We at Truth Wins Out enjoy mocking Peter LaBarbera, better known as Porno Pete, as he is a ridiculous figurehead for an anti-gay movement that is dying in America faster than you can say, “How are assless chaps a ‘business expense,’ Pete?” Even in his own movement, he is viewed as an embarrassment, better relegated to the sidelines. But unfortunately, people like Peter and Scott Lively are often viewed as experts in the Third World, where poverty and lack of access to education make the LGBT community ripe for scapegoating. So it is that we must note that Peter has traveled to Jamaica in order to further enhance the already violent anti-LGBT hatred for which the nation is well known.
Just this year, a gay man was stabbed to death, after which his home was set on fire while the body was inside. The article also reports that the week prior, a mob tried to attack a man they perceived as gay. The month before, a gender-nonconforming teen was “chopped and stabbed” to death. Those are just incidents that happened between July and September of this year. In 2006, Time Magazine labeled Jamaica “the most homophobic place on earth,” and for good reason. I could spend hours linking and chronicling the pervasive culture of anti-LGBT violence that characterizes the nation, but in the interest of time, I will simply link to this Google search for “Jamaica + anti-gay + violence,” which brought up 254,000 results.
As ignorant and small-minded as he is, there is very little chance Porno Pete is unaware of these facts. Indeed, by agreeing to travel to Jamaica under these conditions, he shows that any claims that his work is motivated by Christian love are simply lies. It is obvious, in his gleeful post on the subject, that his work is inspired by nothing more than purely ignorant hatred for LGBT people.
Look how excited he is:
Folks, I was blessed and energized by my trip to Jamaica, in support of a wonderful conference put on by Christians working under the name Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society .
[…]
I loved the moral clarity of the Jamaican family advocates whom I met. Contrast that with the U.S. State Department and the European Union (EU), which along with the U.N. are backing the country’s main LGBT group, J-FLAG.
You’ve got to love the moral clarity of people for whom perpetrating anti-gay violence is de rigueur, and who turn a blind eye to the fruits (dead bodies) of the trees they seed.
My message to the the Jamaicans was that the United States government has nothing to teach you about sexual morality but you, Jamaicans, have a lot to teach us.
If we could only go back to being blind, uneducated, hateful and murderous toward people we don’t understand, but whom we yet believe, because of our third-grade reading of an ancient book, are disgusting reprobates deserving of hell. Keep telling us why the SPLC was wrong to classify Americans For Truth as a hate group, Porno Pete.
We should support the Jamaican Christian majority and expose the new US/EU imperialism that uses foreign aid to undermine biblical morality in sovereign nations.
We should appropriately mock white fundamentalist Christians when they concern troll Third World nations about “US/EU Imperialism.”
Porno Pete gave a quote to the Gleaner, one of Jamaica’s major newspapers, about why he was there:
Peter LaBarbera, president of the Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), in the United States of America (US), has encouraged Jamaicans to be grounded in their Christian beliefs and not to be lured by other countries in repealing the buggery law.
“The United States has no business lecturing anybody about sexual morality. America has rampant abortions, rampant promiscuity, and I stand wholeheartedly with Jamaicans and encourage you all to hold to your beliefs, ” LaBarbera told The Gleaner.
LaBarbera made the comments Saturday following The Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society International Human Rights conference at the Jamaica Conference Centre in downtown Kingston.
“We are all watching Jamaica to see what happens [regarding the buggery law], and I believe if Jamaica can stand up and not bow to the pressure, you can be an example to the world. There is no need to follow anybody,” LaBarbera said.
Jamaica will be an example to the world! You can deny people the right to be who they are, to privacy, to basic human rights, and other Third World nations will follow, guaranteeing that LGBT people around the world are routinely discriminated against, attacked and murdered simply for being who they are! You can deny all the science surrounding sexual orientation, knowing that keeping your societies ignorant about human sexuality preserves your ability to royally fuck your own people over continually and brutally, all while scapegoating LGBT people as the cause of your ills, and White Christian Supremacists from America, who have been completely rejected by their own society, will hand you the weapon!
Is that it, Porno Pete, or are we completely missing something?
UPDATE: Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin took a bit of a different tack with this, focusing specifically on the fact that the cause Peter is advocating for is keeping the buggery law on the books:
the “if-you-take-down-this-law” in question is the buggery law, the law that threatens gay and lesbian Jamaicans with lengthy prison terms, and which, by that very threat, gives homophobes and police open license to assault LGBT Jamaicans, to rape lesbians, to murder gay men and women in their homes, on the streets, in the stores, or wherever else they find them, and to call on others to do the same or to explain it away. And why not assault them? What can they do? Go to the police and risk arrest and imprisonment? The very same police which is, in some cases either assaulting or standing by while others assault them.
Peter’s actions encourage the vigilantes who are already active in harming LGBT people, and Jim points out that just for good measure, Porno Pete told the unwitting crowd that he’s working on a book on the connection between gay activism and pedophilia. As we all know, that is a completely discredited lie, but to Jamaicans looking for, as Jim puts it, “red meat,” there’s nothing like the threat of harming kids to get people started spilling blood, is there?
Well done, Porno Pete.
UPDATE II: Lester Feder of Buzzfeed was at the conference and provides many more details about what transpired there:
“Homosexuals are made, they’re not born,” LaBarbera said to applause, while telling stories of people he said had stopped being gay or transgender thanks to Christian conversion. “The dirty little secret that the media and homosexual activists are desperate — desperate — to squelch is that people are coming out of homosexuality every day. This is the work of God, this is the work of Jesus.”
Therefore we should imprison those who refuse to submit to Fundamentalist Christian Reeducation Camp!
Feder also revealed that the UK activist present, Andrea Minichiello Williams, is approximately as weird as Porno Pete, as she blamed Tom Daley’s same-sex relationship on the loss of his father:
She made the case that it is a “big lie” that homosexuality is inborn, arguing instead it is caused by environmental factors like “the lack of the father” and “sometimes a level of abuse.” She illustrated her point with the case of 19-year-old British diver Tom Daley and his reported relationship with American screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.
Daley, she said, who is “loved by all the girls and had girlfriends,” had “lost his father to cancer just a few years ago and he’s just come out on YouTube that he’s in a relationship with a man, that man is 39, a leading gay activist in the States.”
Horrifically Rude Madam, Tom Daley’s father died two years ago. If you are actually thinking that people are stupid enough to believe that a person can go through something painful — which you are, by the way, capitalizing on, because you are a rude woman — and then within the space of two years, magically become gay, then you are fit to share a stage with Porno Pete.
Be sure to read Lester’s whole piece.
