Brian Tashman's blog

Yesterday, Religious Right broadcaster Janet Parshall hosted ex-gay activists Joe Dallas and Nancy Heche, actress Anne Heche’s mom, to discuss their new book “The Complete Christian Guide to Understanding Homosexuality.”

A caller, John, said that based on his personal experiences with gays and lesbians he doesn’t consider homosexuality to be an “emotional or choice-oriented kind of decision” as they seem “compelled to be this way.”

Heche responded that gays and lesbians might seem different from straight people because they are trying to conform to the norms of the gay community, much like “when teenage girls start wearing makeup then they all want to wear makeup and if the in-group is wearing frilly skirts and ruffle t-shirts then everybody is going to wear a ruffle t-shirt.”

Caller: Their behavior doesn’t seem to be affected, it seems to be genuine and it seems that they are compelled to be this way. I don’t know if it’s hormonal differences or whatever chemical differences in the endocrine system in the body that affect the brain and the body but there is something going on that’s more than just emotional or choice-oriented kind of decisions that these people make.

Heche: What I think is that oftentimes once one associates herself or himself with a gay community or a gay fellowship group they settle in and want to make a distinction from others — others in the heterosexual world — they want to make a distinction and a statement about who they are. I’m just saying this might be 1 percent of the people you’re talking about or 99 percent, but sometimes I think people make a point to adapt and adopt to the community that they are associating with. It’s kind of like this when teenage girls start wearing makeup then they all want to wear makeup and if the in-group is wearing frilly skirts and ruffle t-shirts then everybody is going to wear a ruffle t-shirt. That might be very oversimplifying it but I think it is maybe a tiny explanation for a small group of people that you’re talking about. Does that make sense? Do you understand what I’m saying?

Dallas, meanwhile, said that even if it becomes scientifically proven that homosexuality is not a choice, gays and lesbians should suppress their sexuality in the same way that individuals who have predispositions to violence must suppress their violent urges.

Parshall: Let’s just say for discussion sake that we come out with a peer-reviewed, vetted, highly-scrutinized study that says: Tada! Definitively there is a gene, you are predisposed. God is not the author of confusion, He tells us in His word ‘don’t frustrate your children,’ so would God then say, ‘I’ve designed you that way and then I’m going to turn around and say that if you act on that behavior I’m going to call it a sin’? This is an argument all three of us have heard many a time, so how do we respond to that?

Dallas: First of all, even if we are born with something it does not mean that God designed that something. There are many external and internal inborn realities that God never intended. So I would not presume that if something is inborn that God ordained it, whether we are talking about something as serious as a birth defect or if we’re talking about, as you said Janet, a predisposition. I do think that for that individual who has a predisposition, whether it is to violence, or addictive behavior or homosexuality, that will be an area of weakness in their life and if they want to live an obedient life they’re going to be called to deal with that area of weakness in their life. But the fact that it may even be inborn would not be an excuse to indulge it.

Pat Robertson has been on the attack against environmentalists as of late, and yesterday the 700 Club host warned that environmentalist policies may cause billions of people to die.

Robertson maintained that the “out of control” Environmental Protection Agency “has been run by doctrinaire leftists” who are attacking “American industry, especially fossil fuels.”

After he went on a rant about new rules impacting coal power plants, Robertson said that the ultimate “goal” of the environmental movement is to create “a more pastoral, rural kind of existence and if a couple billion people around the globe die from starvation because of it that’s just tough luck.”

Watch:

Gary Bauer filled in for Family Research Council head Tony Perkins on Washington Watch yesterday where he once again blamed the Republican Party’s problems on a lack of opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights.

Bauer, who once led the FRC but now runs American Values and the Campaign for Working Families, chided President Obama for favoring marriage equality and claimed that “if Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today” he would condemn Obama’s pro-gay rights stance, which Bauer said “twisted and distorted” the legacy of the civil rights movement.

“But in spite of all we’ve done, all of our work, everything that you’ve done at the grassroots level,” Bauer lamented, “we are right on the edge of losing that issue.”

