Happy International Day Against Homophobia

This has been known about for a few years now but here, courtesy of Rabble, is a reminder of the speech that Darrell Reid, former president of Focus On The Family Canada and now Harper's deputy chief of staff, gave in Singapore at a 2003 Focus On The Family seminar. Speaking as a historian, Darrell warned about the correlation between protection of gay rights and the rise of Hiltler and the Nazi party in the 30's :

... in a way I'm ashamed and sorry to be standing before you as a Canadian and telling you this, but my reason for doing so ...is that perhaps our present will never be your future.

There's a very narrow definition of religious rights (in Canada) ... our legal people, our media, our academic elite don't care what you believe (against same sex rights), they just don't want you to talk about it to anybody or act upon it. Now I'm a historian ... the best parallel that I can think of historically is in Germany in the 1930s, as the rise of the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler came to power. You see, Adolf Hitler and his friends didn't care what you believed, you only became dangerous when you talked to somebody else about it, or you acted on it. I believe the same rational is taking place (in Canada.)"

Happy International Day Against Homophobia, Darrel. Here ya go. Try not to eat it all at once this time.






And a very special Happy International Day Against Homophobia greeting to Ratso ,who four days ago "condemned gay marriage and abortion as 'among the most insidious and dangerous challenges' to society."

The Amway Blackwater Focus on the Family Tree

Bill Berkowitz reports that Amway is getting ready to make a comeback.
What superb timing.
Just as we are getting used to the idea that much of the financial markets is one giant ponzi scheme, a company roughly based on the pyramid chain letter is set to rebuild its brand : a multi-level marketing scheme based on selling cleaning products to yourself while buying motivational tapes from the person up the chain who talked you into it.

Don't sneer. Amway made over $7-billion in 2007, having exported 80% of its business abroad to China, India, and Russia - where presumably a whole new batch of "distributors" is out looking around for people willing to buy their motivational tapes.
It's all about the networking.
Berkowitz reminds us of Amway's own networks and Muckety provides a nice interactive family tree with many more links than I've pillaged here :

• Amway co-founder Richard DeVos was chair of the Republican National Committee and former chair of the Council for National Policy.
• His son Dick DeVos, billionaire former president of Amway, is married to Betsy DeVos, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and founder of the National Right To Life Committee.
• Betsy is the older sister of Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA.
• Betsy and Erik's mom, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, is a director of the Council for National Policy along with Grover Norquist and Paul Weyrich and FotF's James Dobson, and a board member of Focus on the Family herself.

As Amway co-CEO Doug DeVos put it : "We thought, well, if we’re going to build a brand, build the brand that everybody knows already."

Fun fact : While the Mormons took the brunt of the negative coverage for their anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 campaign in California, the Colorado Independent reports that our Focus on the Family tree pumped more than six times as much as the Mormon church did into it via the Protect Marriage campaign - $1.25 million .
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Cross-posted at Creekside