#602: Candi Cushman

Candi Cushman is what they call “an education analyst” at Focus on the Family (or its affiliate group, the Orwellianly named “True Tolerance”, which propagates the view that gays can and should be subjected to reparative therapy). The goals of Cushman and her organization is to defend the “innocence and purity” of children against LGBT groups that conspire “under the cover of so-called safe-school initiatives” and use “‘Safety’… as a political arm-twisting tool to force an adult agenda into schools.” It’s all about creating a safe environment for children in schools, therefore homosexuality must be vanquished.

Focus on the Family’s response to the Day of Silence is the Orwellian “Day of Dialogue”. Cushman said: “We're trying to raise awareness that more than one side needs to be heard on the issue of homosexuality, and we're helping to ensure Christian students have the chance to express their viewpoint. What is freedom of speech, after all, but a guarantee of the right to have dialogue?” (it isn’t – Cushman doesn’t have the right to have people listening to her.) Since Cushman and her ilk believes that homosexuality is a sin and gay people are going to burn in hell, the dialogue part may be deficient – “it’s time for an honest conversation about homosexuality” was one of the slogans, which is rather otherworldly; Judith Reisman had earlier claimed that the Day of Silence is a direct assault “on traditional parental, American values” and directly compared youth involvement in GLSEN (the organizers) with the Hitler Youth. Cushman has raged about “anti-bullying radicalism” and conspiracies as well, and she later slammed sex-ed for promoting respect for gay families (gay activists are apparently “infiltrating classrooms under the cover of anti-bullying”), characterizing it as “undemocratic” and dubbing bullying prevention “homosexuality promotion” (in line with the venerable word of wisdom “the only good homosexual is a dead homosexual,” apparently). According to Cushman the standards are designed by ”left-wing, casual-sex activist groups,” and are not intended to promote public health. Her evidence for this claim is that it is how she prefers to interpret it. Here is her more recent contribution to the Day of Silence efforts.

Along the same lines she has supported Focus on the Family’s opposition to the Banned Books Week because of its “promotion of homosexuality to … 6- or 7-year-old [children] against their will.” (But the Bible is apparently OK, at least.) She has also gone rabid over the children’s book “Tango for Three”, claiming that it is not a true story even though it demonstrably is.

Diagnosis: A fine example of purefied, raging bigotry, and the incoherent jumble that usually goes into rationalizing such positions. Truth and reason are probably a gay conspiracy anyways.