New Platform Launched for Christians to Speak out in Favor of LGBT Equality

MEDIA ADVISORY - September 4, 2013

Affirming Christians Directly Challenge the False Idea That all Christians are Anti-Gay, by Proclaiming That we are ‘Not All Like That’

The NALT Christians Project (NotAllLikeThat.org) was launched today, giving Christians everywhere an opportunity to rise up and proclaim their unconditional love and support for their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends and family members. This new movement, inspired by Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project, encourages LGBT-affirming Christians to upload videos that unapologetically express their full acceptance of LGBT people.

This project was created by Christian author John Shore and Truth Wins Out, a non-profit organization that counters religious extremism. It will be an online platform that directly challenges the idea that anti-gay Christians represent all or even most of the Christian faithful. The project kicks-off with a promotional video from author and advocate Dan Savage.



Co-sponsors of the project include: Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, Auburn Theological Seminary, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry, Covenant Network of Presbyterians, The Evangelical Network, Faith in America, GLAD Alliance, Many Voices, Methodists in New Directions, and Reconciling Ministries Network.

“We are playing a symphony inspired by Christ’s Great Commandment that all of his followers love our neighbors as we love ourselves,” said NALT co-founder John Shore. “If you’re an LGBT-affirming Christian, there is a seat waiting for you in the orchestra of The NALT Christians Project.”

“The NALT Christians Project aims to inspire Christian LGBT allies to move their support from the shadows into the public square,” said Wayne Besen, Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director. “Through their NALT videos, Christians will put their values into action, and lead the clarion, Bible-based call for freedom and justice for all people.”


This project will also send a powerful message of encouragement to LGBT youth who are growing up in unsupportive environments.

“This project is designed to reach people like myself when I was sixteen and growing up in a conservative religious community,” said NALT Christians Project co-founder and Truth Wins Out Associate Director Evan Hurst. “I wish I had known about the millions of loving Christians who take Jesus’ teachings seriously, and if this project can help keep LGBT youth from the spiritual turmoil of being convinced they are hell-bound simply for being who they are, then we’ve done our jobs.”

Frequently, well-intentioned progressive Christians approach LGBT people to say high-profile fundamentalist Christians who dominate the airwaves do not speak for them, because they believe in equality for their LGBT brothers and sisters. Dan Savage has dubbed these folks “NALT Christians,” because they often say that they are “not all like that,” meaning they are not anti-gay. Savage and others began telling these well meaning folks, “Don’t tell us you’re not all like that. Tell the National Organization for Marriage’s Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown. Tell the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins you’re not all like that. Tell the media. Tell your friends in church. Go online and tell the world.” The NALT Christians Project is the embodiment of this critically important idea.

If your organization is interested in co-sponsoring The NALT Christians Project, please contact John Shore, john@johnshore.com.

The Gay Agenda In Small Town America

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Waiting For An Apology From The American Family Association Of Pennsylvania

Truth Wins Out Commends Former Exodus Lobbyist Randy Thomas For Apologizing to the LGBT Community

Ex-Gay Activist Says He's Sorry For The Hurt and Harm He Caused While At Exodus

BURLINGTON, Vt. - Truth Wins Out commended Exodus International's former political lobbyist, Randy Randy Thomas older Thomas, today after he apologized to the LGBT community for inflicting harm and increasing hate during his tenure at Exodus International, which was the largest "ex-gay" organization until it shut down last month. Thomas is the fourth major "ex-gay" leader to apologize in the past two years.

"We are gratified that Randy Thomas has begun the process of taking personal responsibility for his key role in damaging the lives of many innocent people," said Truth Wins Out's Executive Director Wayne Besen. "He is a key player in this industry and his admission will help keep future generations from walking down the treacherous ex-gay path."

According to Thomas in his apology:

"I participated in the hurtful echo chamber of condemnation. I gave lip service to the gay community, but really did not exemplify compassion for them. I placed the battle over policy above my concern for real people. I sometimes valued the shoulder pats I was given by religious leaders more than Jesus' commandment to love and serve. That was wrong and I'm disappointed in myself. Please forgive me."

"I was, in a sense, attracted to this kind of power and allowed my conscience to be numbed so I could have a seat at their table. In the name of trying to positively affect Christian leaders, I willingly became one of their pawns. Again, I was selfish and prideful. Please forgive me."

In his apology, Thomas specifically expressed regret for working to further the career of Andrew Comiskey, the head of Desert Stream Ministries and one of the vilest "ex-gay" activists in the industry. In the past, Comiskey has claimed that "Satan delights in homosexual perversion" and whose "ministry" has continually been shadowed by allegations of sexual abuse committed by staff members.

