Brian Tashman's blog

Next time Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent Erick Stakelbeck talks about religious liberty, just remember that he doesn’t seem to extend that freedom to Muslims. During a conference call with the group Tea Party Unity, Stakelbeck attacked the Obama administration for having “literally” intervened in cases to defend the construction of mosques.

Stakelbeck said he is outraged that the Obama administration is trying to stop residents from blocking the construction of mosques because how dare the Justice Department defend the First Amendment!

He was also livid that Muslims may want to build “a $5 million mega-mosque,” just as we are sure he is angry that a Southern Baptist congregation in Dallas constructed a $130 million megachurch.

But then again, what do you expect from a sports reporter-turned-terrorism “expert” who has championed anti-Muslim activists like “mosque buster” Gavin Boby?

Caller: How is it we can get these facilities, because I’m not going to call it a church or a religion, how can we get them shut down?

Stakelbeck: Well look under this administration, good luck, because I’m just working on a chapter in my new book about how this administration when locals, in places like Murfreesboro, Tennessee, when local residents are up in arms about a mosque being built, the Obama Department of Justice literally intervenes, files amicus briefs in support of the mosque, we’ve seen this time and time again. Here’s a statistic for you, folks, in the year 2001 there were 1,200 mosques in America; now, just twelve years later after 9/11, that number has doubled to over 2,000 mosques, that’s a 74 percent increase since 9/11 alone, that is astounding and it is not a coincidence. Under the Obama administration the floodgates are open even more; they are literally intervening in these mosque cases around the country, in small towns with very small Muslim populations. I’m sorry, if you have a 200-strong Muslim population, why do you need a $5 million mega-mosque? And where is the money coming from? Look no further than Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. So getting mosques shut down in this era, in the age of Obama? Good luck. What you’re going to see is more mosques built.

Stakelbeck told another caller that “there is a concerted effort by Islamists to infiltrate the very heartland of American society,” particularly the Bible Belt.

Just to be clear, Muslims represent just 1% of the population of Tennessee and less than 0.5% in other Bible Belt states like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Arkansas.

But maybe they’re all just hiding in national parks….

Caller: We are seeing so much Saudi in middle Tennessee, I mean they have the best health care in the Saudi embassy, we have classes at the university, so we are just seeing a major, major influx of Saudi nationals here in middle Tennessee.

Stakelbeck: Folks, it’s not a coincidence. Middle Tennessee is the buckle of the Bible Belt. This is not just in New York City, Boston, Chicago, LA, traditional gateway cities for immigrants, anymore; there is a concerted effort by Islamists to infiltrate the very heartland of American society. I write about this in my book “The Terrorist Next Door,” I call it “Southern Inhospitality,” and that’s what we’re seeing, and you’re seeing it in a major way in that Nashville area where you have tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants in Murfreesboro and Shelbyville.

Pat Robertson has advice for women who are struggling to forgive their cheating husbands: “Well, he’s a man.”

On today’s 700 Club, Robertson told a woman whose husband was cheating on her that she should stop focusing on the adultery and instead ponder, “Does he provide a home for you to live in, does he provide food for you to eat, does he provide clothes for you to wear, is he nice to the children…is he handsome?”

After encouraging the woman to focus on the positives rather than her husband’s adultery, which Robertson imagined to be a one night stand with a stripper in a hotel room, he said she should “give him honor instead of trying to worry about it.”

He also suggested the woman could have done more to prevent her husband from cheating: “But recognize also, like it or not, males have a tendency to wander a little bit and what you want to do is make a home so wonderful that he doesn’t want to wander.”

“What you have to do is say, ‘My husband was captured and I want to get him free,’” Robertson said, concluding that the woman should still be grateful that she lives in America: “Begin to thank God that you have a marriage that is together and that you live in America and good things are happening.”

Watch:

On Monday, we reported that Truth In Action Ministries spokesman Jerry Newcombe wrote a column defending a Texas student athlete who claimed he was disqualified from a tack race over a religious gesture, which Newcombe used as evidence of anti-Christian persecution in America.

But Newcombe’s account had one tiny little problem: the week before he published his column, the athlete admitted that he made the story up.

Rather than retract his post, our friends at Wonkette point out that Truth In Action Ministries scrubbed it from their website and Newcombe rewrote the column to detail the case of Texas cheerleaders who wanted to put Bible verses on banners during football games.

But despite Truth In Action Ministries’ best efforts, you can still read Newcombe’s original (and never corrected) column here:

Ex-gay activist Christopher Doyle talked to Sandy Rios of the American Family Association this week where he made the outlandish claim that if ex-gay counseling is restricted, then youth who have been sexually abused will never report the harm done to them and “more Jerry Sanduskys will get off scot-free.”

Doyle works for the International Healing Foundation, the “therapy” organization led by Richard Cohen (yes, that Richard Cohen), and is now promoting a group called the Citizens Against The Jerry Sandusky Victimization Act with fellow ex-gay Greg Quinlan.

He told Rios that if “gay activists [who] are indoctrinating young people to believe that they’re born that way” get their way, then children who have been molested will not report the abuse or tell their parents or a counselor and “the Jerry Sanduskys of the world will not be discovered.”

Rios: So there was a press conference last Monday, now who called the press conference and for what purpose?

Doyle: The press conference was called by the Citizens United Against The Jerry Sandusky Victimization Act, I’m a part of that committee, and what we’re trying to communicate to the press was gay activists are indoctrinating young people to believe that they’re born that way, that they’re born gay. And if young people believe that they’re born gay because of the gay activist indoctrination they will not seek a professional counselor to try to figure out why they have same-sex attractions. Many times, in fact about half of the clients that I have in my client list right now, have experienced sexual abuse, lots of them by pedophiles such as Jerry Sandusky. So if they’re never going to go and seek help for their unwanted same-sex attractions which are a symptom of that trauma then the Jerry Sanduskys of the world will not be discovered, they will not be reported by professional counselors, kids won’t tell their parents they were molested because the kids are going to think, ‘hey I’m born this way and my sex abuse didn’t have anything to do with my same-sex attractions,’ and then there you go more Jerry Sanduskys will get off scot-free.

As one of the most nasty and mean-spirited figures of the Religious Right, it was no surprise to see Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel tweet this cartoon implying that a gay Boy Scout troop leader would sexually assault his scouts:

As we know, pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner of Generations Radio are no fans of birth control. In fact, Swanson believes that “little tiny fetuses, little babies” are “embedded” into “those wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill.”

Reacting to the news that the FDA has decided to make the morning-after pill available without a prescription to women ages 15 and older, Buehner called the move an attempt “to destroy the patriarchal structure of the family” as part of its “war against God’s family structure.”

According to Buehner, the Bible makes it clear that an unmarried woman “doesn’t have the feminist independence that we hear so much about to make contracts, to buy drugs, to engage in activities without the father’s consent,” as naturally the father should know “what drugs his daughter’s putting into her body” and “whether or not his daughter is out there fornicating with the football team.”

When the government does something like this, their intentions, their self-conscious intention, is to destroy the patriarchal structure of the family. The Book of Numbers is very clear and the Book of Numbers says that ‘when the father hears the vow of his daughter, an obligation to which she’s bound herself, if the father says nothing then the vow stands; but if the father should forbid her on the day he hears of it then none of her vows, none of her obligations of which she has bound herself, shall stand.’ What that means is that a father who has a daughter, she’s not free, she doesn’t have the feminist independence that we hear so much about to make contracts, to buy drugs, to engage in activities without the father’s consent. Now when you tell the father he has no business knowing what drugs his daughter’s putting into her body, when a father has no business knowing whether or not his daughter is out there fornicating with the football team, you’ve destroyed patriarchy even more. I think the government is waging a war against God’s family structure.

Swanson took it one step further by alleging that a new strain of gonorrhea is divine punishment for sexual immorality.

“God is in control and he can send a superbug to wipe out a lot of people who are engaged in this kind of sexuality and if that be the case then I guess we don’t need a political magistrate to do that work for us,” Swanson said.

He knows what’s going on and he will exercise perfect justice and nobody, nobody, nobody is going to get away with this kind of thing. Dave, you mentioned the rise in STDs, sexually transmitted diseases are going to rise I think significantly for 15, 16, 17 year old girls and here’s an article that just came out yesterday: ‘Sex Superbug Could Be Worse Than AIDS.’ It’s an antibiotic resistant strain of gonorrhea and it could knock of these kids in three days. It’s apparently a very virulent disease, it’s a super bug; they consider it a super bug. ‘Some analysts say that the bacteria’s affects could match those of AIDS. This might be a lot worse than AIDS in the short run because the bacteria is more aggressive and will affect more people quickly…. Even though nearly 30 million people have died from AIDS-related causes, Dr. Christianson believes the effect of the gonorrhea bacteria is more direct. Getting gonorrhea from this strain might put someone in septic shock and death in a matter of days. This is very dangerous.’ Apparently it has hit Hawaii, California and Norway thus far.

This idea that somehow that we are safe and technology can take care of us and we can take a pill for this and a pill for that and everything is going to be hunky-dory and you can get away with whatever kind of sexual activity you want to get away with, there is a God in the heavens, there is a God in the heavens. I know that the average American doesn’t believe that anymore. They don’t fear God, the beginning of wisdom is not the fear of God in these schools, they don’t teach the beginning of knowledge and wisdom is the fear of God in sex-education classrooms. They say, ‘well you know you might get an STD,’ but then the really smart guy says, ‘well that’s alright these government agencies can figure out a way to solve these problems and so I don’t have to worry about any of this.’ Friends, ultimately God is in control and he can send a superbug to wipe out a lot of people who are engaged in this kind of sexuality and if that be the case then I guess we don’t need a political magistrate to do that work for us.

Buehner predicted that within a decade elementary and middle schools will be putting the morning-after pill in vending machines as more and more women have trouble coping with the ramifications of putting “the bullet into the baby’s head.”

Swanson: A lot of these liberals are more than happy to provide abortion and it doesn’t really matter how these girls got to be pregnant, the point being that these little girls can be messed up sexually in so many different ways but society wants to be sure that the child is done away with in the process.

Buehner: Yeah, obviously the goal here is to kill, to keep children from being born, that’s what the pill does, that’s what its point is, to keep children from being born. Now one of the things about the day-after pill is a girl doesn’t know if she’s pregnant, she doesn’t know if conception happened so gets it, she’s like the one in the firing squad, there’s usually one person in the old firing squad who had a blank, she gets the comfort of knowing perhaps that she had the blank and she didn’t actually put the bullet into the baby’s head.

So there is the killing aspect of this but you’re right if the winds of society don’t change the direction they’re blowing not only do I see that this FDA ruling will stand, I believe it will go all the way to the judges’ utopian idea that girls, if they can ask for it they can get it. In fact, I believe you will probably see within a decade that this will be available in vending machines in elementary and junior highs in the near future, within about ten years or so, you just go to the vending machine, put in your fifty cents, get your day-after pill and go on about your life. The social consequences are catastrophic.

After insisting that President Obama’s gun policies are “intended to make sure that people will be slaughtered by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands,” Alan Keyes is now warning that Obama is encouraging the “targeted slaughter” of African Americans by supporting legal abortion.

Keyes, who was Obama’s opponent in the 2004 US Senate race, told conservative commentator Stan Solomon last week that “a lot of black folks are waking up and realizing that there is a terrible tragedy that is playing out in the person of Barack Obama,” whom he claimed African Americans have “come close to worshiping instead of God.”

He went on to say that Obama is “implementing the agenda of death and murder” and “represents the open maw of a charnel house into which the future hopes of the Black-American community are to be fed.”

