Small Church Plays Big In Gay-Rights Debate -- Anti-Homosexual Videotape Reaches High Places

LOS ANGELES - The graphic anti-gay video widely distributed in Congress and the Pentagon during the recent debate over homosexuals in the military was produced at a small, fundamentalist church tucked away in an industrial sector of Lancaster, Calif., in the high desert.

Antelope Valley Springs of Life Ministries - where security guards patrol the aisles during services and weekday visitors are met by locked doors - has been in the news before. It was the church where television evangelist Jim Bakker was reordained after the PTL scandal broke and where he preached his last sermons before entering prison.

But nothing has propelled this 400-member, charismatic church, situated about 60 miles north of Los Angeles, into national prominence like "The Gay Agenda," a 20-minute videotape that features nudity, public lasciviousness and assertions that homosexuality is unnatural, a sickness and not worthy of legal protection.

The slick professional tape has reached the highest ranks of government. Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., chairman of the Armed Service Committee, received a copy. So did other members of Congress. The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Carl Mundy Jr., gave copies to other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Marine spokesman says.

Springs of Life officials say more than 25,000 copies of the video already have been shipped across the country. Church operators, working from a phone bank two doors down from the sanctuary, take 300 to 500 orders each day.

"This is an exciting time!" Jeannette Beeson, wife of the Rev. Tyron Beeson, declared to the congregation on a recent Sunday morning. "God has called us to save a nation."

The service included upbeat music from the six-piece church band and shouts of affirmation that are often part of charismatic gatherings. But unlike many other fundamentalist churches, the services here are almost as much about social and political issues as they are about Scripture.

A SOURCE OF REJUVENATION

And for Springs of Life, a church that had a meteoric rise in the mid-1980s only to suffer the more recent defection of much of its congregation, the production and distribution of the anti-gay videotapes has been a source of rejuvenation.

The sanctuary itself, from which the pastors preside over services, looks like a television talk show set, complete with artificial palm trees, padded chairs, a glass-topped coffee table and silver pillars. Banks of TV lights illuminate it brilliantly.

The set was built for the church's first foray into electronic religion, a weekly cable TV talk show, "The Report: A Righteous Perspective," begun in 1990. The show featured guests such as Bruce Herschensohn, Pat Buchanan and Lorraine Day, a physician whose views about homosexuality and AIDS run contrary to most of the medical establishment. In her interview on the show, copies of which the church now sells, Day defined homosexuality as "a sexual addiction, not an alternative lifestyle."

In 1991, for an episode of "The Report," prepared while debate raged in California over a gay civil-rights bill, the producer, Bill Horn, a Bakersfield, Calif., sportscaster, bought some amateur video of a gay-pride parade. He edited together a 12-minute segment that showed nudity, outrageous costumes and raunchiness.

The segment, entitled "Sexual Orientation Or Sexual Deviation: You Decide," drew interest from prominent figures on the religious right. Dr. James Dobson, a Colorado-based psychologist who hosts the nationally syndicated "Focus on the Family" radio show, arranged to have 8,000 copies distributed throughout California, Horn said.

In at least one instance, the tape was used to further a local political argument. The director of an Antelope Valley private Christian school showed it at a meeting of the Palmdale City Council to back his argument that the council should pass a resolution opposing the gay civil-rights bill.

The council passed the resolution unanimously.

Horn, who eventually quit his sportscasting job to work full time for the church, said the church got so many orders for the tape that it ended production of "The Report" to concentrate on making videos. He trained church members to operate video cameras and sent them out to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York to tape parades and other events.

MORE TAPES COME

They made a second tape about gay issues, "Civil Rights Or Crisis In America?" and then "The Gay Agenda."

With that tape, Springs of Life, which began about 12 years ago as a home Bible-study group, came onto the national scene.

The study group had been started by Beeson shortly after he and his wife arrived in Lancaster from Turlock, near Modesto, Calif.

Beeson, 41, was a real estate salesman but had long wanted to preach. His preaching was rooted in charismatic renewal, an offshoot of Pentecostalist Christianity. Charismatics believe that members of its group have gifts of the Holy Spirit, including the ability to speak in tongues.

"The Gay Agenda" was released last October in time to bolster the efforts of groups in Oregon and Colorado working for the approval of anti-gay-rights ballot measures. Horn said 6,000 copies went to Oregon and another 4,000 went to Colorado.

The interest on the part of the military came as a surprise to the church, Horn said. He read a letter that came, just before President Clinton's inauguration, from someone he identified as a two-star Army general. It praised the tape as "a splendid teaching vehicle" and said that it was being looked at by high-ranking officers.

Soon other Pentagon officials were requesting the tape, Horn said.

Sales of the "The Gay Agenda," which costs $13.95, got its biggest boost when it was featured this month on Pat Robertson's "The 700 Club," which claims a daily nationwide audience of more than 1 million. In the 24 hours following the show more than 6,000 calls were received at the church's phone bank, Beeson said.

Gay-rights advocates say that the information in "The Gay Agenda" is distorted.

"If we were to go and shoot video of beer busts in Florida on spring break, we could create a film called `The Heterosexual Agenda' that would be just as wrong," said Urvashi Vaid, a Washington-based lawyer who has long been active in the gay civil-rights movement. "Gay-pride events are like big parties and of course there is some outrageous behavior. But this is not the norm, any more than spring break."