PFOX-ExGays

Hey Teens!! Read Jake's ex-gay diary!!!

2012-01-31T16:32:00.000-08:00

LGBT Activists to Learn 'How to Become Gay for Pay' at Conference

2012-01-30T18:50:00.001-08:00

“How to Become Gay for Pay! Kicking off Your Queer Career” is the title of just one of the workshops being conducted this week and weekend as part of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s 24th “National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change,” being held in Baltimore.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/lgbt-activists-learn-how-become-gay-pay-conference

An Impossible Choice

2012-01-30T18:34:00.001-08:00

January 30, 2012

Dear Friends,

        On January 20, 2012, the United States Department of Health and Human Services with the approval of President Barack Obama issued a new federal mandate making coverage of abortifacient drugs, sterilization and all FDA-approved contraceptives obligatory for virtually all employers, including faith-based institutions.

        What is at the center of the concern of Catholic bishops and others about this action by the Obama administration? How can it affect the institutions of the Archdiocese of Washington?

        The new mandate is the first federal regulation in our nation’s history to require all faith-based institutions to pay for coverage of abortifacient drugs, sterilization and contraceptives. People were already free to use such widely available products and procedures. Up until this mandate, employers could choose whether or not to cover them and individuals could choose whether or not to seek employers that pay for them. Now nearly all those who provide insurance must include abortifacients, sterilization and contraceptives. Virtually all Catholic institutions and individuals will have to pay for that coverage. Being forced to provide these services violates both our faith conviction and our freedom.

        In upholding the HHS regulation, the administration has ignored the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and has denied Catholics the most fundamental freedom, religious liberty. Despite the Church’s appeal for a broader religious exemption, which was echoed by many other faiths, the administration refused to modify the regulation’s current exemption that is limited to religious groups that hire and serve people primarily of their own faith. Most churches and church-run institutions do not qualify for the exemption because of their very openness to serving the common good of society and all people regardless of creed.

        Even those who may disagree with the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life, such as the editorial boards of The Washington Post and the New York Daily News, have stated that the government has no business forcing religious institutions to sponsor and pay for procedures and drugs which violate their beliefs.

        What will happen if this mandate stands? Our schools, hospitals and charitable organizations will be placed in the untenable position of choosing between violating civil law and abandoning our religious beliefs.

        For example, the mandate will allow a Catholic school one of three options:
1) violate its beliefs by providing coverage for medications and procedures we believe are immoral, 2) cease providing insurance coverage for all of its employees and face ongoing and ultimately ruinous fines, or 3) attempt to qualify for the exemption by hiring and serving only Catholics.

A Catholic school simply cannot effectively teach Catholic doctrine while providing insurance to its teachers – and in the case of Catholic universities, to its students as well – that violates its own beliefs. Nor should it have to deny its employees access to affordable health care, a basic human right. Nor could it afford to pay crippling fines. Nor should it be forced to close its doors to non-Catholics.

        There can no longer be any doubt that religious liberty in our country is in jeopardy. Only weeks ago, the Obama administration unsuccessfully argued to the Supreme Court that the government has the right to interfere in a church’s choice of its ministers. Thankfully, the Court unanimously rejected this radical position. Undeterred, the government has advanced on another front.

        Catholics across America are already fighting this mandate. Catholic journalists of all backgrounds have widely criticized the HHS rules as unjust, and leaders of major Catholic organizations — such as the Catholic Health Association, Catholic Relief Services, and Catholic Charities USA — have also spoken out against them. In the meantime, the Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty is actively exploring options for litigation and legislative proposals to remedy this injustice.

        This is the time to speak up. This is the time for all our voices to be heard. Therefore, I ask of you two things. First, as a community of faith we need to commit ourselves to prayer that wisdom and justice may prevail, and religious liberty may be preserved. Without God, we can do nothing; with God, nothing is impossible. Second, I ask you to visit www.usccb.org/conscience and www.mdcathcon.org to learn more about this assault on religious liberty and to find the resources to support legislation that would reverse the effects of the administration’s decision.

        With gratitude for your collaboration in this very important matter and with every good wish, I am

Faithfully in Christ,

Donald Cardinal Wuerl

Archbishop of Washington

Cardinal Wuerl discusses the importance of the "First Freedom" - religious liberty.

Watch Monsignor Charles Pope's homily from the 2012 Youth Rally and Mass for Life.

Bullying in Schools

2012-01-30T17:04:00.000-08:00

Read this Liberty Alert online at www.LC.org

January 30, 2012

American College of Pediatricians Sends Letter of Caution to Shawano Superintendent

Today the American College of Pediatricians sent a letter to the Shawano School District Superintendent, Todd Carlson, cautioning him to not react adversely to 15-year-old student Brandon Wegner based on political pressure.

Superintendent Carlson called Brandon ignorant for his views on homosexual adoption presented in an op-ed, point-counter-point article for a student-run newspaper. Brandon, the author of the censored article, was punished and bullied for expressing his support of natural, mother-father adoption. The American College for Pediatricians sent a letter to the superintendent, advising him to "consider all the evidence." It also included three articles concerning homosexual adoption and bullying.

In the letter, Den A. Trumbell, MD, President of the American College of Pediatricians, wrote:

The topic of same-sex adoption is not as decided as some professionals would have the public believe. There is no clear evidence that children reared in same-sex-led households fare as well as those reared by their biological heterosexual parents.

The actions by the school superintendent are appalling. The letter from the American College of Pediatricians underscores his bad judgment. The two students who wrote point-counter-point op-eds engaged in a civic dialogue about homosexual adoption. The superintendent then set a bad example by punishing one viewpoint and using his position to bully a 15-year-old student. That is wrong and must be corrected.

Read our News Release for more details.

Defending God's Design for Marriage and Family

Have you ever wondered... "What can I do to help those involved in homosexuality?" "How extensive is the culture war over marriage and family?" "What are they exposing our children to in schools?" Or, perhaps... "Why should I even care?" This book answers those questions and more!

Only One Mommy exposes the truth about the homosexual rights movement and its destructive consequences. Written from the vantage point of Lisa Miller's seven-year custody battle for her biological child against her former same-sex partner, Only One Mommy offers a first-hand account of how people are lured into believing that they are born "gay" and cannot change. As a result of that belief, they make life choices that have devastating consequences for our children, families, and freedoms.

This book offers truth to those struggling with homosexuality, encourages churches to minister to those caught in the lifestyle, and stirs freedom-loving Americans to get involved in the culture war that is raging all around them. Lisa Miller's story illustrates the clash between two radically different worldviews. One will win, and one will lose. No one will escape this impending storm. This book should be required reading.

Rena Lindevaldsen has written this book based on her first-hand experience as an attorney with Liberty Counsel, defending of marriage and family in courts throughout the nation.

Forward this Liberty Alert to your entire email list of family and friends, and encourage them to subscribe.

Mathew D. Staver - Founder and Chairman
Anita L. Staver - President
Liberty Counsel - 1-800-671-1776
PO Box 540774 - Orlando, FL 32854

Actress Cynthia Nixon says she's Gay by Choice

2012-01-29T13:01:00.001-08:00

Wow! Look at this! This actress from "Sex in the City" says that she is gay by CHOICE and she's outraged the gay community...

http://news.yahoo.com/actress-claim-gay-choice-riles-activists-201717513.html

Three Days, Three Events to Defend Marriage

2012-01-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

Hello Everyone,

This is a reminder that next week will be critical for Protecting Marriage in Maryland. Please come to as many of these as you can attend, and please pray for our success for those events you cannot attend. Sunday Night will be a pre-rally Prayer meeting in Hanover, Md. Monday at 6pm will be the Marriage Rally in front of the State House in Annapolis, and Tuesday afternoon will be the Senate Hearing from 1pm – 5pm. If you would like to testify at the Senate hearing, please arrive early (10am) so that you can be sure your name will be on the list. Please see the below message for more details, and for specific information on legislators to contact. Please also keep New Jersey and Washington State in your prayers. Thank you to everyone for all your efforts in this most critical hour.

Sincerely,

Robert Broadus

Chairman, Protect Marriage Maryland

301-789-3128

Subject: Salt & Light urgent call 2 action for traditional marriage

Is this email not displaying correctly?
View it in your browser.

Salt & Light Maryland

Be an advocate for traditional marriage in Maryland!

Governor O'Malley introduced the Same Sex Marriage bill in the legislature. It begins as Senate Bill 241: Civil Marriage Protection Act, and it's moving fast!* There will be a Rally for Marriage on Mon., Jan. 30 from 6-8pm in front of the State House in Annapolis (see #6, below). The Senate hearing will take place on Tues., Jan. 31. Please be praying this bill does not pass! If you can, be at the Senate building in Annapolis during the hearing to give testimony (bring 20 copies of your written testimony with you) and/or pray. Please contact me if you need more information.

What else can we do to defend marriage? A lot!

Pray for (a) God's will to be done in Maryland; (b) wisdom for your leaders; and (c) wisdom for you & others in taking action on this issue. There will be a prayer meeting on Sun., Jan. 29 from 6-7pm at Living Hope Church, 7484 Candlewood Road, Hanover, MD 21076.
IMPORTANT: Click on THIS and make copies of these postcards, get each person to complete all 4 postcards (1 for his/her senator, 3 for his/her delegates) (ask your spiritual leader if you can set up a table or pass out the postcards at your place of worship; this has been very effective), and send them to Maryland Marriage Alliance, PO Box 106, Annapolis, MD 21404. They will be delivered to your legislators. This initiative will continue for the next 3 months.
IMPORTANT: Respectfully call, write, or e-mail state Senators and Delegates. Letters should be addressed to "The Honorable…" with greetings "Dear Mr., Mrs., Ms." (as appropriate). To find your representatives, (a) Use act.marylandmarriagealliance.com or (b) Go to www.mdelect.net, enter your address, and click on the names of your state Senator and Delegates on the left. At the bottom of this email is a prioritized list of Delegates that all of us should contact.**
Contact Gov. O'Malley. Mail: 100 State Cir., Annapolis 21401-1925. Phone: 1-800-811-8336 or 410-974-3901. E-mail: http://www.governor.maryland.gov/mail/
IMPORTANT: Tell like-minded friends.
Bring family & friends to the marriage rally on Mon., Jan. 30, 6-8pm, near the State House. We need you! Dress warmly and bring your photo ID for access to restrooms. Monday nights are the only nights the legislators meet. Signs with a positive message are great, but NO WOOD STICKS. Possible signage includes: 1) Marriage= 1 Man, 1 Woman 2) Marriage: It should not be redefined 3) Marriage Works 4) Stronger Marriages=Stronger Maryland 5) Stronger Marriages + Stronger Families = A dream we can achieve in Maryland.
Write an editorial to your local newspaper defending traditional marriage. To submit an editorial, send an email with your name, address, phone #, and email to your local paper, e.g., the Baltimore Sun (talkback@baltimoresun.com); the Washington Post (letters@washpost.com); the Washington Times (yourletters@washingtontimes.com); and the Gazette (letters@gazette.net).

Let us know if you need any additional information, and thanks for being the "salt of the earth" and the "light of the world" in Maryland!

For God and country,
George & Maribel Avlonitis
Salt & Light Maryland
http://marylandpatriots.org/salt-and-light-home/

* If the bill passes out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, it will go to the Senate floor for a vote. If it passes out of the Senate floor, it will be heard by the House Judiciary Committee and the HGO committee

** Below is the list of Delegates we should focus on calling right now. Please call or email each one and ask them to give you a commitment to vote against the same sex marriage. If you get any commitments or feedback please let us know. PHONE CALLS have the biggest impact!

PETER A. HAMMEN

(410) 841-3772 peter.hammen@house.state.md.us

SHANE E. PENDERGRASS

(410) 841-3139 shane.pendergrass@house.state.md.us

ERIC M. BROMWELL

(410) 841-3766 eric.bromwell@house.state.md.us

JOHN P. DONOGHUE

(410) 841-3125 john.donoghue@house.state.md.us

JAMES W. HUBBARD

(410) 841-3103 e-mail: james.hubbard@house.state.md.us

ARIANA B. KELLY

(410) 841-3642 e-mail: ariana.kelly@house.state.md.us

DAN K. MORHAIM

(410) 841-3054 e-mail: dan.morhaim@house.state.md.us

SHIRLEY NATHAN-PULLIAM

(410) 841-3358 e-mail: shirley.nathan.pulliam@house.state.md.us

NATHANIEL T. OAKS

(410) 841-3283 e-mail: nathaniel.oaks@house.state.md.us

JOSELINE A. PENA-MELNYK

(410) 841-3502 e-mail: joseline.pena.melnyk@house.state.md.us

KIRILL REZNIK

(410) 841-3039 e-mail: kirill.reznik@house.state.md.us

SHAWN Z. TARRANT

(410) 841-3545 e-mail: shawn.tarrant@house.state.md.us

VERONICA L. TURNER

(410) 841-3212e-mail: veronica.turner@house.state.md.us

FRANK M. CONAWAY, JR.

(410) 841-3189 e-mail: frank.conaway@house.state.md.us

TIFFANY T. ALSTON

(410) 841-3692, e-mail: tiffany.alston@house.state.md.us

CURTIS STOVALL (CURT) ANDERSON

(410) 841-3291 e-mail: curt.anderson@house.state.md.us

SAM ARORA

(410) 841-3528 e-mail: sam.arora@house.state.md.us

JILL P. CARTER

(410) 841-3283 e-mail: jill.carter@house.state.md.us

KEVIN KELLY

(410) 841-3404 e-mail: kevin.kelly@house.state.md.us

SUSAN C. LEE

(410) 841-3649 e-mail: susan.lee@house.state.md.us

KEIFFER JACKSON MITCHELL, JR.

(410) 841-3802 e-mail: keiffer.mitchell@house.state.md.us

LUIZ R. S. SIMMONS

(410) 841-3037 e-mail: luiz.simmons@house.state.md.us

KRISELDA VALDERRAMA

(410) 841-3210 e-mail: kris.valderrama@house.state.md.us

GERALDINE VALENTINO-SMITH

(410) 841-3101 e-mail: geraldine.valentino@house.state.md.us

JEFFREY D. WALDSTREICHER

(410) 841-3130 e-mail: jeff.waldstreicher@house.state.md.us

Salt and Light Maryland is a network of Bible believers in Maryland who work together to inform believers of the Bible's relevance to current issues and influence political leaders to follow Biblical principles. Please feel free to forward this to others, and please do not hesitate to contact us if you want to be a part of this network or for more information.