Watch:

Just like last year, the Florida Family Association is getting ready to fly banners condemning “Gay Day” at Disney World this June.

In a press release, the group notes that “the State of Florida does NOT prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” urging Disney to exercise its “right to prohibit people from entering the park with tee shirts that promote LGBT behavior.”

FFA head David Caton told the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow the organization has two planes flying banners in English and Spanish telling people to avoid Disney World out of fear that there will be people “promoting their various alternative lifestyles.”

The AFA’s One Million Moms is also upset about Gay Day, urging members to contact Disney and tell them that they are acting in an “irresponsible” way by not forbidding the event which “is planned with the intent to expose and desensitize children to this lifestyle by same-sex couples holding hands, hugging and kissing.”

Gay Day at the Magic Kingdom in Disney World on Saturday, June 1, 2013 will expose thousands of children to lifestyle. Please send your email to officials.

How would you feel if you entered the Magic Kingdom anticipating a normal day of fun with your family only to witness thousands of same-sex couples holding hands, hugging, kissing and wearing tee-shirts that promoted their lifestyle?

…

Disney’s official email response to critics of Gay Day erroneously pretends that they have nothing to do with Gay Day and have no control over who enters their park. Disney’s email response is posted below. The following facts clearly contradict Disney’s position.

• Disney has prohibited drag queens from entering the Magic Kingdom following Gay Day 1991 when even the mainstream media reported in a negative light the estimated 1,800 cross dressers in the park with children. Yet, Disney continues to allow thousands of people to wear shirts promoting homosexuality.

• Dozens of gang members visiting Disneyland in California have been evicted after entering the park wearing gang colors according to Kenneth Green, Director of Corporate Communications. He said the company was concerned the groups might intimidate or invoke fear in the hearts of regular patrons.

So, Disney can see where a dozen people wearing gang colors might be offensive to regular families but not thousands of same-sex revelers wearing shirts that flaunt and promote homosexual, lesbian and transgender behavior.

• Disney provided special group discount tickets with a pink Mickey logo for Gay Day Patrons.

• Disney paid personnel to hand out special pamphlets to Gay Day patrons informing them of organized activities.

• Disney paid personnel to greet Gay Day patrons at the front gate.

• Disney recruited employees to be guides for special groups of Gay Day patrons.

• Disney gave free Disney tee shirts to people who complained that they did not know that the red shirt they innocently wore meant they supported Gay Day.

• The State of Florida does NOT prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Disney has clearly played a role in helping to sponsor this event for years and allows activities they could otherwise prevent. Disney has the right to prohibit people from entering the park with tee shirts that promote LGBT behavior but deliberately chooses to allow this to occur in the midst of thousands of children.

Star Parker is out with a new column congratulating Mark Sanford for winning his race for Congress, calling him a “consistent, principled, and courageous conservative” who has “pulled in two streams of conservatives – the economic conservatives and the social conservatives” throughout his political career.

The ringing endorsement of a politician who used taxpayer dollars to pursue an extramarital affair which led to divorce and censure by the legislature is particularly rich because Parker has made a career railing against the left for supposedly promoting promiscuity and weakening the institution of marriage.

At last year’s Values Voter Summit she derided Sandra Fluke as a “national icon for sexual promiscuity” who needs to learn from her own “sexual rampage,” and she told James Dobson in an interview that “sexual promiscuity” along with “sexual irresponsibility and immorality” are responsible for the country’s economic crisis.

Parker’s salute to Sanford as a “seasoned, principled, and exciting conservative politician and leader” even includes a dig at Jason Collins: “Perhaps if Sanford's adultery were a gay affair liberal's would be more understanding.”

Put me down as happy to see former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford coming back to Washington. Earlier this week he handily defeated Elizabeth Colbert Busch in a special election for a House seat he himself once held.

…

He has always been a consistent, principled, and courageous conservative. And he has always done it with showmanship and clarity that gets the points across to voters.

