WAYNE BESEN | Founding Executive Director, Truth Wins Out
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Russia: This Berlin Wall of bigotry shall crumble too
If Russia is eventually freed from Vladimir Putin’s tyranny, it will partially be a result of LGBT people fighting this rogue nation’s state-sponsored terror apparatus. Worldwide efforts are now underway to pressure this petro police state into abolishing its recently passed anti-gay laws. … What is occurring in Russia is a psychotic pogrom against homosexuals. The goal is to terrorize and humiliate LGBT people and make their lives a living hell. Such ignorant bullying and cruel barbarism will not stand and Russia will pay a prohibitive price for its outrageous actions.
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Rick Santorum is a dead end for the Republican party
Although we just had an election, Rick Santorum, as tireless as he is tiresome, is already stumping in Iowa to prepare for his next defeat. His willful ignorance and woeful arrogance personifies why the GOP is losing the next generation of voters. Santorum, for instance, attacked marriage equality and foolishly pretended the huge cultural shift on this issue was no more than a passing fad – like a Hula Hoop or a Rubik’s cube…
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Evangelicals confuse ‘freedom’ with free rein to insult others
For fifty years, Bob Jones University, in Greenville, S.C., prohibited interracial dating and Bob Jones Jr. once claimed that Catholicism was a “satanic counterfeit” of fundamentalist Christianity.
Despite the ugly rhetoric and vile policies, Republican candidates regularly flocked to the school and groveled for its endorsement. The GOP luminaries who appeared at the university include Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, and Bob Dole.
This ignoble political ritual ended in 2000 after presidential candidate George W. Bush was excoriated for appearing at the school…
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Pope Benedict’s attack on marriage equality will backfire
In private moments, it must be disconcerting to the Pope that gay couples pledging their love and lives to each other, have significantly greater moral authority than the Vatican. People, including most moderate Catholics, must be scratching their heads and wondering why a troubled religious institution that does not have its house in order, is obsessively trying to cause disorder in loving gay households?
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Joy trumps jurisprudence in gay marriage case
One of two cases that the Supreme Court has decided to hear in the coming year will challenge the Defense of Marriage Act. Although this is ostensibly a legal case, it is really about competing narratives – and there is nothing same-sex marriage opponents offer that comes close to the touching tale of Edie Windsor and her deceased wife Thea Spyer. Their struggle not only tugs at the heartstrings, it transforms the heart into a marionette, dancing merrily to sappy love songs. This case screams out for fair resolution, and the court runs the risk of delegitimizing itself as draconian and doctrinaire if it denies this couple justice.
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Storming the ‘Ex-Gay’ Shores
In 1998, 15 religious right organizations launched a huge advertising campaign to promote “pray away the gay” programs. Anti-gay activist Robert Knight called the “Truth in Love” campaign the “Normandy Landing in the larger cultural wars.” Things didn’t quite work out as Knight had hoped…
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Shocking cult murder puts spotlight on the International House of Prayer (IHOP)
Today, I feel a little bit like Dr. Sam Loomis. He was the psychiatrist in the classic horror movie Halloween who ran through the streets of Haddonfield telling anyone who would listen that Michael Myers had just escaped from the insane asylum. As he frantically warned the residents, they looked at him as if he were a paranoid crank. Similarly, I warned in May that something was seriously amiss at Mike Bickle’s International House of Prayer (IHOP) in Grandview, MO, an exurb of Kansas City…
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Mean Mitt is a rotten apple in a bad barrel
In reality, Mitt Romney is a nasty individual with radical ideas who seems to have little regard for animals, women, minorities, gays, and 47-percent of Americans whom he regards as bums who can get their healthcare in the Emergency Room.
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Gay bashing by churches is why America is losing its religion
When people see their own sons and daughters and friends and co-workers coming out, it creates a crisis of credibility for religious institutions. It leads to countless situations where mean-spirited men like Archbishop John Nienstedt demand blind, irrational obedience and say take it or leave it – and more people are now following their consciences and walking away.
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The convoluted legal case for reparative therapy
If there is one thing that we learned by the Pacific Justice Institute’s lawsuit against California Gov. Jerry Brown, and anyone in his orbit remotely connected to a new law banning “ex-gay” therapy for minors, is that these lawyers are as logic challenged and convoluted as the industry they are poorly defending.
