Posts on Robert Knight

Coral Ridge Ministries unveils a new video featuring Matt Barber, Jordan Lorence, Robert Knight, Tony Perkins, and others warning Christians that if Hate Crimes Laws get enacted, Christianity will be criminalized and churches will be destroyed.

In this excerpt, Knight declares that such laws will result in the “criminalization of Christianity” and that, if passed, American will “have criminalized basic Christian moral doctrine” while Perkins says that hate crimes laws will lead to hate speech laws which will “ultimately silence the churches in the country” and that is no accident because “homosexuals know they must silence the church in this country” in order to enact their agenda.

The American Family Association’s One News Now is a “news” service in the same way that Fox is “fair and balanced.”  Remember, One News Now is the outfit that published stories about “Tyson Homosexual” because they were so opposed to using the word “gay.”  ONN’s “Daily News Briefs” have become a one-stop shop of wing-nuttery. Today it was also a victim of bad timing

Robert Knight, tired of hearing “gay activists” argue that “the sky is not falling” and the “sun still came out, the birds still chirped and the flowers still bloomed” after Massachusetts permitted gay marriage, comes up with a stinging retort: “Well, the birds chirped and the flowers bloomed in Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, as the American fleet lay smoldering.”

Robert Knight weighs in on the Jeremiah Wright controversy, saying it is unfair to compare to Jerry Falwell to Wright because "Falwell was no hater. After his most controversial moment, when he blamed pro-abortion and pro-homosexual groups for 9/11 as God's punishment on America for abandoning moral standards, he apologized." Of course, Falwell did nothing of the sort.

Media Research Center activist accusing "Harry Potter" author of pushing "hip, kaleidoscopic sexual deviancy that is engulfing us from every which way" in revealing gay wizard.

A few years ago, anti-gay activists found themselves having a rough time in their attempts to vilify the gay penguins of Central Park Zoo in New York, but it seems they are always looking for ever-more sympathetic targets.

“There’s good news and bad news in the world of children’s books,” writes Robert Knight, head of the Media Research Center’s Culture and Media Institute, adding that the “good news” involves banning books—a book about penguins, no less:

First, the good news: And Tango Makes Three, a picture book for 4- to 8-year-olds about two penguins who are into homosexual “parenting,” is the “most challenged” book on the American Library Association’s (ALA) Banned Books Week list.

This means some parents are still on the job and are not turning their children over to the tender mercies of the Free Sex Lobby, which effectively runs the ALA.

So, what’s the “bad news,” you ask? According to Knight, formerly a spokesman for Concerned Women for America, it’s that fewer books are being banned, thanks to those (supposedly sex-crazed) librarians and their 25-year campaign against censorship.

One of our correspondents sent this report from the first day of the Family Impact Summit in Florida:

The first panel's topic was "The Homosexual Agenda," and Peter Sprigg, vice president for public policy at the Family Research Council, gave his talk with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation purporting to outline the "Elements of the Agenda." Sprigg lectured the crowd about how “militant gay rights activists” were going about crossing off agenda points, and spoke at length about the gay rights activists' movement to "indoctrinate every student from kindergarten to 12th grade." 

While Sprigg gave the usual compassionate-sounding phrases of the anti-gay movement—with statements like, "We desire the best for homosexuals, and desiring the best for someone and acting to bring that about is the essence of love…"— he "affirmed" the state of Florida for having the strongest prohibition against adoption by gay couples. He made the claim that "most children raised by homosexuals are the result of previous heterosexual relationships," and proceeded to pontificate about how this "undermines the notion that homosexuality is something fixed from birth and cannot change—there are very few homosexuals who have never had a heterosexual relationship."

Just days after the Religious Right’s B-team gathered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida to question Republican candidates for president (including the ones who didn’t show up), a number of more prominent right-wing figures are convening in Tampa for the Family Impact Summit, sponsored by the Focus on the Family-affiliated Florida Family Policy Council, the Tampa-based Community Issues Council, the Family Research Council, and the Salem radio network.

Advertised topics range from “Christian Citizenship” to “Homosexual Agenda,” but the focus will no doubt be on the 2008 election, and in particular, the effort by Florida’s Right to put a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage on the ballot—even though gays are already prohibited from marrying by statute.

Below is some background on the featured speakers, from Tony Perkins and Richard Land to Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell.

As recently interpreted by Focus on the Family and the Culture and Media Institute, polls judging attitudes toward equal workplace rights demonstrate that the American people are a bunch of suckers:

According to Gallup, 90 percent of Americans believe gay people should have equal workplace rights, but only 47 percent think being gay is “morally acceptable.” To bridge the gap, the gay strategy is to spotlight themselves as credible and professional, and provide business leadership with gay-friendly misinformation.

“The bottom line is they are using the power of money and position to promote an agenda that these people acknowledge that half of Americans still feel is immoral,” Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Media Institute in Alexandria, Va., told Family News in Focus.

Apparently, this “gap” couldn’t have stemmed from the American public’s ability to develop nuanced views with regard to ideas of equality and their own personal moral convictions... No, the gap must have come from a successful disinformation campaign that somehow managed to fool the public into believing that gay people can be capable workplace employees.

At a convening of U.S. religious-right activists and reactionary leaders from around the world, Assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey passed along an important message. “I bring you greetings from President Bush!” she told the World Congress of Families in Poland, helping to legitimize the controversial conference. Sauerbrey also specifically thanked the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society “for all of their hard work in organizing this wonderful opportunity to celebrate and reflect upon the family and its vital role in society.”

Including Weyrich, Knight, others. More from LaBarbera.

And citation of GLSEN, sponsor of gay-straight alliance clubs.

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.”

David Limbaugh, Robert Knight, Concerned Women complain. City said “Nativity Story” clips were “too commercial”; the festival has its own nativity scene.

Last night on Comedy Central’s Daily Show, humorist and “This American Life” contributor David Rakoff described an interview he conducted with Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America’s Culture and Family Institute. Knight, who in the past has attacked survivor benefits for same-sex partners of 9/11 victims and compared stores saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” to the Nazi march on Austria, has long warned right-wing audiences about a so-called “homosexual agenda.”

DAVID RAKOFF: His view of what he kept on calling “the homosexual agenda” was literally – it’s like, Oh, you actually think it’s an agenda, like a written agenda. A to-do list.

JON STEWART: It’s a literal …

RAKOFF: Yeah. Things to do: [counting off on fingers] Recruit children. Have sex with them. Spread AIDS. It was just extraordinary!

Later in their conversation, according to Rakoff, Knight argued that heterosexual couples were less likely to transmit HIV because “the vagina can take a lot of punishment.”

Watch the video on Comedy Central’s web site: Part 1 Part 2.