New Photos Emerge of Jerry Falwell, Jr., at Miami Nightclub

I had said that I hope the media scrutiny of modern day Pharisee and grifter Jerry Falwell, Jr., would continue in the wake of Politico's lengthy expose that looked at both questionable financial transactions, sex rumors and boasting, and drinking and dancing - both things that are banned at Liberty University and could lead to the expulsion of students guilty of such transgressions.  In true lying Christofascist/professional Christian form, Falwell claimed that photos of him dancing and drinking at a Miami nightclub were "false" or hand been "altered."  Now, the owner of the club has released an additional batch of photos putting Falwell's hypocrisy on further display.  Politico looks at the release of the additional photos.  Here are highlights:

One day after POLITICO published a piece in which Jerry Falwell Jr. denied visiting a Miami Beach nightclub in July 2014 and alleged that any images showing such were “photo-shopped,” a new trove of photos showing Falwell at the club has been released. 

Seth Browarnik, the owner of World Red Eye, a photography company that documents Miami’s bustling nightlife scene, says he was unaware how many photos he had of Falwell until Falwell alleged that his site’s images were manipulated—prompting Browarnik to explore his photo archive to prove otherwise.

On Tuesday, Browarnik published the newly unearthed photos on his website, WorldRedEye.com, along with a strongly worded “rebuke” of Falwell’s claim of photoshopping. In the article, Jerry Falwell Jr. repeatedly claimed that the photos—which POLITICO obtained from World Red Eye, which World Red Eye has had on their website for five years, and which show Falwell partying at Wall on July 19, 2014—were manipulated. “If the person in the picture is me, it was likely photo-shopped,” Falwell said.

Browarnik said he felt insulted. “My integrity is everything in this business,” he said. . . . . For the past 21 years, Browarnik has photographed Miami nightlife. Because of his trusted reputation as a photographer, he thought it was important to quickly quash Falwell’s accusation.

“That’s why I have an archive of five million photos,” Browarnik told me. “That’s why we catalog everything.”

In the images, the Falwells can be seen in the middle of the club’s dance floor while lasers and other light effects reflect around them. In at least two photos, Falwell family members can be seen holding alcohol. (Liberty University is notoriously strict about alcohol consumption, and students can receive demerits for co-ed dancing and be expelled for drinking.)

The Problem With Alcohol/Drug Rehab Programs

stevecoleimages, via Getty

The death of Cory Monteith has launched a much needed discussion on the flawed 12 step method that seems to be the basis for most drug and alcohol rehab programs.   These programs - I attended some session some years ago with a family member, so I have seen it first hand - stress abstinence only, ignore modern scientific knowledge, and in many cases have too much of a tie with lunatic conservative Christian mindsets.  It is little wonder that far too many individuals go in and out of these programs like a revolving door.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the short comings of these programs.  Here are highlights:

Charlie Sheen has been there. So have Courtney Love and Lindsay Lohan. In fact, Lohan will complete her sixth stint at an addiction treatment center at the end of this month before jumping into the arms of Oprah Winfrey. For every troubled star, it seems, there’s an accompanying stay (or three) in rehab. It only takes a casual tabloid reader to note that the system isn’t working as well it could.

The death of Glee star Cory Monteith,  . . .  has reignited a debate among addiction experts over the efficacy of rehab centers—many of which continue to be built around traditional 12-step, abstinence only-programs despite a growing body of evidence that this approach doesn’t work for everyone. To wit: a 2012 report from the National Center of Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASAColumbia) concluded that many addiction programs don’t employ the kind of progressive, science-based approaches that have been shown to be effective in studies, and that “only a small fraction of individuals receive interventions or treatment consistent with scientific knowledge of what works.”

Part of the problem is that addiction, which wasn’t formally recognized as a chronic brain disorder by the American Society of Addiction Medicine until two years ago, was long considered a behavioral problem rather than a mental-health issue. That stigma is one of the reasons addiction treatment is far from current with the latest scientific literature, says Anne Fletcher, who spent years interviewing rehab patients and researching the facilities taking care of them for her book Inside Rehab.

In fact, the stagnation seen at rehab centers today, both inpatient and outpatient, can be traced back decades, Fletcher says, to when the medical community would actually refuse to treat alcoholics and drug addicts. Addiction programs thus adopted Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12-step approach as a form of treatment, no matter that AA was designed to be a self-help program.

“The treatment model sprung up in a vacuum,” says Fletcher, which is why so many rehabs—including the most expensive ones in the country—remain grounded in the same one-size-fits-all treatment approach. Eight out of 10 programs in the U.S. today still incorporate the 12-step model in some fashion, she says, adding that group therapy is another staple of most programs even though there’s little evidence that this type of counseling helps.

