Wayne Besen is Executive Director of Truth Wins Out.org, an organisation that fights Anti-Gay religious extremism. TWO monitors anti-LGBT organizations, documents their lies and exposes their leaders as charlatans. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality. TWO’s goal is to create a world where LGBT individuals can live openly, honestly and true to themselves.
Besen is a former spokesman for the Washington DC based Human Rights Campaign, and has appeared as a guest on leading news and political talk shows including: the NBC Nightly News, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, and Fox News show the’ O’Reilly Factor.
By Wayne Besen (Brooklyn, New York) NOV 22 | The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a landmark report today adding new official Hate Groups to its well-respected list. The report concludes that the overall climate is getting better for LGBT people, which is leading some anti-gay organizations to get even more extreme.
Such extremism has taken its toll.
SPLC analyzed hate crime statistics and compared the rate of victimization for homosexuals to that of the other groups:
The figures show that homosexuals are 2.4 times more likely to suffer a violent hate crime attack than Jews (8.3 divided by 3.5). In the same way, gays are 2.6 times more likely to be attacked than blacks; 4.4 times more likely than Muslims; 13.8 times more likely than Latinos; and 41.5 times more likely than whites, according to the FBI figures. The basic pattern holds by years as well as across the years.
The bottom line: Homosexuals are far more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be victimized by violent hate crime.
One new organization certified as an official hate group is the Family Research Council. A key reason for the listing is FRC’s Peter Sprigg, who is also on the board of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays. PFOX just weaseled its way in as a charity at the World Bank. Here is what SPLC had to say about PFOX’s go-to guy:
Headed today by former Louisiana State Rep. Tony Perkins, the FRC has been a font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history. It relies on the work of Robert Knight, who also worked at Concerned Women for America but now is at Coral Ridge Ministries (see above for both), along with that of FRC senior research fellows Tim Dailey (hired in 1999) and Peter Sprigg (2001). Both Dailey and Sprigg have pushed false accusations linking gay men to pedophilia (see related story, p. 31): Sprigg has written that most men who engage in same-sex child molestation “identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual,” and Dailey and Sprigg devoted an entire chapter of their 2004 book Getting It Straight to similar material. The men claimed that “homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses” and similarly asserted that “homosexuals are attracted in inordinate numbers to boys.”
More recently, in March 2008, Sprigg, responding to a question about uniting gay partners during the immigration process, said: “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them.” He later apologized, but then went on, last February, to tell MSNBC host Chris Matthews, “I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior.” “So we should outlaw gay behavior?” Matthews asked. “Yes,” Sprigg replied. At around the same time, Sprigg claimed that allowing gay people to serve openly in the military would lead to an increase in gay-on-straight sexual assaults.
The SPLC List:
1. Abiding Truth Ministries [Scott Lively]
2. American Family Association
3. Americans for Truth About Homosexuality
4. American Vision
5. Chalcedon Foundation
6. Dove World Outreach Center [Terry Jones]
7. Faithful Word Baptist Church [Steven Anderson]
8. Family Research Council
9. Family Research Institute [Paul Cameron]
10. Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment
11. Illinois Family Institute
12. MassResistance
13. Traditional Values Coalition
In addition to the "hate group" designations of those listed above, the SLPC lists the following organizations as "anti-gay":
National Organization for Marriage, Concerned Women for America, Liberty Counsel, Coral Ridge Ministries, and the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission.
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