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Channeling Pat Robertson, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality’s Peter LaBarbera said that it is an “insult to God” to argue that gays and lesbians have an innate sexual orientation when God can change “murderers” along with “the most vile criminals, rapists, alcoholics [and] drunks.”

LaBarbera appeared Friday on The Janet Mefferd Show to criticize John Paulk, the onetime poster boy of the ex-gay movement who recently left the movement. He was appalled by Paulk’s claim that “you can be homosexual and still faithful to God” and argued that “it’s weird” to think Paulk believes “he’s become a better person after renouncing this ex-gay life.”

He says, “My relationship with the Lord is more real and authentic than ever before. My beliefs about the Bible are the same. I have not gone off the deep end having become a freakishly liberal gay Christian.” But he’s not a conservative. He gave up the part about not, you know, he says he didn’t want to continue the ex-gay life but he says he’s more real and vulnerable, he says: “Because of God’s recent work in my life I have become more loving, tender, vulnerable, and hopeful.” It sounds like he’s become a better person after renouncing this ex-gay life, it’s weird. This is John Paulk saying that he is “more loving, tender, vulnerable, and hopeful” since he’s basically renounced this part of his life where he’s overcome homosexuality. He’s trying to say that you can be homosexual and still faithful to God.

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How dare anybody say Jesus Christ can’t heal homosexuals and help them overcome. Jesus forgives murderers; he restores the most vile criminals, rapists, alcoholics, drunks; yet we are going to say that Jesus can’t change homosexuals, people trapped in homosexuality? That is an insult to God himself.

Avi Lipkin is back and once again stirring fears that President Obama — with the help of the Illuminati and the Free Masons, of course — is planning to engineer a crisis in the Middle East that will push 50-100 million Muslim refugees to the US who will then live on property seized under Agenda 21.

As he explained on an interview on VCY America’s Crosstalk yesterday, Obama will use Agenda 21 to confiscate lands such as parks and farms in Texas and the Ozarks in order to create “a Muslim majority in America.”

Later, Lipkin explained that Muslims tend to settle in forests and are already setting up encampments until there are about 50 million Muslim forest dwellers.

They go to the country where the President is a Muslim of a Christian country; that’s Obama, that’s the US. You’ve heard of Agenda 21 right? Agenda 21 means the US government can confiscate national parks, national forests, resources, big farms. The King Ranch in Texas is the size of Rhode Island; you could confiscate that ranch and put in 5 million Muslims there. I drive all the time through Texas and Oklahoma, the whole place is full of beautiful forests and mountains and lakes and there are very few people living there. America is empty, Canada is empty, Brazil is empty, Mexico has room, Europe has room. You’re going to have tens of millions of Muslims abandoning the Middle East — which is being turned into complete desolation by these civil wars — and the ultimate goal is to have a Muslim majority in America. Obama said in one of his speeches that America is the greatest Muslim country on earth, he’s a prophet because that’s what his purpose is.

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They bring in say about 50,000 people in one shot in that forest. I heard about this in Virginia, I heard about this in New York, on the border between North and South Carolina, I heard about this in Texas. I go a lot through the Ozarks, I go through Missouri and Arkansas, there is a lot of beautiful pristine country which is completely empty. If you want to bring to the United States 50 million immigrants, you cannot bring them into the cities, you cannot overburden the infrastructure of the cities, cities cannot cope with that, so you build completely new infrastructures in forests, in places where you can plan this, this is being planned.

When a caller on the show wondered if Obama is going to “declare martial law” and follow through with plans “on becoming the dictator of our country,” Lipkin said that while that is a possibility he may not need the help of the FBI and the CIA to pull off the coup since there will be “50 million more minority people in the US” who, with the help of Saudi money and other minority groups, will work to keep Obama in power indefinitely.

Caller: We know that somebody in the Obama group is trying to do away with term limits so he can run again, then we also have the gun control and the government purchasing ammunition and I know before this last election there was some hype about him attacking Iran so he can declare martial law. What I’m wondering is do you think that by 2016 Mr. Obama is planning on becoming the dictator of our country?

