Peter LaBarbera’s Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH) last week launched a campaign to prevent gay men from donating blood. Keep the Gay Blood Ban (KGB²) was sparked, LaBarbera says, because of “renewed lobby efforts to open up the U.S. blood supply to homosexuality-practicing men.”

Since 1983*, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has banned blood donations frommen who have ever had sex with men and women who have ever had sex with men who have had sex with men. In 2010, 40 members of Congress called on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to lift the ban on gay men donating blood. However, LaBarbera only mentioned Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), “who represents the homosexual Boystown neighborhood in Chicago,” in hisKGB² launch article on AFTAH’s website.

Last year, the Advisory Committee on Blood Safety & Availability for HHS recommended the ban not be lifted, due to lack of sufficient data to support revising the policy. The committee did, however, recommend further research into a possible ban lift, at least for “low-risk” gay and bisexual men. And just last month HHS announced that following the studies’ completion, a comprehensive evidence-based policy evaluation will begin.

In Kerry’s original letter to the committee, he was joined by medical experts at the American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers and the American Medical Association in the position that the current blood donor policy (PDF) is discriminatory and “medically and scientifically unwarranted,” pointing out that heterosexual individuals who engage in risky sexual behavior are not subjected to a lifetime ban as gay men are. For example, heterosexual individuals who have had sex with HIV-positive individuals are only banned for a one-year period, as are heterosexual individuals who have had sex for money.

“Sadly, Sen. Kerry and others crusading against the homosexual blood ban do so on the basis that the ban is mainly about ‘anti-gay discrimination’ rather than preserving public health,” LaBarbera wrote in the article.

The thrust of LaBarbera’s call to continue banning gay men from donating blood is apubic health flier about anal sex between men (PDF) produced by Asian Health Services and funded by the California AIDS Clearinghouse.

The flier -– which graphically describes various sex practices and positions, accompanied by images of LEGO-style men demonstrating such positions — discusses health risks of oral, anal and oral-anal sex between men and speaks to the importance of using a condom to prevent the spread of disease.

LaBarbera implies that the transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases is common for all gay men, quoting from the flier: “Anal sex is the riskiest sexual activity for getting/spreading HIV.” He does not, however, quote the rest of that paragraph: “That risk goes up if you have more sex partners, if you f*** without a condom or if you have sex with someone who has HIV.”

LaBarbera writes:

[F]ew seem interested in investigating – much less restricting – the actual high-risk homosexual practices and deviant behaviors depicted and described in this (pro-‘gay’) flier, which crassly helps explain the immense heath [sic] risks of male homosexuality We excerpt this flier – vulgar slang references and all – to help educate the public as to how this lifestyle is so dangerous that men who practice it must be kept from the nation’s blood supply.

LaBarbera asks readers to contact their U.S. senators and representatives and ask them “to put the safety of Americans – and a pristine blood supply – ahead of the demands of the selfish Homosexuality Lobby.” He also wants congressional leaders to launch an investigation “into the health hazards of homosexual behaviors (just as the government studied the dangers of smoking).”

AFTAH defines itself as “a group dedicated to exposing the homosexual activist agenda.” Its nonprofit status was recently revoked by the Internal Revenue Service for failure to comply with IRS nonprofit filing requirements.

The Southern Poverty Law Center still defines AFTAH as a hate group (among 29 others in the Illinois, where the organization is based).

*Correction: TAI previously reported that the FDA banned gay men from donating blood, for a lifetime, in 1977. In fact, this policy on “men who have sex with other men” began in 1983; 1977 — deemed the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. — is the cutoff year for “men who have sex with other men.” In other words, men who stopped having sex with other men before 1977 can donate blood. We regret the error.

Becker is gay; he’s just not conflicted about it. He’s been married to the same man for the past five years and they live in Vermont. But what he told Bachmann & Associates therapist Timothy Wiertzema at the center’s Lake Elmo, Minn., location was that he had just moved to the Twin Cities area and was looking for a church to go to. Wiertzema’s only recommendation to Becker was Eagle Brook Church, the sameBaptist mega-church the Bachmanns relocated to in June shortly after the Minnesota congresswoman officially declared her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

“When I learned the Bachmanns had moved [to Eagle Brook Church], I was curious,” Becker told The American Independent.

As it turns out, both Eagle Brook Church and Bachmann & Associates refer out to each other. Becker said Wiertzema told him Eagle Brook was “a good solid church,” well-known and well-attended. The Eagle Brook Church website refers church members seeking marriage counseling to Bachmann & Associates on its Marriage & Familyresources page. The church recommends only one other counseling center in the area:Family Innovations.

