News Release
For Immediate Release: April 6, 2011
Contact: Diane Gramley 1.814.271.9078 or 1.814.437.5355
Group Still Awaiting Reply from the Southern Poverty Law Center
(Harrisburg) — Last December the American Family Association of Pennsylvania (AFA of PA) joined others in signing onto a statement condemning the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPCL) for falsely listing pro-family groups as hate groups. Within days of that statement appearing as full page ads in two Washington, DC newspapers, the AFA of PA received a letter from J. Richard Cohen, President and CEO of the SPLC. On January 31st the AFA of PA responded to the Cohen letter and, as of today, has received no response. Here in Pennsylvania, the erroneous inclusion of the national office of the American Family Association on the SPLC ‘hate list’ has been used to label the AFA of PA as a hate group as we’ve battled the passage of pro-homosexual ordinances on the local level.
“What we’ve seen here in Pennsylvania is exactly what the SPLC intended with their hate listing of pro-family groups. They intend to control the discussion by limiting it to the pro-homosexual side through this attempt to discredit and mislabel organizations who oppose the normalization of the homosexual lifestyle. The SPLC cannot stand the truth, so they try to silence the messenger,” remarked Diane Gramley, President of the AFA of PA.
Gramley further noted, “The language used in the December 16th SPLC letter should result in them being labeled a hate group. That letter was more hateful than anything the pro-family groups demonized by SPLC have said or written. Cohen’s letter equated pro-family groups to neo-Nazis who call Jews ‘vermin’ and accused them of the ‘propagation of know falsehoods’ and ‘repeated, groundless name-calling’ – all without documented proof of such accusations.”
The AFA of PA letter notes:
Apparently the SPLC is willing to ignore the health and well-being of entire groups of people – gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people — in order to remain in the ‘good graces’ of organizations which promote those lifestyles.
- A July 2010 CDC fact sheet states, “MSM (men who have sex with men) account for more than half (53%) of all new HIV infections in the U.S. each year, as well as nearly half (48%) of people living with HIV.”
- An April 5, 2004 New York Times article states, “CDC researchers have referred to these (bisexual) men as a “bridge” to infection (for HIV) from gay men to heterosexual women.”
- In December 2007 the peer review journal Sexually Transmitted Infections reports, “”Women who identified as lesbians have a 2.5-fold increased likelihood of BV (bacterial vaginosis) compared with heterosexual women.” Additionally, in Montreal, a study of the lesbian subculture found that nearly 90 per cent had been diagnosed with Chlamydia, and 50 per cent with bacterial vaginosis.
- Dr. Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has been involved with patients considering sex-change surgeries. He concluded after interviewing many after the surgeries, “But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with. With these facts in hand I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”
“In our letter we noted it is more compassionate to warn those who are involved in a dangerous activity than it is to affirm that activity which will lead to much grief in the future. We asked Mr. Cohen if he could argue with that position, but we haven’t received a response, so apparently he doesn’t understand true compassion. If his letter is any indication, compassion is not in his vocabulary,” Gramley concluded.
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