The other day, I wrote about the One Million Moms’ complain-a-thon against JC Penney for hiring Ellen DeGeneres as their new spokesperson. If you’re not aware, the One Million Moms, a side project of the American Family Association hate group, is all upset because JC Penney hired the deviant pervert lesbian Ellen DeGeneres, she who is beloved by millions, to be their new spokesperson. They’re not calling for a boycott, but they sure are complaining!
Sandy Rios, wingnut, is not part of the One Million Moms, but she went on Bill O’Reilly to discuss the issue and Bill went after her, calling it a “witchhunt” and comparing their project to McCarthy-era blacklists. Dang! O’Reilly is often a blowhard, but on this issue, he nailed it.
If you’re not familiar, One Million Moms is a project of the American Family Association hate group, and the past week, they’ve been angry with JC Penney for choosing the “perverted” Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson. When I heard about their complaints, my first reaction was, “as if this is even possible, wingnuts are becoming even less self-aware.” Ellen DeGeneres is one of the most beloved celebrities in this nation, even among many, many conservatives. This is one of the reasons the wingnuts have ultimately lost this “culture war.” Ellen is so funny, and so family-friendly, that I’d imagine it’s hard for any but the most hardcore anti-gay bigots to really hate her.
Here’s Monica Cole of One Million Moms complain, complain, complaining that “JC Penneys” is ignoring them, along with the ever-unhinged Bryan Fischer.
Bryan Fischer points out that there are tons of heterosexual celebrities JC Penney could have chosen. Indeed! Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen are probably available! And you know the sad thing? If JC Penney had chosen one of those models of heterosexual behavior, the hate group in question wouldn’t have even noticed.
I haven’t been to a Penney’s in a long time, but maybe I’ll go take a looksee next time I’m near one. I’d imagine that JC Penney knows that the dollars of people who support fairness and equality are worth a lot more than those of the “One Million” [eleven?] moms of One Million Moms.
If you live in Indiana, you can now get a special license plate, a portion of the proceeds from which will go to the Indiana Youth Group, which works with issues related to LGBT teens across that state. If you are a normal person, your reaction to this is somewhere between shrugging and being happy that an LGBT youth group has been added to the myriad organizations which benefit from customized license plates. If you are a wingnut from the American Family Association, you are blowing a gasket:
A pro-family activist has said Indiana ignored the health issues involved in the homosexual lifestyle when it decided to issue an LGBT license plate.
[...]
Micah Clark, Executive Director for the American Family Association, said the DMV’s decision to approve the plate was troubling when one considers the tremendous health risks associated with the homosexual lifestyle.
The Center for Disease Control says that practicing homosexual men accounted for 61% of new HIV infections, despite being only 2% of the U.S. population. Homosexual men aged 13-29 accounted for 27% of the new cases.
“You have to question what the DMV was thinking when they approved a license plate for a group which recruits teens into the homosexual lifestyle. Since health risks do not seem to matter, what is to prevent a cigar club from now getting a license plate from the DMV?”
Oh, Micah is one of those really, really confused wingnuts who still thinks that gays recruit. Poor thing. Most of the wingnuts who believe that died in the 80′s. How did reality miss him?
Also, we will simply note that it’s still grotesque to watch “pro-family” leaders, who seriously do not care about how many gay people die, whether from being bullied to death, or from AIDS, concern troll about the “health risks of homosexual behavior.” If they actually cared, they would get on board with real, grown-up sexual education, for all people, including LGBT people, and with making prevention a priority. They would not be spewing alternate-reality hatred about groups “recruiting teens into the homosexual lifestyle.” As usual, it is their ideology they care about, and nothing more.
One more thing, to the journalist who wrote the piece: it is highly misleading to refer to Clark as a “pro-family activist.” He is the spokesperson for a well-known and certified hate group, and nothing more.
You see, if gay guys stop having sex and using poppers, all the AIDS will go away. Because that’s the problem with sub-Saharan Africa.
It happened just before the black-out, but no less than Rick Warren sharply rebuked Bryan Fischer for his HIV/AIDS denialism. Apparently the American Family Association has chosen to isolate itself further, even within the conservative Evangelical world. They’re earning their hate group label, yes indeed.
There is literally no anti-science conspiracy theory far-fetched enough for a dim bulb like Bryan Fischer to latch onto. So we are not surprised that the most hateful spokesperson for one of the country’s most ridiculous hate groups, the American Family Association, is now an AIDS denialist:
I recently came across several articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis. I still remember the screaming headlines in 1991, the abrupt termination of his NBA career at the height of his powers, and his subsequent and short-lived come back.
One would have expected pictures of Magic, taken 20 years after this life-sentence diagnosis, to be a withered, shriveled version of his former self, his life force eaten away by this killer virus.
“One would have expected,” said the renowned scientist and medical researcher Bryan Fischer.
So why is Magic the picture of health 20 years after this supposedly terminal diagnosis? Easy: the HIV virus does NOT cause AIDS. Since, as one of the world’s leading virologists, Peter Duesberg of U.C. Berkeley, says, HIV is a “harmless passenger virus,” Magic is likely to carry HIV with him to the end of a long and healthy life.
