Four Gay Men Sue 'Ex-Gay' Organization JONAH, Talk About the Lawsuit with CNN: VIDEO

Four gay men sued the NJ "ex-gay" organization JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives to Healing) yesterday, the AP reports:

Three of the men at the news conference are Jewish, and the fourth is a Mormon now living in Salt Lake City who was a college student in New York when he signed up for the services.

Speaking for the men at Tuesday’s news conference were attorneys from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala.-based civil rights organization.

“JONAH profits off of shameful and dangerous attempts to fix something that isn’t broken,” said Christine P. Sun, the center’s deputy legal director. “Despite the consensus of mainstream professional organizations that conversion therapy doesn’t work, this racket continues to scam vulnerable gay men and lesbians out of thousands of dollars and inflicts significant harm on them.”

CNN adds:

Bruck and three male plaintiffs contend they were defrauded by JONAH's claim that "being gay is a mental disorder" that could be reversed by conversion therapy -- "a position rejected by the American Psychiatric Association four decades ago," the lawsuit said.

The therapy, which can cost up to $10,000 a year, put them at risk of "depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior," while giving them no benefits, the suit said.

Jo Bruck, Sheldon's mother, and Bella Levin, the mother of plaintiff Chaim Levin, are also plaintiffs because they paid for their sons' conversion therapy and the counseling the suit said they needed to recover from it.

The conversion therapy techniques included having them strip naked in group sessions, cuddling and intimate holding of others of the same-sex, violently beating an effigy of their mothers with a tennis racket, visiting bath houses "in order to be nude with father figures," and being "subjected to ridicule as 'faggots' and 'homos' in mock locker room scenarios," the suit said.

Watch CNN speak with plaintiff Michael Ferguson and SPLC's Sun, AFTER THE JUMP...

Gay Couple Sues Virginia Conservative Eugene Delgaudio Over Stolen Wedding Photo

The Southern Poverty Law Center, on behalf of Brian Edwards and Tom Privitere, a gay NJ couple, is filing a federal lawsuit against Public Advocate of the United States, the conservative non-profit organization led by Loudoun County Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio.

Delgaudio's group stole the couple's wedding photo for use in an anti-gay political mailing, the AP reports:

The photo was used in mailers in a June primary election involving Sen. Jean White, one of a handful of Republicans who supported a civil unions bill that was blocked in the state House. The mailer, which replaced the Manhattan skyline with a snowy background, read: “State Senator Jean White’s Idea of ‘Family Values?’”

White lost the primary against a fellow Republican in a northwestern Colorado district.

Ypu may recall some of Delgaudio's past antics. He fought tooth and nail against an anti-discrimination ordinance in Loudon County, labeling transgender people "it" and "real life Tootsies" and has had an ongoing campaign against the Student Non-Discrimination Act which included an email sent out by the Weekly Standard warning people that federal anti-bullying legislation is a secret plan to "indoctrinate" children with "homosexual propaganda".

Wayne Besen: A Gunman's 'Associate'? A 'Murderous Homosexual'?

Getting Wayne Besen off The O'Reilly Factor has, in the past 48 hours, become an obsession on the anti-gay right. Andrew Belonsky wrote about its first stirrings on Thursday, when several ex-gay groups jointly published a press release directed at FOX News, the nastiest paragraph of which might have been:

We ask the News Corporation, Fox News, and Bill O'Reilly to find more ethical spokespersons for the liberal view of sexuality. In their infamous Washington Post ad accusing FRC of hateful values, Besen and the SPLC claim that "words have consequences."  Yes, they do. And Besen's may lead to violence.

Wayne Besen is the founder of Truth Wins Out, and he occasionally appears on television to say nice things about the Southern Poverty Law Center -- the same Southern Poverty Law Center that's labeled the Family Research Center a "hate group" (partially because the FRC has stumped for legislation legalizing the execution of "repeat homosexual offenders" in Uganda), and who, therefore, are supposedly responsible for last week's non-fatal shooting of an FRC security guard by a crazyperson.

