Ex-Gay Watch

-The Alliance Defense Fund goes even further off the deep end.

-Sen. Joseph Lieberman becomes chief sponsor of the effort to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

-A West Virginia couple is denied an apartment on the basis of their sexual orientation.

-The Minnesota House holds hearings on a trio of marriage equality bills.

-Bruce Carroll of GOProud argues that the recent CPAC conference was a watershed event for modern conservatism.

-College wrestling star Hudson Taylor speaks out for LGBT rights.

-The West Virginia House shoots down a Republican effort to force a vote on a same-sex marriage ban.

-Media Matters debunks the myths surrounding Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

-Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler rules that the state will begin recognizing out-of-state same-sex marriages.

-The National Organization for Marriage latches onto another anti-gay beauty pageant contestant.

-Hockey legend Brian Burke becomes a gay rights activist to honor the memory of his son, Brendan.

-The California legislature to review an outdated law that mandated research into a ‘cure’ for homosexuality.

-Religious right leaders expand their anti-gay crusade to Mexico City.

An interesting report featured last night on ABC Australia’s Hungry Beast.  The ex-gay featured could be a spokesperson for Exodus International, he is that spot on.   It’s also interesting that one of the gay men describes having been introduced to gay clubs through an affair with this team leader in an ex-gay program.  This tracks with a statement by Peterson Toscano (if anyone remembers that, please post in the comments).

Hat Tip: Anthony-Venn Brown

Ex-lesbian Lisa Miller has been on the run from the law with her daughter Isabella since her refusal to show up in court on January 1st, where she was to relinquish custody to her former partner, Janet Jenkins. Their whereabouts are still unknown, and organizations who once led the cheers for her illegal actions went silent. Still, despite her actions, Miller was not immediately found to be in contempt of court. That changed today.

A Vermont judge has ordered the arrest of a woman who has refused to turn over her 7-year-old daughter to her former lesbian partner.

Family Court Judge William Cohen found Lisa Miller of Forest, Va., in contempt of court during a hearing Tuesday and issued the arrest warrant.

Miller was ordered to surrender custody of her daughter on Jan. 1 but failed to do so and has since disappeared. Their daughter is now considered a missing person.

Jenkins has asked the public to please help her find her missing daughter.

Anyone with information regarding Isabella’s and Lisa’s whereabouts should call the Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 or the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office at 540-586-4800.

NARTH President Julie Hamilton has responded to this week’s report that NARTH Executive Secretary and JONAH co-founder and co-director Arthur Abba Goldberg is a convicted felon.

On the NARTH website, Hamilton makes a number of assumptions and seems blind to the actual issues raised. She says that activists, “unable to silence NARTH’s message, resort to attacking NARTH’s members.”

I can only speak for Ex-Gay Watch, but when the story broke, it never occurred to me that Goldberg’s exposure was ipso facto a way to discredit NARTH as a whole. It discredited Goldberg, certainly, and by extension JONAH. It is primarily NARTH’s own response that will reflect on the organization – though admittedly, the omens in Hamilton’s article are not good.

Goldberg exposé part of coordinated strategy against NARTH?

Hamilton ties in the Goldberg story with a protest staged against NARTH in Florida last November:

[A] journalism student leading the November protest shouted into a megaphone that they had been unsuccessful in stopping the work of NARTH through counter conventions, so they would instead begin to target the individual members of NARTH. Following these threats, there have indeed been attempts to discredit both NARTH members as well as non-members who do similar work.

Again, I speak only for XGW in saying that we know nothing of the group shown in the video, or the identity of the media student speaking through the megaphone. TWO organized speaking and protesting events at the same conference, but XGW is not aware of a connection to the group in the video. Read more…

Campaigners in Northern Ireland today are protesting a visit from American ex-gay leader Reverend Mario Bergner.

The protest is led by journalist Patrick Strudwick, who earlier this month wrote an exposé of the “bizarre world of gay-straight conversion” for The Independent (London). He followed it up with a strong article in The Guardian (London) calling for an all-out “war” on reparative therapy, and announcing the formation of the Stop Conversion Therapy Taskforce (SCOTT).

Of this weekend’s campaign, Strudwick told The Independent:

Love needs no cure. We want to remind the young people in the conference in the midst of so-called treatment that they are healthy, normal, valuable people; they are perfect how they are; they don’t need to try to change something unchangeable and they can be happy being who they really are.

Anglican priest Bergner, of Redeemed Lives, is speaking as part of a conference organized by CORE Issues at Ballynahinch Baptist Church, near Belfast. His most controversial claim is that as a gay man he was healed of the “symptoms” of AIDS through an encounter with Jesus Christ in a hospital room.

-Former vice president Dick Cheney joins the call for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

-Anti-gay mobs march in Kenya; police continue to hunt down gay activists in Malawi.

-Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell strips LGBT state employees of anti-discrimination protection.

-Southern African Anglican bishops denounce Uganda’s proposed anti-gay law.

