I love how evil always dresses itself up with high-minded, euphemistic names. For example, the repressive government of Myanmar is known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council(SLORC). In Zimbabwe, the brutal and corrupt Robert Mugabe’s political party is known as the Patriotic Front.  And, of course, during the Joseph McCarthy era, we had the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. There are countless other examples of reprobates disguised as responsible leaders or political parties.

We can now add the The Society for Truth and Light to this repugnant list of phonies who hide their sinister behavior, sinful lies and outrageous cynicism behind a facade of “good”. The Society is an anti-gay “Christian” outfit based in Hong Kong that has published an irresponsible report hawking unscientific “ex-gay” snake oil cures.

Although the 52-page booklet is raw hatred of gay people, it is deceptively named, “Acceptance–Caring for Homosexuality”.

How much does this group care?

They are using materials from the discredited anti-gay organization, The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). This is an organization that:

1) Had to kick George Rekers off its board this year after the “esteemed” doctor was caught taking a prostitute on a European vacation that he had met on Rent Boy.com

2) Had to kick off another board member this year, Arthur Abba Goldberg, who had been exposed by South Florida Gay News and Truth Wins Out as a convicted felon. Goldberg refers clients to a “life coach” who asks clients to strip naked and fondle themselves.

3) Had for years regularly published essays by Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, who also is a catalyst behind Uganda’s infamous “Kill the Gays” bill. Lively is recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center for running a certified hate group.

4) Has virtually no peer review studies on homosexuality, yet mysteriously claims expertise on the topic. NARTH’s information runs counter to every respected medical and mental health organization in the nation — including the American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

5) Had a board member, Gerald Schoenwolf, who wrote a noxious essay on NARTH’s website that seemed to justify slavery

6) Had used widely condemned and discredited “life coach” Richard Cohen as a therapy trainer. Cohen was permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association for misdeeds.

Given NARTH’s sordid history, why is this Hong Kong organization — that claims to stand for morality — peddling its lies?

Clearly, this  organization is obscuring truth and shedding little light on the topic of LGBT people.

Hong Kong residents should beware of this ministry.

It is selling outdated and bankrupt ideas hatched in America that no one here takes seriously.

Please, do your research. Do not be misled by ideologues and money-hungry charlatans who are out to commit consumer fraud.

Don’t be fooled.

Don’t be duped.

Don’t be misled.

Don’t be taken advantage of.

Scott Lively made his career by perpetuating the revisionist lie that the Third Reich was a homosexual movement, claiming that only burly macho male homosexuals were capable of committing the heinous genocide of the Holocaust. Last year he went to Uganda and told that audience that not only was the Holocaust perpetuated by homosexuals, but that the Rwandan genocide was also likely the work of male homosexuals. For these and many other reasons, most any group affiliated with Scott Lively in any way has earned a spot on the SPLC’s list of anti-gay hate groups. Perhaps the American Family Association is angling for such a designation itself. I can’t imagine why, since they surely know, privately, that virtually no one under 35 in this country supports people like them. This is why they’re all pathetically trying to “reach out to millenials,” a group which is blessedly out of their grasp, for the most part, as a voting bloc. But as long as they allow Bryan Fischer to speak, we can only deduce that the AFA has completely jumped the shark into full-on Fred Phelps/Scott Lively territory, and that they should be addressed as such.

Watch this video, via Right Wing Watch:

If you can’t watch, here’s the transcript:

So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn’t the Germans, didn’t the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Browshirts, were male homosexuals.

He doesn’t specifically cite Scott Lively, but again, we know where that particular lie came from, so Lively’s work is obviously informing Bryan Fischer. The problem here is this: Scott Lively is completely fringe and respected by very few people in the United States, and instead has to run off to foreign lands to spread his bile, places where people might not Google him quite so quickly. Fred Phelps has no credibility with anyone, anywhere. But there are still many Evangelical churches where the American Family Association is considered just a normal, run-of-the-mill Christian organization like any other. We who have been paying attention to their radicalization know otherwise.

In my opinion, this should earn the AFA a hate group designation on two fronts: Both as an anti-gay group and as an anti-Semitic group. It is my strongly held belief that anyone who seeks to obfuscate or revise ANY part of the well documented history of the Holocaust for their own purposes is engaging in fierce anti-Semitism. This should not be a surprise coming from a Fundamentalist Christian source, as I explained fully here. To use that very real event and scare-monger people into believing that the perpetrators of the greatest genocide in recent memory were such monsters due to their alleged homosexuality is beyond the pale, and it’s nothing short of a modern-day blood libel. (Again, not surprising coming from a fundamentalist strain of Christendom, since Christendom frickin’ created the blood libel. And I don’t want to hear any fundamentalist Evangelicals giving me any crap about how that was Catholics, because a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist. I don’t care what strain of that virus you’re infected by, because the behaviors and the end result tend to be the same.)

