Brian Tashman's blog

Bill Bennett appeared today on Family Talk with James Dobson to promote The Book of Man, Bennett’s compilation of works about men at war, work, prayer, politics and the home. Like in his interview with Pat Robertson, Bennett decried “the feminist movement” and “the gay culture,” which he said “confused an awful lot of boys.” He went on to argue that the media and universities are also to blame for not sending “a consistent message to boys about what it means to be a man” and playing a role in the so-called collapse of manhood today:

Dobson: You’re concerned about manhood today, aren’t you?

Bennett: Yes.

Dobson: Especially in the Western world, we’ve forgotten what it means to be a man. And we’re not teaching our boy’s to be men. Why?

Bennett: That’s exactly right, because…moral relativism, the notion that there’s no right and wrong, who’s to say? The dizzying array of signals, the gay culture, which has confused an awful lot of boys, the message is there.

Dobson: The feminist movement has just hammered away at what manhood means.

Bennett: The feminist movement, remember Gloria Steinem, ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’ If you put on TV, if you go to the universities, if you check the popular culture, there is not a consistent message to boys about what it means to be a man, and as a result they’re confused.

Like David Barton, who has no academic training as a historian but is the Religious Right’s point person on American history, Calvin Beinser of the Cornwall Alliance has no scientific credentials but has become the go-to person for right-wing activists on questions of science, particularly climate change. While he lacks any credentials what Beisner does have is close ties to organizations financed by the energy industry and a history of attacking scientists, spreading misinformation, and fueling fears that the environmental movement is a pagan plot to destroy Christianity and kill “about 95% of the human race.”

Beisner is especially concerned about growing calls for environmental protection made by evangelical Christians, and has went out of his way to attack groups like the Evangelical Environmental Network for calling on public officials to clamp down on mercury poisoning. Beisner’s outburst against his fellow evangelicals should come as no surprise, as he has even gone after a Koch-financed study which actually confirmed the science behind climate change. He joined Focus on the Family’s political arm CitizenLink, whose head Tom Minnery appeared in Beisner’s Green Dragon video series, to disparage the EEN for thanking both Republican and Democratic politicians who supported efforts to reduce mercury emissions:

According to the EEN, one of every six American babies is born with harmful blood mercury levels, “which causes permanent brain damage in the unborn and infants.” Therefore, the 12 federal legislators EEN is thanking with radio, TV and billboard ads for supporting the EPA restrictions are “pro-life.”

In truth, only one in every 1,000 American babies is exposed to harmful doses of mercury, and the slight delays in cognitive development it may cause generally disappear by age 7, says Beisner. Moreover, all 12 of the federal legislators EEN is supporting are among the most pro-abortion Congress has to offer.

“Calling this ‘pro-life’ is quite a misnomer, but it will result in a lot of people being confused about who’s really pro-life and who’s not,” Beisner said. “Some of these people have 100 percent pro-abortion voting records in Congress, so people need to know they’re really getting the wool pulled over their eyes if they fall for this.”

But the Center for Disease control did in fact find that one in six newborns, or 630,000 of the 4 million babies born annually, are “at risk for developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in the mother's womb,” which PBS described as mercury levels “so high that they are potentially at risk for learning disabilities and motor skill impairment and short-term memory loss.”

This attack on evangelical environmentalists comes at a time when Focus on the Family head Jim Daly pledged to take the organization in a different direction than his predecessor James Dobson, and Christianity Today reported that CitizenLink recently launched “an effort to reach young adults on issues related to sex trafficking, poverty, and the environment.” It also puts the group at odds with the long list of evangelical leaders who signed the “Evangelical Call to Stop The Mercury Poisoning of the Unborn.”

But apparently for Focus on the Family, being “pro-life” does not entail protecting newborns from mercury poisoning.

While the Florida Family Association has won national attention for its successful campaign to convince advertisers like Lowe’s and Kayak to pull their ads from TLC’s All-American Muslim, the reality show about Muslim families living in Michigan was far from the first show the group attacked, as the FFA previously went after programs like Degrassi, Modern Family, Family Guy and Dancing With the Stars, among others.

