07/1/15

Walmart, Comcast Celebrate Gay Pride

“Homo is Healthy” was one of the signs on the official gay pride website for the big march celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage on Sunday, June 28, in New York City. It was brought to you, in part, by Walmart, a high-level Platinum sponsor that happens to be America’s largest private sector employer. The giant retailer was among a “Who’s Who” of corporate America that also included sponsors Coke, Netflix, Hilton, PBS, Macy’s and Comcast Universal (NBC).

Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth covered the event, publishing photos of nearly naked men and a “leather” contingent on a truck, among other scenes of debauchery. He said hundreds of children could be seen either marching in or watching the parade. “This is the evidence of why gay marriage and gay parenting are wrong,” LaBarbera told Accuracy in Media.

One photo showed a big rainbow flag being unfurled as the Walmart logo could be seen in the background.

LaBarbera said the scenes of nudity and vulgarity that he photographed at the pride march in New York City provided evidence of how the homosexual lifestyle is something America should not celebrate or make into protected status under law.

For its part, Comcast celebrated June as gay pride month with short films targeting “LGBTQ youth” and “LGBTQ teens.”

Comcast boasted, “In 2013, 2014, and 2015, the company earned a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index and was named a Best Place to Work for the LGBT community.”

Nowhere is homosexual influence more pronounced than Hollywood. However, a new film on homosexual influence in Hollywood, “An Open Secret,” is having a hard time getting distributed, with those involved with the film saying that financial interests in Hollywood have been trying to suppress it. This film, however, does not celebrate “gay pride.” Rather, it exposes victims of sexual abuse in the entertainment industry. The homosexual pedophiles exposed in the film include Marc Collins-Rector, a major figure in the entertainment business who is a convicted child abuser and now a registered sex offender. The film is directed by Amy Berg, who also directed the 2006 American documentary film about a pedophile Catholic priest, Oliver O’Grady, called “Deliver Us From Evil.”

The decision by Walmart to embrace the homosexual rights movement is a case study of how the powerful interests who run the movement have worked their will on corporate America.

Quartz, a digital native news outlet, noted that “When Sam Walton started the company [Walmart] in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas, he imbued the chain with a certain small-town conservatism. For instance, it long drew ire for its reluctance to sell music with explicit lyrics.”

Although Walmart still portrays itself as family-friendly, LaBarbera points out that the company is now publicly pro-homosexual and has been giving major grants to homosexual/transgender events and organizations, including $25,000 – $50,000 in 2014 to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a group that helps elect “out” homosexuals to political office. (Most of them are Democrats.)

The group’s 2011 annual report reveals that openly gay Obama ally, Terry Bean, co-founder of the major homosexual lobby, the Human Rights Campaign, has been a major supporter of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund as well. Bean took a leave of absence from the Human Rights Campaign after he was arrested on sexual abuse charges involving sex with a minor.

Corporate supporters of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund in 2011 included Pacific Gas & Electric Company, Bank of America, Southwest Airlines, AT&T, Shell Oil Company, Microsoft, Wells Fargo and the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Wells Fargo achieved notoriety this year by becoming the nation’s first bank to run a national ad including a homosexual couple.

Labor union sponsors of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund included the Service Employees International Union, the National Education Association, and the AFL-CIO.

Meanwhile, open homosexuals in the media, such as Edward Snowden mouthpiece Glenn Greenwald, have opened fire on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for exposing the Court’s gay marriage ruling as a “judicial Putsch” that stole the democratic system away from the American people.

Writing on the website of First Look Media, financed by billionaire French-born Iranian-American Pierre Omidyar, Greenwald hailed the ruling and noted that “Harry Hay created the Mattachine Society,” the first homosexual rights organization in the U.S. However, Greenwald failed to point out Hay’s membership in the Communist Party and support for the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Greenwald is one of several media figures on Out Magazine’s list of “most influential LGBT people in American culture.” Others include Anderson Cooper of CNN, Shepard Smith of Fox News, Robin Roberts of ABC, Don Lemon of CNN, Harvey Levin of TMZ, Rachel Maddow and Thomas Roberts of MSNBC, and Kara Swisher of CNBC.

On the conservative side, support for homosexual marriage seems to be growing—or at least coming out of the closet. Mary Katharine Ham, a Fox News commentator and editor-at-large of HotAir.com, has declared herself in favor of same-sex marriage. She has written a book with homosexual political commentator Guy Benson, a Fox News contributor who serves as political editor of the TownHall.com website.

HotAir and TownHall are owned by Salem Media Group, a Christian firm. Salem has refused to respond to questions about its employees becoming advocates for or activists in the homosexual movement.

04/1/15

The Real Power of the One Percent

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Statistics show that 1.6 percent of the population identifies itself as gay or lesbian. But judging from the hysteria over Indiana’s religious freedom law, it seems that many of them are in positions of power in the media. These power brokers are not only openly gay, but also anti-Christian. Even Holy Week hasn’t kept them from demonstrating their anti-Christian animus.

Indiana’s Republican Governor Mike Pence spoke on Tuesday about the media misinformation over his state’s religious freedom bill. The “perception problem” he referred to is of the liberal media’s making. In fact, one can argue that the misperception was deliberately created by the media.

“I have to tell you,” he said to the press and the public, “that the gross mischaracterizations about this bill early on and some of the reckless reporting by some in the media about what this bill was all about was deeply disappointing to me and to millions of Hoosiers.” He called the coverage a “smear.”

Pence was reluctant to identify the source of the bias—homosexual influence in the major media. But until conservative politicians step forward to identity the real source of the problem, the homosexuals will continue to win the public relations battle and hide behind the façade of “objective” coverage when none exists. The fact is that the liberal media and the gay lobby are essentially one and the same.

It’s this kind of media bias that should not have come as a surprise to Pence, a former member of Congress and a strong conservative.

Liberal media bias is an old problem. The new wrinkle over the last several years has been the relentless promotion of the homosexual lifestyle.

Two years ago a Pew Research Center study of news media coverage of the gay marriage debate found that “Stories with more statements supporting same-sex marriage outweighed those with more statements opposing it by a margin of roughly 5-to-1.” Pew reported, “The findings show how same-sex marriage supporters have had a clear message and succeeded in getting that message across all sectors of mainstream media.”

The media know they’re biased, of course. They are careful to conceal the depth and extent of the bias, in the sense that few members of the public are being told that most of the major news organizations are financial backers of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA). Literally all of the major media, ranging from MSNBC on the left to Fox News on the right, are in bed with the NLGJA.

However, we were somewhat surprised to find that even a financial channel such as CNBC is not above the slanted coverage. On Monday, as we reported, coverage of the markets and economics gave way to a lengthy interview with open lesbian Kara Swisher, who smeared opponents of gay rights as the equivalent of racists.

Regardless of what happens in Indiana, where Pence has vowed to clarify the statute, the issue won’t go away.

The Indiana case should serve as a lesson in how the media distort the news. The clear homosexual/media strategy, in this case, has been to redefine discrimination as the failure to do what homosexuals have demanded that you do, without explaining to the public how the meaning of the term has been changed to meet the demands of the powerful gay lobby.

Since our major media organs are openly pro-homosexual, we have to conclude that the bias in the Indiana case is deliberately designed to fool the American people into thinking that homosexuals are the victims when they are, in fact, the victimizers.

In practical terms, this bias is reflected in the typical ongoing failure of the media to quote pro-family and Christian voices, such as American Family Association of Indiana Executive Director Micah Clark, who has called the claim that the law bestows a “license to discriminate” as “perhaps the biggest lie about this law.” Pence said much the same thing at this press conference.

If our media had simply bothered to cover the other side of the story, rather than rely on pro-homosexual interest groups, we might have gotten some truth and facts in the national debate.