Later in the program, Bauer told a caller from North Carolina that the sole reason Romney won the state and no other swing states was because Bauer ran ads there attacking Obama’s position on marriage equality.

“We lost them all again except for one state and it was North Carolina,” Bauer said. “I believe the only reason that Gov. Romney won North Carolina was because the voters of that state were reminded of that issue, so it’s a lesson I think for the Republican Party.”

Let me give a tip of the hat to North Carolina, you know in 2008 President Obama won all of the swing states that are so important in presidential politics. In this last presidential election in 2012 there was a major effort made by conservatives to get those swing states back. Unfortunately, we lost them all again except for one state and it was North Carolina. The people of North Carolina took another look at Barack Obama and decided, ‘hey, we made a mistake four years ago,’ and this time around they voted differently. I’d like to think at least in part that happened in North Carolina because of some ads that I and other groups ran in that state on the marriage issue, reminding the voters of North Carolina who had just voted just a little over a year ago to keep marriage between a man and a woman, that President Obama had come out right after that vote and had endorsed same-sex marriage. I believe the only reason that Gov. Romney won North Carolina was because the voters of that state were reminded of that issue, so it’s a lesson I think for the Republican Party.

That’s right; Bauer thinks that this ad put Romney over the top in North Carolina.

During an appearance on The Janet Mefferd Show this week, Frank Gaffney of the far-right Center for Security Policy argued that the Obama administration has a “determination to pursue what amounts to the Sharia blasphemy agenda of our enemies” by “suppressing freedom of expression in this country.” Gaffney was referring to the arrest of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man behind the anti-Islam film “The Innocence of Muslims.”

Of course, Nakoula was not arrested for his role in the film but for violating his probation stemming from a 2010 bank fraud conviction. Gaffney also maintained that “he is the only person who has thus far been incarcerated as a result of this [Benghazi] episode,” even though just over a week ago a suspect in the attack was arrested in Libya and late last year suspects were arrested in Egypt and Tunisia.

Mefferd: What about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker who last we heard is still in jail, what are we to make of that, the fact that he blasphemed Islam so-called and is still in jail.

Gaffney: Well this is a critically important point, Janet; he is the only person who has thus far been incarcerated as a result of this episode. And more to the point, what we have now is growing evidence of the Obama administration’s willingness and indeed determination to pursue what amounts to the Sharia blasphemy agenda of our enemies, that is to say suppressing freedom of expression in this country which is our constitutional right, which is a scandal further.

In his latest WorldNetDaily column, Alan Keyes warns that “so-called libertarians” have a “rebellious arrogance that disdains decent self-government” because they are unable to see “the distinction between liberty and licentiousness.”

Keyes specifically pointed to gay rights as a reason to oppose libertarians: “By promoting so-called homosexual rights, they are engaged in a general offensive to disparage, subvert and ultimately deny the constitutional rights” of the “God-endowed family, the primordial institution that is the paradigm, in terms both of liberty and obligation, for natural justice and human community.”

He concludes that the “regressive elitist faction agenda” will discard “the incomparably successful American experiment in principled self-government” and “give way, first to disorder and dissolution and then, in all likelihood, to the most thoroughly totalitarian elitist despotism humankind has ever known.”

Thus, as a logical consequence of the principles of the Declaration, every valid claim of right is associated with the freedom to exercise the right. But in light of those same principles, not every exercise of freedom entails a valid claim of right. This is the essential point forgotten or willfully rejected by many so-called libertarians these days. As a result, they advocate positions that ignore what America’s founders were determined to respect, to wit, the distinction between liberty and licentiousness; and between the wholesome courage wherewith we stand upon our rights and the rebellious arrogance that disdains decent self-government.

As I point out in the essay on Ninth Amendment rights quoted above, the Declaration’s logic in this respect allows Americans to recognize and properly assert rights not mentioned in the Constitution. The 9th Amendment exists to provide them with clear constitutional grounds upon which to stand as they invoke these rights, as constraints upon government power.