Kerry Cook's Tesimony

2012-01-25T09:34:00.000-08:00

I attended a Christian Science church with my mother and older brother until I was 16, when I started staying home on Sundays with my father and two younger brothers. I had cut myself off from God and my mother after being sexual assaulted by a boy at church, and the feelings I had for girls since elementary school were being encouraged in Girl Guides. I left home suicidal at 17 and found a place to belong by 18: radical lesbian feminism politics at Sydney University. I had a party lifestyle in numerous short term lesbian relationships, and studied homosexual and feminist history. After I graduated I worked in anti-discrimination, sued my employer for lesbian discrimination, and was elected to Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby Board.

But the peace I thought I had found was threatened by a transgender board member pressuring everyone to adopt a queer identity. I withdrew from my public role to the privacy of a permanent relationship, where I was becoming increasingly aware of emotional abuse and co-dependency in lesbian relationships. My partner ended our relationship when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, claiming it was sinful. I strongly disagreed, but decided to try going to church because I had great respect for her mother who had died gracefully overseas after a long illness. Her mother wrote to me on a Catholic card in her last days and I was deeply touched.

I was welcomed at an inner-city Anglican Church, where I was gently told that it didn’t matter what I had done in the past - all sin separates us from God. A few months later I took an Alpha course and later recognized my decade in homosexual relationships as a sin. I began to see that I had tried to replace my mother’s love with a woman who was similar to her in many ways. Then one Saturday night, I was getting ready to attend a homosexual party near my parents’ house when I hit my head on the corner of my fireplace and fell to the ground bleeding. I stayed there, said a prayer of repentance and got up feeling loved and forgiven. I accepted Christ.

My behavior and thoughts changed to heterosexual quickly, despite the local pastor’s advice not to mention anything about my homosexual past, because I worked hard on identifying with my mother. I was baptized in June 1999, left Australia for California and got married in 2000. A year before I gave birth to the first of our two sons, my mother was dying of cancer. I stayed close to her hospital bed and accepted the mother-daughter peace, love, and belonging I had always been looking for. One day while looking up a parenting question on the Focus on the Family website, I saw the link to Exodus. The testimonies inspired me to speak publically a couple of years later when biased homosexual and transgender curriculum was introduced into my son’s kindergarten.

I am grateful for any remaining freedom to call homosexual behavior a sin and share my insights into the deeper sins and hurts behind homosexual behavior. I didn’t just magically become a devoted wife and mother. God forgave me just as I was because I accepted the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. God continues to forgive me as I walk out on a limb learning heterosexual skills.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” 1 John 4:18.

Victim of transgender assault at Rosedale McDonald's charged with disorderly conduct

2012-01-25T09:24:00.001-08:00

Chrissy Polis arrested after saying she had been robbed

By Peter Hermann

December 7 2011, 10:31 AM EST

The 23-year-old transgendered woman whose videotaped

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bal-victim-of-hate-crime-beating-charged-with-disorderly-conduct-20111207,0,5109839.story

First Things Article: Same-Sex Science by Stanton Jones

2012-01-25T08:49:00.001-08:00

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/01/same-sex-science

Same-Sex Science

Stanton L. Jones

February 2012

Many religious and social conservatives believe that homosexuality is a mental illness caused exclusively by psychological or spiritual factors and that all homosexual persons could change their orientation if they simply tried hard enough. This view is widely pilloried (and rightly so) as both wrong on the facts and harmful in effect. But few who attack it are willing to acknowledge that today a wholly different, far more influential, and no less harmful set of falsehoods—each attributed to the findings of “science”—dominates the research literature and political discourse.

We are told that homosexual persons are just as psychologically healthy as heterosexuals, that sexual orientation is biologically determined at birth, that sexual orientation cannot be changed and that the attempt to change it is necessarily harmful, that homosexual relationships are equivalent to heterosexual ones in all important characteristics, and that personal identity is properly and legitimately constituted around sexual orientation. These claims are as misguided as the ridiculed beliefs of some social conservatives, as they spring from distorted or incomplete representations of the best findings from the science of same-sex attraction.

Today we approach same-sex attraction with views grounded in social and biological scientific perspectives that are only partially supported by empirical findings. Until the early decades of the twentieth century, moral disapproval of “sodomy” guided public policy, but that grounding was displaced by a psychiatric model that viewed homosexuality as a mental illness. Once homosexuality came to be seen not as a sin but as a sickness, it became a simple matter for social science to overturn the opposition to homosexual acts. Alfred Kinsey’s studies of male and female sexuality, published in 1948 and 1953, portrayed homosexual behavior of various kinds as a normal and surprisingly common variant of human sexuality. In 1951, Clellan Ford and Frank Beach published Patterns of Sexual Behavior, their famous study of diverse forms of sexual behavior, including same-sex behavior, across human cultures and many animal species; they suggested a widely shared “basic capacity” for same-sex behavior.

But the decisive blow to the mental-illness construal of homosexuality came from a single study in 1957. Psychologist Evelyn Hooker published findings that convincingly demonstrated that homosexual persons do not necessarily manifest psychological maladjustment. On the basis of Hooker’s work, and the findings of similar studies, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association amended its designation of homosexual orientation as a mental illness.

To avoid misunderstanding the phenomenon of homosexuality, we must grapple with the Achilles heel of research into the homosexual condition: the issue of sample representativeness. To make general characterizations such as “homosexuals are as emotionally healthy as heterosexuals,” scientists must have sampled representative members of the broader group. But representative samples of homosexual persons are difficult to gather, first, because homosexuality is a statistically uncommon phenomenon.

A recent research synthesis by Gary Gates of the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law School dedicated to sexual-orientation law and public policy, suggests that among adults in the United States, Canada, and Europe, 1.8 percent are bisexual men and women, 1.1 percent are gay men, and 0.6 percent are lesbians. This infrequency makes it hard to find participants for research studies, leading researchers to study easy-to-access groups of persons (such as visible participants in advocacy groups) who may not be representative of the broader homosexual population. Add to this the difficulty of defining homosexuality, of establishing boundaries of what constitutes homosexuality (with individuals coming in and out of the closet, and also shifting in their experience of same-sex identity and attraction), and of the shifting perceptions of the social desirability of embracing the identity label of gay or lesbian, and the difficulty of knowing when one is studying a truly representative sample of homosexual persons becomes clear.

With this caution in mind, we can now approach the broad beliefs shaping our culture. First, are homosexual persons as psychologically healthy as heterosexuals? Many believe so, and public representations of the scientific evidence support the belief. For instance, in 1986, in its amicus curiae brief for the Supreme Court case Bowers v. Hardwick, the American Psychological Association (APA) stated, erroneously, that “extensive psychological research conducted over almost three decades has conclusively established that homosexuality is not related to psychological adjustment or maladjustment.” Today, twenty-five years later, the association’s website still declares, after decades of research to the contrary, that “being gay is just as healthy as being straight.”

Evelyn Hooker, in her 1957 study, was careful to reject only the claim that homosexuality is always pathological. She never made the logically distinct assertion that homosexual persons on average are just as psychologically healthy as heterosexuals. It is well that she did not, because the consistent findings of the best, most representative research suggest the contrary, despite a few scattered compatible findings from smaller studies of less representative samples. One of the most exhaustive studies ever conducted, published in 2001 in the American Journal of Public Health and directed by researchers from Harvard Medical School, concludes that “homosexual orientation . . . is associated with a general elevation of risk for anxiety, mood, and substance-use disorders and for suicidal thoughts and plans.” Other and more recent studies have found similar correlations, including studies from the Netherlands, one of the most gay-affirming social contexts in the world. Depression and substance abuse are found to be on average 20 to 30 percent more prevalent among homosexual persons. Teens manifesting same-sex attraction report suicidal thoughts and attempts at double to triple the rate of other teens. Similar indicators of diminished physical health emerge in this literature.

Social stigma is the popular explanation, both in scientific studies and in mass media, for heightened psychological distress among homosexuals. The possibility that the orientation and all it entails cuts against a fundamental, gender-based given of the human condition, thus creating distress, is not raised. The correlation between social stigma and psychological problem is real, but the empirical case for the first causing the second has yet to be made. This has not stopped advocates, however, from battling alleged stigma by increasingly framing all “anti-gay sentiment” as a form of prejudice. This has led to the creation of new terminology: No matter how congruent with the scientific evidence, any belief that homosexuality is not a normal and positive variant of human sexuality is a manifestation of “homophobia” and “heterosexism,” a symptom of destructive “master narratives of normativity” (of which “heteronormativity” is a part).

Is homosexuality biologically determined at birth? A pervasive understanding is settling into Western culture that homosexual orientation, indeed any and all sexual orientations, has been proven by science to be a given of the human person and rooted in biology. Why does this falsehood—that homosexuality has been proven to have an exclusively biological cause—matter? It is the basis for asserting that sexual orientation is the same sort of characteristic as race or skin color, which has become, for instance, the foundational metaphor in the push for the right to marry someone of the same sex.

One reason it is generally believed that homosexuality is conclusively caused by biological factors is the supposed lack of a credible alternative. Two astonishing examples: The 2009 APA task force report on Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE), Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation, presents over and over as established “scientific fact” that “no empirical studies or peer-reviewed research supports theories attributing same-sex sexual orientation to family dysfunction or trauma.” Neuroscientist Simon LeVay, author of a major book on the science of same-sex attraction, in considering environmental and psychological factors influencing sexual orientation concludes that “there is no actual evidence to support any of those ideas.”

There are, in fact, many such studies and a lot of actual evidence. Recent studies show that familial, cultural, and other environmental factors contribute to same-sex attraction. Broken families, absent fathers, older mothers, and being born and living in urban settings all are associated with homosexual experience or attraction. Even that most despised of hypothesized causal contributors, childhood sexual abuse, has recently received significant empirical validation as a partial contributor from a sophisticated thirty-year longitudinal study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Of course, these variables at most partially determine later homosexual experience, and most children who experienced any or all of these still grow up heterosexual, but the effects are nonetheless real.

To say that psychological and environmental variables play a part in causation does not mean that biology does not, rather just not to the extent that many gay-affirming scholars claim. The two most influential contemporary theories of biological causation focus respectively on fraternal birth order and genetics; each has some level of support, but for modest-sized causal effects at best.

The fraternal birth order theory hypothesizes that some mothers develop something akin to an allergic reaction to their body’s encounter with the male hormones generated by their male fetus, and hence manifest a hormonal resistance against the masculinization process in the developing male fetus. Males who were the product of such wombs are incompletely masculinized. And it is posited that the more male children such mothers bear, the more profound their reactions and the greater the likelihood that the later-born sons will be homosexual. In short, the more older brothers, the more likely the younger brothers are to be homosexual. The actual evidence such an immunological reaction exists is minimal apart from the raw claim that gay men tend to have disproportionate numbers of older brothers. But do they?

Early studies claiming to demonstrate a disproportionate presence of older brothers among homosexual men were based upon advertisement-recruited, volunteer samples vulnerable to volunteer bias. As Anthony Bogaert and Ray Blanchard, the major proponents of this theory, multiplied their reports of this phenomenon, their larger and larger samples were created by folding new volunteer samples into a common pool with their original samples, thus creating larger and larger nonrepresentative samples.

Recently, Bogaert analyzed two nationally representative samples and found only an exceptionally weak older-brother effect, but only for same-sex attraction, not for same-sex behavior. Then he analyzed an independent and truly representative sample eight times the size of his previous studies, finding no older-brother effect. At roughly the same time, a study of two million Danes and another of 10,000 American teenagers both failed to find the effect. It is thus mystifying why many gay-affirming researchers still confidently assert, like Simon LeVay, “that gay men do have significantly more older brothers, on average, than straight men.”

If there is a genetic component to sexual orientation, then the more two people share their genetic endowment, the more likely they are to share the same sexual orientation. The then-moribund genetic theory received a huge boost from J. Michael Bailey’s famous 1991 study that recruited subjects through advertisements and posted announcements throughout Chicago’s gay community. Bailey examined three groups in descending order of genetic similarity: genetically identical twins, fraternal twins and non-twin brothers who are essentially 50 percent identical, and adopted siblings who have no particular genetic similarity. Bailey reported a widely misinterpreted 52 percent “concordance” for identical male twins, compared with 22 percent for fraternal twins, 9 percent for non-twin brothers, and 11 percent for adopted brothers. The results generated wide and simplistic media coverage. It had been settled, the media suggested: Sexual orientation was determined by one’s genes. What was not widely understood was that only in 14 of the 42 identical-twin pairs did the two twin brothers match for sexual orientation; in the remaining 27 sets the identical twin brothers did not match.

But the deeper problem with the study was again one of sample representativeness. What if individuals were more likely to volunteer for the study if they shared same-sex attraction with a sibling, and less likely to do so if they didn’t? Using a more representative sample from the Australian Twin Registry, Bailey in 2000 saw the concordance for identical male twins fall from 52 to a mere 20 percent, and the matching for homosexual orientation between each pair of identical male twins fell to a mere 3 out of 27 pairs (11.1 percent). The findings of Bailey’s new study failed to reach statistical significance. The ballyhooed genetic effect had shrunk considerably, a fact that failed, of course, to capture any media attention and is often left out of the textbook treatments of the subject. In 2010, an impressive and much larger study utilizing the Swedish Twin Registry produced almost identical results: Among the 71 pairs of identical male twins of whom at least one twin was gay, in only seven cases (9.8 percent) was the second twin also gay, yet another statistically insignificant result.

But the search for a genetic mechanism continues, using a more statistically powerful calculation, that of heritability, which estimates how much of the variability of sexual orientation may be attributed to genetic influences. The higher this estimate, the greater the suggested genetic contribution. The best recent studies consistently generate heritability estimates for male homosexuality of 30 to 50 percent, a statistically significant finding that sounds quite powerful. Heritability estimates for female homosexuality are slightly less than for males, but still statistically significant. But what do heritability estimates of 30 to 50 percent mean?

Behavior genetics has established heritability estimates for a vast array of psychological traits. Quite a number of traits demonstrate much higher heritability than does homosexual orientation. Those with roughly similar heritability include social attitudes such as right-wing authoritarianism, inclination to religiosity, and church attendance. One study by a giant of behavioral genetics, Robert Plomin, found that the proclivity to watch television has an average heritability estimate of 45 percent, on par with the typical estimate for the heritability of male homosexuality.

