This is an open letter to both the Chicago Phoenix, an online “LGBT” news source, and the homosexual activist organization Equality Illinois in response to defamatory and unsubstantiated statements made by Bernard Cherkasov, CEO of Equality Illinois, and appearing in articles written by Katherine Iorio and Tony Merevick about the East Aurora High School gender confusion policy.

Both Iorio and Merevick quote Cherkasov as saying that IFI spreads “‘venomous lies,'” and according to Merevick, Cherkasov also said that  “‘The Illinois Family Institute, designated a ‘hate group’ for its Nazi and racist hate speech, is generating the hate and the heat.'”

The “hate group” designation comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which created the hate groups list, decided which groups they wanted on it, and then several years later manufactured loosey goosey criteria that would justify their inclusion of groups they hate on their hate groups list.

If Cherkasov is going to make defamatory public claims like these, he has an ethical obligation to provide clear evidence from our website to support them. 

And if Iorio and Merevick are going to quote such defamatory claims, they have an ethical obligation to ask for his evidence, that is to say, quotes from IFI, to support them. 

We have never employed “Nazi and racist hate speech,” (or, for the record, any other kind of hate speech).  Nor do we “spew venomous lies.”

If Mr. Cherkasov cannot provide textual evidence from our website that proves that we have employed “Nazi and racist hate speech,” or disseminated lies (i.e. deliberate and known falsehoods), then Cherkasov, Iorio, and Merevick owe us a public apology. 

Point of clarity: What IFI consistently claims is that we believe volitional homosexual acts are not moral acts and that crossdressing and elective amputations of healthy body parts are not moral acts. Expressions of belief about what constitutes immoral behavior do not constitute hatred of persons. If Cherkasov were to apply consistently the principle that he and the ethically impoverished and intellectually vacuous* Southern Poverty Law Center hold, which is that IFI’s moral claims about volitional acts constitute hatred of persons, then anyone who expresses any belief about what constitutes immoral behavior would have to be considered guilty of hating persons. 

The reality is that most people in this diverse United States are fully capable of tolerating, delighting in the company of, and even loving those whose beliefs, values, attractions, and behavioral choices they find wrongheaded. Most of us do it everyday. Cherkasov and the SPLC ought not project on to others their own inability to love and treat civilly those with whom they disagree. Nor should they make vicious, unsubstantiated, and false statements about them.

* In other articles, I have provided ample textual evidence for my claim that the SPLC is ethically impoverished and intellectually vacuous.

For those who despite all evidence to the contrary still believe that the bullying amendment that is pending in the Illinois Senate is centrally about stopping bullying, please read what one of Illinois’ chief homosexual activists organizations, Equality Illinois, recently sent out to its devotees:

SAFE SCHOOLS – AMENDMENT SUBMITTED FOR ANTI-BULLYING LEGISLATION

Thanks to the work of Representative Kelly Cassidy and broad Prevent School Violence Coalition, which includes groups like Equality Illinois, Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, ACLU of Illinois, among others, bill passed the House and is now going to State Senate.

Equality Illinois is a homosexual activist organization. The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance is a homosexual activist organization that was once part of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). The ACLU is an organization as committed to normalizing homosexuality and gender confusion as GLSEN, Equality Illinois, and the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance.  And State Representative Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago) is openly homosexual.

Equality Illinois also made clear that HB 5290 is unnecessary: “House Bill 5290 modifies current law by integrating the specific recommendations of the Illinois School Bullying Prevention Task Force.” HB 5290 restates the recommendations created by the very liberal Bullying Prevention Task Force. Those recommendations are easily available on the Illinois State Board of Education website for any school district that feels it needs further guidance.

Cassidy stated that this additional law is needed because 3 school districts (out of over 900) have no policy and 20 do not have “adequate” bullying policy. What she failed to make clear during floor debates is that the 3 school districts that don’t have bullying policy are already in violation of existing law, so HB 5290 is unnecessary.

Furthermore, HB 5290, which mandates nothing, would do nothing about the 20 school districts that have — in Cassidy’s view — inadequate policy. If these 20 districts have bullying policy, they are in compliance with existing law.

To illustrate that “anti-bullying” programs that address homosexuality or gender confusion (aka “gender identity” or “gender expression”) are centrally about promoting “progressive” notions about homosexuality, just replace “sexual orientation” (a Leftist rhetorical creation) with another condition constituted by subjective feelings and volitional sexual acts.

Everyone knows that teenage girls who are promiscuous are often called ugly names or worse. No decent person wants promiscuous girls bullied, so why don’t anti-bullying laws and school policies include promiscuity in their lists of conditions for which students may not be bullied?  Why don’t teachers show films in which promiscuity is portrayed positively?  Why don’t schools invite speakers who affirm a sexually promiscuous identity to come talk to students about how bad it felt to be bullied in high school for their promiscuity?  Why don’t they have “youth programming” in which promiscuity is affirmed? Why don’t teachers have students read and perform plays in which promiscuity is celebrated and disapproval of it is portrayed as ignorant, bigoted, hateful, provincialism — all in the service of ending bullying?

