As Peter noted in his post earlier today, it is a little difficult to take seriously the new Imago Dei campaign aimed at softening the Religious Right’s bigoted, extremist language considering that someone like Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver is one of the leaders of this effort.
Nothing better demonstrates this point than this “Faith and Freedom” radio broadcast in which Staver and Matt Barber wholeheartedly praise foreign nations like Russia, Uganda, and Nigeria for passing draconian anti-gay laws and declaring that the same sorts of laws ought to be passed here in America:
Staver: President Obama has been going in a direction to really deconstruct this and to create this idea of same-sex marriage, which is really an oxymoron. But, at the same time, the rest of the world seems to be going exactly opposite of the president and some of the states.
Barber: Yeah, and it’s encouraging to see what’s happening around the world. I think many nations, you think of Russia, you think of some of the African nations around the world, are looking to a liberalized Europe and are looking to the United States under this Obama Administration and they’re rejecting this notion that you can take the institution of marriage and radically redefine it by sanctifying what every major world religion and thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology have long held: that homosexual behavior and conduct is both immoral, unnatural and self-destructive to the individuals engaged in the behavior and that you don’t have a marriage built upon this immoral behavior.
…
Staver: Well, it seems as though, if people are having AIDS and most of that, as the CDC comes down and says, it is transmitted by male homosexuality, by and large, what are you going to do? Are you going to say, are you going to elevate that to a preferred status and say, well yeah, men ought to be able to marry men? That’s an oxymoron. What Nigeria has done by reaffirming marriage as between one man and one woman is what a number of countries are doing around the world. They’re reaffirming marriage as one man and one woman. Russia is one of those countries recently that did that. Latin American countries have reaffirmed marriage as one man and one woman. Then other countries around the world are reaffirming marriage as one man and one woman and rejecting this radicalized homosexual agenda.
…
Barber: This is a very dangerous lifestyle that countries like Russia are, in addition to reestablishing and saying no, marriage is what it’s always been, they’re saying additionally we are going to stop this homosexual activist propaganda from corrupting children in our nation and we need to see that right here in the United States.