Now, the anti-Besenites have become totally unglued. They've penned a petition, bound for FOX News and signed by such headlining homophobes as Scott Lively, Matt Barber, Matt Staver, and Peter LaBarbera, in which they accuse Besen of being an "associate" of the FRC gunman. They ask readers to sign the petition, and finish off with this PS:

P.S. Thank you for standing with us against anti-Christian violence by murderous homosexuals.  Please forward this free petition widely to your friends!

Even Peter LaBarbera -- even Bryan Fischer -- has never before gone quite so far as to call a famous, non-violent gay activist "murderous." This is usually Fred Phelps's territory.

Wayne Besen responds here.

FOX Affiliate Calls Neo-Nazi Group Patroling Sanford, Florida a 'Civil Rights' Group: VIDEO

Late yesterday, Brandon made note of the National Socialist Movement, one of the largest and most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the United States according to the SPLC, which is patrolling Sanford, Florida in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing,  to protect "white citizens in the area who are concerned for their safety."

Fox Orlando affiliate, WOFL, broadcast a shocking, uncritical report yesterday, calling the neo-Nazis a "civil rights group"

Watch WOFL's report, AFTER THE JUMP...

More on the group's background from Pam Spaulding HERE.

Loudoun County Democrats Call for Resignation of Anti-Gay Hate Group Leader and Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio

Loudoon County, Virginia Democrats on Monday called for Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio’s resignation on Monday following the designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this month of Delgaudio's conservative nonprofit organization, Public Advocate of the United States, as a "hate group".

Evan Macbeth, chairman of the Loudoun County Democratic Committee, said the time has come for Delgaudio, who won his fourth term as supervisor in November, to step down.

 “Loudoun County is no place for hatred and bigotry,” Macbeth said in a statement Monday. “The people of Loudoun deserve much better from their elected leaders than Eugene Delgaudio.”

You may recall that Delgaudio fought tooth and nail against an anti-discrimination ordinance in Loudon County, labeling transgender people "it" and "real life Tootsies" and has had an ongoing campaign against the Student Non-Discrimination Act which included an email sent out by the Weekly Standard warning people that federal anti-bullying legislation is a secret plan to "indoctrinate" children with "homosexual propaganda".

Said Delgaudio in an interview today with the WaPo:

“Now a no-name organization is on [the SPLC] list,. They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when they have to kick the Italian guy...Liberals will always cry when they lose, and they lose every time they come up against me...I think the term anti-gay is wrong, but I’m not going to cry about it. I would categorize [Public Advocate] as pro-family, pro-traditional marriage..."

Southern Poverty Law Center Designates 11 New Anti-Gay Hate Groups in Report on Rise of Extremism

The Southern Poverty Law Center has just issued a new report showing that extremist groups are at record levels. The report also adds 11 groups to the organization's list of designated anti-gay hate groups.

Those groups are:

United Families International, Save California, Sons of Thundr (Faith Baptist Church), You Can Run, But You Cannot Hide, Parents Action League, Jewish Political Action Committee, Mission: America, Windsor Hills Baptist Church, True Light Pentecost Church, Tom Brown Ministries, and Public Advocate of the United States.

SPLC writes:

The SPLC report details the growth of hate groups to a record 1,018 in 2011, up from 1,002 the year before and the latest in a series of increases going back more than a decade. But the dramatic growth came in the Patriot movement, which is composed of armed militias and other conspiracy-minded organizations that see the federal government as their primary enemy. These groups saw their numbers skyrocket for the third straight year in 2011, this time by 55 percent - from 824 in 2010 to 1,274 groups last year. In 2008, just before the Patriot movement took off, there were 149 Patriot groups, a number that metastasized to 512 in 2009.

In all, Patriot groups have increased by 755 percent during the first three years of the Obama administration. Their number has now surpassed - by more than 400 groups - the previous all-time high set in 1996, when the first wave of the militia movement peaked shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead.

...The hate groups listed in this report include neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, Klansmen and black separatists. Other hate groups on the list target LGBT people, Muslims or immigrants, and some specialize in producing racist music or propaganda denying the Holocaust.