Hatred & The History of Social Conservatism

By Ron Hill, from Pam's House Blend:

1860: Social Conservatives claim that slavery is supported by the Bible. Churches even split to create the Southern Baptist and the Methodist Church, South; completely separate denominations from Northern churches. Social Conservatives claim that tradition, history and religion are on their side.

Social conservatives lose. Society doesn't devolve into race wars as predicted by social conservatives.

1919: Social Conservatives use the Bible, morality, and family, to argue for prohibition. Social Conservatives win.Violence ensues in many large American cities as gangs fight to bring alcohol to people. Moonshining takes off, creating more crime and unsafe unregulated alcohol poisons many Americans.

1920: Social Conservatives use the Bible, history and tradition to justify why women should be denied the right to vote.

Social conservatives lose. Women get the right to vote. Society doesn't fall apart as predicted by social conservatives.

1933: After seeing the results of prohibition, the country votes to legalize alcohol. Social Conservatives lose. Violence and accidental poisoning drops off as America becomes a safer and freer country.

1955: Social Conservatives claim Elvis and Rock and Roll are evil and will lead to mayhem and a breakdown in the social order. Movies are evil, and playing cards are a sin. Social Conservatives lose; Rock and Roll is still around, Elvis Presley didn't lead young people into Satan Worship. Society continues to function.

1964: Social Conservatives argue that the Bible, tradition, and history justify Jim Crow in the South. They warn that society will fall apart if blacks are given equal rights with white Americans.

Social Conservatives lose, society doesn't fall apart but becomes stronger.

1980's - present: Social Conservatives take over school boards in the South, and insist that "abstinence only" sex education be taught, despite overwhelming research that "abstinence only" sex ed is a huge failure.

Society loses, especially Southern families, as Southerners lead the nation in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, and unwed mothers. Nonetheless, social conservatives claim to be "pro-family".

2000- present: The Family "Research" Council, The American Family Association, and Americans For "Truth" About Homosexuality are used as "expert" witnesses by reputable media despite lacking any academic or scientific credentials that would qualify them as experts on gay issues. Like their predecessors, they use the Bible, history and tradition to defend their positions, along with a healthy dose of lies, distortions and fake research. Eventually, these groups are labeled as "hate groups" by the KKK and Aryan-Nation busting Southern Poverty Law Center because of their repeated lies and distortions of truth. Nonetheless, the media continue to use them as "expert" witnesses and many Republican presidential candidates continue to associate with, and defend them.


Society loses, as social conservatives twist facts to support their own private religious beliefs. American families are directly harmed by these "pro-family" groups who teach Americans lies about their own family members.

Fortunately, the history of social conservatism is one of repeated losses - and each time social conservatives lose America became a stronger, more free society. Of course, as they claimed with ending slavery, allowing women to vote, and abolishing segregation, social conservatives now claim that allowing gay Americans to have equal rights will somehow lead to society falling apart. Their is no logical reason to believe this is true, but they like to claim it nonetheless. Fortunately, polls show that Americans - even Republicans, increasingly see through the lies. It's only a matter of time before gay equality is the law of the land and social conservatives are proven wrong once again.

For the rational wing of the Republican Party

Ron Hill


"And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism'."

- U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, aka "Mr. Conservative"

Bring It On - We Are Not Afraid

This analysis of the Prop. Hate campaign could just as easily apply to the decade-long effort of Venango County-based American Family Assoc. of PA and radio station WAWN to demean, marginzalize and exclude LGBT people from full and equal participation in society.

But one thing is becoming increasingly clear: when rational people see and hear the lies of those who misuse religion to support bigotry and discrimination, public opinion begins to swing toward justice.

So Diane and Jane, come on out into the full light of day. We're looking forward to working with you to finally bring an end to the charade.

Dear Proposition 8 supporters - You lost because you lied

by: Alvin McEwen on Pam's House Blend
Thu Aug 05, 2010


Dear supporters of Proposition 8,

Please do not take my words as gloating but rather a clear and concise analysis of why you may be feeling dejected now over the overturning of Proposition 8.

In 2008, when you won, many of you stood with your arms raised in defiance of the bitter tears you caused in the lgbt community.


What a difference two years makes indeed.

But let me explain to you why you lost today. It’s not complicated, but rather simple.

Your side lost because you lied.

Oh I know that folks on your side will whine about “activist judges who make laws rather than interpret them,” but let’s be real here.

Your entire narrative has been a lie from the beginning.

Folks on your side, such as Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, and the rest of the pseudo defenders of morality will probably whine about how you all have been unfairly labeled as “bigots.” And I am sure that they will point out that every time there has been a public vote on marriage equality, the lgbt community has always lost.

But they will conveniently omit how these victories were attained. You won’t hear about how they invoked images of gay boogeymen molesting children in false ads nor will they admit to telling lies about children supposedly being taught about gay sex.
Alvin McEwen :: Dear Proposition 8 supporters - You lost because you lied
You won’t hear them admit to exploiting people’s unconscious fears and ignorance of the lgbt community in order to spin outrageous scenarios of what could happen should lgbts be allowed to marry.

And don’t be surprised by this. Those like Gallagher will never admit to the depths they stooped to win not only in California but other places like Maine.

But there is a reason why this country has checks and balances. And there is a reason why people can’t arbitrarily vote on the rights of others without having to defend this vote in the logical arena of courts, where you can’t invoke panic by proverbially yelling fire in a crowded theatre.

In the courts, you must defend your position. And in the long run, you couldn’t. Or rather many of you wouldn’t. Again, the specters of gay bogeymen were invoked as your leaders spun false images of avenging hordes for their reluctance to be questioned in the courts about the unprovoked lies they said in pulpits, in speeches, and on commercials.

This time, it didn’t work. The court saw through the phony claims and realized something, which I hope that many of you now do - you have no logical reason to either deny us the right to love or to deny us the ability to protect the ones whom we love.

But please don’t think that even though we are celebrating, the lgbt community is naive to think that this ends the struggle for marriage equality.

We know this is just the beginning of a long fight to attain something that should have been ours from the beginning.

But that’s okay.

We are a community who learn from our past mistakes. At times we lose, but we learn to adapt and we eventually win.

So bring it on. We are not afraid.

Real and Damaging Consequences

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Is This The World You Want?

Even After Death, Abuse Against Gays Continues

A Glimpse Of The World That The American Family Association Of Pennsylvania, AFR Radio Station WAWN, And Other Anti-LGBT Groups Are Helping To Create Right Here In The USA

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI for The Associated Press:

THIES, Senegal -- Even death cannot stop the violence against gays in this corner of the world any more.

Madieye Diallo's body had only been in the ground for a few hours when the mob descended on the weedy cemetery with shovels. They yanked out the corpse, spit on its torso, dragged it away and dumped it in front of the home of his elderly parents.


The scene of May 2, 2009 was filmed on a cell phone and the video sold at the market. It passed from phone to phone, sowing panic among gay men who say they now feel like hunted animals.

"I locked myself inside my room and didn't come out for days," says a 31-year-old gay friend of Diallo's who is ill with HIV. "I'm afraid of what will happen to me after I die. Will my parents be able to bury me?"

A wave of intense homophobia is washing across Africa, where homosexuality is already illegal in at least 37 countries.

In the last year alone, gay men have been arrested in Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. In Uganda, lawmakers are considering a bill that would sentence homosexuals to life in prison and include capital punishment for 'repeat offenders.' And in South Africa, the only country that recognizes gay rights, gangs have carried out so-called "corrective" rapes on lesbians.

"Across many parts of Africa, we've seen a rise in homophobic violence," says London-based gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, whose organization tracks abuse against gays and lesbians in Africa. "It's been steadily building for the last 10 years but has got markedly worse in the last year."

To the long list of abuse meted out to suspected homosexuals in Africa, Senegal has added a new form of degradation - the desecration of their bodies.

In the past two years, at least four men suspected of being gay have been exhumed by angry mobs in cemeteries in Senegal. The violence is especially shocking because Senegal, unlike other countries in the region, is considered a model of tolerance.

"It's jarring to see this happen in Senegal," says Ryan Thoreson, a fellow at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission who has been researching the rise of homophobia here. "When something like this happens in an established democracy, it's alarming."

