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Reverend of the American Catholic Church in Nevada, an independent church that does not frown upon homosexuality or female clergy.
Dicotignano regularly performed holy unions for gay couples from all over the country before gay marriage was legalized.
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Titled, The Rhetoric of Intolerance: An Open-Letter Video to Pat Robertson from Dr. Mel White, this video provides a point-by-point destruction of Robertson's homophobic social and religious paradigm. Throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, Pat Robertson--founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network [CBN], Regent University, and the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, and one of the loudest voices in the Religious Right--spread a relentlessly homophobic message through his television program, The 700 Club. Mel White, a closeted gay man who ghost wrote autobiographies for such homophobic Christian fundamentalists as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Billy Graham, came out in 1994 and became an outspoken queer activist associated with the Metropolitan Community Church. For documentary materials associated with The Rhetoric of Intolerance ..., see MS-00802, box 8 ["Discrimination - The Rhetoric of Intolerance"] in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' Special Collections Department. [00:00:00 - 00:30:03]
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Ralph Vandersnick was born March 16, 1927 in Annawan, Illinois, a small town that was 150 miles from Chicago, Illinois. His mother died when he was five, and his family moved to Atkinson, Illinois in 1934. He grew up in the Great Depression and was drafted into World War II when he was 17, missing high school graduation by a year.
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