American Family Association - To Russia With Love

Russia's Anti-Gay Law 'Expresses Values We've Been Advocating For Years,' Says Bryan Fischer, Spokesperson for the Hate Group known as the American Family Association

from The Huffington Post - 8/27/13:

The American Family Association's Bryan Fischer is once again taking to the airwaves in defense of Russia's controversial anti-gay legislation, Right Wing Watch is reporting.

Describing the "gay propaganda" laws as part of an overall effort to "scramble their way back to some approximation of Christian morality," Fischer said, "They understand that homosexual behavior is a moral evil among teenagers."

"What Russia's done here with this law is they have expressed the values that we have been advocating for years and years and years," he added. Pointing to the fact that many conservative Americans have been "largely silent" on the issue, he then noted, "In my mind, we ought to be celebrating this ... this is public policy we've been advocating, and here's a nation in the world that's actually putting it into practice."

He re-iterated many of the same viewpoints in an Aug. 23 blog post. "There are catastrophic pathologies associated with homosexual behavior among teenagers, and any society that cares about its youth will do everything in its power to steer them away from this self-destructive lifestyle," he wrote. "We spend billions urging teens not to take up cigarette smoking. Let’s start spending billions to urge them not to take up gay sex."

He then concluded, "I say it’s time for us to be more like Russia."

Fischer, whose anti-gay declarations have become a near-weekly staple of his "Focal Point" radio show, has previously defended Russia's anti-gay law.

"We've got plenty of room in our multicultural world for all sorts of different cultural values and trends," he said in a earlier broadcast this month, Right Wing Watch first reported. "Isn't this wonderful what Russia is doing? Let's celebrate diversity and let's support this tradition in the nation of Russia."

Getting to the Bottom of Bigotry & Hatred, i.e. Understanding the American Family Association of Pennsylvania

by Dr. Joe Wenke - Huffington Post - June 18, 2013:

Hatred and bigotry are very old news. Yet they're in the news every day. More than that, they're in our face constantly, particularly on the Web. The Web is great, but the anonymity of social media provides the perfect breeding ground for haters to spew their hate speech.

Last week, when Sebastien de la Cruz, an 11-year-old Mexican-American boy wearing a mariachi outfit, sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the third NBA finals game in San Antonio, Texas, his performance was met with a torrent of ethnic, anti-immigrant hatred. The bigoted response to this little boy, who was invited back to perform the national anthem for the fourth game, was shocking but hardly surprising.

Hate speech is absolutely pervasive on major social media sites 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For example, check out the comments on just about any YouTube video featuring a member of any minority group. They're disgusting. I've also found that if you hit the wrong button, so to speak, on Twitter (like if you type the words "gun control"), you are immediately treated to a barrage of vitriol and contempt.

Hatred is so pervasive that there's the danger that we may actually get used to it, become numb to it, write it off as "same old same old." If you feel yourself drifting in that direction, consider the anti-LGBTQ comments that were generated by a recent HuffPost story on the extremely high incidence of suicide attempts among LGBTQ youth in San Francisco. Some of the comments are downright pathological. Consider, for example, the following remark, which has since been removed: "This [i.e., the high incidence of suicide attempts among LGBTQ youth] is really good news. It is nice to see these kids care enough about the pain & embarrassment that they brought upon their parents, to end it once and for all."

Comments like that make me ashamed to be a human being. They also make me ask the obvious question: Why do people hate other people? What's at the bottom of hatred and bigotry?

For example, what exactly is it about a human being's sexual orientation that triggers such hate? What's it to them -- the haters of gay, lesbian and bisexual people -- whom other people are sexually attracted to and love? Why are transgender people so hated, so marginalized? Why is there so little respect for these courageous people?

Why do so many men hate women (and there seem to be a lot)? Why do they, the hateful men, think that they are superior to the women they hate? And what about hatred based on race, ethnicity, country of origin, religious or political beliefs? What's going on? Why is hatred so prevalent? Why is it such a big part of the human experience?

It's pretty weird when you think about it: Bigots hate people they don't know. They hate them because of the group they belong to. If you're a member of the group they hate, then they hate you even though they know nothing else about you. That's the very definition of bigotry.