At the moment, the relevance of this constitutional claim is painfully obvious. The elitist faction forces presently controlling the U.S. government and some state governments (including Republicans as well as Democrats) are moving to deny the constitutional right of individuals or states to oppose the taking of human life, as required by the first law of “nature and Nature’s God.” They are doing so in the context of an insidious, persistent assault on Second Amendment rights. They are also doing so in the context of Obamacare, as they prepare, by force of unconstitutional edicts and “laws,” to deny the constitutional right of individuals and States to refuse complicity in so-called health-care practices that disregard this same life-preserving natural law obligation. In addition, by promoting so-called homosexual rights, they are engaged in a general offensive to disparage, subvert and ultimately deny the constitutional rights – rooted in obligations antecedent to any and all humanly instituted law or government – that are inherent in the God-endowed family, the primordial institution that is the paradigm, in terms both of liberty and obligation, for natural justice and human community.

The Constitution’s Ninth Amendment provides the key to recognizing and justifying legal and other moves to oppose what amounts, on every front, to a wholesale assault on the first principle of constitutional self-government in the United States, i.e., the Declaration’s affirmation of God-endowed individual rights. Next week I plan to post an article at my blog in which I will discuss specific instances in which politicians and other public figures, who claim to be conservatives, are cooperating with this assault. By discussing these examples, I hope to awaken Americans committed to our founding principles, and to the constitutional republic based upon them, to a simple fact: No one prominently associated with, or promoted by, either of the so-called major parties appears to shares this commitment. Unless Americans who do share it rouse themselves and unite against the regressive elitist faction agenda, the incomparably successful American experiment in principled self-government will give way, first to disorder and dissolution and then, in all likelihood, to the most thoroughly totalitarian elitist despotism humankind has ever known.

Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute discussed the upcoming Supreme Court cases on marriage equality yesterday with host Jim Schneider on VCY America’s Crosstalk.

After a caller on the show ranted about how homosexuality is “Satanic,” Schneider called it an “anti-God lifestyle.” Dacus agreed and added that homosexuality, along with “looseness in the heterosexual community,” are signs that society is “openly waving our fist at God.”

Dacus said increasing support for marriage equality proves that people are unaware of the dangers of homosexuality: “When you look at it statistically, the medical ramifications, the psychiatric ramifications, the suicide rate, they’re way off the charts.”

“If we’re a compassionate nation, a loving nation and we care,” Dacus explained, “then we’re not going to want to salute something that is so dangerous and so destructive statistically to so many people who decide to engage in it.”

Schneider: We’re seeing a mass exodus Brad from those who once held to the belief to capitulate to the winds that are blowing today in our society and even a poll just released this week by the Washington Post and ABC News indicating support for same-sex marriage has never been higher, they claim that 58 percent of Americans now believe gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to wed.

Dacus: It’s most unfortunate because it’s a slippery slope, number one, and number two they’re not taking into account the real meaning which is to dilute the sanctity and the definition of marriage that God has given us and that the laws of nature have given us and there’s going to be ramifications for that. When you look at it statistically, the medical ramifications, the psychiatric ramifications, the suicide rate, they’re way off the charts and so how anyone can think that it’s in the best interest of America, promoting our general welfare, to change our definition of marriage in view of the ramifications and impact, just purely from an objective and secular perspective, makes absolutely no sense and I think we need to be better communicators of that harm. If we’re a compassionate nation, a loving nation and we care, then we’re not going to want to salute something that is so dangerous and so destructive statistically to so many people who decide to engage in it.

He argued that the members of the United Methodist church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which decided not to perform marriages as long as same-sex couples are denied marriage rights, are “betrayers of the teachings of the Lord” and “have decided to no longer make the Lord the lord of their life or lord of their church.”

Schneider: Another disturbing report came out Monday from CBS News that the Green Street United Methodist Church in North Carolina is actually electing to stop performing marriage ceremonies for straight couples until same-sex marriage is legalized and asking other churches to join them. Brad, in cases like this all I see is the word Ichabod, “the glory of God has departed.”

