Both organizations believe that private broadcasters should be forced to carry sectarian religious propaganda against their will, and that a refusal by private broadcasters to air wealthy organizations’ pro-prejudice advocacy somehow “silences” those sectarian groups.
This week, Focus on the Family took the opposite position regarding the Fairness Doctrine, a defunct federal policy which once required private broadcasters using the public airwaves to carry a balance of ideological perspectives.
Today, Focus on the Family argued that broadcasters should not be forced to carry liberal viewpoints with which they disagree.
It’s still perfectly OK, in Focus’ view, to force broadcasters to air its self-pitying antifamily paranoia.
[The Human Rights Campaign's] desire to exclude Pastor Warren from the inaugural, based upon his religious convictions, proves the validity of the concerns over the homosexual desire to silence the Church.
According to that logic, FRC and Rick Warren are seeking to “silence” the entire Roman Catholic Church, all of Judaism, and all the world’s atheists, by denying them a spot in the invocation.
It’ interesting, the mainline [Christian churches] died. It’ an irrelevant word. The mainline is sidelined. There are more Muslims in America than there are Episcopalians. There’ less than two million of “em. We’ve had a 40 year decline in all the mainline denominations while the independent and charismatic and the evangelicals kept growing and growing.
Warren’s contempt for mainline Christianity may be, by itself, sufficient reason to oppose a role for him in inaugural prayer ceremonies that are intended to unite U.S. religious communities.
Nobody likes Warren. The Religious Right think he’s a flake because he’s too liberal, and everybody else thinks he’s a flake because he’s a shallow idiot. From where I’m sitting, as the victim of an extremely expensive and extremely rigorous theological education, Obama could have gotten a better invocation from Stuart Smalley. It would have as much depth, and at least it would be doing a Democrat a favor. …
Mainline Protestant pastors are opinion leaders in their communities, and they tend to appreciate their GLBT friends and not appreciate slick weasels like Rick Warren.
As noted by TWO, Richard Cizik, Washington lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, resigned his post last week because of controversy over his nationally broadcast support of gay civil unions. The NAE and right-wing political organizations are applauding his departure with words both questionable and unkind.
During a Dec. 2 interview on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” Cizik told host Terry Gross that he voted for Barack Obama in the Virginia primary and said Christians should not fear supporting pro-choice and pro-LGBT candidates. Cizik also said that his views on marriage were “shifting” and that he supports civil union.
The comments made by the lobbyist — formally known as NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs — caused a huge stir in evangelical Christian circles and the controversy led him to resign his job. In a statement to the organization’s board members, the association’s acting president Leith Anderson explained his departure, saying Cizik’s radio remarks caused “a loss of trust in his credibility as a spokesperson among leaders and constituencies.”
It turns out that Cizik’s views are evolving even more. For years, he has been one of the rare evangelicals banging the drum for addressing climate change. The DC-based Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Mark Tooley told OneNewsNow that “Cizik has been very outspoken and in some ways ‘off the reservation’ for the last five or six years in terms of his global warming activism, which the board of NAE had initially somewhat disavowed — but that had not discouraged him.”
Cizik’s civil-union support was an apparent step too far from the reservation. “The National Association of Evangelicals has official positions strongly supporting traditional marriage and opposing same-sex marriage, and certainly by implication same-sex civil unions,” Tooley said. “So it seemed to be a very clear case where Cizik was ignoring the very obvious and official positions of his own organization, for which he is supposed to be the chief spokesman and lobbyist in Washington.”
Evangelical support for Cizik’s resignation is voluminous, the criticisms harsh.
Ingrid Schlueter, co-host of evangelizing radio show Crosstalk America said, “Those who are at war with God, the author of life, should be publicly confronted by evangelical Christians. Instead, they are aided and abetted in their evil by craven leaders like Cizik.”
