Godhatesfags.com, a.k.a. Westboro Baptist Church

(...) Mark Phelps feels nauseated whenever he remembers that night. He was hit over 60 times and his brother, Nate, over 200 with a mattock handle. Nate went into shock. Mark didn't. A boy who became a compulsive counter to handle the stress, Mark counted every stroke. His and Nate's. While their father screamed obscenities and his brother screamed in pain. Every 20 strokes, their mother wiped their faces off in the tub. Nate passed out anyway. That was Christmas Day.

Though he believes he should be the next governor of Kansas, Pastor Phelps has never believed in Christmas. A mattock is a pick-hoe using a wooden handle heavier than a bat. Fred swung it with both hands like a ballplayer and with all his might. "The first blow stunned your whole body," says Mark. "By the third blow, your backside was so tender, even the lightest strike was agonizing, but he'd still hit you like he wanted to put it over the fence. By 20, though, you'd have grown numb with pain. That was when my father would quit and start on my brother. Later, when the feeling had returned and it hurt worse than before, he'd do it again. "After 40 strokes, I was weak and nauseous and very pale. My body hurt terribly. Then it was Nate's turn. He got 40 each time. "I staggered to the bathtub where my mom was wetting a towel to swab my face. Behind me, I could hear the mattock and my brother was choking and moaning. He was crying and he wouldn't stop." The voice in the phone halts. After an awkward moment, clearing of throats, it continues: "Then I heard my father shouting my name. My mom was right there, but she wouldn't help me. It hurt so badly during the third beating that I kept wanting to drop so he would hit me in the head. I was hoping I'd be knocked out, or killed...anything to end the pain. "After that...it was waiting that was terrible. You didn't know if, when he was done with Nate, he'd hurt you again. I was shaking in a cold panic. Twenty-five years since it happened, and the same sick feeling in my stomach comes back now..." Did he? Come back to you?

(...)

A series of interviews with Nate resulted in an eyewitness account of life growing up in the Phelps camp. These reports contained allegations of persistent and poisonous child abuse, wife-beating, drug addiction, kidnapping, terrorism, wholesale tax fraud, and business fraud. In addition, Nate described the cult-like disassembly of young adult identities into shadow-souls, using physical and emotional coercion- coercion which may have been a leading factor in the suicide of an emotionally troubled teenage girl.

from: Addicted to Hate By Jon Michael Bell

This Topeka, KS "church" is a family hate-cult consisting of disbarred lawyer and Baptist Minister Fred Phelbs, his wife Marge and some of their children, their children's spouses and grandchildren. Most Phelbses are lawyers. The Phelbs clan recently gained national notoriety for picketing gay events and funerals of people who died of AIDS, holding up signs with inspirational aphorisms such as "Thank God for AIDS" and "God hates Fags". That almost completely sumarizes Phelbs' fire-and-brimstone theology: God hates almost everyone, and in particular, gays and lesbians. For more information, I recommend the sites below, and in particular, Bell's book "Addicted to Hate". For those who can't read it in its entirety, here's the summary: Phelbs suffers from violent, uncontrollable rage. When brutally beating his wife and children ceased to be an option (because the children had grown up), he channeled his rage into vicious legal attacks against anyone from client's opponents to Ronald Reagan. When he got disbarred in 1989, he had to find yet another therapeutical outlet to pacify the demons within. Gays and lesbians happen to be that outlet.

"My father likes to hurt people. And he needs to hate them. Why, I don't know. But you can be sure of one thing: he'll always do it with the Bible."

"Sometimes Pastor Phelps preferred to grab one child by their little hands and haul them into the air. Then he would repeatedly smash his knee into their groin and stomach while walking across the room and laughing."

"Sometimes, after he'd get done beating her, he'd have forgotten about the kid. Sometimes he'd go back to the kids and beat even harder. Then he'd blame the kid for what had happened." The phone line falls silent. "Out in public," recalls Nate, "she wore sunglasses a lot." Mrs. Phelps was beaten even when she wasn't interfering. After Nate and Kathy, the boys figure their mom was victimized the most. They remember their father finishing one session by throwing her down the stairs from the second floor. "It had 16 steps," says Mark. "And no rail," continues Nate. "Mom grabbed at the stairs going over and tore the ligaments and cartilage in her right shoulder. The doctor said she needed surgery, but my father refused. We had no medical insurance back then. She's had a bad shoulder ever since. My father often chose that same shoulder to re-injure when he was beating mom. He'd grab her right arm and jerk it. She'd yelp."

