Headaches for World Congress of Families Down Under

The World Congress of Families, an anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice organization with ties to prominent Religious Right groups, will be hosting its 2014 conference this Saturday in Melbourne, Australia. That is, if it can find a venue.

According to the Guardian, four venues -- St. Patrick's parish hall in Mentone, St. Cecilia's Church in Glen Iris, Aurora Receptions in East Brunswick, and an unnamed venue -- have backed out of hosting the conference. The Guardian reports that conference organizers had not made arrangements for liability insurance or security, and that at least one venue was advised by police to back out due to security and logistical concerns.

If and when WCF finds a venue, it will have to cope with protesters who oppose its stance on LGBTQ equality and reproductive rights. Gay News Network reports that several groups plan to protest at the conference. Equal Love, an Australian LGBTQ rights organization, describes the conference as a "gathering of bigots" in its outreach to protesters.

The Melbourne fiasco is only the latest logistical headache that the WCF has dealt with this year. Its plans for a conference in Russia, where homophobic legislation burdens the Russian LGBTQ community, fell through. The World Congress of Families VIII Moscow Conference, schedule for this September, was canceled this spring due to unrest between Russia and Ukraine. In a March press release, Don Feder stressed that the WCF was not expressing disapproval of "the Russian people, churches or individuals who have taken a leadership role in the fight to preserve life, marriage, and the natural family". Right Wing Watch and Mother Jones have documented WCG alliances and events surrounding the Moscow conference.

The World Conference of Family's reputation is well established. Prior conferences have provided Religious Right figures with opportunities to network with their counterparts around the world while pontificating on the "natural human family", "demographic winter", and the supposed evils of feminism, divorce, and the LGBTQ community. Human Rights Campaign has just released a hard-hitting report on the organization's troubling messages and activism. Exposed: The World Congress of Families -- An American Organization Exporting Hate discusses WCF's ties to anti-LGBTQ activists, and its support of homophobic legislation around the world and its international outreach in Australia, Nigeria, Russia, and eastern Europe.

The WCF is well-aware of critics' ire and has released an open letter "in response to unremitting and grossly misleading attacks" on its upcoming Melbourne conference. Global Religious Right figures signed their names to the letter, including American figures such as Matt Barber, Mike Huckabee, Mat Staver, and Sharon Slater.

"Sexual radicals have launched a smear campaign to discredit the Melbourne conference," the letter complains, calling disapproval from their critics "an attempt at intimidation." The letter lobbed the usual anti-gay myths at critics, insisting that children do best when raised by heterosexual couples (despite evidence that children raised by same-sex couples do just fine) and that the definitions of marriage and family have remained static across the world until recently (despite evidence to the contrary). The letter accuses "sexual radicals" of seeking to "deconstruct marriage and marginalize the family, and thus to transform society into something unrecognizable to generations past."

The WCF needs to realize that all of this international attention is but a taste of what is to come. As enlightened people around the world learn about the WCF and its right-wing agenda, they will speak out, raise awareness, protest, and deny succor to the organization and its ilk.

Unfortunately, the group has many allies among global opponents of LGBTQ equality and reproductive rights, and it will perform international outreach as long as it has an audience. Activists must continue to monitor the WCF and call out its agenda.


To read additional commentary, visit the following links.

Buzzfeed: Boycott Of World Congress Of Families Heads For Senate Vote

TWO Care: World Congress Of Families Facing Backlash, Cancellations Ahead Of Melbourne Conference

Human Rights Campaign: Anti-LGBT Group to Meet in Melbourne this Week

Right Wing Watch: Why Are 'Sexual Radicals' Accusing Poor Matt Barber, Rick Scarborough And Daniel Lapin of Being Anti-Gay?

Lapin Looks Askance at Secularism, Birth Control, "Sexual Depravity"

On the February 7th edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, Focus of the Family founder James Dobson interviewed Rabbi Daniel Lapin as part of "The Battle for Civilization" series. Lapin, president of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, reportedly had ties with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and participated in Glenn Beck's 2010 Divine Destiny revival. Additionally, he has a history of unkind comments about gays, animal rights, and "secular liberal males," according to Right Wing Watch. Throughout Family Talk, Lapin painted secularism in ominous colors and decried the alleged role of changing sexual attitudes in societal decay.

Dobson set the tone of the interview at the 0:25 mark when described modern society as in decline.

"It is no secret to any of us that the American way of life such as it's been known for generations is under attack today. At least that's what we believe. The Judeo-Christian system of values on which this country, and truly much of Western civilization, have been founded are threatened on a number of different fronts."

Much of Lapin's talk revolved around the alleged dangers of secularism and the degeneration of society. For instance, at the 3:06 mark, Lapin explained that he and his wife homeschooled their seven children to shield them from "the sordid stain of secularism" in public schools.

