You can purchase an autographed copy of Anything But Straight by sending a $35 check or money order to:
-------------------------
Wayne Besen
PO Box 25491
Brooklyn, NY 11202
As others have noted, it's disturbing that after 7 murders, 17 attempted murders, 41 bombings, 175 acts of arson and hundreds of cases of death threats, stalking, assault, and break-ins, Palin doesn't think it's appropriate to use the T-word.
10 Comments
The Dump Coalition held a press conference in Chicago on Oct. 16, 2008. Representatives from the Gay Liberation Network, Truth Wins Out, PFLAG and Equality Illinois took part.
It was held outside the Renaissance Chicago Hotel, where a protest will be held on Nov. 8, 2008 against the Museum of Broadcast Communications, which plans to induct Focus on the Family's James Dobson into its Radio Hall of Fame.
I once had a revealing conversation with an A-list news reporter, when I was trying to convince him to cover the scientific distortions of Focus on the Family's James Dobson. He declined to do so because he felt that Dobson lies so frequently that it wasn't news.
With the media inured to Dobson's Fib Factory and its assembly line of lies, it is difficult for the truth to gain traction. I believe, however, that the press has it backwards. Each nugget of nonsense peddled by ideologues, such as Dobson, should be on the front page of every newspaper and lead daily newscasts. Allowing falsehoods to fester has created a cynical political climate where truth is whatever a press release says it is.
This lack of accountability has allowed Dobson, and others of his ilk, to portray themselves as spokespersons for morality, even though they are regularly engaged in glaring examples of moral turpitude. Occasionally, they are even honored for their sinister "success" and showered with undeserved adulation.
For example, on Nov. 8, the Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC) is scheduled to induct Dobson into its Radio Hall of Fame in celebration of his unquestionable broadcasting achievements. He regularly appears on 3,000 radio stations across the world and has built a $150 million anti-gay empire in Colorado Springs.
The MBC says that Dobson's longevity and success qualify him for honors, even though they will essentially be bronzing his bigotry. In my view, the Radio Hall of Fame devalues its worth when it blithely honors a broadcaster with an amoral indifference to content and good character. Dobson's self-righteous ranting about gay people overrides his ratings and the prejudice he perpetuates overshadows his popularity. If Major League Baseball can keep superstar Pete Rose out of its Hall of Fame because of integrity issues, its broadcasting counterpart can rescind its invitation to Dobson.
The MBC takes the antiseptic, hands-off view that Dobson's red meat is meaningless blather that affects no one. They seem to believe that gay people are not harmed when the millions of devout listeners hear Dobson bellow that gay marriage will, "destroy the earth." Or, that no one will seek revenge on gay people after Dobson shrieks, "For more than 40 years, the homosexual activist movement has sought to implement a master plan that has had as its centerpiece the utter destruction of the family."
Thanks to such inflammatory rhetoric, hate crimes against gay people still occur daily. According to 2006 FBI statistics, hate crimes based on sexual orientation constituted the third highest category reported and made up 15.5 percent of all reported hate crimes. Only race-based and religion-based prejudice crimes were more prevalent than hate crimes based on sexual orientation.
While Dobson does not outright call for violence, he does use his "ex-gay" ministry, Love Won Out, to portray GLBT people, as immoral reprobates who could choose to change if they weren't too stubborn to accept God. By positioning homosexuality as a behavior that can be prayed away, he is offering people a way to justify discriminatory and even violent behavior -- all in the guise of loving the sinner.
What Dobson fails to tell his listeners is that efforts to alter sexual orientation are considered damaging by the American Psychiatric Association, The American Medical Association, The American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
One also wonders why the MBC would honor Dobson until it had fully investigated serious allegations that he distorted scientific research. In the past two years, seven prominent scientists have demanded that he stop citing their work because he misrepresented their conclusions on homosexuality. New York University educational psychologist, Carol Gilligan, PhD., appeared in a video saying that Dobson "was not truthful" and that he should "refrain from ever quoting me again." Dr. Kyle Pruett, a professor of child psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine claimed Dobson "cherry picked" his conclusions. University of Minnesota's Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H. wrote a letter to Dobson that clamed he engaged in "a gross misrepresentation of our research."
Finally, Andrew Colvin, 16, contacted me a week ago. He had recently come out to his mother who he says listens to James Dobson's radio show. Instead of accepting her son, she gave Andrew Focus on the Family's anti-gay books. Thanks to Dobson, things became so tense that Andrew moved out of his mother's home in Colorado to live with his father in Arizona.
Sadly, America is littered with stories, such as Andrew's, where Dobson has taken his microphone and turned it into a club to bludgeon families. The pain is raw and the scars are real. Yet, this cruel reality will be supplanted by a Disneyfied version in the Radio Hall of Fame, where Dobson's viciousness will be euphemized as "virtues" and "values."
The MBC should stop pandering to the right wing and do the right thing by dumping Dobson from its Radio Hall of Fame. And, the media should start doing its job by holding Dobson accountable. Let's focus on the facts and stop peddling the fiction that James Dobson's actions are worthy of anything but condemnation.
** To help protest the Radio Hall of Shame, please visit: Dump Dobson.com
Ex-Gay Watch reported today that anti-gay activist Greg Quinlan's wife of three years, Cheryl Quinlan, appears to have received a decree of divorce in May of 2007, having filed the initial complaint seventeen months earlier.
Who can blame her? From my personal experience, Greg Quinlan is one of the most insufferable, dishonest and phony anti-gay zealots in the nation.
