The Public Eye - Summer 2010 Edition

EYES RIGHT
Radio Host Gives Lousy Advice to LBGT Youth

The call-in show Dawson McAllister Live, which provides advice to young people who have questions about addiction, eating disorders, parents, sexuality, and other issues, airs on Sunday nights on more than 160 radio stations nationwide, including on Boston’s popular KISS-108. On April 10, Greg Kimball, an openly gay, 22-year-old college student, called the show because, he told the Boston, Massachusetts, LGBT weekly Bay Windows, as a fan, he was curious about how the host would deal with a gay caller. Posing as a sixteen-year-old questioning his sexuality, Kimball was advised to contact Exodus International, a Christian organization that claims it can “reverse” homosexuality through prayer and therapy.

“My jaw hit the floor,” said Kimball. “How many gay or questioning youth has [McAllister] hurt? How many have cut themselves or run away from home or killed themselves or lived a life of lies and suppressing who they are because of his advice? It’s sickening.”

Kimball said that an advisor off the air told him that homosexuality is a sin that is as bad as murder.

"The reason why God does not want us to be gay is if everybody was gay there’d just be two people in the whole world,” the adviser said. “If Adam and Eve were gay, that’d be all there’s be. That’s why He made women and He made men.”

Although McAllister does not identify himself as a right-wing Christian on his radio show, his identity is clear on his website, www.dmlive.com. He lists as “partners” several pregnancy “crisis centers,” which steer girls away from abortion and reproductive health services, as well as Christian-based addiction-recovery websites. After protests from the LGBT community, McAllister removed Exodus from his website. Exodus immediately released a statement expressing its “distress” that McAllister had yielded to pressure from LGBT activists and Clear Channel, which produces the show.

LGBT callers are now referred to Focus on the Family—hardly an improvement.

“KISS 108 should immediately sever its relationship with the McAllister show to avoid aiding and abetting these homophobic proselytizers,” said Arline Isaacson, the co-chair of the Massachustts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus. “It is cruel to counsel LGBT youth in this fashion. It’s a form of ‘therapeutic bullying’ that would definitely traumatize many kids and possibly cause long term damage to some.”

What Harry Reid Is Up Against

Sharon Angle, the teaparty-endorsed Nevada Republican who is challenging Senator Harry Reid, belonged to the Christian conservative, libertarian-style Independent American Party for seven years during the 1990s, until joining the Republican Party in 1997 in order to make a credible run for statewide office. The Independent American Party supports passage of a Liberty Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that, according to Talking Points Memo (TPM.com), aimed to “compel the federal government to halt its unconstitutional programs and wasteful expenditures such as foreign aid and welfare corruption. It will prohibit the financing of the New World Order with American taxes.

” The party also opposes what it calls the “debt-money system” and the “Marxist graduated income tax.”

The fringe party placed a sixteen-page insert in the state’s newspapers in 1994 that portrayed so-called sodomites as “child molesting, HIV-carrying, Hell-bound freaks,” according to TPM. The insert also included an article claiming that HIV lived in water and could be transmitted in swimming pools.

“Angle’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about her time in the party,” said TPM.

Angle may be a Scientologist, according to her opponent, Sue Lowden, who published ads to that effect during the Republican primary. Lowden pointed to Angle’s promotion of a Scientologist-supported proposal that would subject drug-addicted prisoners to cold-turkey withdrawal, aided by massages and saunas. Lowden is widely believed to have sealed her loss to Angle when she suggested that healthcare reform was unnecessary and that patients could barter with their doctors, exchanging, say, a chicken for a physical.

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The Public Eye - Summer 2010 Edition

EYES RIGHT Radio Host Gives Lousy Advice to LBGT Youth

What Harry Reid Is Up Against

Summer 2010 Edition:

EYES RIGHT
Radio Host Gives Lousy Advice to LBGT Youth