Anti-gay crusader David Caton is back in the news and this time he is targeting Muslims. The New York Times’ Samuel Freedman reports that Caton is going after advertisers of the show All American Muslim. He apparently thinks that the show is a plot to mainstream Muslims who are surreptitiously trying to trick Americans into thinking they are normal, when they are actually organizing to destroy wholesome Christian families.
In my budding activism years in Florida in the early 1990′s — the LGBT community’s chief foe was Caton of the American Family Association’s and later the Florida Family Association. For those who don’t know, Caton, a porn addict who wrote a book on the subject, was the original Porno Pete. The main difference is that Caton appears genuinely interested in women and doesn’t obsess exclusively on homosexuality.
One of the most hilarious things I remember about this creep was his advice on how not to be tempted by women. Caton warned that when talking to the opposite sex, avoid looking at mouths and instead focus on noses. I’m not sure if this works or just causes nose fetishes.
Sex, nudity and pornography were back on the agenda of the Hillsborough County Commission on Wednesday…In a raucous meeting that featured a burqa-clad protester, shouting matches and sexually laden slights, commissioners narrowly approved letting voters answer a nonbinding ballot question next year on whether to toughen the county’s anti-nudity ordinance. The measure passed 4-3, with commissioners Kathy Castor, Pat Frank and Jan Platt objecting.
More than two dozen people showed up Wednesday to blast the proposal. Many of them did so by ripping the proposal’s citizen sponsor, family rights advocate David Caton, a self-professed reformed porn addict who, in a book about overcoming his compulsion, wrote that his need to masturbate was once more powerful than his need for drugs.
“A professed pornography addict is trying to mislead the public about our crime rates and adult nudity because he can’t control his compulsion,” said citizen activist Ciara Jalandoni…Jalandoni was part of a succession of speakers who described Caton as a “chronic” or “compulsive masturbator,” referring to an admission he made in a 1990 autobiography.
The residents weren’t alone in mocking Caton. Commissioner Pat Frank said his acknowledged past fixation with pornography cast doubt on his credibility.
“That’s going to cost us money that we can ill afford to spend to try to keep Mr. Caton’s temptations away from him,” Frank said. “And that’s what this amounts to … He’s on a one-person crusade to satisfy himself.”
Isn’t it amazing how these types all have serious sexual issues and hate so many different groups of people?
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.
This is predictable. Just as so often conservative Catholics want to deflect attention from child-molesting priests by using their crimes to smear gay people [see: Bill Donohue], Evangelical hate group spokesmouths are now taking the crimes of Jerry Sandusky at Penn State as an excuse to spew bile at gay people.
The press has focused largely on Paterno and others in the Penn State hierarchy who covered up Sandusky’s pedophilia, some of whom even committed perjury to keep his dark and dirty secret from being exposed.
But perhaps some of that press focus is diversionary, to direct the attention of the public away from one of the darkest pathologies associated with homosexual behavior: homosexuals molest children at ten times the rate of heterosexuals.
Homosexual activists will of course lamely argue that since Sandusky is married, he is not a homosexual. Fine, call him bisexual if you will. But his sex crimes are same-sex crimes, and 10-year old boys whose bodies have been cruelly invaded could care less what label homosexual activists want to slap on their abuser.
Also, gay activists will not argue that due to Sandusky’s marriage, he is not homosexual. That would be lame indeed, as we know for a fact that it’s extremely common for conservative Christian men to be simultaneously married to women and also gayer than Glee. However, we will argue that the fact that he’s married and has been molesting young children means that he is a freaking pedophile, as that is what science, reality and common sense suggest.
Let me be clear. A heterosexual pedophile who committed such crimes against young girls should likewise be sent to the chair. Forcible rape of anyone used to be a capital offense everywhere in this country and should be so again.
Without getting into the argument over what punishment should be meted out for these heinous crimes, for our purposes we’ll just note that Bryan Fischer doesn’t seem to know a damn thing about the phenomenon of child sexual abuse. People who molest young kids molest young kids, regardless of the gender of the child. Bryan’s desire to use this as a way to smear gay people is disgusting.
So is Porno Pete’s:
LaBarbera: How Many Boy Victims of Penn State Homosexual Predator Jerry Sandusky Will End Up Thinking They are ‘Gay’?
Ugh. Whichever ones would have been gay anyway, you moron. Indeed, and sadly, many, many kids have been molested since the dawn of time, by people of the same and different genders as they are, and they have grown up to be straight, gay, bisexual, and whatever else in between. There is NO evidence that being molested “causes” anyone to be gay.