Scott Lively is the holocaust revisionist who was instrumental in fanning the flames of bigotry in Uganda that led to the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill. He is a monster whose pathological obsession with homosexuality has reached dangerous levels.

Today, he announced — despite the overwhelming evidence — that he was going to defend himself and fight accusations that he is a barbaric tyrant. Dr. Warren Throckmorton has a letter from Lively and his emerging strategy on his website:

Friends:

I’m looking for a good Christian media source to interview me on film on the Uganda issue for posting online. I intend to get off defense and counter-attack the false witnesses with hard facts about Uganda and the dishonest way the media has addressed the story. Please forward this to any pro-family journalists you know and ask them to contact me at sdllaw@gmail.com.

Please feel free to write this theo-fascist and let him know that he will be held accountable if sexual minorities are jailed, harmed or executed in Uganda.

Peter caught me making a comment on here about Linda Harvey, and he wrote a big mad “Evan is so mean” post about it. But I’ll do you the courtesy of getting everybody up to speed on where the comment came from, and then I’ll explain it further. This press release is from a talk Linda gave wherein, among other things, she defended her friend and SPLC-certified hate group leader Scott Lively, he who went to Uganda to spread the pernicious lie that gays were responsible for the Rwandan genocide:

Harvey said the Southern Poverty Law Center was wrong when it recently classified several anti-gay groups, including Scott Lively’ Abiding Truth Ministries, as “hate groups.”

“I can’t stand the Southern Poverty Law Center. They are such a hypocritical organization. They don’t cover any of the violence that happens to any of the conservatives.I love what they do with the Klu Klux Klan and racial issues, . They need to go back stay out of this other stuff. They need to get out of classifying hate groups, family groups. I mean I am a normal ordinary person I just happen to have conservative values. I don’t hate anybody. I don’t go on anybody’ websites. I don’t picket funerals. I can’t stand Fred Phelps. I think he is funded by the gays,” Harvey said. “I think he is.”

She said she and Lively have both worked on the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda, and that she “loves” Lively.

Ms. Harvey then showed up in the comments section of that press release, and she was shocked, shocked (shocked!), that anyone could have a problem with her dear friend Mr. Lively (there is video at the above link of Lively speaking, by the way):

And how is Scott Lively a “Holocaust revisionist”? Don’t get that one. Are you trying to imply anti-semitism that does not exist? Listen to my daily radio show and hear my support for the state of Israel, much more than you’ll get from most of the left these days, including the Obama administration.

How is Scott Lively a “Holocaust revisionist,” asketh The Linda.

Let us explain this: Scott Lively wrote a book called The Pink Swastika, which argued that the Third Reich was, at its core, a homosexual movement. Indeed, the SPLC (Peter’s personal boogeyman now, apparently) handily disposed of the book’s malevolently asinine thesis in 2005:

In 1995, a book calledThe Pink Swastika made similar claims about the Nazis’ treatment of homosexuals during the Holocaust.

Written by fundamentalist activists Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, The Pink Swastika says that rather than being victimized by the Nazis, gay men in Hitler’s inner circle actually helped mastermind the Holocaust.

“While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism,” write Lively and Abrams. “To the myth of the ‘pink triangle’ ‚Äî the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted ‚Äî we must respond with the reality of the ‘pink swastika.’”

Historians agree that this “reality” is utterly false. But many anti-gay crusaders have used the “gay Nazi” myth as proof that gay people are immoral and destructive.

(…)

In fact, while the number of homosexuals who died in the Holocaust does not approach the number of Jewish or Gypsy victims, the historical record shows that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality (or suspicion of it) under the Nazi regime. They were routinely sent to concentration camps and marked with a pink triangle on their prison garb.

They were not systematically exterminated. But huge numbers are believed to have died in the work camps, along with an untold number of homosexual Jews, Gypsies and other “defectives” who were sent to extermination camps.

The myth that Nazis condoned or promoted homosexuality sprang up as a slander against Nazi leaders by their socialist opponents in the 1930s. Only one of the half-dozen leaders in Hitler’s inner circle, Ernest Rohm, is believed by credible historians to have been gay.

The “gay Nazi” slander stuck, though, partly because German laws against homosexuals remained in place for a quarter of a century after World War II ended. That effectively silenced many homosexual victims of the Holocaust from telling their stories. A landmark survivor’s memoir, The Men With the Pink Triangle, began to break that silence in 1972.

Read that whole piece, please. I’ll wait. And then you tell me whether or not Scott Lively is a Holocaust revisionist, Ms. Linda.

Now. Holocaust revisionism is anti-Semitism. Here’s the comment I made:

Oh, and Linda, “Holocaust revisionism” does not only apply to direct anti-semitism. Of course, it could be argued that Scott Lively is anti-semitic since he co-opts the Holocaust in order to lie about gay people, to satisfy whatever mental illness he suffers from. In fact, yes, now that I think of it, his work IS anti-semitism, because it belittles the reality of the Holocaust in order to score points. And by supporting him, you are supporting that strain of anti-semitism.

