Mat Staver

On a recent "Faith and Freedom" radio broadcast, Matt Barber and Mat Staver were discussing the current Religious Right outrage over an Army Reserve briefing in which "Evangelical Christianity" was listed among various kinds of "religious extremism."

A spokesperson said the slide was not produced by the Army and was removed and the person responsible for it has apologized, but Staver and Barber know who is really to blame: the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In fact, Staver said, what the SPLC is doing by labeling Religious Right organization as hate groups "it's just like in Nazi Germany" where Jews were dehumanized and demonized so that when they were ultimately killed, "people turned a blind eye":

• It is pretty entertaining to see the Religious Right ripping Bill O'Reilly for his arrogance and ignorance, especially since they only seem to have discovered it once he upset them.
• Case in point, Bill Keller has issued a $10,000 challenge to O'Reilly to debate him.
• To hear Mat Staver and Matt Barber describe it, The Awakening Conference is just about the most important thing ever.
• Speaking of Staver, he received the Faith Community Leader of the Year Award at the Weyrich Awards Dinner, which is a good reminder that radical Religious Right anti-gay voices are regularly honored within the movement.
• Finally, and on a related note, Steve Deace takes on "laughabe gay marriage cliches" like "homosexuality is in nature so it’s natural" by declaring "there’s also the licking of one’s own genitals, the flinging of one’s own feces, and the eating of live prey and then vomiting it back up to feed your offspring in nature, too."

On today's "Faith and Freedom" radio program, Matt Barber and Mat Staver once again made their case against marriage equality, with Barber declaring that tolerance "of all forms of sexual deviant behavior" is "a cancer that brings down societies" and linking it to the strange theory that gay marriage was the catalyst for Noah's flood.

That prompted Staver to chime in and remind everyone about Sodom and Gomorrah, which God had to destroy because it "had gotten to the place where men were raping men for their own self-gratification" ... with Barber adding that "it was homosexuality and cross-dressing that were central to that":

Liberty Counsel Chairman Mat Staver yesterday spoke to Vic Eliason of Voice of Christian Youth America on Crosstalk, where the two agreed that legalizing same-sex marriage nationally “would be the same as pronouncing the death sentence on America.”

Staver, who is also the dean of the Liberty University School of Law, even went so far as to say that marriage equality would “obliterate” morality, marriage and “the idea that there even is a God,” along with harming children, parents and society at large.

Eliason: You know as we see the comments, one website indicated that if the court strikes down marriage as we know it that it would be the same as pronouncing the death sentence on America that many of us know and love, recount the days of Sodom and Gomorrah as returning to our culture. Your thoughts?

Staver: Well I think so. Same-sex marriage is ultimately the abolition of gender; it’s ultimately the abolition of any moral behavior with regards to human sexuality. This whole assault on marriage is really an attempt to obliterate not only morality but Judeo-Christian morality, to obliterate marriage and to even obliterate the idea that there even is a God.

…

Staver: You’re going to have people lose their professions, you’re going to have parents lose their rights, you’re going to have churches and other avenues of religious free exercise ultimately throttled and marriage and morality are going to crumble. Children are ultimately going to pay the price and society will suffer.

He later cited California’s law barring the use of ex-gay therapy on minors as an example of how gay rights represent “a direct assault on the very core of our liberties and morality, marriage and even God.”

Staver described Rob Portman, Karl Rove and Reince Priebus as “cockroaches” which “start running” once “you flip on the lights” over their comments on gay marriage, and Eliason said of the Log Cabin Republicans: “Is there nobody to clean the cockroaches out?”

After discussing George W. Bush’s failure to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, Staver joined other Religious Right leaders like Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer in warning about the emergence of a “third party” and a “mass exodus” from the GOP “if the Republican Party were to adopt same-sex marriage.”

Listen:

Staver: You know it’s like going into a building at night and you flip on the lights and all of the sudden the cockroaches start running, and I think this same-sex marriage issue has shown the cockroaches within the Republican Party, the RINOs: Republican In Name Only. That’s why we lost the 2008 election, that’s why we lost the 2012 election, because they put forth their party person who is not really a conservative and doesn’t resonate with the American people and couldn’t carry a conservative message and articulate it if it was handed to them.

Go back to George W. Bush, George W. Bush surrounded himself by a number of people that were not conservative and in fact though he was elected in 2004 on a marriage mandate, that was what ultimately pushed him across the line; remember that was the time when thirteen states passed constitutional amendments, eleven of them actually on the day he was elected, and Ohio was a key state and Ohio had marriage on the ballot and that pushed him over the top. He had a marriage mandate and coming into 2005 we asked him to push forward with a Federal Marriage Amendment; instead, he and Karl Rove backed away. They tried to reform Social Security, which was not a mandate of his, and he failed and we lost that opportunity.

So now you have Karl Rove and you have [Reince] Priebus and some others, [Rob] Portman, they’re going down a way that ultimately will split the Republican Party. I can tell you what, if the Republican Party were to adopt same-sex marriage, if they were to do that, evangelicals will leave en masse and that will create a third party. No one wants to create a third party, they want to work within the system, they want to make sure that it advances freedom and liberty and the sanctity of life and marriage, but if the Republican Party goes down that road you can bet that there will be a mass exodus from that party and it will not win elections again for many, many years in the future.