Contrary to the assumptions of many social conservatives, biology does appear to play a modest part in determining sexual orientation. Contrary to the assumptions of many social progressives, psychological and environmental variables also appear to play at least a modest part in determining sexual orientation. In contrast to the hubris of those prone to making emphatic pronouncements, what we do not yet know about the causation of sexual orientation dwarfs the bit that we are beginning to know. And the fact that causation is indubitably a complex and mysterious by-product of the interaction of biological and psychological variables confounds the assertion that sexual orientation is just like skin color, determined at birth or even conception. And contrary to the suggestions of some, the involvement of some biological influence does not prove that change in sexual orientation is impossible. One of our foremost behavior genetics experts, Thomas Bouchard, has argued forcefully that “one of the most unfortunate misinterpretations of the heritability coefficient is that it provides an index of trait malleability (i.e., the higher the heritability the less modifiable the trait is through environmental intervention).”

If some measure of heritability does not establish that the trait is not modifiable, what does the direct evidence show about change? Attorney General Eric Holder, explaining the Obama administration’s decision not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, repeatedly cited the “immutability” of sexual orientation: “A growing scientific consensus accepts that sexual orientation is a characteristic that is immutable.” The recent APA amicus brief for the Proposition 8 case is also forceful on the issue of change; contrary to claims that change is possible, they say, “research suggests the opposite.”

Has science established that sexual orientation cannot change? Dozens of scholarly papers appeared in journals from the 1940s to the early 1970s reporting that a substantial portion of those wanting to change homosexual orientation did change to some degree. But rarely since 1980 has a professional publication reported such results. Did science change direction and prove change impossible? Not quite.

Certainly, there has been lately less research of late studying the possibility of change. The removal in 1973 of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders both changed the political environment in the mental-health professions and undermined grant funding for research on this subject. Many academics no longer had any motivation to study this phenomenon and considerable political reasons not to do so. Further, prior published research is commonly dismissed as inadequate. The APA’s website stated for many years that claims that homosexual orientation can change “are poorly documented. For example, treatment outcome is not followed and reported over time as would be the standard to test the validity of any mental health intervention.”

Such criticism took its most comprehensive form in the report of the 2009 APA task force studying SOCE (sexual-orientation change efforts). These scholars set extraordinary standards of methodological rigor for what they regarded as a reasonable scientific study of the possibility of sexual-orientation change, a move that resulted in the classification of only six studies out of dozens as meriting close examination. These studies were, in turn, dismissed for a variety of reasons, leaving the panel with no credible findings, by their standards, documenting the efficacy of SOCE. After dismissing SOCE for its lack of empirical validation, the panel then recommended gay-affirming therapy while explicitly acknowledging that it lacked the very type of empirical validation required of SOCE.

In the absence of evidence, it would be proper scientific procedure to acknowledge one’s ignorance. The members of the APA task force claim that their review has established that “enduring change to an individual’s sexual orientation is uncommon” and “that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through SOCE.” But even more-forceful claims have been made. The Public Affairs website of the APA for many years stated, “Can therapy change sexual orientation? No,” and insisted that homosexuality “is not changeable.” But has science proven this? Not at all; rather, skeptical reviewers have dismissed evidence of the possibility of change for some on the basis of such studies being methodologically inadequate by post hoc and artificially stringent standards.

Is sexual orientation immutable? With Mark Yarhouse of Regent University, I recently studied people seeking to change their sexual orientation. We assessed the sexual orientations and psychological distress levels of 98 individuals (72 men, 26 women) trying to change their sexual orientation through ministries organized under Exodus International, beginning early in the process and following them over six to seven years with five additional, independent assessments. Our original round of findings was published in a book titled Ex-Gays?; the latest round, in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy.

Of the 61 subjects who completed the study, 23 percent reported success in the form of “conversion” to heterosexual orientation and functioning, while 30 percent reported they were able to live chastely and had disidentified themselves from homosexual orientation. On the other hand, 20 percent reported giving up and fully embracing homosexual identity, and the remaining 27 percent continued the process of attempted change with limited and unsatisfactory success. On average, statistically significant decreases in homosexual orientation were reported across the entire sample, while a smaller but still significant increase of heterosexual attraction was reported. The attempt to change orientation was not found to lead to increases in psychological distress on average; indeed, the study found several small significant improvements in psychological distress associated with the interventions. And lest we fall prey to the same mistakes we have been criticizing in others, we have said repeatedly that because our sample was not demonstrably representative of those seeking change among all religious homosexuals, these are likely optimistic outcome estimates.

I conclude that homosexual orientation is, contrary to the supposed consensus, sometimes mutable. “Homosexuality” is a multifaceted phenomenon; there are likely many homosexualities, with some perhaps more malleable than others. Not all interventions are the same; not all practitioners are equally skilled. Perhaps most important, those seeking change vary considerably in their intensity of motivation, in their resourcefulness, and in the context in which they try to change. Most of those seeking change and most of those who actually attain some level of change are highly religiously committed, and these individuals who believe in a God who intervenes in their lives are embedded in communities of care and are motivated by their core understanding of who they are as a person before God. It is a wonder that anyone without such resources successfully obtains sexual-orientation change.

Are homosexual relationships equivalent to heterosexual ones? In his ruling overturning Proposition 8, Judge Vaughn Walker cited UCLA psychologist Letitia Peplau’s testimony that “despite stereotypes suggesting gays and lesbians are unable to form stable relationships, same-sex couples are in fact indistinguishable from opposite-sex couples in terms of relationship quality and stability.” The APA’s brief for this case similarly claimed that “empirical research demonstrates that the psychological and social aspects of committed relationships between same-sex partners closely resemble those of heterosexual partnerships.” That brief relies upon the 2007 overview of research on same-sex relationships by Peplau and A. W. Fingerhut.

Here again we return to the issue of sample representativeness, which Peplau and Fingerhut handle with unfortunate evasiveness. They typically launch into discussions about various characteristics of homosexual couples without ever clearly stating that the studies they cite do not examine representative samples. They offer only intriguing hints that the studies on which they rely may be unrepresentative and hence potentially biased. They also raise in passing the provocative possibility that homosexual couples may bias their self-reports to look good.

Even so, intriguing hints of differences, of “nonequivalency,” between heterosexual and homosexual couples emerge from Peplau and Fingerhut’s survey. They mention one large study that found that 28 percent of lesbians had had sex outside their primary relationship—comparable to the 21 percent of women in relationships with men and 26 percent of men in relationships with women. By contrast, 82 percent of gay men had had sex with someone other than their main partner. However one construes such a striking difference in sexual monogamy, whether as a trivial stylistic difference or as indicative of something fundamental and pervasive, such a finding seriously challenges the equivalency hypothesis.

Stability is a relational characteristic of direct relevance to the types of functional concerns intrinsic, for instance, to evaluation for adoption fitness. How does equivalence look in this area? Peplau and Fingerhut cite one study that found that over a five-year period, 7 percent of married heterosexual couples broke up, compared with 14 percent of cohabiting male couples and 16 percent of cohabiting lesbian couples. They also summarize, without mentioning specific numbers, a more representative study from Norway and Sweden, which have sanctioned same-sex partnerships since the 1990s, reporting “that the rate of dissolution within five years of entering a legal union is higher among same-sex partnerships than among heterosexual marriages, with lesbian couples having the highest rates of dissolution.” Their rendering underplays the magnitude of the actual findings, which was that gay male relationships are 50 percent more likely to break up than heterosexual marriages, while lesbian relationships are 167 percent more likely to break up than heterosexual marriages. Odd that they would not mention these actual numbers.

One common obfuscation of such matters can be illustrated through the sensitive issue of rates of homosexual attraction among children raised in homosexual households. Summarizing this research, Gregory Herek, a psychologist who specializes in the study of homosexuality, wrote that “the vast majority of those children eventually grow up to be heterosexual.” It appears he is right, technically. Terms such as “a vast majority” are often used in this literature to obscure probabilistic trends in the data. The small bit of research that exists suggests increased rates of same-sex orientation among the children of such couples; my informal synthesis would be that gay parenting approximately triples or quadruples the rate of same-sex attraction. It may be technically true that “the vast majority of these children eventually grow up to be heterosexual,” but only because if being raised by same-sex parents increases the occurrence of same-sex attraction from 2 percent to 8 percent, 92 percent are still heterosexual. But a fourfold increase is still a sizable effect statistically.

Has empirical science established homosexual identity as positive and legitimate? Some would claim so. University of California psychologists Phillip Hammack and Eric Windell argue that a dramatic shift has “repositioned the scientific narrative of homosexuality from sickness to species” and homosexuality is to be affirmed as “a legitimate minority identity akin to race and ethnicity.” The APA task force on SOCE declared in 2009 that “Same-sex sexual attractions, behavior, and orientations per se are normal and positive variants of human sexuality.”

Declarations that homosexuality is “normal,” “positive,” and “legitimate” would seem be the product of value judgments rather than objective science. The APA’s Proposition 8 brief argues that sexual orientation “encompasses an individual’s sense of personal and social identity based on those attractions, behaviors expressing them, and membership in a community of others who share them.” There indeed are persons who organize their lives around their sexual orientation. But to claim for all human persons that “sexual orientation encompasses an individual’s sense of personal and social identity” is remarkable both conceptually and scientifically. I cannot conceive of data comprehensive enough to support this claim. And how does science establish that such a grounding of human identity is “positive”?

Science may be able to contribute valuable evidence about the association of such identities with certain measurable functional realities of life, such as whether such individuals experience heightened levels of emotional distress, report levels of self-esteem comparable to those of others, and so forth. But how did science become the arbiter of what is positive? Such a thing can happen, precisely as Hammack and Windell suggest, through a paradigm shift within the discipline, a decision of practicing psychologists to embrace the “minority narrative of homosexuality.” But can empirical science establish homosexual orientation as “a legitimate minority identity” or sexual orientation as a fundamental for constituting the self? I hardly see how.

The APA SOCE task force, and the gay-affirming psychological mainstream it represents, describes gay-affirming therapy as pursuing “congruence” between identity and sexual orientation. It seems to take this as a self-evident good. But the task force also seems to recognize that an affirmation of same-sex attraction goes beyond the traditional competence of science. Reflecting on the clash of scientific and religious perspectives on this point, they note that “some religions give priority to telic congruence” while, in contrast, “affirmative and multicultural models of LGB psychology give priority to organismic congruence.” In a moment of exceptional clarity, the task force put its finger on a core issue: Gay-affirming psychologies necessarily embody extrascientific moral and ethical deliberations that raise the potential of conflict with religious beliefs, precisely because the very act of giving priority to organismic congruence is a religious and ethical choice.

As the late theologian Don Browning noted, psychology “cannot avoid a metaphysical and ethical horizon.” Meaningful consideration of the nature of personhood always involves moving beyond the analysis of human life to the broader valuation of this or that characteristic, this or that phenomenon, this or that outcome. The social sciences do not contain within themselves adequate resources to adjudicate among conflicting ways of understanding the good. Individual scientists, stepping beyond their professional bounds, may declare homosexual orientation positive, normal, and legitimate, but such science cannot make this judgment. Such judgments are the domain of religion, theology, and philosophy. The twin claims that science conclusively establishes that sexual orientation grounds human identity and that psychology as a science establishes the legitimacy of such a claim are too far a reach.

So where does this leave us? We know much more now than we did ten and thirty years ago about the emotional well-being of homosexual persons, the complicated interaction of nature and nurture in the causation of sexual orientation, of the complicated and difficult possibilities of sexual-orientation malleability, of the functional and descriptive characteristics manifest in same-sex partnerships, and of the contours of the psychological identities of homosexual persons. The contributions of science to this area, however, remain sketchy, limited, and puzzling. It is remarkable how little scientific humility is in evidence given the primitive nature of our knowledge.

Nevertheless, our culture is polarized between those relentlessly advancing the full acceptance and normalization of homosexuality, indeed of all sexual variations, and those resisting those moves. As religious believers, we must confess our own culpability in creating the mess we are in.

We were complicit, even if ignorantly and passively so, in the cultural embrace of the disease conceptualization of homosexuality. We off-loaded responsibility for the articulation of a thoughtful, caring, theologically rich, and pastorally sensitive understanding of sexual brokenness grounded in our various religious traditions by conceptualizing homosexuality as a disease, and so we were unprepared for the vacuum created by that explanation’s timely demise. The best ecclesiastical, professional, legal, and social policy will be founded not on falsehoods or grotesque and indefensible simplifications but on a clearheaded grasp of reality in all its complexities, as well as on a humble recognition of all that we do not know.

Stanton L. Jones is provost and professor of psychology at Wheaton College. An expanded version of this essay is available at www.christianethics.org, as is a document offering the specific citations for this February, 2012, feature article.

GID articles on Examiner.com

2012-01-25T08:43:00.001-08:00

http://www.examiner.com/county-republican-in-baltimore/ann-miller

15-Year-Old Student Bullied for Supporting Biblical View of Family

2012-01-25T08:42:00.001-08:00

Read this Liberty Alert online at www.LC.org

January 23, 2011

15-Year-Old Student Bullied for Supporting Biblical View of Family

Liberty Counsel sent a letter to school officials at Shawano High School after they censored and punished Brandon Wegner, a 15-year-old, for writing an op-ed article explaining the Biblical view of homosexuality and supporting natural mother-father adoption. the school demanding it apologize for its unconstitutional and irrational censorship and humiliation of Brandon.

Brandon quoted several verses from the Bible regarding homosexuality. After Brandon wrote this article he was pulled into hours of meetings with school administrators and staff, without his parents' knowledge. This caused him to miss exam preparation classes and at least one exam.

Brandon was hauled before the superintendent on charges that he had violated the school's bullying policy. Superintendent Todd Carlson told him that the column "went against the bullying policy," and asked him if he "regretted" writing it. When Mr. Wegner stated that he did not regret writing it, and that he stood behind his beliefs, Superintendent Carlson told him that he "had got to be one of the most ignorant kids to try to argue with him about this topic," that "we have the power to suspend you if we want to" and that the column had "personally offended me, so I know you offended other people!"

The First Amendment protects the opinions of all, including student journalists. The bullying at Shawano High School is by Superintendent Todd Carlson and the school officials, not the student, Brandon Wegner. The school officials have displayed blatant intolerance of a view on homosexuality held by many people. The school's actions are shocking and unjustified. The superintendent should immediately apologize and stop the bullying.

Read our News Release for more details.

Defending God's Design for Marriage and Family

Rena Lindevaldsen has written this book based on her first-hand experience as an attorney with Liberty Counsel, defending of marriage and family in courts throughout the nation.

Text "ALERT" to 20222 to donate $10.

