Joe Morgan | Gay Star News | July 15, 2013
Iceland is to cut ties with Russia after President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law banning ‘gay propaganda’.
Jón Gnarr, the mayor of the capital Reykjavik, says he wishes to formally revise or break off the capital’s political and cultural relations with Moscow.
While the European Union has spoken out against the law, cutting the ties could be the first real international consequence of Russia being able to fine and arrest any gay protest.
Joseph Patrick McCormick | PinkNews.co.uk | July 15, 2013
Police in Moscow detained five gay rights activists on Sunday for holding a demonstration against Russia’s recently introduced anti-gay legislation.
The Moscow Times reports that five activists were held by police after staging a demonstration at Russia’s Red Square, due to the fact that the activists did not have a permit for the rally.
The demonstrators lit flares and held up rainbow-coloured posters which read “Homophobia is riffraffs’ religion.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Event’s Sponsor Makes Unsubstantiated Charge That ‘Security Threats’ Are Responsible For Event’s Termination
Truth Wins Out laughed today at the cancellation of “Ex-Gay Pride Month 2013” by the newly formed group, Voice of the Voiceless (VOV), which announced it was putting the kybosh on a fancy gala it had planned with the Family Research Council on July 31st. The event had sought to portray “ex-gays” as victims and had invited Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-MN, and other members of Congress to attend the benefit.
“There was never going to be an actual ‘Ex-gay Pride Month’ because ex-gays are as rare as the Dodo bird,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “They simply could not find real ‘ex-gays’ to participate and had to cancel to save face. This was nothing but a desperate publicity stunt intended to revive a failing industry that has repeatedly embarrassed anti-gay organizations.”
In 
response to VOV, Truth Wins Out had declared July “Ex-Gay Survivor Pride Month,” to highlight those who had overcome harmful programs that aimed to change their sexual orientation. TWO had lined up several speakers for a press conference in Washington, DC on the 31st. The organization will discuss whether it still plans to hold its event, considering the gala it was protesting never got off the ground.
VOV’s Christopher Doyle offered unsubstantiated charges of “anti-ex-gay extremism” as his reason for terminating the much-ballyhooed event. According to Doyle:
“Due to some anti-ex-gay extremism that has occurred since we first announced Ex-Gay Pride 2013, the July 31 Lobbying Day on Capitol Hill and Evening Dinner/Reception at the Family Research Council has had to be moved and postponed to an undisclosed location in September. The harassment has caused several security threats which has forced us to change plans, and that is unfortunate.
“We challenge Doyle to come forward and release the names of LGBT activists and organizations that have allegedly jeopardized his organization’s security,” said TWO’s Besen. “Until concrete allegations are made, we can only assume Dole is making an excuse for his organization’s abject failure to produce a viable Ex-Gay Pride Month event. ”
Doyle is downgrading his effort and rebranding it “Ex-Gay Awareness Month.” This way, he can pretend there are legions of so-called ex-gays in press releases, without actually proving they truly exist. According to Doyle:
“…We believe it is necessary not only to hold events in July for Ex-Gay Pride, but also to declare September as the First Annual Ex-Gay Awareness Month. Ex-Gay Awareness Month in September will be a time to reflect on the discrimination and marginalization that former homosexuals and ex-gays experience in the public at large. It will also provide some much needed exposure to students in secondary schools and colleges across the country to learn about the plights, challenges, and tribulations facing ex-gays in our culture.”
The VOV event was intended to revive the failing “ex-gay” industry and distract people from the disastrous year 2013 has been for such programs. This has included the closing of Exodus International and the group’s former poster boy, John Paulk, coming out.
In 1998, The Family Research Council was one of fifteen anti-gay organizations to sponsor the Truth in Love campaign, which touted “ex-gays” in full-page newspaper and television ads. Besen photographed one of the campaign’s poster boys, John Paulk, in a DC gay bar in 2000. On April 24, 2013, Paulk apologized to the LGBT community and renounced the “ex-gay” myth saying: “Today, I do not consider myself ‘ex-gay’ and I no longer support or promote the movement.”