Duesberg wrote a bombshell book in 1996, Inventing the AIDS Virus, which exposes the myth of the so-called AIDS virus.
Peter Duesberg’s theories have been widely disproven, and hundreds of thousands of people have died in Africa, in part because certain leaders over there took him seriously for a while. He’s a quack, pure and simple. Right up Bryan Fischer’s alley…
In fact, in this respect, the bogus HIV/AIDS link is just like the hysterical anthropogenic global warming scam.
And only true idiots or those who stand to profit from huge corporations for propagating the idea that anthropogenic global warming is a myth would lend credence to that statement. As I highly doubt that Bryan Fischer is making that much money from the AFA, I’m going to continue believing he’s simply hysterical, incredibly easily led and simply not that smart.
Anyway, there’s no reason to go through Bryan’s piece line by line — that would be giving him more attention than he’s worth — but he sums up by blaming the entire AIDS crisis on gay men and poppers. This, of course, discounts the lives of the untold numbers of AIDS victims around the globe who are heterosexual, women and children. But wingnuts are pretty casual about discounting other people’s lives when it comes to pushing their propaganda, I’ve found.
As usual with right-wing humor, it’s completely unintentional. Here’s the “give us all the change in the cupholder of your Hoveround” pitch from the American Family Association for the end of the year.
I like it how the bumpkin stumbles over his own last name. Two syllables are hard for some Miss’ippi people, y’see. [NOT ALL OF THEM, I KNOW, I KNOW, I KNOW, says the Arkansan writing this.]
And robots and carrots and couches and coke floats and Nerf footballs and Trapper Keepers and Justin Bieber and ascots and berries and scenic routes ["Adopt a Highway" will become "Marry a Highway and Have Sex With It"] and rocks and cans of Red Bull and in the case of polyamory, all of these things at the same time!
Be filled with fear, dumb American Family Association donors, be filled with fear! And give them money, of course.
By the way, the expert explaining alla this to us is named “Buster,” which is a very common name among the intellectual elite.
As Jeremy points out, this is at best, pathetic, and at worst, an illustration of just how much contempt people like Tony Perkins have for their own followers. Basically here is what had happened was: yesterday, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi added a non-controversial amendment to a defense authorization bill which clarified that military chaplains are free to refuse to marry same-sex couples. Though gay rights advocates have never fought to force any clergy to perform weddings they don’t want to, for whatever reason, the following video features Roger Wicker speaking to hate group leaders Tim Wildmon [AFA] and Tony Perkins [FRC], declaring this very non-controversial amendment a “victory.”
I am aware that the Religious Right is winning basically nothing when it comes to gay rights these days — and thank heavens for that — but that they are declaring this a victory is hilarious. Jeremy also points out that there was basically no opposition to this, because it’s already Pentagon policy, and no one cares.
Think about it: why on God’s green earth would any gay couple want to go to Reverend Bubba the Bigot to perform their ceremony?! Weddings are happy occasions, people. No need to have a gross old homophobe on the guest list, much less at the pulpit.
Here’s the video:
When I said above that people like Tony Perkins and Tim Wildmon have absolute contempt for their own followers, those are my words, not Jeremy’s. But let me expand on that a bit. The Religious Right [and indeed, the Republican Party] would not have the donors and followers they have if they weren’t exceptionally crafty when it comes to lying to and scaring the shit out of their sheep. There is no liberal or gay-friendly parallel to this. On this side of the fence, journalists, bloggers and non-profit organizations are well aware that our average readers/listeners/supporters are pretty smart people, and moreover people who are willing and able to research issues for themselves. Therefore, aside from the fact that we have absolutely no reason to mislead people, we wouldn’t make it very far with the people who support us if we played cute with the facts like the Religious Right does.
Sadly, and I know this is a broad over-generalization, but Tony Perkins knows it too, the Religious Right is simply not that kind of crowd. So beholden to fear and authority are they that the “daddy figures” they choose to trust are viewed as impenetrable and beyond reproach, even when the words coming out of their leaders’ mouths defy all logic, reason and civics knowledge. Tim Wildmon, being sort of a fringe, regional figure, might be so dumb/uninformed that he believes what he’s saying, but Tony Perkins is inside the Beltway. He knows full well when he’s lying to his people in order to keep their fear-based ca$h a-rollin’ into the FRC’s coffers. Aside from the fact that the man leads a well-known and detested hate group, it’s grotesque to realize that a large part of his influence comes from the fact that he lies to his own people.
That’s how you end up with a situation where these men are able to go on to AFA radio and boldly claim “victory” on an issue that literally, nobody cares about. If their followers acted like liberals and decided to check for themselves whether or not gay couples wanted to force awful wingnuts to perform gay marriage ceremonies, they’d discover that Tony and Tim and Roger are lying to them. But they won’t, and those men know it, so the lies will continue.
Bryan Fischer is so stupid that he thinks that guys had unprotected sex and contracted HIV/AIDS because Barney Frank “modeled a lifestyle” for people. Yes, everybody was just a-followin’ Barney Frank’s lead.
It’s sad that there are people in this country who are uninformed/fearful enough to believe this crap. The good news is that their numbers go down every day. Fundamentalist idiots just aren’t replacing themselves in actuarial tables.