Dacus: Yeah, when a church decides to take that position it’s discouraging to see them do that because they obviously have decided to no longer make the Lord the lord of their life or lord of their church. They decided to follow the ways of man and “what tickles the ear of the day.” You know Galatians makes it very clear that we can’t be both pleasers of man and pleasers of God which means sometimes we’re not going to be very popular, sometimes when society decides to turn a different direction we can be rejected. But when you see churches do that and people holding themselves out as followers of the Lord and yet being betrayers of the teachings of the Lord and of scripture, it’s very serious to not only the congregation but it’s also especially serious to those in leadership positions abusing their authority.

Sen. Rand Paul’s chief of staff Doug Stafford appears to be scrambling to explain the Senator’s recent comments during a CNN interview where he said there would be “thousands of exceptions” to his “Life at Conception Act,” a federal personhood bill that would ban all abortion by granting legal status to embryos. He added that “each individual case would have to be addressed” and that there will “be a lot of complicated things the law may not ultimately be able to address in the early stages of pregnancy that would have to be part of what occurs between the physician and the woman and the family.”

Understandably, many people interpreted his comments to mean that the government shouldn’t be intruding on the medical decisions that are unique to each woman, or the opposite of what his sweeping anti-choice law would do.

But in an interview with LifeSiteNews, Stafford stressed that Paul’s mention of “thousands of exceptions” only “meant that a singular exception to save the life of the mother would likely cover thousands of individual cases.”

So the “thousands of exceptions” was only really one exception.

And when Paul said that women, their doctord and their families would be free from government interference during the early stage of the pregnancy, Stafford said that Paul was only referring to emergency contraception that prevents fertilization.

Emergency contraception, of course, only works up to 120 hours after sexual intercourse.

Stafford noted that such methods won’t be covered by the law because “it is not practically possible to legislate things like the morning after pill or other emergency contraception,” while stressing that Paul still seeks to ban RU-486.

Some pro-life activists were left scratching their heads after a recent interview Senator Rand Paul did on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN show “The Situation Room,” in which the senator seemed to say he supported “thousands of exceptions” to his general belief that abortion should be illegal. But Paul spokesman Doug Stafford told LifeSiteNews.com in an interview on Wednesday that the senator’s remarks were misunderstood, reiterating that Paul is staunchly pro-life.

…

After the interview, the Atlantic Wire ran a story with the headline “Rand Paul Isn’t 100% Pro-life Anymore,” arguing that the language Paul used in his answer sounded remarkably similar to pro-choice rhetoric claiming abortion should always be a private matter between a woman and her doctor.

But Paul’s chief of staff, Doug Stafford, said the Atlantic got it wrong.

Paul “was speaking medically,” Stafford said.

By “thousands of exceptions,” Stafford told LifeSiteNews.com, Paul meant that a singular exception to save the life of the mother would likely cover thousands of individual cases – for example, ectopic pregnancies or others that directly threaten the mother’s life.

The senator is not in favor of the more nebulous “health of the mother” exception that pro-life advocates argue can be applied to any woman facing an unwanted pregnancy.

But what about Paul’s statement that the Life at Conception Act may not be able to address early abortions? That, too, was a misunderstanding, according to Stafford. He said the senator was talking about things like emergency contraception pills, which may cause very early abortions, but since they contain the exact same drugs used in standard birth control pills, the senator believes they will be nearly impossible to ban.

Senator Paul “has always said it is not practically possible to legislate things like the morning after pill or other emergency contraception,” Stafford said. “It simply isn't possible to do so. The law will likely never be able to reach that.”

“You can legislate abortifacients like RU-486, and he would,” he said. “But you can’t legislatively ban artificial estrogen and progesterone.”

Following a news story on the 700 Club about the Profitable Sunrise investment scam, televangelist Pat Robertson told viewers to beware “scamsters in religious garb quoting the Bible, I mean run from them.”

Of course, if CBN viewers actually followed Robertson's advice, he'd be in deep trouble.