A second FRC and Liberty Counsel poster boy from the 1998 campaign, Michael Johnston, had what anti-gay activists called a “moral fall” in 2003. Johnston moved to a Kentucky sex-addiction facility after Besen and Virginia attorney Michael Hamar discovered that the ex-gay leader was having unprotected sex in motel rooms with men he met on the Internet.
“Ex-Gay Pride month reminded me of a publicity stunt we have seen before,” remarked Besen. “Prior to being disgraced, Michael Johnston founded National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day to mock the LGBT annual event, National Coming Out Day. We see how well that worked out for them.”
The two new “ex-gay” organizations, Voice of the Voiceless and Equality and Justice for All (the lobbying arm) are front groups for the International Healing Foundation, a for-profit therapy center founded by Richard Cohen, a “sexual reorientation life coach,” who was permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association in 2003 for multiple ethics violations. He is known for his alarming fits of anger and bizarre techniques that are widely mocked on the Internet and in the media. This includes having clients sit on his lap while he caresses them, or having them smash a pillow with a tennis racket while irately screaming the name of a parent.
Prior to founding the International Healing Foundation, Cohen was a member of the Moonies, where he met his wife in a mass marriage ceremony. After leaving the Moonies, Cohen joined the Wesleyan Community Church, a cult on Vashon Island, Washington, that practiced nude therapy in church.
Because of Cohen’s shady and disreputable past he has installed his deputy, Christopher Doyle, to be the face of these organizations. However, Doyle has ethical issues of his own. In a testimony he wrote for Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX) he spoke of a disturbing boyhood experience:
“I tried to have sex with the little girls that my mother watched in her daycare, and eventually, one of the girls told her parents what I was doing. The shame that was placed on me by my parents was more than I could bear. Rather than rescue me, teach me, and put me in counseling, the ‘bad boy’ was left alone to deal with all of this shame.”
Doyle has steadfastly refused to reveal the age of the little girls in question or what sexual acts he tried to perform on them. When confronted by Besen in June at the New Jersey Assembly cafeteria, Doyle responded that he hasn’t come clean because, “you would use it against me. You would try to harm me.”
“It is stunning that FRC, a group that claims to support families, would get in bed with disreputable figures such as Richard Cohen and Christopher Doyle,” said TWO’s Besen. “I think this partnership is a mark of desperation and highlights the failure of anti-gay organizations to convince Americans that it is possible to pray away the gay.”
The “ex-gay” industry appears to be a lost cause. A Newsweek poll in the summer of 1998 showed that 56% of the general public believed that homosexuals could become heterosexuals through therapy. Compare this to a March 2013 ABC News poll that showed just 24 percent of Americans see homosexuality as a choice.
Truth Wins Out is a nonprofit organization that fights anti-LGBT extremism. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality.
Associated Press | South Florida Gay News | July 15, 2013
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — As Lincoln’s gay community celebrates its four-day Star City Pride festival, the city’s stalled anti-discrimination ordinance meant to protect gay and transgender residents appears to be heading nowhere fast.
The ordinance, which would protect gays, lesbians and transgender individuals from discrimination in employment, public accommodations and housing, was approved by the City Council in May 2012.
But a successful petition drive, sponsored by a number of conservative Protestant churches and the community’s Catholic churches, required the Lincoln City Council to repeal the ordinance or put it to a citywide vote.
Alfred McCoy | TomDispatch | July 15, 2013
Surveillance: America’s pastime. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: naixn, Jason Smith / feastoffun.com)
The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century, what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not ours) looks bright indeed.
In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I. A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.
In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance. Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.
E. Douglas Kihn | Truthout | July 15, 2013
Rage in Red. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: _ambrown, Muffet)
This is the big question, right? It’s what people are wondering everywhere.
The answer is simple and plausible – but the explanation is a bit more complicated. The majority of Americans are suffering terribly from the current economic crisis, but they do not yet have a political self-identity that will allow for a successful fightback. They don’t know who they are or what they’re fighting for. Neither do they understand whom or what they are fighting against.
“If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles . . . if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” These are the words of Sūn Zǐ, a 6th century BCE Chinese general, military strategist, and author of The Art of War, an immensely influential ancient Chinese book on military strategy.
All fighting is the same. Self-knowledge and knowledge of the enemy confer on the fighter the outlines of a winning strategy, based on the best utilization of available weapons of offense and defense.
John Aravosis | America Blog | July 15, 2013
Gay marriage legislation passed the British House of Lords today, after having previously passed the House of Commons, which means.
According to the BBC, that means the law should be passed by the end of this week (after another technical vote in the House of Commons), leaving only the Queen’s assent.
Gay weddings are expected to start in 2014.
Suzanne Goldenberg | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | July 15, 2013
Efforts to put a price on damage from disaster fails to capture full extent of environmental losses in Gulf waters.
The US government cannot hope to arrive at a full accounting of the environmental destruction caused by the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico using its current methods, an expert panel has said.
A report from the National Research Council said the US government’s efforts to put a price on damage from the April 2010 disaster failed to capture the full extent of the environmental and economic losses in Gulf waters and coastal areas, fisheries, marine life, and the deep sea caused by BP’s runaway well.
Compiled by a team of 16 scientists at the request of Congress, the study went on to call for a sweeping overhaul of methods for putting a price on environmental losses – especially after an event on the scale of the BP disaster.
Ralph Lopez a| Digital Journal | Reader Supported News | July 15, 2013
Contradicting a statement by ex-vice president Dick Cheney on Sunday that warrantless domestic surveillance might have prevented 9/11, 2007 court records indicate that the Bush-Cheney administration began such surveillance at least 7 months prior to 9/11.
The Bush administration bypassed the law requiring such actions to be authorized by FISA court warrants, the body set up in the Seventies to oversee Executive Branch spying powers after abuses by Richard Nixon. Former QWest CEO John Nacchios said that at a meeting with the NSA on February 27, 2001, he and other QWest officials declined to participate. AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth all agreed to shunt customer communications records to an NSA database.
In 2007 the Denver Post reported:
“Nacchio suggested that the NSA sought phone, Internet and other customer records from Qwest in early 2001. When he refused to hand over the information, the agency retaliated by not granting lucrative contracts to the Denver-based company, he claimed.”
Other sources corroborate the former CEO’s allegations, which were made in the course of his legal defense against insider trading charges. Both Slate.com and National Journal have published reports in which sources are quoted which support the former CEO’s claims.
The Washington Post | Reader Supported News | July 15, 2013
The House has finally passed a farm bill, and we’ll start our discussion by listing the legislation’s good points. It won’t take long.
The bill ends the wasteful direct-payment programs that showered $5 billion per year on commodity producers without regard to need. It abolishes permanent agriculture laws dating back to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, thus eliminating the twice-a-decade threat of chaotic price increases that farm lobbyists used to extract new subsidies. And, for the first time in many years, representatives passed agriculture-support programs separately from food stamps, ending the old log-rolling arrangement between urban and rural delegations that insulated both programs from scrutiny on the merits.
Other than that, the bill’s a perfect disgrace. Each of the above-mentioned pluses is more than offset by a corresponding defect. Yes, direct payments would end, but they’d be replaced with a 10-year, $9?billion increase in crop insurance programs that would protect farms against not only natural disasters but also inconvenient market movements – at a time when U.S. agriculture is enjoying record profits. The irrational New Deal-Fair Deal-era default rules would end, but this new law would never sunset, locking in not only the crop insurance bloat but also costly, unnecessary sugar and milk programs.
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