Of course, all the NOMmers love each other, but it’s kind of funny when the “news” arm of the American Family Association hate group actually prints an article like this:
A supporter of traditional marriage finds it “amusing” that people are shocked when pro-family groups use the same strategies employed by the left.
[...]
According to The Associated Press, pro-”gay” advocates call the strategy “underhanded” and “ugly politics.” But Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of the Ruth Institute, commends NOM’s president for the effort.
“If I were an investor in social conservative causes, I would put Brian Brown on my speed dial because these documents are showing that Brian Brown is basically a strategic genius, and he’s doing what any sensible person ought to do in his situation,” she decides.
Um, the Ruth Institute is part of NOM. They might not work together frequently, but Brian Brown is Jennifer Roback Morse’s coworker. Are wingnut readers really that stupid? God.
And of course, this changes nothing about the open, disgusting racism which is apparently de rigueur at the National Organization for Marriage.
Now, for fun, here are the results of the related “poll” the hate group newsies website included with the article:
Wingnuts need to flatter themselves by believing that there are multiple lines of “reasoning” that lead them to their conclusions, apparently…
What’s going on with the most hateful woman in the United States of America? Well, she’s rolled out ten reasons why parents should keep their kids home truant during the “Day of Silence,” which is intended to educate students about the issues facing LGBT kids, including but not limited to the bullying and suicide problem. But, you see, the Religious Right wants to protect only the kids who are willing to adopt their malignant, disproven worldview wholesale, and that decidedly doesn’t include gay kids, as they are expendable to people like Linda Harvey.
Let’s look at her ten reasons why it’s okay to teach your kids to be bigots on the Day of Silence by keeping them home, but first, here’s a bit of her intro:
The Day of Silence goal is not, as I am told frequently by outraged emails from misinformed students, to help end all bullying. The goal is to exploit the tender sympathies of kids to promote homosexuality and gender confusion. The agenda is everything; Judeo-Christian morality is the enemy; and sadly, kids are the tools.
Hm. What’s more likely? That an unhinged bigot who just got added to the SPLC’s list of hate groups is right, or that kids who actually grew up knowing gay kids are right? Of course, we’ll quickly note the incorrect use of the term “Judeo-Christian,” which conservative Christian hate group leaders use in order to pretend to themselves and others that their movement is not limited to the most backwards of fundamentalist Christians.
GLSEN teaches students that homosexuals and gender-confused people are “silenced” and under persecution by those who object to this behavior, and that traditional moral concerns cause bullying.
Because they do. Any gay kid who grew up in the hell of the fundamentalist Christian world can attest to this. Their concerns are, of course, not important to people like Linda, because again, anyone who doesn’t toe the patriarchal fundamentalist line on these issues is expendable to them.
No hard, objective data exist to support this contention
No hard, objective data that Linda is willing to read, anyway. Lots of studies have been done which support our contentions, but blinders are blinders, and Linda’s are permanently affixed to her eyes.
Okay, on to Linda’s “reasons.” I will rebut each with one simple sentence, as this kind of drivel merits nothing more:
1. A silent protest in support of immoral, God-dishonoring behavior is in itself profoundly deceptive. All sexual behavior outside man/woman marriage is sinful in God’s eyes. Why should Christian students and teachers be in the position of accommodating this flagrant violation of their principles?
Public schools exist to educate children, and are not beholden to the backwards, disproven, toxic beliefs of Fundamentalists.
2. Any explicit or implicit message encouraging teens and even younger students to experiment freely with homosexual behavior is not “social justice” or “tolerance,” but actually, child corruption.
No one is “encouraging” anyone to “experiment freely” with anything, but rather they are trying to create an environment unacceptable to Linda, one where gay kids don’t hate themselves with every fiber of their beings.
3. Allowing classroom silence to honor the Day of Silence unleashes tremendous peer pressure for students and even teachers to endorse sexual immorality, or be considered “enemies” of those peers and teachers proudly involved in homosexuality. This puts people of faith in the position of violating Christian doctrine through tacit approval (Romans 16:17-18; Ephesians 5:11). They are also intimidated into self-censoring their First Amendment rights.