Watch:

Steve Deace once again hosted far-right activist Michael Peroutka on his radio show to discuss the talk show host’s latest column on same-sex marriage and why we should not “validate relationships western civilization, heavily influenced by Biblical moral teaching, has up until now said for over a thousand years were immoral, destructive, and counter-procreative.” Peroutka explained that “the state has perverted” what “God called marriage,” and if we followed God’s laws then there would be “no way we are ever going to validate homo or sodomite-unmarriage.”

This can’t last, we are killing our own children, we are burying our own country; at some point reality has to set in. I like to use the term ‘reality,’ another term you use in your article you talk about if we can ‘wave a magic wand’ and that’s interesting because that’s an allusion to illusion. But what we really need is a dose of reality, what we need to do is wave reality over this situation and go back to what God called marriage, not what the state has perverted the definition to be but what God called marriage. That’s what we need to return to. There is no way we are ever going to validate homo or sodomite-unmarriage because God defined marriage as between a man and a woman once and forever.

Apparently the reason we aren’t following God’s moral code on the issue of marriage or other social issues, according to Peroutka, is because of the Unions victory in the Civil War, or as he called it: “The War Between the States.”

He argued that the South’s defeat opened the door to a “huge black hole of centralized power,” which means that people began looking to the government, rather than God, as the source of their rights.

Peroutka said that “the real effect of the War and the Reconstruction after the war was to take the very foundation of our understanding of our rights away from us, that is to say that they come from God, and put them in the hands of men,” who can then change the meaning of concepts like marriage.

Somehow we don’t think that this neo-Confederate logic is going to do a lot to help marriage equality opponents rescue their plummeting poll numbers.

Deace: What we’re coming down to here is: What is the law? Who determines it? How do we know that’s the right determination? Who gets to essentially apply and impose their interpretation of where the law comes from and what the law is? And we’re seeing that played out and frankly divisively with the marriage issue.

Peroutka: That’s right. When you ask me a question about this issue or other social issues, I always go back to these two standards: What does God say and what does the Constitution say? I don’t go to what many people, political talking heads, go to: What is politically effective? What does conservatism say? What does the Republican Party say? I go where our founders would’ve gone and where they did in fact go to declare their independence from Great Britain, they said: What does God say about this? And then in this case, what does the constitution say? So those are the standards I’m always going to use, it’s a new issue but it’s the same standard.

Deace: It’s the standard that founded this country, all the way from the Puritans to the people that ratified the Constitution.

Peroutka: And ever since, well there have been a number of watershed events in American history that have taken us away from this view that I’m describing, this American view. One of them was ‘The War Between the States.’ Ever since then there’s been this huge black hole of centralized power that’s formed in Washington D.C. People sometimes talk about ‘The War Between the States’ as being about the issue of slavery, I believe that history is written by the winners, it wasn’t about that at all. What it was about was consolidating power into the hands of a few people.

One of the best ways I’ve ever heard this explained to me was I was at a formal dinner party one time and a number of us at the table, a couple of gentlemen were talking about this issue and one lady piped up and she said, “Now don’t you start talking about that my great-great-granddaddy fought for the state of Illinois.” A gentleman at the table looked at her and said, “Mam, your great-great-granddaddy didn’t fight for Illinois, he fought for Washington D.C., maybe New York City, the banking interests, and by so doing he conquered Illinois, along with South Carolina and Tennessee and Alabama.” It was one of the best ways I think I’ve ever heard it explained because the real effect of the War and the Reconstruction after the war was to take the very foundation of our understanding of our rights away from us, that is to say that they come from God, and put them in the hands of men and say that they come from the Supreme Court or they come from the legislature or they come from the executive.

Angered by Sen. Rob Portman’s newfound support for marriage equality and an unofficial pro-gay rights panel at CPAC, Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality is warning the GOP against “trying to ‘out-gay’ the Democrats.”

LaBarbera’s advises Portman and others to treat their gay family members like drug addicts rather than support them, which he says would be “like telling a loved one who is has a drug problem: ‘I love you so much that I’m going to send you a five ounces of cocaine every month, because that’s how much I care.’”

He claims Portman “kicked God to the curb” and that Hillary Clinton, who recently endorsed marriage equality, “blasphemes her Creator.”