Lipkin: That’s a very tough question to answer. If I’m going according to the information that I have, I understand the information that you have and the people that I speak to in America are the same type of people like you who have that kind of information about the dictatorship and the FBI and the CIA turning against Christians, this is possible. I think that what we are seeing is a plan by the Saudis, by the Qataris, by the Islamic world to bring into the US tens of millions of Muslims with a lot of money. Wall Street just hit 15,000 and I think Wall Street will continue to rise because it is being propped up by Saudi money. There are a lot of people in America, you’ve got a lot of minorities who are very happy with Obama and if you get 50 million more minority people in the US, the Christians are being increasingly outnumbered and the people who represent the other ideologies, especially Islam, will be dominant and there might not be need for FBI or CIA because the country is lost. So it’s very important for the churches to wake up, have a Christian revival and put a stop to it now.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and a GOP witness at last month’s Senate hearings on immigration reform, laid out his strategy for stopping the reform bill on a Tea Party Unity conference call Thursday.

Krikorian told the Tea Party activists on the call that they were lined up against “all the big institutions in the country” including “Big Business…Big Labor, all the big donors, Big Government Big Education, Big Media, Big Philanthropy, Big Religion -- the Southern Baptist Convention has been roped into this as well.”

Opponents of immigration reform shouldn’t be “distracted by particular pieces of the bill” they might support, he said. Instead, “This needs to be a kind of kill-and-replace, like the fight on Obamacare response.”

“There may be parts of it that some people like, increasing some skilled immigration or guest worker programs, what have you,” he said. “I’m not a big fan of either of those things, but if they’re included in this bill it doesn’t matter because there’s so much in this bill that shouldn’t be there that’s so bad that the whole thing needs to be killed.”

All the big institutions in the country are behind this. Big Business is for this, Big Labor, all the big donors, Big Government, Big Education, Big Media, Big Philanthropy, Big Religion -- the Southern Baptist Convention has been roped into this as well. And once the bill came out, though, it became pretty clear that there’s plenty there to attack. The inevitability is not real. This in fact can be stopped, and in fact I think the approach needs to be not to sort of be distracted by particular pieces of the bill, but the whole thing needs to be killed. This needs to be a kind of kill-and-replace, like the fight on Obamacare response. Because this really is an equivalent to Obamacare and frankly probably much more consequential in the long term, much more damaging to the health of the country.

There may be parts of it that some people like, increasing some skilled immigration or guest worker programs, what have you. I’m not a big fan of either of those things, but if they’re included in this bill it doesn’t matter because there’s so much in this bill that shouldn’t be there that’s so bad that the whole thing needs to be killed.

Krikorian went out of his way to attack two of the four Republicans on the bipartisan Gang of Eight that devised the immigration reform proposal. Sen. Lindsey Graham, he said, is facing attack ads in South Carolina “both because he’s on the Gang of Eight and because he’s frankly kind of a jerk.”

He then accused Sen. Marco Rubio, the main Republican spokesperson for the Gang of Eight’s bipartisan proposal, of having “totally drunk the Kool-Aid” and acting as “Chuck Schumer’s water boy.” The best home immigration opponents have to stop the bill, he added, is to “scare [Rubio] enough to give him some kind of excuse to walk away.”

Rubio needs to be the focus, not so much of attack, although he does kind of need to be attacked. Rubio needs to be, it needs to be made clear to him he’s got to back off this bill. I’m not sure that’s possible. He’s completely, totally latched himself to Chuck Schumer at this point. But, you know, it seems to me it’s at least possible, offering him and a lot of other Republicans an opportunity, a way of backing out of this thing. Because especially if Rubio backs out, if he somehow, and it’s going to be hard at this point, but if he were to walk away from this and say, ‘Look, I tried, it just didn’t work,’ the whole thing is over, it’s collapsed and there’s just no chance the Democrats have of getting this through.

So, in a sense, Rubio really is the key guy. And your  question is, the question, the way it would have to be presented to Rubio, is, ‘Are you the conservative ambassador to this Gang of Eight writing this bill, or are you Chuck Schumer’s ambassador to conservatives?” And I’m afraid he’s the latter. He’s now Chuck Schumer’s water boy, making the case for the bill that the Democratic staff, Schumer’s staff, wrote, and making the case for it to conservatives to try to get enough people basically, you know, silenced enough that this thing can get through the Senate. That’s the real danger and that’s where it seems to me the pressure has to be applied.

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There are some people running ads in South Carolina, for instance, against Lindsey Graham, both because he’s on the Gang of Eight and because he’s frankly kind of a jerk and because he’s up in 2014 and there are people talking about primarying him. My point is that making Rubio feel the heat isn’t going to get him to change his mind. He’s totally drunk the Kool-Aid.  I mean, I can’t put it too strongly: he is Chuck Schumer’s water boy. He is Chuck Schumer’s assistant in tearing out this amnesty. And he just thinks that all the rest of it doesn’t matter as long as he can get everybody amnesty. And remember, everybody’s amnesty first, within a few months of this bill passing. Everything else is just promises. ‘If, you know, we get everyone amnesty then we can get our message to Hispanic voters,’ or something. It’s a complete fantasy. He’s totally bought into it. The point is to scare him enough to give him some kind of excuse to walk away, that’s what my point is.
 

Bryan Fischer is a big fan of Niall Ferguson’s bogus claim (which he has since renounced) that John Maynard Keynes did not care about how his economic policies impacted future generations because, as a gay man, he didn’t plan to have children.

The American Family Association spokesman took issue with Tom Kostigen of Financial Advisor, whom Fischer called a member of the “pro-sodomy gestapo, the gaystapo,” for criticizing Ferguson when he is in fact “exactly right” for blaming the 2008 financial crisis on the gay community.

“He was a narcissist, he was a hedonist and he was a homosexual,” Fischer said, “his view of history is very shortsighted, short-circuited, he cared about himself and his generation exclusively; so homosexuality in the end is going to be responsible for the collapse of the Western economy.”

Watch:

Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan has been one of the Right’s most reliably xenophobic voices against immigration reform. On Friday’s McLaughlin Group, Buchanan was at it again, claiming that immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants would  “lead to the erasure of the southern border of the United States” and the creation of an “entirely different U.S.A.” because of increased Latino voting in border states.

“Let me tell you, if you get amnesty and the path to citizenship that the Mexican president wants, that will lead to the erasure of the southern border of the United States, because the Hispanic population in all those border states is going to be decisive in elections and they will begin to demand that to people, shut up about immigration and let it come forward, and when that happens you’re going to have an entirely different U.S.A.,” he said.
 

Former congressman and anti-immigrant activist Tom Tancredo took to WorldNetDaily on Friday to warn that Americans are a “vanishing breed” who might “disappear” as a result of multiculturalism in the public school system. He said that progressive are using schools to make Americans “worship at the shrine of multiculturalism” and consequently lose their American identity.

Tancredo backs up his argument with a Benjamin Franklin quote which he says illustrates that Americans have become a “fundamentally different people.”

Unfortunately for Tancredo, the quote actually isn’t from Franklin himself, but the character Benjamin Franklin in the musical “1776.”

America as a continent, a region and as a political entity may well survive for centuries, but the American who has created and populated this nation is a vanishing breed. Is it possible for America to survive while Americans disappear?

Yes, it is possible. As our character and culture change, we become a different nation, like an alien being taking over a human body. It looks the same, but the soul is different. As what it means to be an American changes, we are justified in wondering whether the nation’s Founding Fathers – or Alexis de Tocqueville or Teddy Roosevelt – would recognize the new Americans who celebrate not a special American identity and American destiny but our “common humanity” and “oneness” with the world’s collective misery.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to speak of Americans as a new people who required a new nation. For Franklin, what propelled Americans toward independence was not the Stamp Act or the Tea Tax or the quartering of British troops in the homes of colonists. America was destined to be a separate nation because we were a new people on the face of the earth.

In 1776, a fellow Pennsylvanian, John Dickinson, asked Franklin, who had been an early advocate for independence, exactly why the colonies should separate from the mother country. Franklin replied:

“We have spawned a new race here in America. It’s rougher, simpler, more violent, more entrepreneurial, and less refined. … We require a new nation.”

Benjamin Franklin understood that Americans were a fundamentally different people, a new people in the history of the world. Thus, to Franklin, independence from England was both natural and inevitable.

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Can a nation remain exceptional if it evolves into a mirror image of the old world, the corrupt and tyrannical world from which its early immigrants sought refuge? How much accommodation and compromise can a nation endure without losing its special character and becoming, in modern jargon, “part of the problem, not part of the solution”?

This is a new question Americans never before had to ask. For 200 years, Americans took our special mission for granted, and fortunately, so did the rest of the world. We were Ronald Reagan’s “City on a hill,” and we were proud of it.