"Fred has a captive family congregation: their fear of hell and fear of him still control them, like the elephant's rope. His loyal children have fulfilled his ambitions rather than their own. They live at his side and do his work. And since his rage has become their outrage, a wrath they dare not turn back on him, Fred's kids have eagerly joined in whenever he has sallied forth from Westboro to smite the Adamic race. "

Reality Check
If AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality, why is it that lesbians have a much lower risk of contracting HIV than heterosexual women?
 

Anti-Gay Religious Right Groups

"The equal rights of man and the happiness of every individual are now acknowledged to be the only legitimate objects of government." --Thomas Jefferson to A. Coray, 1823

"Homosexuality is Satan's diabolical attack upon the family that will not only have a corrupting influence upon our next generation, but it will also bring down the wrath of God upon America."    Jerry Falwell

Of course, all of the Religious Right is anti-gay. Gays and lesbians are a small and unpopular group of people, and that makes them the ideal scapegoats for religious extremists to blame every actual or imaginary social problems on. Interestingly, christian fundamentalist usually accuse gays and lesbians of what they are doing themselves. They accuse gays and lesbians of trying to recruit children, where in fact it is of course "reborn" christians whose whole existence revolves around recruiting others into their lifestyle. They characterize homosexuality, which as a matter of scientific fact has a genetic component, as a freely chosen lifestyle, while fundamentalist christianity is nothing but a freely chosen lifestyle. They accuse gay people of trying to obtain special rights from the government, while it is in reality them who are constantly asking for (and sometimes receiving) special rights. Psychologists call this projection.

projection n. (in psychology)

the attribution of one's own qualities to other people. This is one of the defence mechanisms; people who cannot tolerate their own feelings (e.g. anger) may cope by imagining that other people have those feelings (e.g. are persecuting).

Concise Medical Dictionary, Oxford University Press 1998

The following is a little who-is-who of religious (usually christian) extremists who have made anti-gay activism into a living.

Paul Cameron

Paul Cameron is a quack psychologist whose long-discredited "research" still serves as the "scientific" basis for the Religious Right claim that homosexuality is "harmful" and "destructive" to individuals and society.

It was Cameron who created the myth that the life expectancy of gay men is 39 with HIV and 42 without HIV, a lie that is still being perpetuated by christian extremists as gospel-truth. Rep. Karen Johnson (R), a mormon who is in her fifth marriage, quoted it as a fact in the Arizona State Legislature on February 3, 1999 in a debate on domestic partner benefits. It is routinely quoted by ex-gay crusaders and usually goes unchallenged by the mass media. Cameron got that number from his reading of obituaries in a few metropolitan gay newspapers. That such a sample is not representative, but what statisticians call a convenience sample is not in question.

Other famous Cameron factoids: domestic violence is epidemic in gay partnerships, and eating feces and having gerbils crawl up your rectum are common gay sex practices.

Today, "Dr. Mengele" runs his own little institute in Colorado Springs. He calls it the "Family Research Institute", but that sounds like a lot more than it is. It takes only a cursory inspection of the FRI website to find that this "institute" is really a one-trick pony - almost every report, "educational" pamphlet and audio program is on homosexuality. Some perpetuate the myth that most gay men are child molesters, others spell gloom and doom at the prospect of legalized gay marriage. They all have two things in common: they look very scientific to a layperson, and they portray gays and lesbians as riff-raff, the worst threat to life on earth since the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs.

For a summary of the true scientific facts on homosexuality, see Homosexuality: Common Questions and Statements Adressed or Facts about Sexual Orientation at UCD.

Prominent Christian conservative psychologist Paul Cameron told Rolling Stone Magazine in a March interview that he feared gay sex would supplant heterosexual sex, unless a vigilant society repressed it. "Marital sex tends toward the boring," he said. "Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does." If all one seeks is an orgasm, he said, "the evidence is that men do a better job on men, and women on women." "[H]omosexuality." he said, "seems too powerful to resist."     (posting on the right-wing Free Republic site)

National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH)

NARTH: Don't be fooled by the legitimate-sounding name or the offical-looking website: NARTH is a part of the christian-right subculture, and it has no standing whatsoever in mainstream psychology or science.

Medicine and psychology tried for over a century to "cure" gays and lesbians, without the slightest success. The reason why science failed to find a cure is simple: there is nothing to cure. Homosexuality is a natural, perfectly healthy variation of human (and animal) sexuality, it has existed in all cultures and all ages, and was accepted as normal in many of them (such as ancient Greece, which is considered to be the origin of modern civilization.)

  amazon.com: Biological Exuberance : Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity
  Homosexuality in marine mammals
  Bonobo Sex and Society

Christianity, however, replaced the ancient acceptance of different kinds of love by the narrow doctrine that sex and love serve procreation, and procreation only. On that basis, Christianity made same-sex affection into a "crime against nature". Science should have known better than to simply accept the claim that there is something wrong with homosexuality, but it did not. Sciencists are only human, and some prejudices are too powerful to overcome.