But why hate a group of people? Well, in almost every case, people don't hate people from the group they belong to. They hate people from a group they don't belong to. For example, straight people don't hate other straight people just because they're straight, and white people don't hate other white people just because they're white. Haters, bigots, seem almost invariably to hate people who are different from them. To the haters, "different" is bad. Are they afraid of the different people? Do they feel threatened by them? On the other hand, are they perhaps secretly attracted to them? If they do feel threatened, however, what exactly is the threat? Do they think they are going to be hurt by the different people? Do they think the different people are going to take something important away from them -- like a job or a girlfriend? Are they going to change the neighborhood? Do they speak a language that the haters don't speak or understand? Do they dress differently? Eat different types of food? Celebrate different holidays?

It certainly appears to be part of the character of some human beings to hate whomever is different from them. That's really bad. That's really disturbing, but the whole truth is even worse. What's the whole truth? Two more things. Number 1: Bigots don't think they're bigots. They think they're right. Number 2: Often the justification for bigotry is based on religion. The justification for the denigration of women goes all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible. Similarly, the justification for believing that black people are inferior to white people, indeed the justification for slavery itself, was for hundreds of years based on the Bible story of the curse of Ham. Anti-Semitism has often been justified by the absurd idea that all Jewish people are responsible for killing Jesus, who was, of course, Jewish. Then there's the belief that your religion is the one true religion and that other people not only have no right to different religious beliefs but have no right to live. That incredibly lethal idea comes to fruition in the oxymoronic notion of "holy war," which is perpetuated today by the radical Islamic interpretation of jihad but which has a long and bloody history in Christianity as well, as evidenced by the Crusades and the Inquisition.

Most LGBTQ bigots base their bigotry on their religious beliefs, only they don't see their beliefs as bigoted; they think they're right, and they believe that their bigoted view of LGBTQ people is sanctioned by God. According to these people, being homosexual is unnatural, perverted, or, to use the Catholic Church's term, "disordered." I cannot conceive of a more hateful or disgusting characterization of another human being than to say that the very way that they are, their very being, is unnatural or perverted, but that is exactly what LGBTQ bigots believe. That's why "love the sinner, hate the sin" is really just a form of hate speech rather than legitimate Christian compassion. It says, "I don't hate you. You're my neighbor. The Bible tells me to love my neighbor, and I do, but you, my neighbor, need to change. Being homosexual is not an essential part of your being. You weren't born that way. Something went wrong somewhere. You need to acknowledge that and get some therapy. Go straight. Love someone of the opposite gender. If you can't do that, well, then you can never marry or have sex. By the way, you can't be a Boy Scout either."

I don't think we'll ever really know why human beings hate, but we do know how they most often justify their hatred. They do it through religion. It is profoundly disturbing but true: When it comes to sanctioning hatred and bigotry, religion is most definitely the root of all evil.

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.

Venango County FAG: Diane Gramley

The Lowest Form of Hatred - The Self-Righteousness of the Religious Mob

Wendell Berry Expounds On Gay Marriage

A Kentucky farmer, essayist, writer and activist, sometimes described as a modern-day Thoreau, criticizes theological strategies used to marginalize gays.

By Bob Allen, ABP News:

Christian opponents to same-sex marriage want the government to treat homosexuals as a special category of persons subject to discrimination, similar to the way that African-Americans and women were categorized in the past, cultural and economic critic Wendell Berry told Baptist ministers in Kentucky on January 11.

Berry, a prolific author of books, poems and essays who won the National Humanities Medal in 2010 and was 2012 Jefferson lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, offered “a sort of general declaration” on the subject of gay marriage at a “Following the Call of the Church in Times Like These” conference at Georgetown College. Berry said he chose to comment publicly to elaborate on what little he has said about the topic in the past.

“I must say that it’s a little wonderful to me that in 40-odd years of taking stands on controversial issues, and at great length sometimes, the two times that I think I’ve stirred up the most passionate opposition has been with a tiny little essay on computers (his 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” published in Harper’s led some to accuse him of being anti-technology) and half a dozen or a dozen sentences on gay marriage,” Berry said.

Berry said he could recall only twice before when he commented publicly on the issue, in a single paragraph in a collection of essays published in 2005 and in an interview with the National Review in 2012.

“My argument, much abbreviated both times, was the sexual practices of consenting adults ought not to be subjected to the government’s approval or disapproval, and that domestic partnerships in which people who live together and devote their lives to one another ought to receive the spousal rights, protections and privileges the government allows to heterosexual couples,” Berry said.

Berry said liberals and conservatives have invented “a politics of sexuality” that establishes marriage as a “right” to be granted or withheld by whichever side prevails. He said both viewpoints contravene principles of democracy that rights are self-evident and inalienable and not determined and granted or withheld by the government.

