John Kirkwood

Peter LaBarbera and John Kirkwood hosted the American Family Association’s Sandy Rios on the Americans For Truth About Homosexuality Radio Hour to respond to the victories of marriage equality activists and Neal Boortz’s post-election rant against the Religious Right. Rios said that Boortz was just one of many conservatives trying to push the GOP to abandon social issues like abortion rights and gay equality in order to win elections. According to Rios, it isn’t that most people don’t oppose the gay rights movement anymore; it’s just that they simply don’t understand how horrible it is!

She said that “education elites” are using gay rights to push “the most horrible trash down our children’s throats” and that even the child abuse scandal at Penn State is part of the “whole fabric” of gay rights. Rios went on to say that she wouldn’t want her family to have gay neighbors just as she wouldn’t like to live next door to a brother or an abortion clinic.

Rios: They find themselves totally shocked when a coach like Jerry Sandusky comes after little boys, that’s shocking, and yet that’s the very thing, the whole fabric of gay marriage is part of that issue of where we draw the lines on sexuality. We have very good reasons for feeling the way they do and they aren’t just scriptural, Scripture is the basis but all truth is God’s truth, we can make our case without Scripture. Most people naturally speaking abhor the things that homosexual activists really working towards, they just don’t know about them. So Neal Boortz is just speaking out of ignorance.

Kirkwood: You’re talking about a movement and activists but you like to be challenged so here’s my challenge to you. I’m going to put it in his leading words…he said he’s going to be waiting for a year for somebody to tell him one reason that the gay couple down the street from Sandy Rios will have any effect on your life.

Rios: Because I have children and grandchildren in school, at least not yet but I will, but I have kids that are going to be in school and because I know how the National Education Association and the education elites have been pushing, pushing, pushing the most horrible trash down our children’s throats in the guise of mainstreaming homosexuality and gay marriage is just a part of that. It may be that a couple next door to me doesn’t affect my life but on the other hand if I’m raising children and I care: do I want to live next door to a brothel? Do I want to live next door to an abortion clinic? There are things that we morally object to and we don’t want our children to consider as normal.

Rios also repeated her claim that the success of abortion rights and gay equality at the ballot box is proof that America is under divine judgment, warning that God is using a “a veil of deception” to confuse people and lamenting that the Republican Party is no longer “a champion of moral values.” She concluded by warning LaBarbera and Kirkwood that they may soon face jail time or a fine for preaching against homosexuality.

Rios: The confusion and the people that we look up to failing us and being confused themselves, I see God’s supernatural hand in this. I really do think that there is a veil of deception and I think that it’s kind of like the way we see God, the way he works in the Old Testament, how when people have chosen to be rebellious he eventually says okay, go for it, you can have it. I think the American people are getting what we want.

We want licentiousness, we do not want moral restraint, whether its homosexuality or living together or abortion or birth control so we can have all the sex we want without consequence. We desperately want that so badly, women want it so badly, it’s all that matters to them on the left, that’s all they can think about, is not having to give up abortion and birth control. Of all the issues it really does drive them and I think God is going to give it to them.

I think He is going to give us homosexual marriage; I don’t see it stopping. I don’t see the Republican Party surviving in any form or fashion in the way it has been. I don’t see it being a champion of moral values; it gave up that ground a long time ago. You’ve seen it happen in Illinois and certainly we’re seeing the death, like the last gasps of death, here in DC. I believe God is bringing judgment.

…

Kirkwood: Regarding homosexuality then, it is going to be transformed from a marriage issue, which it has been, to don’t you think the transformation is now that activism is going to center around religious freedom?

Rios: Absolutely, you better believe it. Pastors like you, you will be fined or jailed like they have been in Canada, that’s coming.

To promote Americans For Truth About Homosexuality’s fall banquet, keynote speaker and pseudo-scientist Judith Reisman of Liberty University appeared on AFTAH Radio Hour with Peter LaBarbera to discuss the fictional connection between pedophilia and homosexuality. According to LaBarbera, “many homosexual men were victims of predators, older men, as teenage boys they were seduced into the lifestyle,” and once again insisted that CNN anchor Don Lemon is gay because he was molested.