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council is expectedly meanspirited: “This is the risk of walking through the green door of environmentalism and global warming – you risk being blinded by the green light and losing your sense of direction. How else can you explain enthusiastic support for what will probably be the nation’s most pro-abortion, anti-family president in our nation’s 232 year history?”
Janice Shaw Crouse, director and senior fellow of Concerned Women for America’ Beverly LaHaye Institute, takes a broad swipe: “I think, perhaps, my dear friend Rich has been inside the Beltway for too long and has swallowed too much of the NPR and Vogue magazine Kool-Aid.”
I suppose the nasty talk has to be over-the-top. After all, Cizik has the ear of millions of Americans. People listen to him. You can see it in the responses on the FRC blog, where faithful Christians responding to Perkins’ statement wonder why caring about the environment or supporting Barack Obama contradicts their beliefs. Time magazine even named Cizik one of the world’s 100 most influential people this year. That’s a lot of clout to for the evangelicals to overcome.
Consider the response of NAE supporters of Cizik — and there are many of them. According to US News and World Report, “a coalition of roughly 60 evangelical leaders (mostly of the non-Christian right variety) has written to … Leith Anderson pushing for a successor [who, like Cizik, is] not beholden to the Christian right… [one] who embraces more progressive causes like combating global warming.” Read the full letter here.
David Gushee, a college professor and progressive evangelical activist who helped write the letter to Anderson, said this in an interview with USNWR:
I think Leith and the executive committee are going to take their time and let the furor over this die down. I personally think they need to find somebody who can promote all seven of the policy commitments in the NAE’s Health of Our Nation statement. There’s one on sanctity of life and one on climate change and one on poverty. There are always pressures from the right that the two fundamental issues of our time should be abortion and homosexuality. I think there will be pressure to hire somebody to make those the top priority.
I can tell you from some feedback that if the NAE makes the mistake of rolling back to the classic Christian right agenda, they would lose support of a lot of people who are currently happy to be working with them.
Yes, this comes from within the NAE.
The good news for Cizik, if he is sincere in his evolution, is that his message is being heard across the nation. It’s evident in the growing support for legal recognition of same-gender couples and for humane and just treatment of LGBT citizens. It is reflected in the fact that an increasing number of people are realizing that “gay” isn’t something that needs to be prayed away. Even the vote that passed California’s obnoxious and un-American Proposition 8 was a close one. Cizik is but one of many Americans who are slowly but surely understanding that being a Christian does not require denying compassion and equality to LGBT people.
Let’s hope this good man is snapped up by a progressive evangelical organization so that his vast influence — and his personal evolution — can continue. And let’s hope those questioning evangelicals continue searching their hearts and minds.
After the passage by antigay Californians of antifamily Proposition 8, peaceful rallies for gay equality and the freedom to marry were held in more than 300 U.S. cities.
Religious rightists ignored the peace, unfortunately, and looked for excuses to portray themselves as victims of those who lost the freedom to marry.
Antigay activists pointed to one incident (on video), in which protesters in San Francisco’s Castro district pushed antigay “Christians” out of the neighborhood, accompanied by a heavy police escort. Antigay activists’ complaint: Castro homosexuals are intolerant and inhospitable to peaceful Christian believers.
Ex-gay advocate Warren Throckmorton was among those who pandered to religious-right victimology and baselessly alluded to gay violence. (Throckmorton did, in fairness, acknowledge the hard feelings of those who unsuccessfully defended California’s freedom to marry from people like Throckmorton.
As facts emerge, however, the fairy tale of innocent Christians and intolerant gay people is being not only refuted but reversed.
Joe.My.God has discovered that some of the “Christians” were actually Christian Dominionists belonging to “Joel’s Army.” Joel’s Army — led by Focus on the Family rally organizer Lou Engle — advocates that gay Americans be stoned to death and teaches a religious mandate to violently overthrow the U.S. government and the nation’s non-fundamentalist places of worship. After executing, incarcerating, and silencing millions of supposed infidels and seizing the nation’s churches and temples, these hateful egotistical zealots would replace the Constitution and representative democracy with their own fundamentalist reinterpretation of the Bible.
