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.
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“You have heard that it was said,” the rebel leader read, “'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away.” Then the leader asked, “What did Isa say here, in your own words?”