Other systemic failures include inadequate credentialing standards for addiction counselors, with more than half of states in the country not requiring so much as a college degree, according to the 2012 CASAColumbia report.  . . . .

Forty to 60 percent of people treated for alcohol or drug dependence relapse within a year after discharge, according to a study published in 2000 by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

[M]any conventional drug rehabs refuse to educate their patients about medication-assisted treatment—primarily because abstinence-only approach remains so predominant in the U.S. As a result, many patients don’t have access to FDA-approved drugs that could potentially save their lives.

“There’s an attitude in addiction treatment where the facility thinks it knows what’s best for the patient,” says Fletcher, “but there’s strong research that involving the client in the treatment process and giving them a say in what goes on increases their chances for long-term recovery.”

What's most important, critics agree, is flipping the script on a treatment system that hasn't kept up with the times. "Constantly sending me to rehab is pointless," Lohan told CNN in May. "I've been court-ordered to do it six times. I could write the book on rehab."

Failed abstinence only sex education  has shown the illogical nature of abstinence only and the bogus "ex-gay" ministries have proven that "praying away" one's problem doesn't work.   My relative has succeeded in their process, but largely because they (i) rejected abstinence only approach, (ii) rejected the Christian brainwashing that was part of the program, and (iii) got therapy from a licensed psychologist familiar with modern knowledge. 

The Tortured and Dysfunctional Lives of Professional "Ex-Gays"

Have you ever noticed that virtually all of the prominent "ex-gays for pay" have a common theme in their pasts? It seems that nearly every one, whether male of female, has a history that includes alcoholism, drug use, prostitution, molestation, screwed up family backgrounds, or all of the foregoing. And rather than take real responsibility for the bad life choices they made, they without exception want to blame their tortured pasts on being gay. In fact, in my view, the biggest problem driving all of the poor choice behavior these "ex-gays" exhibit is the psychological damage they experienced from their religious upbringings. I've often maintained that raising and LGBT child in a far right religious household is a form of child abuse and most "ex-gays" - many of whom have no careers except playing ex-gay for pay - seem to be very damaged individuals as a result of their religious inner self-hate and self-loathing. To listen to these "ex-gays," no one who is LGBT can lead a normal productive life like everyone else in society. Truth be told, most of us do and given their train wreck like past lives, "ex-gays" would seem to be the last people to advise others on any issue. Jeremy Hooper looks at the bizarre lives of the "ex-gays for pay" in a post at Good As You:

n a recent interview with Christian radio host Janet Parshall, professional "ex-gay" Stephen Bennett did that thing the professional "former homosexuals" always do: He linked a whole host of horrible life experiences and choices to his sexuality, as if unrelated feathers are undetachable parts of the gay bird . . .

It's so telling. Virtually to a person, these career "ex-gays" have backgrounds (or supposed backgrounds) of prolonged drug abuse, alcoholism, family strife, molestation, vicious shunning, obsessions with club life, bulimia, and any number of things with which most people truly would need to deal, if they wanted to advance. These "former gays" then link those other elements directly to their sexual orientations, as if it's all in the same bucket. Alan Chambers does it. Charlene Cothran did it. Melissa Fryrear does it. Janet Boynes does it. We never see an "ex-gay" paycheck-earner who just happened to be LGBT with the everyday, up and down life experiences that are most common among the LGBT population. They are always presented as having been addicted, abused, trapped, entrenched, damaged, broken, stuck in horrible relationships, sex-crazed, lacking ambition, immoral (or at best amoral), and generally hurting -- part of a "lifestyle" rather than a life.

I actually think it does more damage to their cause than they realize. Most modern Americans now know an LGBT person or two. Many more see LGBT people in pop culture. A growing number even realize that the negative cultural elements that do greet some LGBT people are largely the byproducts of decades of forced differentiation and stigma, not innate "brokenness."

More and more people know that Stephen Bennett, despite his pretense of firsthand insight, doesn't speak for the LGBT experience, writ large: He speaks for Stephen Bennett, or at least the professionally-crafted version thereof. Oh, and of course he speaks against the entire field of credible science. So there's that, too.

The Bachmanns' "Ex-Lesbian" Friend Fits All The "Ex-gay" Stereotypes

I don't mean to sound mean or nasty, but Slate has a piece on Michele and Marcus Bachmann's "ex-lesbian" friend, Janet Boynes, and true to form she's a former drug addict/dealer who had by the sounds of it a totally f*cked up life - none of which was due to her being a lesbian (in fact, she sounds like a reprise of Michael Johnston who Wayne Besen and I exposed as a total fraud back in 2003). Yet true to form, she wants to blame all of her problems on her sexual orientation rather than her screwed up family circumstances and/or her own bad choices. Are there any "ex-gays" who weren't drug addicts and/or alcoholics? It seems that ALL of them are one time losers who latched on to the "ex-gay" for pay gravy train.
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Like most "ex-gays," Boynes would have us believe that because of her sexual orientation she did not have a relatively normal life (in contrast to most of us in the LGBT community). Moreover, she wants to blame her utterly screwed up prior life on her homosexuality rather than the real causes of her problems. Frankly, I am way past over having any sympathy for losers like Boynes who messed up their own lives with booze and drugs who then want to say that being gay was the cause of their problems. Let's get real - for Boynes like all the rest of the "ex-gay" for pay crowd they "became stright" only learning that there's good money to be made playing "ex-gay." And as an added bonus, they gain a modicum of respect within the Bible beater circles. . Meanwhile, I can only wonder how many lives of young LGBT individuals will be damaged because of the lies Boynes is promoting. To me, it is utterly disgusting and immoral. Boynes may be enjoying her financial freedom and new found self-respect derived from peddling lies and snake oil to the gullible, but I find her less honorable than the most tawdry whore. Here are highlights from Slate:
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If the Bachmanns still believe that being gay is a sinful lifestyle from which it's possible to be delivered, they aren't about to explain their thinking right now. In the past, however, they have pointed to the testimony of one particular friend as proof of their belief that it is possible to leave the gay "lifestyle." This friend is devoting her life to the proposition that homosexuality is not only destructive but, in some sense, contagious, and her beliefs may provide some useful context for the Bachmanns' past comments. Her name is Janet Boynes, and she calls herself an ex-lesbian.
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"I was not born homosexual," Boynes writes in her memoir. "I made a decision." In her telling, a slew of environmental factors tempted her to make that decision, the way a weakened immune system might make the body prone to infection. Boynes writes that she was born into poverty in Norristown, Pa., one of seven half-siblings by multiple fathers.
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Boynes's life as a gay woman was chaotic; she cheated on her girlfriends and was cheated on. For awhile, she was addicted to—and sold—cocaine. But from time to time, she writes, her churchgoing childhood would kick in, and she would think of God and recognize that she was on a sinful path. At last, she writes, in 1998, a chance encounter with a Christian woman in a parking lot prompted her to renounce her lesbian ways.
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Today, she says she wants to marry a man and is just waiting for the right one to come along. . . . And her emphasis on loving the sinner is often undercut by a fire-and-brimstone judgmentalism. In her book, Boynes tells the harrowing story of her gay brother's death from AIDS over a decade ago–noting that he bled out of every orifice. When I asked her what she made of his death, she said, "Sometimes sin has consequences." As she sees it, sin is trying to take over the culture: The fight for same-sex marriage is just a prelude to normalizing pedophilia and bestiality, she writes. Gay activists are "recruiting" children in schools.
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The belief that homosexuality is highly contagious is at the heart of the perspective propounded by Boynes and shared by the Bachmanns and many other conservative Christians, but it is not new.
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Boynes to suggest, as she did to me, that for many people, "if I'm out there in the homosexual community, hanging out with them on a daily basis, that's what I will become." What doesn't make sense is why, if homosexuality is so darn tempting, more of America isn't already gay.
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Boynes may feel better about herself and be enjoying the financial benefits of being "ex-gay," but I suspect that it's her, not LGBT individuals. who will be called to account on Judgment Day for the lies and untruths she willingly disseminated for the purpose of self-enrichment and to engender praise from the hate filled Bible beating set. But for the damage she is doing to others, she would represent a very sad figure. I'm sorry, but I find her - and the Bachmanns - to be contemptible.

A drink a day for a longer life: study results

Well, I have the drink part covered. Now I need to do more on the exercise front, I guess. This story from Yahoo News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080109/hl_nm/drinking_health_dc;_ylt=AjHFHMwjnqsMTNAqupMQB5UEtbAF)indicates that moderate alcohol use helps one live longer and lower the risk of heart disease and perhaps some cancers. Here are some story highlights:

LONDON (Reuters) - Drinking is healthy, exercise is healthy, and doing a little of both is even healthier, Danish researchers reported on Wednesday. People who neither drink nor exercise have a 30 to 49 percent higher risk of heart disease than people who do one or both of the activities, the researchers said in the European Heart Journal.

"The main finding is there seems to be an additional beneficial effect of drinking one to two drinks per day and doing at least moderate physical activity," said Morten Gronbaek of the University of Southern Denmark, who led the study. Several major studies have found that light to moderate drinking -- up to two drinks a day on a regular basis -- is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, and some have also found this leads to a lower risk of some cancers. But the Danish study, one of the largest of its kind to examine the combined effect of drinking and exercise, found there were additional protective effects gained from doing both.

Non-drinkers had a 30 percent to 31 percent higher risk of heart disease compared to moderate drinkers, no matter the amount of physical activity they undertook. Moderate consumption was defined as between 1 to 14 drinks per week.