Janet Parshall

Yesterday, Religious Right broadcaster Janet Parshall hosted ex-gay activists Joe Dallas and Nancy Heche, actress Anne Heche’s mom, to discuss their new book “The Complete Christian Guide to Understanding Homosexuality.”

A caller, John, said that based on his personal experiences with gays and lesbians he doesn’t consider homosexuality to be an “emotional or choice-oriented kind of decision” as they seem “compelled to be this way.”

Heche responded that gays and lesbians might seem different from straight people because they are trying to conform to the norms of the gay community, much like “when teenage girls start wearing makeup then they all want to wear makeup and if the in-group is wearing frilly skirts and ruffle t-shirts then everybody is going to wear a ruffle t-shirt.”

Caller: Their behavior doesn’t seem to be affected, it seems to be genuine and it seems that they are compelled to be this way. I don’t know if it’s hormonal differences or whatever chemical differences in the endocrine system in the body that affect the brain and the body but there is something going on that’s more than just emotional or choice-oriented kind of decisions that these people make.

Heche: What I think is that oftentimes once one associates herself or himself with a gay community or a gay fellowship group they settle in and want to make a distinction from others — others in the heterosexual world — they want to make a distinction and a statement about who they are. I’m just saying this might be 1 percent of the people you’re talking about or 99 percent, but sometimes I think people make a point to adapt and adopt to the community that they are associating with. It’s kind of like this when teenage girls start wearing makeup then they all want to wear makeup and if the in-group is wearing frilly skirts and ruffle t-shirts then everybody is going to wear a ruffle t-shirt. That might be very oversimplifying it but I think it is maybe a tiny explanation for a small group of people that you’re talking about. Does that make sense? Do you understand what I’m saying?

Dallas, meanwhile, said that even if it becomes scientifically proven that homosexuality is not a choice, gays and lesbians should suppress their sexuality in the same way that individuals who have predispositions to violence must suppress their violent urges.

Parshall: Let’s just say for discussion sake that we come out with a peer-reviewed, vetted, highly-scrutinized study that says: Tada! Definitively there is a gene, you are predisposed. God is not the author of confusion, He tells us in His word ‘don’t frustrate your children,’ so would God then say, ‘I’ve designed you that way and then I’m going to turn around and say that if you act on that behavior I’m going to call it a sin’? This is an argument all three of us have heard many a time, so how do we respond to that?

Dallas: First of all, even if we are born with something it does not mean that God designed that something. There are many external and internal inborn realities that God never intended. So I would not presume that if something is inborn that God ordained it, whether we are talking about something as serious as a birth defect or if we’re talking about, as you said Janet, a predisposition. I do think that for that individual who has a predisposition, whether it is to violence, or addictive behavior or homosexuality, that will be an area of weakness in their life and if they want to live an obedient life they’re going to be called to deal with that area of weakness in their life. But the fact that it may even be inborn would not be an excuse to indulge it.

According to Liberty Counsel head Mat Staver, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage equality, America may head toward outright revolt and a second civil war. Staver told Janet Parshall that marriage equality will mean that the institution of marriage, freedom of speech and the freedom of religion will be “destroyed” and “bulldozed over.”

Like Family Research Council president Tony Perkins who last month maintained that the Supreme Court may start a “revolution” and “break this nation apart” by striking down gay marriage bans, Staver said that the court “could split the country right in two” as “this is the thing that revolutions literally are made of.”

“This would be more devastating to our freedom, to our religious freedom, to the rights of pastors and their duty to be able to speak and to Christians around the country, then anything that the revolutionaries during the American Revolution even dreamed of facing,” Staver said, “This could cause another civil war.”

Staver: Basically marriage will be completely destroyed, families will be destroyed, children will be hurt by this and freedom of speech and freedom of religion, including in the pulpit itself, will absolutely be bulldozed over. This would open a floodgate of unimaginable proportions. That’s why with those kinds of consequences to have five of the nine justices ultimately have this kind of power in their hands, that’s not how this court and this country was established, to have five individuals to be able to have that kind of catastrophic, social reengineering power in their hands, that’s just not something that was envisioned by the founders.

