American Family Association

While the Religious Right reacted with apoplectic rage following the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the lifting of the ban on women in combat has brought dejected but relatively subdued responses from conservatives.

American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer, who in December spoke out in favor of the ban by lying about the Israeli military’s policy on women in combat, tweeted that the decision was part of Obama’s plan to “feminize and weaken the U.S. military.”

Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness said that “lives could be lost unnecessarily” by the new policy, which “will harm men and the mission of the infantry as a whole.” “The administration has a pattern of irresponsible actions like this using the military to advance a social agenda,” she said, “This kind of a social experiment is a dangerous one.”

Faith and Freedom Coalition head Ralph Reed maintained that the Obama administration is “putting women in combat situations is the latest in a series of moves where political correctness and liberal social policy have trumped sound military practice.”

Richard Viguerie’s group claimed that “Obama’s plan to introduce women into frontline combat roles in the U.S. military is a dangerous and irresponsible social experiment, not an opportunity for women to serve their country and advance in their chosen profession.”

Radio talk show host Janet Mefferd on her Facebook page wrote that the move is further proof that the Obama administration is “intent upon undoing this great country” and will “stop at nothing to achieve it.”

Family Research Council vice president Jerry Boykin, who was reprimanded by President Bush after he made anti-Muslim and political speeches while in uniform, called the decision “another social experiment”:

The people making this decision are doing so as part of another social experiment, and they have never lived nor fought with an infantry or Special Forces unit. These units have the mission of closing with and destroying the enemy, sometimes in close hand-to-hand combat. They are often in sustained operations for extended periods, during which they have no base of operations nor facilities. Their living conditions are primal in many situations with no privacy for personal hygiene or normal functions. Commanders are burdened with a very heavy responsibility for succeeding in their mission and for protecting their troops.

This decision to integrate the genders in these units places additional and unnecessary burdens on leaders at all levels. While their focus must remain on winning the battles and protecting their troops, they will now have the distraction of having to provide some separation of the genders during fast moving and deadly situations. Is the social experiment worth placing this burden on small unit leaders? I think not.

Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America said that the “majority of women” don’t care about the ban or want its elimination:

News of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's intent to lift the long-standing ban on women serving in direct combat is further proof that this administration simply does not care about the issues about which the majority of women care. Once again, their interest on women issues is driven by special interest groups. The point of the military is to protect our country. Anything that distracts from that is detrimental. Our military cannot continue to choose social experimentation and political correctness over combat readiness. While this decision is not unexpected from this administration, it is still disappointing. Concerned Women for America (CWA) and its more than half-a-million members around the country will continue to do all we can to see that our men and women in uniform are governed with the respect and resources needed to do the hard task of fighting for and protecting our freedoms.

“God help us,” lamented Denny Burk of the Southern Baptist Convention, who seemed to suggest that women shouldn’t be in the armed forces at all:

Are the fortunes of women in our country really enhanced by sending them to be ground up in the discipline of a combat unit and possibly to be killed or maimed in war? Is there a father in America who would under any circumstance risk having his daughter shot or killed in battle? Is there a single husband in this country who thinks it okay for his wife to risk being captured by our enemies? To risk becoming a prisoner of war? Is this the kind of people we want to be? Perhaps this is the kind of people we already are. I would sooner cut off my arm than allow such a thing with my own wife and daughters. Why would I ever support allowing someone else’s to do the same? Why would anyone?

What kind of a society puts its women on the front lines to risk what only men should be called on to risk? In countries ravaged by war, we consider it a tragedy when the battle comes to the backyards of women and children. Why would we thrust our own wives and daughters into that horror? My own instinct is to keep them as far from it as possible. Perhaps this move makes sense with an all volunteer force, but what if the draft is ever reinstituted? Are we really going to be the kind of people who press our wives and daughters to fight in combat?

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Everyone in America ought to be scandalized by this news, but I’m wondering if it will even register on the radar of anyone’s conscience. To the extent that it doesn’t, we reveal just how far gone we are as a people. God help us.

Aaron Ahlert of FrontPageMag said the move is “sure to have deadly consequences” and represents the Obama administration “forcing gender radicalism down America’s throat.”

It didn’t take long for the Obama administration to advance a pernicious piece of its promised radical agenda. Two days after the president laid out his far-left vision during the inauguration, senior defense officials announced that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta will lift the military’s ban on women serving in combat. The move overturns a 1994 provision that prohibited them from being assigned to ground combat units. Panetta has given the various service branches until 2016 to come up with exemptions, and/or make any arguments about what roles should still reman closed to women. Thus, another bit of gender radicalism has been shoved down the nation’s throat through executive fiat — and this one is sure to have deadly consequences.

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It stretches the bounds of credulity to believe that sexual tension, regardless of the legitimate or illegitimate motivation behind it, would be lessened under front line, life-threatening combat conditions. Nor is it inconceivable to think that close personal relationships of a sexual nature would make some soldiers take the kind of unnecessary risks to save a lover that might not only endanger themselves, but their entire unit.

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Once again, elections have consequences. Barack Obama has made it clear that part of his progressive agenda includes forcing gender radicalism down America’s throat, absent any input from Congress. Once, the United States military was all about projecting lethal power around the globe to protect America’s interests. Now, it is all about promoting diversity, inclusion and equality of outcome, irrespective of military readiness and cohesion. For progressives, who have elevated political correctness above all else–national security included–such radical egalitarianism is cause for celebration. For Donnelly and countless other Americans, it is anything but. “No one’s injured son should have to die on the streets of a future Fallujah because the only soldier near enough to carry him to safety was a five-foot-two 110-pound woman,” she contends.

The good folks over at the American Family Association were none-too-pleased with President Obama's inaugural address on Monday, in particular his inclusion of non-Christians and gays, and Buster Wilson was likewise outraged by the speech, especially Obama's mention of Stonewall which "sent shivers down the spines of a lot of people and for good reason":

American Family Association radio host Sandy Rios yesterday spoke to Religious Right historian Bill Federer on her show where she criticized President Obama for mentioning nonbelievers and non-Christians as having “equal standing” with Christians in the U.S.

“When he lists all these denominations and atheists and Buddhists and Muslims it’s like we’re all equal, of equal proportion, and we are not,” Rios said, once again revealing that the AFA does indeed believe that people who do not subscribe to its version of Christianity are inferior and minority rights should be dictated by the whims of the majority.

Federer agreed and said it was part of Obama’s “intentional denigration of the contributions of Judeo-Christian faith in America’s history” and went on to say that “Obama’s been using the bully pulpit to advance Islam.”

Later, Rios mourned that African-American Christians support Obama even though he is working to “usher in a time of godlessness” and is “radically transforming this country” by including an openly gay poet and a gay band contingent in inaugural festivities. She naturally ended by doubting Obama’s Christian faith and patriotism: “Something is terribly wrong and it’s terribly wrong to see this man swear allegiance to the country on the bibles of men who went before him who were men who understood faith and who God was.”

We are radically transforming this country and it is happening by the first black president, which brings me to another point: today is Martin Luther King’s birthday and that’s something to really celebrate and I think about my black brothers and sisters, especially in Christ, and I think about the irony that the first black president that they are so excited about, and rightfully so, should usher in a time of godlessness. It’s just amazing to me. Isn’t that ironic? I mean that is really one of the most twisted things. The black community has to choose between rejoicing that there’s an African American president for the first time in the nation’s history while understanding in their deep conscience that he’s ushering in things that they live their lives are the opposite of, their passions are the opposite of. It’s a dilemma.

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I think ironies of today are just not escaping any of us; it’s very hard, I would be lying if I said otherwise, to celebrate today. But I think it’s very good for us to remember our history, what our founding fathers stood for and there is nothing wrong with reminding each other and fighting to retain it because today does not example that when we have homosexual poet laureates and we have an evangelical pastor who has said that homosexuality was a sin banned from the platform and we have gay bands performing. Something is terribly wrong and it’s terribly wrong to see this man swear allegiance to the country on the bibles of men who went before him who were men who understood faith and who God was, it’s really ironic.

When President Obama unveiled his list of recommendations for combating gun violence earlier this week, a few of the items involved efforts to improve mental health services ... which Bryan Fischer claims is part of an effort to portray supporters of the Second Amendment as crazy:

The American Family Association’s Buster Wilson has been warning for the last few weeks that President Obama is getting ready to confiscate guns en masse. When Obama announced his twenty-three executive actions yesterday, gun groups largely shrugged them off, but not Wilson. In his latest effort to stoke fear, he’s warning that the Obama administration may take guns away from pastors and radio talk show hosts like himself who denounce homosexuality:

Wilson: What if the Attorney General, and listen the reason I say this might happen is because if you remember the first report put out by the Director of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, when the President became President of the United States, she put out a paper talking about the people who are the categories of people who might be homegrown terrorists. In that list she put people who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, people who believe in pro-life issues, people who don’t believe in having illegal aliens here, they put a lot of good, decent categories of people in that paper. Well here’s what number four says, the Attorney General can put who he wants to on the list of people who are too dangerous to get guns. What if he decides radio talk show hosts who don’t believe in gay marriage, they’re dangerous, so they shouldn’t get guns; what about pastors who preach against abortion and homosexuality, they’re too dangerous get guns; that could happen.

Contrary to what Wilson said, the fourth executive action simply directs the Attorney General to make sure that people who are already prohibited from owning a firearm do not do so, not to come up with any new categories:

Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

Not only did Wilson clearly distort the plain wording of the executive actions, but he also grossly misrepresented the DHS report on right-wing terrorism.

He said that the DHS report tacked “good, decent” people “who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, people who believe in pro-life issues, people who don’t believe in having illegal aliens here.”

Not so.

The 2009 report [PDF], which concentrates on racist and anti-government militias, only mentions abortion in a single footnote as an example of how violent actions can be driven by a single issue, such as the bombings of clinics or the murder of abortion doctors. The only references to the Second Coming or Christianity are to the racist, anti-Semitic Christian Identity movement – whose members have engaged in violence – and a note about how End Times and doomsday prophesies have in the past radicalized certain individuals or groups.

As for immigration, the DHS only addresses the connection between anti-immigrant militarism and hate crimes against Hispanics, like violent border vigilantes, not political activism on illegal immigration.

The author of the report, Daryl Johnson, is actually an anti-choice, Mormon gun owner and a Republican. His warnings were prescient – right-wing extremists recently committed a massacre in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and a shooting at the Holocaust Museum.

But to Wilson, completely twisting Obama’s gun orders and the DHS report on right-wing extremism are all par for the course of a job of an AFA spokesman.

While preparing up for the 2016 presidential election, Rand Paul visited Israel in a trip that “was arranged by the American Family Association and included 53 prominent evangelicals and conservative activists.”

This wouldn’t be the first time the far-right AFA worked closely with a potential Republican presidential candidate, as the group also put together Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s “The Response” prayer rally that he used as a springboard into the presidential race.

Guests included top Religious Right organizer David Lane, anti-gay activist Tamara Scott of Concerned Women for America and birther leader Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily. Farah praised Paul in his column today and saluted his opposition to foreign aid and marriage equality.

Farah’s participation is not surprising as the American Family Association also peddles similar conspiracies.

Farah and AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer have blamed the Sandy Hook shooting on the lack of school prayer, endorsed birther conspiracies, likened gays to terrorists and the Taliban, seek to restrict Muslim immigration and predicted that the Obama administration will use special security forces to persecute political opponents.

Of course, Rand Paul certainly won’t be the only potential GOP presidential candidate to court extremists like Farah and the AFA as more Republicans gear up to run.

The Violence Against Women Act expired this year after House Republicans blocked a reauthorization that boosted protections for Native Americans, immigrants and the LGBT community. This development has overjoyed Religious Right activists, who have long opposed the anti-violence law.

Sandy Rios of the American Family Association, speaking today with Ed Bartlett of Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, criticized the indisputably effective law and attacked Vice President Joe Biden, warning that “if we knew Joe Biden’s private behavior with women it might not be a pretty picture.” Rios stated that Biden’s “crassness, crudeness and disrespect for women” raises doubts about his work on VAWA while Bartlett used Biden’s own admission that abuse occurred in his household when he was younger as a reason to block the law.

Rios was also upset that VAWA may soon include protections for the LGBT community. Bartlett contended that these new protections prove VAWA is too easy on women since “studies have shown that lesbian-perpetrated domestic violence is higher than violence among heterosexual couples.”

However, according to the Center for American Progress, “Studies have found that domestic violence occurs among same-sex couples at comparable rates to straight couples.” While Bartlett admits that domestic violence is a concern among same-sex couples, he and Rios seem to believe that is a reason to oppose the inclusion of LGBT protections in VAWA.

Rios: Then we have this whole business of reaching out to the LGBT community and now that’s confusing because that’s women against women in many cases. That would have to be women against women.

Bartlett: Exactly, you’re right. In fact, studies have shown that lesbian-perpetrated domestic violence is higher than violence among heterosexual couples. So that again shows that this is a problem not limited to male perpetrators and female victims.

Rios: You know the person that has been pushing for all these years is Vice President Joe Biden, I find that very curious, what can you say about that?

Bartlett: I’ll tell you something that most people don’t know about Vice President Biden. He himself as a child was subjected to very serious physical abuse by his female sister, his sibling. Most people don’t know that but he has actually stated that in hearings held in the Senate. There’s a high irony here, a fellow who as a child was subjected to female violence is now denying the very existence of that.

Rios: I also think it’s ironic. I have a personal opinion because of Joe Biden’s repeated behavior. I know he’s become the brunt of jokes because he’s always saying something silly. But one theme in his jokes is crassness, crudeness and disrespect for women. He’s supposed to be some champion for women and yet he comes out and says these outrageous things which are insulting. I think if we knew Joe Biden’s private behavior with women it might not be a pretty picture.

Rios even argued that the law has had “an extremely detrimental, unfair, tilted, bad effect on men.” Bartlett dismissed reports that women face disproportionate rates of domestic violence and said that VAWA was actually passed by those seeking “to undermine family stability.”

Rios: The problem with this particular law, as I understand it, is it has had an extremely detrimental, unfair, tilted, bad effect on men. Give us an example of how that has happened.

Bartlett: Sandy, you’re right and it’s happened in many ways. Part of what many people believe is the agenda is to undermine family stability by stereotyping men as being abusive. So over and over when you go to the websites of these various domestic violence organizations, they quote arrest statistics but they don’t quote the actual statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, which are the best statistics of all, which show that this is an equal opportunity problem. So we have men being stereotyped as being abusive, obviously that’s not good for strong, respectful gender-relationships in our country.

To be clear, the CDC and the Department of Justice [PDF] both find that women are much more likely than men to experience intimate partner violence. The DOJ found that “intimate partners were responsible for 3% of all violence against males and 23% of all violence against females in 2008,” and the CDC reports that “about 1 in 4 women (24.3%) and 1 in 7 men (13.8%) have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner” in their lifetime.

Yesterday, Bryan Fischer responded to the news that pastor Louie Giglio had withdrawn from participation in President Obama’s inauguration by declaring that anti-gay Christians were "the new Rosa Parks" and the victims of modern-day Jim Crow laws.

He returned to the topic today, citing a piece by Al Mohler  to declare that anti-gay Christians are now the victims of "moral McCarthyism":

American Family Radio general manager Buster Wilson is joining his AFA colleague Bryan Fischer in expressing his outrage over Louie Giglio’s decision to withdraw from inauguration ceremonies, unleashing a tirade against Think Progress, The New Civil Rights Movement, the Southern Poverty Law Center and us, declaring us the most hateful and mean people in the land. He said that the Christians in America may soon face imprisonment and death over their views on homosexuality. Wilson also claimed that gay rights supporters consider themselves “wiser” than God and Paul the Apostle, apparently unaware that many Christians do not subscribe to the AFA’s anti-gay agenda and interpretation of scripture.

Think Progress, The New Civil Rights Movement, Right Wing Watch, how many other places, how many supported groups in what Bryan Fischer has aptly named the Big Gay movement, think themselves wiser, smarter, more proficient in life than God almighty or the great Apostle Paul. For they take anybody, even pastor Louie Giglio, with the influence that this man has in the world today, they think that anybody, even this man, if they say what the Bible says about homosexuality that they are a dangerous, lying, hateful individual and you should shun them. Make no mistake about it church, that’s where we are today. We are at the place, maybe we’re not thrown in jail for it like pastor Youcef Nadarkhani in Iran, maybe we’re not slaughtered or beheaded for it yet, but make no mistake about it, if you stand and proclaim what the word of God says about certain things, primarily about homosexuality, you are going to be ostracized, you are going to be mocked and ridiculed, you are going to be called names, you are going to be marginalized and you are going to be cast out.

After warning that Christians will be made out to be “lying, hateful” people, he later proclaimed that gay rights bloggers are “lying, hateful people” as “there is nobody out there that is any more hateful than these people are.”

I know for certain, Think Progress is neither. They neither think nor are they progressive, in the traditional sense of the word. These people are hate-filled, mean-spirited, lying, hateful people. If you can take pastor Louie Giglio and marginalize him so much that he looks evil you are some kind of character.

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I don’t know how to process that these groups that are so—they call us a hate group. Let me tell you something, there is nobody in the nation that is more hateful than The New Civil Rights Movement, Right Wing Watch and Southern Poverty Law Center and now you can add to the list in my opinion, Think Progress, there is nobody out there that is any more hateful than these people are.