Reisman argued that pedophiles have targeted the government, the military and schools for infiltration like Soviet spies in order to seek power.

LaBarbera: Judith do you think they are going to succeed in creating sympathy for pedophiles?

Reisman: They already have, this is growing. Let’s understand something; you have many pederasts and pedophiles in positions of power. I thought about writing a book years ago called ‘Pedophiles in Power,’ you don’t get to where we are unless you have so to speak spies in the woodwork, you know? Through World War II some of our top people were working for the Russians and they were advising Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So you have to have people in power, in top positions of power, both in the military by the way, in the church and in the school in order to create the kind of—

LaBarbera: So Judith you’re saying you can’t get to this level of influence without people in high places and of course we’ve seen that also with the homosexual movement and other movements.

LaBarbera and Reisman agreed that the California law banning sexual orientation conversion therapy is designed to help child predators convince their victims that they are gay and therefore increase the gay “power structure.”

LaBarbera: Because of this law, this oppressive law that the homosexualists have pushed, trying to ban treatment for people with this unwanted homosexual attraction that now a boy becomes a victim of say an older man, a pedophile, and he won’t be able to get treatment to reverse that homosexual ideation that’s going on in that kid’s mind.

Reisman: I think that’s the design of the bill, let’s be frank, that’s the design of the bill. There are people in high places, powerful people, who do not want children to reverse their—get straightened out. They don’t want that, they do want to increase their power and their power is based and increased in the numbers of people who self-identify as homosexuals or bisexual or transgender and so forth and so forth. The power lay in the population, the power lay in increasing the number of people who self-identify as dysfunctional but think that that’s normal. The bill in California is designed to increase that power structure, the voting bloc if you will.

LaBarbera’s co-host, pastor John Kirkwood, called the “homosexual movement” the “greatest threat to freedom” in the US and LaBarbera said gays and lesbians are “similar to the Muslims, when they get the power that’s when they start oppressing freedom.”

LaBarbera: There are sectors of society that don’t want kids, little boys and girls to get help with unwanted homosexual attractions. We always said it was coming, we said that when the homosexualists, which are people promoting homosexuality in our culture, when they get the power it’s sort of similar to the Muslims, when they get the power that’s when they start oppressing freedom. John, it is an outrage that you as a parent in California if this bill is signed by Governor Jerry Brown and the gay activists are pushing hard for it to be signed, you as a parent, if you are in California you could not have the freedom to give the treatment you want for your son who might have been molested by a pedophile or by a juvenile, Judith’s been talking about these juvenile predations or say a teenage boy seduces another teenage boy or say a twelve year old boy into homosexuality, you would now be restricted, your options would be limited because they want that idea to get out there that the child is gay.

Kirkwood: This is why that I say the greatest threat to freedom, I normally say religious freedom, in the United States is the homosexual movement. They won’t be satisfied until they control everything.

Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s Peter LaBarbera continued his discussion with Liberty University Law School’s Rena Lindevaldsen on Friday. The two revisited the topic of openly gay judges, specifically the Virginia prosecutor who was rejected from a judgeship simply because he was gay. That discrimination was ok, Lindevaldsen said, because “if you’re engaged in a lifestyle of immorality, whether that be a homosexual lifestyle or an adulterous relationship or fornication, that’s not the type of moral character that I believe should be someone who’s being appointed to become a judge”:

Lindevaldsen: I think we can equate this not only with the judiciary, but the same debate is taking place, you know, who we want to serve as our schoolteachers, for example. We want moral, upstanding individuals to serve as judges, and this debate’s taking place with schoolteachers too. So if you’re engaged in a lifestyle of immorality, whether that be a homosexual lifestyle or an adulterous relationship or fornication, that’s not the type of moral character that I believe should be someone who’s being appointed to become a judge.
…
I think it goes to fit moral character and I think that the necessary qualification of any judicial appointment. And therefore it is relevant, based on your conduct, to judge and decide whether you should be allowed to sit in the judiciary.