Given that information, it appears that the Castro crowd was more than hospitable in its efforts to chase away provocateurs who have vowed to kill gay people if given an opportunity.
At the University of Toledo in Ohio, administrators apparently made the mistake of hiring a bigot to administer university hiring policies which forbid discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation.
In an April 18 article in the Toledo Free Press, Crystal Davis Dixon, associate vice president for human resources for the university, declared her support for discrimination on all three counts:
she was willing to enforce her own antigay religious views upon university employees and students possessing less-homophobic, more-genuine religious beliefs,
despite university hiring policies to the contrary, she denied that gay people have civil rights or that discrimination victimizes them, and
Dixon also denied the natural existence of intersexed and gender-variant people who might apply for jobs at the university — and threatened God’s wrath against such people:
She concluded: “My final and most important point. There is a divine order. God created human kind male and female (Genesis 1:27). God created humans with an inalienable right to choose. There are consequences for each of our choices, including those who violate God’s divine order.
Dixon was fired for flouting the policies that she was hired to enforce, and religious-right media have been in an uproar ever since — accusing the university of discriminating racially and religiously against Dixon because it would not permit her to deny religious freedom to others, nor to arbitrarily violate campus hiring and employment policies with impunity.
Two ex-gay activists have now leapt to Dixon’ defense with a bizarre assertion that antigay African-Americans somehow enjoy a special racial and religious right to discriminate against others on the basis of victims’ religion and sexual orientation, whatever local laws and employer hiring policies may say to the contrary.
When speaking across America, people often marvel when I talk about the strange, unnatural things so-called “ex-gays” do to change their natural sexual orientation. On the list of forbidden objects for ex-gays is sexy underwear.
This week, an “ex-gay” man actually asked to be taken off an underwear mailing list because pictures of the garments were leading him to temptation. He also chastised the company’s workers for leading people to sin.
Check out this nutty ex-gay’s letter to the company by clicking HERE.
The April 25 national Day Of Silence unites students in a silent vigil against violence in schools, and in commemoration of the lives of Lawrence King and thousands of other youths who have been killed or assaulted because of their sexual orientation or gender expression.
The April 28 Day of Truth is something entirely different:
It is a pernicious effort by Exodus, the antigay Alliance Defense Fund, Focus on the Family, ex-gay activist Scott Lively, ex-gay activist Stephen Bennett, Mission: America, and other pro-bigotry organizations to divert public attention from school violence in order to discuss their fixation with homosexual sex on public-school property during school hours.
At least two antifamily, pro-harassment organizations — Mission: America and the American “Family” Association — continued to lobby antigay parents today to shield their teen-agers from anti-bullying messages by keeping them home from school on April 25, which has been designated an annual Day of Silence by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network.
The Day of Silence commemorates GLBT youths who were victims of school violence and murder, by reminding classmates that violence and harassment silence GLBT youths and their families.
The boycott against freedom of speech and nonviolence in schools is co-sponsored by the ex-gay Abiding Truth Ministries, American Family Association, Americans for Truth, Concerned Women for America, Exodus Mandate, Illinois Family Institute, Indiana Voice for the Family, Liberty Counsel, Mass Resistance, Mission: America, Parents’ Rights Coalition, the ex-gay Stephen Bennett Ministries, and Exodus conference speaker Ken Hutcherson’s pro-violence group Watchmen on the Walls.
In inland California, anti-tolerance organizations hope the boycott will prove financially costly to public schools and taxpayers, as school funding is said to be determined in part by attendance. A pro-discrimination group, Capitol Research Institute, has organized a counter-event euphemistically called a “Day of Learning” for antigay parents and students that participate in the pro-harassment boycott. What exactly will participants “learn”? According to The Press-Enterprise, they will learn how to gather signatures “to repeal a state law that prevents discrimination in schools based on sexual orientation.” Meanwhile, the antigay Alliance Defense Fund has declared April 28 to be an annual day when antigay students verbally harangue gay classmates with defamatory, egotistical, and hypocritical religious messages.