Or replace “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” with polyamory?  What if some students are bullied because either they or their “parents” identify as polyamorists? Will schools have anti-bullying “youth programming” in which polyamorous unions are  portrayed as morally equivalent to families headed by two people?  Mary Jo Merrick-Lockett, a teacher in a Minneapolis high school that has recently been at the forefront of a national bullying campaign to malign and sue the district into ideological submission to the great and powerful pro-homosexual lobby had this to say:

If you can’t talk about [homosexuality] in any context, which is how teachers interpret district policies, kids internalize that to mean that being gay must be so shameful and wrong. And that has created a climate of fear and repression and harassment.

Will teachers assert that silence on the issue of polyamory creates a climate of harassment for polyamorists? Do teachers believe that internalizing the belief that polyamory is wrong is damaging to students?

What if a student is bullied because her parents are siblings in a committed, loving incestuous relationship? Will public school administrators treat adult consensual incest exactly as they are treating homosexuality and gender confusion — all in the service of ending bullying?

We all know the answer to these questions. Schools would never have students read plays, novels, and magazine articles; or watch films; or perform plays; or attend “youth programming” sessions; or listen to invited speakers that affirm promiscuity, adult consensual incest, or polyamory — not even to end bullying. The reason that lawmakers wouldn’t seek such remedies and administrators would not permit them is that they would not want to affirm something as positive that they believe is immoral — not even to end bullying.  And this is the point: public schools are both implicitly and explicitly taking sides in the public debate about the nature and morality of homosexuality.

Some will take offense at my comparison of homosexuality to polyamory or adult consensual incest because — they argue — those conditions are immoral and homosexuality is not. But that is precisely the unsettled debate. The moral beliefs of homosexuals and their ideological allies who oppressively control public schools are just that: beliefs, assumptions, moral propositions — not facts.

All the various organizations committed to using public schools to normalize homosexuality are trying to make the case that opposition to their anti-bullying laws, policies, and programs constitutes support for bullying, and our lawmakers are falling for it. Our lawmakers are quaking in their boots because they know homosexuals will call them supporters of bullying if they don’t toe the pro-homosexual ideological line. Allowing their fear to control their actions is destructive and embarrassing. 

The truth is it is entirely possible to oppose bullying without mentioning every possible condition for which students may be bullied, without “youth programming,” and without duplicative non-mandatory laws that will before long be made mandatory.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to contact your senator and urge him/her to oppose this unnecessary bullying bill.

Help expand our reach by forwarding this email to like-minded family and friends.

Click HERE to make a donation to the Illinois Family Institute.

It would behoove conservative Illinoisans to hear from the proverbial horse’s mouth exactly what homosexual activists are pursuing here in Illinois.

Below is a recent email sent by Illinois’ most influential and destructive homosexual activist organization, Equality Illinois, to its subscribers (all emphases added):

Dear *******,

We value your support of Equality Illinois, and we wanted to give you a briefing on our aggressive lobbying efforts in Springfield.

Equality Illinois’ four-person advocacy team was in the State Capitol every day of the fall legislative veto session. Our Policy Director Randy Hannig, our lobbyists, and I held meetings with political leaders, dozens of State Senators and Representatives from both parties, and legislative leadership staff.

IMPLEMENTING CIVIL UNIONS. Among our lead items, we focused on the full implementation of the civil union law. We addressed with lawmakers patterns of glitches that civil union couples are experiencing in Illinois, and stressed the importance of ensuring that same-sex couples receive all the rights and protections that were previously denied to them – just as the lawmakers have intended. We asked every lawmaker – Republican and Democrat alike – about the feedback they hear on civil unions, and we are so proud that everyone reported only positive experiences.

DEFENDING OUR RIGHTS. Every legislative session, our opponents attempt to gut our hard-won rights. This veto session was no exception. We met with lawmakers to stress the harms of Senate Bill 2494, introduced by State Sen Kyle McCarter, which would allow publicly-funded child welfare agencies to reject perfectly qualified prospective same-sex parents using any religious pretext. No child welfare agency should be allowed to take public funds to care for the children, but then refuse to comply with the state’s best-interests-of-the-child standard. This is the FOURTH such attempt this year, and we defeated the previous three efforts. Our opponents are working to force a procedural maneuver to force the bill onto the floor for a vote, and we worked to ensure that their sneaky tactics failed.

FOCUSING ON FULL EQUALITY. The EQIL team also strategized with legislative allies about moving towards full equality. We’ve learned from our work that workplace legal protections have not translated to full workplace equality for LGBT people. And relationship recognition through civil unions leaves many gaps in reaching equal protection. To that end, we also held strategic planning meetings with our stakeholders, donors, and allies.

Furthermore, we met with executive branch officials and local leaders to discuss patterns of homophobic and transphobic discrimination, fiscal policy and budget crisis impact on the lives of LGBT individuals across the state, and expansion of our equality work across central Illinois. We are so grateful to Department of Human Rights Director Rocco Clapps, State Treasurer Dan Rutherford, and Springfield Alderman Cory Jobe for their leadership and commitment. You’d be pleased to know that our organizational partners at the ACLU of Illinois and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago were on the ground in Springfield also fighting for our rights.