As Samuel G. Freedman explains in The New York Times, the FFA is the one-man operation of David Caton, who for decades has been using the FFA as a shell organization for his attacks against not only television programs but also public schools, Disney World and government officials. “What makes the attack on ‘All-American Muslim’ more disturbing — and very revealing — is that it was prosecuted by just one person,” Freedman notes, “a person unaffiliated with any established organization on the Christian right, a person who effectively tapped into a groundswell of anti-Muslim bigotry”:

During the mid-1990s, after hearing about the harassment of gay students, the principal of Largo High School in Florida created a support group for them. Over the next year or two, the meetings also drew sympathetic friends, evolving into a club called the Gay Straight Alliance. For a while, it operated in comfortable obscurity.

Then, in 1998, the principal, Barbara Thornton, began receiving postcards, many bearing the identical message bizarrely denouncing the alliance as a “government-funded witch hunt.” The local school board felt compelled to take up the issue, with 400 parents attending a meeting at which one speaker compared the gay students to murderers.

During that session, Ms. Thornton finally encountered the man who had manufactured the entire controversy: David Caton. An accountant turned rock-club owner, the author of a book about his pornography addiction, Mr. Caton had become a born-again Christian and the founder and sole employee of a fundamentalist activist group called the Florida Family Association.

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It would be upsetting enough if a well-financed, well-organized mass campaign had misrepresented a television show, insulted an entire religious community and intimidated a national corporation. What makes the attack on “All-American Muslim” more disturbing — and very revealing — is that it was prosecuted by just one person, a person unaffiliated with any established organization on the Christian right, a person who effectively tapped into a groundswell of anti-Muslim bigotry.

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The question is why anybody, especially a major company like Lowe’s, would be swayed by Mr. Caton’s campaign. (Lowe’s did not respond to several requests for comment.) Just to put him in perspective, the 2010 federal tax forms for the Florida Family Association list Mr. Caton as its only paid employee, earning $55,200. The association took in $172,133 in donations and closed out the calendar year with precisely $8,868.76 on hand.

Michele Bachmann has made so-called “activist judges” a consistent target of her presidential campaign, dubbing them “black-robed masters” and in last night’s debate she called for Americans to “take the Constitution back” from the courts. Railing against the judiciary is a safe bet for Republicans trying to pander to social conservative voters, but Bachmann’s view of the legal system has come out of her experience as a Religious Right activist and student at Oral Roberts University Law School.

At Oral Roberts, Bachmann worked for Professor John Eidsmoe, and as reported by Ryan Lizza, Eidsmoe taught that when “Biblical law conflicted with American law, Eidsmoe said, O.R.U. students were generally taught that ‘the first thing you should try to do is work through legal means and political means to get it changed.’” Bachmann has consistently trumpeted her work with Eidsmoe, whose legal philosophy has been greatly influenced by Christian Reconstructionist RJ Rushdoony and has urged Christians to promote Biblical law in government.

Today on The Jan Mickelson Show, Bachmann said that her “biblical view of law” molded her view that America needs to disempower the judiciary:

Bachmann: I hold a biblical view of law. If you look at the original constitution and the founding documents of our country, it was clear that the founders wanted to separate power, they wanted to separate the presidency from the Supreme Court and from the Congress, because they thought that the Congress should be the most powerful of all the people’s voices because the people would have the ability to change out the members of the House every two years, originally the state legislatures would chose the Senators and they would have the state’s interest in mind, and the President was meant to execute the laws that Congress would put into place. The courts had a relatively minor function, it was to take current facts and apply it to the law that Congress had passed. So it was really a beautiful system that set up but it’s been distorted since then, and that’s what we need to do, get back to the original view of the Founders because it worked beautifully.

Mitt Romney has attempted to thread the needle on whether gays and lesbians have a right to serve openly in the military, saying he staunchly opposed the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell but is not willing to reinstate the policy. In a 1994 letter to the Log Cabin Republicans, Romney called Don’t Ask Don’t Tell “the first of a number of steps that will ultimately lead to gays and lesbians being able to serve openly and honestly in our nation's military,” but then in 2007 Romney claimed he originally found the policy “silly” but effective, and has since criticized attempts to repeal it. In a June debate Romney dodged a question on whether he would reverse the repeal, until he finally told the Des Moines Register editorial board this week that he would oppose the restoration of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

While his halfhearted and milquetoast stand may not surprise the vast majority of Americans who supported the policy’s repeal, it has not played well with Religious Right activists who want to see Don’t Ask Don’t Tell reinstated.

Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness recently started the Military Culture Coalition along with other conservative leaders to oppose repeal efforts, denounced Romney for his position of supporting Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in principle but not its reinstatement:

Donnelly questioned Governor Romney's comments to the Des Moines Register, noting that "The military does not work that way. Flawed policies that impose heavy 'complicating features' on the backs of military men and women cannot and should not be switched on and off, depending on the direction of political winds or promises made to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) activists of either political party."

She added, "Sound policies that reinforce morale and readiness should be maintained at all times. A long list of what Governor Romney calls 'complicating features' were caused when the 2010 lame-duck Congress voted for Obama's LGBT Law and related policies. Current problems and those yet to come are no more acceptable now than in the midst of a shooting war."

Sandy Rios of Family-Pac and the former head of Concerned Women for America mocked Romney for the “audacity” to say he is more conservative than other candidates while revealing a complete lack of conviction regarding his views on open service in the military:

As the issue of allowing gays to openly serve in the military raged last year, Mitt Romney let it be known he roundly opposed the idea. He was outraged ... incensed. Many conservatives were certain this was the real Mitt revealing himself after years of having to pretend to embrace gay rights as governor of Massachusetts. With this messy business of his position on gay rights out of the way, they could at last breathe a sigh of relief and support the man they thought looked and sounded presidential and had the credentials to turn the economy around.

But now that has all changed. In an interview with the Des Moines Register editorial board last Friday, the former Massachusetts governor explained that it wasn't the concept of having gays openly serve in the military that had troubled him ... only the fact that the change was being made in a time of war. Now that the conflict is over, he would not, as Commander in Chief, do anything to change it.

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As if to drive his point further, Romney added that Gingrich's "unreliability" hadn't just been 14-15 years ago, but in the last 2-3 years. Yet Mitt Romney's latest leap from conservatism had only taken place a few days prior. What kind of audacity does it take to stand before a news agency editorial board and brag in the face of the evidence that you are the most conservative candidate?

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One could go further back with Romney's liberal/conservative iterations, but these are current examples which, in the case of gays in the military, goes back not a few years but a few days. Surely it is a quantum leap to assign him the mantle of conservatism in the current race.

Truth and honesty are inconvenient at times, but they are as much a part of conservative values as any position on the economy or national defense. Dishonesty and deceit are basic disqualifiers -- and bend as we may to excuse the inexcusable, in Romney's case, they are very hard to ignore.

Not to be outdone, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association went after Romney and Ron Paul, who voted in favor of repeal last year, calling them “non-starters as candidates”:

If evangelical Christians simply vote their values, there is simply no way they can cast a vote for someone who is in favor of legitimizing homosexual behavior in the military.

In the GOP field, there are just two candidates who support the presence of sexual deviancy in our armed forces: Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

Romney told the editorial board of the Des Moines Register last Friday that he is just fine with sexually aberrant behavior in the military.

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Bottom line: for values-driven voters who claim to be conservative and to draw their values from the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are both likely to be - and should be - non-starters as candidates. If a voter only claims to be a social conservative but isn’t one in fact, then a vote for Romney or Paul is not likely to be a problem.

Following a series of debate gaffes and blunders that have pushed him out of his spot as a frontrunner in the presidential race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has tried to win back support by stressing his social conservative credentials. He is kicking off a bus campaign around Iowa focusing on “faith, family and freedom” and has framed himself as a victim of the media, claiming he is being “criticized for standing up for the values Jesus Christ talked about.” In one ad he discusses alleged liberal attacks against his faith and in another attacks openly gay soldiers while lamenting President Obama’s supposed “war on religion.” While Perry has won praise from Religious Right leaders for his ads that vilify gays while stoking fears about President Obama’s handling of religious freedom, at least one right-wing talk show host is angry at the candidate—because he hired a gay pollster.

After the governor’s gay-baiting ad was released, the two leaders of the gay conservative group GOProud tweeted that a high-level pollster on the Perry campaign, Tony Fabrizio, is himself fact gay. Fabrizio has previously worked for pro-gay rights causes, including the campaign to stop Florida’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Steve Deace, an influential Iowa radio host, condemned Perry on his radio show yesterday for hiring an openly gay staffer, who  to work on his campaign for president, likening it to hiring a pedophile or a rapist: “When you put someone in place in your organization, regardless of whether they’re a practicing homosexual, a polygamist, a pedophile, a thief, a rapist, or any other form of behavior that violates the natural law, you are empowering people within your organization that are lawbreakers.”

Deace argued that Perry cannot claim to stand opposed to gay rights while working with people who are trying to “redefine” marriage and that Perry’s decision to hire Fabrizio “repudiates everything that his campaign is supposedly based on.” He went on to say that Perry either “didn’t know” or “didn’t care” about Fabrizio’s sexual orientation, which shows why “despite the fact he’s got $50 million, he’s got six percent more of the popular vote in the polls than I do”:

Deace: So what happens is here is the homosexual deviation from the script, from a public policy standpoint presents challenges to a culture that the rest of the deviations do not. It demands by its very nature, or its violations of nature, it demands that you change the definition of what nature is on everything, across the entire board. So therefore—what is the legal system in America? Well, let’s again go back to our founding document; our founding document says we are governed by ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,’ the natural law. Like, gravity is the natural law, it just is, whether you accept it or not, this is the natural law. So if this natural law is one man and one woman procreating and perpetuating the next generation, and so we’ve set up an entire standard in our system based off of this defined law, if we attempt to redefine that law, we are going to have to redefine everything else.

And so when you put someone in place in your organization, regardless of whether they’re a practicing homosexual, a polygamist, a pedophile, a thief, a rapist or any other form of behavior that violates the natural law, you are empowering people within your organization that are lawbreakers. We are all lawbreakers to some extent, but there’s a difference between recognizing that and going to God for grace and mercy, as opposed to saying you have to change the law and your tradition because of who I am right now, I don’t have to change, you must all change for me.

For the life of me I can’t understand why anybody who’s espousing what Rick Perry espouses in that television ad would put somebody in a place of prominence in his campaign who repudiates everything that his campaign is supposedly based on. What sense does that make? Who would do such a thing? So that leaves two options, either they didn’t know and didn’t do their own homework or they didn’t care. I’m not sure either one of those is really a good answer. That might be signs of why despite the fact he’s got $50 million, he’s got six percent more of the popular vote in the polls than I do.

Talk show host Janet Parshall yesterday along with her husband Craig Parshall, general counsel of National Religious Broadcasters, discussed the Obama administration’s directive to advance LGBT rights abroad. At the end of the program, they argued that the new initiative will infringe on religious freedoms, a common argument used by right-wing activists against the directive. Janet even claimed that the “Father of Lies,” or the devil (John 8:44), is working “through a UN resolution or funding from the United States to try to silence the proclamation of the gospel”:

