American Family Association

Naturally, the American Family Association is promoting conspiracy theories about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s medical condition. Today, the AFA’s Sandy Rios argued that Clinton is lying about the blood clot that was located between her brain and skull and about her earlier health problems. Citing the tabloid The National Enquirer, which says Clinton has brain cancer, Rios concludes that Clinton isn’t sick at all but rather orchestrating a lie straight from the Saul Alinsky playbook!

Rios finds a clue in the fact that Clinton’s doctors “are both women and they have these very strong female names” and therefore must be playing along in the blood clot deceit. She claims that “the doctors have refused to make statements” and “have not been allowed to ask questions.” (The doctors did in fact release a statement to the press.) The self-proclaimed “pro-family activist” even argued that Clinton isn’t telling the truth about her “supposed” health condition since she looked “happy” (gasp!) after she left the hospital.

She’s out of the hospital, so they say, but did anybody see that yesterday? They saw pictures of her riding in the car, a camera caught her, she looked perfectly happy, laughing. Leaving the hospital but there had been no report that she had left the hospital and then suddenly the State Department issues a statement, ‘oh yes she’s out of the hospital.’ This has been a bizarre story to me. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t one of the skeptics, I am a skeptic, I’m a huge skeptic. Let me just give you the exaggerated claims here. The National Enquirer printed a story saying that Hillary Clinton is having a ‘brain cancer drama.’ And then of course we’ve had detailed reports of this blood clot that supposedly happened as a result of a fall which supposedly happened as a result of a terrible flu which that had caught.

I read an article in the Washington Post just a couple of days ago where her two doctors, and I’m sorry I can do this because I’m a girl, they are both women and they have these very strong female names and I say to myself: you know what, I just, I’m sorry, I just—do you know that the doctors have refused to make statements? They have not been allowed to ask questions, it’s just been statements from the State Department reporting how dreadfully awful, terrible the disease, that Hillary Clinton has is.

I think the point I want to make is that Hillary Clinton has a long history. Many of us remember what a liar she is. She sat at the feet of Saul Alinsky, she wrote her master’s thesis on how to do propaganda and lie; I see her finger prints on Benghazi, I see her finger prints on this illness. I have to say this is like the ‘Boy that Cried Wolf,’ when you lie that many times in your life, when you won’t testify in all of these scandals with your family, when you destroy women that your husband’s been involved in by lying about them, when you create this vast right-wing conspiracy, then who can believe you when you say you’re sick? I’m sorry, I’m not there.

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• Scott Keyes @ Think Progress: Leading Conservative Religious Organization Warns That Christians Will Soon Be Treated Like Blacks In Jim Crow Era.

As a general rule, we tend not to write about the things said by those who call into the right-wing programs we monitor, as many of them tend to be isolated crackpots and the hosts themselves cannot really be held responsible for the things that callers say. 

But we occasionally make exceptions for cases like this, where a caller tells AFA's Buster Wilson that he owns an AR-15 assault rifle, loathes President Obama and is absolutely fed up, warning that the government is turning him into a vigilante and that "when the bullets start flying, well, I got plenty of bullets."  

Wilson's response to this caller was truly remarkable, as he declared that "those were the kind of sentiments" that were expressed by the Founding Fathers leading up to the Revolutionary War, saying that Americans "are not now willing to revert back to anarchy [and] to have our liberties stripped away from us" before blaming school shootings like Sandy Hook on lack of prayer and the Ten Commandments in our schools:

Pastor Bill Elliff of the Arkansas-based The Summit Church and the Religious Right group OneCry appeared on AFA Today with host Buster Wilson this week where he explained that the September 11 attacks and the elementary shooting in Newtown, Connecticut were “gracious” acts of divine punishment. He said that God allowed the two tragedies to occur because of “our humanistic pride” and secular government in order to “bring us to our senses and bring us back to him.”

Wilson was positively dumbfounded as to why people would be offended by such rhetoric and similar language by AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer, who said that God refused to stop the school shooting because he’s a “gentleman,” and Elliff worried the U.S. is going the way of the Roman and British empires.

Wilson: I have never seen the vitriol that has been unleashed against us, some of us here at this ministry, since we’ve been publicly saying: you know what one of the problems is for the last fifty years we’ve been saying to God we don’t want you, there’s a wall of separation between us, and the place you’ve seen that amplified most has been in the public schools. We have received just unbelievable vitriol for saying that, seeing it as too simplistic, one person wrote ‘this is 2013, are we still wrestling over Creationism?’ We are in a changing, almost post-Christian America is what it seems like at time, what’s gonna happen if we don’t turn back to the Lord and see great revival brought about?

Elliff: I think what’s going to happen is what’s happened to every society before us who has not turned back. I was thinking the other day probably in Rome they thought ‘this could never happen to us’ and England in its prime they said ‘this could never happen to us.’ There is something about our humanistic pride that causes us to think, we could never go down as a nation.

…

Elliff: I’ve often thought about 9/11 and what happened there. God doesn’t cause evil, he didn’t cause the shooting the other day. But when we say, ‘Lord we can live life without you,’ then he says, ‘okay, I’ll let you feel that.’

Wilson: Let you get a taste of it.

Elliff: I thought at 9/11 what happened was God’s protective hand was removed and we felt what pure evil is like. We felt that this last week. That was pure evil, it’s the devil who has come to steal, kill and destroy. He’d just as soon kill a baby or a child in the womb as anything else. God allows that moment, we’re pressing the issue by turning from him, but he allows that moment to bring us to our senses and say, ‘God we desperately need you.’ So really it’s gracious. The pain that comes, the judgment that has really come by our turning away from the Lord is a merciful thing that God does to bring us to our senses and bring us back to him.