The victims of this bias, unfortunately, include top CEOs and businesspeople, such as Marriott International CEO Arne Sorensen, who called Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act “madness.”

Upon reflection, Sorensen must himself be mad or completely misinformed. Or, perhaps, he’s just pandering to homosexuals for their business. Marriott was named Corporation of the Year by the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce in 2014. It received a 100 percent score on the Human Rights Campaign’s “Corporate Equality Index.”

The Human Rights Campaign is the group whose co-founder, Terry Bean, has been arrested on child sex-abuse charges.

Perhaps people like Sorensen don’t want to know the facts and simply don’t care whether the rights of Christians are violated in the pursuit of providing special rights for homosexuals.

Micah Clark, of the American Family Association (AFA) of Indiana, explains how the Indiana law works: “This law does not allow a person of faith to deny service to someone, nor should it,” he points out. “No Christian bakery owner should say that people involved in homosexual behavior couldn’t shop in their bakery. That, in my opinion is wrong, un-Christian and discriminatory unless the patron is misbehaving ( i.e., ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’). However, when a customer seeks special participation from the baker, asking him or her to specially decorate a ‘gay’ wedding cake and come set it up at a homosexual wedding, then there is a very different line crossed, and a problem for most people of faith.”

The Indiana law attempts to protect people of faith from being forced to participate in activities that they have religious objections to.

The American Family Association has noted the following four cases in states without a religious freedom law involving Christian business owners being prosecuted, fined or punished for refusing to bow to homosexual demands:

Washington: Florist Barronelle Stutzman was fined by the state for not providing flowers for a homosexual wedding.
New Mexico: Photographer Elaine Huguenin was ordered by the state to give a lesbian $7,000 for declining to take pictures of a lesbian wedding.
Oregon: Aaron and Melissa Klein were fined $150,000 by the state for refusal to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding.
Kentucky: Blaine Adamson was ordered by the city of Lexington to undergo “sensitivity training” for refusing to print T-shirts for a gay pride festival.

Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal group involved in several of these cases, says there are three key issues at stake:

Whether the government can force Americans in expressive professions to communicate messages and ideas against their will
The freedom of Americans to live and do business according to the teachings of their faith and the dictates of their conscience
Whether Americans should be forced to compromise freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution

The case of the florist in Richland, Washington, Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene’s Flowers, illustrates the stakes. She is being sued by the Attorney General because she declined to decorate for a same-sex ceremony and may be forced into financial bankruptcy.

Joseph Backholm of the Family Policy Institute of Washington state has commented about the case: “…there’s a problem with the argument that she discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. She has consistently and happily done business with people who identify as gay for years, including the individuals involved in this case. She considered them friends.” What she objected to was being part of a same-sex marriage ceremony.

In this case, as noted by her attorneys with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a state judge ruled that the government can force her to do custom design work and provide wedding support services “even if she has a religious conviction that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

As such, this is a violation of the basic God-given right to freedom of religion that the founders of the United States gave to the American people. It is as sacred as freedom of the press.

This is the issue: In the name of “non-discrimination,” homosexuals want to force Christians and other religious believers to violate the principles of their faith. But this is precisely the point that has been deliberately obscured by a media that functions as the propaganda arm of the militant gay lobby.

ADF Senior Counsel Kristen Waggoner noted, “The couple had no problem getting the flowers they needed. In fact, they received several offers for free flowers. So, where’s the tolerance for Barronelle Stutzman? It’s hard to believe that Barronelle should prepare to have everything she has earned and built seized by the state just because of her beliefs about marriage.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook, an open homosexual, attacked Indiana’s religious freedom law, saying, “There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country.” What is dangerous is how a small minority is trying to dictate the acceptance of their lifestyle by the majority. They have gotten this far because the same small minority also seems to control major centers of media and corporate power in the United States.

04/1/15

Unholy Assault on the Hoosier State

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

I was watching CNBC on Monday for updates on the markets and economic affairs when I suddenly found technology “journalist” Kara Swisher of “Re/code” being “interviewed” by the “Squawk Alley” team about Indiana’s new religious freedom law. She compared opponents of the homosexual agenda to racists and said that Indiana Governor Mike Pence (R), who signed the law, is “shameless.” The interview went on and on, with no opposing views presented.

Although shocked at first by her blatant hostility toward Christian America, a little digging discovered that Swisher is a major player in the gay community and CNBC is a major outlet for homosexual propaganda.

Swisher, who has interviewed President Obama and Hillary Clinton, had been a featured speaker at the “Lesbians Who Tech” summit, where she used the “F” word quite liberally and declared: “I’m often confrontational, so F— you.”

The group “Lesbians Who Tech” describes itself as “a Community of Queer Women in or around tech.” The American people might be interested to know that the sponsors of the “Lesbians Who Tech” event included Google, ebay, Wells Fargo, Intel, Walmart, Target and Amazon, among other corporations.

Not surprisingly, the pro-homosexual Huffington Post ran a glowing profile of the summit by its own correspondent, a self-described “Lesbian-Feminist, Public Intellectual PhD” by the name of Marcie Bianco. This appeared in the on-line publication’s “Gay Voices” section, which has also featured a video of full frontal male nudity.

When I pointed this out recently, I was attacked by the “conservative” Daily Caller for somehow exaggerating what The Huffington Post had done. It’s a sign of the times that even a “conservative” outlet is reluctant to expose the shameless promotion of homosexuality in the media. One of the main funders of The Daily Caller is a Christian by the name of Foster Friess.

At the risk of promoting this kind of repulsive “journalism,” it is important to note that The Huffington Post item, Male Full-Frontal Nudity Supercut: Which Stars Have Bared It All?, which appeared in the “gay voices” section, was exactly as I described it—a form of gay porn.

But when Christians get repulsed by this kind of thing and seek to protect their families and children from it, they are singled out as bigots.

With Google in the news because of its clout and influence with the Obama administration, it is important to note that Swisher has announced on her website that Megan Smith, a former vice president at Google and Swisher’s “longtime spouse from whom I am now separated and have two children,” is now the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, working for President Obama.

Smith’s White House bio also discloses that she previously served as CEO of PlanetOut, a company that targeted lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders. It was then acquired by Here Media Inc., which owns the Alyson Books publishing division.

Do you remember the “children’s books” which carried the titles Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s New Roommate? Those were published by Alyson. Some of its more recent titles include the “S/M classics” Coming to Power and Leatherfolk. The latter is described as a book about a “distinct subculture” known as “the gay and lesbian leather underground.”

But don’t expect any coverage of this “lifestyle” by the major media, except perhaps to promote it.

Swisher’s softball interview was not a surprise. She has a CNBC “profile” on the channel’s website, demonstrating that she is a regular. Indeed, her online “news” service “Re/code” is owned by Revere Digital, whose minority investors and strategic partners include the NBCUniversal News Group. This guarantees Swisher access to such media properties as CNBC, MSNBC, “Today,” and the “NBC Nightly News.”

This helps explain some of the homosexual movement’s clout in the major media.

CNBC won’t advertise the fact, but the channel is itself a big backer of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA). Mandy Drury, Simon Hobbs and Carl Quintanilla of CNBC have appeared at NLGJA fundraisers.

At one NLGJA event, Natalie Morales of the NBC “Today” show described how “Many of us here in this room—the media—we are responsible for opening the world’s eyes to these issues and the stories that have brought about such change.”

Now that they’re on the verge of getting the Supreme Court to declare gay marriage the law of the land in all 50 states, the homosexuals in the media are identifying and demonizing their enemies in the heartland of America. That’s what Indiana is all about.

Swisher and her lesbian and gay allies are saying “F— You” to traditional American values.