Do you have ANY proof he was taken into back rooms? I can’t find any references to what you’ve written. Either back up your claims, or retract them. Prove that he was out of control, or shut the fuck up!

I love you, Team 8! Their coverage of the Derek Copp shooting was great.

At the same time, I think the AFA is doing more than demeaning a class of people. Surely they don’t honestly believe that what they’re saying in their informercial is true.

We stopped the disinfomercial in Michigan; we can stop it again. We can also counteract the AFA’s disingenuous propaganda. The film For the Bible Tells Me So basically exposes the AFA’s James Dobson for the fraud that he is. Soulforce has some good booklets that help to counter AFA misinformation. One of them, A False Focus on My Family, is devoted entirely to James Dobson’s false and misleading claims. I think we should get information like this widely viewed – on Youtube or, better, through the mainstream media.

“‘Speechless purposely promote lies and distortions,’ the national LGBT rights group Human Rights Campaign said in a statement to its members which led to the e-mail campaign to the TV station.” I agree that LGBT rights groups must step up to the plate, but let’s give credit where it’s due.

We’ll also need to fight any future broadcasts of the disinfomercial. I agree with the poster who said it sounds like slander. Maybe its time for some LGBT lawyers, or groups like Lambda Legal, to sue the AFA for its repeated misrepresentations.

The rationale behind a defamation (libel/slander) suit is that falsehoods uttered maliciously by the defendant caused provable damages to the plaintiff’s reputation. In terms of legal philosophy, falsehoods don’t do much to serve the goals of the First Amendment (to wit, open, vigorous and meaningful debate in society) – so allowing the identifiable, individual plaintiff to recover on *proven* harm *to her in specific* is basically the outcome of a balancing act between the interest in free speech and the interests against undeserved harm to one’s reputation.

Since the freedom of speech is a fundamental constitutional right, there are only a very few places we allow such a balancing act to take place, and Terminiello established that “group libel” is not one of them. Those who support the decision reason, more or less, that the reputational harm from a mean-spirited statement like “gays are pervy, Satanic weirdos” is thought to be more diffuse, unpredictable, and difficult to measure than the harm from a mean-spirited statement like “Phyllis Smith has been stalking me since 1997″.

The former statement is undeniably nasty, extreme, ill-considered and unfounded… but it’s also clearly a matter of opinion. No one is likely to take it hook, line, and sinker if he doesn’t already have some beliefs in that direction – and, since opinions belong fundamentally to the ultimate gray area of human cognition (“belief” rather than fact), humanity is going to be kicking them around amongst ourselves until the end of time, no matter what. The latter statement, on the other hand, is a factual assertion, which, if false, can be proven so. It’s more reasonable to conclude that a false statement of *fact* has the power to harm someone’s reputation, since a statement of fact is a reference to an outside, objective reality (even if the reference turns out to be an inaccurate one).

So maybe the question up for debate is – how far did Terminiello really extend? (Constitutional scholars still discuss wrinkles in the case, 60 years later…) The crap put out by most anti-gay groups seems to run the gamut from vague statements of opinion (the “destroying America” sort of fluff) to broadly drawn – yet comparatively concrete – attempts to state facts (nonsense about LGBTQ people having a 43-year life expectancy, for instance). So the question is, is there anywhere on this continuum where a statement might be “facty” enough to support an argument that the statement falls outside the scope of Terminiello? And if it’s established that it may be *possible* to maintain some limited form of “group libel” suit without offending the *Constitution*, what’s the likelihood that the judiciary will depart from the current *case law* requiring individualized identification of a defamation plaintiff? How on Earth would a whole group of people prove its damages?

These are some rather complicated questions, and as righteous as our cause is, we still can’t pretend that the implications are unimportant. Treating words as if they were sticks and stones is a pretty hefty matter. We have to determine whether it’s morally fair to allocate any responsibility for physical harm (say, hate crimes) to a person who merely said something nasty – and, if so, come up with a way of determining just how much of the responsibility lies on the speaker – and also ensure that we don’t excuse the person who chose to ACT on the speaker’s mean-spirited garbage. (Even the worst bastards out there aren’t robots – at some point, THEY took a concrete step to translate some fundie’s hateful words into a physical attack, and THEY need to be held responsible for this free choice).

I know it might be unpopular to state this – but instead of winning a judgment in court on what amounts to a “hey, that was mean” argument, I’d much rather win public opinion by pointing out “hey, that was idiotic and false”. It might take a lot longer to show the world that the AFA is just self-serving, mean-spirited, and above all *incorrect* in their anti-GLBTQ rhetoric… but when we finally do succeed, I think we win something a lot more valuable than a difficult-to-predict sum of money split a million ways. (There’s also the bad precedent that might be set by imposing legal liability for what, in many cases, amount to rude statements of opinion; I don’t want to endanger OUR ability to argue that FOF, AFA, and their ilk are freakin’ loony!

This organization has done everything in its power to abridge the rights of gay Americans. This organization opposes the core constitutional values of equal protection, and scorns such notions as the separation of church and state.

Call these people what they are — evil to the very core.

PHILIP