Pacific Justice Institute

The New York Times on Saturday covered Dr. Robert Spitzer’s retraction of his 2003 study on the supposed effectiveness of ‘ex-gay’ reparative therapy, concluding that it “failed the test of scientific rigor” and was irredeemably flawed. Reparative therapy, also known as sexual orientation conversion therapy, has been deemed ineffective, harmful, and unethical by leading medical groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Counseling Association, the American School Counselor Association and the Pan American Health Organization (a division of the World Health Organization).

But that doesn’t stop Religious Right activists from parroting blatant falsehoods about reparative therapy, as Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute told talk show host Janet Mefferd on Friday that the effectiveness of such therapy is “at least over 80%,” citing discredited “therapist” Joseph Nicolosi. Speaking about a bill in the California state legislature that would place limits on reparative therapy, Dacus claimed that if the legislation passes it will mean that “many hundreds of thousands or millions of youths who will be led down a path of death and destruction.”

Mefferd: Brad, is there overwhelming evidence that reparative therapy is a fraud?

Dacus: Actually it’s contrary, there’s overwhelming evidence that reparative therapy actually works. It’s not 100% because you have individual will and every person has their own issues. But Dr. [Joseph] Nicolosi and other famous psychiatrists who have treated this, thousands and thousands of patients, report a very high success rate, I know it’s at least over 80%, I believe it’s 80-85% success rate. These are people who leave the lifestyle, get married to people, have children, and enter heterosexual relationships. It’s a big mass of deception that they are trying to carry out at the expense of many hundreds of thousands or millions of youths who will be led down a path of death and destruction, unfortunately, if they get away with this.

Dacus, who earlier called the bill a “gross and outrageous violation against humanity,” also dubbed the bill “diabolical” and maintained that being gay is a result of child abuse or strained parental relationships, and that gay men have “an average lifespan of the age of 40.”

Dacus: This attempt to politicize this issue is going to leave a huge number of casualties and victims in its wake in the form of children and even adults.

…

Dacus: It’s very diabolical, it’s undermining parents. The assumption of those who are pushing this lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual movement, is that the average parent out there is ignorant, is harmful, is dangerous to children when they don’t affirm the child’s sexual orientation. Of course parents want what’s best for their children, parents love their children, and parents know that the homosexual lifestyle gives for boys an average lifespan of the age of 40. It’s worse than being a chain cigarette smoker. Parents who love their children are going to want to do everything they can, especially in the developmental, preadolescence, to steer them in the right direction. In fact, the majority of children work it through. But when you have children who have been sexually abused or youth who have not had any kind of bonding with their father or affirmation of their father, they are very subject to this and are in need of counseling.

• The effort by the Pacific Justice Institute to force California to defend Prop 8 has been rejected.
• Chinese students will now be learning about abstinence from Focus on the Family.
• Gary Bauer blames the Discovery Channel hostage situation on the Left.
• This may be one of the dumbest WorldNetDaily articles I have never seen, and that is saying something.
• Speaking of WND, this first person tale from Glenn Beck's rally written by Victoria Jackson absolutely has to be read.
• AZ Gov. Jan Brewer did not get off to a good start in her debate last night.
• This NRA ad is actually rather funny, though the main character seems to be a pretty obvious rip-off of Danny McBride in "The Fist Foot Way."
• The battle of the century: Ray Comfort vs. Stephen Hawking.
• Finally the quote of the day from a column in the Baptist Press: "How should we as Baptists regard the growing popularity of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)? Simply put, we should hate it."

The Pacific Justice Institute is not a particularly well-known group.  In fact, it is quite likely that most people who read this blog don't even recognize the name ... but they probably recognize this video:

That is Brad Dacus, PJI 's President, explaining before the 2008 election how failure to pass Prop 8 in California would be akin to failing to stop Hitler.

But just because PJI is less well-known than many of the other right-wing legal groups, that doesn't mean that it doesn't have some rather high-profile supporters, like Karl Rove and James Dobson:

Addressing a group of roughly 600 people, a senior advisor to former president George W. Bush recently spoke on the importance of faith, family and freedom -- the "timeless values of America."

At the Pacific Justice Institute's 2010 Celebration of Justice Banquet in Anaheim, California, Karl Rove exhorted listeners to defend these values and to make an "argument" for them in all communities. He praised the family as the source that defines America and molds its individuals, saying, "It's in the family where hearts and minds of children are shaped. If society loves and cherishes life, it is because families love and cherish life."