"Randy's realization that folks like Andrew Comiskey are chief instigators of hatred against LGBT people echoes Alan Chambers' earlier reference to many anti-gay activists as 'vipers,'" said Truth Wins Out Associate Director Evan Hurst. "As a movement, the anti-gay forces in the United States and around the world are known, not for their Christian love, but for the fact that their grace extends only to those who submit to their orthodoxy and supremacy without question. The second the human heart enters the equation, the Religious Right bare its fangs. We applaud Randy for taking this important step to start the healing and prevent future harm to LGBT people."

Thomas, a rising star in the "ex-gay" industry, began his career by leading Living Hope ministry in Dallas. He Randy Thomas was soon recruited as Vice President of Communications, and moved to Exodus International's Orlando headquarters. Thomas eventually took on the role of chief lobbyist, where he reached his pinnacle in 2006, when he and Exodus International President, Alan Chambers, attended a White House meeting with President George W. Bush to push for the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Thomas fought tenaciously against the successful inclusion of sexual orientation in the federal hate crime law. He appeared in an infamous newspaper ad under the inflammatory headline, "Hate crime laws say we were more valuable as homosexuals than we are now as former homosexuals." He was also a key speaker at Focus on the Family's ex-gay road show, Love Won Out.

While Thomas did not come out as gay, his apology was a good first step. He also wrote on Truth Wins Out's website that, "I will be sharing more about my thoughts concerning what has happened, personally, and from my perspective in the movement."

In the past two years, Alan Chambers, John Paulk, John Smid, and now Randy Thomas have all issued apologies, rocking the "ex-gay" industry to its core. Unfortunately, new groups like Restored Hope Network and Voice of the Voiceless have risen to fill the vacuum. The recent apologies, however, undermine the credibility of these new "ex-gay" organizations and complicate their efforts, says TWO.


Truth Wins Out is a nonprofit organization that fights anti-LGBT extremism. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality.

How Long Will Venango County Remain Silent About Being Home To Its Own Purveyor Of Hate, the American Family Association of Pennsylvania?

What Is the Endgame of the Anti-Gay Movement?

by Wayne Besen, Truth Wins Out - The Huffington Post, May 23, 2013:

As if intending to justify the need for the International Day Against Homophobia, a vicious mob of more than 20,000 homophobes attacked 50 gay rights advocates who were commemorating this event in Tbilisi, Georgia. According to The New York Times, the attack was "led by priests in black robes" who "surged through police cordons" and "swarmed the busses" where the gay activists ran so that they could be evacuated.

"They wanted to kill all of us," said Irakli Vacharadze, the head of Identoba, the Tbilisi-based gay rights advocacy group that organized the event.

After the initial horror of the attack, I felt a powerful sense of relief. Finally, the world saw the unscrubbed underbelly of religious persecution against LGBT people in broad daylight. In Tbilisi, there were no sophisticated church PR gurus drafting saccharine statements to hide the hideousness of depraved minds and wicked hearts. There were no insincere attempts to spin the spite by laughably claiming to "love the sinner" but "hate the sin." What the world saw was a rare glimpse of would-be killers for Christ unplugged in their full glory.

We should be grateful for this peek at unfiltered prejudice, because most indoctrination and incitement takes place in the shadows. What people often fail to comprehend is that a colossal industry exists to demonize gay people, including numerous attempts to create conditions where homosexuals are imprisoned, assaulted and even murdered.

It is not just at the fringes of Christianity where calls for violence occur but in organizations that are considered mainstream. In January, for example, Campus Crusade for Christ (which recently rebranded itself with the hipper-sounding name Cru) sponsored an evangelism conference in Lagos, Nigeria. At the event, Dr. Seyoum Antonios, the head of United for Life Ethiopia, incited the crowd to frenzy, shouting multiple times that "Africa will become a graveyard for homosexuality!"

Antonios can't simply be dismissed as a renegade speaker, because two high-ranking vice presidents in the Campus Crusade international organization, Bekele Shanko and Dela Adedevoh, organized the conference. They invited Antonios to speak even though it was widely known that he led a movement to legislate the death penalty for LGBT people in Ethiopia.

The question is why an American organization that is currently on 1,600 college campuses, with extensive outreach within the U.S. military too, is giving a platform to an aspiring murder. It seems that the policy for groups like Cru is to persecute homosexuals to the full extent that a country allows them to get away with. Of course, this raises the question of what they would do to gays in America if given free rein.

