Brian Tashman's blog

Last night, the Family Research Council held a “Stand with Scouts Sunday” event, featuring politicians such as Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Steve Palazzo, to oppose a proposed resolution that would end the Boy Scouts of America’s ban on gay members who are under the age of eighteen.

The event included an address by pastor Robert Hall of Calvary Chapel Rio Rancho, who warned that the push to end the ban on gays is a sign of the End Times and will ultimately make America “self-destruct.” FRC president Tony Perkins argued that the BSA should fear what happened to the military after it repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, even though all reports so far have found no problems as a result.

Boy Scouts who participated in the webcast described homosexuality as unclean and expressed fears that he might “have my buddy come on to me.”

Watch highlights here:

Rep. Steve Palazzo (R-MS) has been working with the Family Research Council to defeat efforts to allow gays under the age of 18 into the Boy Scouts and appeared yesterday on FRC’s “Stand With Scouts Sunday” webcast. The congressman said he would do anything he could “to protect the Boy Scouts from this popular culture, this liberal agenda that is being crammed down their throat,” arguing that “the Boy Scouts are actually being bullied worse than any group or organization that has ever been bullied before.”

“They are being harassed and at the end of the day they are also being ridiculed by some in the liberal media,” he added. Palazzo asked if America cannot tell the Boy Scouts to “stand strong” and preserve its ban on gay members, “then what do we stand for as a country?”

Later, Palazzo said that the organization must “remove the agitators who are trying to corrupt the Boy Scouts of America and bend to popular culture.”

Watch:

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) appeared in the Family Research Council’s “Stand With Scouts Sunday” webcast last night where he told FRC president Tony Perkins that the Boy Scouts of America must resist those trying to “tear apart” the organization’s values and replace them with the “flavor of the month”—homosexuality.

He warned the BSA against becoming “more like pop culture” and urged scout leaders to channel the spirit of Sam Houston, whom Perry said lost his governorship because he was “against slavery” and opposed secession.

Watch:

• Zack Ford @ Think Progress: Rush Limbaugh: Where’s The ‘Tolerance’ For People Who Come Out As Bigots? 

• Tim Murphy @ Mother Jones: Ted Cruz Sets His Sites on a New Target: Common Core. 

• Matt Gertz @ Media Matters: Five Things To Know About The NRA’s New President Jim Porter. 

• Alex Seitz-Wald @ Salon: A march on Washington with loaded rifles. 

• Leah Nelson @ Hatewatch: WND and Glenn Beck Want YOU to Build an Untraceable Assault Rifle.

• David Edwards @ Raw Story: Fox News guest: Obama ‘encouraging’ statutory rape by supporting birth control. 

• Steve Benen @ Maddow Blog: Searching in vain for a scandal that isn’t here. 

• Don Byrd @ Baptist Joint Committee: Pentagon Debunks Rumor of Religious Expression Policy Shift.

• Police have released more information on the Houston airport shooter and none of it backs up Glenn Beck’s “guarantee” that the shooter is an “uber left,” Occupy Wall Street radical who is trying to “set up” the NRA. 

• Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) is the latest Republican to embrace the discredited allegation that the military is preparing to court-martial Christians. 

• A bill to repeal Louisiana’s Creationist education law was killed in committee.

• Does Brian Brown seriously think that most people would back laws banning same-sex marriage if only “cultural elites” didn’t get in the way? 

• Phyllis Schlafly prays that God will speak to the Justices of the Supreme Court and tell them to oppose marriage equality. 

• Ex-gay activist Greg Quinlan of PFOX has launched the “Citizens Against the Jerry Sandusky Victimization Act.”

• WND’s Ilana Mercer writes a column about how gun violence is the result of our “estrogen-infused” society and somehow manages to fit in an attack on Jason Collins.

Fox News correspondent Todd Starnes likes to report on culture war issues and frequently highlights examples of supposed anti-Christian persecution. He plucks the examples from Religious Right media outlets, which then turn around and point to Starnes’ Fox News stories for validation.

Fox example, one recent Starnes story alleged that a New York school was forcing girls to kiss each other as part of an anti-bullying seminar. But the ‘forced lesbianism’ story was baseless [PDF], and the school superintendent had to write to Starnes to urge him to, you know, report stories accurately [PDF].

In another instance of shoddy journalism, Starnes claimed that the military was deliberately blocking access to a Southern Baptist website as part of a “Christian cleansing” of the armed forces by the Obama administration. Well, as it turns out, the website was automatically blocked over malware issues and the Southern Baptist Convention’s own director of information systems acknowledged that there was malware on the SBC website, not any anti-Christian animus in the military, was responsible for the mishap.