“Christians of a certain disposition have found several ways to categorize homosexuals as different as themselves, who are in the category of heterosexual and therefore normal and therefore good,” Berry said. What is unclear, he said, is why they single out homosexuality as a perversion.

“The Bible, as I pointed out to the writers of National Review, has a lot more to say against fornication and adultery than against homosexuality,” he said. “If one accepts the 24th and 104th Psalms as scriptural norms, then surface mining and other forms of earth destruction are perversions. If we take the Gospels seriously, how can we not see industrial warfare -- with its inevitable massacre of innocents -- as a most shocking perversion? By the standard of all scriptures, neglect of the poor, of widows and orphans, of the sick, the homeless, the insane, is an abominable perversion.”

“Jesus talked of hating your neighbor as tantamount to hating God, and yet some Christians hate their neighbors by policy and are busy hunting biblical justifications for doing so,” he said. “Are they not perverts in the fullest and fairest sense of that term? And yet none of these offenses -- not all of them together -- has made as much political/religious noise as homosexual marriage.”

Another argument used, Berry said, is that homosexuality is “unnatural.”

“If it can be argued that homosexual marriage is not reproductive and is therefore unnatural and should be forbidden on that account, must we not argue that childless marriages are unnatural and should be annulled?” he asked.

“One may find the sexual practices of homosexuals to be unattractive or displeasing and therefore unnatural, but anything that can be done in that line by homosexuals can be done and is done by heterosexuals,” Berry continued. “Do we need a legal remedy for this? Would conservative Christians like a small government bureau to inspect, approve and certify their sexual behavior? Would they like a colorful tattoo verifying government approval on the rumps of lawfully copulating parties? We have the technology, after all, to monitor everybody’s sexual behavior, but so far as I can see so eager an interest in other people’s private intimacy is either prurient or totalitarian or both.”

“The oddest of the strategies to condemn and isolate homosexuals is to propose that homosexual marriage is opposed to and a threat to heterosexual marriage, as if the marriage market is about to be cornered and monopolized by homosexuals,” Berry said. “If this is not industrial capitalist paranoia, it at least follows the pattern of industrial capitalist competitiveness. We must destroy the competition. If somebody else wants what you’ve got, from money to marriage, you must not hesitate to use the government – small of course – to keep them from getting it.”

Berry said “so-called traditional marriage” is “for sure suffering a statistical failure, but this is not the result of a homosexual plot.”

“Heterosexual marriage does not need defending,” Berry said. “It only needs to be practiced, which is pretty hard to do just now.”

“But the difficulty is not assigned to any group of scapegoats,” he said. “It is rooted mainly in the values and priorities of our industrial capitalist system in which every one of us is complicit.”

“If I were one of a homosexual couple -- the same as I am one of a heterosexual couple -- I would place my faith and hope in the mercy of Christ, not in the judgment of Christians,” Berry said. “When I consider the hostility of political churches to homosexuality and homosexual marriage, I do so remembering the history of Christian war, torture, terror, slavery and annihilation against Jews, Muslims, black Africans, American Indians and others. And more of the same by Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics, Catholics against Catholics, Protestants against Protestants, as if by law requiring the love of God to be balanced by hatred of some neighbor for the sin of being unlike some divinely preferred us. If we are a Christian nation -- as some say we are, using the adjective with conventional looseness -- then this Christian blood thirst continues wherever we find an officially identifiable evil, and to the immense enrichment of our Christian industries of war.”

“Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred,” Berry said. “Categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob. It makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob, a mob overflowing with righteousness – as at the crucifixion and before and since. This can happen only after we have made a categorical refusal to kindness: to heretics, foreigners, enemies or any other group different from ourselves.”

“Perhaps the most dangerous temptation to Christianity is to get itself officialized in some version by a government, following pretty exactly the pattern the chief priest and his crowd at the trial of Jesus,” Berry said. “For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.”

Hater, Heal Thyself

An apt message for the Venango County-based hate group known as the American Family Association of Pennsylvania ...

At Some Point, That Fault You Find In Others Is Your Own

from Will O'Bryan at Metro Weekly:

Bryon Widner is the subject of a recent documentary, Erasing Hate. Widner, once a racist skinhead, tattooed himself to make his disposition clear. The documentary follows his hours of painful procedures to remove that ink, reflecting his transition away from all that anger. Painful for Widner, but a feel-good story, nonetheless.

Of course, he's gotten death threats from white supremacists still trapped in their own cages that hate built.