The new question for Americans in the 21st century is whether we even want to be a distinct race and a distinct nation, a beacon of light in the darkness. The question has become, not whether we have lost that quality that made us different but whether we should care one way or the other.

This doubt and this questioning of our place in the world is the cumulative product of three generations of progressive education of our elites. Beginning in the mid-20th century, our schools began teaching the devaluation of our history and doubt about our character as a different kind of nation.

Our new progressive culture asks us to worship at the shrine of multiculturalism, where “American Exceptionalism” is cast into what Marx called the “dustbin of history.”

America maintained its exceptionalism for 200 years because it attracted a special kind of immigrant as well, people similar in spirit to the first colonists – individuals drawn to the promise of Franklin’s entrepreneurial individualism. They didn’t come just for employment and with the intention of sending a third of their earnings back home and then returning there some day. They came wanting to be not laborers, but Americans.

Ronald Reagan was an optimist on the question of America’s destiny, and many conservatives still echo that optimism. Yet, the case for a weary pessimism grows stronger each day.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the driving force behind draconian anti-immigrant laws in Arizona and Alabama and a rising national figure on the Right, is close to a major victory on one of his other pet projects – gaining attention for the mythical problem of “election fraud.”

Kansas’ legislature is poised to grant Kobach’s office the power to prosecute election fraud cases that it identifies, a responsibility previously reserved for county and federal prosecutors. Kobach claims that prosecutors and the state attorney general’s office are neglecting these cases because of “a very full plate.”

But a look at even a few of the cases Kobach claims that prosecutors are neglecting tells a very different story. In February, Kobach told The Topeka Capital-Journal that he had referred eleven “slam dunk” cases to prosecutors, none of which had ended in convictions. But one of the prosecutors responsible for following up on those cases found that most were isolated incidents involving people who were just confused about the voting laws:

Johnson County District Attorney Stephen Howe took exception to some of Kobach's characterizations in his testimony on behalf of the Kansas County and District Attorneys Association. Howe said Kobach's bird’s-eye view of widespread voter fraud crumbles when investigated by those on the ground.

For instance, Howe said one double-voter his office investigated was an elderly man showing "the early stages of dementia." Howe's office notified the man's family rather than prosecute him.

Another alleged double voter was a developmentally disabled man.

“Are we supposed to prosecute that case?" Howe asked. "I chose not to.”

This fits with the pattern. In 2011, Kobach claimed that there had been 221 incidents of voter fraud in Kansas between 1997 and 2010. Yet just seven of these resulted in convictions.

Kobach now claims that he has identified at least 30 cases of illegal double voting in the 2012 election by finding people with the same name and birthdate who voted in two separate states. Such matching tactics have in the past have resulted not in legitimate voter fraud convictions, but in embarrassing errors and mass wrongful disenfranchisement.

Kobach’s issue with the state’s prosecutors seems to be not that they haven’t properly investigated voter fraud – but that they have failed to promote the conspiracy theory about widespread voter fraud that, when it becomes popular, benefits people like Kris Kobach and the policies they pursue.
 

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:

Last week, we reported on the creative and constitutionally questionable efforts by Iowa Republicans to punish the state supreme court justices who issued the state’s landmark marriage equality ruling.

Now, Wisconsin Republicans are up to something similar, seeking to strip county circuit court judges of the ability to issue preliminary injunctions on laws that may be unconstitutional. The measure, which was introduced last month and had public hearings yesterday, is widely seen as a reaction to judicial injunctions on efforts by state Republicans to impose voter ID requirements and limit collective bargaining rights.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel explains:

With some of their major legislative achievements thwarted by trial courts in the past two years, Wisconsin Republicans have been looking for ways to rein in local judges, particularly in liberal areas such as Dane County.

Since 2011, circuit court judges have blocked all or parts of laws backed by Republicans that required voters to show photo ID at the polls, limited collective bargaining for public employees and expanded the governor's power over administrative rules. Under a measure announced last month, such injunctions would be automatically stayed as soon as they were appealed - meaning laws that were blocked would be put back in effect until a higher court issued a ruling.

The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Council is now warning that the bill is likely unconstitutional.

Incidentally, one of the bill’s sponsors is state Sen. Glenn Grothman, who last year tried to get a state public health agency to list single parenthood listed as “a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.”