With the Boy Scouts of America national leadership refusing to either consider lifting its ban on LGBT scouts and leaders or make public its rationale for keeping the policy, two large Scout councils have reaffirmed they will not go along with discrimination.

The Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN-based Northern Star Council, which serves over 75,000 scouts in Minnesota and Wisconsin, recently posted a statement reiterating that it welcomes “all people who can help to further Scouting’s mission of youth development.” This commitment to inclusive, the council notes, has been in place for more than a decade.

The Boston Minuteman Council, which serves 8,000-plus scouts in Massachusetts followed suit. Reaffirming at 2001 statement, the council said:

Through the Scout Oath and Law, we pledge to respect all people and to defend the rights of others. Bias, intolerance and unlawful discrimination are unacceptable within the ranks of the Boston Minuteman Council. The Boston Minuteman Council serves youth through volunteers in Packs, Troops and other units without regard to color, race, religion, ethnic background, sexual orientation or economic status. We have done our best to live up to this statement in the decade since its adoption.

A council spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that the national organization has long been aware of Boston Minuteman’s policy and has done nothing to interfere.

Eagle Scout Zach Walls, founder of Scouts for Equality, told ThinkProgress that this is “another example of local BSA units standing up for one of the key principles on which the BSA was founded: mutual religious respect. Frankly, I think this is only the beginning.”

Lisa Miller, Janet Jenkins, and Isabella before their separation.

American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer took to Twitter again today to double down on his claims that an “underground railroad” is necessary to kidnap children away from same-sex parents. Referring again to the case of Lisa Miller, who kidnapped her daughter away to Nicaragua to prevent her former same-sex partner from gaining custody, Fischer argued that court rulings that recognize same-sex unions constitute “judicial kidnapping”:

No kidnapping involved in Lisa Miller case. She left the US to keep her natural, biological daughter FROM BEING KIDNAPPPED. In Lisa Miller case, I’m advocating AGAINST JUDICIAL KIDNAPPING, in favor of keeping daughter with her own mother. In Lisa Miller case, lesbian who wanted sole custody of the daughter had NO legal or biological relationship to the girl. If any kidnapping involved in Lisa Miller case, it’s judges stealing a child from her mother and giving her to a stranger.

First of all — and unsurprisingly — Fischer has the facts wrong. While it’s true that Miller was her daughter’s biological mother, her former partner, Janet Jenkins, was also legally her mother. Isabella grew up calling Jenkins “Mama” and Miller “Mommy.” Jenkins and Miller had their civil union dissolved in 2004, and Vermont’s Family Court granted Jenkins visitation rights. Miller moved to Virginia, which did not recognize Vermont’s civil unions, and used the court to block Jenkins from visiting for two years. Ultimately, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Vermont still had jurisdiction, reinstating visitation rights for Jenkins. When Miller again started blocking Jenkins’ visits, a Vermont judge held her in contempt, prompting her to flee with Isabella to Central America, apparently through a covert network of Mennonites. ”Mama” was hardly a “stranger” in the eyes of the law, despite Miller’s best attempts to alienate Isabella from her.

Worse than simply being wrong on the facts, Fischer is arguing for complete anarchy. Judges granting custody to legally recognized guardians is the courts acting in the best interest of children. To call that “judicial kidnapping” is to suggest that the entire legal system be disregarded when it recognizes same-sex relationships. Fischer is essentially encouraging conservative Christians to become anti-gay vigilantes, kidnapping the children of same-sex couples to enforce their own perverted sense of justice outside the legal system.

Despite how extreme Fischer’s positions are, there is actually precedent for this particular mindset. The Manhattan Declaration, drafted in 2009 by former National Organization for Marriage chairman Robert George and the late prison evangelist Chuck Colson, encourages Christians to violate the law if that’s what it takes to uphold their anti-gay (or anti-choice) values. Fischer is apparently ready to follow through on that “call of Christian conscience.”

(Click to see full-size.)

This week, a letter has gone viral that a father sent to his son, disowning him because he is gay. Here is its full text:

James,

This is a difficult but necessary letter to write.

I hope your telephone call was not to receive my blessing for the degrading of your lifestyle.

I have fond memories of our times together, but that is all in the past.

Don’t expect any further conversations with me. No communications at all. I will not come to visit, nor do I want you in my house.