Symon Hill was also in need of redemption. He found it by walking 160 miles from Brighton, England, to London last year. He calls that trip ''a pilgrimage of repentance for my former homophobic attitudes and behavior.'' Another feel-good story, right?

Not for some, probably. At least one person is too angry to forgive Hill his trespasses. On the Guardian.co.uk site, a post about Hill was answered with, ''This guy should fucking crawl the distance for his forgiveness. I forgive him nothing.''

In some people there is this expression. Maybe it's hate. Maybe it's anger. Maybe jealousy or fear or arrogance. While it's evidenced in some, we are certainly all capable of embodying this negative pain. That's what I thought of as I watched the lines of people – people who no doubt believe they were doing the right thing, making a righteous stand – line-up to support Chick-fil-A.

Whatever they may have thought, they weren't standing up for freedom of speech. They were standing up to oppress gays and lesbians. They were standing up to support donations being made, as tracked by Equality Matters, to the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. They might have thought otherwise, but just what did they think had everybody so upset? If you're going to take an action against a community – even if you'd prefer to believe it's in support of free speech and in opposition to no one – you know what you're doing. And I forgive you.

I really wish, however, you could forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for whatever shortcoming, whatever sin that has made you so strident. If you're anti-gay because your kid is gay and you blame yourself, stop; you had nothing to do with your kid's sexual orientation. If you simply think two dudes getting it on is gross, forgive yourself. That's okay. We don't take it any more personally than you do when your kids get grossed out by seeing you kiss your spouse. If you think you're not being dogmatic enough in your religious beliefs, that God will smite you for loosening your grip, just please stop. Forgive yourself. If most people's gods are famous for anything, it's forgiveness. At least, as an observer, it seems to me I've heard plenty more about love and forgiveness than about righteous damnation.

There's no need to give up your beliefs to give up some of that anger. If you think God frowns on romantic love between people of the same sex, that's between you and God. If, however, you think marriage equality is the harbinger of societal downfall, lighten up. Consider that you're the Jewish parent of a straight girl engaged to a nice Mormon fellah, and she's going to convert. It may distress you, but it's not the end of the world. Let it go. To the guy demanding the former homophobe ''fucking crawl,'' take a breath. Mr. Hill didn't put a bomb in a gay bar. Just count to 10 and give him a small salute for trying to make things right.

Our lives are short. As everything moves forward, your hate will do little but hold you back. I'm not hoping you'll leave it behind for my sake. I'll be fine, either way. But I am hoping you'll do it for yourself.

Heated and Hateful Rhetoric Is A Threat To All, Not Just Elected-Officials

In the wake of the recent tragic events in Tucson, where a troubled young man went on a shooting rampage that killed six people, including a federal judge, and gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords, what is likely to be a wrenching debate over anger, vitriolic rhetoric, and violence in American political culture has been set off.

We can not help but be reminded of the inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence that emanate from those who call themselves "Bible Believing Christians" in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania and be concerned about the consequences for those that are in their crosshairs.

We reprise this article as a renewed call to conscience for us all.



"Bible Believing Response" to OUT IN THE SILENCE Promotes Anti-Transgender Violence

Dispatch from Coudersport, PA:

by Joe Wilson, August, 31, 2010:

Diane Gramley sat peacefully behind Robert Wagner in the Coudersport Public Library as the retired physician shared his views on transgender individuals with the assembled audience. “I'm gonna put a ball bat in my car,” he said, “and if I ever see a guy [Wagner refuses to use proper pronouns] coming out of a bathroom that my granddaughter's in, I'm gonna use the ball bat on him.” Moments later he added: “In the good old days, before 'she-males' existed, they just called such people perverts.”

Gramley is no stranger to such ideas. As President of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Family Association, a 'traditional family values' organization based in Mississippi, she spends much of her time planting similar seeds of suspicion about the dangers posed by “men who think they are women,” her disparaging term for transgender females. She also crusades relentlessly against what she and the AFA call the “homosexual agenda” and the type of legal protections that her and Dr. Wagner's threatening rhetoric suggests are needed for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

Gramley was in Coudersport, a small town of 2,600 residents in the sparsely populated north-central part of the state known as the Pennsylvania Wilds, as a special guest of Dr. Wagner for what he titled “A Bible Believing Christian's Response to OUT IN THE SILENCE,” my documentary film about the quest for inclusion, fairness and equality for LGBT people in the small town where I was born and raised, Oil City, PA, just a two-hour drive from Coudersport.

