Kevin McCullough

After calling GLAAD a tool of the Devil, talk show host Kevin McCullough defended previous statements, listed by GLAAD’s Commentator Accountability Project, that gay couples “despise” marriage and are “seeking to destroy” it. McCullough said that they are indeed trying to “destroy” marriage, but took issue with GLAAD’s use of the term “gay,” because according to McCullough, “I don’t believe that you can be gay.” He said that being gay is a choice and warned that “homosexual behaviors can end up killing you” because “homosexual behaviors when acted upon in the teenage years greatly increases the likelihood if you’re male that you will try to commit suicide.” McCullough is correct in arguing that gay youth do have a higher risk of suicide, but seems to ignore the fact that anti-gay prejudice and bias in society plays a large role in why there is the higher suicide rate.

Watch:

They also said that ‘Kevin once said that gay couples both despise marriage and are seeking to destroy it.’ How is that not true? If homosexuals who want to engage in homosexual behavior therefore sexually couple just like themselves, if they are wanting to change the definition of marriage then they are wanting to destroy what current marriage is, that’s just a factual statement that I made. They don’t like the fact that men and women complete one another. They don’t like the fact that that union is so perfect that it sometimes brings children out of it, they don’t like the fact that that is the ability of what a natural marriage relationship brings. So I said they “despise,” they do, “they don’t like normal marriage and they’re seeking to destroy it,” yeah, “by redefining it,” that’s what they are seeking to do, they are seeking to undo what it’s always been. Yeah, I said that, I still believe it. It’s still true.

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I don’t believe that you can be gay. I believe that people engage in homosexual behavior, and I believe that homosexual behaviors can end up killing you, and I think that homosexual behaviors when acted upon in the teenage years greatly increases the likelihood if you’re male that you will try to commit suicide. But that’s what the data says, that’s not what the Kevin McCullough says, that’s what the studies show, that’s what the secular humanist studies indicate about homosexual behavior. I don’t—they are grossly misrepresenting me—they are saying that I said that being gay kills people, no, because I don’t believe that people are gay, I think they behave in homosexual ways but I don’t buy that ‘gay’ is a state of being, I think it’s a series of choices.

Since the Charity Give Back Group was forced to defend its financing of right-wing organizations like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, spokesman Kevin McCullough (who himself has propagated virulent anti-gay rhetoric) has stated that the campaign to have companies withdraw from the CGBG represents bullying. Tony Perkins, the president of the FRC, even said it was an attempt to “censor” Christians. After Apple dropped out of the CGBG, which was previously known as the Christian Values Network, McCullough told The Christian Post, “We're not asking Apple to embrace our position or the other side's position. We just want them to stay neutral,” and the FRC is calling on activists to tell companies to “remain neutral in the current cultural battles.”

But by indirectly assisting the FRC and Focus on the Family, two of the major ‘culture war’ players, companies listed in the CGBG’s virtual mall are inadvertently finding themselves anything but ‘neutral’ parties. Both groups are heavily involved in the electoral politics and lobbying, which makes it difficult to consider them purely charitable organizations. FRC is one of the most prominent Religious Right advocacy groups in Washington D.C., and Focus on the Family has a policy arm (CitizenLink) dedicated to political activism. If companies really wanted to ‘remain neutral in the current cultural battles,’ that is more reason to drop out of the CGBG’s list.

While FRC and Focus have received the most attention, another group listed as an affiliated organization is Liberty Counsel.

Liberty Counsel is a sister organization of Liberty University and Liberty Action, part of the network established by the late Jerry Falwell. Liberty Counsel’s Liberty Alerts depict their legal victories as “Gaining Ground in the Culture War,” and the head of Liberty Counsel, Mat Staver, wrote a book called Take Back America that he descried a Liberty Action flyer called “an Invaluable Resource to Help Win the Intensifying Culture War!” Staver’s deputy at Liberty Counsel Matt Barber even described liberalism as “hatred for God” and demanded President Obama’s impeachment for providing family benefits to federal employees in domestic partnerships. Most recently, they defended Lisa Miller, who kidnapped her daughter and fled the country to escape a court order granting her former partner custody of the child, and the Florida teacher who used his Facebook to post anti-gay messages. Like FRC and Focus, Liberty Counsel consistently propagates the most stringent anti-gay rhetoric.

Barber has argued that marriage equality is “rebellion against God,” held that gay and lesbian youth who commit suicide do it because they intuitively know homosexuality is “immoral” and called anti-bullying programs part of a “a homosexual activist political indoctrination agenda.” Such anti-gay rhetoric is extremely similar to that used of the FRC and Focus. The FRC’s Perkins claimed that homosexuality is “man shaking his fist in the face of God” and said that gay and lesbian children are likely to commit suicide because they “recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal.” Focus on the Family led the push against anti-bullying programs across the country, calling them efforts “to promote homosexuality to kids.”

Liberty Counsel and the FRC also defended Malawi’s law that criminalizes homosexuality and attacked American efforts to alter it.

Despite right-wing criticisms of the pressure campaign on companies tied to the CGBG, Liberty Counsel launched their own pressure campaign against schools that allowed students to participate in the ‘Day of Silence,’ which protested anti-gay bullying. Liberty Counsel also conducts an annual campaign against companies that they believe are supposedly undermining Christians, and Staver calls on customers to “shop elsewhere” if the store is not seen as sufficiently respectful of Christmas.

Liberty Counsel even joined forces with the militantly anti-gay Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Illinois Family Institute, and the American Family Association to launch a boycott and pressure campaign against McDonalds after it made a donation to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Barber lashed out at McDonalds for working with “militant homosexual activists” in front of their company headquarters.

Who else supported the boycott and pressure campaign against McDonalds?

Why, none other than the Family Research Council, which supported the boycott against McDonalds and lauded “McDonald’s agreement to stop financing the homosexual agenda.”

Now, will FRC and its allies please stop complaining that pressure campaigns against companies represent “discrimination” and the undue influence of ‘cultural battles’ into the corporate world? Probably not.

When it was recently announced that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois) would speak at a global AIDS conference at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, radio talker Kevin McCullough was quick to denounce the partnership between the “evil” young senator and Warren, author of the best-selling “Purpose-Driven Life”:

In doing so he has joined himself with one of the smoothest politicians of our times, and also one whose wickedness in worldview contradicts nearly every tenant of the Christian faith that Warren professes.

So the question is, "why?"

Why would Warren marry the moral equivalency of his pulpit - a sacred place of honor in evangelical tradition - to the inhumane, sick, and sinister evil that Obama has worked for as a legislator?

According to McCullough, what makes Obama “a man who represents the views of Satan at worst or progressive anti-God liberals at best” is his position on abortion and his support of “the radical homosexual activist lobby.”

Obama, who in his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention famously called for political ecumenism, will appear with far-right Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) to be tested for HIV on stage. But the spirit of bipartisanship in approaching issues, like AIDS, that cross the ideological divide is not enough to tamper the Right’s political efforts. Perhaps hoping to preempt a future presidential bid by Obama, right-wing leaders are coming out unusually strong against the AIDS Day appearance.