Hate Crimes

The AFA's Bryan Fischer sure does seem intent on driving home his point that homosexuality ought to be illegal, as he has now written yet another post on this subject, this time seeking to how much better life would be if gays were still considered to be criminals: 

This raises the question, then, as to whether sodomy laws should be, or legitimately have been, repealed just because they are rarely enforced.

The answer to this is a clear and unequivocal "No."

Think for a moment of the current social controversies that could potentially be avoided if homosexual conduct was still against the law.

Gays in the military: problem solved. We shouldn't make a place for habitual felons in the armed forces. End of discussion, end of controversy. If someone objects, ask them which other felonies the military ought to overlook in screening recruits.

Gay marriage: problem solved. We should never legalize unions between any two people when the union is forged specifically to engage in felony behavior. Would we sanction, for instance, the formation of a corporation whose stated purpose was to import illegal drugs?

Gay indoctrination in the schools: problem solved. We don't want to raise a generation of schoolchildren to believe that felony behavior is perfectly appropriate. That's why we spend so much money warning students about the danger of drugs.

Hate crimes laws: problem solved. We wouldn't throw a pastor in jail for saying that illegal behavior is not only illegal but also immoral. For instance, he's free to say that murder is not only contrary to man's law but also to God's law. End of the threat to freedom of religion and speech.

Special rights for homosexuals in the workplace: problem solved. No employer should be forced to hire admitted felons to work for him. End of the threat to freedom of religion and freedom of association in the marketplace.

This list could actually be extended, but you get the point. Laws not only curb dangerous and risky behavior, they keep such behavior from being normalized, sanctioned and endorsed by the rest of society, and as such render an enormous benefit to a healthy culture.

The promos for the old movie "American Graffiti" asked the question, "Where were you in '62?" If the same question were asked about the United States, we'd have to answer: in a much better, saner and healthier place when it comes to criminal sexual conduct.

I think Fischer is aiming to establish himself in the obsessively anti-gay wing of the movement heretofore inhabited mainly by people like Peter LaBarbera and Matt Barber.

What can better sum up the current state of the Republican Party and its ties to the Religious Right than the fact that the day after Pat Robertson declared that Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake due to the fact that the nation "swore a pact to the Devil," Rep. Michele Bachmann is profiled on The 700 Club, where Robertson introduces her as "one of the leading conservatives in America":

Now, just three years into the job, Bachmann is a major voice against what she believes is an out of control government threatening the freedom of Americans.

"What we are seeing now is the rise of big government, and so, big government is now oppressing the American people with too much spending, too much taxes, too much regulatory burden," she said. "We just saw the hate crimes law pass...really that bill is more about restricting free speech and free expression of American citizens, in contradistinction to the First Amendment that wants free speech and expression for all of Americans."

Bachmann says the United States is blessed with a unique form of government, but the current administration is straying from what the founding fathers intended.

"Jefferson warned us over 230 years ago, be prepared. The natural way of government is to enslave you," she explained. "And Jefferson said again, bind down big government with the chains of the Constitution. That's what the effort was. Use these beautiful documents to limit man, not to grow man's influence and oppress mankind."

Bachmann believes the current growth of government's influence will backfire.

"We have the most left-leaning, radical president we've ever had in the history of the United States. The most radical, left-leaning speaker of the House than we've ever had in the history of the United States and one of the most radical, left-leaning majority leaders in the Senate," she said. "We have never had this type of radical view of government."

The congresswoman has proven she's not about to be silenced and she relies on God as her source of strength to endure the battle.

However, Bachmann isn't the only one speaking her mind. Much like Sarah Palin, Bachmann has her share of critics who lash out against her in the media, online and on TV.

"Women are very competent, very intelligent. They can be very successful and make it on their own," Bachmann said about why she's under attack. "And I think that the left is very concerned [about] the message that myself and other women would be able to deliver. And I think that's part of the reason why you see the attack to silence us as messengers."

In fairness, Bachmann apparently sat down for this interview with CBN back in early December, around the time that she joined Robertson on-air for the first time, and the segment was finally ready to air today. 

Last year, I wrote a whole series of posts about the utterly manufactured "controversy" over a Department of Homeland Security report which right-wing activists claimed labeled conservatives as "domestic terrorists."

Needless to say, the report did nothing of the sort, but no matter how many times we or others pointed out this lie, the Religious Right would not stop repeating it. 

That issue finally faded away, but now it looks like were going to have to relive it in a slightly different form, thanks to this new manufactured "controversy":

President Barack Obama's nominee to head the agency charged with keeping American travelers safe from terrorism thinks pro-life advocates are terrorists. A new video shows Transportation Security Administration nominee Erroll Southers including pro-life advocates in a list of terrorist groups.