GLSEN has released the following ad featuring Lance Bass to counter pro-harassment, pro-silence propaganda that is being fed to students by antigay political organizations:
Meanwhile, pro-exgay pundit Warren Throckmorton continues his campaign against the anti-bullying day. Throckmorton’s proposal creates an artificial division between the Golden Rule and explicit opposition to antigay violence and harassment. Throckmorton may view his own campaign to supply students with misinformation as a lesser evil than that of the boycotters. But, in pandering to the worst elements of the pseudo-Christian religious right, Throckmorton trivializes both Christian values and the growing problem of antigay violence and harassment in schools.
Focus on the Family admitted today that Canadian Bill C-250 has caused it to alter its Canadian antigay propaganda.
Bill C-250 added penalties to the Criminal Code of Canada for inciting hatred or encouraging genocide of people on the basis of sexual orientation, in addition to race, religion, ethnic origin, gender, color, and disability.
The law states that no one may be convicted if:
(a) if he establishes that the statements communicated were true;
(b) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text;
(c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true; or
(d) if, in good faith, he intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada.
The key defense is (a): Speech may not be punished if it’s true.
And that has been a problem for Focus on the Family, which — its critics allege — has persistently relied in the United States upon sweeping, unfounded, and malicious falsehoods about the behavior and values of same-sex-attracted persons as a class.
Today, Focus communications operative Gary Booker told WorldNetDaily:
“In particular, our content producers are careful not to make generalized statements nor comments that may be perceived as ascribing malicious intent to a ‘group’ of people and are always careful to treat even those who might disagree with us with respect,” Gary Booker, director of global content creation for Focus, told WorldNetDaily.com.
“Occasionally, albeit very rarely, some content is identified that, while acceptable for airing in the U.S. would not be acceptable under Canadian law and is therefore edited or omitted in Canada.”
In the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution has acted as a bar against similar legislation.
Update:‘Repent America’ Leader Guilty: Michael Marcavage, whose Philadelphia-area band of followers uses megaphones to shout down public events, was found guilty of disorderly conduct for shouting down a Halloween festival last year in Salem, Mass. Previously, Exodus officially defended Repent America’s megaphone raid against a Philadelphia gay event as a matter of religious expression. (American Family Association) (More: The Salem News)
Focus on the Family Undermines Couples to ‘Save’ Marriage: Focus on the Family says that states must keep traditional families intact. How? By discriminating against all other families. Focus is upset at a same-sex couple that is suing the University of Hawaii after being excluded from married student housing on campus. Focus accuses the couple of “attacking marriage” by seeking respect as a couple and by honoring marital commitment. (Focus) (Update.)
Protest Planned against Ex-Gay Charlene Cothran: Chicago-based Gay Liberation Network will protest on March 13 against “ex-gay” Venus magazine publisher Charlene Cothran, who is developing an inflammatory new project: a speech entitled “How Homosexuality Destroys Families, Not Just Values.” (Queerty)
Hutcherson and the Legacy of MLK: On the Wallbuilders Live radio program, Exodus speaker Ken Hutcherson expands his campaign against his daughter’s school to include attempts to shut down the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and end the school’s participation in The Day of Silence. Hutcherson warns that the school faculty should be glad he’s not still committing acts of violence against whites, but adds: “If they don’t fire these teachers, I’m going to sue ‘em and I’m going to ask them for their dreams. And then they’re going to mess around and laugh and I’m going to take their tongue out.” So much for Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of nonviolent social unity and equal opportunity. (Right Wing Watch)
Lighter Side: Who cares what overpaid, over-blowdried anchors think? Anderson Cooper doesn’t — and doesn’t think the public should, either. (Romenesko)
