Vision Forum under Siege by Gay Activists

Vision Forum, which provides family-building books, films, CDs, and toys to Christians, has come under siege by gay activists for their defense of traditional marriage. This is from their email bulletin:

In the early hours of May 17, Vision Forum began to receive the first in an ongoing and unprecedented attack to neutralize our website. The attack coincided with what appears to be a concerted and ongoing effort from within the atheist and homosexual community to manipulate an online poll to VF readers, and transform the VF Facebook page into a forum for homosexuals and opponents of Christianity to mock Christianity. The attack successfully curtailed our ability to make some products available to customers today, successfully undermined the integrity of an online poll, and was successful in placing profanities, blasphemies, and offensive content on our Facebook page.

Here is the story as we presently understand it:

Vision Forum is a ministry dedicated to the defense of the Christian family. We believe that God alone has the right to define marriage, and it is intended to be between a man and a woman. Over the course of the last week, Vision Forum has been posting articles expressing our opposition to President Obama’s declaration in favor of same-sex marriage. We have pointed out the anti-Christian and unbiblical nature of the President’s support of homosexual marriage. We have pointed out that his declaration promotes an agenda which is inconsistent with the historic statutory and common law foundations of Western law which are rooted in Christianity. We have also pointed out that the President has unleashed a nationwide campaign of scoffing at Christianity and the biblical definition of marriage.

On Wednesday afternoon, we launched a poll through Doug’s Blog which asked the question: Do you support President Obama’s declaration favoring same sex marriage?

As of midnight that night, there were just under 1,600 votes, approximately 90% of which expressed disapproval for the President’s support of homosexual “marriage. ” By 7 o’clock the next morning, the number of votes had jumped to just under 25,000 voters, and the demographic had switched to close to 90% of Vision Forum readers voting in favor of the President’s declaration. We realized that something fishy was going on for there to be a 2000% increase in pro-sodomite voting during the early hours of the morning.

The D-DOS Attack on Our Website

But something else was also afoot.

Around 3:00 a.m. Thursday morning, Vision Forum began experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (D-DOS) attack on the website, VisionForum.com. This type of attack uses large numbers of compromised computers, hundreds in this case, to send repeated requests to a website in an attempt to overload it. The result is that it can become very difficult, if not impossible, to use a website under such an attack.

If you were one of the hundreds of people who had problems loading the Vision Forum pages yesterday, it is because of this D-DOS attack which coincided with the efforts of others to populate our Facebook page with inappropriate material, and to undermine the integrity of our poll.

What is Causing the Inflated Pro-Homosexual Results?

At the time of this writing, the poll shows more than 50,000 voters, more than 47,000 of which support same-sex marriage. The numbers are growing with almost exact frequency each minute, and the proportionality of the votes have remained a general constant, at least since we have been tracking it early this morning.

Is this a case of the “people speaking”? Hardly!

There are two explanations for the dramatic change in proportionality of the vote and massive increase in voters. First, the pro-sodomite community could have rallied more than 40,000 supporters to vote in a time period of the last ten hours or so. This would show the power of anti-Christian hate groups to create a viral response to Christians who take a public stand against redefining marriage to accommodate the homosexual agenda.

How Anti-Christian Groups Deliberately Manipulated the Data

The second primary explanation is that the poll was deliberately manipulated by an individual or individuals wanting to interfere with the poll. An online poll of this kind provided by the PollDaddy service used on Doug’s Blog could easily be skewed through use of a macro script or browser plug-in such as the iMacros add-on for Google Chrome.

So what happened?

The evidence indicates that internet trolls and activists have tampered with at least a portion of the polling process.

We have verified, for example, by mid-afternoon that at least 4,500 of the votes are duplicates coming from the same IP address. This is almost indisputable proof that “there is something fishy going on.” Another 17,000 votes are from outside the United States of America, which means either that Vision Forum is either experiencing an unprecedented amount of international traffic, or that individuals may be using anonymizing networks to make their IP addresses appear unique while actually “rigging” the poll in their favor. It does not appear to be a hack of PollDaddy’s servers, but instead someone employing an automated script to vote repeatedly.

