Kevin McCullough

For years, Kevin McCullough was little more than a fringe right-wing activist who hosted a radio program called “MuscleHead Revolution” heard sporadically throughout the northeast United States, blogging at Townhall and penning columns for WorldNetDaily – columns where he claimed, for instance, that “Radical homosexual activists hate marriage because fundamentally they hate God, and the guilt of both drives them to extremes”:

No longer satisfied with practicing the unspeakable perverse sexual pleasures that their hearts seek in private bedrooms, they wish to be able to do so in public. They are also suffering from such immense guilt over their sexual behaviors, because they know inherently that the actions they perform are in fact unhealthy, that they will go to any means necessary to try and shut down the voices in their heads that tell them it is wrong.

They wrongfully believe that the guilty voice within them is an echo of a prudish state that seeks to limit their freedoms. They wrongfully believe that the judgment they feel is emanating from "Bible thumpers." And what they fail to admit is that the voice that condemns them the loudest is never a human voice – but in fact the voice of their own conscience informed by the truth of the God who created them.

There are attributes of marriage that same-sex couples will never achieve. But in the minds of radical activists, getting the label and a piece of paper saying so will be close enough.

For instance, a woman who engages in lesbianism will never know the joy of lovemaking that creates within her the product of that union – an actual human life. She will never know the security of a true man protecting her from the dragons of the world and providing for her an environment where she can nurture and give love to that little life once it arrives, or the stamp of approval that God puts on such an experience. And because she and her partner know this, they must defy reason, biology and sexual function to create children and experiences that serve as faulty substitutes for that God-ordained picture.

Likewise, a man who seeks his perverse kicks by depositing the seed of life in, shall we say, non-life-giving cavities, may know orgasm, but never complete union, as he uses anatomy in ways for which the Creator did not create it.

Apparently, Family Research Council leaders were so impressed by McCullough’s insights such as HIV doesn’t threaten “people who behave as God intended when it comes to sexual expression” that they decided to bring him on board:

On this week's edition of Washington Watch Radio: We go LIVE to California for the very latest on the court's decision to redefine marriage to include alternate sexual unions. FRC had eyes and ears on the ground in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, Santa Barbara, Ventura, West Hollywood, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Kevin McCullough, nationally syndicated columnist, former New York City based talk show host, and author of the book, The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be joins Tony live from California.

McCullough not only joined FRC’s Tony Perkins for the radio program, but for an extended discussion of the issue that FRC posted on YouTube where Perkins referred to him as “the voice of FRC news.” In the past, McCullough has participated in FRC events, such as the Blogs for Life Conference and has recently begun contributing to the FRC’s institutional blog.

McCullough’s bio says he has “been called the heir apparent to Dobson and Falwell, by America's most prolific faith-based writers,” which seems like a shameless exaggeration – but if he continues to receive validation and credibility from “mainstream” right-wing groups such as FRC, it seems entirely possible that he might actually manage to transition from the right-wing fringe where he currently resides out into the broader Religious Right political network.

Media Research Center ’s Robert Knight called it “tragic.” Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth called it “immoral.” Concerned Women for America ’s Janice Crouse called it “unconscionable.” What are they talking about? A couple deciding to have a kid. If Vice-President Cheney thought that some of his biggest supporters would congratulate him on a new grandchild – or at least restrain themselves from sending out press releases – he had to be disappointed at the right-wing reaction to his daughter’s pregnancy and her plans to raise the child with her lesbian partner.

According to the Right, gays just aren’t fit to be parents – and raising a child is akin to a malicious act. CWA’s Crouse told ABC that Cheney and her partner are “deliberately bringing a child into the world without a father, leaving a great gaping hole” and that leads to “all sorts of negative outcomes — drug use, juvenile delinquency. You name it.” Crouse’s former fellow Concerned Woman Bob Knight went further, claiming that the “child has been conceived with the express purpose of denying it a father,” and “they're shortchanging this child from the start." LaBarbera described the situation as “fatherless by design,” and decry the couple’s plans to “model immoral homosexual behavior before innocent children.”

Carrie Gordon Earll of Focus on the Family was a little more tactful, saying, "Just because you can conceive a child outside a one-woman, one-man marriage doesn't mean it's a good idea. Love can't replace a mother and a father.” She also talked, obliquely, about gay adoption, saying it “intentionally denies children either a mother or a father” and put the “desires of adults” above the “needs of children.” In this she echoed radio talker Kevin McCullough, who wrote that Cheney and her partner were withholding a father “purposefully, simply to stroke one's own desire to have a child - sort of like a new handbag, or pair of shoes.”

Gay advocates pointed out that Mary Cheney’s home state, Virginia, recently passed a constitutional amendment to bar her partner, Heather Poe, from marrying her (or even entering a legal arrangement to approximate marriage), and so the efforts of the right-wing will have a real, deleterious effect on the child’s family situation. “Unless they move to a handful of less restrictive states, Heather will never be able to have a legal relationship with her child,” said Jennifer Chrisler of Family Pride.

But the Right took the opposite view: that Cheney was getting in the way of their anti-gay mission. Crouse told the L.A. Times, “Not only is she doing a disservice to her child, she's voiding all the effort her father put into the Bush administration.” Knight said, "Mary and Heather can believe what they want, but what they're seeking is to force others to bless their nonmarital relationship as marriage" and to "create a culture that is based on sexual anarchy instead of marriage and family values.”