Parshall: Absolutely right. God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind so we need to be in prayer, but I also think we need to be preparing our hearts as well Mat that if in fact the Supreme Court decides to trample underfoot the truth of God’s word, we as a church are going have to decide what we’re going to do. Mat, you know I’m going to appeal to your pastor’s heart, that means that every single pastor who is called to hold out the word of life is going to have to decide whether or not he is going to sidestep certain passages for fear of some sort of response from the government.

Staver: This is the thing that revolutions literally are made of. This would be more devastating to our freedom, to our religious freedom, to the rights of pastors and their duty to be able to speak and to Christians around the country, then anything that the revolutionaries during the American Revolution even dreamed of facing. This would be the thing that revolutions are made of. This could split the country right in two. This could cause another civil war. I’m not talking about just people protesting in the streets, this could be that level because what would ultimately happen is a direct collision would immediately happen with pastors, with churches, with Christians, with Christian ministries, with other businesses, it would be an avalanche that would go across the country.

He even argued that marriage equality laws “destroy the very foundation of our family” and have “catastrophic consequences,” including “the unraveling of the United States.”

Parshall: There is no ambiguity as to what the definition of marriage is. Here are nine people in black robes who are basically going to judge, and I’m going to put this in the vernacular of the common man, these are nine people who are basically going to say: God didn’t say that and here’s our ruling. I know I really distilled it down but you’ve got judges who are basically going to decide for us at the high level, potentially, how marriage should be defined. That’s amazing. Who would have thought we would ever find ourselves in that place?

Staver: It’s stunning. That’s why I am very concerned that this has made its way to the United States Supreme Court because only five of those nine can make a decision and so five people, potentially, in the United States, only five out of the hundreds of millions that we have, have in their hand this opportunity to literally wreck marriage, to destroy the very foundation of our family and the biblical definition of marriage. The consequences are staggering. This could be the Roe v. Wade of marriage and family. If we ultimately say as a court and if the country follows it that marriage is between two people of the same sex and it’s now how common sense, history and the Bible ultimately defines it, that has catastrophic consequences. That is staggering and it is actually something that we ought to be in significant prayer about because this could be the unraveling of the United States.

Conservative talk show host Janet Parshall joined Crosstalk host Vic Eliason of Voice of Christian Youth America this week to promote her book, Buyer Beware: Finding Truth in the Marketplace of Ideas. The two spent much of the time discussing Parshall’s time working for VCY America, before becoming a leader of Concerned Women for America and National Religious Broadcasters, but soon began discussing a prior Crosstalk program that blamed Hurricane Sandy on the gay community. While Parshall said she is not in the position to say whether God used the hurricane to punish New York for legalizing same-sex marriage, she did claim once again that Satan is the main culprit behind the push for LGBT rights.

Listen:

Parshall: While this gets debated in the halls of Congress and while it gets adjudicated from the high courts of this country, in the end this is a spiritual battle and we need to put on spiritual eyes and understand that the Father of Lies hates the model of marriage because it is such a profound message of Christ’s unconditional love for us, the church. So we begin to see all of these skirmishes, so battles for same-sex marriage are nothing more than the Great Deceiver himself still rattling his tail saying to a watching culture, ‘did God really say’? And the answer back from the church has to be without blush, hesitation or embarrassment: ‘yes he did, and here I stand, marriage is and always shall be one man and one woman.’

Ron Crews of the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty likes to conceal his over the top rhetoric about gays and lesbians serving openly in the military by claiming that he simply wants to defend the freedom of chaplains to oppose same-sex marriage, which he claims is under attack. During his appearance on the Janet Parshall’s radio show In The Market yesterday, however, Crews continued to simply make anti-gay statements without making a serious case as to how the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’s repeal has jeopardized the military’s standing or the rights of chaplains.

Parshall lauded his efforts by warning listeners that “the removal of this [Don’t Ask Don’t Tell] policy has opened a Pandora’s box” and that the repeal was “unfair.”

Crews claimed that the military is now being “used to promote the radical homosexual agenda,” turning it into a “social pawn” rather than using it to “fight our nation’s wars.” He later reminisced about a time when everyone understood that “homosexuality was not good for the order and discipline of our military” and that people “could not get a security clearance” if they were gay or “went to homosexual activities or gay bars.”

This administration has chosen to use our military to promote a radical social agenda. For the very first time in our nation’s history, the military is being used as a social pawn rather than for what it’s intended to do: to fight our nation’s wars and to make sure our boundaries remain safe. But this administration in urging Congress and pressuring Congress, and it was done in a lame duck session of Congress two years ago in December of 2010 when the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was passed into law, and then there was a series of briefings that were given to the military to get ready for the repeal to go into effect and then our Service Chiefs had to ratify it and send a note to the president, and that was done just about two years ago, in September two years ago. Now for the first time our nation’s military has been used to promote the radical homosexual agenda to legitimize and to say that homosexuality is okay.

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The military existed for the first two hundred plus years with a real clear standard, that homosexuality was not good for the order and discipline of our military. Furthermore, if you were known to be homosexual or went to homosexual activities or gay bars or whatever you could not get a security clearance, that was a part of the criteria of every officer had to have a security clearance, so all of those policies have had to be changed.

Yesterday during In The Market, Dan Gainor of the right-wing Media Research Center and host Janet Parshall are the latest conservative activists to deny their movement’s history of supporting boycotts in order to attack gay rights groups protesting Chick-fil-A, agreeing that “conservatives generally are against boycotts” while freedom-hating liberals just can’t help themselves:

Gainor: This is a line in the sand for everybody listening, for every American right now: what country do we want to have, do we want to have people just say ‘well I don’t like what you believe so we’re going to destroy your business’?

Parshall: Exactly. Dan let me pick up on that point because I think it’s a great one. Paradoxically, in the midst of this brouhaha with Chick-fil-A comes the announcement that Amazon.com CEO and his wife give $2.5 million to Washington state for the same-sex marriage battle going on there. I tell you what, I get an awful lot of press releases all day long and I’m still waiting, I have yet to hear a Christian group that’s saying we’re going to boycott Amazon.com because their founder and CEO has decided to make a multimillion dollar contribution to battle against something that I happen to hold dear and believe in. So this tactic, unfortunately, seems to be one sided, one the one hand I guess I can understand it, and on the other hand, it’s just not the way Christians behave in the marketplace.

Gainor: Conservatives generally are against boycotts. We’ll boycott occasionally for something that’s really extreme. But we accept that people have different values and different opinions, that’s called democracy, we tend to like that and like our Constitution and like our freedom of speech.

Parshall: I couldn’t agree more.

Huh, that’s odd since the National Organization for Marriage is boycotting Starbucks and General Mills, and the American Family Association and the Catholic League are boycotting countless companies. In fact, the AFA’s One Million Moms has said “so long Amazon.”

Concerned Women for America, Parshall’s former employer which recently urged shoppers to stop shopping at Macy’s and once endorsed a boycott of Disney, just today sent an email to members warning them about shopping at…Amazon.com! While they claimed that the group “does not participate in boycotts,” they suggested members shop at their website instead of Amazon.com due to their CEO’s pro-gay rights contribution:

Now Amazon.com Founder and President Jeff Bezos is wading into the moral morass by offering 2.5 million investor dollars (unlike Amazon.com, Chick-fil-A is privately owned) to same-sex "marriage" advocates in Washington state in retaliation for the Cathy's religious stance. (We're also taking it personally, as Maureen Richardson, State Director for CWA of Washington, has fought like a lioness against the efforts of liberal legislators to redefine marriage.)

Concerned Women for America (CWA) is supporting the Chick-fil-A Day of Appreciation on August 1, 2012, in defense of a Christian family that is being absolutely excoriated by the mainstream media, public officials, private companies, and irate liberals for honoring their faith.

While CWA does not participate in boycotts, we understand that the brazen, politically correct move of Amazon.com's founder and president may trouble some of our members and supporters. If you feel uneasy shopping at Amazon.com, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our own store, www.shopcwfa.org, carries over 170,000 Christian titles, and part of every purchase goes back to CWA so we can continue to be your voice on Capitol Hill and in the culture.

Gainor’s MRC promoted boycotts against McDonalds and Ford that were organized by anti-gay groups, denouncing journalists for not giving them enough attention, and MRC head Brent Bozell lauded the Southern Baptists Convention’s boycott against Disney as the “correct” decision:

The Mouse answered with a spit in the face. The Disney-owned production company Touchstone, along with Disney-owned ABC television, brought America the most hyped, high-profile homosexual happening in entertainment history: "Ellen." To no one's surprise, on June 18 the 1997 SBC overwhelmingly voted to undertake an all-out boycott of Disney and its subsidiaries.

Bozell also said that boycotts are an important tool for pressure groups and commended groups like CWA for joining the cause:

It certainly grew on August 27 when Dr. James Dobson announced that his organization, Focus on the Family, would join the SBC, the Catholic League, Concerned Women for America (CWA), the American Family Association (AFA), and several smaller groups. The SBC claims 16 million members; Focus on the Family four million; the Catholic League, the AFA, and CWA several hundred thousand each. Add those numbers up and you've got an awful lot of parents whose entertainment dollars have bought a lot of Disney products for their children.

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A Disney executive has said his company thinks of the boycott as analogous to "a gnat on an elephant." But remember this: gnats are persistent, and if you've ever been plagued by a cloud of them, you know you'll do almost anything to make them leave you alone. If the boycott reaches gnat-cloud proportions - which it probably will given the tenacity of the boycott's leaders - Michael Eisner, et al, will want to shoo it away, and fast. The good news is that Disney can do so simply by returning to the family-friendly product that won it a special place in American cultural history.

But forget all that, conservatives don’t boycott!

As Republican leaders express their outrage at service members marching in a San Diego pride parade in uniform, Religious Right activists aren’t holding back either. In her radio alert yesterday, Mission America’s Linda Harvey accused the military personnel who marched in the parade of bringing “disgrace to the uniform and to America”:

Harvey: The San Diego homosexual pride parade on Saturday, July 21st, broke new ground. For the first time the Pentagon allowed members of the military to dress in full uniform at an event with a political agenda, and what an agenda it is. If you haven’t been to a pride parade recently, or ever, it’s not anything to be proud of. The uniform of our country was allowed to honor a display featuring men dressed as women, people in virtually no clothing at all and in your face advocacy of every aspect of homosexuality. How low will this present administration stoop before Americans say ‘we’ve had enough’? Here’s how the decision went down: there were concerns that some military members would march in uniform with or without permission so the big brass caved and said OK. Now think about that, because men and women who have taken an oath were planning to disobey standing protocol, their superiors decided to let them. The Pentagon says the exception is only for this parade but do any of us truly believe that?

This signals much more than an endorsement of deviance, it signals a breakdown of order. It’s also an exception that would not be extended to any groups but those on the left, could conservative soldiers appear in uniform at a Tea Party rally? Of course not, it’s only the homosexual lobby that gets this kind of deference. There were approximately three hundred service members signed up to march in this parade, that friends is a disgrace to the uniform and to America.