Janet Parshall: Sometimes it’s imperative to be Nehemiah, a watchman on the wall, and Craig you and I see this stuff, we’re in the shadow of that Capitol dome, and I have to tell you, honestly, I just think to myself, ‘Father, in your sovereignty and in your perfect will, you called us for such a time as this.’ All that stuff you just said, God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear but a power and love and of a sound mind, and our message must be so powerful, so transformative that the Father of Lies does everything he can, works through a UN resolution or funding from the United States to try to silence the proclamation of the gospel. If anything, this should make us all the more committed to the power, the truth and the absolute transforming nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Cindy Asmussen of Concerned Women for America’s Central Texas chapter pleaded with the organization’s members to boycott Macy’s over the company’s LGBT rights policy and to protest the Obama administration’s directive to combat discrimination against the LGBT community abroad. Macy’s has faced a torrent of criticism from Liberty Counsel and the American Family Association because the company fired a worker in San Antonio, Texas, who refused to abide by the company’s guidelines on LGBT customers. Asmussen said that members should stop shopping at the store until they rehire the employee:

As I strive to finish my Christmas shopping this season, the stores I choose to shop at are in the forefront of my mind. There are some companies that are actively supporting the lesbian, "gay," bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) agenda in our nation; therefore, they will not be getting my business. In the past week, one more store has been added to my list - Macy's (also their affiliate company Bloomingdales).

The Macy's store in San Antonio, Texas, fired Natalie Johnson after she noticed a cross-dressing man wearing lipstick coming out of the women's dressing room; she politely told him the rooms were for women only. The man, and several friends who were with him, began shouting profanities at Natalie and demanded to speak with her supervisor. After the management of the store assured the man that Macy's was indeed a LGBT friendly store and transgender men could use the women's dressing rooms, the supervisor then summoned Natalie into an office where she was forced to choose between upholding the company policy or job termination. Natalie chose to defend her values and the belief that it is a dangerous precedent to allow men to change in a women's dressing room also used by young girls. For that, she was fired.

But Asmussen wasn’t just concerned about “the lesbian, ‘gay,’ bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) agenda in our nation” (apparently only the word ‘gay’ warrants scare quotes), as she went on to rail against the Obama administration’s efforts to fight both legal and social discrimination against LGBT people around the world, which she said infringed on the rights of people who don’t support LGBT rights and undercut ‘ex-gay’ reparative therapy:

On December 6 at the United Nations, Hillary Clinton championed LGBT "rights." She claimed that members of the LGBT community are born that way, and it is something they cannot change. We know from all of the facts and testimonies of those who have come out of LGBT lifestyles that this is simply a lie. They can and do change all of the time. It is a behavior and a choice, and this is why there are several nationwide ministries helping those who want to be free from this lifestyle.

Statistics and facts already prove the destructiveness of these behaviors (such as the high numbers of sexually transmitted diseases in the homosexual community). Yet despite that, LGBT activists want to alter OUR lifestyles by intimidating us into accepting what we know is not of God, by trying to inhibit our free speech rights and abilities to speak out against it, and by forcing us to use the same dressing rooms (and, in many cases, bathrooms) with the opposite sex.

Evidently, while Concerned Women for America wants their members to pressure companies that developed progressive policies regarding their LGBT customers, the group condemns the U.S. for pushing back against countries that criminalize homosexuality and discriminate against their LGBT communities.

Joe Dallas, the former leader of Exodus International and speaker at Focus on the Family’s Love Won Out conferences, appeared yesterday on The Janet Mefferd Show to attack Christian figures who support equal rights for gays and lesbians. Dallas claims that he is an “ex-gay” and runs his reparative therapy group, Genesis Counseling. He has also endorsed the work of the immensely discredited Joseph Nicolosi, an officer of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality and who jokes that it is better for a child to have brain damage than to be gay.

While the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Social Workers and the American Psychiatric Association all deny the effectiveness, safety and ethics of ‘ex-gay’ reparative therapy, Dallas in his book When Homosexuality Hits Home claims that people can change their sexual orientation. He lists the “causes” of homosexuality, including “unmet needs for bonding with the same sex” and “early sexual violation” like child molestation. He also argues that Satan has a role:

Satan’s strategy is leading humans astray, whether the arena is doctrinal or moral, is to deceive an individual into thinking that what God has forbidden is not really wrong or destructive, but is, in fact, life enhancing. So it was I the garden when Satan tempted Eve; so it may well be with your loved one. The sin of homosexuality is human nature, but the belief that sin is not really sin comes not from human nature alone but from an ancient and evil messenger.

Dallas told Mefferd that church leaders who are gay, such as Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, or who support gay rights are all asking for God’s judgment. “So I really tremble for Bishop Robinson and the many other leaders who are in essence perverting the truth that they have been commissioned to speak,” Dallas said, “and I don’t want to be anywhere near them when they stand before God.” He went on to compare Christians who back gay rights to cultists and Nazis who distort scripture:

That causes me to wonder when Bishop Robinson says he’s going to evangelize, what exactly he means by evangelizing, of course I would love to see anyone preaching the gospel to homosexual people or heterosexual people anywhere but I’m not sure what gospel he will be preaching to put it plainly and I’m not sure what his concept of evangelism is going to be, I suspect that it will be a message to young people stating that homosexuality is legitimate, therefore they can embrace their homosexuality and do so with God’s approval.

I am reminded of the warning to those who call good evil and evil good and darkness light. There is a particular judgment, and this is the heart of the matter, there is a particular judgment that is placed biblically on leaders who teach falsehood, it is of course serious when any Christian goes into error, whether moral error or doctrinal error, but you remember James said, ‘my brethren let us not be many teachers because we will receive the greater judgment.’ Shepard’s in the Old Testament who misrepresented God and misrepresented truth were in a terrible position and had serious judgments placed on them. Jesus was death-on-wheels when he talked to religious leaders who proclaimed falsehoods.

So I really tremble for Bishop Robinson and the many other leaders who are in essence perverting the truth that they have been commissioned to speak, and I don’t want to be anywhere near them when they stand before God.

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And as you know, if you took the Bible hard enough you could make it say whatever you want it to, cults can do that, Nazis did that and I’m afraid it’s being done today under the guise of civil rights and gay liberation.

Mission America president Linda Harvey today echoed the arguments of other Religious Right leaders that the Obama administration’s directive to support LGBT rights abroad will encourage “perversion and deviance” and “lead to destruction.” On her radio show, Harvey accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of trying to demonize religious beliefs and defying God. “We can read in Genesis 19 about how predatory and abusive people became in Sodom,” Harvey said, “I think the message is very clear that these behaviors do not benefit society but lead to destruction.” She concluded her radio show by asking viewers whether they “believe Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on this, or Almighty God”:

Harvey: In their vigorous defense of perversion and deviance they have declared war on people of faith and families, particularly Christians, Hillary equated religious objections to homosexuality with being “not unlike the justification offered for violent practices toward women like honor killings, widow burning or female genital mutilation.” So let’s understand, that those of us who believe men with men or women with women are unnatural or immoral relationships, we are being lumped in with murderers and mutilators. This is such unsupportable and childish reasoning, it’s almost worthy of satire if the results weren’t so destructive and unjust. Hillary highlighted the practice of criminalizing homosexual conduct in some countries, she didn’t name them, but she made no distinction between the most harsh and unnecessary penalties and those who simply speak out in a free society to discourage homosexual behavior. What about those who don’t want these behaviors promoted to kids or don’t support legalizing same-sex marriage? It’s apparently all the same to her and Barack Obama.

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There’s a problem, more than one actually. This new declaration of gay rights as human rights is not backed by U.S. law, homosexuality is not a civil right in our country, so once again the Obama administration is inventing policy and acting unilaterally. I hope that Congress will respond soon to restrain this tyranny. Homosexuality is not opposed only in modern times and not only by Christian conservatives, it was part of antiquity and we can read in Genesis 19 about how predatory and abusive people became in Sodom. I think the message is very clear that these behaviors do not benefit society but lead to destruction. We have a choice; we can believe Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on this, or Almighty God. I know what my choice is, what about you?