No one’s being intimidated into anything and no one’s rights are being threatened, but if it encourages just one bigot to keep her mouth shut in order to create a safer environment for her students, so be it.
4. The Day of Silence encourages students to nurture prejudiced, hostile and bigoted attitudes against Christians and others with traditional moral beliefs, and to spread inaccurate and harmful information.
Linda, you do not have a corner on the word “Christian,” and in fact your beliefs put you squarely somewhere out in space compared to the vast majority of Christians in this country.
5. Using legitimate concerns about bullying and teen suicide to advance the promotion of homosexuality in schools is educational malpractice. It’s totally unnecessary to stop bullying and prevent harm to students, and Christians should not be a party to this gross distortion of a genuine problem. No one needs to embrace homosexuality or gender confusion in order to prevent bullying, but GLSEN routinely takes this deceitful position.
Anti-gay bullies wouldn’t bully gay kids into depression and, worse, suicide, if they didn’t first hear that it was okay to hate and abuse gay kids from fundamentalist religious people, as that sort of unhinged bigotry and fear is a learned behavior.
6. Teachers know harassment when they see it. They can simply say, “Cut it out!” But GLSEN and the Day of Silence pressure teachers to amend this to, “Cut it out, because you are only permitted to say good things about homosexuality!” When did we all sign up to become public-relations agents for the good reputation of homosexuality? This viewpoint discrimination forces an untruthful and ungodly agenda on staff members, when stopping verbal harassment can be accomplished without becoming champions of “gay” behavior.
“Cut it out!,” said the teacher who walked in on the straight “Christian” jock beating the shit out of the gay kid in the hallway, failing to prevent the action from happening in the first place and failing to address why it’s not okay to beat the shit out of kids for being gay…
7. There are legitimate lessons students should learn about prejudice and bias. But Day of Silence promoters deceptively link moral objections about homosexuality to racial discrimination or anti-Semitism in an attempt to legitimize the pro-homosexual agenda and portray homosexuals as perennial victims, while disguising the harmfulness and risk.
The reasoning behind racism and anti-semitism is linked to the reasoning behind anti-gay bigotry because they all share a few things in common: none of them make any sense, none of them are rooted in sort of discernible reality, yet the purveyors of all three kinds of hatred wouldn’t believe or act the way they do if the “adults” in their lives didn’t first model said behavior.
8. Teachers have used the DOS to inappropriately become classroom advocates and models of this deviant behavior. In one Ohio school, a teacher used a PowerPoint presentation to tell students about her “gay” support and even disclosed to students that she was a lesbian, without prior notice to parents or permission from her principal.
It’s okay for a teacher, who isn’t beholden to fundamentalist Christianity in either her life and DEFINITELY not in her job, to refrain from abusing children with indoctrination into right-wing Christian bigotry, and it’s also okay for a teacher to let her students know that she has a wife, as children in public school are being educated into the realities of the world, rather than the pretend reality of Linda Harvey.
9. The health and lifestyle risks of homosexuality are virtually never shared on the Day of Silence. Instead, students are given the deceitful impression that homosexuality is just as safe and worthy an identity as heterosexual dating and marriage.
Generally, it’s better to teach kids reality, rather than the a-scientific ramblings of disgraced “researchers” like Paul Cameron.
10. The DOS message inhibits Christians from witnessing to their peers caught up in homosexuality or gender confusion. There is salvation through Jesus Christ and the hope of leaving this sin behind. Calling homosexuality a sin on the Day of Silence would be considered “hateful,” when it is actually God-honoring and respectful to the hearer. It may lead them to an eternal home with God. But that won’t happen if the truth is suppressed, which it always is on the Day of Silence. Stay home that day, and choose to witness on another, where perhaps you will have a fair chance of being heard.
You call it “witnessing,” people who actually care about children and the gay kids themselves call it bullying.
And done! A one-sentence rebuttal for each, and now I go have dinner.
