public policy

I have to admit that my biggest pet peeve about David Barton is not his incessant dishonesty, but the manner in which he repeatedly asserts that the Bible supports his right-wing agenda by simply citing Bible verses without every explaining what they say, as he does in this clip about how only a Christian nation allows religious freedom because Christians know their true faith will always win:

Notice how he simply asserts that the entire concept of the free market comes out of the Bible and then just rattles off verses without bothering to elaborate? Of course, if you actually bother to look them up, here is what you find:

1 Timothy 5:8

Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

2 Thessalonians 3:10

For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

According to Barton, these passages are the foundation of the entire concept of free market capitalism.

Barton does this all the time ... like when he spoke at the Rediscover God in America conference and rattled off verses claiming they opposed everything from the Estate Tax to Minimum Wage laws:

So let's just take a look at the passages he cites, shall we?

Luke 19:13-26 and Matthew 25:14-29 - Opposing the Capital Gains Tax:

14 “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. 15 To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. 16 The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. 17 So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. 18 But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

19 “After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. 20 The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’

21 “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

22 “The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’

23 “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

24 “Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25 So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

26 “His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? 27 Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

28 “‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. 29 For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.

Leviticus 27:32, Numbers 18:28-29, Deuteronomy 14:22 - Opposed to progressive income tax:

32 Every tithe of the herd and flock—every tenth animal that passes under the shepherd’s rod—will be holy to the LORD.

28 In this way you also will present an offering to the LORD from all the tithes you receive from the Israelites. From these tithes you must give the LORD’s portion to Aaron the priest. 29 You must present as the LORD’s portion the best and holiest part of everything given to you.’

22 Be sure to set aside a tenth of all that your fields produce each year.

Proverbs 13:22, 1 Chronicles 28:8, Ezekiel 46:18 - Opposed to the Estate Tax:

22 A good person leaves an inheritance for their children’s children, but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous.

8 “So now I charge you in the sight of all Israel and of the assembly of the LORD, and in the hearing of our God: Be careful to follow all the commands of the LORD your God, that you may possess this good land and pass it on as an inheritance to your descendants forever.

18 The prince must not take any of the inheritance of the people, driving them off their property. He is to give his sons their inheritance out of his own property, so that not one of my people will be separated from their property.’”

These are the passages, taken completely out of context and left utterly unexplained, upon which Barton thinks our public policy ought to be based.

How are Old Testament passages about setting aside offerings for the Lord to be used for determining our tax policies?

Using Barton's tactic, couldn't someone just as easily assert that Mark 12:41-44 means Jesus supports a progressive income tax?

Which brings us to Matthew 20: 1-16, which Barton cites as proof that "Jesus did not like the minimum wage":

1 “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. 2 He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

3 “About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. 4 He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ 5 So they went.

“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. 6 About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’

7 “‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.

“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’

8 “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’

9 “The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

13 “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? 14 Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15 Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

16 “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

The conventional interpretation of this parable is that Jesus was talking about the Kingdom of Heaven - in fact, Jesus says right in it that "the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner" - and that the point was that no matter how late in one's life one comes to Christ, the heavenly reward is the same; those who embraced Christ on their deathbed will receive the same eternal reward as those who were Christians all of their lives because of God's generous love.

But for Barton, this is not a parable about Heaven but rather a statement by Jesus that he opposes minimum wage laws.  

And using Barton's logic regarding this parable, it also means that it would be perfect acceptable to Jesus if employers want to pay minority and/or female workers less than they pay white male workers for doing the same job.  After all, if this parable is not about the Kingdom of Heaven but rather wage laws, then Jesus is saying that employers have every right to decide what they are going to do with their own money and if they want to be more "generous" to white male workers than others, then that is perfectly acceptable in God's eyes.

When I was watching the series of Barton appearances on "Gospel Truth" with Andrew Wommack that I posted on last week, Wommack continually marveled at  Barton's ability to find political messages in Gospel passages, repeatedly telling Barton that while he has spent his life studying the Bible, he had never made these connections. 

And I think that is pretty telling. 

If you have spent your life studying and preaching on the Bible and never realized that it contained detailed instructions for how we were to establish everything from our tax laws to building codes in accordance with a right-wing political agenda ... well, there is probably a reason for that.

