money – on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. ‘He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,’ renowned anti-death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, ‘though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.’

“The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors,” continued Silverstein. “Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though [its fundraising literature] quite naturally omits that fact. … ‘Morris and I…shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money,’ recalls Dees’ business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). ‘We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich.’” (You say Fuller. I say Farmer. The two Millards say “call the whole thing off.”)

So, what happens when a dragon slayer – paid per dragon head – runs out of real dragons to slay? Well, he invents new ones, of course. Gotta keep those sprinklers-a-sprinklin.’ (According to Harper’s, “Dees bought a 200-acre estate appointed with tennis courts, a pool, and stables.” SPLC’s 2008 Form-990 shows net assets of over 219 million at the beginning of that year. Yup, there’s a spate to be made in the hate trade.)

Dear AFTAH Readers,

Homosexual activist Wayne Besen screams with a bullhorn into the window of Boston's Park Street Church, which was hosting an "ex-gay" seminar last April. Will the SPLC investigate virulent anti-Christian activists like Besen in its ostensible campaign against "hate"? How would the SPLC react if right-wing conservatives were to terrorize a homosexual church in the same way?

Well, now I think I’ve seen it all. A Chicago-based Marxist “direct action” group, the Gay Liberation Network (GLN) — which smears Chicago’s historic Moody Church as a “House of Hate,” attacks Catholic Cardinal Francis George as a “homophobe,” and compares the Boy Scouts to racist fringe groups  — has successfully lobbied the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to label AFTAH’s website a “hate site.” The GLN and its co-leader, Bob Schwartz, know a thing or two about hate: in 2005, Schwartz told me, as I was standing in opposition to a “gay youth” event in downtown Chicago, that he would have pushed me into the busy city street were it not for the presence nearby of my “friends,” the police. (Read my 2005 account as Executive Director for Illinois Family Institute HERE; imagine if I had made such a veiled, physical threat against Schwartz: I probably would have been arrested on “Hate Crime” charges right then and there.)

There are few things as sinister, and as cynical, as the Left’s manipulation of “hate” as a political weapon to malign Christians and patriotic, conservative Americans. Thankfully, it seems the only people taking the SPLC seriously anymore are the liberal media and hardened, ‘Move On’-types on the Left. The SPLC is a spent force when it comes to moral authority — and even some honest liberals are seeing through its disingenuous campaign to redefine morality as “hate” and “bigotry.” (Don’t look to the SPLC to investigate homosexual haters like Wayne Besen’s notoriously nasty “Truth Wins Out” anytime soon; Besen is shown at right screaming with a bullhorn into the window of Park Street Church in Boston; click here to read the MassResistance story on the shocking 2009 demonstration.)

GLN's Bob Schwartz knows about "hate" ....

The Left is so steeped in its own ideology and self-righteousness that it is oblivious to how out of step it is with everyday Americans. Sure, there are haters on the right like Fred (“God Hates Fags”) Phelps (who despicably pickets U.S. soldiers’ funerals, and whom AFTAH has repeatedly condemned). But there are far more haters on the Left, and they are much better organized and dangerous to American liberty than those on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

On behalf of Americans For Truth, I am gratified at the outpouring of support we have received from pro-family advocates across the country in response to the SPLC’s shenanigans. We’ll say it again: to defend historic Judeo-Christian moral norms is not “bigotry,” and to disagree with homosexual activists is not “hate.” You can contact the Southern Poverty Law Center HERE. God bless you. — Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org; e-mail us: americansfortruth@comcast.net>

Matt Barber’s statement on the SPLC follows the jump:

“Anti-bullying” bill now moves on to Mass. House – text is still troubling

Congratulations to the vigilant pro-family activists over at MassResistance for stopping this proposed “hate speech” provision in an “anti-bullying” bill (see the proposed text in box at right). It is victories like this that made it easy for me to praise this gutsy organization and its founder, Brian Camenker (and MR blogger Amy Contrada) as a speaker at their recent fund-raising banquet.

For years — no, decades — homosexual activists have been telling us that their agenda (oops, I forgot…there is no “gay agenda”) does not pose a threat to freedom. Then we watched in Canada as religious critics of homosexuality were forced to defend themselves against “discrimination” suits brought through Orwellian government “human rights” tribunals — simply for expressing their beliefs against homosexuality. To label these state-sanctioned spectacles  “nuisance suits” would be to trivialize the great harm they have done to their innocent victims. Meanwhile, in Britain and Sweden, Christians also faced government oppression for opposing homosexuality. Other countries stand poised to criminalize “homophobia.”

The silence among American homosexual activists against this escalating PRO-“gay” oppression has been deafening. After all, justifying state censorship of your critics isn’t easy when you’re playing the victim card.

And now we see the first, rudimentary attempts at legislating a “hate speech” regime here in the United States. Consider the removed paragraph above in light of the common homosexualist accusation that groups like Mass Resistance and Americans For Truth “hate gays.” Self-described “queer” militants routinely equate traditional religious tenets or moral beliefs with hatred (all the while demonstrating consistent “malice” of their own with abundant lies and nasty smears against pro-family opponents).