LGBT activist organization Truth Wins Out has launched a lawsuit against PFOX, the anti-gay lobbying group whose president accused TWO’s Wayne Besen of calling for his death.
Here’s what Greg Quinlan said on TV last year:
[Wayne Besen] asked for people, you know, somebody needs to run Greg over. He needs to be hit with a bus. Somebody should inject him with AIDS. Those are the things that Wayne Besen and Truth Wins Out says about me. That’s pretty hateful rhetoric.
Quinlan later incriminated himself by misrepresenting what he’d said:
First of all, Besen blatantly mischaracterized what I actually said on the program, claiming that I suggested he solicited my assassination. This is a bald-faced lie and Besen knows it. The truth is that Besen once said to me in a private conversation that someone should run me over with a bus or inject me with AIDS. Did I think he was serious? No. I knew it was just Wayne being Wayne; one part bluster, two parts hyperbole and three parts hot air.
Unfortunately for him, the televised accusations were preserved on tape, and their meaning is clear. Even if the comments were made (and there’s no evidence they were, other than Quinlan’s word), he now says they were made privately and not in seriousness. In the original interview, he portrayed the comments as both serious and public.
More Evidence of Dishonesty from Exodus and Alan Chambers
Meanwhile, TWO has also taken on Exodus International, although not in court. To refresh your memory, in January this year, Exodus President Alan Chambers made a guest appearance at the annual conference of the Gay Christian Network. He claimed he was there as a “brother in Christ” who acknowledged gay Christians as fellow believers who loved and served Jesus. We’ve already exposed those claims as a sham; he later back-pedalled, as he has many times before, and returned to the same anti-gay rhetoric to appease his conservative evangelical constituents.
Chambers also told the GCN audience:
The majority of people I have met, and the majority meaning 99.9% of them, have not experienced a change in their sexual orientation or have gotten to a place where they can say they have never been tempted or are not tempted in some way or experience some level of same-sex attraction.
Exodus no longer uses the slogan “Change Is Possible,” he said. But while they may not feature it as a slogan, per se, TWO provides ample evidence that the claim is still part of Exodus’s essential message. Literature distributed at its recent Love Won Out conference claimed that
Many people have bought into the lie that you cannot change. The reality is that people have been coming out of homosexuality since biblical times. … If change from homosexuality is not possible, then no change is possible. [Emphasis in original.]
It’s abundantly clear to both XGW and TWO that Alan’s GCN appearance was simply a step in Exodus International’s rebranding, which we predicted when we broke the story of the organization’s struggle for survival last December. It was obvious Exodus would soon be making big efforts to promote a more inclusive and tolerant image of itself.
TWO also notes the low attendance at the LWO conference, which appears to be a record. A mere 400 turned up, according to Besen, lower than the 450 who attended LWO last September. In its heyday, the figures were more than twice that.