So it came as no surprise to learn that a new Starnes column about the military getting ready to court martial Christians, since picked up by organizations like the Family Research Council, was also completely groundless.

Starnes contends that Obama administration officials are working with church-state separation activists to begin kicking Christians out of the military and cracking down on their religious freedom.

As Warren Throckmorton points out, the Defense Department guidelines on proselytizing and religious bias that has so enraged Starnes and others was actually put in place in 2008 during the Bush administration and the language clearly “draws a distinction between simply speaking about one’s faith and coercion.” Throckmorton also notes that Starnes twisted a statement from a Pentagon spokesman “to make it seem as though the outcome of religious proselytizing cases would be court martial.”

The Tennessean and Stars and Stripes have also debunked the story, but don’t tell Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who in an interview with Starnes said that Obama is trying to make Christian service members leave their faith:

“Under President Obama’s military you are no longer allowed to share your faith,” he said – noting that the policy is putting Christians in a tough position. “Do you follow President Obama or do you follow God and the teachings of Jesus?”

“That’s pretty tough when your commander in chief puts you on the horn for that dilemma,” he added.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) similarly told Tony Perkins on Washington Watch earlier this week called the story “yet another attack on religious liberty that we’ve seen from the Obama administration.”

Perkins: The idea that members of the military who share their faith, directly or indirectly, could be potentially court martialed, is this stunning or what?

Scalise: It’s frightening and shocking. Unfortunately it is yet another attack on religious liberty that we’ve seen from the Obama administration and it’s just been an endless assault from so many different angles. Of course it comes off the heels of the FDA approving the morning-after pill. There are just so many things that this administration is doing that go against a lot of the Christian beliefs that this country was founded upon and I think it really needs to be pushed back hard on.

While the victimhood narrative of oppressed white straight evangelicals is beloved by the Religious Right and trumpeted by Fox News, conservative activists may want to at least try to find real incidents of persecution and real journalists if they want people to ever believe them.

Truth In Action Ministries, which last year produced a film warning that the “radical homosexual agenda” will destroy America like an iceberg hitting the Titanic, is out with a new short film opposing gay members in the Boy Scouts. Featuring Religious Right leaders like Bob Knight of the American Civil Rights Union, Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the anti-gay activists warn that gays pose a physical and spiritual danger to children and do away with morality.

Watch highlights here:

Alan Keyes is out with a new column opposing efforts to end the ban on openly gay members of the Boy Scouts and it is about as dumb as you’d expect.

He argues that if the Boy Scouts change the policy, then straight Boy Scouts will be forced to acquiesce to the “sexual advances” of their gay peers in order to avoid being “viciously accused of unrighteous bigotry.” Once they deny their faith and turn gay, Keyes warns, they will “slip into a whirlpool of compulsive sensual indulgence, moral guilt and spiritual confusion.”

“What is most disturbing is that it uses the young participants in the Scouting movement as cannon fodder in the battle against the natural family,” Keyes writes. “In the realm of moral contention, this deployment of, and against, children reminds me of the way the strategists of terror exploit kids in their perpetration of deadly acts of physical violence.”

We are in the midst of an historically unprecedented campaign to deny and disparage the rights of the God-endowed natural family. Do the top leaders of the BSA naïvely believe that the emotionally charged, personally confrontational situations their proposal will inevitably foment will not be exploited as part of this campaign? Obviously, the policy being proposed will produce situations the powerful elitist forces pushing for the normalization of homosexuality will portray in the worst possible light.

Ignoring the logic of God-acknowledging moral conscience, they will portray these situations as proof of willfully hurtful personal prejudice and unfair discrimination by the BSA. They will seek to prejudice public opinion in a way that lends credence to civil lawsuits and even criminal prosecution (on civil-rights grounds) against individual BSA leaders and the BSA itself. In addition to the erosion of trust and support from people who have relied on the BSA’s respect for the moral tenets of their faith, the BSA will have to devote financial and personnel resources to defending against these charges. Wrenched between these whirlpools of public reaction, the organization could easily go under.

…

The residual moral appeal of that façade will be used to attract and indoctrinate youngsters in an essentially self-serving, hedonistic and unmanly understanding of human family life, one that destroys the independent moral basis of the family as the primordial, God-ordained institution of human self-government. This will effectively deny the family’s institutional claim to possess God-endowed authority and rights which all other institutions of human government are obliged, by the Creator, to respect.

