As the child of a same-sex couple, she’s different. And being different has caused her to be targeted for destruction, threatened and abused, libeled and lied about. She writes under the pseudonym Rivka Edelman, and you will soon see why she’s afraid to use her real name.
Oh, she is being targeted for speaking out against same-sex parenting.
And her tormentors are homosexuality activists.
“The only good anti-LGBT bigot is a dead anti-LGBT bigot,” reads a threatening tweet to Ryan T. Anderson, an editor whose sin was deciding to publish a piece by Edelman in Public Discourse. It was sent by Scott “Rose” Rosenzweig, a homosexuality activist, who also sent another tweet, stating “Her lies-choked claim against gay parents is going to be adjusted alright.” The “her,” of course, is Edelman, who raised homosexuality activists’ ire to a boiling point by penning the above-referenced piece, titled “Ruthless Misogyny: Janna Darnelle’s Story and Extreme LGBT Activism.” Darnelle, by the way, also spoke out against same-sex parenting. She also had to write under a pseudonym. She also has been targeted for destruction. More on that later.
Edelman’s life has changed completely since her essay was published October 2. She wrote about her ordeal recently at American Thinker:
[T]here have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of posts calling me a liar or trying to shame, discredit, intimidate, and threaten me. Read this for details. People I do not know have gone directly after my family and my job. They have posted information, mis-information, accusations, and threats against me. A vicious abusive “activist” well-known for his unhinged misogynistic cyber-stalking and violent threats, Scott Rose, sent blast e-mails to the university where I teach, describing himself as a “human right activist and an investigative journalist.”
This is slightly reminiscent of the Astroturf campaign against Rush Limbaugh, in which a cabal of left-wing activists has targeted the talk-radio giant’s sponsors with automated mass e-mails. One difference is that Edelman’s tormentors are greater in number; another is that as an academic, feminist, and children’s rights activist, Edelman is likely no rock-ribbed conservative. But this hasn’t saved her from people who tolerate no dissent.
Edelman first got on homosexuality activists’ radar screen by filing an amicus curiae brief in August in the Texas faux marriage case, where she was joined by three other adult children of same-sex couples in contesting the claim that children raised by such couples have no disadvantages. But the campaign against her really entered no-holds-barred mode after her Public Discourse essay. At a blog named “Good As You,” proprietor Jeremy Hooper, Rosenzweig, and other homosexuality activists have advanced a conspiracy against Edelman, sharing information about her in an effort to destroy her reputation. As Edelman wrote, Hooper “uses his blog as a platform to harass, bully, and silence with impunity. Hooper published comments from his readers and thereby shared our home address and my daughter’s private information. They contacted other family members looking for information.” The cabal also discussed contacting Edelman’s ex-husband, as the comment shown below evidences.
The homosexuality activists even posted on Craigslist looking for information on Edelman.
And they did in fact contact her ex-husband in the apparent hope that he’d lie about her. Rosenzweig wrote to him, “We can conclude with reasonable certainty that significant details of her young life were left out of her brief[.]” Another activist, going by the handle “Straight Grandmother,” told Edelman’s husband that she wanted to know “how much of their [the amicus-brief filers] personal narrative is made up just to further their Hate Agenda. The only way we have to discern the truth is to delve into their personal narrative.”
As for threats and vicious lies posted at Hooper’s website, he makes the fanciful claim that he has no control over the comments (all blog owners do). At least one of these messages even threatened Edelman with career destruction. Written by Rosenzweig, it read in part:
[M]y message to the gay-bashing bigot is YOU’LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN.
… And now that editors and English Department Chairs know that [Rivka Edelman] is a vicious anti-LGBT bigot, they have more information for their publishing and hiring decisions.
P.S. to Rivka – Rots a Ruck getting your work published in any non-religious, non-bigot publication, now that the world knows that [Rivka] is a malicious, lying, anti-LGBT bigot.
This is no idle threat. Mozilla Corporation co-founder Brendan Eich was forced to resign from his position as company CEO in April of this year — after just a little more than a week on the job — merely for donating $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as being between a man and woman.
Edelman sums up this harassment with a damning indictment of the homosexuality milieu, writing, “I can say I recognize these abusive behaviors as part of the culture I grew up in. Notice the lack of accountability, the deflections.”
And notice the other victims. This brings us to Janna Darnelle’s story, which is a little different. She was married to a man who one day announced he had same-sex attraction, divorced her, and then, as some observers would put it, ran off with their children. She wrote in Public Discourse in September that her divorce went to trial, where her husband’s playing of the homosexuality card worked wonders with the judge; in fact, after giving her husband most everything he wanted, the judge told him, “If you had asked for more, I would have given it to you.”