Immediately after Lindevaldsen and LaBarbera made the case that gay judicial nominees should be defined by and excluded for their sexual orientation, they changed the rules when it came to another prominent example of an openly gay person in public life. Lindevaldsen and LaBarbera heaped scorn on gay rights activists who have had the nerve to call the late Sally Ride, who lived for 27 years with her same-sex partner, a gay pioneer. Emphasizing Ride’s sexual orientation, LaBarbera said -- expanding on a tweet from shortly after her death --would be like defining her as an alcoholic if she had a drinking problem:

LaBarbera: They’re always using opportunities to promote what their version of reality on homosexuality. And really quickly, Sally Ride, another great example. Sally Ride was the first female astronaut, the first…and she had many amazing accomplishments. Unfortunately she also fell into lesbianism and left her husband, she was married, she ended up living in a lesbian lifestyle. She was not public about it. Now gay activists, like Michelangelo Signorile, are using her homosexual, you know, the fact that she practiced the homosexual lifestyle, to say, ‘Hey, this is another gay hero.”

Kirkwood: She was a female astronaut, now she’s the ‘lesbian astronaut.’

LaBarbera: Now she’s the lesbian astronaut, and you better believe in textbooks like in California where they’re teaching gay history now, there’s going to be Sally Ride. So people are going to learn Sally Ride as a, and we’re going a bit over here, they’re going to learn Sally Ride, Rena, as a gay hero, even though she wasn’t even public about it in her life.

Lindevaldsen: Yeah, because they need to contort our history to show that we’ve accepted this all along and that it’s perfectly normal, and see you too can do this and become great things. And you can, you can accomplish things, but that’s not who she was, that doesn’t define who she was and what she accomplished.

LaBarbera: And Rena, I tweeted, and I knew this was going to get me in trouble, but I tweeted, ‘Did she have a drinking problem too?’ In my tweet, I said that she made great accomplishments. But she should not be, and I didn’t, of course she doesn’t, I don’t know if she had a drinking problem or not, but my point was the fact that she practiced homosexuality would be about as relevant as saying, ‘Sally Ride, hey people who drink can be great.’ I mean it’s still immoral behavior, it’s very sad to me that she was involved in that lifestyle. The fact that she was in that lifestyle doesn’t take away from the great accomplishments that she had. But the point is gay identity politics now wants to seize her as a hero.

Peter LaBarbera today posted yet another interview with his new best friend, Patrick Wooden along with John Kirkwood, pastor of Grace Gospel Fellowship in Bensenville, Illinois. discussing the recent passage of the marriage amendment in North Carolina.

During the discussion, the three men tackled a wide array of related topics, including President Obama's statement of support for marriage equality.  It was Obama's citation of the Golden Rule in explaining his views that seemed particularly offensive to them, prompting Wooden to offer up a truly incoherent statement that "most people don't invite strangers to their family reunions" while Kirkwood simply compared Obama's citation of Scripture to Satan: 

LaBarbera: Talk about this use of the Golden Rule that Obama cited to justify his new support of the so-called homosexual marriage.

Wooden: It's funny, he's quoting Scripture to debunk Scripture. Amazing. But I agree with the President on the Golden Rule, I think we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us ... I don't that that I should aid anyone in entering into anything that does apply to them or does not appertain to them. Words still have meaning and the word "marriage" means something, it means the union between a man and a woman. So I don't know how he's applying the Golden Rule but I think we should treat people the way we want to be treated. But if a person wants to do something that doesn't apply to them, then I don't think we should help them do it.

Most people don't invite strangers to their family reunions. Most people don't allow perfect strangers to come into their house and sit at the dinner table and dine with them. And we shouldn't, under the Golden Rule, allow people who are not to participate in marriage to be invited into the union in the name of treating people the way we want to be treated. It makes no sense.

LaBarbera: And John, also, four years ago or long, dismissed Romans 1 to justify his support for homosexuality. So talk about this.

Kirkwood: Yeah, I don't think he holds The Word with a great deal of esteem. There was another guy in Matthew 4 who quoted The Word to rebuke The Word. It's not going to work out so well for him.

Matthew 4, for those who may not know, is when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by Satan.