The Minnesota Child Protection League’s political arm is hosting a fundraiser on Oct. 30 with two anti-LGBT activists, Dr. Judith Reisman and Dr. Gina Loudon. The duo are well-known in anti-LGBT and conservative Christian circles.
The event, titled, Sexual Radicalism: The New “Normal,” will be held at Emmaus Free Lutheran Church in Bloomington. Reisman will serve as keynote speaker; Loudon will serve as emcee. Tickets range from $40 to $1,000.
Reisman is best known for her crusade against sexual health education. Loudon is best known for her stint as the Tea Party mom on Wife Swap. Both have a huge record of anti-LGBT activism.
Judith Reisman
Dr. Judith Reisman has been fighting the sexual revolution for the last four decades, with the particular focus of her scorn directed toward Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a sex researcher whose body of work has been credited with helping launch that revolution. Her activities and her opinions have become a staple of Minnesota’s anti-LGBT movement. She’s even come to Minnesota to try to block LGBT rights.
Reisman’s ideas are behind much of Minnesota Child Protection League’s anti-LGBT and anti-sex education initiatives.
Barb Anderson, who worked for the Minnesota Family Council for more than a decade and was instrumental in founding the MNCPL, has been touting Reisman’s work for at least 14 years. In 2001, in a letter to the Hutchinson Leader, Anderson wrote in part:
“It took the scholarly work of Dr. Judith Reisman to finally expose the fraudulent work of Dr. Kinsey and the false foundation for comprehensive sex education. Her book “Kinsey, Crimes and Consequences” is a must-read.
Yes, there are answers available about sexuality. If we truly want healthy sexuality for ourselves and our kids, we must reject the Kinsey philosophy, protect the latency period and give clear, truthful and consistent guidelines for sexual behavior that teach abstinence from sexual activity until marriage. The personal and health benefits are priceless.”
In 2006, Anderson defended Reisman in a letter to the editor of ECM Publishers. and she would do so again in 2010.
Anderson and Reisman appear to be friends as evidenced by this email exchange among several religious right leaders. The duo co-presented a 2011 conference called “Our Toxic Culture: Dehumanizing Individuals” which they discussed “The Fed’s push on Schools to Promote Toxic Sexuality: Money and Curriculum.”
MNCPL’s October 30th fundraising event won’t be the first time Reisman has come to Minnesota to block LGBT rights. When the Minnesota Legislature was considering adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the Minnesota Human Rights Act, Reisman was brought in by conservative Christians to testify against it. She recounted her efforts in a 2000 essay. Reisman said she “was called in to try to stop the ‘sexual orientation’ bill introduced by a small clique of Democratic legislators.”
Reisman claimed that the bill would protect pedophiles:
“Minnesota’s statute would have given special rights for ‘age’ and ‘sexual or affectional orientation’ jettisoning parents’ God-given rights in favor of special rights for pedophiles conferred by government.”
She went on to claim that Democrats were trying to legalize sex with children:
To that end, the political party that would normalize “sexual orientation” inevitably normalizes bi/homosexuals, transgendereds, transvestites, zoophiles and all other sexual pathologies cited above, including the most treacherous of them all, pedophiles and pederasts. So, when you vote November 7 remember the covert pedophiles working within the very sympathetic Democratic Party to gain legal access to America’s children! And, remember, you read it here first.
Minnesota’s lawmakers have turned to Reisman for “expert” advice on LGBT youth, pornography, and sexual health education.
When the Safe and Supportive Minnesota Schools Act was up for final passage in the House, Rep. Cindy Pugh, a close associate of MNCPL, cited a visit with Reisman in her diatribe against the anti-bullying bill.
“During the interim, I met a woman, a world renowned speaker on this subject matter. She’s a subject matter expert and an author and her name is Judith Reisman,” Pugh said adding that Reisman is an expert in pornography, homosexuality, and sexual harassment. “I spoke with Judith and I heard– and Judith has read the bill and she spoke to the threat that this poses to our children and our families, to parents. She knows about the book that many of my colleagues have highlighted, It’s Perfectly Normal and she knows of the threat that texts like this pose to our children, and warned of similar texts that will likely be coming in curriculum in Minnesota if this bill passes. Ever since I met Judith and have really become engaged on this issue, there is really nothing more important to me right now than doing anything I possibly can to stand up and protect our children.”
Before becoming a state representative, Glenn Gruenhagen, praised Reisman in a 2002 letter in the Jordan Independent:
“Many of these sex education programs, in the name of education, promote illegal, immoral, unhealthy and untruthful values to the children as normal and optional. How did this happen?” Gruenhagen blamed Alfred Kinsey. “[Kinsey] also believed that 10 percent of the population was homosexual, and that homosexuality (sodomy) should be classified as a sexual orientation and not as an unhealthy perversion and psychological disorder.”
Gruenhagen turned to Reisman for his arguments. “[T]hrough the research and work of Dr. Judith Reisman and others, the majority of Kinsey’s so called research has been shown to be nothing but lies and fraud. The evidence is that upwards of 48 percent of Kinsey’s subjects who were interviewed for this study were deviant sex offenders, pedophiles (child molesters), and/or in prison. This is one reason that he came to the false conclusion that 10 percent of the population was homosexual when, in reality, studies show that only 1 to 4 percent is homosexual.”
