Subscribe to Breaking News
Loading ...Besen: A Backdrop of Brutality
Sporting a fog machine for its smoke and mirrors routine and an extravagant stage that would make The Rolling Stones blush, the “ex-gay” group Exodus International held its glitzy annual conference in Asheville, North Carolina.
I was in town all week to partner with regional and state organizations to oppose the meeting and its dizzying array of distortions.A dark cloud hovered over the Exodus event, with violent hate crimes unsettling the local GLBT community. At the very moment ex-gay televangelists were railing against homosexuals in the foothills, news broke of an 18-year old boy in Anderson, South Carolina whose father, “yelled, cursed, swung a baseball bat, prayed and tried to cast the demon of homosexuality out of him.”
In nearby Greenville, South Carolina, Stephen Moller, an anti-gay thug who murdered 20-year-old Sean William Kennedy outside a gay bar, just learned that he would spend approximately 10 months in jail for his ferocious crime. In this gross miscarriage of justice, the message was sent that murdering gay people was tacitly acceptable, if not encouraged. While in town, I spoke to Sean’s grieving mother, Elke Kennedy, who rightfully called the sentence, “a joke and a slap on the wrist.” Meanwhile, on the opening day of the Exodus conference, an anti-bullying bill was stalled in the North Carolina legislature.
Into this backdrop of brutality stepped the ex-gay activists Alan Chambers and Randy Thomas, who were determined to show the progressive residents of Asheville that Exodus did not stigmatize gay and lesbian people. Unfortunately, they kept tripping over reality and revealing the true nature of their duplicitous, deceptive and depraved ministry.
For a week, western North Carolinians were dazzled with disingenuousness. The audacity of the lies was breathtaking and the sheer nerve was mind numbing. By the end of the conference, everyone who had paid attention learned that Exodus leaders are shameless charlatans who lack even a modicum of morality.
For example, Thomas tried to distance Exodus from the controversial practice of “reparative therapy,” telling the Asheville Citizen-Times, “We get lumped into the groups that do reparative therapy, when it’s just not true.”
To put it kindly, Thomas sees the truth as a political pinwheel that he can spin in his efforts to win. I personally visited the Exodus conference (before I was evicted) and found that they were selling several books that taught “reparative therapy” including one from Dr. Joseph Nicolosi who invented the term.
In yet another instance of insincerity, on a local radio talk show Thomas feigned compassion for people living with HIV and AIDS. What “good guy” Thomas failed to tell listeners was that Exodus addresses AIDS on its website by saying that, “In today’s society, homosexuality is reaping a bitter harvest…Homosexual involvement reaps deep devastation in the lives of many who practice it.” That Thomas runs away from such judgmental words when speaking to more liberal audiences shows what a phony he truly is.
The double-talk and dissembling continued when Alan Chambers told the Citizen-Times that Exodus was, “not about fire and brimstone.” This, of course, was the same person who wrote in a 2005 newsletter, “One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy, is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can.” On Sept. 21, 2007, Chambers told a crowd of social conservatives in Florida, “We have to stand up against an evil agenda. It is an evil agenda and it will take anyone captive that is willing, or that is standing idly by.”
With such bombastic broadsides, does one really have to wonder how the violent Andersonville father got the idea that homosexuality was demonic? Or, how the gay bashing hooligan, Stephen Moller, believed he could devalue the life of a gay man?
To underscore this connection, consider Exodus’ keynote speaker on Friday, author Andy Comiskey, who wrote a book that Exodus was selling, which calls homosexuality “spiritual disfigurement” and says that “Satan delights in homosexual perversion.” Inside of a packed chapel, 700 vulnerable and confused gay people had their souls strip-mined, as Comiskey declared war:
“Wickedness is a reality,” said Comiskey on-stage. “And those with same-sex attraction that succumb to the spirit of the age, can become agents of that wickedness…When you claim healing for the homosexual, you have declared war. And people, it is only going to get worse; it is only going to get worse in the changing cultural climate in which we live. Ours is not a benign healing path, it is a call to battle.”
And, Exodus claims it does not preach fire and brimstone?
Exodus may smile sweetly and tell the mainstream media they love homosexuals. But, judging by the recent hate crimes in the Carolinas combined with the reactionary rhetoric of Exodus, it seems that they are literally “loving” us to death.