The new video from 2008 shows Southers responding to a documentary-style interview question about terrorist organizations.

The documentary asked Southers, "Which home-grown terrorist groups pose the greatest danger to the U.S."

Southers explained, "Most of the domestic groups that we pay attention to here are white supremacist groups. They're anti-government, in most cases anti-abortion, they are usually survivalist type in nature, identity oriented."

"Those groups are groups that claim to be extremely anti-government and Christian identity oriented," he continues.

Here is the video in question, which has already been seized upon by right-wing activists:

And predictably, groups like the Family Research Council are all over it:

What's the story on the President's choice to head the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)? Well, if you've traveled through airport security, blogger Erick Erickson says that you've probably been screened more thoroughly than this pick. Among other things, Erroll Southers, the latest in the White House's parade of unqualified nominees, is on record saying that pro-lifers pose one of our nation's greatest security risks. In a video from 2008, Southers specifically targets "Christian identity" groups and anti-abortionists as a homegrown threat.

That's right. The man chosen to be first line of defense against another 9-11 is more worried about churchgoers than radical Islamic fundamentalists. Unfortunately, that makes him the perfect choice for Homeland Security's Janet Napolitano, who last year included pro-life and pro-marriage conservatives on the domestic "watch list." So far, Southers is just parroting what the President's official policy has been all along: marginalizing values voters who don't see the federal government as the solution to every problem.

Do these people really not realize that "Christian identity" is a specific term with a specific meaning?

Christian Identity is a religious ideology popular in extreme right-wing circles. Adherents believe that whites of European descent can be traced back to the "Lost Tribes of Israel." Many consider Jews to be the Satanic offspring of Eve and the Serpent, while non-whites are "mud peoples" created before Adam and Eve. Its virulent racist and anti-Semitic beliefs are usually accompanied by extreme anti-government sentiments. Despite its small size, Christian Identity influences virtually all white supremacist and extreme anti-government movements. It has also informed criminal behavior ranging from hate crimes to acts of terrorism.

The term "Christian identity" doesn't mean your average "churchgoer," it mean a movement consisting of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-government extremists.

But the Religious Right obviously doesn't care that and isn't about to let its fundamental misunderstanding get in the way of its efforts to generate controversy.

• In times of trouble, remind me not to turn to Brit Hume..
• Rick Warren needed $900,000 in end-of-the-year donations and got $2.4 million instead.
• The New York Times examines the role that three American anti-gay activists played in the creation of Uganda's death penalty for gays effort.
• Apparently, Oklahoma Republicans are going to attempt to "opt-out" of federal hate crimes laws. Good luck with that.
• The Washington Monthly explains how David Barton, Don McLeroy, and other Texas conservatives are rewriting your kids’ textbooks.
• You know, if GOProud has a problem with WorldNetDaily's reporting, they ought to take it up with WND, not Good As You.
• Finally, I never fail to be amazed at the sort of outrageous things conservatives can get away with saying.

As we head into the last days of 2009, we are doing some end-of-the-year fundraising so we can keep going strong as we prepare to keep tracking, exposing, and fighting the Right in 2010. 

So, in honor of that effort, here is a look back at the ten most popular Right Wing Watch posts of 2009:

1. God Commands You To Kill Gays

2. Sally Kern's Proclamation for Morality

3. Terry Declares That Tiller "Reaped What He Sowed," Then Asks If Someone Will Buy Him Lunch

4. Rep. Trent Franks Declares President Obama an "Enemy of Humanity"

5. Putting "Christ" In Your Christmas Tree. Literally.

6. Virginia GOP Chair goes all Cro-Magnon on Darwin, on his birthday

7. Robertson: Will Hate Crimes Protect Someone Who "Likes to Have Sex With Ducks"?

8. Wiley Drake Prays For Obama's Death

9. The Religious Right's New Demand: Stop Calling Us the Religious Right

10. Halloween is Satan's Holy Day and Candy Is How Demons Steal Your Soul!

It is your support that makes it possible for us to do this work and help turn stories such as these into national news. Please considering making a donation today, so that we can go into 2010 prepared for the battles that lay ahead.

Earlier this year, GOProud, a new gay conservative group, appeared on the scene intent on finding ways to sell the conservative agenda to gays. 

Their approach has been to eschew the "traditional" gay issues like hate crimes protections or the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in favor arguing that healthcare reform would be bad for gays, that "the inheritance tax is really a gay tax," or claiming that the best way to stop hate crimes is to expand gun ownership.