He unfurled this showmanship in this campaign of redemption, in which he was combatting not just his opponent, but also his deeply tarnished image as result of serious ethical transgressions during his second term as governor.

The story is well known. While governor, Sanford conducted an adulterous affair, disappeared to visit the woman in Argentina, lied about his whereabouts, and misused state funds in making the trip.

Sinful stuff.

He survived to serve out his second term as Governor, but departed as what seemed to be permanently damaged political goods.

…

Those personal transgressions have, of course, been raw meat for those on the left.

According to Alexandria Lapp, executive director the House Majority Pac, which poured some $450,000 into ads and mail against Sanford, "The House Republican Caucus has added yet another ethically challenged embarrassment who will be an albatross around the neck of every Republican forced to answer for Sanford's embarrassing and reckless behavior."

The irony does not drip but pours forth like a tsunami when liberals start talking about morality and ethics.

A few weeks ago Washington Wizards basketball player Jason Collins announced that he is gay. This was an event of such apparent import that he received a congratulatory phone call from the leader of the Democrat Party, President Obama, and an official tweet from first lady Michelle. Both expressed their pride and joy about Collins' courageous coming out.

The plight of Carolyn Moos, the woman with whom Collins was living for eight years, and to whom he at one point was engaged, was apparently of no interest to the Obamas, despite the President's supposed great concern for women's affairs, nor was the deceptive life that Collins lived with her.

Moos, 34, expressed distress at eight wasted prime years with Collins, who she said she never had a hint was gay and living a double life, and with whom she actually believed marriage and children were in the cards.

Perhaps if Sanford's adultery were a gay affair liberal's would be more understanding.

When the National Republican Congressional Committee pulled their support from Sanford's race following the news that he trespassed in the home of his former wife (to watch the Super Bowl with his son), support came in from both FreedomWorks PAC and the National Right to Life PAC.

Sanford's persona pulled in two streams of conservatives – the economic conservatives and the social conservatives – that many see at odds with each other.

A seasoned, principled, and exciting conservative politician and leader is exactly what Republicans need today.

Welcome back to Washington, Mark Sanford.

It apparently doesn’t matter that a Texas student athlete who had claimed he and his team were disqualified from a race over a religious gesture recanted his allegations and admitted that he made it all up, as it appears that Religious Right groups intend to pursue the story anyway.

The debunked accusation, promoted by Fox News and even Gov. Rick Perry, was featured as the top story on Liberty Counsel’s radio show Faith & Freedom even after the student and his father both acknowledged that the disqualification had nothing to do with religious expression.

Today, Truth In Action Ministries today is promoting the fabricated case as well, with Newcombe citing the fictitious account to warn of the imminent threats to the freedoms of religion and speech.

Virtually every week there is some outrageous story of an alleged violation of the separation of church and state. They’re becoming so frequent that they are often met with a collective yawn.

The crazy thing about all this is how removed this is from the clear intent of the founders themselves---as seen in their documents, in their actions, in their words, etc.

One recent incident that blows me away is that involving a high school junior sprinter in a competition in Texas. His team, the Columbus High School Mighty Cardinals, had a chance to compete at the state level, until he did something egregious.

What did he do? What was his crime? After a successful run, as one of four runners (100 meters each in a relay), he pointed his finger to the sky---in a gesture of thanksgiving to God.

This one gesture now disqualifies his team because it was supposedly an “excessive celebration”---which is not allowed.

His father was dumbfounded, according to Alexander Marlow of Breitbart News (May 3, 2103): "It was a reaction," said the father, "You're brought up your whole life that God gives you good things, you're blessed."

It dawned on me that if that young man had given an obscene gesture to his team’s opponents, and he were likewise punished, the ACLU would have been at that young man’s defense faster than he had run the 100-meters.

Let me ask a question in this case: Where’s the church? Where’s the state?

Why is it that any sort of Christian expression in the public arena is not allowed, but virtually every other expression is allowed?