Ку,блогер!!!
Предлогаю вам,владелец сайта, обменятся ссылками или статьями- очень понравился ваш сайт.
Для ваших пользователей предлогаю скачать фильмы, игры, музыку софт и много другое.
С уважением и поклоном
С удовольствием читаю. Продолжайте писать обязательно. Андрюха, Башкортостан.
Автор, а скажите а куда написать по поводу обмена ссылок (на какое конкретно мыло)?
IT IS exodus AND HATE GROUPS (HIDING BEHIND THE BIBLE) THAT MADE MY FRIEND NICK TAKE A GUN AND BLOW HIS BRAINS OUT. WHEN HE WAS FEELING LOST HE CALLED THE 700 CLUB, WHICH TOLD HIM TO CALL exodus. WITH IN HOURS OF DOING THIS HE WAS DEAD. HIS BLOOD IS ON THIER HANDS. I’D LOVE TO BE THERE WHEN THEY ARE TALKING TO ST. PETER ABOUT THAT. I’M A RETIRED NASCAR DRIVER AND I’M USEING THAT TO WRITE A BOOK TOO TELL EVERONE ABOUT NICK. (ANY ONE WANTING A SHORT STORY ABOUT NICK PLEASE CONTACT ME AND I WILL BE HAPPY TO SEND IT TO YOU sidcarmines@gmail.com ) I SAW PAT ROBERTSON TALKING ABOUT GAY MARRAGE, YOU COULD SEE THE HATE IN HIS EYES. “GOD FORGIVE THEM FOR THEY NO NOT WHAT THEY DO” I ALSO DO ALOT OF PUBLIC SPEAKING ABOUT SAVING AND HELPING GAY YOUTH. IF YOU HAVE A GROUP YOU WOULD LIKE ME TO TALK TO PLEASE EMAIL ME /SID
Ten months, huh? This murderous Moller jackass thinks his sentence will only be ten months? Maybe that’s the length of his jail term… but GLBT’s and allies in the South can make his REAL “sentence” much longer. Let’s find out where the bastard lives and where he works, and put a squad of us on him at all times. We wouldn’t have to DO anything to him, mind you… just have enough of a presence to make him constantly sick with worry as to what we (or others who don’t support his bigotry) MIGHT do. Just enough so that he constantly thinks about the consequences of what he’s done and the pain he’s caused. We can make sure this S.O.B. never has a minute of peace again in his life.
I found this quote in Wayne’s story to be rather humorous…..“One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy, is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can.” DESTROY THE KINGDOM OF GOD!!! Organized Christianity is doing a superb job of destroying The Kingdom of God!!!! It’s so ironic that Christ wanted to create “Heaven on Earth” (i.e. Kingdom of God) and “Christians” do everything to ensure that it will never happen. Hatred, lies, exclusion, intolerance, judging everyone. I could go on, but I have to go. My lions are getting hungry.
These type of people have nothing to sell but hate wrapped in lies. They are just freak variants of the religious maniacs who gave us 9/11.
We’ll take our gay friends anyday, and we long ago trashed their bibles full of lies and hatred, for that is all they have to offer. Maybe they would understand if we packed them off to Saudi Arabia with their bibles. Unfortunately for them it would be a bloody mess, on Friday, when they really learn the true meaning of religious hate… As the executioner shouts “Allahu Ahkbar” (God is Great). Too bad for these hateful people also, for they’ll never have a chance to change their ways.
Chuck in Chicago said that this group is worse than the American Nazi Party. I’m afraid that’s the problem. When people think of haters, they think of shaved heads with swastikas and rednecks in bed sheets. The plain and simple truth is that what lies at the heart of this is IGNORANCE. I, too, am an ex-ex-gay survivor. I, too, used to hate my homosexuality and tried groups like Exodus in order to change it. I nearly drove myself insane and was planning to kill myself before I cam across other gay Christians that showed me that what I have isn’t “sinful” but just the way that God made me. I am now helping other gay Christians with their problems of faith, and hopefully will someday start my own progressive church. In it, I will help show the body of Christ the error of their interpretation of the bible and bring them into the truth of God’s unconditional love and acceptance of His LGBT children.