No debate about the military’s approach to gay and lesbian service members can be complete without a comment from Elaine Donnelly, who told Janet Parshall yesterday that participants wearing the uniform brought “discredit upon the Armed Forces”:

Later, Donnelly said the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell undermined the military’s commitment to “selfless service”:

Donnelly: Connect the dots here, how far is the military going to go with this? Well, frankly, they don’t know. Because the administration is saying that LGBT equality is a paramount concern, it is actually a political concern, the President is trying to deliver on political promises to his LGBT base, the left if you will, and the Pentagon is helping him do it.

Parshall: So stunning that there has been a historic set of rules of deportment of where and when that uniform can be used, and it seems to me and you have made this point several times over the last few years, that we are kind of making it up as we go along.

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Donnelly: This is a special interest faction. We don’t have in our military, we shouldn’t have, special interest factions. We don’t have labor unions either. You don’t have groups that are more interested in their own interests than they are in the selfless support for the institution, for the mission. Selfless service is what the military is all about. When you start dividing up into special interest factions that start saying ‘we want this and we want that and we are different from everyone else and we are more special than everyone else,’ that’s when you really invite problems. So Janet, this is just beginning, this is LGBT law in the military.

Janet Parshall in 2010 narrated a right-wing “documentary” about the “Green Dragon” menace, where Religious Right activists said that environmentalists do not believe in science but superstition, calling environmentalism its own anti-Christian religion. Yesterday, Parshall’s radio show was devoted to exposing the supposedly sinister origins of environmental science with guest Mark Musser, whose works include: “The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory”; “Green Lebensraum: The Nazi Roots of Sustainable Development”; “Enviro-Baalism-Fascism” and “Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrificial Offering of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust.”

Essentially, Musser’s main argument on Parshall’s program was that evolution, animal rights and environmentalism were the main forces behind Nazi thought and dehumanization of non-Aryan groups. He told Parshall that environmentalism inevitably leads to fascism and tyranny, and warns that the U.S. may be destroyed like ancient Israel if American society embraces environmentalism:

With environmentalism, especially the radical version of it—you know we used to have conservationism in America with Teddy Roosevelt and these people—but now environmentalism has taken over and nature is the most important thing. So you have to adjust everything to nature. Nature is viewed as a holistic tyrant, so to speak, and holism really teaches tyranny. Fascism is all connected here. You have to bow everything to nature’s holistic inter-relatedness and you can’t buck anything with regards to what nature does. This is the problem with environmentalism and why it’s so dangerous, because it becomes your tyrant.

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Israel would be the example of this originally, as they were commanded to go in and subdue the promise land and fill it and that’s what they did and for a while it was a good land, then these other things came in, environmentalism came in and destroyed their culture, what I call the Baalism, the nature worship, instead of worshiping the Creator they worshiped nature and this led to the destruction of their society. I think the same things are happening in our own country today too. We have this nature-worship now that is infiltrating our society, infiltrating Christianity too, and it is bringing us down and it is something that people need to be wary of. There is a dark path to this whole environmental discussion that people need to know.

The Religious Right’s favorite anti-environmental activist Cal Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance appeared on Janet Parshall’s radio show In The Market on Monday where he maintained that environmentalists are following the same path as Satan. Ironically, the corporate-allied Beisner lamented the presence of “theft,” “covetousness” and “greed” in society, which he said that along with “sexual perversion” and disobedience were part of “the growing depravity in the United States,” which he of course linked back to the environmental movement. Beisner later used the refrain, used by conservatives from Rick Santorum to David Barton, that efforts toward environmental protection are dislodging God and humanity from their rightful place and is turning the natural order “upside down just as Satan did in the Garden of Eden.”

As I look at the growing depravity in the United States, whether it’s in those things that most of us think about in terms of depravity, sexual perversion and so on, or in those things that people don’t usually think of in those terms but Paul certainly does: theft, disobedience to parents, dishonoring of authorities, covetousness, greed, idolatry. All of these things are signs of the depraved mind to which God gives people over when they choose not to recognize Him. The Cornwall Alliance is trying to call attention to these things to show particularly how they are dominant in the environmentalist movement.