Eliason: You know Mat, as we look back to a term that isn’t new but they call them Log Cabin Republicans and that of course was the group that favored homosexual involvement and moral decadence, as I define it, but this was the liberal element. When I saw that happen years ago down in my heart I thought: Is there nobody to clean the cockroaches out? Why do you coexist with that?

On the latest "Faith and Freedom" radio broadcast, Matt Barber and Mat Staver weighed in on the Proposition 8 and Defense of Marriage Act cases that are currently before the Supreme Court,  during which Staver declared that if the Court does not rule as he thinks it should, the Supreme Court "will have lost its legitimacy in its entirety." 

Barber agreed and took it a step further, stating that if the Court rules in favor of marriage equality, it "will be the nail in the coffin of the credibility" of the entire judicial system because it is "just absurd" to think that something that the Founding Fathers believed to be a "crime against nature" would now be ruled constitutional.

"If they go over the edge here," Barber warned, "we are no long in decline, we are in a free fall":

• With every passing day, CPAC becomes even more of a joke.
• Mat Staver was awarded the "Defender of Liberty" award at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention.
• When it comes to Newt Gingrich, we are actually inclined to trust Roger Ailes.
• Bryan Fischer says writers at The National Review "should be ashamed of themselves" for supporting the presence of groups like GOPround at CPAC.
• Finally, the quote of the day from Mike Huckabee: "I've come to the conclusion that [President Obama] is not sincere about anything other than poking Republicans in the eye."

Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum on Friday warned that the Obama administration has estimated that the average family will pay a minimum of $20,000 for health insurance once the health care reform law goes fully into effect.

The only problem with Schlafly’s claim is that the government never issued such an estimate.

The IRS simply used the $20,000 figure as an example for calculating the “shared responsibility payment,” or penalty, for a nonexempt family that does not acquire health insurance.

As the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org notes:

The IRS used $20,000 in a hypothetical example to illustrate how it will calculate the tax penalty for a family that fails to obtain health coverage as required by law. Treasury says the figure “is not an estimate of premiums.”

…

[T]he regulations weren’t a “cost analysis” at all. A spokesperson for the Treasury Department confirmed to FactCheck.org in an email that the IRS wasn’t making any declarations or projections about what prices will be.

“[Twenty thousand dollars] is a round number used by IRS for a hypothetical example,” the official wrote. “It is not an estimate of premiums for a bronze plan for a family of five in 2016.”

Schlafly wasn’t the only conservative leader to fall for the false story, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel also wrote an article arguing that a government “cost analysis based on ObamaCare regulations show[s] that the cheapest healthcare plan in 2016 will cost average American families of four or five members $20,000 per year for the so-called ‘bronze plan.’”

The Obama Administration is now estimating that by 2016 the minimum annual cost of health insurance for an average American family under ObamaCare will be $20,000. And there is no guarantee that the health insurance will actually cover all the medical treatments that the family wants and needs. $20,000 is merely the minimum annual cost; many families could face even higher premiums. Millions of Americans will be faced with the choice of buying this expensive health insurance, or paying hefty penalties to the IRS. Those who choose not to buy health insurance will be slapped by the IRS with thousands of dollars in additional taxes. Is this what Americans really want? Certainly not. $20,000 is many times more expensive than what most Americans pay for health insurance today.

It's not only families who will be hit by these enormous price increases under ObamaCare. One study predicts that a 27-year-old non-smoking male in Texas will go from paying $54 a month in health insurance premiums to a whopping $153 per month as soon as ObamaCare goes into full effect. That will be on top of the massive student debt that so many young people are already struggling to pay off. The real result may be that many Americans will choose to drop their health insurance simply because they cannot afford it. But that is the opposite of what ObamaCare was supposed to achieve.

None of this is a surprise to those who have criticized ObamaCare for years. Not a single Republican voted for this costly injection of federal bureaucracy into the American health care system, which has been the finest the world has ever known. Many businesses are decreasing the number of hours that their employees can work in order to fall below the threshold requiring employers to buy this costly insurance for their employees.

On today's "Faith and Freedom" radio program, Mat Staver and Matt Barber discussed the decisions by the Boy Scouts to delay the vote on lifting the ban on gay scouts and scout leaders as they wondered what the organization could even be thinking by contemplating such a change, saying there is no way that boy scouts can remain "morally straight" if "you have adults modeling for children what every major world religion and thousands of years of history have held to be immoral behavior."

As Staver said, "it makes no sense to have a Jerry Sandusky as your scout master and essentially that's what this policy would open up the doors to" while Barber asserted that gay activists are demanding access to your children, so "what father in his right mind" would let his son join the scouts if he knew that a gay man was serving as scout leader, especially since all gay men define themselves by the fact that they "sexually crave sex with other males" because they are "hyper-sexual":

Mat Staver and Matt Barber were discussing the two amicus briefs that Liberty Counsel has filed with the Supreme Court for the hearings on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8, claiming that it is "absurd" to think that the Constitution guarantees any right to same-sex marriage because at the time the Constitution was written, homosexuality was widely considered to be a "crime against nature."

As Barber explained, "the aberrant sexual behavior, the twisting of normal human sexuality that would be involved in order to consummate a so-called same-sex marriage" carried a punishment of death at the time the Constitution was written, so "there is now way that they would have ever intended that they would twist and deconstruct the fundamental cornerstone institution of marriage in order to put the government's official stamp of approval on a crime against nature":