$10 will be charged to your mobile phone bill or deducted from your prepaid balance. Msg & data rates may apply. Service is available on most carriers. All purchases must be authorized by account holder. Terms: http://www.hmgf.org/. Text STOP to 20222 to unsubscribe; text HELP to 20222 for help. Privacy policy.

Receive our Press Release via RSS Feed

this Liberty Alert or

Join Freedom Federation and view us on

Quebecers launch group to help people with unwanted SSA

2012-01-25T08:39:00.001-08:00

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/quebecers-launch-first-group-to-help-people-with-unwanted-same-sex-attracti/

Quebecers launch first group to help people with unwanted same-sex attraction

by Patrick B. Craine

MONTREAL, Quebec, January 9, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As governments, celebrities, and activist groups declare "gay is good" to stave off teen suicides, some brave souls in Quebec are breaking ground as they launch the first group in the province dedicated to helping men and women overcome unwanted same-sex attractions.

Michel Lizotte, the journalist who founded Ta Vie Ton Choix, said bullying is not the only reason that those inclined to homosexuality consider suicide. "Some of these people who did their coming out and experienced the gay lifestyle, are feeling so bad after a while that they have suicidal ideas," he told LifeSiteNews. "They will make suicidal attempts and they will commit suicide."

Michel Lizotte receives the 2011 NARTH President's Award

Lizotte's group, which launched a website in October at TaVieTonChoix.org, aims to connect those hoping to overcome their unwanted attractions, refer them to competent therapists, and offer sound - but often ignored - scientific information on same-sex attraction.

Join a Facebook page to defend marriage here.

A journalist by trade, Lizotte got involved in the issue of homosexuality while covering the debates around same-sex "marriage" in the early 2000s.

In the midst of his research, he was shocked to learn about the existence of so-called "ex-gays" – men and women who were able not only to leave the homosexual lifestyle, but who say they have largely overcome even the attractions.

"What I learned from society was that people were born gay and it was not possible to change that," explained Lizotte. "And if you tried to do that, it would cause damage to the person. So when I discovered the existence of this population, it was a big surprise."

"I started to ask myself, if there's such a population in San Francisco, in Toronto, in New York, there must be some ex-gays in Montreal," he said.

In 2003, he began interviewing ex-gays and therapists specializing in what is known as "reorientation" therapy, which culminated in his publishing a book in 2007 entitled "Homosexuality: the Myths and the Facts" (L'homosexualité : les mythes et les faits).

"I saw that it was important to make this information available to the public. We also needed workshops and a website. But I felt that this goal was too big for me alone," he explained. "So I decided to organize a team of people that would help me to reach that goal. So this group was formed in 2009."

Ta Vie Ton Choix offers workshops with testimonies from men and women who have overcome same-sex attractions, and the group is in the process of forming support groups for those who wish to be freed from these attractions. They have also developed a network of therapists who are willing to offer reorientation therapy.

The group's message has proven controversial in the formerly Catholic province, whose government now boasts of being the first jurisdiction in North America to launch a full-scale campaign to eradicate "homophobia."

In 2009, Lizotte had several workshops cancelled at a Montreal-area Catholic parish after outrage by homosexual activists and newspaper columnists.

Lizotte told LifeSiteNews at the time that the media flurry had "destroyed [his] reputation." In particular, La Presse columnist Patrick Lagacé had accused him of having "a fixation on the gay thing," and insinuated that Lizotte was himself a closeted homosexual.

The incident highlighted the need "to protect the right of people who want to be freed from same-sex attraction," said Lizotte.

"We discovered that if we want to organize a conference here in Montreal presenting the testimony of the ex-gays, there will be activists to protest [and] there's high risk that the person offering us his building or home will change his decision," he said.

"The rights of the population to listen to the testimony regarding the possibility of being freed from same-sex attraction is not respected, and the right of the ex-gays to present their testimony is not protected, is violated by these activists," he added.

Lizotte's efforts were rewarded in November by the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), who honoured him with their annual President's Award for his commitment to the cause despite the enormous personal and professional cost.

Lizotte says he felt compelled to take up this work because neither the government nor homosexual groups are interested in helping those who desire to be freed from same-sex attraction.

"If I did nothing, those people would remain helpless, and would remain in the position that society doesn't protect their rights for self-determination," Lizotte said.

"If you are suffering with the issue of same-sex attraction, you have the right to know that you can either be helped to accept them or to be free from those same-sex attractions," he added.

For more information, or to donate, visit TaVieTonChoix.org.

AUDIO of Compelling AFTAH Press Conference at SPLC HQ in Alabama

2012-01-24T14:14:00.001-08:00

LISTEN: Audio of AFTAH Press Conference Featuring Black Pastors Denouncing SPLC’s ‘Hate Group’ Smears

GET AUDIO ONLINE: http://americansfortruth.com/2012/01/23/splc-press-conference-audio-montgomery-al-january-17-2012/

African American leaders bristle at SPLC claim that they are tools of “white organizers”

Dear Friend of AFTAH,

Please take a half hour to listen to our press conference last week outside the Southern Poverty Law Center's headquarters in Montgomery, AL. [click HERE to listen.] We had a wonderful event -- Speaking Truth to Arrogant Leftist Power! Note the SPLC's racist-tinged response implying that the Black leaders who participated can't think and act for themselves. Of course, the SPLC's "hate group" smear against Americans For Truth and other pro-family groups is preposterous. If we are haters, then every leader -- black, white or brown -- who speaks out in the public square against the aggressively anti-Christian Homosexual/Transsexual Agenda is a "hater."

This event is what Americans For Truth is all about: calling out the Left for their pro-homosexual lies, and educating Americans on the "other side" of the pro-"gay" movement that the liberal media regularly covers up. AFTAH will continue to fight the Left's evil campaign to demonize and marginalize Christians and all citizens who oppose the Homosexual Lobby -- which corrupts children, undermines marriage and public health, and leads the Secular Left's assault on religious freedom. You can help us stay in the fight by making an online gift to AFTAH at www.americansfortruth.com/donate/. (Regular mail: AFTAH, PO Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522.) Thank you and keep on standing unapologetically for Truth! -- Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org

_____________________________________________________________

North Carolina pastor Patrick Wooden criticized the Southern Poverty Law Center for implying that Black leaders cannot think for themselves and had to be "brought" to the SPLC press conference by "white organizers." Here he is interviewed by a Montgomery TV reporter after the AFTAH press conference. In the background is a large SPLC banner decrying "HATE." Go online and click on photo to enlarge.

Here is the audio [click HERE to listen] for AFTAH’s press conference January 17, 2012, outside the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Alabama, featuring a coalition of African American pastors and pro-family leaders challenging the SPLC’s tendentious “hate group” designation against Americans For Truth and other pro-family groups. Total length is 33 minutes.

The following speakers appeared (with beginning times on recording):

Peter LaBarbera, President, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality;
Dr. Patrick Wooden, Pastor, Upper Room Church of God in Christ, Raleigh, NC; 3:03
DL Foster, Founder, Gay Christian Movement Watch and Witness Freedom Ministries, Atlanta, Ga.; 7;10
Matt Barber, Vice President, Liberty Council Action; Lynchburg, Va.; Board Chairman, AFTAH; 13:07
Tim Johnson, Chairman and Founder, Frederick Douglass Foundation; 17:07
Wil Nichols, Pastor, Victorious Praise Fellowship Church of God in Christ, Durham, NC; 20:00
Rochelle Conner, representing Scott Lively and Abiding Truth Ministries [Conner flew in from California]; 22:22
Troy Towns, representing Apostle Kyle Searcy, Fresh Annointing House of Worship, Montgomery, AL; 26:05
Glenn Sawyer, Pastor, New Mt. Zion Church of God in Christ, Elizabeth City, NC; 28:30
Jon Robinson, Pastor, Kingdon C.O.M.E. Ministries, Clairton, Pa.; 29:50

Referenced links: Click HERE for the SPLC’s racist-tinged blog post by Mark Potok issued just before the press conference — alleging that “the white organizers of the press conference are bringing along a set of black pastors.” Click HERE for the SPLC “Hate Map [Illinois]” referenced by LaBarbera showing the Neo-Nazis.

_______________________________

HOW TO LISTEN: This is an mp3 file, supported in most operating systems by Windows Media Player, Quick Time and/or I-Tunes. Real Player is not supported and there may be difficulty when attempting to listen with it. Left click once on the link below to play. (Please be patient, depending upon the speed of your internet connection it may take a moment to load.) OR right click the link then “save target as” to download the entire segment.

SPLC Press Conf Audio, 1-17-12

_______________________________

Help AFTAH Stand Up to the Powerful Pro-Homosexual Lobby!

Americans For Truth is a unique Christian ministry, equipping believers and anyone who defends time-tested Judeo-Christian morality in the Culture War over homosexuality and marriage. You can help us stay in the fight by making an online gift to AFTAH at www.americansfortruth.com/donate/. Send regular mail gifts to: AFTAH, PO Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522.

______________________________

To subscribe to Americans For Truth emails, click http://www.americansfortruth.org/subscribe.php (or copy and paste this link to your browser)

Castrating Children

2012-01-24T09:09:00.001-08:00

www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/01/castrating_children.html

An interview with Dawn Wilde, the author of 'Confessions of a recovering lesbian'

2012-01-22T17:47:00.001-08:00

In a compelling testimony titled Confessions of a Recovering Lesbian, a woman struggling with attraction to other women shares how, despite being involved in a youthful lesbian relationship, and ongoing attraction to women, she is now a Catholic, happily-married homeschooling mother of five children.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/confessions-of-a-recovering-lesbian-an-interview-with-dawn-wilde

Safety standards

2012-01-22T15:11:00.001-08:00

"Journey Into Manhood" comes to UK in February, Arizona in March

2012-01-22T15:02:00.001-08:00

Presents...

Journey Into Manhood

February 10 - 12, 2012

Southern England

March 2 - 4, 2012

Arizona (near Phoenix)

March 30 - April 1, 2012

Eastern Pennsylvania

Register Now

What Is Journey Into Manhood?

Journey Into Manhood is a 48-hour immersion in cathartic self-discovery and emotional-healing work for men who are self-motivated and serious about resolving unwanted homosexual attractions. It is designed specifically for men who believe that their homosexual attractions are not "inborn" but stem largely from unhealed emotional wounds and unmet needs.

Journey Into Manhood is an experiential-learning weekend. We create opportunities for you to experience healing, not just learn about it.

The exercises are designed to help you identify and process the underlying issues that may be alienating you from your authentic heterosexual masculinity - and, ideally, to help you experience a deep emotional breakthrough.

Each weekend is peer-led by about 20 staff volunteers, including men who have resolved homosexuality themselves.

What Does The Fee Cover?

The cost is US$650, which covers:

the complete program (25 hours of training and experiential "processing")
take-home materials (summary booklet and audio CD summarizing key teachings)
two nights' lodging at the camp/retreat center
six meals
three weekly follow-up coaching group calls to help you further process and integrate your experience in the following weeks
and, if you are married, one free group coaching call for your wife while you are away at Journey Into Manhood. Led by the wife of a past participant, the call will help your wife better understand your experience, anticipate its potential impact, and process her feelings about what you are both going through.

What Happens After the Weekend?

After the weekend, you'll be invited to participate in three weekly follow-up coaching group calls to help you further process and integrate your experience in the following weeks.

You'll also be invited to participate in email groups and periodic in-person reunions (and, in some areas, ongoing in-person support groups).

You'll belong to a growing international brotherhood of men who have experienced this powerful program and who support and encourage each other in living its principles as they journey together out of unwanted same-sex attractions.

Links to More

Featured on ABC Nightline, November 2010

Surveys of Past Participants

Testimonials from Past Participants

Endorsements from Counselors, Ministry Leaders

Frequently Asked Questions

Brochure (PDF)

Registration Page

Please Donate

Contact Us

rich@peoplecanchange.com

lynn@peoplecanchange.com

1-434-985-8551

PCC Calendar

Journey Into Manhood

Feb. 10-12, 2012: England

March 2-4, 2012: Arizona

March 30-April 1, 2012: Pennsylvania

May 25-27, 2012: Indiana

June 1-3, 2012: Utah

June 19-21: Israel (tentative)

July 13-15, 2012: Southern California

Register Now

_______

Journey Beyond

August 15-21, 2012: Indiana

_______

Journey Together

Coaching Tele-Group

Tuesday Evenings

Especially for Wives Coaching Tele-Group

Sunday Evenings

Journey Into Manhood Weekend by People Can Change (www.peoplecanchange.com)

Watch Our Video

Endorsments

"The Journey into Manhood weekend has become an essential part of helping men with unwanted same-sex attraction to access their true heterosexual nature. We encourage our clients to experience the JiM weekend as a powerful dimension in their healing process. The psychodynamic principles that underlie the JiM weekend are completely in accord with reparative therapy."

-- Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D.,

Clinical psychologist. Co-founder and past president, National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.

"Courage regards Journey Into Manhood as a powerful resource to help men develop their full sense of manhood - a resource that complements the work of Courage in many respects."

-- Father John F. Harvey, OSFS, Founder of Courage International, an apostolate of the Roman Catholic Church.

"Journey Into Manhood can transform a man's life. It is one of the best programs out there enabling men to confront their pain and walk through their fear. Men go into the weekend lonely and isolated and emerge bonded with a community of like-minded brothers on a journey to wholeness."

-- Arthur Goldberg, JD,

Co-founder / co-director of JONAH - Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality.

Testimonials

"The most healing, affirming, loving experience of my life."

"I found a deep respect and care for me as a person like I had never experienced before."

"I have never felt so free to be truly, authentically me."

"I left the weekend feeling more alive, solid, masculine and free than I'd ever felt before."

"It was a turning point in my life."

More Testimonials

What's wrong with lesbian parenting studies

2012-01-18T20:06:00.001-08:00

Volume 7, Issue 3

January 18th, 2012

This has been a noisy week for parenting studies.

First off, was a big (about 5,000 observations) sophisticated (University of Chicago Business School) study of bad behavior in little boys. Conclusion: little boys benefit substantially from living with both their biological parents. The second study was a little (78 observations) simplistic (unrepresentative sample, ideologically motivated researchers) of the Quality of Life of the children of lesbian couples. Conclusion: the children of lesbian couples are just as happy and well-adjusted as their peers.

Guess which study got the most positive media attention? Yes, in our topsy-turvy world, the study of a handful of hand-picked children of lesbians was greeting with the breathless, fawning attention we've come to expect.

