Focus on the Family this week won the right to post exgay ads on Tampa Bay, Fla.-area bus shelters, according to 365gay.com.
Gay activist/author Wayne Besen responded with a press release this afternoon:
“AUTHOR CRITICIZES DECISION TO LET FOCUS ON THE FAMILY PUBLICIZE EX-GAY HOAX
IN PINELLAS COUNTY”
This Is The Equivalent Of Allowing Cigarette Companies To Advertise to Youth, Said Author Wayne Besen
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Author Wayne Besen today criticized an out of court settlement in the Tampa-area allowing divisive hate group Focus on the Family to advertise their ex-gay hoax. The settlement will let FOF promote a dangerous product, mislead area-residents on gay life and perpetuate outdated myths.
“This is analogous to Pinellas County allowing cigarette companies or asbestos manufactures to market their potentially deadly wares to children,” said Besen, author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. “Focus on the Family traffics in hate, peddling a harmful product that has likely ruined many lives. What they do is scientifically empty and their claims of sexual conversion have been shown to fail.”
In 2000, Focus on the Family paid $5,000 to advertise in Tampa–area bus shelters for their “Love Won Out” conference, a traveling road show that purports to help people pray away the gay. This was the same year that Love Won Out founder John Paulk got photographed cruising in a Washington, DC gay bar.
Upon learning about the group’s hate speech and failures, the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority rejected Focus on the Family’s bus station posters. FOF sued, hoping to use its vast resources to intimidate Pinellas into allowing FOF to run ads touting a defective, misleading product.
Under the settlement’s terms, reached this week, FOF will be allowed to promote “Love Won Out” on bus shelter ads in the future. Monetary damages were not included in the settlement.
“This was a victory for purveyors of false advertising and bullying legal tactics,” said Besen. “The real message that they should be preaching is ‘Out Love Wins.’ When gay people come out and accept themselves, they can live rich, fulfilling lives as whole human beings.”
Besen is a columnist and a former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay advocacy group.
Um…that’s what they made cans of spray paint for, isn’t it? I prefer the twirly moustaches and pirate eye patches myself, maybe a little devilish goatee if there are faces on the signs, and then again there is the creativity involved in blacking out some of the letters of the message to say something smutty. hahahahaha!
Or will Focus have to hire private security guards to ‘protect’ there little hate missives?
Besen seems to be against the First Amendment. Sure these ads are BS, but so are ads promoting any religious idea, including liberal Christian ideas that some invisible man in the sky loves you and your homosexuality.
Actually, I think Besen has a legitmate point even if the delivery of it leaves something to be desired. You don’t have the freedom of speech to, for example, advertise and sell a medicinal drug that is un-tested and potentially dangerous to consumers. If the ex-gay movement want to take on a veneer of legitimacy by appropriating the language and respectability of the medical sciences then perhaps they should be judged by the same standards, submitting their research and findings for external review, with proper testing to ensure that their therapies are actually helping people, and not merely easing the therapist’s own moral indignation at the expense of their test subjects.
We need to be careful about raising suspicion by rumor or innuendo about folks, no matter how plausible a thing might seem.
I agree. I’ve deleted Hephaestion’s remarks.
XGW is not an appropriate place for undocumented accusations about specific religious-right leaders.