New York

Last year, when the Smithsonian hosted “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” a groundbreaking exhibit exploring gay and lesbian themes in American art, the Religious Right unified in protest. Inspired by a CNSNews story titled “Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts,” and egged on by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, the campaign against the exhibit quickly gained the support of soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Within a day they succeeded in pressuring the Smithsonian to remove the most controversial work from the exhibit, David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly.

Last week, the exhibit opened at the Brooklyn Museum, famously the site of the Giuliani-fueled controversy over the 1999 “Sensation” show. Within days, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn sent a letter to the museum protesting the exhibit, and a small coalition of GOP elected officials followed up with a letter accusing the museum of “Christian-bashing.” New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser also weighed in, calling the Wojnarwicz work “a revolting piece of slime.”

However, the museum hasn’t budged in its support for the show, and the Right’s efforts to censor the work have mostly fizzled. Donohue himself has decided it’s not worth expending too much effort –instead simply issuing a statement reiterating his disgust with the exhibit and accusing Wojnarowicz of bringing about his own death from AIDS.

Left to fill the vacuum so far have been a far-right Catholic group inspired by a Brazilian fascist movement and an artist who was previously known for painting a heroic George W. Bush on horseback holding Osama bin Laden’s severed head.

On Sunday,America Needs Fatima, a campaign of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), held a protest in front of the museum. TFP is a spin-off of a Brazilian movement that has been called “neo-fascist.” TFP’s foundational text is a treatise by founder Plinio Correa de Oliveira, which argues that the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Communism have in their turn undone a natural order that must be restored. While the main American branch of TFP mostly focuses on anti-gay propaganda [pdf], America Needs Fatima is dedicated to organizing “anti-blasphemy” campaigns against targets like The Da Vinci Code, editorial cartoons and Madonna’s planned performance at the 2012 Super Bowl.

The other notable protest against the Brooklyn Museum has been that of Staten Island artist Scott LoBaido, who was thrown out of the museum after showing up with a painting of the museum’s director sitting on a toilet filled with green muck. LoBaido has been protesting art that he sees as blasphemous since at least 1999, when he was arrested for throwing horse manure at the Brooklyn Museum to protest the “Sensation” exhibit. His own work is not always negative, though. Along with his year-long project painting flags on rooftops across America, LoBaido has created fawning, heroic portraits of Ronald Reagan and of George W. Bush brandishing the head of Osama bin Laden.

The 700 Club today featured a story on Rose Marie Belforti, the New York town clerk who refuses to sign marriage licenses following the passage of the state law providing marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples. The highly sympathetic story featured interviews with Belforti along with her allies in New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms and her legal counsel, the Alliance Defense Fund. People For the American Way Foundation is representing a lesbian couple Beforti turned away, and Belforti is facing a write-in challenger in her re-election race tomorrow.

Following the segment, Robertson called marriage equality an “abomination” and said that Belforti, along with two town clerks who resigned after the Marriage Equality Act passed, are “prisoners of conscience.” After the Marriage Equality Act was signed into law in June, Robertson said that God would destroy America like he did Sodom and warned that in “history there’s never been a civilization ever in history that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing, and has survived.”

Watch:

Robertson: Isn’t it a shame that this kind of thing has come up. It’s what the Bible calls an abomination. It’s one thing to say these folks should have all the freedom and all the rights of any citizen, that’s the American way, but marriage particularly is a sacrament of the church and the fact that they have civil ceremonies and civil clerks that sign licenses it’s not the same thing as marriage. And the homosexuals want to have the imprimatur of the church on their lifestyle, that’s what this is all about. They don’t want to have anybody say what they’re doing is sinful. So these clerks have stand up as prisoners of conscience and it looks like a steamroller is taking them out of the way, but we’ll see what happens. You know, sometimes a few brave people have changed the course of history.

When Deirdre DiBiaggio and Katie Carmichael went to their town clerk in Upstate New York to receive a marriage license, the clerk turned them away and refused to process their marriage application, instead telling them to make an appointment with a deputy on another day. The couple, represented by People For the American Way Foundation, is now trying to make sure that the clerk does her job and complies with the state’s Marriage Equality Act.

The Family Research Council is now defending the clerk, who, the group writes in an email to members, faced a “surprise visit from a lesbian couple” – a strange choice of words since a major part of the clerk’s job is to process marriage applications. The right-wing organization wrongly insists that “the women weren’t denied a license” and falsely claims that “the two women got their license and were ‘married’”:

Rose Marie Belforti, a small town cheese maker in rural New York, is at the epicenter of the effort to banish Christians from living out their faith in public office. Belforti, a Bible-believing Christian, has been the elected town clerk for nearly a decade. After the New York legislature redefined marriage and ordered clerks to issue same-sex "marriage" licenses, Belforti had a surprise visit from a lesbian who wanted a marriage license. Rose did what she would do for anyone--she offered an appointment. Just not with her. The women weren't denied a license, but Rose, in anticipation of a conflict with her faith, took the matter to the Ledyard Town Board in August. The board appointed several deputy clerks to sign and issue the licenses. The two women got their license and were "married," but now they want to make sure that those who won't participate and celebrate this ruse of a "marriage" are banished from public office.

This is hardly the case. DiBiaggio and Carmichael are still not married because Belforti continues to deny them a marriage license, insisting that they jump through hoops to obtain one from a part-time deputy. But for the Family Research Council, the facts never stand in the way of advocacy for anti-gay discrimination.

UPDATE: In Thursday’s email update, the FRC corrected its assertion that DiBiaggio and Carmichael were married.

Robert George, founder of the American Principles Project and Chairman Emeritus of the National Organization for Marriage, said that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shouldn’t be considered a Catholic because he signed marriage equality into law. In an interview with Kathryn Lopez of the National Review, George also attacks Gov. Cuomo for living with but not marrying his companion Sandra Lee, saying that “no one takes him to be a serious Catholic” and that he “flouts his Catholic principles.” Using George’s logic, more than half of Catholics in America would not be “real Catholics” because they favor marriage equality.

LOPEZ: How significant is it that this governor is Catholic?

GEORGE: Is he? There are many devout Protestants and even Jews and Muslims whose moral beliefs and practices are far more closely in line with Catholic teachings than Andrew Cuomo’s are. Andrew’s father’s views and policies gave scandal (as Catholics use that term) precisely because people took him to be a serious Catholic. No one is scandalized by Andrew’s beliefs or conduct because no one takes him to be a serious Catholic, that is, a Catholic who is serious enough about his faith to live by its tenets. Indeed, he quite publicly flouts Catholic principles, and doesn’t even seem to wrestle with it or be anguished about it, as his father at least liked to give the appearance of being. In word and deed, he has made it clear that he simply does not believe what Catholicism teaches about sexual morality and marriage. There is no reason to suppose that he regards the Catholic Church as having the authority to teach definitively on these issues or anything else. If there is a sense in which he is a Catholic, it does not involve believing what the Catholic Church teaches or even that the Catholic Church has any authority to teach. So I don’t see Cuomo’s Catholicism as a significant part of this story. He doesn’t even pretend to be serious enough about it to make anyone care or even take much notice.