Cary Gordon of Iowa’s Cornerstone World Outreach has continued to make waves with his anti-gay diatribes. Gordon was heavily involved with the successful effort to remove three Iowa Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of marriage equality in 2009, and just last week he told a rally hosted by Bob Vander Plaats that like Rome, “we too will be extinguished from the earth” as a result of civil rights for gays and lesbians. While Gordon’s political maneuvers through his “Project Jeremiah” drove his church into bankruptcy. After failing to pay back the construction company that worked on Gordon’s church, the county sheriff is now putting the church on the auction block. But severe fiscal problems haven’t stopped Gordon from targeting gays and lesbians, and criticizing secular government. Tyler Kingkade of the Iowa Independent reports:

Gordon, pastor at the Sioux City-based Cornerstone World Outreach church, claimed secularists want to throw God out of our public policy decisions.

“The natural problem that causes is an overt immorality. The crime rates go up, people suffer, people are stealing and murdering and [doing] all the things morality tells you not to do,” Gordon said in an interview with The Iowa Independent, although he clarified that he did not mean same-sex marriage is the direct cause of all these things.

…

Gordon often referred to France’s government and society and noted an “objectum sexualist” who married the Eiffel Tower. Gordon said he believed the secular path he saw America’s society as being on would lead beyond legalizing same-sex marriages to polygamy, “whole villages getting married,” or grandparents marrying their own grandchildren. “There’s always been this fight of can you have a free country without God?” Gordon said.

“There has been a tendency leaning backwards towards secularism. And so what my point was that gay marriage or any other issues that are detached from the moral foundations of the teachings of Christianity are the result of a vacuum created by secularism.”

…

Gordon told The Iowa Independent his outspoken opposition to same-sex marriages is “not about hate, it’s about natural law.” Although he didn’t say how he felt about two men or two women being able to receive the same legal benefits if they were not legally married.

“I didn’t make gravity, no board of three against two on a board of five voted and said ‘let’s have gravity now,’” Gordon said. “And so there are natural laws that men did not make and we don’t have the power to overrule. One of those laws is it takes one man and one woman to make a baby. I didn’t make that law … and that is the logical definition of family.”

He then called children the innocent bystanders of the situation, and said a same-sex couple could never raise a child as well as a heterosexual couple.

“When two men say to the world we can raise a child just as good as any heterosexual couple, I think that’s offensive to women, because you’re saying that a woman, a female, does not bring a unique contribution,” Gordon said.

Tony Perkins took to The Hill today to argue that Planned Parenthood costs taxpayers billions of dollars because, he argues, by providing affordable contraception it raises the abortion rate, and by providing abortions it raises the STD rate.

First he acknowledges that the one study that he uses to back up the contraception-abortion link doesn’t actually conclude what he wants it to conclude. But that doesn’t stop him from contributing his own scientific analysis:

Earlier this year, the medical journal “Contraception” published a study, “Trends in the use of contraceptive methods and voluntary interruption of pregnancy in the Spanish population during 1997–2007.” The researchers noted that from 1997 to 2007, “the overall use of contraceptive methods increased from 49.1 percent to 79.9 percent.” During this same period, “The elective abortion rate increased from 5.52 to 11.49 per 1000 women.”

Although the article states, “The factors responsible for the increased rate of elective abortion need further investigation,” the relationship between increased contraception and increased abortion seems apparent.

I’d refer Perkins not only to common sense, but to this study in The Lancet and this USAID report citing numerous studies proving that access to contraception does, in fact, prevent unintended pregnancy.

Perkins goes on to argue that Planned Parenthood—which directs a full third of its budget to testing for and treating sexually transmitted diseases—is actually driving the STD rate in the United States because of the three percent of its budget that it spends on abortion services:

But the connection between Planned Parenthood’s so-called family planning and an increase in abortion is not the only manner in which the abortion giant is running up the taxpayer tab. A 2005 study from George Mason University suggests that as the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood is costing taxpayer billions of dollars a year by fueling the sexually transmitted disease pandemic.

According to researchers Jonathan Klick and Thomas Stratmann, who examined over four decades of data related to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), there is a statistically verifiable link between legalized abortion and the rise in STDs. Klick and Stratmann make the argument that sexual behavior responds to economic incentives. In other words, as the laws and economies of scale, along with government subsidies made abortion more economically enticing, an increase in risky sexual behavior followed and with it STDs.

How much is this increase costing us? The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 19 million new STDs occur each year, almost half of them among young people ages 15 to 24. The estimated price tag is $15 billion dollars for healthcare costs alone!