Hi Timm: The link you’re looking for is here:
http://www.365gay.com/news/gay-teen-arrested/
Wayne, your old “friend” Paul Cameron is at it again:
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2008/07/21/insurance-service-quotes-anti-gay-crackpot-as-authority/
Insurance Service Quotes Anti-Gay Crackpot as Authority
Posted in Anti-Gay, Hate Groups by Casey Sanchez on July 21, 2008
“It’s a loaded subject, but let’s get right down to it: gay men, on average, die significantly younger than the rest of the population.” So begins “Gay Men Die 20 Years Younger,” an article posted on insure.com, a publicly traded online insurance brokerage. The source for the article is identified as none other than “Dr. Paul Cameron, the President of the Family Research Institute, [who] published a study in Psychological Reports that confirmed a 20-year life expectancy gap for actively gay men.”
The study in question in fact did nothing of the sort. Its author is a notorious anti-gay propagandist who for more than 25 years has circulated bogus, homophobic “research findings” in pay-to-publish vanity magazines like Psychological Reports (which will publish most anybody willing to pay $27.50 a page). Cameron’s goal, as he says quite candidly, is to provide “ammunition for those who want laws adopted banning homosexual acts throughout the United States.” (In fact, such laws were struck down as unconstitutional by the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.) Cameron’s propaganda is so transparently false and aimed merely at defaming homosexuals that the Southern Poverty Law Center added his Family Research Institute to its list of hate groups in 2005.
One of Cameron’s most infamous works is his 1983 “gay obituary study,” for which he used obituaries published in gay newspapers at the height of the AIDS crisis to conclude that gay men die on average at 43. “Gay Men Die 20 Years Younger,” which was written by insure.com company blogger Joseph White, is obviously based on the gay obituary study, even though Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, thoroughly debunked the study in 1997 in the online magazine Slate.
The average age of death for AIDS victims, Olson noted, was about 40. For Cameron’s figure of 43 years old to hold true, he pointed out, gay people who never contract AIDS must have a life expectancy of no more than 46 years — a truly absurd proposition. “Looked at another way,” Olson reported, “if even half the gay male population stays HIV-negative and lives to an average age of 75, an average overall life span of 43 implies that gay males with AIDS die at an implausibly early age (11, actually).”
Despite Cameron’s total lack of credibility and professional accreditation — he was expelled from the American Psychological Association in 1983 for ethical violations — his work is often cited favorably by anti-gay hate groups, and it still pops up regularly in conservative religious sermons.
But what’s it doing on insure.com?
Although insure.com is a regular sponsor of conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly’s radio show, by all appearances it’s an established mainstream business website. Insure.com, which describes itself as “an online consumer insurance information service” that allows visitors to obtain insurance quotes from more than 200 leading insurers, regularly wins Web design and Web commerce awards. The site is not a public discussion forum. Its owners strictly control its content, and the vast majority of its articles — described as “a vast library of originally authored insurance articles … not available from any other source” —deal with topics like quarterly car insurance rate reports and tips for discussing rider policies with a homeowners insurance agent. It’s hardly a typical venue for promoting the work of a raving homophobe like Cameron, who once said: “Homosexuality is an infectious appetite. It is like the dog that gets a taste for blood after killing its first victim and desires to get more victims thereafter with a ravenous hunger.”
Last month, bloggers at boxturtlebulletin.com, which delivers “news analysis and fact-checking of anti-gay rhetoric,” privately contacted insure.com CEO Robert Bland to make sure that Bland knew all about Cameron’s background, including his praise for Nazi Rudolph Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, for how he “dealt with” gays. The bloggers went public after Bland wrote back, informing them he had no intention of removing the article from the website. “It contains no factual errors and no editorial bias or slant whatsoever,” Bland wrote in a July 12 post to the boxturtlebulletin.com comments section.
Addressing the implications of Cameron’s findings for the life insurance industry, the insure.com article concludes that despite the gross disparity in life spans, “no life insurance companies charge elevated rates to gay men. Then again, perhaps the issue is still too sensitive for such realistic evaluation.”
Bland, in his correspondence with the boxturtlebulletin bloggers, indicated his belief that such a “realistic evaluation” should be based at least in part on the work of Paul Cameron: “There’s a human interest story to be researched here on why all U.S. life insurers decline HIV-positive applicants (many of whom are healthy and have been for two decades) but will not even attempt to segregate gays who, according to a growing body of evidence, may have a much shorter lifespan than non-gays.”