Elliff explained that the shooting was a sign of God’s discipline as “judgment comes to a nation it is God saying, wake up, you have walked away from me and I have loved you and I have so much desire to protect you but when you walk away you forfeit that.”

Elliff: We look at what has happened recently here in the school shooting and the so many things that have happened in the past few years. If we put all of those in biblical context and surround it with the Scripture we would come to different conclusions about what was happening. I was thinking the other day that God has instituted pain in our body, you know when you get a rusty nail that goes up to the sole of your foot that’s a real good thing that you feel pain because it causes you to make an adjustment. God’s judgment is like that. It’s a loving God saying to us when judgment comes to a nation it is God saying, wake up, you have walked away from me and I have loved you and I have so much desire to protect you but when you walk away you forfeit that.

Bryan Fischer essentially dedicated his entire radio program yesterday to defending the claims he made last Friday that God refused to prevent the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut because he is a "gentleman" who doesn't go where he is not wanted.

Since Fischer absolutely means everything he says, there was no need for him to attempt to apologize for or clarify his original comments in any way, so instead he simply reiterated and expanded upon them, explaining that the shooting was evidence that the reservoir of "moral capital" that this nation had built up by publicly honoring and recognizing God from its founding until 1962 has now been utterly depleted, thus weakening the shield of God's protection and allowing Satan to get through:

American Family Association’s Buster Wilson yesterday warned that gays and liberals are trying to “elevate hate speech [laws] above the freedoms of our precious first amendment,” citing a case in Canada where he says a “pastor spent 18 months in jail for a sermon he preached against homosexuality.”

As we think about the basics of Biblical morality, today we will discuss the issue of hate speech and the first amendment’s guarantee of freedom of Speech.

While most Americans refuse to believe anyone could ever be imprisoned simply for something they said, the examples of it actually happening are abundant.

In our neighbor to the north, Canada, a local pastor spent 18 months in jail for a sermon he preached about homosexuality. A member complained to the hate speech council and he was found guilty and jailed.

Now for certain, that’s in Canada. But the hate speecher’s in this country are modeling their efforts on those successful hate speech laws in Canada.

The left wants to control the speech of the right, and if left to themselves, they will find a way to elevate hate speech above the freedoms of our precious first amendment!

If a pastor was sentenced to jail for eighteen months in Canada, don’t you think there would be a single news story about it?

We couldn’t find a single one, but Wilson seems to be citing a decision by the Alberta Human Rights Commission which fined a pastor over an anti-gay letter to the editor which preceded an attack on a gay youth. But the ruling was overturned because it violated Canada’s constitutional protection of free speech. Even Canadian Baptist leaders have rebuffed claims that pastors in their country can go to jail over their stance on homosexuality.

So basically, a Canadian judge tosses out a fine against a pastor and reaffirms his free speech rights, but Wilson claims that he “spent 18 months in jail” and therefore hate speech laws are coming to the U.S.!

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association today dedicated his radio show to railing against the American Civil Liberties Union for filing a lawsuit against the ban on women in combat. He got most heated in responding to the claims from ban opponents who point to Israel’s policy towards women, arguing that Israel actually excludes women from combat roles and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

Don’t let people lie to you that the Israelis use women in combat, they do not. They tried it for three weeks in 1948, they scrapped it, it doesn’t work and they’ve never done it again. Now women still serve in the Israeli military, they serve as secretaries, clerks, communications specialists, nurses, teachers and army social workers. They do not serve in combat. They don’t serve as pilots, they don’t serve on ships, they don’t pump gas, they don’t even drive trucks. Now they do receive a minimal amount of weapons training but they receive no training in how to use weapons in combat and they don’t even practice shooting at combats. In fact the only time, and this is what perpetuates the myth, the only time that Israeli female soldiers carry weapons is on parade.

However, this is simply not the case.

“Women have served in combat roles in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) since the mid-1990s,” the BBC reports. “During the 2006 Lebanon conflict, women fired artillery, served on warships, and piloted aircraft.”

Apparently Fischer doesn’t believe the IDF’s own website which clearly states that women in “some of the most combative, extreme roles” in the military.

Everywhere in the IDF, women play a vital role in all positions, both combat and administrative. In the Air Force, Navy, and Ground Forces- these women man some of the most combative, extreme roles in the IDF.

Today, over 90% of all IDF jobs are available for female soldiers, including a variety of elite positions. Over the last decade, IDF women completed pilot’s course, became naval officers and took on a variety of infantry positions.

The following women fight alongside men, contributing to the security of the State of Israel and proving their immense toughness

The IDF says women serve as weapons instructors, pilots in the air force and soldiers in combat, K-9, field intelligence and engineering units.

There is even an entire page about combat options for Israeli female service members.

But Fischer doesn’t have any interest in doing even elementary research into this issue and is much more content with spewing baseless statements that fly in the face of reality.

On yesterday's program, Bryan Fischer responded to a caller who asserted that President Obama is "a very evil man" who wants to turn American into an Islamic state by laying out a wide-ranging theory about how Obama is not a Christian but rather a Muslim sympathizer who believes that the United States is fundamentally racist and evil and must be destroyed.  And that is exactly what Obama is trying to do, Fischer asserted, by entertaining ideas about capping tax deductions on charitable giving for high-income donors  because he wants to wipe out private charity so that people will become dependent on the government.

In fact, when companies lay off workers, Obama rejoices because "he wants to see America and Americans suffer" because "he is Barack the Destroyer; he is out to punish America for our misdeeds, to punish us for our racism, to bring us to our knees, to humble us in the dust so he can rebuild some kind of a socialist utopia on the ruins of what used to be the United States of America":