FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
American Extremist Group Sees Obama As a Larger Threat than Russia’s Putin
CHICAGO – Truth Wins Out harshly condemned the World Congress of Families (WCF) today for supporting Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea region. While most Americans are 
staunchly opposed to Russia’s destabilizing actions, this virulently right wing organization, based in Rockford, IL is serving as Vladimir Putin’s chief American cheerleader. By doing so, the group is cynically selling out American interests for cold hard Russian cash and propping up the Russian police state, says TWO.
In a delusional and highly offensive op-ed published online in American Thinker today, “Putin Doesn’t Threaten Our National Security, Obama Does,” World Congress of Families spokesperson Don Feder enthusiastically defended the military actions taken by Russia, while portraying Obama as a threat.
“In supporting Russia’s illegal invasion of the Crimea, The World Congress of Families has revealed how radical and out of touch it truly is,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “This group has cynically sold out American interests for cold hard Russian cash and has abandoned freedom and democracy in its zeal to promote a dangerous theocratic agenda.”
In Feder’s gay bashing op-ed, he shamelessly serves as a Russian apologist and uses the occasion to go on an anti-Obama rant. According to Feder’s tendentious and bizarre interpretation of the conflict:
Putin is a power player who cares more about Russia’s national interests, and Russian minorities in his near abroad, than in that mythical force known as world opinion. Would that [SIC] America had a president who cared more about our interests than in promoting globalism and the left’s social agenda.
The Russian-backed government in Kiev came to power democratically, but was ousted by the Maidan mob. We’re told that the interim government is pro-Western and pro-EU.
When Reagan was president, the expression pro-Western meant something. It meant pro-representative government, pro-human rights and pro-Western (Judeo-Christian) values.
Today, it means a willingness to accept same-sex “marriage,” abortion on demand, an anti-religion ethos – the agenda of the EU’s cultural commissars — and the economic dictates of the Brussels bureaucracy.
The WCF’s interests in Moscow may come from the fact that Russian billionaires, Vladimir Yakunin, CEO of Rusian Railways, and Konstantin Malofeev, founder of Marshall Capital, heavily subsidize the organization. The WCF – which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a hate group — played a key role in Russia’s unconscionable anti-gay crackdown. On Sept. 10, the World Congress of Families will bring 5000 religious extremists to meet in the Kremlin.
“The World Congress of Families should cancel its Kremlin conference and stop cheerleading one of the world’s greatest enemies of freedom,” said Truth Wins Out’s Besen. “It is deplorable how WCF has supported tyranny and abandoned core American ideals of liberty, justice, and equality.”
Mother Jones magazine wrote about the influence this American organization has in Russia and other nations:
WCF has lent its support to anti-gay politics elsewhere in Eastern Europe—Serbia, Lithuania, Romania—but it has had its biggest and most notable successes in Russia. Indeed, the rise of anti-gay laws in Russia has mirrored, almost perfectly, the rise of WCF’s work in the country, with 13 new anti-gay laws passed since [WCF’s Managing Director Larry] Jacobs first traveled there. When I ask Jacobs if WCF’s work has contributed to this pattern, he laughs and says, “Yes, I think that is accurate.”
But the fight is not just about what happens in Moscow. With same-sex marriage now legal in 16 American states and counting, elements of the US religious right have come to see Russia as a redoubt in a global battle against homosexuality. “The Russians,” Jacobs has said, “might be the Christian saviors of the world.”
A bill to separate gay parents from their children, shelved as the Olympics drew closer, is widely expected to be reintroduced after the world’s gaze moves on.
Truth Wins Out (TWO) is a non-profit organization that works to demolish the very foundation of anti-gay prejudice. Our philosophy is simple: We attack the underpinnings of homophobia by debunking harmful lies, discrediting hateful myths, and countering anti-gay organizations. By chipping away at the underlying ignorance that fuels anti-LGBT attitudes, we can ultimately win our fight for fairness and achieve full equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people worldwide.
