Family Research Council leader caught w/ gay prostitute

[Soon]

JMG Readers Shut Down Florida AG Bill McCollum's Facebook Campaign Page


Thanks to the thousands of you that heeded my call to visit Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum's gubernatorial campaign Facebook page, the page's administrators have repeatedly closed it down, wiping out all of the entries demanding his response to the Rekers scandal. My outclick tracker thingy tells me that 22,441 of you hit his page in the last 24 hours and I thank all 22,441 of you beautiful people, whether you left him a message or not. And big thanks to Michelanglo Signorile, who yesterday sent his listeners there too. We've gotten McCollum's attention, that much is certain.

Today we're waiting for a response from the Florida Department of Children and Families, to whom McCollum's office yesterday passed the buck regarding the $87,000 payment to Dr. George Rekers so he could continue his campaign to rip apart Florida's gay families.

[Soon]

Anti-Gay Hypocrite is News Because of His Activism

[Toughy]

This is probably a derail, but since 'Slut Night' was brought up, I thought perhaps those who don't know, should know where that came from. This will be the short and sweet version.

ButchFemme Socials of Oakland/San Francisco has been doing Socials for over 10 years now. In Oakland, we originally did them at the White Horse (fondly know as 'the Ho'). At one of our first Socials, one of the femmes in attendance had on a black form fitting dress that could have been a slip. She went to the bar to get a cocktail and the old gay man bartender told her she needed to put some clothes on.....that she was dressed inappropriately. She came over to me and said that man had insulted her and hurt her feelings......well......... laughin.....that set me off and I ended up threatening to strip down to my boxers (with all the butches behind me)...which I wasn't wearing........long story short....one of the femmes said 'if he thinks that is slutty, we can show him slutty'......and Slut Night was born.

The first Slut Night was held for the next social at the Ho and the femmes came in all their slut finery.......corsets, garters, etc.......a tradition was born and continues to this day at various times across the country.

-------
I got nothing but disgust for hypocrisy.

[Toughy]

miss juney da poodle...........

I know nothin about no 'long strokin'....nothin...

and just so ya know.....that femme who was in the inappropriate dress is a PhD professor of economics at a 'prestigious' college somewhere in the US..........

we got us some smart sluts around here...........

[Rufusboi]

Originally Posted by HowSoonIsNow

Baptist minister 'took ten-day holiday with male prostitute'

A Baptist minister and leading anti-gay activist faced the ruination of his career yesterday after being photographed returning from a European holiday with a male prostitute.

George Rekers, who sits on the board of a national organisation dedicated to changing the sexuality of gay men and lesbians, hired a companion from a website called Rentboy.com that offers clients a wide range of choices, from “rentboy” and “sugar daddy” to “masseur”.

Dr Rekers said he took the prostitute on the ten-day trip last month to London and Madrid as a travel assistant after a stint in hospital. “I had surgery,” he said when approached this week by the Miami New Times. “I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.” Photographs of the pair emerging from Miami international airport last month show the older man pushing their suitcases on a trolley.

Dr Rekers’s companion has been identified as a 20-year-old Puerto Rican whose entry on the Rentboy.com website gives his name as “Geo”. The site says that he is “sensual”, “wild” and “up for anything”. It also describes him as “versatile”, with a “nice ass”.

Contacted this week by reporters in Miami, he said he was surprised by Dr Rekers’s claim to have realised he was a prostitute only halfway through their holiday.

Geo’s profile on Rentboy.com is a bewildering mix of the banal and the specific. “I’m a college guy, masculine, educated, really easy going,” he says. “Great to get along with, can hold a conversation.” He lists stripping and go-go dancing among his talents. “I will do anything you say as long as you ask,” he promises.

Dr Rekers, who co-founded America’s most powerful Christian lobbying group, has testified as an expert in favour of bans on gay adoption in Florida and Arkansas. He has also written numerous books on homosexuality as a curable condition, including Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know about Homosexuality.

Gay rights advocates called yesterday for him to step down from the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (Narth), for which he lectures across the world. He is also closely linked with the Washington-based Family Research Council, which he founded with Dr James Dobson in 1983.

In an e-mailed response to questions about the European trip, he said: “My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them.”

Dr Rekers also told a blogger who reached him via Facebook: “If you talk with my travel assistant . . . you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.”

In 2006 Ted Haggard resigned as a leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after a male prostitute claimed to have had sex with him for three years.