Even though homosexuality is illegal in Senegal, colonial documents indicate the country has long had a clandestine gay community. In many towns, they were tacitly accepted, says Cheikh Ibrahima Niang, a professor of social anthropology at Senegal's largest university. In fact, the visibility of gays in Senegal may have helped to prompt the backlash against them.

The backlash dates back to at least February 2008, when a Senegalese tabloid published photographs of a clandestine gay wedding in a suburb of Dakar, the capital. The wedding was held inside a rented banquet hall and was attended by dozens of gay men, some of whom snapped pictures that included the gay couple exchanging rings and sharing slices of cake.


The day after the tabloid published the photographs, police began rounding up men suspected of being homosexual. Some were beaten in captivity and forced to turn over the names of other gay men, according to research by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

Gays immediately went into hiding and those who could fled to neighboring countries, including Gambia to the south, according to the New York-based commission. Gambia's erratic president declared that gays who had entered his country had 24 hours to leave or face decapitation. Many returned to Senegal, where they lived on the run, moving from safehouse to safehouse.

In March 2008, Senegal hosted an international summit of Muslim nations, which prompted a nationwide crackdown on behaviors deemed un-Islamic, including homosexuality.

The crackdown also coincided with spiraling food prices. Niang says political and religious leaders saw an easy way to reach constituents through the inflammatory topic of homosexuality.

"They found a way to explain the difficulties people are facing as a deviation from religious life," says Niang. "So if people are poor - it's because there are prostitutes in the street. If they don't have enough to eat, it's because there are homosexuals."

Imams began using Friday sermons to preach against homosexuality.

"During the time of the Prophet, anytime two men were found together, they were taken to the top of a mountain and thrown off," says Massamba Diop, the imam of a mosque in Pikine and the head of Jamra, an Islamic lobby linked to a political party in Senegal's parliament.

"If they didn't die when they hit the ground, then rocks would be thrown on them until they were killed," says Diop, whose mosque is so packed during Friday prayer that people bring their own carpets and line up outside on the asphalt.

Sermons like Diop's were carried on the mosque's loudspeakers as well as in Senegal's more than 30 newspapers and magazines.

Around this time, in May 2008, a middle-aged man called Serigne Mbaye fell ill and died in a suburb of Dakar.

His children tried to bury him in his village but were turned back from the cemetery because of widespread rumors that he was gay. His sons drove his body around trying to find a cemetery that would accept him. They were finally forced to bury him on the side of a road, using their own hands to dig a hole, according to media reports.

The grave was too shallow and the wind blew away the dirt. When the decomposing body was later discovered, Mbaye's children were arrested and charged with improperly burying their father.

In the town of Kaolack three months later, residents exhumed the grave of another man believed to be gay. In November 2008, residents in Pikine removed a corpse from a mosque of another suspected homosexual and left it on the side of the road.

The grave-robbing has shocked even hardened gay activists, such as Nigerian Davis Mac-Iyalla.

"People have done horrible things (in Nigeria). I have seen people spit on coffins and people spit on graves," he said. "But it stopped there."

Among the people who appeared in the photograph published from the gay wedding was a young man in his 30s from Thies. He was an activist and a leader of a gay organization called And Ligay, meaning 'Working together,' which he ran out of his parents' house.

He was HIV-positive and on medication.

When the tabloid published the photograph, Diallo went into hiding, according to a close friend who asked not to be named because he too is gay. Unable to go to the doctor, Diallo stopped taking his anti-retrovirals. By the spring of 2009, he was so ill that his family checked him into St. Jean de Dieu, a Catholic hospital in downtown Thies, says the friend.

He was in a coma when he died at 5:50 a.m. on May 2, 2009, according to the hospital's records. Although the hospital has a unit dedicated to treating HIV patients, the young man's family never disclosed his illness, according to the doctor in charge.

Several gay friends tried to see Diallo in the hospital but were told to stay away by his family, says the friend.

When the AP tried to speak to Diallo's elderly father at his shop on the main thoroughfare in Thies, his other children demanded the reporter leave. One sister covered her face and sobbed. Another said, "There are no homosexuals here."

Hours after he died, his family took Diallo's body to a nearby mosque, where custom holds the corpse should be bathed and wrapped in a white cloth. Before the family could bathe him, news reached the mosque that Diallo was gay and they were chased out, says the dead man's friend. His relatives hastily wrapped him in a sheet and headed to the cemetery, where they carried him past the home of Babacar Sene.

"A man that's known as being a homosexual can't be buried in a cemetery. His body needs to be thrown away like trash," says Sene. "His parents knew that he was gay and they did nothing about it. So when he died we wanted to make sure he was punished."

The video footage captured on a cell phone shows what happened next. His thin body was placed inside a narrow trough in the middle of the bald cemetery dotted with clumps of weeds. Then you hear shouting.


The shaky image shows a group of men jerking around the edges of the grave. One of them straddles the pit and shovels away the fine gray dirt until you can see the shrouded body. It's still inside the trough when they tie a rope around its feet.

They yank it out, cheering as the body bends over the lip of the grave. The shroud catches on the ground and tears off, revealing the dead man's torso.

Rassul Djitte, 48, watched from behind the wall of a nearby school. He had not known Diallo personally, but says he felt a stab. "People were rejoicing," he says. "They dragged him past me and his body left tracks in the sand. Like a car passing through snow."

Right-Wing Rage: Hate Groups, Vigilantes and Conspiracists on the Verge of Violence

By Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.


Hate groups stayed at record levels -- almost 1,000 -- despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80 percent, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called "Patriot" groups -- militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans -- came roaring back after years out of the limelight.

The anger seething across the American political landscape -- over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as "socialist" or even "fascist" -- goes beyond the radical right. The "tea parties" and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.

“We are in the midst of one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States history,” Chip Berlet, a veteran analyst of the American radical right, wrote earlier this year. "We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage."

Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Just a quarter think the government can be trusted. And the anti-tax tea party movement is viewed in much more positive terms than either the Democratic or Republican parties, the poll found.

The signs of growing radicalization are everywhere. Armed men have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the "tree of liberty" needs to be "watered" with "the blood of tyrants." The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and Oath Keepers, a Patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps. Politicians pandering to the anti-government right in 37 states have introduced "Tenth Amendment Resolutions," based on the constitutional provision keeping all powers not explicitly given to the federal government with the states. And, at the Web site titled "A Well Regulated Militia," a recent discussion of how to build "clandestine safe houses" to stay clear of the federal government included a conversation about how mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph were supposedly betrayed at such houses.

Doing the Numbers

The number of hate groups in America has been going up for years, rising 54 percent between 2000 and 2008 and driven largely by an angry backlash against non-white immigration and, starting in the last year of that period, the economic meltdown and the climb to power of an African American president.

According to the latest annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center), these groups rose again slightly in 2009 -- from 926 in 2008 to 932 last year -- despite the demise of a key neo-Nazi group. The American National Socialist Workers Party, which had 35 chapters in 28 states, imploded shortly after the October 2008 arrest of founder Bill White for making threats against his enemies.

At the same time, the number of what the SPLC designates as "nativist extremist" groups -- organizations that go beyond mere advocacy of restrictive immigration policy to actually confront or harass suspected immigrants -- jumped from 173 groups in 2008 to 309 last year. Virtually all of these vigilante groups have appeared since the spring of 2005.

But the most dramatic story by far has been with the anti-government Patriots.

The militias and the larger Patriot movement first came to Americans’ attention in the mid-1990s, when they appeared as an angry reaction to what was seen as a tyrannical government bent on crushing all dissent. Sparked most dramatically by the death of 76 Branch Davidians during a 1993 law enforcement siege in Waco, Texas, those who joined the militias also railed against the Democratic Clinton Administration and initiatives like gun control and environmental regulation. Although the Patriot movement included people formerly associated with racially based hate groups, it was above all animated by a view of the federal government as the primary enemy, along with a fondness for anti-government conspiracy theories. By early this decade, the groups had largely disappeared from public view.

But last year, as noted in the SPLC’s August report, "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias," a dramatic resurgence in the Patriot movement and its paramilitary wing, the militias, began. Now, the latest SPLC count finds that an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244 percent jump.