-The city of Charleston, SC to host its first gay pride event.

-The New Hampshire House kills an attempt to repeal the state’s marriage equality law.

-The Archdiocese of Washington DC terminates its foster-care program in reaction to the city’s new marriage equality law.

-Grinnell College in Iowa installs an openly gay president.

-Another religious right activist endorses the death penalty for homosexuals.

-A federal appeals court orders the state of Louisiana to list the names of both members of a gay couple on an adopted child’s birth certificate.

-The Alliance Defense Fund claims that repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell would constitute an establishment of religion under the First Amendment.

Arthur Goldberg’s damage-control campaign has begun. His strategy is to portray himself as an innocent man who made a mistake, and is now the victim of a ruthless personal attack by the purveyors of the much-feared gay agenda.

Arthur A Goldberg, Executive Secretary of NARTH and a co-founder and co-director of Jewish ex-gay group JONAH, was exposed earlier this week as convicted felon Arthur Abba Goldberg, the Wall Street investor fined $100,000 and sentenced to 18 months in 1989 on three counts of mail fraud and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States of America.

Goldberg has yet to respond publicly to the reports. He appears, however, to have written to his fellow board members at NARTH, in a letter obtained by Ex-Gay Watch.

Goldberg: Allegations exaggerated, false, malicious

Goldberg begins by describing the charges made against him by the Truth Wins Out/South Florida Gay News investigation as “exaggerated and in many parts false and malicious.” He then says he will explain what happened “so that all of you may have some idea of what was involved.”

This suggests that he had not disclosed his criminal past to NARTH. This is further supported by XGW’s conversation with David Pruden, NARTH’s Vice President of Operations. While freely identifying Goldberg as Arthur Abba Goldberg, Pruden denied knowing anything of the charges made in Monday’s article.

This is very concerning. Who neglects to disclose criminal convictions – especially a felony of this nature – to organizations for which they work, unless quite deliberately? Most companies, organizations and workplaces require their employees and officers to disclose such matters, not least because it could open an organization like NARTH to liabilities of its own. The protocol applies even more so when an organization is professional, pastoral, financial or charitable in nature. Yet the evidence so far suggests Goldberg said nothing. Read more…

Andrew Sullivan reports on the Cato Institute‘s forum addressing the question Is there a place for gay people in conservatism and conservative politics?, a debate that featured Sullivan alongside Catholic anti-marriage equality campaigner Maggie Gallagher and openly gay British Conservative MP Nick Herbert.

Gay Cato employee Jason Kuznicki was also in attendance (he can be seen on the video at about the 73-minute mark here). Kuznicki writes:

… I got to ask Maggie Gallagher the question I’ve always wanted to ask her: What do you think that am I supposed to do with my life?

Suppose I found myself in agreement with her. Suppose I concluded that same-sex marriage was corrosive to society. Do I leave my husband? Do I send my adopted daughter back to the state? Enter ex-gay therapy, which isn’t likely to work? Tell my whole family that I’m single now, and that Scott shouldn’t be welcome at family events? Live my whole life alone, and loveless? Hide? Where is the life I’m supposed to live?

I probably wasn’t so articulate at the Cato event, but I do recall Gallagher’s very simple answer: “I don’t know.”

She certainly doesn’t, and that’s the whole problem with gay conservatism — there’s hardly a life to be lived within it. There’s no breathing room. Until social conservatives offer us a better answer than “I don’t know,” until they offer us a way to be gay, and conservative, and respectable in their eyes, they’re not going to find many gay conservatives.

Upon first reading the recent story about Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH) founder Arthur A. Goldberg, we contacted NARTH’s David Pruden (among others) for a statement for the record.

Goldberg is listed on NARTH’s website as an Executive Secretary and they have a long history with him.  In his response, Pruden confirmed that JONAH’s Arthur A. Goldberg was indeed Arthur Abba Goldberg.

I know nothing about the content of the article from Arthur or anyone else. I can say that everyone I know, knows his name is Arthur Abba Goldberg. I’ve seen it on documents, email communications, etc. for years. No secret there.

Pruden is referring to the article we sent him from the South Florida Gay News (SFGA).  As such a revelation, particularly on the record, amounts to something of a statement against interest, we give it substantial weight.

With the preponderance of evidence originally brought forth by Truth Wins Out (TWO) and SFGA, and the additional information discovered since, there is no room for any reasonable doubt here.

Further, Arthur Avrum Goldberg appears not to exist, except in a brief edit of Arthur Abba Goldberg’s Wikipedia page.

This is a clear, concise and accurate analysis of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009, with its  implications laid out simply and horrifyingly. The narrator of this video demonstrates faultlessly that the bill in its current form would mean death not only for gays, but for anyone who supports them.

For more clear analysis, see Ex-Gay Watch’s earlier post Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009: Just the Facts.

A tip of the hat to Harry’s Place for the video.