...

He exhorted the audience to continue taking a stand for the values in which they believe, concluding that "if we stay in the fight, we will win the fight. If we love our country, we need to defend our country."

Other gala speakers included PJI attorney Brad Dacus, Dr. James Dobson, and Father Frank Pastore of Priests for Life.

For those that are interested, the East Bay Express ran a good profile of Dacus and PJI last year:

Religious convictions have compelled Dacus to take on such cases as a fight to allow Bakersfield students to opt out of a homosexual teacher's class, a tussle with a Utah public school that he claims was peddling a book "promoting witchcraft" via the Scholastic Book Club catalog, and — while employed by the conservative Rutherford Institute — the defense of the family of a teenage Nebraska boy who, with his parents' help, had his girlfriend arrested for seeking an abortion. For the courts to find in favor of the girl, Dacus told Time in 1994, would have had "a chilling effect" on free speech.

You may recall Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute for his activism on Prop 8 in California and especially for this video in which he proclaimed that failure to pass the measure was akin to failing to stop the Nazis:

Well, Rin Kelly profiles Dacus and PJI, which has opened a new satellite office in Oakland, for the East Bay Express:

The Oakland office represents an expansion of the institute's efforts to fight what Dacus calls "intolerance" in the region. "The increase in requests for assistance that continue to come into our office is such that a Bay Area office we found was very warranted and needed," he said in an interview. This could mean increased headaches for school districts — a favorite target in Dacus's war for "parents' rights" — and more lawsuits like the ongoing case in which the institute's client, Faith Fellowship Church, alleges that the city of San Leandro is breaking the law by not rezoning to accommodate church expansion plans.

Religious convictions have compelled Dacus to take on such cases as a fight to allow Bakersfield students to opt out of a homosexual teacher's class, a tussle with a Utah public school that he claims was peddling a book "promoting witchcraft" via the Scholastic Book Club catalog, and — while employed by the conservative Rutherford Institute — the defense of the family of a teenage Nebraska boy who, with his parents' help, had his girlfriend arrested for seeking an abortion. For the courts to find in favor of the girl, Dacus told Time in 1994, would have had "a chilling effect" on free speech.

...

Such issues are of special interest to the institute and Dacus, who with his wife Susanne is the author of a book informing public-school teachers, students, and parents of "strategies to practically and legally evangelize your school." Titled Reclaim Your School, the book calls separation of church and state "the big lie" and covers everything from pastor visitations to special school-hours Bible study through which, Dacus writes, "a large number of students ... make commitments to receive Christ by the end of the year." Another passage states, "because public school employees are cautious not to display their faith inappropriately or in a manner that might violate the law, it may take a few visits or conversations before you can determine the religious or non-religious views of the staff at your public school."

Dacus is a man with strong religious convictions. "I'm a Christian," he said in an interview. "My wife was in full-time youth ministry for ten years working with high-school kids. That book goes right along with my personal convictions and desire not just for religious freedom but ideally for people, for kids, to be able to come to Christ. So it's evangelical. It's a book with a definite evangelical perspective. I don't have to apologize for that because we have a society where we have religious freedom."

Kelly asked Dacus about his infamous "Nazi" statement, to which he replied that instead of criticizing him, the Anti-Defamation League ought to be thanking him for it: 

One group that has recently taken notice of the institute is the Anti-Defamation League, which released a statement last year condemning the Third Reich analogy he used in his Proposition 8 speech. "We are outraged and deeply offended that a spokesman for the Pacific Justice Institute has chosen to invoke images of Hitler and Nazi Germany as part of that organization's campaign on behalf of Proposition 8," read the press release.

Asked about his comments, Dacus told the Express, "Obviously I wasn't trying to infer that anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area was akin to the Third Reich or in favor of any cause of the Nazis. That would be a ludicrous understanding of the point that was being made." Instead, he argued, the speech was an exhortation that today's church not be "silent on an issue they had a strong theological and moral conviction about." But he added: "If the purpose of that organization is to stand up to anti-Semitism, they should be glad that I was once again reminding people of the importance of people to stand up to tyranny."