Thus understood in terms of its likely consequences, the latest proposal for ending the BSA’s ban on homosexual participation in Scouting is a strategic ploy. What is most disturbing is that it uses the young participants in the Scouting movement as cannon fodder in the battle against the natural family. Some youngsters will be positioned to draw other youngsters into situations where, because they react against sexual advances according to the moral precepts of the faith of their fathers, they will be viciously accused of unrighteous bigotry. Or else their vulnerable adolescent emotions will impel them to betray the tenets of conscience derived from their faith, and slip into a whirlpool of compulsive sensual indulgence, moral guilt and spiritual confusion.

In the realm of moral contention, this deployment of, and against, children reminds me of the way the strategists of terror exploit kids in their perpetration of deadly acts of physical violence. I earnestly pray to God to open the eyes of the BSA’s grass-roots leaders and participants. I pray that He will grant them the wisdom to see past false pretenses of compassion and tolerance, in order to recognize a strategy that intentionally and recklessly endangers the moral lives of the youngsters God has entrusted to their care. These young souls deserve better than to be casualties in the battle to force the American people to surrender the unalienable natural rights endowed by their Creator’s provision for the wholesome life of the human family.

The ever-articulate Ted Nugent writes at WorldNetDaily today that liberals and their allies in government, teachers’ unions and the media are carrying out a “brainwashing jihad.” He says they are using schools to “vilify guns,” which will help them achieve their “ultimate goal of disarming America.” Just as Saul Alinsky wanted…

Like the brainwashing jihad running amok among government goons and most of America’s media, our social engineering indoctrination camps (formerly known as the public school system) clearly have it in for guns.

This is not surprising since these camps are controlled by the National Education Association, which is the largest contributor to the bigger/more-control government-approved party (formerly known as the Democratic Party).

…

While liberals proclaim they are the vanguards of free speech and tolerance, that protection only applies to their leftist, dope-inspired agenda that destroys everything it touches. The purpose of kicking little Billy out of school for drawing a picture of a gun or wearing a pro-gun T-shirt or eating a locked and loaded pop-tart is to simply vilify guns, or in the words of Eric “Fast & Furious” Holder, to “brainwash” Americans against the Second Amendment. Achtung, baby!

However, like every other brain-dead liberal idea that backfires, kicking little Billy out of school provides him even more time to play video games, many of which are violent. You don’t need to be a school psychologist to know that little Billy plays computer and video games much more often than he cracks open a leftist, historical revisionist school book.

Our social engineering indoctrination camps are intentionally sending the message to kids and parents alike that guns are evil. Commie community organizer Saul Alinsky would be proud. It takes a very special person to dedicate his book to the devil, which must be why Hillary “No security for you” Clinton was so enamored with old Saul.

…

Alinksy-inspired radicals are not interested in facts, only to advance their anti-freedom, anti-American agenda of destroying the Second Amendment.

They once again re-kick-started their agenda by championing the banning of so-called assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

They did this because they believe these weapons and magazines could be easily demonized in the wake of numerous gun free zone slaughters. This tactic meets Commie Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals No. 12: pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

…

Part of achieving the ultimate goal of disarming America is to vilify guns at every opportunity. Constantly drumming the message home that guns are evil to little Billy and Susie who attend social engineering indoctrination camps is part of the plan.

Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America celebrated the defeat of the Manchin-Toomey bill to expand background checks on firearms purchases during an appearance on The Steve Deace Show yesterday. Pratt, who previously attacked gun safety laws as “paganism,” told Deace that prayer stifled the new legislation (before making a Bill Clinton joke).

Pratt: The one thing that the other side will never understand about how a small group like ours was able to do what we did is because we pray. That’s so far outside their box that you could tell them that and they would probably think you were kidding or so what, you know what I mean.

Deace: They would probably think you’re referring to p-r-e-y and wondering why you want to pick on endangered species too, Larry.

Pratt: Either that or we had Bill Clinton loose among us.

He also claimed that Sen. Toomey should be “committed” if he honestly believed that his legislation would not create a national gun registry. “You are functionally so stupid that you can’t operate in the modern world if you believe that,” Pratt said.

Deace: I’ve been around a lot of politicians, particularly because I live in the first in the nation caucus state, so I’ve seen them in their staffs lie with impunity, but Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania’s contention that they were going to do these background checks and collect all the data that they would need for a national gun registry that his bill says they are not allowed to do. So government is going to collect all this data and then restrain itself from actually utilizing it? That one ranks right up there with absolutely some of the dumbest and most incredulous lies I’ve ever heard a politician expect voters to actually buy; I mean that’s just crazy.

Pratt: And if he believes that himself then we really need to get him committed. You are functionally so stupid that you can’t operate in the modern world if you believe that. So I think you’re supposition is closer to what actually was likely going on in his mind. This was just a boldfaced effort to get the gun registry.