On a Marriage & Family blog post from April 2009, Marcus Bachmann posted a message stating:

Bachmann & Associates Christian Counseling is honored to be in the marital healing and restoration business. We are trully [sic] seeing couples restored, Christ is transforming peoples lives with a work of our skilled counselors and the principles of God’s word. Christ is the Almighty Counselor and we are in awe of what man would call irreparable, God brings wholeness and healing.
Thank-you for allowing us to partner with Eagle Brook.
Marcus Bachmann

In a statement emailed to The American Independent, Eagle Brook Church explained that it has partnered with Bachmann & Associates since 2003 and only refers attendants seeking biblical counseling to the Bachmann business and Family Innovations due to positive opinions from church members.

From Eagle Brook Church:

The Eagle Brook approach has been to choose a few strategic partners in all ministry areas. We partner with organizations who are experts in what they do so that we can remain effective at what we do — reaching people for Christ. Bachmann & Associates was chosen as a partner in 2003 after many of our attenders reported that they were pleased with the level of care and counseling they had received there. We continually monitor all of our relationships with outside organizations through feedback provided by those who have used them.

Requests for comment were not returned by Bachmann & Associates, or Bachmann’s campaign. (At a recent National Press Club event, the Minnesota representative stated she would continue to refuse to answer questions related to her family business.)

Church controversy

Following the revelation that Bachmann and her family formally withdrew their membership from the Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minn., on June 21 — then she officially declared her presidential candidacy in Waterloo, Iowa, six days later — speculation as to why they left began. One immediate theory was that the Bachmanns wanted to sever ties with Salem Lutheran’s larger affiliate, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), whose stance on the Pope is considered controversial and potentially alienating to Catholic voters.

The explanation offered to the press — by the Bachmann campaign and Salem Lutheran — has thus far appeared to diffuse the initial controversy. The Atlantic published a storyon July 13 in which a WELS spokesman clarified the organization’s use of the term “Antichrist” -– “false Christ” as opposed to Satan — for the Pope, saying it “has never been one of our driving principles.”

On July 14, Religious News Service reported that the Bachmanns had formerly ended their membership after a church leader had questioned the family’s two-year absence. A few days later, The New York Times reported that after leaving Salem Lutheran Church, the Bachmanns started attending Eagle Brook Church, “closer to their new home in another Stillwater neighborhood.”

Then the blog Spiritual Politics pointed out:

[C]ontrary to what the friends told [NYT reporter Sheryl Gay] Stolberg, not one of the campuses is actually closer to the Bachmann’s new home on the eighteenth green of the Stoneridge Golf Course than their old Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) church, Salem Lutheran, was. The drive from their mini-mansion to Salem is just eight miles, as opposed to 19, 28, 29, and 29 miles respectively to Eagle Lake’s facilities at White Bear Lake, Lino Lakes, Spring Lake Park, and Blaine.

Eagle Brook and ex-gay therapy

The 60-year-old Eagle Brook Church currently has a weekly attendance of 13,000 people spanning across its four locations in Blaine, Lino Lakes, Spring Lake Park and White Bear Lake. Eagle Brook spokeperson Johanna Price told TAI that a fifth location is due to open in Woodbury on Sept. 10. According to a church statement emailed to TAI, Eagle Brook’s mission is “reaching people for Christ.”

According to SpiritualPolitics, Eagle Brook belongs to the Baptist General Conferenceand is the largest church in Minnesota. It is a member of the Willow Creek Association(WCA) based in Illinois, whose board chairman is Bill Hybels, the founding and senior pastor of the Willow Creek Community Church (WCCC) in South Barrington, Ill., a seven-campus mega-church.

WCA spokesperson Nancy Gruben told TAI that the nonprofit group offers resources and training to any church that aligns with WCA’s mission to help churches “make disciples of Jesus Christ” (from Matthew 28). She said WCA serves 10,000 churches a year, 4,000 of which are in the United States. Any church that either partners formally with WCA for a $249 annual fee (about 200 churches, according to Gruben) or that joins in on WCA-sponsored ministry events must align with the association’s “statement of faith.”

Gruben would not comment directly on WCA’s position on homosexuality or “ex-gay” therapy — which is at the heart of the controversy surrounding Bachmann’s Christian counseling business. “We believe all people matter to God, and so all people matter to us,” Gruben said.

