Bryan Fischer does not exist within reality. If he did, he would understand that homosexual students will always exist, no matter what kind of verbal genocide he and his cohorts try to commit against gay kids. If he did, he would realize that his words are words of malice and hatred, and that for him to suggest that “homosexuality” should be eradicated is tantamount to an endorsement of exactly the kind of bullying that drives gay kids to take their own lives. I doubt (???) he intends it that way, but seen within the context of reality, that is what these words mean:
It bears repeating: speaking the truth about homosexual behavior is not bullying. Nor is it harassment, as much as the deviancy cabal wants it to be.
It’s too bad Bryan Fischer hasn’t spoken the truth about homosexuality for one second in his sad life.
Homosexual conduct is as risky and dangerous as injection drug abuse. No right-thinking adult would encourage a student tempted to shoot up to yield to such impulses and plunge headlong into a drug-addled lifestyle. In fact, we would be highly critical of any adult who would do that, and hold him partially accountable for the destruction that would follow.
Nor should we encourage students wrestling with same-sex attractions to take the plunge. Rather, they should be helped to resist these self-destructive impulses and redirect their sexual energies in healthy and life-giving directions. It can be done; in fact, it happens every day.
If we want to see fewer students commit suicide, we want fewer homosexual students. What all truly caring adults will want to do for a student struggling with his sexual identity is to help him resist dangerous sexual impulses, accept his biological identity as either male or female, and help him learn to adjust his psychological identity to his God-given biological one.
The parts I skipped are where Bryan Fischer cries like a little baby about the fact that “homoseckshul activists” are “mean to Christians,” by which he means that he’s upset that we call his bigotry and hatred what they are: the ignorant, childish, malevolent, not socially acceptable, un-American, vile, piggish, ramblings of a miscreant whom the history books will remember with a disgusted smirk, if they remember him at all.
[h/t Kyle]
If we want to see fewer students commit suicide, we want fewer homosexual students.
Hey Bryan…So I take it this means you don’t want fewer homosexual students committing suicide, since that would mean more, not fewer, homosexual students.
Such ridiculous people Bryan and AFA are.
I followed the story links and ended up at AFA’s site.
I decided to look at their TOS and Acceptable Use Policy.
I get such a laugh out of these people.
This is great:
Prohibited Activities
Neither AFA content, nor any links to AFA.net or RightlyConcerned.com, may be posted on any website, transmitted through any electronic delivery system (i.e. “email”), or published in any print publication that engages in any of the following:
* Any behavior or speech, or advocacy of any behavior or speech that, in the sole opinion of the management of the American Family Association, is contrary to biblical standards of morality (Example: encouraging sex outside of marriage);
basically according to AFA, nothing on its site may be quoted in a criticism or refutation of the AFA’s homophobic opinion.
So much for free speech.
“…accept his biological identity as either male or female…”
What the hell has that got to do with it? One’s biological identity as either male or female and one’s sexual orientation are two different things. Can the pillock not grasp that? He clearly doesn’t understand what homosexuality is.
There’s no indication that any of these kids and young adults were struggling with anything except the pain of being assaulted both verbally and physically, day in and day out. Remember Phoebe Prince, another high school student who committed suicide after being bullied to the point of abuse? She appears to have been straight, but she endured the same kind of taunting and physical harassment as the gay kids — much of it sexual and misogynistic in nature. Bryan Fischer might as well say, “If we want fewer suicides, we want fewer bright, attractive heterosexual girls.”
No, if we want fewer suicides, we need to take peer abuse seriously, and ensure that the kids who engage in it, and the teachers who condone or encourage it, face serious consequences.
Of course, it would also help to attack the mentality that makes it okay to call any girl a “s**t” because of who she does or doesn’t sleep with, or to beat the living crap out of the local tomboy or sissy. (And yes, girls who are insufficiently girly do get beaten up for it.) But even if no one’s opinion ever changed, a lot of suicides could be prevented if only we would stop sweeping abusive behavior under the rug, and rationalizing it as “kids being kids.”
William, Fischer hates gay people, but he’s got his eyes on an even bigger prize than just making our lives hell. He wants to dictate how heterosexuals run their lives, and what he’s got in mind is sometimes referred to as “Biblical marriage,” which is sort of like a cross between Leave it to Beaver and The Handmaid’s Tale. (Check out the Vision Forum’s website, or Google Voddie Baucham, if you are unfamiliar with these lovely people. Then head on over to nolongerquivering.com for the fascinating stories of women who have escaped this subculture.) The very existence of gays, even gays whose gender presentation is fairly conventional, is a reminder that there are other ways to run your life, and he’s afraid that might give straight couples ideas about, well, you know, birth control and men doing housework.
I’ve got a better idea.
Stop recruiting people into the Christian Lifestyle. You’ll see a dramatic decrease in anti-gay bigotry within a decade.
“Biblical marriage”? Oh yeah, that old chestnut. Here are some shining examples:
Lamech – 2 wives
Abraham – married to his half-sister, whose servant girl he also shagged
Esau – 3 wives
Jacob – 2 wives
Gideon – “many” wives
Elkanah – 2 wives
Ashur the father of Tekoa – 2 wives
Rehoboam – 18 wives
Abijah – 14 wives
David – 10 wives (or thereabouts – difficult to keep track)
Solomon – 700 wives (+ 300 concubines)
Yep, the term is hilarious when you look at what’s actually in the Bible. It’s easy to make fun of, but given the influence extreme fundamentalists have on US politics, I think it’s useful to take a moment to understand them on their own terms. They’re coming out of a particular exegetical tradition that does not see the the Bible as a collection of ancient texts, but as a unified work that shows a clear progression towards a particular ideal, which is their modern, literalist reading St. Paul (and the pseudo-Pauline letters) — ‘the man is the head of the woman, blah, blah, blah…’
Their particular, weird notion of what a family is supposed to be — a quasi-military chain of command with Dad at the top, taking orders only from God, grew out of the militant 1970′s fundamentalism promoted by Francis Schaeffer, R.J. Rushdoony, and Bill Gothard. That’s what they’d like to impose on the rest of the country. Within this movement, there are people who actually oppose women’s suffrage (e.g., Voddie Baucham. Interestingly, he’s an African American man married to a white woman.) Since these people have influenced the outcomes of a disturbing number of elections, let’s look at what they really believe, instead of caricaturing them — although I share your amusement at those examples.
A prominent British evangelical fundamentalist vicar wrote that “the Bible is a carefully planned whole.” If that is so, then it was very carefully planned to make it look as though it isn’t a carefully planned whole.
Brilliant article Evan. Fischer and all his AFA fanatical co-religionists are nutbags. Keep up the good work exposing them as such.
I know this has been asked about a million times before, but, seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people?
“I know this has been asked about a million times before, but, seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people?”
Emma, they suffer from the various GOD disorders:
Gay Obsession Disorder,
Gender Obsession Disorder, and
Genitalia Obsession Disorder, which all fall under the umbrella of
God Obsession Disorder.