Guess which study was greeted with skepticism, to the point of dismissal? That's right: the University of Chicago study, based on nationally representative data showing boys need their moms and dads. Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family made what he thought was an unremarkable statement, "This supports over three decades of consistent research showing that kids who grow up in a home with their married parents tend to do better in all measures of educational attainment than their peers being raised in single, divorced and cohabiting-parent homes. This is true from everything from grade-point average, behavioral issues, high school graduation and going on to graduate from college. Moms and dads both matter here, as well as the type of relationship between them."

But the Life-Style Left and the G*y Blogosphere erupted with anger over his "duplicity" and "mischaracterization" of the study. Their complaint: Dr. Stanton might, just might, someday draw the conclusion that same s*x parents aren't as good as married biological parents.

Go figure.

In our main article this week, we are proud to introduce Mr. Michael Worley, who explains some of the most obvious methodological problems with the study of 78 children. Mr. Worley is a first year law student at the J. Reuben Clark School of Law at Brigham Young University. And most importantly, Michael is a 2011 graduate of our "It Takes a Family to Raise a Village" conference.

On the Ruth Blog earlier this week, I wrote about the tactics of the Left on display in the reaction to the University of Chicago Business School study: the Life-Style Left is outraged over something Dr. Stanton didn't say! And I wrote about the study itself, and what it actually means, here.

I was in the midst of responding to this little dust-up, when the "78-marvelous-children-of-lesbians" study hit the news. I sent out a cry for help among our ITAF graduates, and Michael stepped up to the plate! Your support for the Ruth Institute helps young people like Michael learn and make the arguments for marriage.

In the meantime, yet another set of breathless headlines hit the wires, this time from Live Science, claiming to show "Why Gay Parents May be the Best Parents." Watch the Ruth Institute blog: we may do a critique of that piece too. Maybe I will. Or maybe another one of our students will!

Bottom line: do not be intimidated by these headlines! There is nothing there!

We have a goal of getting 10 new donors to the Ruth Institute this week. If you have never donated to the Ruth Institute, now would be a good time! And if you are one of our faithful regular contributors, thank you! And do you have any friends who would make a $25 gift to support marriage? Sure you do! Send them our way! We are grateful for your help in finding our 10 new donors for this week!

Speaking of supporting marriage: I will be in Olympia Washington on Monday, January 23^rd, testifying in favor of marriage. If you live anywhere near Olympia, by all means, come to the capitol and help us stick up for marriage! Here is the info from the Family Policy Institute of Washington, the local sponsoring organization.

Thanks for your support!

~Dr. J

Promotion of G*y Rights Internationally

Dr. J and Todd Wilken meet on Issues, Etc. to discuss Secretary Clinton's assertion that religious liberty and homosexual rights stem from the same source. (Click the POD icon.)

Subscribe to the complete Ruth Institute podcasts with iTunes!

He sings like an angel

My two-year-old son was singing, or rather, belting out, the Alleluia in his best voice. The only problem was that he replaced the word "Alleluia" with... Keep reading.

What's wrong with lesbian parenting studies

by Michael Worley, First year law student at J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, and a 2011 graduate of the Ruth Institute "It Takes a Family to Raise a Village" program.

It is common knowledge that TV reports don't tell the whole story. Frequently a group of 75 undecided voters gather to share their responses immediately after a debate. Such people provide instant commentary that the theorists of network TV may not be able to perceive. However, these groups tend not to be predictive of overall election results. Random polling via phone calls shows us much clearer results.

Likewise, the media frequently fails to report the whole picture by reporting on insufficient studies on gay or lesbian parenting. The latest reporting of the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study pertaining to lesbian mothers continues this trend.

Let's consider issues that demonstrate bias with such studies in the context of the latest report—saying that 17 year-old children of lesbian mothers are just as happy as a Washington study of 75 similar children. This post won't address the questions used– even considering how the lesbian couples were found raises red flags.

In the lesbian study, there were several requirements for the couples or single people to be considered:

a. They had to respond to advertisements. This means they wanted to be a public example of a lesbian couple. This would imply they will be more invested in a child's happiness.

b. They had to conceive via insemination (eliminating the vast majority of lesbian couples which have children from previous relationships). This implies that they had the money to afford insemination, and money is a factor in happiness.

c. They had to be women. There are practically no studies of parenting by gay men in existence.

d. They could only be one of the 78 couples who were used.

When you are gathering data, you want a large sample to ensure you get accurate answers. Most Presidential polls will ask between 500-1,500 randomly selected voters—and still not be perfect. The authors instead feel like 78 children (the same 78 they've used before) is enough to conclude things about a much wider group of children. While case studies with small sample sizes can be useful, case studies are best done when there is a pre-established set of research, not as the banner study in the field.

Keep reading.

Action Item:

Become a new donor for the Ruth Institute. If you can, give just $100.

Talking Point:

"Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe children of lesbian parents do just as well as normal parents. Maybe this holds independent of whether a child was conceived by insemination. Maybe this holds irrespective of whether the moms stay together. But neither this nor any other NLLFS study based on the same adolescents, whose parents self-selected them, credibly supports any such conclusion." (From this week's main article.)

Lutheran Public Radio: Dr. J is usually on live on Tuesdays from 2-2:15 p.m. Pacific Time (Click the link above to listen live or find a station near you.)

TODAY--Clear Victory Radio, 3-4 p.m. PST "The Definition of Marriage" Listen on-line here.

January 23--Olympia, Washington, 10a.m. to testify at a hearing regarding same s*x marriage. If you're in the area, come see her!

January 21--St. Therese of Carmel Parish, San Diego. 1-4:30p.m. Workshop is entitled: Divorce Prevention 101: Finding Love that Lasts. Free and open to the public.

January 26--Flagstaff, Northern Arizona University, 7-8 p.m. "How Redefining Marriage Affects Everyone"

Miss an issue of the newsletter? Check out the archives here.

Send to a friend

Forward this email to someone you think may be interested.

SUBSCRIBE to this newsletter

Bureaucrats Defy Law, Mandate “Gay” Agenda in West Virginia Schools

2012-01-18T19:12:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends of Family:

The 2012 WV Legislative Session has begun and we gearing up for an aggressive fight against the homosexual advocacy organization, Fairness of West Virginia. This group is responsible for abolishing West Virginia's comprehensive anti-bully policy 'Student Code of Conduct' Policy 4373. This policy was one of the best in the nation and in place for over a decade prior to the 2011 legislative session.

The revamped 'Expected Behavior in Safe and Supportive Schools', Policy 4373 which replaced the Student Code of Conduct, is a "hate crimes" bully policy which seeks to identify "motive" and politicize public schools in order to promote the homosexual agenda rather than curb bullying.

Read the entire story about this outrageous and unscrupulous power grab, including the individuals involved to force the radical homosexual agenda on our children and grandchildren!

TAKE ACTION!

Urge your state legislators to support your right as a parent to send your children and grandchildren to school free from homosexual indoctrination!

Please be polite and contact the following:

Governor Earl Ray Tomblin requesting he introduce legislation by Executive Order reinstating the previous 'Student Code of Conduct', Policy 4373. Tell Governor Tomblin you will pull your children out of public education and 'private' or 'home school' before allowing exposure to homosexual indoctrination.

Your state senators and delegates informing them of your anger H.B.3225 passed in the 2011 legislative session. Tell them you want to see this bill repealed and the previous provisions contained in H.B. 3023, (2001) creating the 'Student Code of Conduct', Policy 4373 passed again in this legislative session.
These legislators expressing your outrage for their key roles supporting passage of H.B. 3225, supplanting the 'Student Code of Conduct' and allowing for the promotion of the homosexual agenda in West Virginia's public schools. If these legislators represent your district, inform them of your expectations to work as diligently reversing the damage they have done by returning to the previous provisions contained in H.B. 3023 if they expect any chance of getting your vote in the next election.

We will keep you posted as developments occur.

Blessings,

Kevin McCoy, President
West Virginia Family Foundation

PS - This ministry is dependent on the support from our friends. Please consider helping us financially by making an online contribution to the Family Foundation today!

Please forward this email to all those on your email list!

The West Virginia Family Foundation advocates and defends policies based upon Biblical truth, advance religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and traditional family values.

The West Virginia Family Foundation advocates and defend policies based upon Biblical truth to advance religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and traditional family values.

To opt-out of all future mailings from us, click on "Manage Your Subscription" below.

©2012 The West Virginia Family Foundation. All Rights Reserved.
P.O. Box 3421, Charleston, WV 25334 Phone: (304) 721-4636

ACTION ALERT: ASK COUNTY COUNCIL TO INCLUDE EX-GAYS IN LEGISLATION

2012-01-17T17:55:00.001-08:00

1/17/2012 Testimony of Grace Harley before the Baltimore County (Maryland) Council:

Good evening, Council members. I am very grateful for the opportunity to address you. I am Grace Harley, speaking for Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays, known as PFOX, a non-profit organization that works to eliminate negative perceptions and discrimination against former homosexuals.

I am here to let you know that people can leave homosexuality and transgenderism permanently.

I lived for 18 years as a transgendered man called Joe. I once wanted to have sex reassignment surgery but could not afford it. Later on in my 20s, I asked my gynecologist for a hysterectomy. He refused, but I was able to get testosterone injections. Today I am all woman, body, mind and soul. I am no longer Joe, no longer do I have the mind of a male.

I also know of so many homosexuals who left homosexuality and no longer identify as gay. Because of this, they are discriminated against and verbally abused by society. Therefore, I ask you to protect all people, and not just a few.

Councilmember Tom Quirk, as the sponsor of Human Relations Bill No. 3-12, which would protect sexual orientation and gender identity or expression from discrimination, I ask that you include ex-gays in your legislation. The bill defines ‘sexual orientation’ as homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality. Your current definition is not broad enough to cover all individuals from discrimination because the definition does not specifically include former homosexuals.

Each year thousands of men and women with unwanted same-sex attractions make the personal decision to leave homosexuality. However, there are others in society who refuse to respect individual self-determination. Consequently, formerly gay men and women are reviled simply because they dare to exist.

Two years ago PFOX sued the Washington D.C. Office of Human Rights because it refused to extend protection to former homosexuals under the city’s sexual orientation non-discrimination law. So now former homosexuals are entitled to the same legal protections as others and recognized as a protected class under D.C.’s Human Rights Act.

Baltimore County should do the same and extend sexual orientation protection to the ex-gay community. If you can provide protection to people who change their gender, then you can certainly provide protection to people who change their sexual orientation. All it takes is to add two words, “former homosexuality,” to the bill’s definition, to ensure protection from discrimination for everyone and not just some. Councilmember Quirk, I know you can do this because you believe in diversity and safety for us all.

Action Alert: Email, phone, and fax the Councilmembers and urge them to include ex-gays in their sexual orientation bill. Talking points can be found at: http://pfox.org/about_us.html

Contact today:

Baltimore County Councilmembers Tom Quirk, Vicki Almond, Todd Huff, Kenneth N. Oliver, David Marks, Cathy A. Bevins, and John lszewski

E-mail: countycouncil@baltimorecountymd.gov
http://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/needtocontact/countycouncil

Phone: 410-887-3196
Fax: 410-887-5791

Internet: http://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/countycouncil

Address: 400 Washington Avenue, Room 205
Court House, Second Floor, Mailstop 2201
Towson, Maryland 21204

Baltimore County Proposes "Peeping Tom" Law

2012-01-17T17:51:00.000-08:00

Media Contact:

Maryland Citizens for a Responsible Government

301-641-6420

www.NotMyShower.com

CRGmaryland@yahoo.com

Baltimore County Proposes "Peeping Tom" Law

Baltimore County, Md., Jan.16, 2012 – “Maryland’s Baltimore County Councilmembers will introduce a bill tomorrow which creates serious safety issues for women,” said Dr. Ruth Jacobs, President of Maryland Citizens for a Responsible Government. “The bill allows cross-dressing men into women’s bathrooms even if they are sexually attracted to women. Promoted as a ‘gender identity anti-discrimination bill,’ Human Relations Bill No. 3-12 forces the public to recognize men as women, thereby allowing men access to women’s bathrooms. Sponsored by Councilmember Tom Quirk, the new law, if passed, will legally protect cross-dressing behavior.”

“The bill is a direct attack on women’s privacy,” said Dr. Jacobs. “Under Portland’s new ‘gender identity’ law, a cross-dressing sex offender gained access to the female locker rooms and was found changing his clothing with little girls present. And public outrage about a high school girls’ locker room invasion by 48-year-old Robert Domasky was reported as ‘Locker Room Transvestite Has Cheerleader Fantasy.’”

“Women are easily victimized and ladies’ bathrooms can be risky places when men have access. Since the passing of a similar law in Montgomery County, Maryland, rapes have occurred in the women’s bathrooms of Montgomery Community College, Asbury nursing home, Pelican restaurant, and Bethesda Hyatt.”

“The bill also encourages gender confusion,” said Dr. Jacobs. “Individuals with gender identity disorder can be so focused on their appearance that they are unable to work or maintain relationships. Pfc. Bradley (“Breanna”) Manning, the soldier charged with leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, informed his superiors that his gender identity disorder affected his ability to do his job, interact with others, and think.

“Individuals with mental illnesses are more likely to be both victims of crime and to victimize. Treatment of mental illness, and not collaboration with mental illness, is recommended to decrease both.”

“Christopher (“Chrissy”) Lee Polis, a cross-dressing male, was assaulted apparently without public knowledge of his gender identity. His court records include disorderly conduct, malicious destruction of property, and prostitution charges. Transgender activist Dana (Wayne) Beyer harassed citizens collecting signatures to place Montgomery County’s unpopular gender identity law on referendum. That case is now before the Maryland Board of Ethics.

“In these difficult economic times, Councilmembers are not only endangering women and children, but prohibiting employers from using common sense in their hiring/firing practices by subjecting businesses, public accommodations, and churches to this far reaching gender expression law.”

www.NotMyShower.com

###

comments by George Gilder @ SS Marriage

2012-01-17T06:16:00.001-08:00

Hello all,

This is a 5 min video on the Nat'l Org for Marriage site which has some comments by Gilder against same-sex marriage.

Video: George Gilder's Libertarian Case Against SSM

Religious Leaders Warn of Threat to Religious Freedom

2012-01-17T05:58:00.000-08:00

Religious Leaders Address the Nation on Marriage and Religious Freedom
On January 12, 2012, thirty-nine religious leaders representing a wide variety of faith communities released an open letter to all Americans calling for the preservation of the time-honored definition of marriage and warning of the dire and far-reaching consequences to religious freedom of conscience that are already occurring because of public acceptance of "same-sex marriage." One concerned citizen's first reaction to the news of this letter was to find out if his church had signed it. Click our link to find out if yours has, and if so, publicize it! Because of fear, intimidation, and misinformation, churches are no longer making their position on this topic clear and public.

