A few weeks ago, vandals threw bricks through the windows of the site hosting an Americans For Truth About Homosexuality banquet demanding that the anti-gay event be shut down. Ever since, AFTAH’s Peter LaBarbera and Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber have been running around screaming “hate crime” and telling the story to anyone who will listen.
So it was no surprise to see that it was also the topic of discussion on Liberty Counsel’s “Faith and Freedom” program today, though it was a surprise to see Barber start asserting that not only were windows broken at the event site, but that those responsible also broke into the building and destroyed plumbing and flooded floors.
But that was nothing to compare to where the discussion went after that, when Mat Staver declared that this sort of vandalism was totally predictable because as gays get more rights, they become more hostile and violent and then declaring that when the Southern Poverty Law Center labels anti-gay groups as “hate groups,” they are doing just what the Nazis did to the Jews:
Staver: This aggressive homosexual agenda is not about tolerance, it’s about dominance. And the more emboldened they get, the more laws that they get, the more vocal they become, the more hostile they become, the more aggressive they become, and the more violent, in this particular case, they become.
Barber: Americans for Truth, as well as Liberty Counsel for that matter, is one of those flashpoints, they have been unfairly labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hard left-wing extremist organization that uses smears in order to label Christian organizations that take a principled stand on the biblical model of sexual morality in love, speak God’s truth in love, they label them hate groups. But really, they are fanning the flames of this kind of violence with their rhetoric, by labeling organizations a hate group. And they’re partly responsible for this, indirectly, I’m not going to say they’re directly responsible …
Staver: Well, when you go out and label somebody a hate group you think of the KKK …
Barber: It emboldens these people …
Staver: It also, it begins, you know, it’s the same thing that happened in the Nazi Holocaust where they start to just demonize and stigmatize and then at some point in time you don’t even think that someone’s human and then, you know, we look at it and our consciences are shocked but if you look at how it ultimately began where they began to just demonize and dehumanize them, that’s what’s happening with this labeling of hate groups.