“No nation can survive moral decay of the sort America is experiencing,” LaBarbera writes. “It is the height of folly to dumb down conservatism and jettison the wholesome dictates of the Bible and Christianity because the “Glee” Generation has a new idea about sodomy.”

In the midst of the CPAC gathering, news broke that Sen. Portman had flip-flopped on homosexual “marriage” because his 21-year-old son Will is a homosexual. Thus Portman succumbed to the emotionalism and illogic that dominate post-Christian America. Employing some awful theology, he kicked God to the curb — as is becoming habit in a land that increasingly mocks its own national motto, “In God We Trust.”

Here is a dose of Politically Incorrect truth: homosexual behavior is sinful (read: always wrong in the eyes of God), unnatural, destructive and yet – thankfully – changeable. To become homosexual-affirming because someone you love announces he or she is homosexual is the antithesis of “tough love.” It’s like telling a loved one who is has a drug problem: “I love you so much that I’m going to send you a five ounces of cocaine every month, because that’s how much I care.”

…

How should conservatives and Republicans respond to the tidal wave of misinformation and the largely liberal and libertarian campaign to normalize homosexual perversion? Certainly not by trying to “out-gay” the Democrats on the issue — which will never happen anyway. If the time-honored Judeo-Christian marital ethic is not worth “conserving,” what is? Shame on any “conservative” who buys into the radically egalitarian proposition that all relationships “equally” deserve marriage, and that civil rights laws should be twisted to accommodate those practicing deviant sex and gender confusion.

Moreover, both conservatives and self-styled libertarians should be outraged at the threat to liberty posed by “Big Gay Government.” Even before homosexual “marriage” emerged as the main battlefront in this debate, “sexual orientation” laws were the Left’s tool of choice to force Christians and moral-minded institutions like the Boy Scouts of America to affirm homosexuality. (The Boy Scouts went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the right to operate by their own “morally straight” code, but “gay” activist pressure against them never let up and now the BSA is on the verge of overturning the policy.) Where is the outcry from libertarians and freedom-loving conservatives at the threat to citizens’ freedom of conscience and association posed by pro-LGBT laws — which, ironically, discriiminate [sic] against traditionalists in the name of “nondiscrimination”?

…

American conservatism cannot divorce itself from Christianity and biblical revelation; in fact, it is wrapped up in the defense of Judeo-Christian mores. Yes, conservatives and Christians alike will be vilified by homosexual activists if they criticize “gay marriage” or any aspect of the LGBT agenda. But what kind of conservative or Christian turns tail after getting flack for standing on principle? If ever there were a cultural tide to stand against it is the LGBT agenda and sexual immorality in general, for no nation can survive moral decay of the sort America is experiencing. (In that sense, we are not “exceptional.”)

Even if polls are semi-accurate in gauging cultural trends, bending to worldly falsehoods and irrational public policy is the stuff of humanists and moral relativists — not “conservatives” and certainly not biblical Christians who accept and defend absolute Truth (right versus wrong).

As for “gay conservatives,” beware of homosexuals like Tammy Bruce and GOProud, who sound and act much more like “gay” activists than conservatives whenever their special interest — justifying their own dysfunctional embrace of homosexuality — is involved.

As for the pro-homosexual ”Christian Left,” faithful believers must insist that homosexuality be treated like other sins in the Bible. (Have you ever heard of a “Porn-Users Pride Parade,” or been called an “adultery-phobe”?) Homosexuality is what you do, not who you are, and Jesus Christ has set many men and women free from this besetting sin. Hillary Clinton may be good at politics, but she blasphemes her Creator by using His Holy name to support her faithless push for counterfeit “marriage” based on conduct that God Himself calls an abomination.

It is the height of folly to dumb down conservatism and jettison the wholesome dictates of the Bible and Christianity because the “Glee” Generation has a new idea about sodomy. Instead, principled conservatives need to fight back against politically correct shibboleths and bravely stay the course; defend transcendent Truth against modern, secularist lies; affirm marriage (one-man, one-woman) and virtuous morality for everyone; and return to reason and the biblical idealism of yesteryear.