State Sponsored "Safer Sex Kits"???
Salt Lake Community College is partnering with local Planned Parenthood assembling volunteers January 17, 2012 to create 800 "safer sex kits" as part of the school's Martin Luther King Day service events. These kits are being prepared for "the youth served by the Volunteers of America Homeless Youth Resource Center." Amanda at Planned Parenthood told us that the kits contain "condoms, female condoms, lube, and information on where to get tested for STDs." One problem with this is that vulnerable homeless minors are being exploited and encouraged to act out sexually. Another is that this state college is funded by our taxes. (Spreading STDs and selling sex are reportedly growing problems among homeless youth, but encouraging "safer sex" is not the answer.)

Federal Government Sexualizing Children
The US Dept. of Health and Human Services in a section of its website asserts that children are sexual beings, prompting psychologists to push for the decriminalization of pedophilia.

Gayest City?
It was all over the news last week that Salt Lake City was named by a gay website/magazine the "gayest "city in the U. S. It isn't (think San Francisco and New York), but the award seems to have been based on the relative "progress" Salt Lake has made towards affirming homosexuality in recent years, including its inordinately lewd gay pride parades each June. The Mormon city, with its reputation for upholding traditional morality, is being purposely targeted by activist groups.

Archie Comic Book Celebrates Gay Marriage
Life With Archie, #16, hitting the newstands January 2012 (yes, it's still printing) features a gay wedding on the cover and new gay characters.

Legislative Action
Standard of Liberty is a member of FACT (Family Action Council Team), a coalition of like-minded family values organizations which influences legislation. We meet weekly at the Capitol during the 45days the Utah legislation is in session. Areas of focus are the natural family based upon marriage between a man and a woman, the sanctity of life, community standards of decency, and parent responsibility and rights to teach children values in relation to human sexuality and morality. It was reported that in the 3 years it has existed FACT has been instrumental in passing several positive laws and stopping several harmful bills.

FACT met today at the Sutherland Institute to talk about our goals for this session. We discussed specific bills coming up regarding divorce, marriage, abortion in Utah, Planned Parenthood's new campaign to target minors with inappropriate sex information through unsolicited phone texts, sex education, and parental rights. Please contact us with any questions. We will try to keep you up to date.

Education Concerns
We also belong to an Education Coalition consisting of several members from these same FACT groups. One area of great concern is the brand new Common Core Curriculum, funded by the Gates Foundation. We will soon be posting a short video explaining the hidden dangers of this national program. It has already been accepted by most state governors, including Utah's, and is already being implemented in some Utah school districts. Problems with this curriculum include how it takes away local control and how the federal government will choose the majority of the values, textbooks, content, and worldview children are presented with.

FACT organizes volunteers to attend the monthly Utah State Board of Education meetings, usually held the first Friday. One of our reps who attended the January 2012 meeting was interviewed and quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune regarding proposed state standards for private preschools. Thank you Amber Peck! Contact us if you'd like to attend with us, or attend on your own. These meetings are open to the public. Our State Board of Education too often operates as if it is not accountable to parents and taxpayers. The same goes for districts and local school boards.

Chased by an Elephant
SoL and Tidal Wave Books received a nice review from the Association of Mormon Letters by Allison G. McKenzie, for our book Chased by an Elephant, the Gospel Truth about Today's Stampeding Sexuality, which follows:

Title: Chased By An Elephant, the Gospel Truth about Today's Stampeding Sexuality
Reviewed by: Allison G. McKenzie for the Association for Mormon Letters

Believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, seek after these things. Obviously, seeking "these things" will provide growth, understanding and clarity. LDS youth are taught this from a very young age; however "these things" are difficult to fully understand at any age, but especially at a young age. Most LDS youth grow up, repeating the Thirteenth Article of Faith as: We Believe in being honest, true, "Chased by an Elephant" and virtuous... This lack of understanding has created a running joke amongst youth in the church and perhaps brought about the title of this book. This is an excellent example of the importance of this book in understanding some basic yet deep principles. While this theme provides comic relief and light-hearted reading, I feel the author is passionately trying to convey to readers the importance of discerning the true meaning and the reality of sexuality and morality, because "Encouraging the differences between male and female has been essential for the continuation of humankind."

While some might feel this book is directed more to youth, to help educate on the "Stampeding sexuality," in today's society it appears that adults seem to lack understanding about what they should respect as valuable and beneficial and what they should reject as worthless and detrimental. This lack of understanding might be why youth are confused or ignorant. This lack of understanding is why men and women, boys and girls do not understand and might not be completely fulfilling their gender roles. This book provides excellent interpretations and understandings and the analogies of the overgrown jungles, the mad and wild elephants and Tarzan vs. Jane are enlightening.

I wanted to read this book because I serve as a Young Women's President in the Chula Vista Stake. I like to read about topics that might be helpful in my service. Not only did I find this helpful as a teaching tool, but I gained personal understanding of my role as a woman. I strongly feel that all parents, youth and youth leaders could benefit from this non-threatening, straightforward commentary. Because this book reads similar to the Gospel Principles Sunday School manual, these chapters could easily be used in Family Home Evening and other object lessons. Everyone should understand the basic principles and imperative concepts discussed in this book.

Cross-dressing in Utah High School?
We have heard there is a male student assuming a feminine name and dressing in girls' clothes in a Utah high school to the dismay of students and parents. If we heard this is casual conversation, how many more are there? FACT is looking into State law regarding this issue.

Reader Response
Thanks to several readers for your positive response to our review of Light in the Closet, by Arthur Goldberg.

--

Our new book Captain of My Soul may be ordered on www.tidalwavebooks.com now for 12.95, free shipping. It will be available soon on Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com. Also find Chased by an Elephant, the Gospel Truth about Today's Stampeding Sexuality for LDS families, Wild Elephant, the Gospel Truth about Today's Stampeding Sexuality for all Christian families, and Me, Tarzan, You Jane for the youngest children written for all Christian families, also at Tidal Wave Books, BYU Bookstore, through Barnes and Noble and amazon.com.

We have new entries in our news links and quotes sections of our website you will find informative.

Click here to go to our SoL blog, read the posts and leave comments.

If you or anyone you know is troubled with unwanted homosexuality, our website offers help and hope for those who truly desire to overcome it. On our website just click the Get Informed button. You will find helpful resources there: articles, papers, books, websites, videos. Be sure to read "The Only Good Choice," found at the top of our Home Page.

Email: sgraham@standardofliberty.org. Website: www.standardofliberty.org Blog: http://standardoflibertyblog.blogspot.com/

Confront the SPLC's Lies about "Hate"

2012-01-16T16:46:00.001-08:00

MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- How would you like it if someone compared you to the KKK and spread a lie that you're a "HATER" -- simply because you agree with the Bible and oppose the radical agenda to normalize homosexual behavior and "gay marriage"? Well, that's exactly how we at AFTAH feel about the Southern Poverty Law Center's despicable campaign to demonize Americans For Truth as a "hate group" by putting us in the same league as racist, anti-Semitic fringe outfits like the Klan and Neo-Nazis.

But AFTAH is fighting back against the SPLC's left-wing slanders! As I write this, we are preparing for our press conference tomorrow here in Montgomery, AL -- led by godly Black leaders like my friends Dr. Patrick Wooden and DL Foster who refuse to sit back and let the SPLC steal "civil rights" to advance its radical sexual agenda.

Please help us continue our FRONT LINE work defending God's moral Truth by making a donation to Americans For Truth today. You can give online at www.AmericansForTruth.com/donate/ or send a gift to: AFTAH, PO Box 5522, Naperville, IL 60567-5522. Thank you! We will let you know how it goes. God bless. -- Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org

PS. I hope you can find 45 minutes to listen to my radio interview with Pastor Wooden (see 2nd story below). This is what Americans For Truth is all about: giving voice to godly and principled Truth-tellers who are ignored by the liberal media because they stand against today's Politically Correct nonsense.

_____________________________________________________________________

Press Conf.: Black Pastors Confront Southern Poverty Law Center for Smearing as 'Hate Groups' Pro-Family Organizations Opposed to Homosexual Agenda

READ IT ONLINE: http://americansfortruth.com/2012/01/16/press-conf-black-pastors-confront-southern-poverty-law-center-for-smearing-pro-family-organizations-opposed-to-homosexual-agenda-as-hate-groups/

Americans For Truth Press Release

January 16, 2012

Contact: Peter LaBarbera; americansfortruth@gmail.com

Raleigh pastor Dr. Patrick Wooden rejects the comparison of black civil rights to sinful and unnatural homosexual behavior.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama – A coalition of African American pastors and pro-family Christian and Jewish leaders is holding a press conference at noon tomorrow (the day after Martin Luther King Day) outside the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center — to protest the SPLC’s smearing of pro-family groups that oppose homosexual activism as “hate groups”:

WHERE: Outside the SPLC headquarters, 400 Washington Ave., Montgomery, Alabama
WHEN: Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012, noon, Central Standard (Montgomery, AL) Time
WHO: Scheduled speakers:
Peter LaBarbera, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), Chicago, IL (the SPLC has smeared AFTAH as a “hate group”);
Dr. Patrick Wooden, pastor, Upper Room Church of God in Christ (COGIC), Raleigh, NC;
DL Foster, founder, Gay Christian Movement Watch, Atlanta, GA;
Matt Barber, Director of Cultural Affairs, Liberty Counsel, Lynchburg, VA;
Tim Johnson, Fredrick Douglass Foundation, Washington, D.C.;
Rachel Conner, representing Scott Lively's Abiding Truth Ministries (smeared by SPLC as a “hate group”)
Pastor Glen Sawyer, New Mt. Zion Church of God in Christ, Elizabeth City, NC
Pastor Wil Nichols, Victorious Praise Fellowship COGIC, Durham, NC
Pastor Jon Robinson, Kingdom C.O.M.E. Ministries, Clairton, PA
Pastor Kenneth Jefferson, Greater Harvest COGIC
The following pro-family leaders and groups will issue supporting statements:
Rabbi Yehuda Levin, Rabbinical Alliance of America, Brooklyn, NY;
Laurie Higgins, Illinois Family Institute (smeared as “hate group”)
Arthur Goldberg, author, “Light in the Closet: Torah, Homosexuality, and the Power to Change,” New Jersey;
Linda Harvey, Mission America, Columbus, OH
Brian Camenker, Mass Resistance, Boston, MA (smeared as “hate group”)

Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth, which is sponsoring the press event, recently interviewed Pastor Wooden, who said that the SPLC’s gambit of labeling mainstream pro-family groups that oppose homosexual activism as “hate groups” is seriously damaging the SPLC’s credibility. Wooden also debunked the “civil rights” analogy used by “gay” activists, saying it is wrong to compare “my beautiful blackness” to changeable homosexual perversion.

LaBarbera said the SPLC is engaged in a thinly-veiled, one-sided campaign to demonize adherents of traditional Judeo-Christian morality. He noted that despite the considerable hatred and anti-Christian bigotry emanating from homosexual activists (e.g., Dan Savage’s vile hate-site, Santorum[dot]com), the SPLC has never labeled a “gay” organization or website as “hateful.”

____________________________________________________________________________

LISTEN: AFTAH Interviews Dr. Patrick Wooden – Part One

READ IT ONLINE: http://americansfortruth.com/2012/01/16/aftah-interviews-dr-patrick-wooden-part-one/

January 16th, 2012

NC pastor to lead press conference condemning SPLC’s smear campaign against Christian pro-family organizations as “hate groups”

Dr. Patrick Wooden, Sr., says the Southern Poverty Law Center is losing credibility by smearing pro-family groups opposed to the homosexual activist movement as "hate groups."

This is Part One of my interview [click HERE to listen] with Dr. Patrick Wooden, pastor at Upper Room Church of God in Christ, in Raleigh, NC. This interview was pre-recorded and aired January 14, 2012. Pastor Wooden will be leading a contingent of African American pastors at an AFTAH-sponsored press conference Tuesday, Jan. 17 outside of the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, AL. The SPLC infamously labeled Americans For Truth and several other Christian pro-family groups as “hate groups” due to their strong opposition to the homosexual activist lobby. (Other groups smeared by the SPLC include Family Research Council, American Family Association and Scott Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries.)

Wooden is a leader in the effort to preserve the definition of marriage constitutionally in North Carolina as one man, one woman — and he is regularly tarred as a “bigot” and “homophobe” by homosexual activists in his state. Here he debunks the LGBT analogy of “gay rights” to Black civil rights — affirming that there is no connection between “my beautiful blackness” and deviant sexual behavior condemned by God. (Last year, Wooden interviewed me at his church in Raleigh; go HERE and click link for the video, “Fighting Homosexuality in America.”) – Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org

HOW TO LISTEN: This is an mp3 file, supported in most operating systems by Windows Media Player, Quick Time and/or I-Tunes. Real Player is not supported and there may be difficulty when attempting to listen with it. Left click once on the link below to play. (Please be patient, depending upon the speed of your internet connection it may take a moment or two to load.) OR right click the link then “save target as” to download the whole show.

1-14-12, Patrick Wooden, Part One

________________________________________________

To subscribe to Americans For Truth emails, click http://www.americansfortruth.org/subscribe.php (or copy and paste this link to your browser)

Why O'Malley is wrong....

2012-01-15T14:07:00.001-08:00

http://www.gazette.net/article/20120113/OPINION/701139669&template=gazette

Maryland Community News

Published: Friday, January 13, 2012
Dr. Ruth M. Jacobs and Mike McManus: Why O'Malley is wrong on same-sex marriage Commentary

Dr. Ruth M. Jacobs and Mike McManus

Gov. Martin O'Malley, in promoting same-sex marriage, wants to change the long-established meaning of marriage by promoting an illusion that gender and even biological relationships don't really matter.

Yet the healthiest children are those reared by a married mother and father.
"Marriage is the union of a husband and wife for a reason: These are the only unions that can make new life and connect children in love to their mom and dad," says Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage.

In his 1828 American Dictionary, Noah Webster defined marriage as the "act of uniting a man and a woman for life," because marriage "was instituted … for the purpose of preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, for promoting domestic felicity, and for securing the maintenance and education of children."

While children can lose their parents for many reasons, changing from Webster's timeless definition of marriage to same-sex marriage as pushed by Gov. O'Malley would mean that it is our state government that is dividing the family tree, breaking biological ties and depriving children of either dad or mom.