Gramley, who also happens to call the Oil City area home, plays a central role in OUT IN THE SILENCE as a result of the firestorm of controversy she helped to ignite in opposition to the publication of my same-sex marriage announcement in the local paper. It was that controversy that compelled my partner, Dean Hamer, and I to go back to my hometown with our cameras to document what life is like there for LGBT people, and to show hopeful and inspiring stories about the growing movement for equality.

The film was produced in partnership with Penn State Public Broadcasting, received support from the Sundance Institute, premiered at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, screened in Tribeca Cinemas Doc Series, and has been broadcast on PBS stations around the country. We're now using it as an educational tool in a grassroots campaign to help raise LGBT visibility and to bring people together in small towns like Oil City and Coudersport to begin building bridges across the gaps that have divided families, friends, and entire communities on these issues for far too long.

As part of this campaign, OUT IN THE SILENCE had screened just a month earlier for a standing-room-only crowd in the Coudersport Public Library despite vehement opposition from Dr. Wagner and the efforts of the local Tea Party and a small group of fundamentalist preachers to shut the event down and have the library 'de-funded' for making its space available for such a program.

Wagner's “Bible Believing Response,” he told the crowd of approximately 60 local church people, “was intended to expose the filmmakers’ real agenda and to question the directors’ assertion that the community should tolerate alternative lifestyles.”

During the two hour program, Wagner asked special guest Gramley a few questions about her experiences as a minor subject of the film, but he used her more as a prop, seated silently behind him, providing an odd sort of legitimacy as he put forth offensive theories and mischaracterizations about LGBT people, including that “AIDS is the gay plague” and “gays can't have families.”

Dean and I were in the library for the presentation. We made the six-hour drive to Coudersport from our home in Washington, DC because I wanted to bear witness to this event, to experience for myself, if only for a few hours, what it feels like to be so close to such willful ignorance and brazen cruelty.

As I sat there, listening to 'amens,' snickering laughter, and even a roar of approval from the people around me when asked if they agree with the AFA assertions that there “should be legal sanctions against homosexual behavior” and “homosexuals should be disqualified from public office,” I felt a sadness unlike any I have known before. A sadness for those who fall prey to such bigoted and hostile bombast, who carry the feelings these things stir into their homes and family relationships, and for the communities that suffer the sometimes-violent consequences of such mean-spirited divisiveness.

But as I looked at Gramley, unmoved next to Wagner, condoning the ugliness without a word of protest, I thought of all the courageous people who have attended OUT IN THE SILENCE Campaign events over the past many months in far flung places, including there in Coudersport, who refuse to be silent anymore, who are working for change in their communities against great odds, and I was inspired all over again.

It is in their spirit that we will continue our campaign to speak out in the silence and to help build the movement for fairness and equality in small towns and rural communities across America.

I hope you'll join us! Learn more at OutintheSilence.com

Not In Our Town!

Over a decade ago, one town took a stand against hate and intolerance. Their story helped launch a national movement: Not In Our Town.



You can join them! Learn more at Not In Our Time!

Murder: Is The Bible Really Meant To Be A Weapon?

Will It Be Used As A Weapon For Such Violence In Venango County Someday?

Will Local Leaders Act Before It's Too Late?

Not Making Progress In Pennsylvania

This Alarming Comment, Posted Anonymously In Response To Today's Earlier Article About Progress Being Made In Pennsylvania On Fairness, Freedom and Equality for the State's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Residents, Is A Stark Reminder Of Just How Much Work There Is Still To Do!

It Comes From "Anonymous" Somewhere in Northwest Pennsylvania:

"Take your demented life style and put it in the bath house where it belongs. I'm sick and tired of you perverts trying to make normal people think you're normal. This is why people have had it with you fags."

Does This Represent The Venango County That We Know And Love?

If Not, What Do We Do To Overcome It?

Hate Moves To Facebook - Anti-Gay Extremist Group Seeks Friends

by Jon Ponder for Pensito Review:

Don Wildmon, the leader of the Mississippi-based, virulently anti-gay group, the American Family Association, joined Facebook recently, and has sent an email blast to his followers urging them to sign up so that they can use the social networking platform as an outlet for propagating hatred and intolerance of gay people.

“I have joined Facebook. Please join me on Facebook and become a friend of AFA,” reads the email’s headline. In the body, Wildmon explains what Facebook is and hints at how his followers can use it to promote the homophobia agenda:

Every day new technologies are emerging on the Internet. For several years now Internet “social networking” has been the preferred choice of many for keeping in touch with friends and family. From Yahoo! 360 to MySpace to Facebook, people of all ages are enjoying quick, easy, and inexpensive ways of communicating with others near and far. And best of all it’s FREE!