Another friend of Reisman is Bradlee Dean of the anti-LGBT You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International Ministries. Reisman has been a guest on Dean’s radio show, and in 2012, she penned an article titled Who’s Afraid of Bradlee Dean? where she defended his anti-LGBT record.
Outside of Minnesota, Reisman has had a controversial career. Though she speaks and writes about sexuality, her education is in communications. Her doctorate in communications is from Case Western Reserve University, and has been named as a visiting professor in the law school of the anti-LGBT Liberty University, which was founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1971. Last year’s keynote speaker at MNCPL’s event was Matt Barber, the Dean of the law school at Liberty University.
In a 2004 profile in the New Yorker, Daniel Radosh noted Reisman’s penchant for connecting the LGBT community to nazis:
To a reader of Reisman’s scholarly papers, it sometimes appears that there is little for which she does not hold Kinsey responsible. In her research on gays, for instance, she has written that the “recruitment techniques” of homosexuals rival those of the Marine Corps. The Kinsey paradigm, she holds, created the moral framework that makes such recruitment possible. Reisman also endorses a book called “The Pink Swastika,” which challenges the “myths” that gays were victimized in Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party and the Holocaust itself, she writes, were largely the creation of “the German homosexual movement.” Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, she warns, the American homosexual movement is poised to repeat those crimes. “Idealistic ‘gay youth’ groups are being formed and staffed in classrooms nationwide by recruiters too similar to those who formed the original ‘Hitler youth.’ ”
A 2004 profile by Max Blumenthal in Alternet, recalled some of Reisman’s thoughts on the LGBT community:
At a May, 1994 conference of Christian right leadership in Colorado Springs described by the Washington Times as “top secret,” Reisman introduced her theory of a proselytizing homosexual movement. “I would suggest to you,” she told the conference, “that while the homosexual population may right now be one to two percent, hold your breath, people, because the recruitment is loud; it is clear; it is everywhere. You’ll be seeing, I would say, 20 percent or more, probably 30 percent, or even more than that, of the young population will be moving into homosexual activity.” The notion of a surreptitious homosexual recruitment campaign is now casually advanced by conservative Christian leaders as they rally for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
The marketing, lobbying efforts, and writings of the MNCPL mirror much of Reisman’s claims. Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way, has documented much of Reisman’s statements about LGBT people including that sex ed turns children “little sexual deviants”; said those classes are designed to brainwash children into the LGBT lifestyle and “these kids become fodder for adult predators, that’s exactly what they become”; claimed that novels with LGBT-themes violate a federal law that makes it illegal to “groom children for sex”; said that anti-bullying campaigns are modeled on Hitler Youth and said that “the whole point” of GLSEN’s anti-bullying efforts was to promote pedophilia; claimed that “the aim of homosexual males and now increasingly females is not to have sex with other old guys and get married but to obtain sex with as many boys as possible”; and warned that allowing gay youth to participate in Boy Scouts would lead to increased pedophilia, stating “Eroticize the campsite and you eroticize boys to one another and to their leaders.”
She used her expertise as a PhD in communications to come up with the concept of “erototoxins” on which she seems to blame homosexuality.
Gina Loudon
Reisman’s talk on October 30th will be facilitated by Dr. Gina Loudon. She is best known for her role on the ABC show Wife Swap. Loudon, part of a Tea Party family, swapped roles with a woman living in a polyamorous family. The episode was notable because Loudon quit the show halfway through taping and refused to continue to participate.
Now, she hosts a talk show from her home in San Diego, and has a weekly web series called America Trends. She goes by the name “Dr. Gina,” a reference to her PhD from the distance-learning Fielding Graduate University.
She’s also had plenty to say about LGBT people, but not much of it positive. In “Enough of the LGBT Tyrants’ Bullying,” she repeats an old trope that LGBT community is after children:
“As we wait for the Supreme Court to decide if gay marriage will become the new Roe v. Wade, LGBT has zeroed in on a new target: children. Current LGBT leaders are now advancing their (not so) open-minded ranks into the classroom for the indoctrination and intimidation of our children.”
Loudon promotes conversion therapy and wrote a piece defending “former homosexuals.”
“Gay” pride day. “Gay” pride week. “Gay” pride month. “Gay” pride parades. “Gay” clubs. “Gay” rights. Promoters of the homosexual lifestyle now have a wealth of special designations and privileges after claiming to be victims of discrimination for so many years.
Now, it’s homosexuals who are being accused of discrimination against people who describe themselves as “ex-gay.”
She compared same-sex marriage to men marrying animals:
So one should not be surprised that progressives who could find a Constitutional right to “privacy” buried deep in the penumbras of that precious document, could also find a Constitutional “right” for men to marry men or a man to marry multiple women for that matter. How about the right of a Missouri man who did his State proud by telling the BBC that he wanted to marry his horse?
Here is a compilation of some of her anti-LGBT views:
Despite all this, she says she’s close to gay people:
In the case of gay people, I live in California, and some in my closest circle are gay. I am very close to my godmother today. That doesn’t mean they are LGBTQ militant radicals who believe in the abolition of traditional marriage, just that they are gay. All have been very supportive to me in my desire to understand their psychology, and my passion to distinguish the liberties and political policies that can help us all live without bigotry that hurts people.
The Minnesota Child Protection League used money from its fundraising to try and block anti-bullying legislation, to buy ads in Minnesota newspapers that insinuate that transgender youth are sexual predators, to lobby for legislation to block gender-inclusive school policies, and to rally supporters to school boards to oppose LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying initiatives.