Rick Scarborough

Today is World AIDS Day, a day for "people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, show their support for people living with HIV and to commemorate people who have died."

Which, of course, means anti-gay activists like Peter LaBarbera decided to "commemorate" it with press releases calling for cutting AIDS funding while promoting efforts to "re-stigmatize" homosexuality.

So, in this vein, let us "commemorate" World AIDS Day by highlighting a few of the Religious Right's more outrageous AIDS-related statements from recent years:

• Rick Scarborough says AIDS is God's judgment for an immoral act:

• Sally Kern stating that AIDS is more dangerous than terrorism:

You know if you just look at it in practical terms, which has destroyed and ended the life of more people? Terrorism attack here in America or HIV/AIDS? In the last twenty years, fifteen to twenty years, we’ve had maybe three terrorist attacks on our soil with a little over 5,000 people regrettably losing their lives. In the same time frame, there have been hundreds of thousands who have died because of having AIDS. So which one’s the biggest threat? And you know, every day our young people, adults too, but especially our young people, are bombarded at school, in movies, in music, on TV, in the mall, in magazines, they’re bombarded with ‘homosexuality is normal and natural.’ It’s something they have to deal with every day. Fortunately we don’t have to deal with a terrorist attack every day, and that’s what I mean.

• Bryan Fischer saying that gay sex is just like domestic terrorism:

• A quote from former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop from the book "Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite" claiming that Gary Bauer fought his efforts to inform President Reagan about the AIDS crisis:

[In 1986] President Reagan asked the surgeon general to prepare a report on AIDS as the United States confirmed its ten-thousandth case. Leaders of the evangelical movement did not want Koop to write the report, nor did senior White House staffers who shared Koop's evangelical convictions. As Dr. Koop related to me, "Gary Bauer [Reagan's chief advisor on domestic policy] ... was my nemesis in Washington because he kept me from the president. He kept me from the cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had AIDS ought to die with it. That was God's punishment for them."

• And who can ever forget Mike Huckabee standing by his 1992 remarks calling for "carriers of this plague" to be removed from society and placed in quarantine:

"It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population," he said. "This deadly disease, for which there is no cure, is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.

"If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague."

As we noted last week, Rick Perry spent some time this weekend at James Leininger's ranch in Texas meeting with a bevy of Religious Right leaders and activists.

According to Time, there was some 300 such leaders in attendance and Rick Scarborough, though he refuses to confirm that he was actually in attendance, appears quite smitten with the Texas Governor:

Last weekend, Rick Perry privately met some 300 conservative evangelical leaders at long-time supporter Jim Leininger’s home near Fredricksburg, Texas. And on Monday afternoon, reported-attendee and evangelical leader Rick Scarborough told TIME he is endorsing Perry: “I was holding judgment,” says Scarborough, who in 1998 founded the group Vision America to mobilize pastors and their congregations to vote on social issues, “but the more I’ve studied and listened, the more I have liked what I have heard.”

Perry first charmed Scarborough, who supported former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee for President in 2008, over a decade ago when Perry gave an impromptu personal testimony of his evangelical faith at a 1998 Republican convention. “It was obvious to me as a preacher that it was real, it was undoctored, it was unprepared, it was off the cuff. It really resonated with me.”

The governor had help in winning over the evangelical leader. Scarborough cited Perry’s wife Anita as a major factor in his decision. “I’ve had a chance here recently to hear Anita, much more close and personal,” Scarborough said. “Unlike [previous Presidents’ wives], I find that she holds the same values that he holds.”

...

The pastor’s endorsement has real sway. Vision America’s “Patriot Pastor” coalition has 20,000 members, and American Family Association founder Don Wildmon and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye are on the group’s advisory board. Scarborough says he’s already begun making his case to other influential social conservatives. “That’s not to say Rick Perry is Jesus because he is not,” he says. “But when you look at his full body of work, he’s been the best governor we’ve ever had.”

As we noted before, Scarborough is a self-proclaimed "Christocrat" who believes that it is his duty to "mix church and state God's way" in order to stop the country's "slide further into Communism/Socialism [and] sexual anarchy led by sodomites" and fight President Obama's efforts to "de-Christianize" this country.

Oh yeah, and he is also a Birther who stated, just a few months ago, that AIDS is God's judgment for engaging in an immoral act:

In June, Janet Porter's radical anti-choice "Heartbeat Bill" passed the Ohio State House but then stalled when the state legislature recessed without the bill being taken up by the Senate.

But the Legislature will return in September and Porter is already planning a rally to welcome them back that will continue her efforts to join together Religious Right leaders with prophetic dominionists by mixing the likes of Wendy Wright [formerly] of Concerned Women for America and Rick Scarborough from Vision America in with Porter's prophetic pal Rick Joyner of The Oak Initiative:

Last year, Mike Huckabee received the "National Hero of Faith" award from Rick Scarborough, a self-proclaimed "Christocrat" who believes that AIDS is God's judgment for immoral behavior, and even showed up in person at the Vision America gala to receive it.

This year that honor will go to the man that Huckabee calls the "single best historian in America today" and whom he wishes everyone would be forced to listen to at gunpoint - David Barton [PDF]: