Martin Mawyer, longtime editor of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority Report, founded the Christian Action Network (CAN) in 1990, a year after Falwell folded the original Moral Majority.

In his "dirty and dangerous" battle against "militant homosexual groups," Mawyer has not held back. In 1997, after Ellen Degeneres came out as a lesbian on her TV sitcom, Mawyer accused her of "DUMPING HER FILTHY LESBIAN LIFESTYLE RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF YOUR LIVING ROOM!! ... If we allow the tidal wave of gay and lesbian smut to continue to pour into our homes, it will utterly consume us in no time at all!"

In 1999, he asked the Federal Communications Commission to put an "HC [homosexual conduct] warning label" on TV programs with gay characters. The following year, CAN caused a national stir when TV stations refused to air its inflammatory ad attacking Hillary Clinton, who was then running for U.S. Senate.

Over ominous drumbeats, the narrator intoned: "It is rumored that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian. It is rumored that Hillary Clinton supported homosexual marriage. It is rumored that Hillary Clinton will leave her husband upon taking office. ... Sometimes, rumors are true. Shouldn't you know the truth? For more information on traditional family values, please contact the Christian Action Network."

More recently, CAN protested "Gay Days" at Disney World and other theme parks — events that Mawyer's wife and CAN partner, Bonnie, says demonstrate "the true intent of these homosexuals: they are after our children!!"

A 2000 Mawyer mailing incorporated militia-like paranoia: "I am not ready to give this great nation over to one-world government extremists ... radical, disease-carrying homosexuals ... anti-family lesbian feminists ... or anti-American U.N. globalists!"

CAN activists today are familiar faces at Gay Days, videotaping "bad behavior." In 2003, CAN turned its footage of "homosexual kissing, hugging and fondling" into a video tour of the Southeast, warning parents about the perils of Gay Days and warning that "homosexuals live in a pattern of sin and debauchery."

Concerned Women for America
WASHINGTON, D.C.
www.cfwa.org

When she founded Concerned Women for America (CWA) in 1979, Beverly LaHaye was a budding "family activist" best known for The Act of Marriage, a fiery anti-feminist bestseller co-authored with her husband, Tim.

LaHaye's goal was to energize the anti-feminist (or "pro-family") cause with an advocacy group that might rival the National Organization for Women — which LaHaye calls "anti-God, anti-family" — in both size and political power. With a daily radio show that now reaches more than 1 million listeners, four affiliate organizations, and a cadre of attorneys, researchers and lobbyists battling the "radical, leftist crusade to transform America into Sextopia," LaHaye has done just that.

She pins much of the blame for the "radical crusade" on gay people. In 1992, LaHaye said gay activists "go after boys by becoming teachers and Boy Scout leaders." In 1998, CWA called homosexuals "people who make lewd phone calls, expose themselves to others, and engage in prostitution."

n 2001, LaHaye hired two of America's most prominent anti-gay propagandists, Robert Knight and Peter LaBarbera, to launch CWA's Culture and Family Institute. LaBarbera, a former Washington Times reporter and editor of an inflammatory anti-gay journal called The Lambda Report on Homosexual Activism, had earlier been thrown out of the American Psychological Association due to his faulty "science." That didn't prevent him from producing CWA's 11 Ways You Can Fight the Homosexual Agenda manual.

Knight, called "America's premier gay-basher" by Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, produces reams of sensationalistic reports like "Sexual Orientation and American Culture," which warns that accepting "sexual orientation as a civil right" will lead to "a loss of stability in communities, with a rise in crime, sexually transmitted diseases and other social pathologies."

Knight has also accused gays of preying on "shy and artistic young boys," using the boys' desire for male affirmation to make them into "an easy mark for seduction."

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, CWA accused same-sex partners of those killed of "trying to hijack the moral capital of marriage." Last year, CWA raised a ruckus over a gay Canadian couple that wanted to visit the U.S. together, calling the men "a new threat to border security" and "the latest pair of 'domestic terrorists.'"

The group has also accused the Harry Potter books of promoting the practice of witchcraft among children.

Coral Ridge Ministries/
Center for Reclaiming America
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.
www.coralridge.org

Beginning in the early 1960s, the Rev. D. James Kennedy turned conservative Coral Ridge Presbyterian into a mega-church that now claims 10,000 members. In 1974, Kennedy branched out with Coral Ridge Ministries, which has since become one of the largest fundamentalist enterprises in America with some 160 employees, several divisions including a Washington-based Center for Christian Statesmanship, and radio and television studios producing shows that reach a combined weekly audience of 3 million.