The legislature will reconvene for a special session after Thanksgiving to discuss unresolved budget issues and will then adjourn until the start of the regular legislative session in 2012.

Our lawmakers recessed, but our work must go on. In fact, with legislators now back in their districts, we are going to be traveling to their field offices to organize constituent visits and continue to address our issues. Can we count on you, *******, to help us move forward with our assertive agenda? Please support our efforts now by making a contribution.

We must protect the rights we have achieved while we continue to fight for fairness and full protection of LGBT Illinoisans and our families. We cannot do our work without your support. Please show your support of our work now. And remember to forward this message to at least 5 of your friends or family members.

Let’s keep moving forward!

Very truly yours,

Bernard Cherkasov
Chief Executive Officer, Equality Illinois

Some comments on this troubling letter:

1. The concept of equality is grossly abused by homosexual activists. The central question regarding equality is, “To what conditions does the concept of equality apply?” Equality applies legitimately to only those conditions that are immutable* and not defined or constituted by volitional behaviors that are legitimate objects of moral evaluation. Society is not morally obligated to treat all conditions constituted by subjective attractions, impulses, or desires and by volitional behaviors as equal. Indeed, societies that refuse to make distinctions between moral and immoral behaviors will not survive, let alone flourish. Society ought not treat homosexuality and cross-dressing as equal to heterosexuality.

Moreover, those who identify as homosexual have equal access to marriage. They have the legal right to marry. They simply do not have the right to declare that marriage is no longer a sexually complementary institution. Similarly, polyamorists do not have the right to declare that marriage is no longer a binary institution. And adult siblings who are in love do not have the right to declare that blood kinship is irrelevant to marriage.

2. When Equality Illinois’ CEO, Bernard Cherkasov, refers to child welfare agencies taking public funds while refusing “to comply with the state’s best-interests-of-the-child standard,” he’s sneakily avoiding mentioning that the child welfare agencies to which he’s referring are the religious child welfare agencies that the state asked to partner with many years ago. Cherkasov also failed to mention that during floor debates on the “Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act,” the bill’s sponsor, Senator David Koehler, specifically stated that the freedom of religious child welfare agencies would be protected.

3. Conservatives are endlessly duped by the deliberate deceit of homosexual activists. Cherkasov bleats out the “public money” canard when in reality, homosexual activists will eventually challenge the right of religious child welfare organizations to refuse to place children with homosexuals even in the case of private adoptions in which no public money is involved. This is already the case in New York.

4. Equality Illinois dismisses the deeply held religious convictions and religious liberty of organizations like Catholic Charities and the Evangelical Child and Family Agency as “religious pretexts.”

5. Equality Illinois believes that public schools in Illinois do not demonstrate an “appropriate level of affirmation of LGBT and questioning youths….Unfortunately, many administrators within schools…have not ensured open affirmation of LGBT students and have not provided resources specifically tailored to the needs of those students.”

6. Equality Illinois thinks that gender is created in the mind and cross-dressing is moral. Conversely, they think that believing gender is an objective biological fact that cannot be changed and believing cross-dressing is immoral constitute the invented disorder “transphobia.”

7. Cherkasov states that Equality Illinois asked every Republican lawmaker about the feedback they received on the civil union law and that every Republican lawmaker reported only positive “experiences.” That’s an astonishing claim. Through IFI alone, thousands of Illinoisans have voiced their opposition to the civil union law to their lawmakers. Either our Republican lawmakers are lying to Equality Illinois or Cherkasov is lying to Equality Illinois’ subscribers.

7. State Treasurer Dan Rutherford, beloved by homosexual activists in Illinois, is a former Republican state representative and state senator, and the only GOP state senator in Illinois to vote for the so-called “Civil Union” law.

8. Department of Human Rights Director, Rocco Clapps, to whom Equality Illinois is also deeply grateful, served on the Illinois State Board of Education’s “anti-bullying” task force, which created recommendations on how public schools should implement Illinois’ disastrous “enumerated” anti-bullying law.

9. Equality Illinois’ policy director/lobbyist, Randy Hannig, used to work for House Speaker Michael Madigan and is the son of former State Representative and current Illinois Department of Transportation Director, Gary Hannig.

Illinoisans, if you value your parental and speech rights and religious liberty, get educated on issues related to homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder and demand that your lawmakers do likewise. Speak courageously in the public square and demand that your lawmakers do likewise. Act as if your convictions are true and good — because they are.

*Although many consider religious belief and practice to be mutable matters of choice, religious liberty is a special category unto itself and is the central liberty upon which this country was founded. In addition, religious practice is wholly distinct from sexual practice. While people may disagree about what constitutes a true religion, religious differences are not thought to be moral errors in the same way that society views, for example, polyamory as a moral error and not worthy of legal recognition.