I’ve returned for vacation and am slowly working my way through everything that happened while I was away and trying to catch up. While going through my RSS reader, I saw a New York Times article entitled “Obama Gains Evangelical Allies on Immigration” and decided to take a look at it because this is an issue that we have been covering here for several months now.
As we’ve been noting, a handful of Religious Right leaders including Richard Land, Mat Staver, Lou Engle, Samuel Rodriguez, and Ken Blackwell, have come out in support of immigration reform, marking a distinct break from the rest of the conservative movement which has traditionally opposed any such reform and instead favored fences, round-ups and overall anti-immigration crackdowns.
So imagine my surprise when I took a look at the NYT article and saw this photo:
Bryan Fischer, in addition to being the one of the most viciously anti-gay activists operating today, has also been among the most vocal Religious Right activists opposing immigration reform, calling for the deportation of all Muslims and advocating for the deportation of entire families in the name of compassion and controlling “vigliante justice.”
While the article focused mostly on activists like Staver and Land who are supporting President Obama’s efforts to reform our immigration system, for some reason the NYT decided to feature of photo of a man who easily ranks among the Religious Right’s most openly hostile anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant activists … and, not surprisingly, he opposes those leaders who are supporting this effort:
Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the American Family Association, a national conservative Christian organization in Tupelo, Miss., said, “What my evangelical friends are arguing is that illegal aliens should essentially be rewarded for breaking the law.
“I think it’s extremely problematic from a Judeo-Christian standpoint to grant citizenship to people whose first act on American soil was to break an American law,” said Mr. Fischer, who hosts a daily radio show on which immigration is a frequent topic.
On a related note, Fischer and Staver debated this issue on Fischer’s radio program last week. You can read Fischer’s take on it here.
