Wayne Besen

Obama’s decision today shows he has a moral core and is a change agent – just as he promised in his first campaign. Obama’s strategists hope such leadership qualities will play well in the war for Independent voters. Furthermore, Team Obama hopes that today’s decision will energize the progressive base and open the floodgates for gay volunteers and money. An excited base will be needed to counteract the expected onslaught of anti-gay groups that will portray the President as a radical gay-loving socialist. Make no mistake: today’s announcement is risky...

The last time I checked, I never signed up for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. I don’t even like his church, yet he thinks I should be forced against my will to live by its rules. Do we now make our civil laws based upon Christian Sharia? Do we all have to follow his version of the Bible or be punished by government? And if this is the case, are we really a free country? Are we really much different than Iran, or is it only by a matter of degrees or a matter of time until these so-called “Christian Supremacists” get their filthy and corrupt paws on all of our laws?

On April 20, Invisible Children will hold a worldwide rally to draw attention to murderous Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) founder Joseph Kony. The event is called “Cover the Night,” but when one looks a bit closer at the shady right wing extremists this group cavorts with, a more appropriate name might be “Invisible Agenda: Covering Up The Theocratic Nightmare.”

I am a fan of the late Mike Wallace and am very sad that he has passed away. I have always enjoyed his reports and consider him a first-rate journalist. However, there was one noticeable career snafu that caused an enormous amount of damage to the LGBT community. In 1967, the news magazine CBS Reports aired an hour-long segment, “The Homosexuals,” that gave America its first glimpse of gay and lesbian Americans. Thanks to the efforts of anti-gay psychiatrists, gays were vilified in front of 40 million people, solidifying despicable stereotypes that would last for more than a generation.

Given what we now know, young minorities that embrace NOM should not feel cool, but instead should realize that they are tools that are doing the bidding of a few overpaid white zealots with an insincere political agenda cooked up in a banal Washington conference room. This is not truly about reflecting Black or Latino culture, but promulgating a wicked culture of corruption where the lies of scheming lobbyists are slickly packaged and cunningly sold to voters.

While I would absolutely love for the President to support marriage equality, it is not the end of the world if he waits until a second term. Michele Obama is correct to suggest that the most critical component in securing such rights is ensuring fair-minded judges sit on the Supreme Court. If any one of the current GOP candidates were elected, it would almost guarantee that the high court would include an intolerant majority hostile to LGBT rights.

By all indications the GOP race has boiled down to The Insincere (Romney) vs. The Insane (Santorum). Although, the way things are going in this tumultuous race, The Unstable (Newt) should stay in a bit longer because he will likely get one more chance in the limelight if he performs well in the South.

Cynthia Nixon recently told the New York Times that she chose to be gay. Her statement was clumsy, irresponsible, inaccurate, and lent itself to exploitation by anti-gay activists.

Will someone in the Republican Party please tell me how this scheming, cheating couple that made a mockery of family values is remotely conservative? They had a secretive, sleazy affair that they hid for years until they could no longer conceal it.

There is something seriously wrong with a political party where it is more controversial and exotic to speak French than in tongues. Given this acid trip facsimile of reality, it was inevitable that the Republican presidential primaries have come down to the Slickest vs. The Sickest.

Why are we even listening to the pronouncements of a “moral leader” who presides over a church that has spent billions of dollars to settle child molestation cases? The last thing hardworking, taxpaying, law abiding LGBT families need is to be scolded by the enablers of the child sexual abuse scandals.

The Roman Catholic Church’s toxic obsession with homosexuality manifests itself in countless ways. The most recent anti-gay outburst came from the Chicago Archbishop, Cardinal Francis George, who foolishly compared the LGBT community to the Ku Klux Klan.

In June, I penned a column, “The Fall of the Ex-Gay Myth,” which predicted that so-called “ex-gay” programs would crumble from internal rot. “It’s time for the discredited ‘ex-gay’ myth to simply go away and be rightfully viewed as an experiment that was tried and failed,” I wrote at the time. In the months since this column was written the decline of these “pray away the gay” organizations has only accelerated.

Hillary Clinton’s soaring speech on international LGBT issues was game changing. An historic address of this magnitude was desperately needed to counter the rising tide of backwards and barbaric nations that had recently been persecuting LGBT people to distract from their glaring problems.

As a general rule, places that are leaders in passing anti-gay laws are losers in virtually every other category that defines successful, civilized societies.