In his book Stranger at the Gate, evangelical minister Mel White (see A Thorn in Their Side), who produced a popular film for Kennedy called "Like a Mighty Army," says Coral Ridge "practically funded its television outreach on ... disgusting, inflammatory antigay propaganda."

In one typical newsletter, Kennedy published a photograph of two sweet-looking children under a headline reading, "Sex with Children? Homosexuals Say Yes!" Elsewhere, he has written that "homosexuals prey on adolescent boys" and "take America's children."

After Kennedy cited bogus claims about AIDS transmission, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, himself a conservative evangelical, attacked his statement as "reprehensible" and "homophobic." "I just cannot believe the poor scholarship of so many Christians," Koop said, adding that Kennedy refused his subsequent offer of a briefing on the facts of AIDS transmission.

Kennedy denies that he subscribes to the extremist ideology of Christian Reconstructionism, which calls for killing "practicing homosexuals," but he is tied closely to leading Reconstructionists.

Kennedy has described the works of Reconstructionism founder R.J. Rushdoony (see Chalcedon Foundation), which are laced with anti-black racism and anti-gay vitriol, as "essential." His ministry has sold a book by leading Reconstructionist George Grant that laments the abandonment of legal codes prescribing death for homosexuals.

And he certainly holds theocratic views closely related to Reconstructionism, as reflected in the name he chose for Coral Ridge's political outreach arm: the Center for Reclaiming America (CRA). Since its founding in 1996, the CRA has brought together fundamentalist groups in campaigns like "Truth in Love," a million-dollar 1998 ad campaign that promoted "ex-gay" ministries offering discredited methods of "curing" homosexuals.

CRA sponsors an annual conference, Reclaiming America for Christ, that has featured leading Reconstructionists like Grant (who is also a former Coral Ridge vice president) and Gary DeMar (see American Vision), along with anti-gay stalwarts like Robert Knight (see Concerned Women of America).

Coral Ridge also has been a generous supporter of deposed Alabama Chief Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, the "Ten Commandments Judge" who in a 2002 "special concurrence" court opinion suggested that the state could impose "physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution" to protect children from gays and lesbians.

Moore's new Alabama outfit, the Foundation for Moral Law, is being partly bankrolled by Coral Ridge.

Family Research Council
WASHINGTON, D.C.
www.frc.org

In 1988, James Dobson's Focus on the Family mega-ministry merged with the Family Research Council (FRC), a tiny Washington think tank headed by Gary Bauer, a former Department of Education official. With Focus' millions behind it, FRC's profile shot up as Bauer brought Dobson's anti-gay, anti-abortion and anti-sex education messages to leaders on Capitol Hill.

When FRC's lobbying threatened Focus' tax-exempt status in 1992, the groups severed their legal ties. But by then, FRC had become a powerful group in its own right.

During the gays-in-the-military debate of 1993, Bauer wrote an influential op-ed alleging that gay people's "notion of 'civil rights' would mean a jackboot on the back of the 99 percent of society that still follows the norms of nature."

Robert Knight, FRC's chief anti-gay researcher during the 1990s (see also Concerned Women for America), claimed that the gay rights movement's main goal was "going after the kids."

Drawing liberally on the discredited research of Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute), Knight published papers claiming, among other things, that gay people view "pedophiles as the 'prophets' of a new sexual order." FRC also cited Cameron's bogus claim that children in gay households are at greater risk of sexual involvement with a parent. In a legal brief, it even warned that schools offering diversity education could be sued for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

The FRC led boycotts and protests when major corporations began to give domestic-partner benefits; in 1997, Knight lambasted American Airlines for its "immoral" benefits program, asking, "What are you going to develop next? A pedophilia market?"

Former Louisiana legislator Tony Perkins, a "family values" crusader who had given a speech to the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens on May 19, 2001, took over the FRC's leadership in 2003. By then, the FRC was well established in Washington, with board members like Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, an OB/GYN who in his 2004 campaign falsely claimed that guards had to be posted inside some public school restrooms to protect girls from lesbian sex attacks.

The FRC's current senior fellow for cultural studies, Timothy Dailey, has taken over Knight's role as FRC's main anti-gay propagandist, comparing gays to "abnormal cells," co-authoring Getting It Straight, a "statistical" compendium of the "evils" of homosexuality, and penning Dark Obsession: The Tragedy and Threat of the Homosexual Lifestyle, yet another lurid FRC publication.