I'm posting this as a promo for my colleague Rachel Tabachnick's new story, Invisible Children's "Cover the Night" is April 20 - on GLBT "Day of Silence"
[by Rachel Tabachnick]
Invisible Children has an extensive history of funding and promotion by anti-gay rights entities, summarized in this article.
The annual Day of Silence, initiated in 1996, has been observed in schools across the nation in an effort to protest the bullying and harassment of gay and lesbian students. Since 2000, the annual event has been sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), and since 2005 Religious Right organizations have sponsored very visible and widely-criticized efforts to counter this event. This year the Day of Silence is competing with a different type of event - Invisible Children's week of activities closing with "Cover the Night," also on April 20.
Invisible Children's Cover the Night is being held on Friday as the grand finale to several days of activism from April 16 - April 20. Participants are requested to wear their Kony 2012 t-shirts from their Invisible Children action kit to school (and all day) on April 20. Video with instructions for making a "Kony 2012" t-shirt by using a downloadable template and red spray paint, is provided on the Invisible Children website for those who did not purchase an action kit. Participants will be busy on April 20, because they are also asked to do three hours of community service in their local area in order to build good will for the Kony 2012 effort.
Graphic below on left is the GLSEN "Day of Silence" t-shirt for April 20 and on right is the Kony 2012 t-shirt to be worn on April 20.
Last year Invisible Children held an event in public schools on April 25, 2011 to promote fundraising. The goal was to encourage 25,000 supporters to donate $25 dollars each. This event was held days after the GLBT-focused observance on April 15, 2011, but was also called the "Day of Silence."
Participants were asked to be silent for 25 hours in this event that was advertised in advance. Dog tag style necklaces were marketed holding cards explaining Invisible Children's Day of Silence. The Invisible Children website for the event has been removed, but advertising in various school newsletters is still accessible on the internet. The 25 hours of silence was followed by "Breaking the Silence" events in cities across the nation.
This is yet another curious coincidence among a growing body of evidence that Invisible Children is something very different than what has been marketed to the general public.
Rachel Tabachnick's story, which continues the ongoing documentation of the extensive ties between the Invisible Children nonprofit and the religious right, continues
here at www.talk2action.org.
As Tabachnick discusses in her story, from a LGBT rights perspective there are a lot of fishy aspects to the Invisible Children / KONY 2012 effort - for example, Invisible Children says that the Caster family - one of the biggest Proposition 8 funders, is part of the Invisible Children network and gave IC's founders their initial money to go to Uganda and film IC's first video.
IC's website also states that the Caster family's foundation gave IC the initial seed money ($100,000) for IC's Schools For Schools program which - as the article linked below discusses - has become co-mingled in Uganda with educational programs run by The Family, the Washington DC-based global evangelical network credited with having helped inspire, and provide "technical support" for, Uganda's Anti Homosexuality Bill, dubbed the "kill the gays bill".
See: http://www.talk2action.org/...
There's now a well-documented case that Invisible Children is a "stealth" ministry of the religious right - which launched its KONY 2012 promotion campaign, last February 23rd, with a rally at the Mt. Soledad Cross overlooking San Diego.
See: http://www.talk2action.org/...