That is cause for grave concern. Individuals associated with the Patriot movement during its 1990s heyday produced an enormous amount of violence, most dramatically the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead.

Already there are signs of similar violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, right-wing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation’s first black president. One man from Brockton, Mass. — who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites — is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama’s inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with antigovernment, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases.

As the movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream. While in the 1990s, the movement got good reviews from a few lawmakers and talk-radio hosts, some of its central ideas today are being plugged by people with far larger audiences like FOX News’ Glenn Beck and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. Beck, for instance, re-popularized a key Patriot conspiracy theory -- the charge that FEMA is secretly running concentration camps -- before finally “debunking” it.


Last year also experienced levels of cross-pollination between different sectors of the radical right not seen in years. Nativist activists increasingly adopted the ideas of the Patriots; racist rants against Obama and others coursed through the Patriot movement; and conspiracy theories involving the government appeared in all kinds of right-wing venues. A good example is the upcoming Second Amendment March in Washington, D.C. The Web site promoting the march is topped by a picture of a colonial militiaman, and key supporters include Larry Pratt, a long-time militia enthusiast with connections to white supremacists, and Richard Mack, a conspiracy-mongering former sheriff associated with the Patriot group, Oath Keepers.

What may be most noteworthy about the march, however, is its date -- April 19. That is the date of the first shots fired at Lexington in the Revolutionary War. And it is also the anniversary of the fiery end of the government siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Anti-GLBT Zealots Are Everywhere

What you're about to hear is a portion of a jaw-dropping speech delivered by an Oklahoma State Representative at a gathering in her legislative district.

It's very reminiscent of the misleading and hateful rhetoric that one often sees & hears from the likes of Venango County's own American "Family" Association of Pennsylvania and "Christian" radio station WAWN.

This is what they say when they think we're not listening, and unfortunately, even when we are.

Learn To Speak Tea Bag

Death for Gays ?

The following article from the New York Times provides a look at the world as it might be if Venango County extremists Jane Richey (below left) of "Christian" radio station WAWN and Diane Gramley (below right) of the American "Family" Association of Pennsylvania had their way.




Richey's and Gramley's efforts regularly promote one of the anti-gay organizations (Exodus International) and many of the anti-gay tactics mentioned in the article that have led to a call for the death penalty for gays in Uganda!

It's Time To End The Hate!

After Americans Visit, Uganda Weighs Death for Gays

By Jeffrey Gettleman for the New York Times:

KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.


The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.


One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.

Donor countries, including the United States, are demanding that Uganda’s government drop the proposed law, saying it violates human rights, though Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity (who previously tried to ban miniskirts) recently said, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.”

The Ugandan government, facing the prospect of losing millions in foreign aid, is now indicating that it will back down, slightly, and change the death penalty provision to life in prison for some homosexuals. But the battle is far from over.

Instead, Uganda seems to have become a far-flung front line in the American culture wars, with American groups on both sides, the Christian right and gay activists, pouring in support and money as they get involved in the broader debate over homosexuality in Africa.

“It’s a fight for their lives,” said Mai Kiang, a director at the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a New York-based group that has channeled nearly $75,000 to Ugandan gay rights activists and expects that amount to grow.


The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

“I feel duped,” Mr. Schmierer said, arguing that he had been invited to speak on “parenting skills” for families with gay children. He acknowledged telling audiences how homosexuals could be converted into heterosexuals, but he said he had no idea some Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for homosexuality.

“That’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” he said. “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”

Mr. Lively and Mr. Brundidge have made similar remarks in interviews or statements issued by their organizations. But the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Later, when confronted with criticism, Mr. Lively said he was very disappointed that the legislation was so harsh.

Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape.

“Now we really have to go undercover,” said Stosh Mugisha, a gay rights activist who said she was pinned down in a guava orchard and raped by a farmhand who wanted to cure her of her attraction to girls. She said that she was impregnated and infected with H.I.V., but that her grandmother’s reaction was simply, “ ‘You are too stubborn.’ ”

Despite such attacks, many gay men and lesbians here said things had been getting better for them before the bill, at least enough to hold news conferences and publicly advocate for their rights. Now they worry that the bill could encourage lynchings. Already, mobs beat people to death for infractions as minor as stealing shoes.