2 Responses to
‘Insurance Service Quotes Anti-Gay Crackpot as Authority’
Subscribe to comments with RSS
1.
Robert Bland said,
on July 21st, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Mr. Sanchez,
Shame on you!
Calling people “crackpots” and slaming my firm for its journalistic desire to report on relevant mortality issues of interest seems hateful itself, shortsighted and certainly contrary to your “hatewatch” million. The article that has you in a lather was published by us back in November 2007 and is one of 3,000 that we have posted at Insure.com since 1995. Insure.com has no political agenda and never has. Moroever, our article also describes the many Cameron critics in several places. And you conveniently left out my written promise to The Box Turtle writers that we’d soon be re-researching this topic in hopes of further expanding our article, which would take 3-4 weeks.
Don’t like the Camerons, you say? Note to throw gas on your fire, but noted mortality researcher Morten Frisch did baseline research on this topic and reported in 2003 that homosexual men were, in fact, at elevated cancer risk (see below):
“Am J Epidemiol. 2003 Jun 1;157 (11):966-72 12777359 (P,S,E,B) Cited:1 Cancer in a population-based cohort of men and women in registered homosexual partnerships.
[My paper] Morten Frisch, Else Smith, Andrew Grulich, Christoffer Johansen Department of Epidemiology Research, Danish Epidemiology Science Center, Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark. mfr@ssi.dk Cancer patterns among broad populations of homosexual men and women have not been studied systematically. The authors followed 1,614 women and 3,391 men in Denmark for cancer from their first registration for marriage-like homosexual partnership between 1989 and 1997. Ratios of observed to expected cancers measured relative risk. Women in homosexual partnerships had cancer risks similar to those of Danish women in general (overall relative risk (RR) = 0.9, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.6, 1.4), but only one woman developed cervical carcinoma in situ versus 5.8 women expected (RR = 0.2, 95% CI: 0.0, 0.97). Overall, men in homosexual partnerships were at elevated cancer risk (RR = 2.1, 95% CI: 1.8, 2.5), due mainly to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)-associated Kaposi’s sarcoma (RR = 136, 95% CI: 96, 186) and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (RR = 15.1, 95% CI: 10.4, 21.4). Anal squamous carcinoma also occurred in excess (RR = 31.2, 95% CI: 8.4, 79.8).”
Dr. Frisch’s research states that homosexual men have a deadly increase (RR=2.1) of carrying 3 deadly cancers.
Will you be calling him a “Crackpot” anytime soon?
We reported on this issue back in November 2007 as a matter of mortality interest to consumers and the life insurance industry. Our articles are accurate, fair, impartial and balanced.
Robert Bland, CLU
Chairman and CEO
Insure.com
2.
High John de Conquerer said,
on July 22nd, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Casey Sanchez calling people “crackpots” is him projecting onto others what he is.
For example, he published a piece covering up the sex trafficking of Mexican children in San Diego because it would hurt their cause of hate against Americans who want the border secured.
Comment
Name (required)
Email (will not be published) (required)
Website
Notify me of followup comments via e-mail
This is a moderated blog. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) encourages user comments on blog postings, but these comments are the personal opinions of the individuals posting them and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SPLC. SPLC may edit your comments for content or space. SPLC may also choose not to post your comment.
Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Ave.
Montgomery, AL 36104
Podcast Powered by podPress (v8.8)
No matter how much Exodus attempts to sugar coats their misinformation and blatant lies. Their agenda of gay hatred can’t be covered and leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. My heart goes out to our GLBT youth, whose naive parents believe in what Exodus is spewing. They suffer unbearable horrors under going “reparative therapy” treatments. Thank God for Wayne’s relentless efforts to expose Exodus for the hate mongering bigots they are. Our GLBT youths lives depend on his success.
They’re worse than the american nazi party.
I’m just curious: yesterday I remember reading articles (including on this very website) that suggested the 18 SC boy you mention was thought to have lied because there was no evidence to support his claim. Now I can’t find any information on the subject. When I do web searches on the subject, the links are to pages that no longer exist. Can somebody tell me what is going on here?
This article shows what I have believed all this time: Exodus International is a hate group.