Lies, lies, lies. So many lies that the mind reels and the stomach lurches, trying to keep up. The lies that have been told by Christian extremists in Florida to preserve the state’s archaic and cruel law prohibiting gay adoption should shame anyone who still supports it.

Let’s start with the lies told by George Alan Rekers, Ph.D. The member of the founding board of the Family Research Council, an anti-gay advocacy group, was this week discovered to have hired a male prostitute to travel Europe with him.

Rekers was likely flush with cash provided to him by Florida Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum (R). McCollum authorized about $60,000 in taxpayers’ funds distributed to Rekers in 2008 and again in 2009, for his services in testifying in McCollum’s crusade to preserve the Florida ban on gay adoption. Equality Florida provided screen shots of public searches clearly showing the payments, which amount to twice that originally disclosed.

Rekers tried to maintain lies that he only hired the prostitute to carry his luggage. The Orlando Sentinel’s Scott Maxwell showed just how silly this lie sounds.

Florida’s antiquated ban on gay adoption was championed in court by a guy who just spent a week traveling with a 20-year-old male prostitute whose profile on Rentboy.com describes everything from his body type to his genitalia…

Rekers, of course, says he never had anything less than the purest of intentions with his Rentboy, Lucien. He said that he hired the boy who[se] services were featured on a website that features graphic pictures of anal and oral sex because he wanted a strong young man to help him carry his luggage. Of course he did.

Buy that? I wonder if Dr. Rekers would. You know, if he was once again lending his “expertise” to Bill McCollum and the fine taxpayers of Florida, do you think Dr. Rekers would gleefully recommend adoption rights to an adult who had just finished taking a 10-day vacation with a gay hooker he hired for luggage help?

But the lies go even deeper. As Maxwell points out, if it weren’t for Rekers’ flagrant hypocrisy and taxpayer funding thereof, it would be no one’s business who he pays to travel Europe with him. The true damage is done to the loving parents who are prohibited from adopting children who need caring, happy homes and to the children themselves, who are forced to remain in the foster system.

The parents who were used as pawns in the case McCollum lost earlier this year are a prime example. They were victimized twice. First, McCollum tried to take away their child to score campaign points with fellow born-again zealots. Then they were the subject of a smear campaign by Rekers’ group. Except it wasn’t actually them being smeared. Maxwell again:

“Arrogant judicial activism” was how the finger-waggers at Orlando’s Florida Family Policy Council described the ruling in an alert it sent out to its members last week.

And to make their point about just how frightening this ruling was, the Policy Council included a photograph of the couple — a strange and androgynous-looking duo, one with bleached skin and both with mullet haircuts. The couple look so odd (you literally can’t tell whether they are male or female) that one might wonder how any judge could place a young child with such a disturbing-looking duo.

Except the judge didn’t.

The abnormal-looking couple that the Policy Council chose to illustrate this story is not the same couple granted the right to adopt the child.

No, the two-woman couple awarded custody of the 1-year-old — South Florida trade-show executive Vanessa Alenier and her partner, Melanie Leon — look more like J.Crew models: all-American with catalogue clothes and smiles.

The picture that the Policy Council chose was a grotesque caricature.

These are the dirty tactics of Christianity’s far-right warriors.

So not only did the Family Policy Council lie about the parents whose child they sought to take away, but we now find that Rekers’ entire life and life’s work is a lie, and that Bill McCollum is lying and covering up the money involved.

Is this what it takes to continue to deny some people in our society the same rights as all the others? Endless vicious lies and self-hatred, and delusion, and contortions of facts? How about if we just examine our strangely-held biases, and decide, in the interest of truth, to finally reject them?

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