So, Perkins’ plan is to take away the ways women have to prevent pregnancies and STDs, thereby scaring them into abstinence. Sounds like the Religious Right’s dream come true…but truly scary public policy.

• GOP may abandon effort to defund Planned Parenthood.

• NOM promises to spend $1 million to defeat marriage equality and its proponents in Maryland.

• Disgraced former congressman Bob Livingston named the top fundraiser for the Louisiana GOP.

• Lisa Ling reports that even the head of Exodus International believes “you can't change your sexual orientation.”

• Birthers at WorldNetDaily absolutely flabbergasted that the Supreme Court rejected their lawsuit against Obama.

• Michele Bachmann still has no idea what she’s talking about.

• Bryan Fischer says “it’s long past time to return our public policy to biblical principles of justice.”

Earlier today it was reported that President Obama had ordered the Justice Department to stop defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act.

So far, reactions from the Religious Right have been few and far between but we are going to post them here as they trickle in:

National Organization for Marriage:

“We have not yet begun to fight for marriage,” said Brian Brown, president of NOM.

“The Democrats are responding to their election loss with a series of extraordinary, extra-constitutional end runs around democracy, whether it’s fleeing the state in Wisconsin and Indiana to prevent a vote, or unilaterally declaring homosexuals a protected class under our Constitution, as President Obama just did,” said Brown. “We call on the House to intervene to protect DOMA, and to tell the Obama administration they have to respect the limits on their power. This fight is not over, it has only begun!”

...

“On the one hand this is a truly shocking extra-constitutional power grab in declaring gay people are a protected class, and it’s also a defection of duty on the part of the President Obama,” said Maggie Gallagher, Chairman of NOM, “On the other hand, the Obama administration was throwing this case in court anyway. The good news is this now clears the way for the House to intervene and to get lawyers in the court room who actually want to defend the law, and not please their powerful political special interests.”

FRC:

"It's a dereliction of duty,'' said Tom McClusky, senior vice president of Family Research Council Action. "Whether they agree with the law or not is irrelevant...The Obama administration has purposely dropped the ball here."

AFA:

"I think it's a clear sign that we simply cannot avoid engaging on the social issues," Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the group, told TPM. "Mitch Daniels has called for a truce on social issues and that would be fine if the homosexual lobby was willing to lay down arms, but they're obviously not and this proves it. A truce is nothing more than a surrender."

Fischer said he was not surprised by the president's decision.

"Frankly I was surprised that President Obama pretended to be a defender of natural marriage as long as he did," he said.

He said that the White House move should serve as "a wake-up call to all conservatives that fundamental American values regarding the family are under all-out assault by this administration. It ought to represent a clarion call to man the barricades before we lose what is left of the Judeo-Christian system of values in our public life."

Focus on the Family:

Tom Minnery, a vice president with Focus on the Family, said the Obama administration did not aggressively defend the Defense of Marriage Act in any case. "If the federal government will not defend federal laws, we're facing legal chaos," Minnery said. "If the administration can pick and choose what laws it defends, which law is next?"

"We would hope Congress uses the tools at its disposal to counter this decision and defend marriage," Minnery said.

ADF:

“Typically, when a law is challenged, the government has a duty to defend the law, and typically they do so with the most vigorous possible defense,” said Jim Campbell, attorney with the conservative Alliance Defense Fund. “In this case, we’ve seen executive branch officials refuse to do so.”

Official FRC statement:

"This decision by President Obama and the Department of Justice is appalling. The President's failure to defend DOMA is also a failure to fulfill his oath to 'faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.' What will be the next law that he will choose not to enforce or uphold?

"Marriage as a male-female union has been easily defended in court and overwhelmingly supported by the American people. There is absolutely no excuse beyond pandering to his liberal political base for President Obama's decision to abandon his constitutional role to defend a federal law enacted overwhelmingly by Congress.

"With this decision the President has thrown down the gauntlet, challenging Congress. It is incumbent upon the Republican leadership to respond by intervening to defend DOMA, or they will become complicit in the President's neglect of duty," concluded Perkins.

Liberty Counsel:

Today President Barack Obama instructed the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, and the Department of Justice to cease defending the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). “This is outrageous and unthinkable that the President would abandon the defense of marriage,” said Mathew Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. “President Obama has betrayed the American people by his refusal to defend the federal law that affirms what many courts upheld as constitutional, namely, that marriage is between one man and one woman,” said Staver.