For over a century, doctors and psychologist tried to find a cure for love. They tried counseling, surgery and electroshocks, but a true change of sexual orientation remained elusive. In the second half of the 20th century, the medical establishment started to realize its mistake. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) acknowledged that Homosexuality is not a disease. Other professional organizations followed suit.

A small number of psychologists and psychiatrists, however, were unable to face the facts and give up on their wild goose chase of "sexual conversion therapy". In 1992, some of them created their own association - NARTH. But despite the academic credentials of some of NARTH's members, the group's work is completely unscientific. True science is an open-ended, unbiased process of inquiry. The NARTH approach is to start with an assumption - that homosexuals are sick - and then to search for evidence that fits and discard the evidence that does not.

NARTH claims to be seeking an "honest debate" about the alleged possibility of conversion, but it refuses to discuss why conversion of homosexuality would be a desirable goal in the first place. Indeed, the combined experience of millions of gays and lesbians who live happy, fulfilling lifes shows that it is not.

Together with the fact that NARTH documents use right-wing buzzphrases like "the gay lifestyle", the verdict is clear: christian-right propaganda and disinformation in the guise of science.

I went to the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) website and found my answer. There was an announcement for a workshop called "How to Survive Being Married to an Ex-Gay Man." If homosexuality is a "condition" and it is not a permanent one, as ex-gay advocates claim, why should someone be prepared in the ways of dealing with a supposedly healed ex- homosexual? At the press conference, a packet containing the NARTH Bulletin newsletter was handed out. In the newsletter there was much hurrah over a study reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry that found significantly higher levels of pathology in the gay population than the heterosexual population. In a commentary, Dr. Michael Bailey, a researcher for these findings, says, "These studies contain arguably the best published data on the association between homosexuality and psychopathology, and both converge on the same unhappy conclusion: homosexual people are at substantially higher risk for some forms of emotional problems, including suicidality, major depression, and anxiety disorder."

Well, no kidding! You would be, too, if you could not openly kiss your lover on the street without fear of being hit with a flying beer bottle from a car full of drunk frat boys. You would be, too, if your family ignored, denied or even disowned you because of your orientation. You would be, too, if you were forced to suppress your identity, play the pronoun game, or bring a friend of the opposite sex to office parties to ensure your job. You would be, too, if you paid every imaginable and applicable tax that everyone else does but were denied the right to marry, the right to adopt children or the right to be covered under your partner’s insurance. You would be, too, if you ran the risk of having your home, your children or your right to decide on important legal matters taken from you should something happen to your partner. You would be, too, if you lived in a society that chose to explain your sexual orientation as a mental condition rather than accept what they themselves could never think to be. You would be, too, if all the progress for your equal rights attained by years of blood, tears, pain and even death were threatened every day by bigotry, prejudice, ignorance, discrimination, intolerance, bias, negative influences and fear.

from a May, 2000 article in Outlines Chicago

The Marriage Law Project
The Marriage Law Project is a group of right-wing legal scholars who think that the human right to marry the person one loves must be permanently denied to same-sex couples. To this end, The Marriage Project organizes symposia "to increase the amount of scholarly literature that supports marriage, especially in the legal field". The Marriage Project also filed amicus briefs in the Hawaii and Vermont court cases. Recently, it released a statement to the press bashing the Kings College, London conference "Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships" because it failed to include the radical right viewpoint that same-sex marriage "will introduce unprecedented moral, social and legal confusion into our communities. It will not advance the causes of freedom, equality, justice, and human rights". The statement, however, offers no arguments to back up these claim. That is not surprising, since no rational case, i.e. a case based on scientific facts and reason, can be made against same-sex marriage. All the arguments against gay marriage are based on ignorance of the facts, Cameron-type pseudofacts and ideology.

More information:

"Ex-gay" individuals and "ministries"

These are ex-gay ministries, which translated into plain English means cult-like groups which prey on gays and lesbians who are dissatisfied with their lifes, or, to use the terminology of the religious right, with the "gay lifestyle". In a society where being different can make you subject to discrimination, namecalling and even violence, it is only natural that some gays and lesbians are fundamentally unhappy. They are vulnerable to the message of the radical right that it is their sexual orientation which is the cause of their unhappiness.

The solution that ex-gay groups offer (for money) is "conversion to heterosexuality through Jesus Christ". Translated into plain english, these groups use sectarian brainwashing techniques in an attempt to suppress same-sex desires in their clients. These techniques are fear, guilt and peer pressure, plus a little pop psychology (absent father, domineering mother) and a stereotypical notion of "proper gender identity" (gay men are encouraged to play team sports, lesbians are told to wear dresses and makeup).

