|
By Jack Nichols
|
Tampa, Florida—James Dobson's wealthy Colorado-based fundamentalist ministry,
Focus on the Family, is suing Central Florida's Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority for its
refusal last year to accept ads at Tampa bus shelters promoting Love Won Out,
a conference which claimed to be about “understanding and preventing homosexuality in
youth.” |
 James Dobson |
Charging censorship, Focus on the Family insists that its First Amendment right
to free speech has been violated. The fundamentalists are not seeking financial remuneration,
however, but hope to force the transit company to advertise this year's Tampa-area conference
planned by Focus on the Family in November.
The fundamentalists teach gay and lesbian youths that they are not acceptable in God's sight
and that they must enter a “therapy” program promising so-called conversions to heterosexuality
through prayer and intensive Christian advocacy.
The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association
have both condemned such faith-based “Ex-gay” therapies as useless and harmful. Eller
Media Company, a private advertising firm which contracts ads for the government-
operated transit company, had initially begun to post the ads but re-thought the matter after
pondering the phrase “preventing homosexuality.”
|
Eller Media explained that its contract with the transit company allows it to turn down
any ad the company thinks to be "in bad taste or to be in violation of the existing laws,
offensive to the moral standards of the community, false, misleading or deceptive or in any way
reflects upon the character, integrity or standing of any organization or individual."
Simultaneously, a notorious fundamentalist scandal resurfaced when it was announced Monday
that an area evangelist, George Crossley, hailed by the Orlando Sentinel as "once the most
powerful Christian broadcaster in Central Florida" would be released from prison tomorrow.
|
Related Stories from the GayToday Archive:
James Dobson's War on America
Close Encounters with the Religious Right:
Journeys into the Twilight Zone of Religion and Politics
GayToday's Ex-Gay Series
Related Sites:
Focus on the Family
GayToday does not endorse related sites.
|
Crossley, a married ordained minister, was convicted four years ago after hiring a hit man to kill the
jealous husband of a woman with whom he'd been enjoying adulterous relations.
|