...

“Regardless of President Obama’s own ideological agenda, as President, he and his Attorney General have a duty to defend lawfully passed legislation, especially when the essence of the law has been upheld by many courts. Thirty states have passed marriage amendments affirming marriage as one man and one woman. Today President Obama has abandoned his role as President of the United States and transformed his office into the President of the Divided States. He has been the most divisive president in American history. He has today declared war on the American people and the fundamental values that are shared by most Americans. His radicalism resulted in the historical push-back in the 2010 elections. His radicalism today will come back around when the people respond to this betrayal in 2012,” said Staver.

TVC:

“The Obama Administration has been sabotaging marriage in direct contradiction to his campaign promises. Today, President Obama takes his most unprecedented step yet, choosing to rule and reign through executive decree in what could only be called a supra-constitutional act. After massive defeats at the polls in November, a total repudiation on health care, and staring down a cost-cutting Congress, Obama is looking to secure what little base remains. Obama’s actions today are an unprecedented grab for power and perhaps the most audacious in the 235 year history of the American republic.

“President Obama believes he has “concluded” that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, as passed along by Attorney General Eric Holder -- effectively asserting that Obama may rule by whim and decree.

“We are a nation of laws, not whims.

“Virtually every state in the country has overwhelmingly passed laws and state constitutional amendments protecting marriage. This unprecedented power grab demands the immediate reaction of the United States House of Representatives, who must do everything possible to fight back against what can only be described as a despotic and alarming attack on the rule of law.”

Catholic League:

Now Obama is officially on record as president opposing the defense of marriage. Thus does he pit himself against the 1996 law that was signed by President Bill Clinton, and opposed by only 15 percent in the House and 14 percent in the Senate. He also stands in opposition to the over 30 state initiatives affirming marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Now that Obama is totally out of the closet, it will spur a genuine effort to adopt a constitutional amendment affirming the integrity of marriage.

Gary Bauer:

The president is the chief law enforcement officer, not the chief justice! It is not up to Barack Obama to determine which laws he likes and which laws he doesn’t. It is his responsibility to enforce the law until the nation’s highest court decides the law does not pass constitutional analysis.

But this president sees things very differently — he’s here to fundamentally transform America, by, among other things, redefining marriage ...

Today’s news should put to rest any suggestion that Obama has moved to the center. He has just aligned himself with the most radical elements in the culture war who are trying to redefine normalcy.

I’ll have more on this tomorrow, but I have to be honest with you: I’m worried our side has gone back to sleep. Financial support for our work has dropped significantly. But the left is energized. Obama suddenly feels free to abandon the law and let the militant homosexual rights movement force same-sex “marriage” on every state in the nation. A liberal politician is urging the unions to “get a little bloody” in the streets.

The Tea Party protests have ebbed while the left-wing radicals are fired up. The momentum seems to have shifted back to the left. Men and women of faith must remain engaged in the public policy battles of the day. The culture war is real and only one side can prevail.

As we noted yesterday, the American Family Association has pulled Bryan Fischer's recent blog post asserting that Native Americans were "morally disqualified" from exercising control over North America and that Europeans were justified in taking it by force.

So far, the AFA has not offered any statement on why it did so and all we have gotten is Fischer's side as he claims it was taken down because people are just "not mature" enough to handle the truth and was becoming a distraction because the Left was just too "dim-witted" to understand that Fischer was speaking only for himself and not for the organization.

Now, as Warren Throckmorton reports, a representative of the AFA showed up in the comments to a Throckmorton post on Crosswalk about Fischer's piece to reject Fischer's bigotry and claim that his views do not represent the AFA:

Bryan Fischer’s blog runs on the AFA website. His blog does not speak for AFA. His statements about Native Americans were wrong and disturbing. I am posting this as an individual, but provide my job description to illustrate that Bryan’s views were not those of AFA as a whole.

Patrick Vaughn
General Counsel
American Family Association, Inc.

This raises an interesting question: just when does Fischer speak for the AFA?

Fischer claims that when he writes on the blog, he is speaking only for himself.  Fine.  But what about when he shows up on the radio or in the press? Does he represent the AFA in those situations? 

What about when he is given a speaking slot at the Values Voter Summit where he attacks "the dark and dangerous and devious religion of Islam." Or when he appears in right-wing documentaries?