Many openly homosexual (“gay”) men, like CNN anchor Don Lemon, were molested as boys or experienced abnormally early sexualization. Yet many of these same men do NOT see their boyhood victimization at the hands of homosexual male predators as causing their homosexuality. (This is due partly to the success of the modern “gay” movement that falsely ascribes “gayness” to a person’s (innate) identity, and emphasizes the ambiguous notion of “sexual orientation” as opposed to behavior that is sinful, destructive and changeable.)
Don Lemon has actually talked about this in detail, so it’s a wonder Porno Pete’s so completely unwilling to listen to Lemon’s words on the subject, while simultaneously playing armchair psychologist to a man he’ll never be lucky enough to meet.
Thus, how many boy victims of homosexual predator Sandusky will end up believing that being homosexual (“gay”) is “who they are”? How many will struggle with sexual identity issues? And how many will be told by LGBT advocates and liberal-minded people just to “accept being gay” as “who they are” because they were “born that way”?
Because the media and academia have largely become apologists for the modern homosexualist movement, they downplay or ignore obvious causative factors in the formation of “gay” identity – including pederastic molestation. CNN’s Lemon is a case in point: he is now an “out gay” celebrity, yet few question the absurdity of him not associating the molestation of his youth with his later embrace of homosexuality as a positive identity.
Porno Pete is a scientist and is therefore qualified to point out “obvious causative factors in the formation of gay identity.” Oh wait, no he is not, he is an amateur fetish sex photographer who leads a very small hate group.
There IS a long history connecting homosexuality to pederasty, and a disproportionate link between homosexuality and pedophilia: why else would so many child molestation victims be boys when only 1-3 percent of the population is homosexual? Since cases of women molesting boys remain rare, if homosexuality were not such a strong factor, nearly all of pedophile victims should be girls, which is far from the case.
Except for the fact that there’s a hell of a lot of science on the issue, which points to many factors that lead to boy victims. One of them is ACCESS. Let us look at the Catholic Church again for a minute, please. Who do Catholic priests have the most consistent access to? Young boys! So those who are child molesters are going to go for the kids they have the easiest ACCESS to. This is science, but it’s not that damned complicated.
Sandusky is married but obviously has a homosexuality (perversion) problem.
No, he has a child rape problem. It’s amazing that Porno Pete has missed that child rape is the crux of the Penn State debacle, so blinded is he by his hatred of gay people.
But we’re used to this kind of crap from bizarrely gay-fixated wingnuts like Bryan and Porno Pete.
Occasionally it’s good to check in and see what our favorite anti-gay hate groups are up to when they’re not hating gay people. Lest we fail to understand that the fights for LGBT equality and reproductive rights are inextricably linked — they are both about the ability of fundamentalist Christian men to control the bodies and sex lives and autonomy of anyone who doesn’t look like them — let’s take a look at the “personhood amendment” being debated in Mississippi right now.
If you’re not familiar with a “personhood amendment,” it goes like this:
Garden variety “pro-life” people tend to be concerned with stopping abortion, and favor using the law to enforce that, rather than actually fighting for things like economic freedom for poor women and sex education, things which have been proven to reduce the need for abortion. [Those are the things the pro-choice movement works toward.] However, there is a subset within the activist anti-choice movement which seeks dominion over all female bodies, and will go to any length to achieve it. A “personhood amendment” would codify in a state’s Constitution that human life begins at the point of fertilization and grant that embryo all the rights of an actual human being. This is patently insane to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the human reproductive process. By this definition of “personhood,” millions of people “die” every day when embryos which haven’t yet implanted simply don’t turn into actual pregnancies. They aren’t even miscarriages.
The result of such an amendment would, of course, go around Roe v. Wade and ban all abortion in a state, but it would also put in danger lots of other things 99% of women take for granted in the United States. Irin Carmon has a great piece in Salon today which exposes what Mississippi is trying to do right now:
[T]he Personhood movement hopes to do nothing less than reclassify everyday, routine birth control as abortion. The medical definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg successfully implants in the uterine wall. If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.
On the chopping block: the morning-after pill, IUD’s, most forms of in vitro fertilization and, according to some, the regular old birth control pill. Moreover, the door would be open to investigating women who have recently miscarried. It happens in lots of countries.
You may be reading this and thinking, “that is insane. Nobody is that insane.” Have you met Fundamentalist Christian men before?
But a Colorado-based Personhood activist, Ed Hanks, is more than willing to publicly take things to their logical conclusion. He wrote on the Personhood Mississippi Facebook page that after abortion is banned, “the penalties have to be the same [for a women as well as doctors], as they would have to intentionally commit a known felony in order to kill their child. Society isn’t comfortable with this yet because abortion has been ‘normalized’ — as the Personhood message penetrates, then society will understand why women need to be punished just as surely as they understand why there can be no exceptions for rape/incest.”
[...]