Ray Ashburn, a California state senator with a long record of opposing gay rights, was arrested and charged with drunk-driving this year while leaving a gay nightclub in Sacramento. In 1988 Jimmy Swaggart, one of America’s most successful televangelists, was found to have had regular paid sex with prostitutes.

Do as I say ...

• The televangelist Pat Robertson caused outrage when he said that the Haiti earthquake was caused by “a pact to the Devil” sworn by Haitians when they became independent of French rule

• Matt Baker, a Texan minister, was convicted of faking his wife’s suicide in 2009 so that he could have a relationship with a member of his church

• Kent Hovind, a creationist minister with his own dinosaur theme park in Florida, was sentenced to ten years in jail for falsely declaring bankruptcy and threatening investigators in 2006 Hovind paid employees in cash, claiming that they were all workers of God and therefore exempt from taxes

• The TV minister Jim Bakker shocked viewers of his television series when it emerged that he had had an affair with a secretary, paying her off with church funds. He was jailed in 1989 for fraud after paying himself and his wife, Tammy Faye, below, millions of dollars in church funds and concocting a timeshare scam at his theme park in South Carolina

Sources: ABC; AP; BBC; Time; Times archives

I love this article. I love that it includes all these so called pastors, ministers, tele evangelists reagrdless of whether it is sex with male or female prostitutes, killing wives, or just saying crazy stuff like Robinson does regularly. This article shows the hypocrisy of all of them. Why do people still follow and believe the junk they spew. Ultimately they are the agents of their own demise. We just have to sit back and wait. Haggard is out there now trying to rehab his image and I'm sick of seeing him. Rufus

[Rufusboi]

Originally Posted by HowSoonIsNow

Anti-Gay Hypocrite is News Because of His Activism

I love Rachel Maddow. I would add one thing. If miserable George thinks being gay can be cured why doesn't he cure himself?

Rufus

[UofMfan]

May 9, 2010

Far Right Leader Busted With Gay Escort Got Taxpayer Money from GOP Gov Candidate to Bash Gays

Alternet.
This post originally appeared on Washington Monthly.

REKERS GOT TAXPAYER MONEY FROM FLORIDA’S MCCOLLUM…. At first blush, the controversy surrounding George Alan Rekers is just another embarrassment for the religious right movement, and another example of bizarre personal hypocrisy on the far-right. But the story might turn out to be more politically relevant than first believed.

If you’re just joining us, Rekers, a Baptist minister who worked with James Dobson to create the right-wing Family Research Council, has long been a virulently anti-gay crusader. It was interesting, then, when we learned this week that Rekers hired a young, male prostitute to join him on a European vacation last month. Rekers met his travel companion on a website devoted to connecting gay escorts with clients.

Though Rekers later said he merely counseled his companion on how to stop being gay, the escort later said the two were physically intimate.

Yesterday, however, the larger story took on a new angle. Rachel Slajda reports that Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum (R), currently a leading gubernatorial candidate, used taxpayer money to pay Rekers to bash gays.

[McCollum] paid George Rekers at least $60,900 to be an expert witness in 2008 while defending Florida’s ban against gay couple adopting children. When a judge called Rekers’ testimony neither “credible nor worthy of forming the basis of public policy,” McCollum explicitly defended him in following briefs.

Rekers is currently embroiled in a scandal for hiring a male escort to accompany him on a trip to Europe. But he’s also a leader in the ex-gay movement. He co-founded the Family Research Council and sits on the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. He has, by all accounts, dedicated his life to protecting children from the “harmful” influence of gay people.

In his testimony for the state of Florida, Rekers testified that homosexual people have a higher incidence of depression, substance abuse and break-ups than heterosexual people. This, he testified, made homosexual partners incapable of “providing a safe and secure and emotionally stable environment for the child.”

Rekers’ anti-gay testimony was ridiculous, and the judge in the case rejected his remarks, noting that his conclusions are “motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions that are not consistent with the science.”

But this certainly seems like an area that warrants some follow-up. Bill McCollum used at least $60,900 in taxpayer money — more than most Americans earn in a year — to pay Rekers to make ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims against gay people? And then we find out that Rekers also gallivanted through Europe with a male prostitute?

McCollum has been leading in most statewide polls, but this one might leave a mark.

[UofMfan]

George Rekers Resigns From Anti-Gay Group In Wake Of 'Rentboy' Scandal
HuffPo
First Posted: 05-12-10 09:32 AM, Updated: 05-12-10 11:38 AM

Prominent anti-gay activist George Rekers, who was caught last week returning from a 10-day trip to Europe with a male escort he found on Rentboy.com, has terminated his association with a major anti-gay group.

Rekers has resigned from the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, or NARTH, "to allow myself the time necessary to fight the false media reports that have been made against me," the retired professor said in a statement.

Once again, Rekers declined to dispute specific elements of the Miami New Times' coverage, choosing instead to contradict its obvious implications. "With the assistance of a defamation attorney, I will fight these false reports because I have not engaged in any homosexual behavior whatsoever," he said. "I am not gay and never have been."

NARTH, which advocates "therapy" to convert gays and fights scientific research suggesting that such treatment is ludicrous, attached a statement to Rekers' resignation asserting that his apparent hypocrisy does not reflect on their work. A NARTH spokesman told TPM that the extent of the organization's involvement in the Rentboy scandal is to tell Rekers "if he is innocent he needs to get a good lawyer."

Rekers is no stranger to courtrooms. As Michael Rogers notes, Rekers has testified against gay adoption on behalf of the states of Florida and Arkansas, for which he was paid $120,000 by Florida and $60,000 by Arkansas -- the latter in a settlement following a two-year court battle after he billed Arkansas for $165,000. In each case, the presiding judge called Rekers' testimony "extremely suspect" or concluded that "the court cannot consider his testimony to be credible nor worthy of forming the basis of public policy."

The escort Rekers was caught with, Jo-Vanni Roman, appeared on "Anderson Cooper 360" to talk about their trip to Europe. Roman didn't have too many new details, but he talks a bit about some elements of the contract Rekers drew up, which required that Roman spend eight hours and eat two meals with him per day during the trip.

[SuperFemme]

McCollum says he needed Rekers in case challenging state gay adoption ban

Attorney General Bill McCollum Tuesday defended his personal intervention into the selection of an antigay expert witness in the case defending the state's gay adoption ban, saying his office "searched a long time" for someone and that George Rekers was the only one of two they could find.

Records show that McCollum personally requested that the state's Department of Children & Families hire Rekers at $300 an hour to help the state defend the case. When the agency balked at the price tag, McCollum's office persisted, ultimately leading to DCF paying pay him $120,000 over two years.

McCollum said that while he would not hire Rekers again knowing what he knows now -- that Rekers vacationed for two weeks in Europe with a gay male escort from Miami and received sexual massages from him -- he suggested that without Rekers the agency would not have been successful.

DCF lost the case in circuit court and the matter is now on appeal.
Here's a Q and A between McCollum and reporters today:

Q: Did you push for Rekers because he was the only expert you could find that represented the point of view that you wanted to take in that case?

A: The attorney generals office played its traditional role and defended DCF and the legal challenge, McCollum said. "There was a search that I oversaw and saw for the best available experts. Dr. Rekers was one of the two expert witnesses we used in this case. We recommended both to the department. They decided to hire Dr. Rekers and they paid him.

"If I knew what I know today would I recommend him again? Of course not. Would I ever recommend him again? No. But he was the best available at the time.''

Q: Was he the only available?

A: "There were two."

Q: There were only two you could find in the whole nation?

A: "There were only two willing to step forward and testify and we searched a long time. His credentials were very good and, on paper, excellent. That's why we recommended it because those kinds of people that we were able to fill for the job. It's nice to quarterback in hindsight but we didn't know his background that we know today. Nobody else did."

Q: Does it raise some questions about about the nature of hiring an expert witnesses? ...If you are trying to find an expert witness who will only say one thing and you can only find two people who will only say one thing does that raise any questions in your mind about the legal principle here?

A: "If you want to look at the whole system of law today, the battle of expert witnesses needs to be addressed. But the way our system works today, expert witnessses are important. You have to establish your case. We happened to be on the side of the state. You've got to get the very best you can."

Q: If you didn't have an expert witness what would have happened to your case?

A: "If you don't have an expert witness you aren't going to be as successful...I didn't try the case. These are our lawyers for the department and I'm proud of our lawyer team."

Q: Should the state ask for its money back?

A: "I can't comment on the litigation itself. It's an ongoing process."

Read more: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/naked...#ixzz0njuJWUrR

[SuperFemme]

Commentary: Professor George Rekers explains it all
Fred Grimm | The Miami Herald

last updated: May 10, 2010 01:31:55 PM

If Professor George gets away with this, I'm going straight to Rentgirl. It's my bad back.