You’ve made your choice though wrong it may be. God did not intend for this unnatural lifestyle.

If you choose not to attend my funeral, my friends and family will understand.

Have a good birthday and good life.

No present exchanges will be accepted.

Goodbye,

Dad

The letter was sent five years ago. James, who usually goes by Jamie, had this to offer upon sharing the letter this week:

It’s important to know just what this zealotry from Bryan Fischer, Maggie Gallagher, Dan Cathy, et al., does to everyday people. I’ve never done drugs, was an excellent student, an obedient child (far less trouble than many of my classmates), didn’t drink until I was 22 because it terrified me, and have had just 1 speeding ticket in my life. Yet I am still seemingly deserving of this terrible act of hate and cowardice that one person can place on another.

5 years on and I am still doing fine, though this letter saunters into my mind every once in a while. When it does, I say without hesitation: Fuck you, Dad.

Some might be quick to dismiss this letter as a hoax, but I can assure readers it’s not. In fact, I’m going to break the editorial fourth wall for this post to disclose that I actually know Jamie personally. We were friends in college — in the same degree program, in fact — and I can assure the world that he is very real, and one of the kindest, sweetest, and gentlest people I’ve ever known. Though I haven’t seen him since our last overlapping year of college, I remain connected to him through social media, and vicariously through his partner, fellow blogger Viktor Kerney, who posted about the letter at The Bilerico Project.

I, like many fellow LGBT bloggers and activists, argue daily here at ThinkProgress that the anti-gay rhetoric spewed by conservatives and the actions taken against the LGBT community have serious consequences. Time and attention has been dedicated to the Chick-fil-A controversy, for example, because Dan Cathy’s open condemnation of gay people and his company’s donations to hate groups and ex-gay ministries aren’t just offensive — they harm people. Study after study has shown the impact of family rejection on homelessness, the impact of bullying on depression and suicide, and the impact of societal stigma on the health and economic well-being of LGBT people. Here before you is an example of that harm in its simplest form: a father prioritizing his disdain for homosexuality over his ability to love his own son, his own flesh and blood.

Almost every group opposed to LGBT equality identifies somehow with defending the “family,” either in name or in messaging. But it is the anti-gay rhetoric they profess on behalf of families that actually destroys them. It’s up to those who so proudly turned out for fried chicken last week to defend and justify encouraging such rejection.

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer has sunk to a new, disturbing low with his anti-gay statements. In two separate tweets last night, he called for an “Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households.” In one tweet  he was referring to the sad story of Lisa Miller, who, after declaring herself ex-gay, kidnapped her daughter away to Central America to prevent her former partner from having any custody. (She is still being tracked by federal agents as a fugitive of the law.)

In the other tweet, Fischer referred to the testimony of a individual named Robert Oscar Lopez, who blames all of his social problems on being raised by his mom and her lesbian partner. Here’s a sampling:

Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.[...]

Life is hard when you are strange. Even now, I have very few friends and often feel as though I do not understand people because of the unspoken gender cues that everyone around me, even gays raised in traditional homes, takes for granted. Though I am hard-working and a quick learner, I have trouble in professional settings because co-workers find me bizarre.

Perhaps unfamiliar with the concepts of self-fulfilling prophesies and internalized homophobia, this man’s odd testimony seems to attack gay parenting merely because he believes his bisexual mother’s decision to live with a woman made it a struggle for him to identify as bisexual himself. Unlike his mother, his preference seems to be to conform to heteronormative society, and he feels unable to do that because he feels he wasn’t properly conditioned by archaic gender stereotypes. Given the added incentive to defend Mark Regnerus’ “bullshit” faulty study attacking gay parenting, he is clearly trying to pin his panoply of personal problems on his mother (and all same-sex parents as a result.) His story is not a valid representation of anything except his own unique perception of the world.

And yet, Bryan Fischer believes it to be the perfect example of why the children of same-sex parents should be kidnapped away for their protection — that they are the equivalent of slaves who need to be rescued. This is incredibly dangerous rhetoric that has the potential to do great harm. How much destruction could self-declared “Harriet Tubmans” do to same-sex families, motivated by Fischer’s claims? More than ever, the “culture war” is a direct attack on the lives of LGBT and their families.