“What these people have done is set the fire they can’t quench,” said the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian who went undercover for six months to chronicle the relationship between the African anti-homosexual movement and American evangelicals.

Mr. Kaoma was at the conference and said that the three Americans “underestimated the homophobia in Uganda” and “what it means to Africans when you speak about a certain group trying to destroy their children and their families.”

“When you speak like that,” he said, “Africans will fight to the death.”

Uganda is an exceptionally lush, mostly rural country where conservative Christian groups wield enormous influence. This is, after all, the land of proposed virginity scholarships, songs about Jesus playing in the airport, “Uganda is Blessed” bumper stickers on Parliament office doors and a suggestion by the president’s wife that a virginity census could be a way to fight AIDS.

During the Bush administration, American officials praised Uganda’s family-values policies and steered millions of dollars into abstinence programs.

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)


Many Africans view homosexuality as an immoral Western import, and the continent is full of harsh homophobic laws. In northern Nigeria, gay men can face death by stoning. Beyond Africa, a handful of Muslim countries, like Iran and Yemen, also have the death penalty for homosexuals. But many Ugandans said they thought that was going too far. A few even spoke out in support of gay people.

“I can defend them,” said Haj Medih, a Muslim taxi driver with many homosexual customers. “But I fear the what? The police, the government. They can arrest you and put you in the safe house, and for me, I don’t have any lawyer who can help me.”

"Intellectual" Architect of the Extreme Right

This article echoes many of the questions and concerns that swirl around the activities of local Venango County anti-gay extremists like Diane Gramley of the American "Family" Association and Jane Richey of "Christian" Radio station WAWN and the Fishermen's Net "ministries."

from Truth Wins Out:

A feature article in this week’s New York Times Magazine refers to Princeton professor Robert P. George as the “intellectual architect” of the extreme right. This is hardly an honor, considering the main competition for “Values Valedictorian” is Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Mike Huckabee. One also has to consider admiration comes from the likes of George W. Bush and FOX instigator Glenn Beck, who calls George “one of the biggest brains in America.”


George’s primary accomplishment has been denying gay couples the right to marry, by forming an unholy political union between conservative Catholics, like himself, and Evangelical Christians. He is the chairman of The National Organization for Marriage, the group that most recently worked to strip marriage rights from LGBT couples in Maine.

Quite frankly, I’m hardly impressed with George’s cognitive abilities. If one looks at the numbers in Maine, his allegedly intellectual arguments against same-sex marriage failed miserably in cosmopolitan Portland and in Orono, home of The University of Maine. His primary talent, it seems, is to trick the unschooled and easily fooled. Given this reality, George is more back woods propagandist than deep professorial thinker.

Indeed, one of the simplest ways to succeed in America is to rabble rouse and scapegoat. It takes no brains to peddle belligerence and play the gay card by pandering to people not playing with a full deck. George exploited an undereducated constituency and fed them red meat, which is no more than a cheap shortcut for those incapable of the more difficult task of bringing Americans together. In a diverse nation paradoxically frightened by diversity, demagogues such as George are a dime a dozen and unworthy of praise.

What George offers is sophistry disguised as scholarship. For example, his opposition to gay people having sex or marrying rests on his version of “natural law”, allegedly based on “practical reason.” In the Times Magazine article, Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali parrots George’s idea of “natural law” at a press conference, with George at his side, cheering on his protégé.

“Sexual relations outside the marital bond are contrary not only to the will of God but to the good of man,” said Rigali. “Indeed they are contrary to the will of God precisely because they are against the good of man.”

The “good” of which men (and women) might Rigali and George be referring to?

Is it the teenage boys who were molested in the Catholic Church because such conservative ideologues insisted on turning gay men into sexually repressed and emotionally stunted shells and then placing them in the priesthood?

Is it “good” for the gay youths who commit suicide in disproportionate numbers because men like George and Rigali tell them their love is inferior?

Perhaps, they can illuminate how such “practical reason” was “good” for Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas who came out of the closet this weekend after hiding his sexual orientation for two decades.