Fatherhood.gov states, "Fathers play a unique and irreplaceable role in their children's lives." Yet, the majority of same-sex partnerships raising children are lesbian. Enforcing same-sex lesbian marriage would officially make dad the "throwaway parent" and would give greater legal rights to an unrelated female.

Most studies of same-sex parenting involve children of divorced lesbian mothers who started out in a heterosexual household, thus providing little or no real information about parenting when dad is axed right out of family. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports, "There is a paucity of data on ... adolescents ... reared in lesbian households since birth."

We do know, that children from fatherless homes, according to federal statistics, are "14 times more likely to commit rape, 32 times more likely to run away, 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders, five times more likely to commit suicide, ten times more likely to abuse chemical substances and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."

We also know that same-gender relationships lack the stability of traditional marriage. A study of homosexual men found that the "duration of steady partnerships" was 1.5 years. In a lesbian-parenting study, 60 percent of the mothers had separated before the child's 7th birthday. By contrast, 66 percent of all heterosexual first marriages last 10 years or longer, with 50 percent lasting 20 years or longer, reports the National Center for Health Statistics.

Gay activists want you to believe that homosexuality is innate, making genderless marriage a "civil right." Yet, studies of identical twins indicate that if one twin is homosexual, in the majority of cases the other is not. There is no "gay gene." Peter Tatchell, a British homosexual activist, states, "If heterosexuality and homosexuality are, indeed, genetically predetermined ... how do we explain bisexuality or people who, suddenly in midlife, switch from heterosexuality to homosexuality (or vice versa)? We can't." In fact, there are more 250 ex-gay groups (ExodusInternational.org).

After Maine 's legislature voted for same-sex marriage in 2009, Maine voters repealed the law. Subsequently, two dozen state legislators who voted for it were defeated in 2010.
Gov. O'Malley is wrong on same-sex marriage. Maryland legislators must vote "no" to same-sex marriage — or risk the fate of Maine legislators.

Dr. Ruth Jacobs of Gaithersburg is a physician. Michael J. McManus of Potomac is president of Marriage Savers.

Buy Girl Scout Cookies and support GID?

2012-01-15T12:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.wnd.com/2012/01/youtubers-punish-girl-scout-for-her-beliefs/

How Do You Explain a Lesbian Wedding to an 8 year old?

2012-01-15T11:02:00.001-08:00

January 13, 2012

Thought provoking words follow this greeting. I am sure you will consider them carefully. Please know OneByOne appreciates YOU and the support you offer our ministry through your prayers and financial giving!

How Do You Explain a Lesbian Wedding to an 8 year old?

A few weeks ago my wife and I finished sending out our Christmas newsletter and family picture. The picture was taken last summer on a beautiful Martha's Vineyard beach. Minutes after capturing this family moment a short distance from us a photographer began taking pictures of two women dressed in white gowns. A same-sex wedding had just taken place. Watching attentively to what was occurring on the beach my eight-year old granddaughter asked her mother why these two women were kissing one another. I was very interested in my daughter-in-law's reply. She said, "Honey, these women love each other a lot. Their friendship and love are wonderful gifts from God. However, God wants only a man and a woman to be married. Their marriage and outward affection are not His will. God doesn't condone what they are doing." I thought to myself, "Well said."

I pastor a church on a resort island off the coast of Cape Cod. Each summer I receive a couple of phone calls asking me if I would perform a same-sex wedding. I respectfully decline. I will never be comfortable being asked to marry two persons of the same gender. I am even more uncomfortable having my grandchildren exposed to a lesbian wedding. The thought that my granddaughter will grow up with an image in her mind of two women amorously kissing and embracing on a sandy beach makes me angry.

In less than thirty years, homosexuality has evolved from being something that was understood to be sinful, to something that is being declared as the moral equivalent of heterosexuality. In recent years I have been surprised and heartbroken with how many friends and contemporaries in ministry have capitulated to the "spirit of this age" and are now supporting homosexuality and same-sex marriage. I wonder if they have given much thought to the impact the acceptance of homosexual expression has upon our nation's children.

For example, the growing acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriage will compound sexual confusion and experimentation by young people. This week Archie Comics released the first-ever issue featuring a same-sex wedding. Riverdale High will never be the same. The clear message of same-sex marriage is that all sexual choices are equally acceptable and desirable. A child who grows up in a home with traditional values will face a world where all sexual options are equal and encouraged. They will be cheered on by their peers and the media to accept same-sex marriage, a choice they never would have considered before.

And what about the chaos that is now pulsating through our public schools? Schools today have non-discrimination policies that include "sexual orientation." In states where same-sex marriage is legal gay activists are working hard to have administrations change the content of the curriculum. As of January 1 California public schools must teach students about the specific contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and

transgender Americans. Children will be taught to see homosexuality, bisexuality, cross-dressing, sex-change operations, and homosexual marriages as good and natural, and a possible life-style choice for them.

In Massachusetts where I live, married homosexual teachers wear their wedding rings. At school social functions the teacher will introduce his/her homosexual spouse to you. Little Anna will learn in first grade that "Mrs." Smith is married to another "Mrs." Smith and when she grows up she has the right to choose the partner of her choice. It is wrong for a school child to criticize homosexuality. Educators, in this state, work hard to protect their schools from "mean thinking" conservative people. And what about sex education? In some public schools students are taught that remaining abstinent until heterosexual or homosexual marriage is a good thing. It is also communicated that since pregnancy is not a danger for homosexuals then sex can be a wonderful experience for young people, as long as they act "responsibly."

It's impossible to assess the sexual confusion that boys and girls are experiencing growing up in today's culture. Young girls are wondering if they are lesbians for no reason other than they find their pretty friends attractive. Many children will carry their confusion into their adult years. Generations will be severely damaged by the sexual chaos we see all around us. Millions of people will be emotionally and sexually harmed by the eradication of biblical standards established by the Creator. "For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. (Gen. 2:24)." The accumulated wisdom and good sense of over 2,000 years has concluded that the best marital and parental blueprint is composed of one man and one woman. Arrogantly discounting such time-tested wisdom and using children as guinea pigs is devastating to our culture as well as individual lives.

The OneByOne Speaker's Bureau is available to assist your church, small group, or bible study in discussing the biblical answer to this difficult question. Please email me at JWinter777@aol.com to discuss how we might assist you.

Sincerely,

Rev. Jeff Winter

OneByOne

Pittsburgh General Assembly 2012 Luncheon

OnebyOne Luncheon

Tuesday, July 3 12:00 - 1:30 pm

Speaker:

Linda Harvey: Founder of Mission America

"Same-Sex Marriage: The Destructive Impact on America's Youth"

Tonic Bar and Grill

917 Liberty Avenue

(one block from the main entrance of the Pittsburgh Convention Center)

Cost: $15.00

**Everyone is welcome at lunch. You do not need to be a registered attendee of GA. If you would like to attend our luncheon and are not a registered participant, please email JWinter777@aol.com or send a note to PO Box 440, Pittsford, NY 14534.

General Assembly 2012

June 30 - July 7

David Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh, PA

Important Connections

www.pcusa.org

www.oneby1.org

US religious leaders join together in support of marriage and religious liberty

2012-01-15T10:58:00.001-08:00

Leaders of some of the largest religious communities in the United States have joined together in an open letter to all Americans to voice their shared concern for marriage and religious freedom.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/us-religious-leaders-join-together-in-support-of-marriage-and-religious-lib?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=885201eae5-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines_01_13_2012&utm_medium=email

GID Woman says her fake penis got her fired

2012-01-15T10:57:00.000-08:00

http://articles.philly.com/2012-01-13/news/30624125_1_gender-identity-damages-complaint

__._,_.___

Cheating Arizona Wife Could Face Jail Time Under State's Anti-Adultery Law

2012-01-15T10:55:00.001-08:00

An Arizona woman who cheated on her estranged husband was very surprised to receive a phone call about her extramarital affairs…from the cops.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/cheating-arizona-wife-could-face-jail-time-under-states-anti-adultery-law/

Folks, how many agree with this statement:
Since the gov't sanctions the vows of marriage, it has an obligation to enforce them. Removing adultery laws from the books, whether by actual repeal or by non-enforcement made a mockery of marriage as a legally protected union.

One Cannot Make This Stuff Up!

2012-01-09T09:10:00.001-08:00

Chaz Bono Saving Up to Buy a Penis

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/06/idUS292655787820120106

__,_._,___

"Use the Wrong Pronouns and You're Out"

2012-01-03T16:41:00.001-08:00

Maryland Citizens for a Responsible Government

January 3, 2011

Citizens ask Maryland State Ethics Commission to Correct

"Use the Wrong Pronouns and You're Out" Ruling

by Montgomery Co. Ethics Commission

The Maryland State Ethics Commission has been asked by Maryland Citizens for Responsible Government (MCRG) to review a Montgomery County Ethics Commission (MCEC) decision which protects Gender Identity confusion over reality. MCRG claims that MCEC's decision was flawed by MCEC's refusal to consider testimony from key witnesses simply because they used pronouns that correctly identified birth sex. In denying the credibility of these witnesses, it appears that MCEC issued a decision based on its own personal bias instead of relying on the ethics law.

Per MCRG's newly filed complaint, MCEC illegally revised the County's ethics code to arrive at its decision, denying MCRG due process under the law. The controversial decision could enable any Montgomery County public employee "off the clock" to harass and intimidate citizens engaging in political activity.

In its complaint filed with the Maryland State Ethics Commission, MCRG is asking for a complete review of the Montgomery County Ethics Commission's decision,

reached earlier last year, to dismiss ethics violations against Dana Beyer, M.D., a former Montgomery County Council employee and special assistant to former Councilmember Duchy Trachtenberg. According to the complaint, the four-member County Ethics Commission blatantly misinterpreted the County's ethics law, going so far as to create non-existent stipulations and requirements.

For example, the County Ethics Code (Sec. 19A-14(e)) reads: "A public employee must not intimidate, threaten, coerce or discriminate against any person for the purpose of interfering with that person's freedom to engage in political activity." However, in its decision, the County Commission, added the conditional words "as a function of being on the job, self-identifying as a public employee, or entailing the prestige of office" to the end of this provision. The County Commission did not, says the MCRG, cite any legislative authority or legal precedent to justify its sudden rewriting of the County's public ethics law.

The original MCRG ethics complaint lodged with the County against Dr. Beyer charged that Beyer repeatedly violated County ethics laws by harassing and intimidating participants in a citizen-driven referendum effort to place the County's controversial "gender identity" law on the ballot. According to the complaint, Beyer also misused her power and position at the Montgomery County Council. Beyer, as an aide to then County Council Member Duchy Trachtenberg and vice president of Equality Maryland, a gay and transgender advocacy group, was repeatedly hailed as one of the chief architects of the law.

"The Montgomery County Ethics Commission ignored transcripts of 911 calls,

a video, and numerous affidavits detailing the harassment; it suddenly revised the law on its own initiative and without any authority to do so in its problem riddled ruling," said Dr. Ruth Jacobs, MCRG President. "The Ethics Commission also rejected key testimony of witnesses simply because they used pronouns which reflected Beyer's own gender confusion," said Jacobs. "If the Commission wasn't acting out of personal bias, why should it question the truthfulness of everyday Americans who were simply being honest about gender?"

Dr. Dana Beyer was born as Wayne Beyer, lived as a male throughout his youth, married a woman as an adult, and fathered two sons. In his forties, Wayne Beyer became a transgender woman, and legally changed his name to Dana.

Because of the harassment by Beyer and other Equality Maryland members, the gender identity bill became law despite the request for a referendum by Montgomery County residents who wanted to vote on the proposed law. The "gender identity" law was used by Beyer in a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the County which Beyer eventually dropped. Beyer has been quoted as stating, "I helped craft the bill, and I'm the first person to use it...That's a delicious irony."(Gazette, Nov. 18, 2009)

"The MCEC's startling decision allows Dana Beyer and any other public employee to harass and intimidate citizens with a purpose to interfere with their freedom to engage in political activity," stated Dr. Jacobs. "How can citizens trust their government if the law is rewritten whenever the County Ethics Commission feels a personal and biased need to do so? Therefore the purpose of the MCRG complaint is to ensure that all citizens have due process under the law in Montgomery County, Maryland."

The members of the Montgomery County Ethics Commission consist of:

Nina A. Weisbroth, Kenita V. Barrow, Antar C. Johnson and Stuart Rick

Maryland Citizens for a Responsible Government

PFOX, AFA, Liberty Counsel and WorldNetDaily Named Pro-Family Champions

2011-12-31T11:19:00.001-08:00

PFOX, AFA, Liberty Counsel and WorldNetDaily Named Pro-Family Champions

WND Exclusive
Farah named 1 of 10 'pro-family champions'
Posted: December 31, 2011

WND

Joseph Farah

WASHINGTON – Abiding Truth Ministries, a pro-family activist group, today named WND founder Joseph Farah among the nation's top-10 "pro-family champions."

"I rate these groups and individuals based upon my own subjective 'Courage Index,'" explained Scott Lively, director of the group. "In my estimation, the following groups/individuals have the most of it and have risked the most in defense of biblical truth on the issue of homosexuality."

Besides Lively's own group, the list includes:

Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth.
Brian Camenker of MassResistance.
Joseph Farah of WND.
Linda Harvey of Mission: America.
Bryan Fisher of American Family Association.
Mat Staver, Matt Barber and Judith Reisman of Liberty Counsel.
Dr. Joseph Nicolosi of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.
Regina Griggs of Parents and Friends of Gays and Ex-Gays.
Bishop E.W. Jackson of Exodus Faith Ministries.

Lively is the author of the controversial book, "The Pink Swastika," about the homosexual influence within the Nazi hierarchy. Abiding Truth Ministries' mission is to promote and defend the biblical view of marriage and family through education, training and funding.

"I am very grateful to be honored by Abiding Truth Ministries and to be included among such distinguished and courageous luminaries," said Farah.

Farah is the only former top newspaper executive in America to form an independent, national online news outlet back in 1997 – the very first of its kind. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies. Prior to launching WND.com, he was editor-in-chief of the Sacramento Union, then the oldest daily west of the Mississippi and the original newspaper home of Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Herb Cain. Previously he served as editor-in-chief of the daily Glendale News-Press and a group of Southern California weeklies in Burbank and the surrounding communities. He was also executive news editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. In 1991, he founded the Western Journalism Center, a non-profit organization sponsoring investigative reporting and journalism education. Farah took over Oliver North's long-running daily national radio talk show, serving as host for three years. He serves as chief executive officer and editor of WND.

