By Cathy Kristofferson, November 15, 2013
As we posted earlier, friend of OBLOGDEE Ellen Sturtz attended today’s World Congress of Families (WCF) Symposium “Family Policy Lessons from Other Lands : What should America Learn?” What the WCF believes America should learn sounds like a whole lot of denial! Here are some of the claims and insights made by the panelists today.
Featured panelists at the symposium were:
- Dr. Allan Carlson, President of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society and Editor of The Family in America;
- Austin Ruse, President of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute;
- Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, Senior Fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, think tank for Concerned Women for America;
Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute, who was listed as a panelist proved to be a no show, apparently unwell following a recent trip to Ecuador.
The crowd only numbered a couple dozen. It is unknown if the large number of empty seats and unclaimed name tags were due to the room change or the heightened scrutiny of the symposium. Perhaps the scant crowd shows an actual lack of interest for learning about backward-looking ideologue gay bashing in American. One can only hope.
The most offensive part of the symposium was the all-out denial by multiple panelists that any animosity towards the Russian LGBT community has resulted from the recent spate of anti-gay laws which the WCF claims to be pro-family. Keep in mind those laws include the gay propaganda law silencing all speech that can be conceived to be positive towards the LGBT community, the gay adoption ban barring adoption to anyone in any country or State that has legalized same gender marriage, the bill that allows for 15 days detention followed by deportation of any foreigner that is suspected of being gay, the bill that labels NGOs “foreign agents”, aka spies, if they receive any foreign funding, and the bill filed, but not yet passed, that calls for the removal of all children, including biological, from LGBT families. Nothing to see here. Painting the LGBT community as pedophiles never riles up the natives.
Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, went so far as to say the tales of woe from the Russian LGBT community specifically as described by Harvey Fierstein in the NY Times are all false. He claimed they face no harassment from the Russian government. Certainly nothing has changed since the laws have passed, starting in July. It is simply the media’s faulty reporting. He claimed to have even blogged about the media’s distortion of truth. Perhaps he rode around looking out rose-colored limousine windows, the same as Thomas Roberts.
Allan Carlson, founder and international secretary of the World Congress of Families, described the panelists “as a small band of refugees” who had to find a home in the House (after being evicted form the Senate Dirksen building). “A great fear seems to be descending” impacting their freedoms of speech and religion, Carlson said, making parallels to German fascism describing this time in our country.
Janice Shaw Crouse of the Concerned Women for America’s Beverly Le Haye Institute stated that the United Nations International Year of the Family is “usually pretty ‘leftist'” but she has been pleased that the pro-family folks have had a greater influence in recent years. Though she warned “we have a long way to go to re-install the natural family.”
The panelists reported that they are inspired by not only the advances of the Russian laws and the Russian Orthodox Church’s influence on that country, but also by the push back seen elsewhere such as in France during their marriage debate. Interesting that they would site an opposition that was widely known to have been generated by America’s own National Organization for Marriage.
One humorous tidbit reported was the statement that Scott Lively’s claims of legislative influence in Russia and other Former Soviet Union countries were described as self-aggrandizement. It was curious back in October when Lively blogged about being in Russia as part of WCF’s planning committee and WCF’s later reports that left him off the list of attendees. Clearly something else is going on beyond Scott Lively’s penchant for bragging.
Throughout the question and answer period the American LGBT community was portrayed simply as thugs. After the civility present during the Clinton years, the gays have been out for vengeance. Oh how I long for the days of civility with DOMA and DADT.
The event closed with the claim that the pro-family movement in the U.S. may be being silenced by the gay thugs, but they “are not defeated, and they are not on the run!” So it seems we LGBT activists and advocates have more work to do!
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Somehow these dinosaurs have escaped the Le Brea tar pits…Glad it was (un)covered by Ms. Sturtz, terrible that Bohner is behind it, and the total crybaby-fest that these poor people are feeling so “oppressed” = petulant bigots who claim to be put-upon. What a crock…The bullies cry foul– yeah, right.
I agree with Ms. Sturtz- the WCF is disgusting!
Reblogged this on JerBear's Queer World News, Views & More From The City Different – Santa Fe, NM and commented:
Details from the symposium in Washington, D.C, by anti-LGBTQ campaigners…