What about when he is hosting his radio program for the AFA on which he interviews Republican members of Congress and presidential hopefuls? Does he represent AFA then?  Does he represent the AFA when he uses his radio program to say that gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism, when he says that Muslims should be banned from the military, or when he claims that Hitler filled the Nazi ranks with gays because they were the only ones capable of being savage and brutal enough to carry out his orders? Did he represent the AFA in any of those situations?

Or finally, what about when Fischer demands a ban on the construction of all mosques in America?  He first made the assertion on the AFA blog, which he claims does not represent the AFA.  He then made the same point on his AFA radio program. He then defended the statement on a program with Alan Colmes.  And then defended it again on CNN.

Did Fischer represent the AFA in any capacity in any of those venues, or was he simply representing himself? 

If Fischer doesn't represent the AFA when he writes on their blog, hosts their radio show, or appears in the press or at a public event as Director of Issue Analysis, just when does he represent the AFA? 

And if the AFA doesn't want to be associated with Fischer's unrelenting bigotry, why do they keep him on staff and continue to give him venues from which to spew his hatred?

It would be really helpful to the rest of us if the AFA could clarify just when Fischer is speaking on behalf of the organization and when he is spewing his bigotry as a private citizen so that we can know when to hold the AFA accountable for the outrageous and offensive things he says on their blog, radio network, or in public appearances as the Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy for the American Family Association.

Last week we noted that the American Family Association had pulled down Bryan Fischer's latest blog post claimed that Native American's were "morally disqualified" from exercising control over North America and that Europeans were justifed in taking it by force. 

On Friday, Fischer put up a new post explaining that the original post had been removed because people just were "not mature enough" to handle this brutal truth.  On his radio program that same day, Fischer also discussed the incident, saying that the comments his post generated were so vile and hateful that the woman in charge of monitoring them refused to continue and so they removed it because his critics were "too dim-witted" to realize that he was speaking for himself and not for AFA:

The left-wing blogosphere has just been lit up over this that the column that I wrote on Tuesday over westward expansion, settlement of the United States got pulled down.

The column generated an incredible amount, so much intense, vitriolic and profane reaction - in fact, we had the woman here that monitors comments, she had to say "look, you have to get somebody else to do this, the things that people are saying about Bryan are so vulgar, they are so vile, they are so profane, they are so blasphemous, I can't take it any more." That's how much hate there was, and yet we're the ones that are accused of being the hatemongers.

So this thing was taking on a life of its own, it was kind of mushrooming into a huge issue and becoming a distraction really to the fundamental mission that we have here at AFA even though when I blog, I mean they have it on every column that I write, at the bottom of every blog it says that I'm not speaking for the organization, that the opinions expressed here do not necessarily express the opinions of AFA or AFR talk. I am just speaking for myself. I say it every day at the foot of my columns, that was my idea to put that in there because people we so confused whether I was speaking for AFA or whether I was speaking for myself. Well, if I am blogging, I am speaking for myself. But apparently, the left-wing media is too dim-witted to understand that or to pick up on it, so we just pulled it down because it was taking on a life of its own.

So let me get this straight: the AFA lured Fischer away from the Idaho Values Alliance, named him director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy, gave him a two hour daily program on its radio network, and allows him to appear in print, on TV, and at right-wing events as a representative of AFA  ... but we are supposed to believe that when we writes posts for the AFA blog, he is just speaking for himself and that his views should in no way be seen as a reflection on the organization?

What about when he is hosting his daily radio show?  The AFA logo was prominently featured as Fischer dedicated more than ten minutes to reading and expanding upon this very column during a broadcast last week.  Was Fischer simply speaking for himself when he claimed that Native Americans are mired in poverty and alcoholism because they refuse to accept Christianity while serving as a host for AFA's "Focal Point": 

Peter LaBarbera and Gary Glenn, head of the American Family Association of Michigan and a longtime ally of Mike Huckabee, came together to condemn homosexuality. Much like Lou Engle, who prayed for Ellen DeGeneres to be “converted” and use her influence to condemn homosexuality, LaBarbera began the program stating that Oprah Winfrey “will have to answer to her Creator” over her support for gay-rights:

I believe that someday Oprah will have to answer to her Creator about what you did with your influence. She’s a woman of incredible talent and influence, not just in America but the whole world. And yet here she is, using it to promote a lifestyle that God has declared sinful.