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It turns upside down the whole understanding that Scriptures gives us of God, man and the earth. In Scripture, in Genesis 1-3, we see that God is supposed to be in supreme authority, He rules over man, man then rules earth as God’s representative, so hierarchically it’s God, then humanity, then the earth. The environmental movement turns that upside down just as Satan did in the Garden of Eden as he tempted Eve, he wanted Eve to submit her will to a serpent, one of the creatures, and put that serpent over her and God under her, so it becomes earth, then humanity, then God. That happens in the secular movement but frankly, Janet, it increasingly begins to happen among some evangelicals.

Enraged and energized by President Obama’s support for marriage equality, conservatives have begun to speak out not only against Obama but also against anti-discrimination laws, not just marriage, for gays and lesbians. Terry Jeffrey of CNSNews, an outfit of the Media Research Center, told American Family Association’s Tim Wildmon and the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins on Today’s Issues that anti-gay discrimination is not “morally wrong” and asking people not to discriminate against gays would violate natural law:

Jeffrey: It’s worth noting that the Obama Justice Department has gone out into the courts and taken the position that discrimination against homosexuals is identical or ought to be identical in law to racial discrimination. Fact of the matter is, racial discrimination is morally wrong, I think Tony you were mentioning the natural law before. Racial discrimination is a violation of natural law, that was the point Martin Luther King made, it goes against the very principle laid out in the Declaration of Independence. The fact is, homosexual behavior goes against the natural law, as well as being specifically condemned in Scripture.

So if you have a federal government that is going to force Americans to treat homosexual behavior as if it’s a moral right, you basically have a federal government that is asking the American people to overturn the entire moral order on which our society depends. Personally, I believe people who stand up and fight for that and articulate the truth are going to have the r argument resonate with people because quite frankly God wrote the law on people’s hearts and people know that’s true.

James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, weighed in on Obama’s remarks by arguing that he is defying God and lamenting that America is emulating Sodom and Gomorrah:

Dobson: I can just tell you from my point of view I will be praying even harder about this upcoming election because there is so much at stake. Marriage must be maintained, it’s been in existence on every continent on earth since the Garden of Eden, not just in Christian countries but wherever mankind has taken root, marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman has been honored in law and in practice. Obviously homosexuality has flourished in many places, in Rome, in Greece, in Sodom and Gomorrah, but it has been relationships between one man and one woman because we’re made that way, we’re designed that way. To throw it on the ash heap of history at this stage of our existence and defy the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which I believe this does, has got to be considered by all of us.

Talk show host Janet Parshall responded to the news by blaming the “Father of Lies” (Satan) and describing it as man “raising his fist” at God:

Yesterday, Janet Mefferd even said that because of Obama, the country is “swirling down into the sewer”:

Perkins told Mefferd today that marriage equality is “not about rights” but “fundamentally changing America,” even suggesting that “nobody lost any rights” as a result of North Carolina passing Amendment One, even though unmarried couples, both gay and straight, could lose partnership rights. Perkins later lamented that Obama’s support for LGBT equality is “beyond comprehension”:

Perkins: This is not about rights. Nobody lost any rights when North Carolina amended their constitution on Tuesday. What was preserved was the ability of parents the way they want to, the ability of religious organizations to associate based upon their shared faith and not be forced to change that because of someone’s sexual orientation, public accommodations are not wide open to whoever wants them based upon what gender they feel like for the day. This issue as it’s beginning to unfold now not theoretically but in very practical ways as people are losing jobs, churches are being forced into certain things, people realize this is not about two people living together and loving each other, it’s about fundamentally changing America.

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The administration when George Bush was president, it did not deal with the marriage issue and the social policies surrounding homosexuality I would say not even, maybe ten percent, a tenth of what this administration has done on it. It is every day it is some new revelation. It is beyond comprehension.