Not that I'm suggesting George Rekers went straight to Rentboy, the explicit website where his fellow traveler advertises a willingness "to do anything you say as long as you ask."

Professor George, as he styles himself on his website, ProfessorGeorge.com , offers a vaguely plausible (alcohol might help) explanation. He didn't procure the services of a 20-year-old male prostitute to join him on a 10-day-jaunt through England and Spain for purposes of prostitution. "Following medical advice Professor George Rekers requires an assistant to lift his luggage in his travels because of an ongoing condition following surgery."

With a line like that, and a note from a doctor, who knows how many relationships I might have salvaged?

To be fair, Professor George has never testified that gays don't make splendid international traveling companions.

George Rekers was paid handsomely by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum ($60,900) and the state of Arkansas ($60,000), to flog gay men and women as unfit parents. Particularly adoptive parents.

As a bonus, at no extra charge, Rekers testified in Miami-Dade Circuit Court that he also considered American Indians to be in the same risky category.

Best I can tell, Rekers has never disparaged the fitness of gays or Indians to hump his baggage. George Rekers comes with a lot of baggage.

Rekers, 61, of North Miami, a Baptist minister and a retired professor of behavior science, has long provided academic cover for the Christian right's anti-gay agenda. He's written books, delivered lectures and provided pithy quotes that intimate a scientific basis for opposition to gay adoption and gay marriage.

[SuperFemme]

I am wondering who will expertly hate on us now that Georgie is unavailable?

He was crucial as an expert witness in both Florida and Arkansas banning adoptions by gays. BUT according to the AG's office in FL, there were only two such *experts* willing to come forward and testify.

I am hoping that his fall from grace will result in more than a resounding *thud* as conservative groups trip over themselves to put some distance between Professor George and their organizations.

I am hoping that there will be nobody left. Dare I hope that his actions take away his credibility as an expert in appellate court?

[UofMfan]

Originally Posted by SuperFemme

I am wondering who will expertly hate on us now that Georgie is unavailable?

He was crucial as an expert witness in both Florida and Arkansas banning adoptions by gays. BUT according to the AG's office in FL, there were only two such *experts* willing to come forward and testify.

I am hoping that his fall from grace will result in more than a resounding *thud* as conservative groups trip over themselves to put some distance between Professor George and their organizations.

I am hoping that there will be nobody left. Dare I hope that his actions take away his credibility as an expert in appellate court?

Well, I think his credibility is basically in shambles now, or at least I hope so.

As for who is left? There is always some wing nut willing to step in, I am afraid. Let's hope not.

[SuperFemme]

Let's hope.

BTW, what is his problem with Native Americans? I had no idea he had it out for more than just us.

[Cyclopea]

[Soon]

Sleazy deal snares McCollum

[Rufusboi]

I'm a fan of Leonard Pitts' column and he had a great one yesterday on Georgie. Here a link.

http://www.miamiherald.com/living/co...leonard_pitts/

Rufus

[Soon]

Before He Hired an Escort, Rekers Tried to Spank the Gay Away

....

In 1974, Rekers, a leading thinker in the so-called ex-gay movement, was presented with a 4-year-old "effeminate boy" named Kraig, whose parents had enrolled him in the program. Rekers put Kraig in a "play-observation room" with his mother, who was equipped with a listening device. When the boy played with girly toys, the doctors instructed her to avert her eyes from the child.

According to a 2001 account in Brain, Child Magazine, "On one such occasion, his distress was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him... Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room." Rekers's research team continued the experiment in the family's home. Kraig received red chips for feminine behavior and blue chips for masculine behavior. The blue chips could be cashed in for candy or television time. The red chips earned him a "swat" or spanking from his father. Researchers periodically entered the family's home to ensure proper implementation of the reward-punishment system.

After two years, the boy supposedly manned up. Over the decades, Rekers, who ran countless similar experiments, held Kraig up as "the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy."

At age 18, shamed by his childhood diagnosis and treatment, Rekers's poster boy attempted suicide, according to Gender Shock, a book by journalist Phyllis Burke. Rekers, whose early experiments were the first to ostensibly demonstrate a "gay cure," resigned from the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) last week, after it was revealed the gay escort had given him nude sexual massages. NARTH, however, stands by his science.

[Soon]

Scandal Stirs Legal Questions in Anti-Gay Cases