I’ve long said that the defining characteristic of a religious wingnut is that they don’t fight for or against anything that is actually verifiably real. While gay activists are over here concerned about working to make sure gay kids don’t kill themselves and all citizens are treated equally in our society, wingnuts are losing it over completely imaginary boogeymen. I imagine that a good psychologist could explain how this sort of denial protects them from having to confront the utter emptiness of their lives, but I’ll leave that to the doctors. For now, let’s look with wonder and awe at the imaginary world the AFA’s Bryan Fischer has created in his mind, as he elucidates the “Ten Commandments of Secular Sharia Law,” something which, um, doesn’t even make sense. These are the imaginary monsters under Bryan Fischer’s bed, y’all:
These new commandments must be obeyed, and those who flout them will receive the most severe and unyielding punishments, including censure, excommunication, (say, from graduate counseling programs), and fines in the forms of legal fees to the secular imams at the ACLU.
The ACLU is under Bryan’s bed, making tapping noises on the box spring.
1. “Government, not Yahweh, is God.” Secular fundamentalists want us to look to government for everything we we [sic] were once taught to look for from God. Government is all knowing, all powerful, all wise, all caring. You know, all the things God used to be.
This is strange, since our nation didn’t have an official god to start with.
2. “You shall have no gods, period.” The goal of secular fundamentalists is the extermination of any and all mentions of God and Christ in the public arena. The only exceptions to the “no god” rule will be for Gaia and Allah. Gaia is to be worshiped, and any blasphemy against her, by plundering her for such things as the fuel on which the world runs, will be met with the severest punishment and condemnation.
In the real world, liberals hold to the virtues of separation of church and state so that people actually CAN have religious freedom, rather than the un-free version supported by Fundamentalists, wherein we are all free to worship or not worship as we please, as long as we don’t offend the delicate sensibilities of people like Bryan Fischer. I don’t have the energy to burst the idiot bubble regarding some sort of connection between radical Islam and secular liberalism, and the stupidity of the argument is self-evident to all thinking sixth graders, so…
3. “You shall not take the name of the homosexual agenda or Islam in vain.” If you do, we will land on you like a falling safe. Profanity, blasphemy, vulgarity, obscenity, pornography, all are fine. Criticize homosexual conduct, on the other hand, and we will cause the wrath of our god to descend upon you as a consuming fire. You will be silenced, marginalized and treated as a leper. We secularists have freedom of speech but you cretinous conservatives do not. If you have a problem with sexually deviant behavior, you are by definition a homophobic hatemonger and we don’t have to listen to you.
But yet we’re still on “gay and Islam are just alike!,” aren’t we? Of course, the notion that we are or would ever try to “silence” the bigots is silly, as they win people for our side every time they talk. In that way, they are our unwitting allies. Of course, his complaint that we don’t HAVE to listen to them is valid, as there is nothing in our Constitution which suggests that we need to listen to the whining of bigots. They may speak. We may ignore. Been that way for 236 years…
4. “Observe Halloween, Labor Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as holy days. Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, on the other hand, must be wiped off school calendars as if they never existed.”
I observe every holiday on that list. If such a high god of the homosexual agenda such as I hasn’t gotten the memo to destroy Christmas, Easter and Turkey Day, I’m worried that there’s a glitch in our top secret e-mail system.
5. “Honor your father and mother – by which we mean liberal politicians, since they have turned government into your mommy and your daddy.” No husband, no problem: government will be the head of your home. No father, no problem: government will be your provider and raise your children for you.
This is why we fight so hard for marriage equality, and why untold numbers of gay couples give adopted children loving, two-parent homes. It’s to promote single parenting, obviously.
6. “You shall not murder – unless it’s a defenseless baby in the womb.”
Yes, well, we do support reproductive rights, but overall, we’re still the true pro-life contingent here, as most liberals see life as something that extends beyond birth.
7. “You shall not commit adultery – unless it’s with another man’s wife. Fornication and sodomy without repercussions and penalty are okay too. And we’re working on polygamy and pedophilia.” Anyone who disagrees, and says anything remotely critical of such behaviors, will be subject to the wrath of the holy and righteous prophets of secular Sharia in the out-of-the-mainstream media, who will call down fire and brimstone on those who dare to challenge the sexual orthodoxy of leftist libertines.