I have joined Facebook. I hope you will join, too, and become a friend of AFA. Facebook allows users to send and receive emails, add comments, post photos and videos, share links, and join groups or causes. You can also learn about the people you meet or would like to meet. And you can network with like-minded people concerned about America’s moral decline. Once signed up, you can invite your family and friends to visit or join your homepage. You can also search the entire Facebook site to see if relatives, friends, acquaintances, and classmates are already members. Facebook is informative, fun, and easy to use. There simply is no reason not to join!

Take Action!

It’s likely that most Facebookers are not familiar with the AFA, which is among the wealthiest of the groups that raise money based on gay-hate mongering. In fiscal year 2006, the last year for which figures are available, it claimed net assets of $37 million. The AFA generates almost all its revenue in advertising campaigns designed to raise the specter of hatred of gay people, mostly among less educated, low-income whites.

The AFA is known for its “off with their heads” approach to boycotts. It even targets companies that exercise free speech — and free enterprise — by marketing to gay consumers. The list of companies boycotted by AFA is a who’s who of American brands, including 7-Eleven, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Airlines, American Girl, Blockbuster Video, Burger King, Calvin Klein, Carl’s Jr., Clorox, Crest, Ford, Hallmark Cards, Kmart, Kraft Foods, S. C. Johnson & Son, Movie Gallery, Microsoft, MTV, Mary Kay, NutriSystem, Old Navy, IKEA, Sears, Pampers, Procter & Gamble, Target, Tide, and Walt Disney Company.

The group is not just opposed to gay marriage, it even attacks companies that provide partner benefits for their employees:

[The AFA asks]”Christian consumers”to think twice before they patronize companies that support the homosexual agenda.” AFA lists major corporations that have non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation or that offer domestic-partner benefits for same-sex couples… “One company losing five to ten percent of its sales will send a clear message to every company in America,” offers Don Wildmon. AFA attacked Kraft Foods (owner of brand names Post, Oscar Meyer, and Maxwell House, among others) for the company’s support of the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago.

Facebookers should know that, like all anti-gay groups, AFA purports to base its anti-gay agenda on the Scriptures. But not only is using the Bible to justify organized hate campaigns a bizarre construct, it also requires a mind-bendingly selective reading. The Bible does condemn homosexuality in a few obscure references, but, in the Old Testament, it classifies it as an “abomination,” a class of sins that also famously includes eating shrimp, lobster and ham, as well as burning incense, cheating at business, women wearing pants, haughtiness, lying and improperly covering one’s poop in the desert. among other infractions.

At the same time, anti-gay Christians selectively ignore sexual sins that the Bible decries much more frequently and fervently than homosexuality, including sex between unmarried people, which it calls “fornication,” and, in particular, adultery. Adultery, unlike homosexuality, is prohibited in the Ten Commandments — the only Old Testament laws that Jesus did not rescind with his New Covenant.

In the real world, adultery, unlike gay marriage, is a real threat to “traditional” marriage. Adultery destroys families, and is a direct cause of the high incidence of single-parent homes, poverty and a whole host of social ills. Heterosexual adulterers are 100 percent more likely than monogamous gays and others to contract sexually transmitted diseases. Adulterers are, by definition, liars, and there is no doubt that adultery, unlike being gay, is a choice.


But the AFA is mute in opposition to the civil rights of adulterers. It has never opposed the right of adulterers to remarry. It has never launched a boycott against a company that employs adulterers or that gives partner benefits to remarried philanderers. The AFA once forced the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to reassign a reporter who covered education because he happened to be gay, but the AFA finds no problem with adulterous reporters covering education or even with adulterers working as teachers, where they are can recruit children into their sinful, adulterous lifestyle.

When the day comes that the AFA expands its agenda to advocate rescinding the marriage rights of adulterers and denying adulterers’ protections from being fired or evicted because of their status as sinners, we’ll start to believe their antipathy toward gays is purely Bible-based. Until then, the only conclusion to draw is that they are using the Bible to excuse their own personal prejudices and, too often, their own self-loathing — a fact that renders their hatred of gays to be as destructive and scornful as white supremacists’ hatred of blacks and antisemites’ hatred of Jews.

Like all social media platforms, Facebook is largely self-policing, so it will be interesting to see whether the Facebook community will tolerate a hate group like the AFA moving in and establishing an outpost there for its message of intolerance and oppression.