Darnelle then wrote about how, with her ex-husband’s faux marriage being one of the first in her state, the media published pictures of her children:
Commenters exclaimed at how beautiful this gay family was and congratulated my ex-husband and his new partner on the family that they “created.” But there is a significant person missing from those pictures: the mother and abandoned wife. That “gay family” could not exist without me.
There is not one gay family that exists in this world that was created naturally.
Every same-sex family can only exist by manipulating nature. Behind the happy façade of many families headed by same-sex couples, we see relationships that are built from brokenness. They represent covenants broken, love abandoned, and responsibilities crushed. They are built on betrayal, lies, and deep wounds.
This didn’t sit well with the homosexuality activists. The usual suspects reared their heads, with Jeremy Hooper attacking Darnelle at his blog, where, wrote Crisis’ Austin Ruse last month, “the real action was in the comment section. In fact, among the first commenters was the pseudonymous Janna’s husband who promptly told everyone her full name, all the better to stalk her with.” And one man who certainly could stalk the stalk has a name — and a tactic — you’ll now recognize. Ruse reported that they “hung poor Janna from a viral meat hook. One particularly creepy guy named Scott Rose [Rosenzweig] even went onto her company’s Facebook page and complained about her.” Rosenzweig wrote (redacted version, as presented by Ruse):
This is a COMPLAINT against […], an executive assistant in […]. Under the nom de plume of “Janna Darnelle,” […] has published a horrifying, defamatory anti-gay screed on the website “Public Discourse.” The first problem would be that she is creating a climate of hostility for eventual gay elders and/or their visiting friends and relatives. The second problem would be that in the screed, she comes off as being unhinged. Her public expressions of gay-bashing bigotry are reflecting very poorly on LLC.
In other words, as bakers, a shirt printer, and other businessmen have learned, it’s quickly becoming the case that no one may buy or sell — or make a living — unless he accepts the mark of the homosexuality lobby beast.
No one knows this better than Robert Oscar Lopez, an English professor at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). Raised by two lesbians, Lopez came out a few years ago as an opponent of giving children to same-sex couples. And likening the practice to trading flesh, to slavery, and owing to his academic credentials and intrepid activism, he quickly became the man homosexuality activists love to hate.
After writing a 2012 piece for Public Discourse titled “Growing Up with Two Moms,” in which Lopez bared his soul and discussed the difficulties his upbringing wrought, he was put through the wringer. Rosenzweig contacted CSUN, accusing the professor of misrepresenting a Mark Regnerus study and publishing “a gay-bashing essay.” Recounting this last month, Lopez wrote that this distorted his essay “from personal reminiscence to ‘gay-bashing,’ an inflammatory charge on a college campus,” and then said that it was just the first salvo “in a relentless twenty-six months of harassment.” Outlining this, Lopez wrote:
Soon I was getting hit by writers all across the web. A piece on August 9, 2012, in Frontiers LA affixed my photograph and began with the line, “Perhaps you know Cal State Northridge bisexual professor Robert Oscar Lopez….
… On August 14, 2012, the campaign reached my workplace in a whole new way when my dean informed me that I would have to turn over all emails from January 2009 onward that had anything to do with Mark Regnerus and his research team, Witherspoon Institute, Bradley Foundation, NOM, U.S. elected officials, the Romney campaign, Republican National Committee, and University of Texas officials.
A team of IT workers and student employees were allowed to access emails and turn them over to my off-campus accusers.
For a year, the provost’s office, dean’s office, and president’s office at Northridge were barraged with angry emails denouncing me and demanding that the university take action.
Friends of a bisexual female student went so far as to file a complaint against Lopez with CSUN’s Equity and Diversity Office, claiming he was a “homophobe.” “They even alleged I had erections while teaching,” he writes. A CSUN officer tried to block him from accessing grant money he received from outside donors, he was disinvited from university speaking engagements for supposedly being a purveyor of hate speech, GLAAD targeted him with their “Commentator Accountability Project,” and the Human Rights Campaign besmirched him as an “exporter of hate” and posted what is essentially a “mug shot” of Lopez (shown).
All this is accompanied by other false accusations and, true to form, the publishing of Lopez’ work location, email, and phone number.
Much as with Edelman’s story, Lopez’ status as “a bisexual [non-practicing] Latino intellectual, raised by a lesbian, who experienced poverty in the Bronx as a young adult,” as he put it, meant nothing except that the attacks would be all the more vicious. As with the Soviets who feared defectors more than anyone else — as with leftists today who seek to destroy conservative blacks and women — no critic is less tolerated than one who dares leave the plantation. For being wedded to the homosexuality lobby is a marriage certainly not gay. And it’s till death do you part.