But a church that in recent years has taken a stand on “ex-gay” therapy –- albeit in a quiet, indirect way -– is WCA founder Bill Hybel’s Willow Creek Community Church. In the midst of last month’s revelation of the Bachmann church switch, a few blogs picked up on the fact that WCCC at one point referred members to Exodus International, the world’s largest ex-gay ministry.

WCCC severed those ties in 2009, but that fact was only brought to light this past June byEx-Gay Watch.com. The mega-church’s relationship with the ex-gay ministry ended a year after meeting with Soulforce, the Abilene, Texas-based Christian gay-rights organization that in 2008 began a project with other LGBT-rights organizations calledAmerican Family Outing. This was a campaign to open peaceful dialogue about faith, family and the LGBT community with influential mega-churches that might welcome gay and lesbian people into their churches but still support the idea of reparative therapy. Between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in 2008, the American Family Outing groups met with six churches identified as having a big cultural and political influence on Americans through ministries and media. Willow Creek Community Church with its vast network of mega-churches throughout the country, was among them.

“We knew if we could have an impact in those churches, we could have an impact nationwide,” Soulforce Executive Director the Rev. Dr. Cindi Love told TAI.

Jay Bakker — pastor of Revolution Church in New York City and who was part of the Soulforce team meeting with Hybels in 2008 — said he doesn’t think the American Family Outing can take full credit WCCC splitting from Exodus. But he told TAI they likely had some part in the decision.

“It is definitely a push in the right direction,” Bakker said. “The times are changing.”

Bakker said the LGBT group was trying to send all the mega-churches a message about the dangers of the ex-gay movement and the value in affirming LGBT people and allowing them to be members or to work for the church. Among the mega-church pastors who would actually meet with Soulforce, Hybels was the most open and positive, Bakker said, though he refused to meet with all of the gay and lesbian families, as was the intention of the campaign. Bakker said that instead, the LGBT leaders and Hybels and some of Hybels’ staff talked briefly about scripture over deli sandwiches. Children of the same-sex couples were forced to take their lunch away from Hybels, in a different room.

“It was a very tense meeting,” he said. “But it was a good meeting.”

Jeff Lutes, a licensed professional counselor in Austin, Texas, was the Soulforce executive director at the time. Like Bakker, Lutes was impressed by some of Hybels’ comments, such that many of the Bible’s “clobber passages,” which are sometimes used by some religious figures to condemn homosexuality, were no longer relevant. Where Hybels was hung up was on the Genesis verse that defines marriage between a man and a woman, Lutes told TAI.

“I remember that, at the end of the meeting, Hybel’s second-in-command said: ‘Jeff, I want you to know that our problem is with the sexual relationship that you have with your partner. But what you are doing with your three children, God is in that.’ I feel they have made progress, but they are not an affirming church,” Lutes said.

WCCC denied TAI’s request for comment about the events that led it to end ties with Exodus.

The church response to Ex-Gay Watch regarding the cutoff was brief: “After a recent review of our affiliations we determined that, moving into the future, we no longer intend to be affiliated with Exodus International.”

Christianity Today received more explanation:

Scott Vaudrey of the elder response team said in writing that Willow Creek’s decision was not intended as a social or political statement, but rather an indication of “a season of reviewing and clarifying some of our affiliations with outside organizations.”

Exodus International President Alan Chambers told Christianity Today that the WCCC move was political, suggesting the church’s support for ex-gay therapy lives on:

“The choice to end our partnership is definitely something that shines a light on a disappointing trend within parts of the Christian community, which is that there are Christians who believe like one another who aren’t willing to stand with one another, simply because they’re afraid of the backlash people will direct their way if they are seen with somebody who might not be politically correct.”

Barton has said the idea of separation of church and state is a myth and suggested the federal government should regulate homosexuality. His association with reported anti-Semitic groups prompted the Anti-Defamation League to condemn him earlier this year. He has called holding congressional sessions on Sunday unconstitutional and he has stated that United States’ borders were drawn by God.

“God’s the one who drew up the lines for the nations, so to say open borders is to say, ‘God, you goofed it all up and when you had borders, you shouldn’t have done it,’” he said recently on his radio program. “And so, from a Christian standpoint, you cannot do that. God’s the one who establishes the boundaries of nations.”

Bachmann and Barton have a long relationship going back to Bachmann’s time as state senator. Barton was invited to Minnesota to help Bachmann with legislation on school history standards, she’s appeared his radio show numerous times, and she and Barton have conducted tours in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate to Tea Partiers how religious the founding fathers were.