But GOProud does also support things like marriage equality and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell ... and for that reason the Religious Right's professional anti-gay activists at Americans for Truth and the Liberty Counsel are now threatening to boycott the annual CPAC conference if GOProud is allowed to serve as an official co-sponsor:

Folks, for years religious conservatives have been complaining about getting the shaft from CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. There is usually only a token panel or two dealing with “Culture War” social issues like abortion and homosexuality (and rarely one explicitly on fighting the “gay” agenda) – as organizers seek to appease the CPAC libertarians, some of whom support goals like homosexual “marriage” that are anathema to socially conservatives.

Now CPAC’s tenuous ”Big Tent” could collapse altogether as social conservatives led by Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber threaten to launch a boycott of the conference (scheduled for Feb. 18-20, 2010) unless CPAC drops a homosexual activist group, GOProud, as a co-sponsor. Barber, my good friend, an AFTAH Board Member, and the Director of Cultural Affairs at Liberty Counsel, is leading the charge to keep the CPAC sponsorship list … conservative.

...

It boils down to this: there is nothing “conservative” about — as Barber inimitably puts it — “one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it ‘love.’” Or two women awkwardly mimicking natural procreative relations or raising a child together in an intentionally fatherless home. This does not mean that people practicing those and other immoral (and changeable) behaviors cannot think and act conservatively on other issues like lowering taxes, cutting government spending, ending abortion, etc. But let’s be honest: the “proud” in GOProud is not about pride in opposing the death tax, or defending the right to bear arms; it’s about proudly embracing sinful homosexual behavior – and that is hardly a conservative value.

I challenge every thinking conservative to explain why we should jettison our nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage (which clearly rejects homosexual acts as immoral) for some new, secularized brand of “conservatism” that fails to conserve natural, normal, and noble sex within God-ordained marriage. Where does the expansion of “conservatism” stop? Would CPAC welcome “Republicans for Abortion” as a co-sponsor? How about “Conservatives For Higher Taxes”? We doubt it. So let’s stop the double-standard on one issue — homosexuality — that happens to be politically incorrect in this decadent age.

The American Family Association is also voicing its opposition:

Bryan Fischer is director of issues analysis for the American Family Association and host of the radio program Focal Point with Bryan Fischer. He says CPAC chairman David Keene and CPAC organizers have a serious problem on their hands.

"The bottom line is that homosexuality is not a conservative value," Fischer states emphatically. "There are any number of co-sponsoring organizations that I believe are going to have a real problem with the fact that they are giving such a prominent place to an organization which is such an active proponent of gay rights."

"And it's GOProud, they're identifying themselves with the Republican Party...and yet their legislative agenda is directly contrary to the platform of the Republican Party."

As I wrote last year, though there is significant overlap, those who attend the CPAC conference have distinctly different priorities from those who attend the strictly Religious Right conferences like the Values Voter Summit.

It'll be interesting to see how CPAC organizers managed to handle this controversy.  I'm guessing that GOProud will eventually "voluntarily" withdraw their sponsorship.

During the debate about expanding hate crimes legislation to cover sexual orientation, one of the standard scare tactics employed by the Religious Right was to point to pastors in other nations who had been arrested for speaking out about homosexuality and warning that, if this legislation passed, the same thing would start happening here.

One of the incidents they regularly pointed to involved Canadian pastor Stephen Boissoin ... in fact, Sen. Jim DeMint explicitly mentioned Boissoin in his speech on the Senate floor opposing the legislation:

Today in the United States, only actions are crimes. If we pass this conference report, opinions will become crimes. What is to stop us from following the lead of European countries and American college campuses, where certain speech is criminalized?

Can priests, pastors, and rabbis be sure their preaching will not be prosecuted if they say certain things are right and wrong? Again, in Canada, for instance, Pastor Stephen Boissoin was so prosecuted by Alberta’s Human Rights Commission for publishing letters critical of homosexuality.

Or will this provision serve as a warning to people not to speak out too loudly about their religious views, lest federal agents come knocking on their doors?

What about the unintended consequences, such as a pedophiles and sex-offenders claiming protected status under this provision as being “disabled”?

There is no such thing as a criminal thought, only criminal acts. Once we endorse the concept of thought-crime, where will we draw the line? And more importantly, who will draw that line?

...

I urge my colleagues to consider the implications of what we’re doing, just the raw cynicism of attaching this type of controversial legislation to the bill that funds the defense of our country. What type of legislative extortion will they consider of next? I have a choice to vote for hate crimes legislation that I feel would undermine the very justice system in our country or against the defense of my country. I don’t think we could be more cynical.
 

Well, guess what happened yesterday?

A Court of Queen's Bench judge has ruled an anti-gay letter written by a former Alberta pastor in 2002 was not a hate crime and is allowed under freedom of speech.