I don’t see anyone on our side advocating for adultery. “Fornication and sodomy without repercussions and penalty are okay too.” Yep, they are! When two adults are consenting and want to have sexytime with each other, it’s really not Bryan Fischer’s bizness, is it? No, I don’t think it is. However, to derail the discussion with mention of polygamy and pedophilia, the most egregious scandals of which involve those bastions of secular liberalism known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the Roman Catholic Church…well, that’s just confusing.
Outside of Bryan’s fever dream, are we fighting for those things? I don’t think so…
8. “You shall not steal – unless it’s to plunder from the producers what they have earned to give to the non-producers what they have not earned.” Anyone who complains about this involuntary transfer of wealth will be judged by the secular mullahs as evil, greedy capitalists and silenced. Right after they have been ripped off.
Jesus was all about giving a big “F you” to the poor, you see, in Bryan’s theology. I’m pretty sure he’s reading his Bible upside down, of course.
9. “You shall not bear false witness – unless it is to tell blatant lies about the Constitution, American history, the economy, unemployment figures and drilling for oil.” As long as you are lying to advance the power and reach of government, or get a leftist politician reelected, it’s okay. Secularists have their own version of taqqiya, just like the Muslims do.
They have the joke historian known as David Barton, yet we are the liars…
10. “You shall not covet anything – as long as it belongs to people who are poorer than you. If they have more money than you, they are evil oppressors who must be plundered of their ill-gotten wealth by our government overlords so it can be redistributed to the lazy, shiftless and irresponsible.”
That’s the same thing as number 8, dillweed. Bryan must have heard George Soros rifling around under his blankie and, jittering in fear, decided to phone number 10 in. Lazy.
I continue to be amazed that there are actual humans in this country who believe these sorts of things. But, as I said at the top, I’m sure there is some sort of psychological reason these people worry themselves over things that simply don’t exist. I don’t want to spend any time in their heads figuring it out, though…
Oh, Maggie just doesn’t like the “language” of NOM’s internal race-baiting documents, because they make them sound “too big for their britches.” Other than that, it’s all good. Does she have any clue what a national embarrassment her organization is right now? Is there any self-awareness at all?
In our work here at Truth Wins Out, we go to great pains to make sure that when we’re talking about Fundamentalist Christian hate groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, or even Porno Pete’s Dungeon of Leather Photography, we are talking about a specific subset of American Christians who believe they are entitled to a special, supremacist place in our society based on their “sincerely held religious beliefs,” i.e. their bigotry. It does a disservice to the broad swath of American Christians who are not hatemongers obsessed with what’s going on in everyone else’s beds and wombs to simply use the term “Christian” to describe these conservative Fundamentalists. Unfortunately, much of the culture and the media doesn’t grasp this distinction, and it hurts a lot of people. In a phone conversation with my mom last week, she said something to the effect of, “I’m a Christian and I’m right of center, but I’m not a wingnut.” Indeed, she is not, but she was kinda pissed that so often the media glosses over these distinctions. It doesn’t just give liberal Christians a bad name — it smears all the rest of them.
Of course, the media is at fault, but we have to also look at the hate groups themselves, who constantly use the blanket term “Christian” to describe their activities, most of which are quite un-”Christian” indeed. Timothy Noah has an important piece in The New Republic addressing this very issue, and he’s seeking to reclaim the term from that tiny subset which co-opts it and gives the rest of Christendom a bad name:
Christian? Christians aren’t some twee boutique demographic. Christians represent the majority. About 78 percent of Americans self-identify as Christian, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. What NPR and Fox and Sony mean when they say “Christian” is “Christian right” or “Christian conservatives,” terms that adherents don’t like because they think they’re pejorative. “Fundamentalist” and “evangelical” are imperfect substitutes because a) the two categories, though they overlap a lot, aren’t precisely the same; and b) some of these folks consider themselves political liberals. (The worldly Cold War liberal Reinhold Niebuhr called himself an evangelical Protestant.) What conservative Christians really like to be called is “Christians.” Hence “Christian rock” and “Christian college” and now “Christian film.” This strikes me as terribly presumptuous. Bruce Springsteen was raised Catholic but he doesn’t perform anything these folks would accept as Christian rock. Wesleyan was founded by Methodists and named after John Wesley but evangelicals would never call it a Christian university. “Christian” has become a euphemism for “acceptable to the type of Christian (in most instances Protestant) who frowns on homosexuality and wishes Saul Alinsky had minded his own business.”
[...]
To suggest that conservative Christians are the only Christians is like saying Hasidic Jews are the only Jews. It’s a cartoonish misconception that the Christian right has managed to sell to a largely secular news media that’s too sensitive to accusations of anti-religious bias.
I’ll co-sign that sentiment. Noah goes on to suggest that the media really should wake up and specifically use the phrase “Christian conservative” to describe the culture — films, music, hate group rallies — enjoyed by the subset of Fundamentalists who seem to think they’re the only real Christians. It’s not pejorative. It’s simply what they are.
But this disconnect is the reason why people like Tony Perkins are able to call gay rights an attack on “Christians” and get away with it. Most Christians couldn’t give a tinker’s damn what Tony Perkins or Bryan Fischer says, but you wouldn’t know it watching the news. This is a theme that Truth Wins Out will be pursuing in more detail in the coming months, so stay tuned.
This is unfortunate. Chris Matthews is usually pretty good on our issues, but our entire media has a big problem when it comes to believing that there are two legitimate sides to every issue, that argumentative crossfire is healthier for our discourse than actual reporting.
Just kidding, it’s about ratings.
Anyway, activists from Faithful America confronted Chris at a book signing in Massachusetts about his program’s continued invitations to Tony Perkins, the leader of one of the country’s most notorious hate groups, the Family Research Council, which is of course known for spewing some of the most dishonest bile about LGBT people imaginable, in their quest to create a gay-free America. Perfunctory fact-checking reveals that most of what comes out of Tony Perkins’ and Peter Sprigg’s mouths is made up, and one need only listen to their words for a moment to hear that their primary message is hate.
Matthews responds by falsely claiming that Perkins never says homophobic things on his show, but when challenged that his invitations give legitimacy to what Perkins says outside the show Matthews is mute.
The most upsetting part of the video below is when Matthews talks about the LGBT community wanting to “silence” Perkins.
And here’s video:
It is disturbing that Chris suggests that people want to “silence” Perkins. That’s not really the case. Indeed, the more that people like Tony Perkins speak, the more that we win. That being said, here is the problem, and there is a problem: presenting “all the arguments” is fine, as long as journalists are willing to do their jobs and correct misinformation. When Tony Perkins comes on Hardball or any other show and spews dishonest, homophobic bile [and yes, Chris, he's homophobic on your and every other show], it’s a matter of journalistic responsibility to correct the lies, as LGBT equality simply isn’t one of those issues where there are legitimate arguments on both sides. Our opponents will concoct any smear, tell any lie, in order to achieve their hateful goals. The problem that activists are confronting at this very moment is the fact that far too few journalists are willing to do this work, choosing instead to lean into The Way Things Have Always Been, which leads to segments on anti-gay bullying and teen suicide featuring rebuttals from hatemongers who, in their daily work, blame gay kids for the fact that people drive them to depression, despair and suicide. That’s not journalism and that’s not integrity.
I like Chris Matthews. I’ve been on his show. He does tend to be a pretty good advocate for our issues, but there is simply more to this than “presenting both sides of a story.” And Chris, if you want to talk about it some more, I’d be glad to come back on. Just give me a call.
Here is David Barton, the amazingly revisionist “historian,” explaining that every time there was a Christian revival in the Bible, it was always heralded by the people suddenly choosing to hate gay people:
Got that, fundamentalist wingnuts? If you want the spirit to truly descend on your church, you all simply need to hate us MORE. Wasn’t sure that was possible in the world of David Barton, but there it is.