“Sometimes I felt so alone and depressed,” said Thomas. “I’ve stood on so many cliff edges. I used to go to the cliffs overlooking the beach near our cottage in St Brides Major and just think about jumping off and ending it all…I was like a ticking bomb. I thought I could suppress it, keep it locked away in some dark corner of myself, but I couldn’t. It was who I was, and I just couldn’t ignore it any more.”

Maybe George can explain how his philosophy was somehow “good” for Gareth’s wife Jenna, who is about to be divorced?

If “practical reason” has proven one thing, it has shown the closet, particularly for the Catholic Church, to be destructive on so many levels. George has demonstrably failed to articulate how openly gay people harm heterosexuals or how living a lie helps homosexuals be more productive members of society. His entire presentation is a ruse meant to rally the rubes.


Interestingly, George believes in restricting marriage because, in his view, only a husband and wife can experience, “comprehensive unity” and become a “one-flesh union.” He blatantly ignores that millions of people can achieve this state only through homosexual relations. By forcing GLBT people to conform to his views and presumably marry the opposite sex, he is creating the conditions to achieve the polar opposite of what he claims is necessary for a healthy marriage.

George is equally disingenuous in claiming that marriage is based on procreation. These days, the vast majority of people marry for love. Many couples choose not to have children, while others are unable to. To suggest otherwise is to proffer an incoherent and intellectually dishonest view of modern marriage.

George is an intellectual lightweight without an original idea in his head. His claim to fame is organizing like-minded conservatives and providing a veneer of education to mask his goal of discrimination. This is not the pride of Princeton, but a paean to prejudice.

The Story Behind "Curing The Gays"

Mark Benjamin, national correspondent for Salon.com, describes for MSNBC's Rachel Maddow what he learned reporting undercover on the "ex-gay" movement.

Here in Venango County, Jane Richey and her "Christian" radio station WAWN are fervent proponents of the crackpot, dangerous, sometimes deadly, "ex-gay" theory.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

What They Call An Agenda, We Call Our Lives

This video, posted on the Fishermen's Net, "a communications tool for Venango County area churches" operated by Lighthouse Ministries of Franklin, provides a glimpse of the beliefs and attitudes that exist here in our communities and the people with whom we need to work to find common ground in order to ensure justice, fairness & equality for all.

What Some Of The Speakers Call An Agenda, We Simply Call Our Lives!

Responsibility For What We All Let Come To Pass

We Hope and Pray that the Incendiary Anti-GLBT Rhetoric of Venango County's Own Christian Radio Station WAWN and Locally-Headquartered American Family Association of Pennsylvania Do Not Have Such Tragic Results Here

By Mary Alice Carr

The first time I appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor," in 2004, I sat across from Bill O'Reilly in awkward silence while he shuffled papers and took notes.


Finally, he glanced up and acknowledged my existence. "Thank you for coming on," he said. "Most people don't have the guts."

I said, "Well, you are one of the most-watched new shows on cable."

He swiftly retorted, "The most-watched new show on cable TV."

Let's face it: Bill O'Reilly is not only aware of his power and his reach, he's damn proud of them.

So I went on his show, time and again, even though many other progressives discouraged me. I went because I know what O'Reilly knows: It's the most-watched show, and I thought it was imperative that his audience also hear our viewpoint.

I also know that when you have a bully pulpit, you need to be held accountable for what you preach.


O'Reilly is being incredibly disingenuous when he claims that he bears no responsibility for others' actions in the killing of Dr. George Tiller on Sunday. When you tell an audience of millions over and over again that someone is an executioner, you cannot feign surprise when someone executes that person.

You cannot claim to hold no responsibility for what other people do when you call for people to besiege Tiller's clinic, as O'Reilly did in January 2008. And this was after Tiller had been shot in both arms and after his clinic had been bombed.

O'Reilly knew that people wanted Tiller dead, and he knew full well that many of those people were avid viewers of his show. Still, he fanned the flames. Every time I appeared on his show, I received vitriolic and hate-filled e-mails. And if I received those messages directly, I can only imagine what type of feedback O'Reilly receives. He knows that his words incite violence.

That is why I made a personal pledge to no longer sit across from him after he called for people to converge on Tiller's clinic. I realized that appearing on the show with him would only legitimize his speech and that no good would come of my efforts.