The Quinlan family shamelessly paraded their marriage through the media to prove that people could "pray away the gay." Greg exploited his union in a successful political effort to ban gay people from marrying in Ohio. He and Cheryl also capitalized on their wedding by appearing in Dr. Warren Throckmorton's hopeless "ex-gay" movie, "I Do Exist." That Throckmorton hasn't burned the remaining copies of this humiliating train wreck in a giant bonfire (or, more appropriately, Hellfire) says all you need to know about his values and morality.
Now, instead of being honest about his failed marriage to an "ex-lesbian," Quinlan, also an "ex-gay" poster boy, slunk out of Ohio in the dead of night and went to work for the New Jersey Family Policy Council. When you go to the group's website, they have much to say about gay people. However, notably missing from the"issues" section of the site are editorials about divorce. Perhaps, now that Quinlan has personal experience in this arena, he can contribute to the commentary. He can begin by writing an essay on why Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, but was quite clear that divorce was unacceptable.
I want to know why Quinlan is still working for a "pro-family" organization, when the one family unit he was responsible for - he destroyed. Who does this hypocrite think he is to tell me or anyone else how to run their family? Aside from wrecking a marriage, what makes this holier-than-thou busybody an expert? It seems he would get his own house in order before preaching to others. But, unfortunately, these types who fight their inner-demons by attacking others on the public stage can never mind their own business.
The first time I heard of Quinlan is when I worked for the Human Rights Campaign in 1998. The ambitious ex-gay activist tried to climb the career ladder by lying about his past. He said that he had worked for HRC, when in reality, no one had ever heard of him. Instead of apologizing, he kept repeating this lie, as if by mere repetition it would become true.
My next run-in with Quinlan came on a television show when he seemed a little "off" and tried to shout me down. After the show, I pointed out that he still seemed stereotypically gay, which sent him into a tizzy. For a decade, Quinlan has been railing at me for pointing out the obvious -- he does not appear to be heterosexual. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this, unless you are Quinlan and make your living as an ex-gay activist who strives (and apparently fails) to appear as a beacon of masculinity.
My saga with Quinlan continued in 2006, when he was working with the bizarre group, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX), which sponsored an "Ex-Gay Educators Caucus" booth at the National Education Association's annual convention in Orlando. After Truth Wins Out held a press conference condemning the Ex-Gay Educators Caucus (which is a front and Trojan Horse for anti-gay political organizations), I peacefully walked into the exhibition hall and up to their booth.
I asked one simple question to the activists, "How many educators were part of the ex-gay caucus?" Upon asking, I was physically accosted by Quinlan. Ironically, he had called security on me, even though he was the hostile party. When security arrived, he made up a fake story and I was forced to leave the conference. (It is important to make clear that I had previously and subsequently been to dozens of ex-gay and anti-gay conferences without incident.)
This Orwellian scenario was to become a pattern with PFOX and Quinlan. They intentionally inflame situations and then call security and act as if they were innocent actors, when they were really the instigators. Their perverse goal is to portray so-called "ex-gays" as victims and create phony martyrs that could be shamelessly flogged in the media -- much like Quinlan's doomed marriage.
PFOX pulled this unseemly stunt last year at a Virginia fair -- claiming that an ex-gay at their booth was assaulted, when the incident likely never took place. After weeks of denying an incident occurred at the fair, the police belatedly said that something happened. However, the police have no perpetrator, no arrests, no witnesses and simply repeated PFOX's uncorroborated claims. It is truly amazing how such a boisterous "assault" could go unnoticed at the busy fairgrounds.
Only weeks after the alleged fair incident, PFOX and Quinlan badly undermined their credibility and martyr strategy. PFOX had another booth at a fair in Falls Church, Virginia. Curious, the publisher of the Falls Church News Press, Nicholas Benton, (disclosure, I write a column for the newspaper) came up to the PFOX booth to photograph it for his next edition. Quinlan did not know who Benton was -- and preceded to threaten to have him arrested for inciting violence and a hate crime. The embarrassing incident exposed the PFOX strategy of crying wolf and showed Quinlan's propensity for storytelling.
Last week, PFOX allegedly filed a lawsuit with the DC Office of Human Rights, once again falsely portraying ex-gays as victims who needed legal protection. Furthermore, it now appears that PFOX may not have even filed a real lawsuit, making their claim to have done so their latest, empty publicity stunt. (The jury is still open on this matter and by press time, PFOX has yet to clarify the situation)
PFOX and Quinlan are the bottom of the barrel of ex-gay activists. His divorce -- and cover up of the incident -- speaks to his lack of character and utter hypocrisy. It is time Quinlan step down and get a real job, because his twisted morality play has come to an end. He now has been reduced to a self-righteous sinner who makes a living browbeating others into living up to a standard in which he notably failed.
An effort to rewrite the Florida Constitution to prohibit gay marriage is falling short of the numbers needed for victory in the Nov. 4 election, a Sun Sentinel and Florida Times-Union poll shows. The poll of 600 likely voters shows support for Amendment 2 at 53 percent, less than the 60 percent approval rate required to change the constitution.
Amendment 1 is the only other ballot measure that would remove a provision from the Florida Constitution. It would repeal a clause that allows legislators to ban Asian immigrants from owning land.
Florida is the last state in the nation with a so-called "alien land law," a standard drawn in 1926 to target Japanese immigrants. Legislators never invoked this authority, however, and it couldn't be enforced today because of equal-protection laws.
Supporters describe Amendment 1 as a symbolic vote to remove racism and discrimination from the constitution.
In the poll, 44 percent favored removing the discriminatory language, while 37 percent were opposed and 19 percent were not sure.
Well, folks, that is exactly why human rights should never be on the ballot. In 2008, 37 percent of Floridians still want to discriminate against Asians. One wonders if we put a ballot measure in California to ban Mormon marriage, if it would pass? Perhaps, if we lose in California, the strategy should be to make anti-gay groups pay - by putting their rights up for a vote? Just something to think about....