Please make a tax-deductible gift to PFOX so we will be able to meet the challenges of 2012. PFOX is an all-volunteer organization -- we are not funded by any church or organization. We do not rent fancy offices, own any buildings, or get paid salaries. We do not hire fundraisers, so every cent you donate goes to PFOX. Without you, we could not exist.

To donate, please go to http://pfox.org/donate.html

Thank you and God for making all of this possible. Remember – no one does it but PFOX – and you!

Blessings,

Regina Griggs

Executive Director, PFOX

PFOX and You

2011-12-27T08:06:00.001-08:00



	December 26, 2011 PFOX and You The year of 2011 has been one of the busiest PFOX has experienced. The battle to bring truth and love to those who struggle with unwanted same sex attractions or gender identity disorder, and the families who love them, has been an uphill battle. Anti-ex-gay activists and their allies in the liberal media have attacked PFOX, people of faith, and families who support equal access and their children being taught the facts about sexual orientation. PFOX started the year off in February by hosting an exhibit booth at the popular and heavily attended CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in Washington D.C. PFOX was one of only two social conservative organizations present at CPAC. GoProud, a Republican homosexual activist group, also exhibited, so we were able to answer many questions from attendees curious about what GoProud was saying about homosexuality. Without PFOX, conservatives from across the country would have received a one-sided message about homosexual behavior. GoProud members also came to our table, and we gave them our brochures and testimonies of freedom from homosexuality. Thanks to your donations, we were able to pay for the exhibit booth to hand out our materials and speak to the many people who approached our booth. While the majority of the political organizations there professed to be conservative, most knew nothing about former homosexuals. But the truth came out, that homosexuality and gender identity are not immutable or in your DNA or genes, and that sexuality is fluid and changeable. PFOX also hosted an exhibit booth at the American Association of Christian Counselors International Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Over 7,000 participants/counselors from all over the world attended this special event. PFOX president Greg Quinlan staffed our booth, answered questions from an ex-gay perspective, and was visible poof that changing sexual orientation is possible. Therapists, social workers, and school counselors approached our exhibit booth with enthusiasm, telling us how appreciative they were to find us because they had been looking for educational homosexual literature for some time. Our transgender brochures were also a popular resource. At one point, Dr. Mark Yarhouse, who writes about sexual preferences and taught a seminar at the conference, passed our PFOX exhibit booth. We stopped him and led him back to our booth so he could see our ex-gay brochures, meet former homosexuals, and speak to the spouses of ex-gays. We told Dr. Yarhouse about the intolerance faced by former homosexuals and urged him to take our brochures. We also answered questions about the ex-gay community from people who had attended Dr. Yarhouse's session and stopped by our booth. Also staffing the PFOX booth was Donna Lawlor, the wife of an ex-gay man. Donna is a witness for the fact that marriages and families can be saved through prayer, honesty and hard work. Ex-gays can and do raise beautiful healthy families. This fall, PFOX was one of only 175 organizations invited to the Federal Partners in Bullying Summit held by the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C. Presenting our Bullying Brochure at the conference was ex-gay Christopher Doyle. Please read, copy and distribute our anti-Bullying brochure at http://pfox.org/Prevent-Bullying-at-School.pdf PFOX ended our travels by hosting a booth at the Values Voter Conference in October. The Values Voter Conference in Washington D.C. gave us the opportunity to meet the Republican presidential candidates. PFOX personally provided the candidates with our ex-gay brochures and the opportunity to meet and speak to former homosexuals. We wore our 'Ex-gay Is OK!' buttons throughout the conference, a visible sign that invited people to stop and ask questions. Throughout the year PFOX distributed thousands of educational fliers to public schools and shared our resources with organizations around the country. PFOX issued press releases, participated as guests on radio and television shows, and maintained a web and blog site to share our testimonies nationwide and internationally, judging from the large number of inquiries from around the world. Postage and the costs of producing our newsletter have risen. The costs of issuing vital press releases, traveling to display our exhibit booth, and renting booth space at national conferences to educate the public have also stretched our budget to the maximum. As the year ends and we look forward to 2012, we need your help more than ever before. Our freedoms are under attack. Equal access, free speech, freedom of religion and the right to self-determination are being taken away, and ex-gays are on the chopping block. Organizations like PFOX are the target. PFOX needs your prayers and financial support. We cannot succeed in getting our message out without advertising, media support, and attending national conferences. We understand how difficult it is during the ongoing recession to donate -- it means giving up something else. How do you place a value on saving our children and being able to bring them the gift of hope? We must provide help to those who are being denied the hope for the change they need; no child should be denied help. Please make a tax-deductible gift to PFOX as this year ends so we will be able to meet the challenges of 2012. PFOX is an all-volunteer organization -- we are not funded by any church or organization. We do not rent fancy offices, own any buildings, or get paid salaries. We do not hire fundraisers, so every cent you donate goes to PFOX. Without you, we could not exist. If you postmark your gift before midnight December 31, 2011, it is tax deductible, whether made by check, cash, or credit card. To donate, please go to http://pfox.org/donate.html Thank you and God for making all of this possible. Remember - no one does it but PFOX - and you! Blessings, Regina Griggs Executive Director PFOX
	Remember to read the PFOX blog regularly for ex-gay views and news. See http://pfox-exgays.blogspot.com/
	If you like what you read here, please forward it to a friend. Click here to subscribe from PFOX e-mails or simply send an e-mail to pfox@pfox.org. Visit us at http://www.pfox.org/. Mailing address: PFOX, Box 510, Reedville VA 22539. Phone 804-453-4737. PFOX is a 501(C)3 non-profit organization. All donations to PFOX are tax deductible for IRS purposes.

Incredibly Shrinking Jesus

2011-12-26T12:24:00.001-08:00

Homosexuality and the Incredibly Shrinking Jesus

Ex-homosexual DL Foster, who runs the "Gay Christian Movement Watch" website monitoring that heretical agenda. Defending Christian Truth on homosexuality is unpopular in some quarters, but it is the duty of every Bible-believing Christian. Go to the AFTAH Radio Hour Archive to listen to our interview with Foster.

READ IT ONLINE: http://americansfortruth.com/2011/12/24/homosexuality-and-the-incredibly-shrinking-jesus/#more-10480

Penguins 'pray away the gay' (WND column)

2011-12-26T08:59:00.001-08:00

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=379601

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Penguins 'pray away the gay'
Exclusive: Matt Barber notes even liberals
admit that changing orientation is possible

Those bent on justifying the homosexual lifestyle often claim that there are umpteen million – or somewhere thereabouts – species of "gay" animals in the world. This begs a few questions:

What?
Then how do they procreate? If these animals forgo natural mating behavior to, instead, spend nights hooking up in Yellowstone's public men's rooms, march in critter "gay pride" parades and decorate their nest in fabulous Art Deco pastels, then wouldn't their species cease to exist after just one generation? So much for Darwinian evolution.
Even if such nonsense were true, so what? There are plenty of species in the world that eat their young, too. Animals are animals. Does this mean we should act like them? (Besides, show me one species of animal that engages in the same kind of depraved homosexual conduct that can come only from the mind of man, and I'll be impressed.)

Still, whenever some animal displays atypical nesting behavior or exhibits quirks that can be remotely called "gay" (We've all seen that dog), moral relativists – who desperately seek to justify objectively immoral behavior – will cry: "Look! Animals are gay, too. It must be natural!"

So, it's not surprising that liberals have their feathers in a ruffle – that they're egg-cited over recent news that another pair of same-sex penguins has flown the "gay" coop. (I wrote about a second pair in 2009).

Famous "gay" penguins Buddy and Pedro from the Toronto Zoo are the latest chirpy birds with happy feet to begin eyeballing chicks. They're now "ex-gay" penguins. (Read about Buddy and Pedro's "reparative therapy.")

I know. For most of us this elicits little more than a chuckle. Yet there are those who actually believe this twaddle.

Unfortunately, this is all part of liberals' desperate attempt to dredge up some natural, biological rationalization – of which science has found none – to validate demonstrably unnatural behavior.

That's why we see such visceral hatred on the left for the ex-gay community. From a political and legal standpoint, it's strategically critical that these same liberals undermine and marginalize the very real-life experiences of untold thousands of former homosexuals.

This mean-spiritedness represents a profound lack of respect for other people's "right to choose." Their favorite dig is: "You can't pray away the gay." Once you've self-identified as – or been labeled – "gay," you're stuck with it, you see.

Ironically, these same liberals will suggest with a straight face (no pun intended) that something that is innate – a person's biological sex – can change. If you're a man who, today, feels like a woman, why then, snippity-snip and voila! You're a woman.

Many men and women with unwanted same-sex attractions have exercised sexual self-determination and have chosen to leave the homosexual lifestyle. As we make continuing advances in the science of human sexuality, it has become clear that "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" are largely fluid, subjectively determined classifications. As to what may drive a person's "sexual orientation" and/or sexual appetites, the highly liberal American Psychological Association (APA) has concluded: "Many [scientists] think that nature and nurture both play complex roles."

The scientifically reinforced fluidity of "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" may help to explain why, as even the liberal APA has admitted, thousands (if not millions) of people have "altered their sexual orientation" with "varying degrees of satisfaction and varying perceptions of success."

It is no longer open for serious debate. Despite tremendous political pressure to find otherwise, even the left-leaning APA has been forced to acknowledge that for people with unwanted same-sex attractions, change is possible. It's not always easy, but change is undeniably and conclusively possible.

Recently, the most comprehensive study ever done on the ex-gay phenomenon was released in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. In the study, researchers concluded that, for many who desire to leave the homosexual lifestyle, "change does indeed occur, although not for everyone."

Some of the study's conclusions:

Success: Conversion: 23 percent of the sample reported substantial reductions in homosexual attraction and subsequent conversion to heterosexual attractions and functioning.
Success: Chastity: 30 percent reported that homosexual attraction was still present, but only incidentally or in a way that did not seem to bring distress, allowing them to live contentedly without overt sexual activity.
Continuing: 16 percent reported modest decreases in homosexual attraction, but were not satisfied with their degree of change and remained committed to the change process.
Non-response: 7 percent reported no significant sexual orientation change; they had not given up on the change process, but some were confused or conflicted about which direction to turn next.
Failure: Confused: 5 percent reported no significant sexual orientation change, and had given up on the change process, but without yet embracing a gay identity.
Failure: Gay identity: 20 percent had given up on the change process and embraced a gay identity.

Most importantly, the study determined that, for those who struggle with same-sex attraction and wish to change, "some people can indeed move from homosexuality to heterosexuality, and that harm is unlikely to result from such efforts."

But that's people. Penguins? They're probably just "bisexual" to begin with.

Matt Barber (@jmattbarber on Twitter) is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. He serves as vice president of Liberty Counsel Action. (This information is provided for identification purposes only.)

Voter Guide for Republican Presidential Candidates

2011-12-26T08:58:00.001-08:00


	Download the 2012 Presidential Voter Guide today!

December 21, 2011

The first contests in the race for the Republican nomination are just around the corner. To better inform you, we looked beyond the rhetoric to the candidates' actual records on the issues important to families.

This voter guide outlines candidate stances on issues that are important to the family. We researched the candidates' statements and votes on the ten issues that best give voters an understanding on if the candidates match your values. Please use this resource as you think about who you would like to see be the nominee to challenge President Barack Obama.

Download the free guide and be sure to share this resource with your friends and family before the 2012 primary season begins next month.

A values voter is an informed voter.

Sincerely,

Tony Perkins
President

P.S. Please forward this to your friends, family, and fellow church members.

FRC Action: 801 G Street N.W. Washington, D.C. 20001

PFOX-ExGays

Hey Teens!! Read Jake's ex-gay diary!!!

LGBT Activists to Learn 'How to Become Gay for Pay' at Conference

An Impossible Choice

Bullying in Schools

Actress Cynthia Nixon says she's Gay by Choice

Three Days, Three Events to Defend Marriage

Be an advocate for traditional marriage in Maryland!

Kerry Cook's Tesimony

Victim of transgender assault at Rosedale McDonald's charged with disorderly conduct

First Things Article: Same-Sex Science by Stanton Jones

GID articles on Examiner.com

15-Year-Old Student Bullied for Supporting Biblical View of Family

Quebecers launch group to help people with unwanted SSA

Quebecers launch first group to help people with unwanted same-sex attraction

Related Stories

Catholic Parish Cancels Series About Homosexuality in Face of Homosexualist Pressure

AUDIO of Compelling AFTAH Press Conference at SPLC HQ in Alabama

LISTEN: Audio of AFTAH Press Conference Featuring Black Pastors Denouncing SPLC’s ‘Hate Group’ Smears

African American leaders bristle at SPLC claim that they are tools of “white organizers”

Castrating Children

An interview with Dawn Wilde, the author of 'Confessions of a recovering lesbian'

Safety standards

"Journey Into Manhood" comes to UK in February, Arizona in March

What's wrong with lesbian parenting studies

This has been a noisy week for parenting studies.

What's wrong with lesbian parenting studies

Bureaucrats Defy Law, Mandate “Gay” Agenda in West Virginia Schools

ACTION ALERT: ASK COUNTY COUNCIL TO INCLUDE EX-GAYS IN LEGISLATION

Baltimore County Proposes "Peeping Tom" Law

comments by George Gilder @ SS Marriage

Religious Leaders Warn of Threat to Religious Freedom

Confront the SPLC's Lies about "Hate"

Press Conf.: Black Pastors Confront Southern Poverty Law Center for Smearing as 'Hate Groups' Pro-Family Organizations Opposed to Homosexual Agenda

LISTEN: AFTAH Interviews Dr. Patrick Wooden – Part One

NC pastor to lead press conference condemning SPLC’s smear campaign against Christian pro-family organizations as “hate groups”

Why O'Malley is wrong....

Buy Girl Scout Cookies and support GID?

How Do You Explain a Lesbian Wedding to an 8 year old?

US religious leaders join together in support of marriage and religious liberty

GID Woman says her fake penis got her fired

Cheating Arizona Wife Could Face Jail Time Under State's Anti-Adultery Law

One Cannot Make This Stuff Up!

"Use the Wrong Pronouns and You're Out"

PFOX, AFA, Liberty Counsel and WorldNetDaily Named Pro-Family Champions

PFOX and You

Incredibly Shrinking Jesus

Homosexuality and the Incredibly Shrinking Jesus

Penguins 'pray away the gay' (WND column)

Voter Guide for Republican Presidential Candidates