The National Organization for Marriage is having a fun week. Just this morning, Maggie Gallagher was supposed to appear on MSNBC to debate our own Wayne Besen on the topic of this week’s document dump, which revealed NOM’s disgusting, cynical strategy to pit racial minorities against the gay community in order to advance their causes of denying LGBT people our equal place in society and hurting our families, in general. [NEWSFLASH: Some LGBT people are also racial minorities and most respected Civil Rights leaders are also supporters of equality for LGBT people.] Anyway, the point is that Maggie bailed without an explanation. [NOTE: it appears that Thomas Roberts tweeted that Maggie's failure to show was due to a studio error. The following point about NOMmers being embarrassed to appear on television this week stands, though.]
Frankly, if we were in NOM’s shoes, we’d be embarrassed to appear on television at this point. The race baiting is gross enough, but another tidbit revealed in those documents shows that NOM also has been seeking to recruit glamorous, yet stupid celebrities to, presumably, help spread their agenda to less glamorous, yet just as easily led voters. NOM’s contempt for the human beings they want to reach knows no bounds:
It sounds like a headline from the Onion, but strategy documents uncovered yesterday, from the nation’s most prominent anti-gay marriage group, the National Organization for Marriage (found by the Human Rights Campaign), reveal a novel approach to convincing Americans to vote against marriage equality: recruit glamorous but unintelligent celebrities. (p.19/20)
“Hollywood with its cultural biases is far bigger than we can hope to be. We recognize this. But we also recognize the opportunity – the disproportionate potential impact of proactively seeking to gather and connect a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites across national boundaries. (This is applying the Witherspoon and IAV model to non-intellectual elites.)”
[...]
Tonight GLAAD responded to NOM’s approach to “recruit glamorous but unintelligent celebrities”:
“Celebrity or not and ‘cognitive’ or not, given how cynically NOM views its supporters, who would want to stand with them and support their agenda?” said Herndon Graddick, GLAAD’s Vice President of Programs and Communications.
Indeed. One major difference between our side and their side is that, perhaps sometimes to a fault, we who support and fight for equality and fairness tend to assume that the people reading our words are intelligent people capable of forming thoughts, sentences and opinions on their own. The Religious Right, on the other hand, has never shied away from lying to and manipulating their followers, as they are fairly certain that the people who respect them will never fact-check them or question them.
Our readers? Smart. And if we make an honest mistake, we usually get called on it pretty quickly, often from other journalists on our own side, because we value honesty and integrity. Our opponents simply do not.
Last week I posted a rambling, eleven minute invocation on the floor of the Georgia House of Representatives from an anti-gay wingnut pastor named Tony Byrd. In that invocation, he listed gayness right along with child rape and other violent assaults, oh, and also the Mary Jane, among the things that are destroying America. Of course. Well, he’s back to entertain us, thank goodness!
Right Wing Watch posted a video of one of Tony’s sermons from last year, with this description:
Byrd’s appearance at the capitol was downright tame compared his sermon last October on the evils of compromise and the moral bankruptcy of America. Byrd said that compromise leads to catastrophe, citing homosexuality and abortion. He went on to rail against TV sitcoms, which “have some kind of homosexual agenda involved in them” and equate gays with drug addicts. The bottom line, he argued, is that “we’re going down the tubes.”
Oh, those teevee sitcoms! “Most of them have a homosexual agenda!” Enjoy.
It’s so bizarre that there’s a percentage of Americans who really believe this stuff.
After admitting he has friendly ears in longtime anti-LGBT activists Tim Wildmon and Tony Perkins again fails to take even an iota of responsibility for saying that gays are “unnatural” and “detrimental to society in a number of ways” and instead tries to flip the script behind some bizarre “bigotry” thought exercise. Oh, he then makes some more comments about homosexuality being detrimental.
“Detrimental” not only to ourselves, but also to others. But he doesn’t hate gays! Nawwwwww. He’s just talking to a hate group for fun.