So on Tuesday morning, when an O'Reilly producer called and asked me to come on the show to "discuss the reasons why women have late-term abortions," I held fast to my pledge. I told his producer what I thought: that I had had that conversation on air with O'Reilly five years earlier and that he agreed with me at the time that the decision was between a woman and her doctor. That O'Reilly then went on to pretend we had never talked about it and continued condemning women and doctors. That the nation and those of us in the pro-choice community are reeling from the murder of a doctor who helped women. That we hold O'Reilly responsible for helping to create a climate in which hate was allowed to fester. That I refused to dignify his irresponsible behavior, not to mention his deplorable reaction to Tiller's shooting.

O'Reilly had the opportunity to apologize for his words, and he didn't. He had the opportunity to say that this tragic outcome was something about which he felt sorry. He didn't. When restraint and perspective were called for, he fanned the flames higher. In fact, on his June 1 "Talking Points," he played the martyr, saying his critics were seeking to stifle any criticism of "people like Tiller -- that and hating Fox News is the real agenda here." On his show the next day -- the show I declined to appear on -- he again called a murdered man "Dr. Killer."

I admit that after the call from the producer, I hesitated. What an opportunity, I thought, to sit across from O'Reilly and call him out for what he has done and where his responsibility lies. To speak for everyone in America who is hurt and scared and angry. I have never been a Fox News hater; clearly, I've used the show for the benefit of my movement and my organization, and I've answered his questions on some of the toughest issues around. Didn't I have the right to also call him out for his speech?

But then I realized I just couldn't. Because if the murder of a man in a house of worship wasn't enough to make Bill O'Reilly repent, what hope did I have?

The writer is vice president of communications for NARAL Pro-Choice New York.

Merciless Anti-Gay Bullying Leads To Child's Suicide

With the vicious, relentless, unchallenged, anti-GLBT rhetoric of Venango County-based groups such as the American Family Association of Pennsylvania and Christian Radio Station WAWN, will such a tragedy happen here?

We hope and pray not!

Help For Those Hurt By "Ex-Gay" Programs

New Landmark Publication Offers Legal Options To Those Hurt By The Type Of "Ex-Gay" Programs Promoted By Venango County Extremist Organizations Such As the American "Family" Association of Pennsylvania and "Christian" Radio Station WAWN.

If You Have Been Harmed By 'Ex-Gay' Programs, 'Ex-Gay & The Law' Is For You

CHARLOTTE - Truth Wins Out and Lambda Legal released a landmark publication today, "Ex-Gay & The Law", that aims to educate victims of "ex-gay" programs of their legal options. This work was inspired by the many people who have had their lives damaged by programs that seek to "pray away the gay" or use questionable counseling techniques.

"Ex-Gay & the Law helps survivors of ex-gay programs explore their legal rights if they believe they have been harmed," said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. "This groundbreaking publication offers practical legal advice so important questions can be answered."

"We are pleased to help support this publication and to be a part of this effort," said Hayley Gorenberg, Deputy Legal Director of Lambda Legal. "Groups that proclaim to 'cure' gay people of their sexual orientation lack any legitimate medical backing, cause harm, and sometimes operate unlawfully and unethically. If you have experienced any of the scenarios outlined in the last pages of 'Ex-Gay & the Law', we welcome you to contact or Legal Help Desk."


Each year, thousands of men and women enter "ex-gay" programs. Adolescents are even forced into these boot camps by their parents. While their stories differ, nearly all of these individuals have one thing in common: They are harmed by the traumatizing experience.

The American Psychiatric Association says, "The potential risks of 'reparative therapy' are great, including depression, anxiety and self destructive behavior."

Ex-Gay & The Law was released at a press conference in Charlotte to counter Focus on the Family's ex-gay Love Won Out conference. The Charlotte Rainbow Action Network for Equality (CRANE) hosted the event. CRANE is a grassroots coalition of activists and community members working toward civil and social equality for Charlotte's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) community.

Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that defends gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from anti-gay lies. TWO also counters the "ex-gay" myth and educates America about gay life.

Lambda Legal is a national organization committed to achieving full regonition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and those with HIV through impact litigation, education and public policy work.


Download Ex-Gay and the Law