Showing posts with label West Palm Beach. Show all posts
Showing posts with label West Palm Beach. Show all posts

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Chick-Fil-A Becomes Iconic for Neo-NAZIS & Tea Party

Young-Adult fiction writer's idea accidentally leads to Arizona Chick-Fil-A protester being cyber-bullied by "White Power" website based in West Palm Beach, Florida

It's no secret that Arizona has become absolutely infested with Neo-Nazis since Jan Brewer took office...  But their intermingling with the Tea Party receives very little media attention - until now.  The "White Power" groups, it turns out, are BIG fans of Chick-Fil-A and have been resorting to well-orchestrated cyber-bullying attacks in order to fulfill their "chicken pride" dreams...

This story starts out with a Young Adult Fiction writer named Jackson Pearce... She's level-headed, witty, and her fans love her...  She's a white, Christian girl who makes fun, upbeat YouTube videos and updates her Twitter account like every 10 minutes... seriously.

Jackson used to eat at Chick-Fil-A "all the time" until she decided that the company was indeed anti-gay and she joined the protest/boycott movement with this clever addition to the dialogue:


Now, as you can see from the above video, Jackson Pearce's idea is simple... Go to Chick-Fil-A  during "chicken pride day" and ask them for a cup of free water...  This, you should mention is a fulfillment of Biblical principle set forth in Proverbs 25-whatever...

But one Chick-Fil-A protester, Adam Smith in Tuscon, AZ sort of botched up the idea... He demanded "free water" without really asking for it... and he forgot to mention the Proverbs thingy...  In short, you could say that Adam was a little bird-brained and forgot the key ingredients from the idea that Jackson Pearce cooked up... (See what I did right there?)

Here's Adam Smith's video upload that kind of botched Pearce's good intention:


But Adam Smith was indeed, over-all, respectful and did not "abuse" the Chick-Fil-A employee... This is very important to note.  The Chick-Fil-A employee (identified only as Rachel) was VERY respectful and polite... Adam's protest made her uncomfortable but she didn't lose her cool...  Chick-Fil-A has every reason to be proud of her.  

But although Adam's protest was maybe a bit "bitter" in the sense that he questioned how "Chick-Fil-A employees live with themselves"... He was also very polite and said "Thank You" and told the employee that she "deserves better" than what Chick-Fil-A can offer her...

Now - here's where the whole clucking thing gets deep-fried and battered and comes up as a big smelly ball of gizzards for the Tea Party.

Adam was fired for this...

Adam got fired from his job right after he uploaded the video to his personal YouTube account. The video wasn't made on company time and he didn't connect his off-the-clock actions to his employment on any level.

Adam worked for a medical supply company called the Vante Corporation in Arizona... It remained unclear how Vante knew about Adam's protest video so quickly and took such swift action against him within 24 hours...  But I am going to clear that up for you now.

Indeed, within 24 hours of Adam making his anti-chick-fil-a protest video, not only did he find himself out of a job, but he was stalked, bullied and cyberbullied by random people he'd never even met before.  Furthermore, in that same brief period of time, Adam's name and photo and personal email address were being blasted all over Twitter and even corporate press-release websites such as Marketwire and Business Insider...

This is the work of a Neo-Nazi "White Power" hate-group website called Stormfront.org... I will not link to the offending portion of their website for obvious reasons...  But I will show you a screenshot from their YouTube video re-upload of Adam's protest video...

On the website itself, users do not always take the requisite precautions to obscure their identities and their Twitter accounts as "Tea Party" activists are easily located by anyone who looks into such things. Stormfront.org was the first website to begin squawking and crowing (there I go again!) about their Chicken Pride Day success in getting Adam fired from his job at the Vante Corporation.

They had orchestrated the sabotage and were happy to log onto Twitter under their "Tea Party" identities (a friendlier face of hatred) and make sure that every "conservative" website was soon blogging about the "gay man" (not true in Adam's case) who had "assaulted" and "abused" an innocent Chick-Fil-A employee. Even Fox News has such a story... and it's been less than 48 hours since the event took place... However the real story here is how the story was fabricated by the Tea Party in conjunction with a Neo-Nazi website...

Another question remains... Will the Vante Corporation hire Adam back and admit that they have no business prying into the private lives of their employees to such a degree? Or will we forever suspect that Vante itself is somehow connected to Stormfront.org?


Update:  Adam has contacted me and admitted that his actions in the video are not his personal best - which is why he originally attempted to erase the video. 
Furthermore, I need to explain why I've copied both his video and Jackson's video for this blog post.  Under the "fair use" clause in copyright terms, these videos are both "newsworthy" and should now be considered "in the public domain" since they are part of and directly relate to an ongoing issue in mainstream news.
I am not attempting to claim that these videos are my own or that I have any right to use them beyond preserving/displaying them for their newsworthiness alone. I was not the first person to copy and display these videos and specifically Adam's video is one that he did not wish to have online anymore - since others have begun to edit the video in order to further harass him, I feel obligated to show the untouched version here to counterbalance that.  I do not attempt to make any money from these videos or connect their creators with the opinions expressed in this blog.  The facts and opinions expressed on Florida Squeezed are the author's own and are not necessarily endorsed by any other parties discussed or mentioned on this blog.  08/04/12  (Original blog post at 08/02/12)


Watch Adam's sincere apology to Rachel here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmP9Shki6_I
It also contains some very interesting information about the way in which he was immediately bullied at work over something that people ordinarily wouldn't even have known about so quickly...

Thursday, October 29, 2009

"NARTH Vader" Descends On West Palm Beach

In Brief: This post discusses Julie Harren, a licensed therapist who believes for religious reasons that it is her duty to convert homosexuals to make them straight.


Julie Harren is the director of Worthy Creations Ministry, INC. - a conversion therapy program for "people recovering from homosexuality". Calvary Chapel of Fort Lauderdale has been known to refer people to this program as well as Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church.

On November 21st, Julie Harren (now Harren-Hamilton) will make her first appearance as President of NARTH at the Marriott Hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida.

N.A.R.T.H. stands for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuals. It is a small but well-funded, religious, for-profit group of therapists whose aim is to take away civil rights from gays, lesbians and transgendered people by singling them out and labeling them as having a mental disorder.

The "Social Issues" section of their website reads like a horror film... all the worst most negative aspects of gay life are drudged up, re-hashed and emphasized over and over again by NARTH... Everything from obscure groups of men who wish to contract HIV to sado-masochistic tendencies and the perennial "pedophilia" accusation. If gay life were even one tenth as bad as NARTH makes it sound, I would have offed myself long ago...

NARTH shares a building with the corporate offices of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons). In fact, their offices are right around the corner from the temple. They are strongly supported by The Traditional Values Coalition (better known as The House on C Street or "The Family").

But back to Julie Harren Hamilton...

Would you pay for advice on child-rearing from a woman who has never had kids? Would you accept marital counseling from someone who still has rice in her hair from her recent wedding? I know I wouldn't...

So how does a poor counselor from a religious college in Chattanooga Tennessee become the President of the most well-funded anti-gay organization in America? How does she move so quickly from being a Republican spinster in a 1 bedroom apartment to a married marriage counselor and college professor, living in a half-million dollar oceanfront property in West Palm Beach?

She sells the cure for a disease that nobody really has.

When you first Google her name, you are directed to her website called Homosexuality101.com, Which is just a brochure-style webpage offering her "scientific" explanation of how gay people are "lead off the path" from being happy, healthy straight people. She claims that homosexual men are the products of distant, absent or abusive fathers and that they never learned how to bond with other boys as children because they were afraid of their dads and their mothers became over-involved with their lives. And in true keeping with the hogwash technique, she affirms that the damage is done before your child's 5th birthday! I wonder how many other therapists have been able to talk parents into starting their children in on $125/hr therapy before they start 1st grade?

In short, she blames your parents for your "disease" and she can make them feel guilty enough about your "painful lifestyle" to pay her lots of money to "help you".

Click around a little bit more and you see that she is hocking her DVD's for 15 bucks a piece, too. Do some more online research and you finally get to the foundation of her rationale:

"As Christians we are vessels of God's love. So I just want to challenge us all to go out into the places we live and work and BE vessels of God's love because people are hungry for God's love..."

"It's God who does the transforming but first people need a relationship with him."

On July 23, 2005, she gave a talk at the Exodus Freedom Conference called "Educating the public on the topic of homosexuality". It was here that she really raised some eyebrows at Exodus Inc. and breathed new life into the dying carcass of conversion therapy.

You see, Harren-Hamilton takes a different approach. She mixes the old with the new... She is willing to accept that there are biological pre-dispositions which lead to being gay and she even professes to "love" her subjects and see them as equals. With her twittery coo, she blesses everyone and calmly explains that gay people did not make a choice to be gay... but they CAN still make a choice to become straight.

This new approach to the presentation of conversion therapy is becoming quite popular in some Christian ministries because it takes the focus away from their lack of success and away from the fringe hate-groups that back them and puts the focus back on "Christian love".

But what is Julie Catherine Harren-Hamilton's experience and why is this issue so important to her?

She is experienced only in public speaking and money-making. She only became married herself about 2 years ago (to Robert Tyler Hamilton who is 6 years her junior). She has never been a lesbian - recovered or otherwise. Nor has she ever been a mother or had a child - gay or straight. Most importantly, she has yet to present one solitary person who is willing to come forward and testify that her therapy works.

The more difficult question to answer about Julie Harren-Hamilton is why converting homosexuals has been her sole focus for more than 10 years.

Perhaps the good "Doctor" suffers from an Obsessive Personality Disorder with a dash of Histrionics and Narcissism... (I'm just sayin'... you know, maybe she's CRAZY?)

Maybe she had an unrequited grade-school crush on the local Clay Aiken and now she's bitter...

Whatever the reason, she's swimming up stream without a paddle and she's about to drown in Fort Lauderdale's ocean of loving gay/straight families who don't take too kindly to being called "diseased" and "abusive".

November 21, 2009
Please
join us in showing NARTH (and the world) that our love is not a disease and many of us have excellent relationships with our parents and friends.