FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Wayne Besen, Executive Director
Phone: 917-691-5118
E-Mail: wbesen@truthwinsout.org
Fake Religious Freedom Argument Used In Debate to Mask Red Meat Bigotry, Says TWO
NEW YORK – Truth Wins Out expressed its revulsion over the unrestrained anti-gay bigotry expressed by Republican candidates in tonight’s ABC News debate. The contenders bent over backwards to slap loving gay couples in their faces and hid behind phony religious liberty arguments to mask their anti-gay animus, says TWO.
“We are completely disgusted by virtually the entire GOP field which panders to prejudice and bows to anti-gay bigotry,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “The unabashed extremism witnessed in this debate is a disgrace and an embarrassment to both the Republican Party and to this nation.”
The most outrageous view expressed this evening came from former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum who said that he would support a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying, as well as breaking up gay couples who are already legally married. “If the Constitution says marriage is between a man and a woman, then marriage is between a man and a woman,” Santorum said. “Those who are not men and women and are married would not be married.”
“I think the radical idea of destroying families and invalidating their marriages is so preposterous that it will cost Rick Santorum any chance of ever becoming President of the United States,” said TWO’s Besen, who married his partner of five years, Jamie Brundage, last month in Burlington, Vermont. “Santorum is just too extreme and the cruel position he took on this issue will lead to the unraveling of his campaign.”
Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum defended their anti-gay positions by falsely claiming that marriage equality conflicted with religious liberty. Perry actually claimed that allowing LGBT couples to marry is a “a war against religion.”
“The red meat may work to some degree in the primaries,” said TWO’s Besen, “But homophobia will haunt the eventual nominee in the general election.”
The most laughable moment of the evening came when Newt Gingrich expressed his opposition to marriage equality and invoked “the sacrament of marriage.” He did so with a straight face as his third wife, Callista, sat in the audience and applauded.
Truth Wins Out (TWO) is a nonprofit that fights anti-LGBT religious extremism. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality.
Video via Think Progress:
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Christian Pastor’s Stinging Rebuke to the Anti-Gay “Concerned Women for America”
http://tinyurl.com/83hnm96
he so-called Concerned Women for America recently released a video with the fatuous gasbag Janice Crouse delivering a veritable greatest hits parade of fraudulent assertions demonizing gay human beings. Given that the alleged topic of the video is “The Challenges Facing Marriage in the 21st Century,” a viewer could wonder why Crouse deceitfully alleges that anal cancer is “very prevalent” among homosexuals.
CWFA describes itself as a “US coalition of conservative women which promotes Biblical values.” I spoke about this CWFA video with the Reverend Doctor Nancy E. Petty, Senior Pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“One of the actual threats to marriage in our society today,” Pastor Petty tells me, “comes from people misusing the Bible to define marriage. If you look at the Old and New Testaments, you will not get one picture only of what constitutes marriage. In fact, often in the Bible, men had numerous wives, and women were bought and sold as property. The claim that the Bible defines marriage for today is false.”
“It’s interesting,” Pastor Petty continues “to listen to how this woman — and others in the extreme right wing — spins marriage equality as something that supposedly undermines marriage. She talks first about co-habitation and promiscuity, as though these were not elements of the human condition. And the statistics she uses, many of them strongly negative about gay people, don’t seem applicable to the arguments she’s trying to make, which I think are not well-founded. I don’t feel that Janice Crouse is a person interested in talking about how to strengthen commitment in relationships and how we as a society can support people’s commitments to each other. To the contrary, the things she talks about are tangential to that. She has taken an ideologically-driven position against same sex marriage and has chosen to use very divisive phrases to instill hatred and fear in people about this issue. She is saying these things from a place of hate and intolerance; that video is not at all about the substance of how to talk about and to encourage loving relationships.”
“It’s shocking, where she starts going on about social science, saying that equality supporters believe love is the only thing that matters, and that the field of social science contradicts this idea. There are many heterosexual marriages where one spouse is abusing the other, and the children too are being abused, so I’m not sure I understand how that woman can claim that what’s most important for marriage is not love but rather that the couple is heterosexual.”
Crouse indeed maliciously portrays gay human beings as being virtually incapable of long-term commitment. Readers should be sure to note this article on a gay couple recently married in New York after a 52-year relationship.
Pastor Petty continues “The real assault on marriage is to be found in right-wingers’ support of inequality within marriage, with a man given more power than a woman. If you look at what Jesus said about relationships, he calls us into relationships that are loving, just, compassionate and equal. Where Crouse says that love is not the most important thing in a marriage, her argument is morally, spiritually and ethically bankrupt. The real assault on marriage is Crouse’s use of hateful language spoken in a total void of what love means. For obvious reasons, it does not work well, generally, for a homosexual person to marry a heterosexual one. Where one social group, feeling itself superior, is beating another group down in order to get ahead, that is not talking about what is of value in loving commitments, and it certainly is not an authentically Christian way of being. The foundational Christian message is to love one another.”