Presently, a user is claiming responsibility for skewing the results using a macro script of this kind. As early as 1:00 a.m. on Thursday morning, a link to my blog post with this polling question “Do you support the President’s stand on same-sex marriage?” was shared in the Atheism section of the social site Reddit, encouraging visitors to participate. The item received more than 500 responses including acknowledgements of participation, many of which contained specific statements in opposition to the Christian definition of marriage.

It was on the Reddit atheist forum that a user boasted of their use of a specialized computer script to dramatically inflate votes in our poll in favor of President Obama’s position and urged other readers of the Reddit forum to employ the same method to further skew the poll results. Several of these individuals identified themselves as homosexuals and posted glee-filled obscenities about their behavior within the context of their attempt to hijack our poll. Their boasting simply reveals what the common IP addresses point to — the manipulation of the poll by a few, thus rendering the results highly imbalanced.

Pro-Homosexual and Atheists Target the VF Facebook Page

But if bots and macro sabotage scripts were not enough, atheists, sodomites and pro-homosexuals from around the world targeted our Facebook page to populate it with hundreds of profanities, hateful dialogue, scoffing, blasphemy, and more. This prompted the posting of the following statement:

“This Facebook page has been targeted by the atheist and homosexual community, members of which have generated a spate of posts which violate the guidelines of this page. We remind our readers: We are a Christian company that takes seriously the Third Commandment. It is one thing to charitably post an alternative opinion, it is another to mock God, his Scriptures, or to take His name in vain. If you use this Facebook page for scoffing (Proverbs 22:10), for posting defiling communications, or if you in any way violate the Third Commandment in your posts, or encourage others to do the same, you will be deleted and banned. ”

What Are We to Make of This Attack?

Last year, atheist groups targeted the Facebook page of Ken Ham, filling it with pornographic material and hateful and filthy language. Yesterday Vision Forum was the object of attack (and still is). Tomorrow, it will be someone else.

While these plots to sabotage our poll and website, or to pollute our Facebook page with inappropriate dialogue can be a nuisance, they are not surprising. In fact, they are entirely predictable. They are a predictable tactic of radical groups known for bad behavior, groups made up of individuals who have little respect for Christianity or decency. What Vision Forum is presently experiencing is the predictable consequence of taking a stand against the radical pro-homosexual and atheist communities.

Of course, the battle on the Vision Forum website points to a much bigger and defining cultural battle that confronts us today: Will we embrace God’s program for marriage and the family and seek to personally model it in all its power and beauty, even as we fight for its sanctity — or will we cave to societal pressure and call “evil, good ” as it relates to homosexual behavior and attempts for unlawful recognition of practicing homosexuals, in defiance of God’s standards given to us in the Bible? The choice is simple: God’s law or chaos.

May God Receive All the Glory

Since our inception, Vision Forum has embraced the Bible as the standard for all of life and has sought to encourage the restoration of the biblical family by reinforcing godly masculinity and femininity — calling on men to act as noble men and women to embrace the high calling of virtuous womanhood and biblical femininity. Part of this mission has been to extol the glories of godly marriage as first pictured in the Garden when God brought Eve to Adam as his perfect helpmeet. The institution of marriage was the capstone of Creation Week, as God declared that “it is not good that man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18); that Adam needed a wife to aid him in his dominion work. Eve was God’s gift to Adam, and through Adam’s union with her, they were to bring forth children — to “be fruitful and multiply” — even as they worked together as dominion stewards of God’s creation. It’s this grand model of God-ordained marriage that Vision Forum has sought to advance since our founding more than fourteen years ago.

The battle against biblical marriage is likely only to escalate. As the pressure increases, we as Christian must fight against compromise and uphold God’s standard concerning this foundational institution.

Your grateful friend in the battle
Douglas Phillips
President, Vision Forum Inc.

(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)