Barton has come under criticism for what some have called revisionist history in promoting the idea that the Constitution calls for America to be a Christian nation.

The Baptist General Association of Virginia passed a resolution last week that promoted the concept of separation of church and state and singled out Barton’s work, calling him inaccurate and urging its members not to read his work.

In a 2008 interview, Bachmann said of Barton, “I’ve probably been on four of his Spiritual Heritage tours at the Capitol, and the staff knows, whenever David’s going to be in town doing one, if I can get over there, I want to go because I learn something new every time I’m going through one of his tours. He’s a treasure for our nation.”

The classes will be a part of the new Constitutional Conservative Caucus that Bachmann intends to start. It would be separate from the Tea Party Caucus that she founded in the House earlier this year.

“Scholars such as David Barton, members of the media who cherish [the founding] principles such as [Fox News host] Sean Hannity, honorable commentators such as Judge [Andrew] Napolitano, honorable judges and justices, and leading legal minds will and have been invited to speak,” Brooke Bialke, Bachmann’s deputy chief of staff, told AOL News. “Topics ranging from the commerce clause to the intersection of constitutional principles with daily concerns such as Medicare will be covered.”

Andy Birkey reports for The Minnesota Independent.

Two Minnesota pastors say they will endorse political candidates from the pulpit this Sunday, in direct defiance of federal law that prohibits such politicking at tax-exempt churches: Brad Brandon of Berean Bible Baptist Church in Hastings announced his intentions on his KKMS radio show earlier this week, while Greg Stone of Jesus Assembly of God in St. Peter outlined his plans on Facebook. Stone writes that, unlike most of his sermons, this Sunday’s won’t be available as a podcast. Brandon taunts the “liberal media” to file an IRS complaint against his church. “Do it out of hatred for me,” he urged.

“I am not going to stop my pursuit of taking on the IRS,” Brandon told listeners on Tuesday. “Somebody has to stand up and fight, so I guess it might as well be me. So on October 17, ladies and gentlemen, I am continuing making this the day. I will endorse the candidates here in the state of Minnesota.”

He added, “I’m the only guy, so I’m not scared to do it. I’m the righteous that is bold as the lion.”

And why’s he doing it? The gays, naturally:

Pastor Brandon said his decision to endorse conservative candidates for office has to do with homosexuality.

“At what point does our responsibility to God trump our responsibility to the government? That’s my question. At what point does that take place? And I have decided that the point is now,” said Brandon. “Because we have hate crimes out there involving speaking out against homosexuality.”

Hop on over to The Minnesota Independent for the full story.

Today, they report that this same group, the Iowa Family Policy Center, has received over $3 million in federal funding.

Between 2004 and 2009 the politically influential Christian organization Iowa Family Policy Center (IFPC) received more than $3 million in federal grants through two subsidiaries of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. [...]

The money IFPC receives apparently goes to a marriage-counseling program called Marriage Matters, which offers couples weekends along with marriage and pre-marital mentoring.

In fact, Bush had refused to sign exactly that statement in the past, saying that the federal government could not sign a statement that would bind the United States on matters that fall under state jurisdiction. Never mind that the federal government has legislated in all sorts of other areas of civil rights, such as race, gender and age discrimination.

In refusing to sign the statement, reports JURIST, the United States was in some unusual company: China, Russia, members of the Islamic Conference, and the Roman Catholic Church.

For Obama, signing the U.N. statement is just the beginning. He’ll have to deal with a host of other issues related to sexual orientation, including the military’s antiquated “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy; the federal government’s refusal to pay employment benefits for the same-sex partners of federal employees (which Obama has said he supports, but requires repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act); and an immigration law that denies access to the United States for foreign same-sex partners of U.S. citizens.

From Playbook:

BREAKING: The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who became the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop in 2003 and last year entered into a civil union with his gay partner, will deliver the invocation for Sunday’s kickoff inaugural event on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with President-elect Obama in attendance. The event is free and open to the public.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Rick Warren!

Oh, by the way, according to the transition, the move has absolutely nothing to do with Rick Warren. Also from Playbook:

An Obama source: ‘Robinson was in the plans before the complaints about Rick Warren. Many skeptics will read this as a direct reaction to the Warren criticism – but it’s just not so.’

No word yet on whether Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s witch-hunting pastor is planning to come to Washington to protect Obama from black magic.