Naturally, no true "conversion" occurs since sexual orientation is an inborn characteristic. A gay man can no more will himself to find women sexually attractive than a straight man could force himself to feel attracted to other men. (Ex-gay activists, of course, claim that it is God who affects the change, not the person. That theory raises the interesting question why God creates people gay in the first place.)

Needless to say, such instruction to live a lie only aggravates the psychological trauma and the depression that brought ex-gays to seek out this kind of treatment in the first place. A typical statement that characterizes a "successful" ex-gay is: "I don't think about men anymore, except when I masturbate". Ex-gay ministries do not only harm gays and lesbians, they also hurt straight people, by encouraging their clients to enter fake heterosexual marriages.

"The potential risks of 'reparative therapy' are great, including depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior, since therapist alignment with societal prejudices against homosexuality may reinforce self-hatred already experienced by the patient... the APA opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as 'reparative' or 'conversion' therapy which is based on the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based on a prior assumption that the patient should change his/her sexual orientation."
December 1998 statement of the American Psychiatric Association

Ex-gay ministries are key players in the Religious Right's overall anti-gay agenda. They provide the basis for the claim that homosexuals can change and are thus not deserving of civil rights. Since statistics would not substantiate that claim, ex-gay ministries take care to never publish any meaningful statistics. If they did, they would reveal that most participants

Ex-gay ministries ignore the obvious criticism that the small number of remaining individuals who seem to have "changed" were in all likelihood bisexuals to begin with, so that a true conversion of sexual orientation did in fact never occur. These individuals were simply successful in repressing their gay side.

Despite these facts, the Religious Right is waging an aggressive media campaign, promoting ex-gays as "proof" that gays and lesbians do not deserve civil rights. That so-called "truth in love" campaign - which has little to do with truth and even less with love - started in 1998 with newspaper ads and continued in 1999 on television. Curiously, all the ex-gay posterboys of the "Truth in Love" campaign are on the payroll of the Religious Right and have made handsome careers out of being "ex-gay". You can view the ex-gay ads as real video on the Concerned Women for America Site.

Reality Check
Why would television ads that are supposedly non-political and only meant to help gays and lesbians first air in Washington D.C., and then almost nowhere else?
 

More information:

"Exodus attracted media attention in 1978 when two of its founders, Gary Cooper and Michael Busee, left the ministry after falling in love with each other. Together they went on the talk show circuit in the early 1990s to tell their story. Busee and Cooper repeatedly called ex-gay ministries a fraud that promote homophobia and self-hatred. They told stories of people who went through the Exodus program and had emotional breakdowns or committed suicide. After interacting with hundreds of people, Busee and Cooper said they hadn't met one person who successfully changed their sexual orientation from gay to straight."  from the report Calculated Compassion

9/2/99 Update: The ex-gay movement is in financial trouble. Anthony Falzarano, founder of P-FOX, admitted in a National Press Club conference on September 1, 1999, that the ex-gay movement is in dire straits and that all the money raised by the ex-gay ad campaign went to D. James Kennedy's "Center For Reclaiming America". It seems that Falzarano and his ex-gay friends are waking up to the fact that they have been mere pawns in a cynical political game. Religious Right leaders are fully aware of the fact that 'conversion therapy' doesn't work, but they endorsed it anyways because it was a great fundraising and publicity tool. They had lost abortion and the red scare, so they turned to the gay scare in the hopes of generating fresh political momentum for their agenda. It was not a coincidence that the 'truth in love' campaign was launched just months prior to the November 1998 congressional election.

But that strategy backfired badly. The Religious Right suffered a critical defeat in that election, and the mainstream of the Republican party realized that pandering to right wing hatred and divisiveness does not win majorities. As a result, there has been a remarkable absence of anti-gay rhetoric among the Republican presidential candidates so far. Bush, Dole and McCain pay at least lip-service to basic fairness, and the extreme-right candidates like Forbes and Buchanan simply don't talk much about the issue - cetainly not because they have changed their attitudes, but because they realize that rhetorical gay-bashing is no longer good strategy.

The bottom line is that the strategical usefulness of the ex-gay 'movement' for the Religious Right has come to an end - and with it any willingness of christian-right circles to fund it.

You can read more about this in a Washington Blade article (local copy, no longe available on original site)

" (..) that poor, unfortunate boy in, where was it? South Dakota? That man was a predator to heterosexual men."

Anthony Falzarano, refering to murdered University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard at 1999 "Reclaiming the Rainbow" conference in Washington, D.C.