Glenn and LaBarbera later criticized Congress over the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and Glenn described the “security,” “moral,” and “medical,” reasons for banning gays from serving in the military, baselessly claiming that the “preponderance of sexual assaults [are] committed by individuals who are secretly in the military and involved in homosexual activity”:

Glenn: This Don’t Ask Don’t Tell moniker was not federal law; the federal law actually prohibits individuals who openly identify themselves as involved in the homosexual lifestyle from serving in the United States military. Because of security concerns for example, the openly homosexual intelligent officer at the Pentagon who’s responsible for all the WikiLeaks that have been in the news recently.

LaBarbera: That’s Bradley Manning right.

Glenn: Bradley Manning.

LaBarbera: Funny how the media didn’t report that much, Gary?

Glenn: Because of the dramatically, certainly from a per capita standpoint, preponderance of sexual assaults committed by individuals who are secretly in the military and involved in homosexual activity.

I mean to compel a more conservative segment of American society, which is the definition of those who volunteer to serve in the United States military typically tend to be people of traditional values, to be forced to share showers and barracks and latrines and foxholes and battlefield conditions with people openly involved in the homosexual lifestyle. Not only from a moral standpoint but from a medical standpoint, because of the severe medical consequences associated with that behavior, and battlefield blood transfusions. It simply defies reason or rationale that anyone would institute a public policy that put our men and women in the armed services especially on the battlefield at increased risk of being injured or infected on the battlefield through battlefield blood transfusions.

Then, Glenn says Martin Luther King Jr. would be standing with LaBarbera and himself if he was here today:

I mean, Dr. King having been a conservative, southern, with a small ‘s,’ southern Baptist pastor in the 50’s and 60’s, whose view from a biblical standpoint on the question of homosexual behavior would’ve been unquestionable that he would have opposed it. And yet homosexual activists today use the legacy of Dr. King and the civil rights movement to suggest that someone’s sexual behavior, two men engaging in sex with each other, is somehow comparable to the color of skin, which someone happens to be born.

Listen:

Last October a group of Anti-Muslim activists led by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer protested Campbell’s for making Halal soups in Canada, calling on followers to boycott the company. Halal foods are made according to Islamic dietary laws, much like Kosher foods are made according to Jewish dietary laws. Geller accused Campbell’s of doing the “bidding” of the Muslim Brotherhood and said that “Warhol is spinning in his grave.”

WorldNetDaily believes it’s time for another right-wing panic over “creeping Sharia law” in supermarkets and restaurants, and Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association is happy to help. Fischer warns against eating the food of “the demon God-Allah” and lends his support to a messianic Jewish leader’s campaign against all foods Halal:

Are you eating food sacrificed to idols?

American pastor sounds alarm on supermarkets, restaurants

When you bite into a delicious pizza, succulent sandwich or luscious lamb chops, are you possibly eating food that has been sacrificed to idols?

An outspoken American pastor says yes, and he's sounding the alarm for Christians to be aware of the Islamic influence he calls "backdoor Shariah" now nibbling its way across the fruited plain.

At issue, says Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Wash., is eating food that's "halal," in other words "lawful" or "permitted" for the Muslim diet.

…

"This is coming to a store near you. This is all over," says Biltz, who is especially concerned about restaurants serving halal meats.

"At a restaurant, you're not going to know [if the food is halal] unless you ask," he said. "I think we need to be aware of these things because they don't want Christians to know because they just want to sell it and get it out there. ... A lot of people don't want you to know it's going all over the world. Christians are upset as they're finding out about this because Christians are saying, 'How come you didn't tell me?

…

Pastor Biltz is not the only one raising concerns.

Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for government and public policy at the American Family Association, said Americans need to look at what's been taking place in Britain when it comes to the expansion of Islamic food standards.

"Folks in hospitals, schools, and pubs across the U.K. have been eating food that has first been blessed in the name of the demon-God Allah but know nothing about it," Fischer wrote in a column last fall.

"So Christians in the U.K. have been eating meat over which Islamic rituals have been pronounced, and most of the lamb sold there has had an Islamic prayer said over it at the point of slaughter. ... The prayer? 'Bismillah Allah-hu-Akbar,' which means 'In the name of Allah, who is the greatest.' Some chicken butchers in the U.K. slaughter chickens using an automatic circular saw while a tape recorder intones the Islamic prayer. I kid you not."