If this is just a misunderstanding, then Cru should send a powerful message by apologizing for hosting Antonios and immediately cutting ties with Bekele Shanko and Dela Adedevoh. If advocating persecution and murder of LGBT people in Africa is indeed part of Cru's mission, then college administrators and military officials should strongly reevaluate whether this organization belongs in their institutions.

Of course, unlike the barbarians who bared their teeth in Tbilisi, we fully expect Cru to disingenuously split hairs and say that the organization did not promote violence, because it advocated a "graveyard for homosexuality" and not homosexuals.

That's an interesting concept; it's much like claiming that a campaign to wipe out Judaism won't harm Jews. I'd love to know the last time homosexuality was convicted of a crime and sent to jail while the gay person walked out of the courthouse free. I'd love Cru to show me tombstones dedicated to homosexuality that do not also have the rickety bones of a slain gay man or lesbian resting six feet below.


We can look at foreign anti-gay violence and discrimination and blithely conclude, "It could not happen here." However, the dehumanization of LGBT people, on a smaller scale, happens every single day in America. (Pictured at left, Diane Gramley, President of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania.)

It occurred last week when a thug shot and killed Mark Carson in Greenwich Village for being gay. It happened when Edie Windsor was slammed with a $363,053 inheritance tax bill after her partner of 42 years, Thea Clara Spyer, passed away. (A straight surviving spouse would not have had to pay.)

We witnessed injustice in Columbus, Ohio, this week after Carla Hale, a lesbian gym teacher at a Catholic school, was fired after 18 years of service because her mother's newspaper obituary had outed her by mentioning her partner. We can see the vindictiveness in the senators who threaten to derail immigration reform if it includes gay couples, which would essentially ruin lives and tear families apart.

People can only perpetrate such vile deeds when they consider homosexuals to be inferior. In most of these cases, there is a sadistic joy of inflicting pain and punishment on LGBT individuals when they are already suffering, such as after a parent or partner's death.

Until religious leaders stop portraying the LGBT population as subhuman, we can expect more atrocities, whether in Tbilisi, Lagos or Greenwich Village.

First LGBT State Legislator in Pennsylvania Comes Out

Republican Rep. Mike Fleck Becomes

First Openly Gay Legislator in Pennsylvania History

from The Keystone Student Voice:

HARRISBURG – The Pennsylvania Student Equality Coalition (PSEC) and LGBT youth across Pennsylvania commend Republican State Rep. Mike Fleck (R-81) for coming out today, becoming the first openly LGBT lawmaker in the Keystone State. Not only is Fleck the first and only legislator currently in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly who is openly gay, he is also one of only two openly gay Republican state legislators nationwide.

This is a historic and significant event for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. A Pennsylvania General Assembly that reflects the true diversity of her citizens is a better state for us all. Fleck said he hopes his openness will help others better understand the journey people have to take to live an authentic life, according to the Huntington Daily News.

Rep. Fleck represents a largely conservative and rural district stretching over Blair, Huntingdon, and Mifflin counties in Central Pennsylvania. In the breaking article in his local paper today, he noted that he remains committed to the same political ideals as before the announcement, as he has since he was first elected in 2006.

PSEC has been proud to work with Rep. Fleck. Prior to his big announcement, Rep. Fleck was already a friend of PSEC as a cosponsor of the Pennsylvania Safe Schools Act (HB 2636), which is a landmark anti-bullying bill to update Pennsylvania’s weak safe schools statute. Supporters of the PASS Act have appreciated considerable diversity of cosponsors, in terms of political affiliation, gender, and now–as of today–sexual orientation.

“Rep. Fleck has made history in becoming the first openly gay member of the Pennsylvania legislature. We could not be more proud of his courageous decision to be open and affirming of his identity.” said PSEC Executive Director Jason Landau Goodman.

PSEC wrote personally to Rep. Fleck on the day of his announcement. “On behalf of the thousands of LGBT youth we represent across the state, we thank you for coming forward and becoming a role model for us.”

PSEC is excited to continue working with Rep. Fleck in helping make the Commonwealth a better place for all Pennsylvanians, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Role Models and other Glimpses of Self

A Message from Betty Hill, Executive Director of the Persad Center, the nation’s second oldest licensed counseling center specifically created to serve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community:


Barbara Grier, lesbian-themed novelist and publisher, died this week. She and 3 other women founded Naiad Press in 1973 which she is quoted as saying “to publish books about lesbians who love lesbians and where the girl is not just going through a phase.”

She was overwhelmed by the volume of orders for her books. While she was surprised at the demand, I am not. Think about the thrill of a young lesbian who finds a story that reflects how she thinks and feels and loves in the world in the midst of a lifetime of stories and books where she is out of place and cannot relate.

It speaks to me about the need for evidence and reflection that is hungered for by a population of people who are made invisible in their world.


Heterosexism is institutionalized isolation. In heterosexism, it isn’t just that GLBTQ people are a minority and so you don’t run into them as much as heterosexual people; there is deliberateness about omitting any signs of the minority population’s existence. It sends the message that there isn’t just fewer of you, “we wish there weren’t any of you.”

GLBTQ people are seeking signs of their existence and of their realities. You figure out who you are in the world by seeing signs of yourself in others and in aspiring to bring into life what sparks as a glimmer of you in people you admire. Barbara Grier brought stories of lives that were glimmers of hope to the reality and existence of women who love women.



We need visible signs and safe spaces to sort out our way of relating in the world.

This can happen in small and everyday ways where we acknowledge and name the relationship between a family member and his partner, or where we include the possibility that some kids may want bring a same-sex partner to the school dance, or while we watch “Dancing with the Stars” that we talk about the challenges of being transgender, and we make information available to young people about sexual or gender orientation.

Persad works with organizations to help them eliminate institutional heterosexism and homophobia. We can conduct on-site assessments of environments, policies, practices and staff /worker attitudes and understanding, as well as to assist in achieving goals to improve diversity and inclusion.

THE PROPAGANDISTS: Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association and the Demonization of LGBT People

The Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association, the Mississippi-based Hate Group that is the focus of a disturbing new Intelligence Report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, summarized below, is based in Venango County. (The AFAofPA's activities are chronicled in the Emmy Award-winning film "Out In The Silence.")


It is from Venango County where vicious attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are broadcast (on the airwaves of American Family Radio station WAWN, 89.5 FM, Franklin), and it is from Venango County where the AFA of PA's president, Diane Gramley (pictured), launches vitriolic attacks and smear campaigns against LGBT people and their allies across the state.

Until Venango County's elected representatives, opinion leaders, and other voices of influence publicly denounce this organization's hateful and harmful activities, it must be assumed that they condone them.

In this case, cowardly silence must be seen as support.

THE PROPAGANDISTS:
Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association & the Demonization of LGBT People

Executive Summary

The American Family Association (AFA) is one of most powerful religious-right groups in the nation, with a $20 million budget, a network of 200 radio stations and two Internet television channels. Its spokespersons have appeared on all major networks and cable news channels, and in leading print and radio media. It is also one of the leading purveyors of lies about LGBT people and homosexuality.

The AFA has come under fire repeatedly over the years since it was founded in 1977 by the Rev. Donald Wildmon, who was sharply criticized in the 1980s for suggesting that obscene content on television and in the movies is largely due to the media being con- trolled by Jews. It once demanded that an openly gay Arizona congressman be barred from speaking at the Republican National Convention and suggested that he be arrested under a state law criminalizing sodomy. It regularly attacked corporations like Disney, which it described as a “two-faced” company that “welcomed hordes of homosexuals to celebrate their sexual perversions.”


But in the last three years, since hiring a radical Idaho preacher named Bryan Fischer (pictured) as its director of issue analysis, the AFA has gone even further. Since moving to Mississippi to join the group, Fischer has declared that “homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler … the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews” — a complete falsehood, as any historian knows. He has suggested that gay sex be recriminalized. He has routinely claimed that gay men molest children at rates far higher than those of heterosexual men — another falsehood, as all the relevant professional scientific associations have long agreed. Fischer has said that President Obama “nurtures a hatred for the white man” and suggested that welfare incentivizes black “people who rut like rabbits.” He has said that non-Christian religions “have no First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion,” claimed that the “sexual immorality of Native Americans” was part of what made them “morally disqualified from sovereign control of
American soil,” and suggested that the best way to deal with promiscuity would be to kill the promiscuous.

Words like these have consequences. While the AFA would certainly deny it, it seems obvious that its regular demonizing of members of the LGBT community as child molesters and the like creates an atmosphere where violence is all but inevitable. And that violence is dramatic. A study by the Southern Poverty Law Center found, based on an analysis of 14 years of FBI hate crime data, that LGBT people were by far the American minority most victimized by such crimes. They were more than twice as likely to be attacked in a violent hate crime as Jews or black people, and four times as likely as Muslims. And that doesn’t take into account the anti-gay bullying that has resulted in so many recent teen suicides.

Based on the foregoing and other evidence, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last year began listing the AFA as a hate group. The listing, as was said at the time, was based on the group’s use of known falsehoods to attack and demonize members of the LGBT community — not, as some have gratuitously claimed, because the organization is Christian, or because it opposes same-sex marriage, or because it believes that the Bible describes homosexual practice as a sin.

Many thoughtful Christian commentators have said as much. Warren Throckmorton, a respected professor and past president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association, wrote last year that the AFA and other “newly labeled hate groups” were seeking to “avoid addressing the issues the SPLC raised, instead preferring to attack the credibility of the SPLC.” Reviewing an SPLC list of myths propagated by anti-gay religious-right groups, he said many are “provably false” and “rooted in ignorance.” The criticisms, Throckmorton concluded, are “legitimate and have damaged the credibility of the groups on the list. Going forward, I hope Christians don’t rally around these groups but rather call them to accountability.”

We hope public figures will do the same.

The Tipping Point on LGBT Equality Has Arrived

by Wayne Besen for Truth Wins Out:

A couple of week ago I wrote, “The war over gay rights in America and other modern nations has been largely won. Too many people have come out of the closet and will never go back in for the clock to be turned back.”


This trend towards acceptance has only accelerated since my column and may have reached a tipping point. New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote about a new Gallup Poll that found, for the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. Also, for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do.

Blow attributes these advancements to LGBT people coming out and the realization that it is primarily weirdoes and socially stunted hypocrites who are obsessed or threatened by homosexuality.

“Virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality,” wrote Blow. “Many heterosexual men see this, and they don’t want to be associated with it. It’s like being antigay is becoming the old gay. Not cool.”

Blow is correct. Normal, healthy, functional heterosexuals do not become paranoid or fixated on homosexuals. It is primarily people with sexual hang-ups, extreme religious indoctrination or deep, dark secrets that are preoccupied and consumed by the sexual orientation of others.

Of course, this does not mean that all supporters of civil rights for LGBT people are comfortable with the idea of gay sex. The good news is they don’t have to be. While speaking across the nation I have found an easy way of diffusing this issue. I ask the crowd to look at people they assume are heterosexual in the audience. Then, I ask if they would want to see all of the people they stared at having sexual intercourse.

The answer is inevitably and resoundingly, “No”. Then, I simply make the point that there are many people, heterosexual and homosexual, they would not want to witness in bed. And, they never have to unless they elect to do so – making any objections in terms of the “ick” factor moot. As simple as this sounds, it works and audiences “get it.”

Adding momentum to the LGBT struggle for equality is a cute McDonald’s television commercial in France that dealt with a teenager who had not yet told his father he was gay. The message of the campaign is, “come as you are, just leave a little fatter.” Okay, I added the last part.

While such an ad is not likely to air in the United States anytime soon, it does not have to in order to have a positive impact. Thanks to the Internet and talk shows, millions of people will see the ad and associate the message with their beloved Golden Arches.

Speaking of the impact of social media, in Newsweek, Joshua Alston made the case that websites such as Facebook are accelerating the demise of the closet. He wrote about the, “painstaking labor that goes into being secretly gay in the age of information sharing.” His advice to a friend who was outed by a seemingly innocuous tweet: “if you want to be in the closet, you can’t be on Facebook and Twitter.”


Crucial to the sudden surge of success is the falling of ugly stereotypes, such as the old canard that LGBT people are a threat to children. This week, the research journal, Pediatrics, published a study by Nanette Gartrell, a professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco and Henry Bos, a behavioral scientist at University of Amsterdam. The article discussed a landmark study that measured the long-term affects on children who were raised by lesbian parents.

“We simply expected to find no difference in psychological adjustment between adolescents reared in lesbian families and the normative sample of age-matched controls,” says Gartrell. “I was surprised to find that on some measures we found higher levels of [psychological] competency and lower levels of behavioral problems. It wasn’t something I anticipated.”

Finally, The Human Rights Campaign reports that Kaiser Permanente updated its Patients’ Bill of Rights to fully protect LGBT patients and their families from discrimination. These changes make Kaiser Permanente the first large health network to have a fully inclusive non-discrimination policy for LGBT people.

Sure, full legal equality may take two decades and the battle against bigotry will last forever. But, there is no denying that the LGBT movement is on the move like never before. The homophobes are finally the minority and appearing more secluded and deluded by the day. It’s not time to crack open a bottle of champagne, but feel free to treat your self to a cold beer and appreciate the progress.