Justice E.C. Wilson overturned a 2008 ruling by the Alberta Human Rights Commission that the letter by Stephen Boissoin that was published in the Red Deer Advocate broke provincial law.

At the time, the commission said it may even have played a role in the beating of a gay teenager two weeks after it was published.

The commission had ordered Boissoin to refrain from making disparaging remarks about homosexuals and to pay the complainant, former Red Deer high school teacher Darren Lund, $5,000 in damages.

Neither order can now be enforced, as Wilson declared them "unlawful or unconstitutional."

The letter carried the headline "Homosexual agenda wicked" and suggested gays were as immoral as pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps.

Boissoin had argued he was simply commenting on government policy by criticizing homosexuality being portrayed positively in the public school curriculum.

On Thursday, Boissoin said he was thrilled with the judge's ruling, calling it a victory for "freedom of speech and religious expression in Canada."

Of course, this won't stop the Religious Right from continuing to cite this case as proof of their claims, just as they continue to cite the case involving two grandmothers arrested a few years back in Philadeplhia, as we explained in our Right Wing Watch In Focus on the issue:

One story Religious Right leaders like to tell revolves around the arrest of some Repent America protestors at a Philadelphia gay pride rally. This incident has become the stuff of mythology on the right, in part due to ads produced by Repent America in 2007 featuring a couple of grandmothers who were supposedly arrested for sharing the Gospel. The way they tell it, it’s understandable that it would concern people. So it’s worth finding out what really happened.

The kernel of truth under the pile of propaganda is that a group of Repent America activists were in fact arrested while protesting Philadelphia’s OutFest, and a local prosecutor did charge them with violations of several laws, including the state’s hate crimes law. But none of those charges were for “sharing the gospel.” Repent America – and the religious and political leaders who tell the same story – don’t mention that the police in fact were careful to protect their right to protest. The court found that among other things the protesters “blocked access to vendors, and disobeyed direct orders from the police, who were trying to preserve order and keep the peace.”

The First Amendment allows equality advocates to rally, and allows those with a different point of view to protest. But it doesn’t mean that the protesters have the right to disrupt the rally or drown out its speakers. It is universally recognized that public safety officials can place reasonable “time, place, or manner” restrictions on people exercising their First Amendment rights in order to preserve public order and prevent one group from trampling another’s rights. The court, which noted that Repent America did not get a permit for its protest, found that the police applied the law reasonably when the bullhorn-wielding Repent America protesters refused a request to move to another location and instead sat down in the street.

It’s also important to note that the court ruled that the prosecutor’s decision to file charges under the hate crimes law was a misapplication of the law – and charges against the protesters were dismissed. The court affirmed that the hate crimes law did not apply to the protesters’ speech or even to their disruptive behavior and refusal to obey police requests. That’s not exactly the impression you’ll get from listening to Religious Right leaders. It’s also important to note that federal courts rejected Repent America’s claims that the city and Outfest organizers had violated their First Amendment rights.

Rick Scarborough of Vision America has sent out an urgent fundraising email seeking to capitalize on the anti-climatic anti-hate crimes legislation rally held week, warning that he still expects to be arrested and saying that even though they were ridiculed in the press, God was quite pleased:  

Vision America needs your generous support NOW to stay in this battle.we need partners NOW to stand with us in prayer and financial support if we are to continue this battle. Please select here to make the largest tax deductible gift you can to this effort NOW. I believe our right to hold our deeply held religious beliefs as well as freedom of speech is at stake and therefore the soul of our nation. You can select here to make a donation. For more than 10 years I have stated that if and when speaking out against sexual deviancy was declared to be illegal by federal law, I would defy that law and obey God. I have followed through with that promise. Our legal team believes this law can be overturned in Federal Court, but

A number of Christian news agencies and talk programs covered our event, but the secular press was strangely silent, even though they covered the event, or worse, as in the case of the Washington Post, they chose to ridicule us.

...

No one was arrested. (Our lawyers tell us that will come later!) .. From the world's perspective, nothing noteworthy took place, but in Heaven, I believe God looked down and said, "Well done!" to those who stood for traditional values and on the truth of God's Word. He was able to say on that day that in Washington, D.C. there was a remnant that said, "We stand with God."

• I, for one, can't wait for Ken Hutcherson's follow-up column: "I think Christians are the new Negro – but that's an issue for a follow-up column."
• CafePress has decided to remove all Psalms 109:8 designs for its website.
• The full text of Rick Scarborough's remarks at the anti-hate crimes legislation rally has been posted on his website.
• You want a fight? Bill Donohue will give you a fight! 
• Finally, this, amazingly, is not a joke: