The Financial Collapse of Focus on the Family?

OK, maybe it's a bit too premature to call it a financial collapse.  But suffice it to say, one of the loudest anti-LGBT organizations is facing huge money problems, to the point where they've been forced to outsource their anti-LGBT programming.  Focus on the Family, according to AP, is about to fall $6 million short of its annual budget.  While they sent out an emergency fundraising appeal to try to close that gap, one thing is clear: Focus on the Family's rabid anti-LGBT actions are becoming so increasingly unpopular, even many conservatives don't want to fund them.

In Maine, for instance, a Focus on the Family affiliate blamed marriage equality for rainy weather and a potato blight. In Florida, Focus on the Family activists are behind an effort to tax heterosexual marriage, as a means of making marriage unavailable to people with limited means.  These activists have prepared a campaign that would allow couples to get a refund on their marriage tax, so long as they complete several sessions of premarital, Christian-infused classes.  Focus on the Family activists even launched a Web site with a bassett hound mascot to promote their anti-LGBT agenda.  The point of the Web site?  To say that bassett hounds weren't born to moo like cattle, and people weren't born gay.

So while Focus has paid money to consultants to create anti-LGBT Web sites starring bassett hounds, or funneled money to state affiliates who support taxing heterosexual marriage and forcing couples to undergo premarital counseling, or sending money to statewide activists who blame gay marriage for a bad potato crop, it seems a whole lot of people have wised up and stopped donating to the organization.

Which may be the reason that this week Focus on the Family has just outsourced their anti-LGBT events, known as "Love Won Out," to the slightly more frightening Exodus International group in Florida.  Here's what a staff member at Focus on the Family told the Denver Post about the decision to eighty-six the "Love Won Out" program:

Love Won Out is not an inexpensive event to stage, and rarely, in over 50 cities where it's been held, have we ever made back our investment.

Ah, I see.  And in that regard, "Love Won Out" is kind of like Clear Pepsi.  Certainly a lot of marketing behind it, but when it comes down to it, people just don't like it.  And how interesting that Focus's decision to get rid of their ex-gay therapy programming comes the same week that the American Psychological Association announces that ex-gay therapy, like the story of Prometheus or the tale of that cereal kid from the 1970s who died eating Pop Rocks and soda, is simply just a myth.  In other words, ex-gay therapy don't work.

The truth in all of this is likely somewhere between these two points:  Focus on the Family didn't manage its budget well during the economic downturn, which has already forced the organization to lay off more than 20 percent of its workforce.  Couple that with the fact that support nationally for the organization is at an all-time low, and it makes sense that they'd have to start out-sourcing programs.