In conclusion, Pastor Petty says “When it pops up on that video, Concerned Women for America . . . . well . . . . this is one woman that they are not representing.” To view the signatures of dozens and dozens of other clergy for whom the maliciously anti-gay Concerned Women for America do not speak, go here.
African-American Pastor Rebukes NOM’s Anti-Gay Bigotry
http://tinyurl.com/7lu5mmd
On November 14, Jennifer Roback Morse of the so-called National Organization for Marriage’s Ruth Institute — (an anti-gay hate speech propaganda factory) — took malicious aim at a Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services publicity campaign to promote awareness among gay people that they may foster and/or adopt children in need of homes, RaiseAChild.us.
Morse’s screed is chocablock with bullying non-acceptance of gay human beings. With no sense of shame or decency, Morse attempts to depict gay adoptive parents as enemies of all African Americans. Having noticed that the two children shown in the campaign’s promotional banners are black, Morse wrote: “I wonder what the African-American community thinks about recruiting gay men to become foster parents for the children of their community who have been taken from their parents. Do the African-American pastors have any thoughts and opinions about this? I imagine they do. But I will let them speak for themselves.”
To me, Morse’s expression of the idea that gay people are out to get other people’s children was suggestive of the notorious blood libel, whereby Jews were said to kidnap Christians’ children to use their blood to make matzo.
Pastor Michael Bledsoe of Riverside Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. – an adjunct professor at the Howard University School of Divinity — however, told me in an e-mail that Jennifer Roback Morse’s…
“article is offensive on many levels. That said, I’m not sure the blood libel analogy is appropriate. I think it sufficient for you to point out the ludicrous nature of her lie that children are being taken from their parents to give to gay couples. The more accurate reference she is likely trying to pull from is slavery where children were separated from families. But of course, this is a smear aimed at shamelessly exploiting what was a horrific time in this nation when indeed slave families were torn asunder. Adoption is the voluntary giving up of a child because the mother or parents do not want the child or cannot take care of it. In my own congregation, I have watched with delight as a lesbian couple adopted a child, saved him from a life of meager resources and are nurturing him with love and devotion. He is a joy to behold. Each Sunday, he interacts with me and each time I see him, I embrace his parents, thanking God for their love of this child. I dedicated him in our church with his adoptive parents as I would do for any other couple. The Roback piece is ignorant, exploitive and hateful. “
Though Jennifer Roback Morse (jmorse@ruthinstitute.org) had wondered whether African-American pastors had thoughts and opinions about the RaiseAChild.us adoption program, she did not respond to my request for comment on Pastor Michael Bledsoe’s assessment of her anti-gay hate screed. That request for comment was copied to NOM’s Maggie Gallagher and to NOM’s Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Princeton Professor Robert George. Apparently, Professor George and his anti-gay-hate-speech enablers on the Princeton University Board of Trustees see nothing wrong with demonizing gay people by fraudulently insinuating that gay adoptive parents are stealing babies from African-American families.
It’s disgusting how Santorum preaches about “family values” and the “sanctity of marriage” while promising he’ll forcibly divorce millions of legally married couples if given the chance.
Can’t tell from the short clip provided above, but did no one call out Gingrich on the outright lie he told about the Catholic adoption service that CHOSE to close down rather than work with LGBT couples? Did no one push back at Romney’s patronizing crap regarding our long-term relationships – that the question is about the legal protections and recognitions of them and NOT our ability to form and sustain them?
When is the next one of these godawful LGBT hatefests going to take place? There needs to be a major expression of public outrage at their insistence of punishing us for breathing (which is ultimately what it comes down to- religiously driven animus).
Why are pro-equality Americans not protesting outside these hate fests, I mean, debates? I’d like to see a line of pro-equality people with signs saying, “Homophobia is a sin.” And for one special candidate: “Adultery is a sin.”
The anti-gay argument is becoming less effective over time since a few courageous states have enacted equality over discrimination.
And people are seeing that LGBT folks are just people first. That is remarkable.
But the Repugs think they can still run politics on wedge issues. They’re wrong. You cannot have the problems inherent in the United States going on and think that anti-gay rhetoric will get you elected.
Religion is wonderful. You can use it to get money and get elected. Just crawl up the asses of the biased and bigoted creeps to whom you are pandering. Of course, you need a great enemy to rally them and WE are it and have been for many many decades. I especially liked Mitt’s answer: “It’s a wonderful thing to form loving and committed relationships; that doesn’t mean it has to be called marriage.” He’s right. It’s just that a committed relationship called and recognized legally as marriage gets all sorts of legal and material benefits handed to the couple all over the world. Isn’t it obvious that “marriage” then is a contrived term that the government uses to “recognize” such committed relationships and unions? How about we dissolve marriages and eliminate this otherwise “useless” classification and everyone just forms one of those “wonderful things” called a loving and committed union like Mitt Romney thinks is sufficient. Would he like to be no longer be married, but instead have a non-legally recognized committed union? These people are so anti-gay the none of them has the guts to try to educate their listeners to the finer points of “equality” under the law. NO! It’s a “war against religion” and what? We need to be stomped on and relegated to ‘not quite human status’ so that these loving practitioners of God’s will can demonstrate to each other how wonderful they really are? f**k Them All! And Rick Perry talking tough – now there’s a laugh. “IT WILL STOP UNDER A PERRY ADMINISTRATION,” said he of the famed “n****r Rock” property. I really hate it at these closed debates when there is no one there to challenge these creeps and call them out for their hatred and bigotry. Newt commenting on marriage – what a joke! He wouldn’t know a good one if it bit his a*s. He certainly shopped around long enough.
Gianni,
You are so right. I’ve always thought that we should just have civil marriages and religious marriages. The civil marriage comes from the government and gives you legal recognition and the religious marriage is just for ceremony.
I know that we are all repulsed by the GOP’s, but come on guys, were we really all that surprised? What has happened to the Republican Party? They used to be the respectable opposition. Now? Now, I don’t know what to make of them.
On a brighter note, since the Republican Party has descended to this madness of hateful bigotry, many of my Republican friends and family members are rethinking their voting habits. Some of them are now identifying as “Independent” and/or quietly voting for Democrats. Hell, one of my best friends who is a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool Republican confessed to me that because of Sarah Palin, she voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and will probably do so again given the current crop of GOP candidates.
I am consistently appalled by the mindless bile emited by these so-called ‘conservative’ candidates.
If these ‘conservatives’ were to say this kind of thing in the UK, they would be vilified even by the right wing press, and possibly even arrested for hate-speech and incitement.
You may have already heard about this, but the UK has a conservative Prime Minister, and he said this recently:
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/10/05/david-cameron-urges-tories-to-back-gay-marriage/
That’s right, he’s pushing FOR full equality.
I may not agree with all his policies, in fact I did not even vote for him, but at least he is open minded enough to realise that this is the way the western world is heading, and that there are inummerable benefits to introducing full gay marriage, and NO disadvantages.
The GOP candidates won’t even LISTEN to reason, and instead rely on emotional responses influenced and even dictated by some 2000 year old tome that is at best VERY open to interpretation.
I visit this site and others so often because I love America and someday hope to move there. If one of these guys gets in, I’m going to have to seriously re-think that plan.
Peter, I and others have said it here before, despite how ‘advanced’ the US is in some/most ways, in other ways, like sexuality, we are still very backwards and neurotic. The infection of Calvinism left here by the Puritans still lurks in the body politic like a herpes virus waiting to blister forth and ooze out its fear and ignorance. It’s cool that you live in the UK, I didn’t know that.
I have gay friends in Germany who, when I first visited them in the mid-90s, assumed that I would be offended by their gay porn movies (because I’m American) and hid them out of sight. I laughed when I found out and told them that we’re not all nuts in the States when it comes to sex, especially us lgbt folks. And the gays who are fucked up about their sexuality are republicans.
Thank you Wayne. I too was disgusted by the ease at which these candidates will vilify us to stir up votes. Soon, I hope, these ideas will be so laughable that candidates won’t be able to target LGBT families when looking for fear based voting.
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Gary (NJ)
I always enjoys your posts, they are more often than not insightful and pertinent, with a large dash of ascerbic wit.
I’ve always thought where the US and the UK differ most visibly is in our respective attitudes to sex and violence. UK censors for example will always concentrate more on violent content, whereas sex, not so much.
However in the US violence is almost normalised in the media, especially in TV and film, but any sexual content restricts a movie to a strictly adult audience.
I was watching Captain America the other day, a ‘family’ action movie, and the body count was one of the highest I have seen in a long while, but I imagine if there was the slightest hint of lady-nipple, this would have rendered the film ‘adults only’.
I don’t get this. Like the majority of people in the world (I hope!), I never will, nor do I ever intend to kill, maim, beat or hit anyone. Heck, I’ve never even been in a fight.
However like the vast majority of the human race, I have seen and will continue to see naked people, and I have had and will continue to have sex, an expression of love and trust between 2 consenting people.
And yet in the US, sex seems to be MUCH worse than violence. Curious.
(Sorry, got caught in a rant there!)
http://wthrockmorton.com/2012/01/09/alan-chambers-99-9-have-not-experienced-a-change-in-their-orientation/
The problem Peter this statement was made on a panel at a presentation at the Gay Christian Network annual conference. I really question the judgment of the leadership of GCN. It gives Alan more ammunition to go back to the religious right and say see I am relevant the gay sinners are allowing me to speak at my conference I am making a difference. Really a stupid stupid move on their part.
Tim,
I agree, the GCN probably made a bit of a boo-boo in allowing this charlatain to even be allowed into the conference, let alone speak.
However I think it was more damaging for Chambers. After all, he did not have to say that.
Perhaps this marks the beginning of a journey of repentance for Chambers (although going by his past actions, I doubt it)
Otherwise, this was extremely foolish on his part.
For example, would you go to a driving instuctor who proffessed to have a 99.9% failure rate?
This could be the straw that broke the camel’s back.