(Then again, all fundamentalist Christians are anti-semitic at their core, considering the fact that they actually believe their apocalyptical horseshit.)

And you just parrot right along with it, because you’re too virulent to see that if your Jesus was here, he’d probably lay you out like the Pharisee you are.

Let’s get this out of the way: There is one word in that comment I would change. I would remove the word “all.” Because, quite frankly, it was late, and I popped off. Because the truth of the matter is that many fundamentalist Christians do not realize that some the beliefs they are taught, and some of the beliefs which they espouse about the state of Israel are profoundly anti-Semitic. So it’s a mistake to say that they “all” are, because I’m quite sure that many who hold the beliefs I’m about to explain have never taken the time to reflect on the inherent anti-Semitism contained therein.

But that’s one word in a larger train of thought, which I will now flesh out, for the record: A particular and prominent belief system in Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity is known as “Christian Zionism,” which is inspired by “pre-millenial dispensationalist” eschatology. (Think: Left Behind; Rapture Ready, etc.) In its simplest form, this means that these Christians believe that for Christ to return, the Jewish people must set up a state in Israel. (Done.) At which point:

Uri Avnery, is the leader of Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group. He was discussing the theology of many Fundamentalist and other Evangelical Christians in a 2002-JUN essay, and wrote: “According to its theological beliefs, the Jews must congregate in Palestine and establish a Jewish state on all its territory so as to make the Second Coming of Jesus Christ possible…the evangelists don’t like to dwell openly on what comes next: before the coming [of the Messiah], the Jews must convert to Christianity. Those who don’t will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle of Armageddon. This is basically an anti-Semitic teaching…” 1 This teaching implies that Jews who remain true to God’s covenants in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) will be all exterminated in a massive genocide that may be more numerous than the Nazi Holocaust.

This theology is most popular (and growing) in extremely conservative, fundamentalist churches, from Pentecostal to Southern Baptist to non-denominational, etc.

It is an anti-Semitic belief system. Period! It takes all of the humanity away from the Jewish people and instead makes them pawns in the biggest “screw you” ever doled out by a (supposed) deity in human history! It ends the story that Fundamentalists believe started in the Garden of Eden by exterminating the race God called his “chosen.”

It is helpful to understand this, because often you will see fundamentalist Christians (John Hagee, etc.) expound on their deep, deep “support” for Israel. Indeed, in Peter’s “big mad Evan Hurst is so mean” post, he says this:

Surely Hurst is not unaware of the fact that the “fundamentalist” Christians he so obviously despises are historically a bastion of support for the State of Israel.

No, Pete. Evan Hurst is all too aware, and is just as cynical as many Jewish Americans about the supposed “support” Christian fundamentalists have for Israel. Because this belief system is not inspiring them to “support Israel” out of love for the Jewish people. It’s, rather, about propping up Israel so that Jesus will come back and take his final revenge on everybody they don’t like. Jews, gays, Muslims, you-name-it. Read Revelation 20. This is the moment of triumph in the premillenial dispensationalist Christian Fundamentalist worldview, which, again, is extremely popular in those circles. This is the moment where Jesus comes back and just cold kicks everybody’s ass. They project all of their perceived victimization onto this imaginary moment in the future where their white warrior will come back and avenge everything they claim to have suffered at the hands of, you know, whoever is upsetting them that day.

Could I have fleshed out that comment more at the time? Sure. Maybe I should’ve. Well, now I did!

But, Peter LaBarbera, for perhaps the first and last time, you’re right about one solitary thing: I shouldn’t have said “all.”

The rest of it stands.

At least Truth Wins Out has a comments section where people can air their views on things, as opposed to AFTAH, where freedom of thought, expression, and even occasionally poorly worded popping off is deemed far too threatening.

(Oh, and Peter does announce, finally, that he suddenly remembered to award the Gay Grinch award to Wayne! He forgot to do it for three months, because, well, you see, what had happened was…)

RELATED: Peter earlier issued a quote-unquote challenge to me, to Wayne, and to Jeremy Hooper, Joe Jervis and Rea Carey to answer a question that this site and Good-As-You have already answered at length: Should other groups like the Catholic Church and the Family Research Council also be classified in the same SPLC-certified hate-boat upon which Peter now sets sail? There is a simple answer: that the SPLC has very specific guidelines for what crosses over into “hate” territory, which they use to decide who is indeed a force for genuine hatred in this country. That’s the simple answer. For a more fleshed out answer, may I recommend that you visit Good-As-You because Jeremy took the ball and ran with that question.

UPDATE: Joe.My.God has also now responded to Peter’s Hate Challenge Wolverine Wankfest or whatever it is.