"We realized that sending them off for the best part of every day to fall under the influence of a system that is fundamentally spreading the sordid stain of secularism, essentially a public educational system that has as one of its prime purposes the obliteration of faith, that seemed to me to be an incredibly self-destructive act after we've invested so much of ourselves ... into these children."

Throughout the show, Lapin's distaste for secularism was clear. At the 16:32 mark, he demonized secularism as a "sinister and aggressive religion" bent on the obliteration of faith.

"You don't see secularism as a sort of benign, comfortable absence of religion. On the contrary, when you see that secularism is actually a very sinister and aggressive religion all on its own ... if you are a secular fundamentalism, then yes, you do need to obliterate all evidence of competing religions, and Christianity of course is the most conspicuous of the competing religions. And so obviously a prayer to the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob must be removed from schools. Praying to Jesus Christ, yes, must be stopped and eliminated."

In line with Lapin's contempt for secularism was his positive opinion of school prayer, whose demise in the U.S. he lamented. At the 13:40 mark, he suggested that school prayer is not an assault on anyone's rights, stunned that anyone would be opposed to school prayer.

"Prior to the Supreme Court rulings in that period, it was unthinkable. I mean, nobody ever thought that there was anything problematic--I know so many Jews of that generation who said, 'Of course we all said prayer in public school. So what? It was wonderful. It was not a bad thing.' And all of a sudden, over a span of terrifyingly few decades, people have been trained to consider prayer as a violent assault that challenges your rights to, what? Secularism?"

Like other voices from the Religious Right, Lapin help up Biblical knowledge as paramount. At the 9:15 mark, Lapin lamented that "timeless truths" from the Torah have been rendered "unpopular" in modern society. Amusingly, he suggested that this is the first generation in all of human history that considers itself sophisticated despite its alleged lack of Biblical knowledge.

"Christians ... during the colonial period were deeply aware of the permanent principles and the timeless truths to be found in the Torah, and they implemented them to build the society. And as the society has become more secularized and these timeless truths have been stripped one by one from the culture and made unpopular, to the point where interestingly enough we are now in the very first generation in all of human history ... this is the first generation where people, there are people in America today who consider themselves educated and sophisticated ... and yet they are utterly and sublimely clueless about the Bible. There's never been people who dared to consider themselves educated and yet who were ignoramuses Biblically."

Um, Rabbi Lapin? You do know that countless societies existed long before the Bible was compiled? And that many non-Christian and non-Jewish societies have existed across the globe? Were they uneducated and unsophisticated by default, despite their impressive contributions to history? To boot, Lapin's assumption that well-read, cosmopolitan people aren't truly "educated and sophisticated" unless they are knowledgeable about the Bible was extremely condescending.

In keeping with Religious Right rhetoric, Lapin pointed to sexual practices he disagreed with as culprits for a host of social ills. During a discussion of the roots of societal decline, Lapin attributed the emergence of the birth control pill to the alleged rise of "perpetual male adolescence." At the 11:35 mark, he had this to say.

"Perhaps one of the notable events ... was the arrival of the birth control tablet in the 1960s. And what that did for the very first time is it created the possibility of perpetual male adolescence. It made it possible for the first time for men to really never grow up and essentially it transformed masculinity and with all the implications of honor and respect and courage and the ability to defer gratification, everything that we think of as responsible masculinity got transformed into a very simple question: did you remember to take your pill, honey?"

Lapin conflates male responsibility with delaying sex, and delaying sex with the absence of birth control. The idea that birth control use is a form of responsibility meant to prevent unwanted pregnancy was not considered, nor was the idea that men can embody "honor and respect and courage" and have non-procreative sex. To boot, Lapin neglects contraception's immensely positive impacts on women, allowing them to enjoy intimacy while postponing or foregoing childbearing. This, in turn, allows them to cultivate other realms of their lives such as education, career, and community life.

Similarly, Lapin claimed that removing faith and Biblical wisdom from society heralded a tide of abortion, homosexuality, and changing sexual attitudes. Describing "sexual depravity" as the "barometer of a failure of a culture to control its basic instincts," he had this to say at the 21:20 mark.

"There is only one force powerful enough to combat the pull toward sensuality. Only one force powerful enough to defeat the compelling urge of rising sap in adolescent bodies, and that is God's power, the power of faith, and the wisdom of the Bible. When you strip that out of a society, you start off gradually with the violation of sexual mores, which we found during the Sixties and Seventies. It follows on with abortion, which is of course just another way of furthering if you like the sexual revolution, and then finds full expression in homosexuality which is ultimately the freest form of sex there is."

In keeping with familiar right-wing tropes, Lapin looks askance at secularism, contraception, and homosexuality as supposedly corrosive to a sound society. Instead of recognizing church-state separation, reproductive autonomy, and LGBT inclusion as positive developments, Lapin excludes them from his vision of an ideal society.


To listen to the broadcast, click here. 

(Hat tip to Right Wing Watch)