• Concerned Women for America, Operation Rescue, and the Christian Defense Coalition are already opposing the idea that Gov. Kathleen Sebelius might be Obama's nominee to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
• Speaking of CWA, they are also opposing efforts to add sexual orientation to South Dakota's hate crime laws, saying "What about obese people or short people or bald-headed men?"
• The Pacific Justice Institute is suing a California school district for allegedly forcing a twelve year old girl to take a pregnancy test, an accusation the school vehemently denies.
• Gordon Klingenschmitt continues his crusade to defend police chaplains in Virginia Virginia who want to pray in Jesus’ name, delivering thousands of petitions to Gov. Tim Kaine.
• Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has been chosen to delivers the national Republican response to President Barack Obama's first speech to Congress.
• The National Republican Trust PAC is threatening to finance primary challenges to any of the Republicans who vote for the stimulus bill - so far, that is only three and, of those three, only Sen. Arlen Specter is up for re-election in 2010.
• Mike Huckabee says everyone needs a good Christian education because "greed caused the collapse not only of our economic system but of our ethical system."
• Finally, Alan Keyes apparently has a blog called Loyal To Liberty where he likens himself to Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill and proclaims:

I have an ominous feeling about the years ahead. With Obama, we have crossed the line that separates civil politics from civil war disguised as politics. Occupying the White House is a man known for his support and association with people for whom that line appears never to have existed. I predict that American politics as we have known it is gone. And unless we Americans wake up, more than civil politics will end up dead.

Last week the Courage Campaign unveiled a new ad highlighting the millions of dollars the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has poured into the California campaign to strip marriage rights from gay and lesbian couples.  As KUTV explained the ad:

A new commercial against proposition 8 in California is expected to fuel the fire of an already heated debate over gay marriage.
 
The commercial depicts two Mormon missionaries invading the home of a same sex couple.

In the commercial they knock on the door, say they are from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and tell a lesbian couple “we are here to take away your rights.”

They enter the home take the women’s rings, ransack the house looking for their marriage license, find it, and then tear it up. 

At the end, the missionaries was away saying, “that was too easy, yeah, what should we ban next?”

The ad itself is here:

Needless to say, the Yes on 8 folks are none too pleased with the ad and are now screaming “religious bigotry”

"This ad reaches new lows of religious bigotry and intolerance," said Yes on 8 Chairman Ron Prentice. "We hope that the leadership of the No on 8 campaign - including Senator Feinstein, Mayor Newsom and Superintendent O'Connell -- as well as all Californians regardless of their position on Proposition 8, will not only condemn the ad but join us in asking television stations to refuse to air it. After all, the No on 8 campaign has been running their own television commercials saying we must all oppose discrimination and intolerance whenever we see it. The bigotry this ad shows to members of the LDS church demands action now."

The California Catholic Conference is likewise outraged:

Bishop Stephen Blaire, the President of the California Catholic Conference decried the new advertisement from opponents of Proposition 8 as "a blatant display of religious bigotry and intolerance." He expressed dismay that any public media outlet would give it an airing. "The YES on 8 campaign is not about discrimination and intolerance; it is about restoring the traditional definition of marriage for the good of society and children," said Bishop Blaire. "All individuals and groups, whether religious or not, have both a right and a responsibility to participate in a civil debate about this important issue. From the beginning of this campaign the Catholic Conference has stressed the importance of mutual respect and denounces this type of religious bigotry."

Of course, when footage surfaced last week of Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute telling a rally of Prop 8 supporters that failure to pass the amendment was akin to failing to stop Hitler, they uttered not a peep.

The American Family Association has unveiled a new, half-hour video on the necessity of passing the Proposition 8 marriage amendment in California. Featuring people like Chuck Colson, Hadley Arkes, and Ron Prentice, Chairman of the "Yes on 8" effort, along with various representatives of right-wing groups like the Pacific Justice Institute and the California Family Council - along with lots and lots of footage of gays and lesbians getting married and showing affection - the video explains the various ways in which failure to pass Prop. 8 will destroy America.

As they say, straight, married sex is "unique" because the two are designed to "fit together, like pieces of a puzzle" and the best that gay couples can do is imitate it. But Bridget Melson raises an even more ominous point: if gays and lesbians can get married, who's going to teach the children of the future how to change the oil?

And on and on it goes, until Colson finally declares that failure to stop the "gay-marriage juggernaut ... is Armageddon" and the end to freedom of religion, after which the others call upon pastors and activists to get involved in the fight to pass Prop. 8 or risk losing their right to spread the Gospel: