I'm Encouraged

GLSEN has issued a cease and desist letter to anti-gay hate groups Family Research Council and MassResistance over their slanders about "The Little Black Book":

The cease-and-desist letter has to do with the video below in which Tony Perkins, head of FRC, and Brian Camenker, head of the Massachusetts anti-gay group Mass Resistance claimed that GLSEN and the Massachusetts Public Schools distributed an explicit safe-sex guide called The Little Black Book to fifth to ninth graders at a conference in 2005.

(I'm not going to post the video here -- I have standards, after all. You can see it at the PHB post linked above.) As one might guess, that's a lie. Media Matters thoroughly debunked it some while ago, but hey! FRC is not one to let a good slander go to waste.

My understanding is that a cease-and-desist letter is something that an aggrieved party issues as a preliminary to legal action, to demonstrate that they have attempted to resolve the matter without going to the courts. My guess is that FRC and MassResistance will claim that they are being attacked as part of their next fundraising appeal and otherwise try to ignore the whole thing. My hope is that GLSEN will have their asses in court suing for major damages and a public retraction.

(If you follow the Media Matters link, you'll see that the original controversy was directed at Kevin Jennings when he was appointed to head the Safe Schools Office in the Department of Education -- it was directed at Obama as much as GLSEN, but I guess Perkins and his henchmen have run out of new material.)