At several public forums organized by the secretary of state to discuss ballot initiatives, resident Scott Murray’s statement was typical: “I know there is an issue with pregnancies, unmarried pregnancies, but I tell you the greatest prevention is God, and we’ve got to return to God.” So was Stephen Hannabass’ assertion that “we’ve got to repent. We’ve got to come before God and beg for mercy for our state and for our country.”
You see, if Mississippi just “repents” and “turns back to God,” there won’t be any problems anymore! Left unmentioned by these men, of course, is the fact that Mississippi has one of the worst infant morality rates in the nation, as well as one of the worst rates of child poverty. For these people, life truly begins at conception and concern for it ends at birth, especially if you happen to be a woman.
Irin explains that this measure [which was once supported by most Mississippians, until they actually heard the details of it] didn’t really have legs until one of our favorite hate groups got involved. Yes, the American Family Association is an anti-gay hate group, but it’s also an anti-woman and anti-family hate group:
It was the American Family Association endorsement that put media muscle behind the movement in Mississippi, with email blasts, radio PSAs and interviews, promotions on its own website, and combined with the grass-roots energy, the state’s anti-choice groups took notice. Suddenly, people who had previously focused on incremental change – parental consent laws, waiting periods, ultrasound laws – were ecstatically heralding an end of the “murders.” Mike Huckabee keynoted a fundraiser and even presumed GOP front-runner Mitt Romney to endorse the concept on his show.
Ta-da! When they’re not letting Bryan Fischer lie shamelessly about gay people and screaming and crying about hardware stores being mean to them, the AFA is quietly working to take away most of women’s fundamental rights over what they can and cannot do with their bodies. I cannot imagine what the next step would be, should something like this ever pass. Once they have women’s reproductive systems firmly in their hands, will they move on to controlling what they eat or when they speak? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Please, do yourself a favor and read Irin’s whole piece. The part about how this could affect the treatment of ectopic pregnancies will make you sick. There is a good chance that, as the details of the Personhood Movement, and their true goals, come to light, that this will go down in history as one of the patriarchy’s grand overreaches. I hope so. Again, 99% of women think birth control is just great.
And remember — groups like the American Family Association don’t just hate you as an LGBT person. They hate you in any way you might be different from their poorly conceived, bastardized fundamentalist “Christian” view of how people should live.
UPDATE: Two more things. First, here is the video from Freda Bush, a proponent of the amendment, who is also an OB-GYN. Watch as she lies through her teeth about what this bill is about.
Her lies are solidly refuted in Irin Carmon’s piece.
Of course — until Christian Rightists elevate themselves above God and say otherwise.
In her book, “Somone’s Son,” Brenda Rhodes recalls how she corrected her son (who was dying from HIV/AIDS) when he asserted belief in a God of unconditional love.
Rhodes tells the American Family Association’s propaganda arm, OneNewsNow:
“He would get of the opinion that God loves us unconditionally no matter what we do,” Rhodes explains. “I told him that that is true but when we live outside of his bounds and we do things that we know we should not then it breaks the relationship with God and we have consequences that we have to live with, and even die with sometimes.”
Rhodes should have titled her book, “God Loves Me, Not Thee” — the tale of “bounds” set by a control-freak mother who vainly claims to be God’s spokeswoman.
Rhodes’ book advises other parents how to be stubbornly vain and prejudiced toward gay sons, how to equate sexual orientation with drug addiction, and how to mangle the Bible for perceived personal advantage and control.
Southern Poverty Law Center to Hold Press Conference Outside Values Voter Summit
The Southern Poverty Law Center will hold a press conference this Friday, Oct. 7, to release a report on the Family Research Council (FRC) and American Family Association (AFA), two groups that spread false propaganda that demonizes the LGBT community. The FRC is hosting the annual Values Voter Summit this weekend Washington, where many prominent public officials will be speaking. The AFA is a major co-sponsor.
WHO: Mark Potok, Director, Intelligence Project, Southern Poverty Law Center
Wayne Besen, Truth Wins Out
WHEN: Friday, October 7
8 a.m. (EDT)
WHERE: Omni Shoreham
2500 Calvert Street NW (at Connecticut Ave.)
Washington, DC
###
The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama with offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society. For more information, see www.splcenter.org.
Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that fights anti-LGBT religious extremism. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality.
Anti-gay crusader David Caton is back in the news and this time he is targeting Muslims. The New York Times’ Samuel Freedman reports that Caton is going after advertisers of the show All American Muslim. He apparently thinks that the show is a plot to mainstream Muslims who are surreptitiously trying to trick Americans into thinking they are normal, when they are actually organizing to destroy wholesome Christian families.
Of course — until Christian Rightists elevate themselves above God and say otherwise.
