Anti-Gay

For decades, the gay community and its allies have been doing incredible work combating HIV/AIDS and providing care for people with the virus, but according to anti-gay activists Janet Mefferd and Peter LaBarbera, gay rights supporters have tried to whitewash the epidemic and show little compassion to HIV-positive people.

While discussing LaBarbera’s “20 Resolutions for Pro-Family Advocates Battling the Homosexual-Transgender Agenda in 2013” on her radio show, Mefferd said that the Religious Right had an opening to exploit the issue of HIV/AIDS “because we’ll say, we care about people who are having terrible diseases because of the behavior and where is the compassion on your side for these people who have these illnesses?”

Of course, Mefferd and LaBarbera have both defended efforts to criminalize LGBT status, which only exacerbates the spread of HIV.

LaBarbera: Boy, about fifty years ago the whole issue of homosexual behavior was taboo. Now, they are basically running society, they are deciding which issues get covered on the news, which people get to speak at inaugurals, I mean wow, this country is really de-Christianizing fast.

Mefferd: That’s right. One of the things you’ve mentioned and this is one of your resolutions as well, but you mention the fact that we don’t talk very much at all anymore about the health consequences of the behavior. It used to be in the ’80s when then AIDS crisis was at its peek peak at the time, when Elizabeth Taylor and everybody came out and they had the red ribbons at every awards show and everything, everybody wanted to raise money and solve the AIDS crisis; people aren’t talking about AIDS anymore and yet it is still an issue, isn’t it? We still have venereal diseases and all kinds of bad health consequences to this, how are they successful and able to get this whole subject to be something we don’t talk about anymore?

LaBarbera: Well, it’s just the media, they have the media in their pocket and so the media is like a massive affirmative action program for the gay agenda, the media does not want to talk about the obvious connection between homosexual behavior and sexual diseases, especially for men. I put in my point four on my list, you know getting back to the behavior, try Googling ‘MSM, ‘CDC’ and ‘HIV,’ and you get this laundry list of articles about the strong, disproportionate connection between men who have sex with men and sexual diseases like HIV.

Mefferd: And on that point we could really make a lot of progress because we’ll say, we care about people who are having terrible diseases because of the behavior and where is the compassion on your side for these people who have these illnesses? This is awful.

LaBarbera: Absolutely.

This post has been updated, 1/16.

Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality spoke to Vic Eliason of VCY America about his twenty “Resolutions for Pro-Family Advocates Battling the Homosexual Agenda in 2013” on Crosstalk yesterday. When a caller told him that she does not “accept the behavior” of her gay son and forbids him and his partner from “staying in my house together,” LaBarbera said that accepting her son’s homosexuality is “a lie from the pit of Hell” and commended her for “praying for your son to be delivered out of that lifestyle.”

Caller: The reason I’m calling is I have a son that’s homosexual and my thing of it is, it’s what Peter said, even if he is my son I can love him unconditionally, I will not accept the behavior. If he comes to my house and brings a partner, there is no way they are staying in my house together. Jesus said: do you love me more than these? Even though there are children, we are to love him first. Jesus will bring our children out but we’ve got to be on our knees before the Lord and on our face. We bombard Heaven for their deliverance and at the same time we uphold these values before them.

LaBarbera: That’s wonderful. You love your son and that’s not in question. The lie of the other side is to love your son you have to love or embrace his homosexuality, and that’s really a lie from the pit of Hell. We don’t give an alcoholic, we don’t say, ‘I love you so much I’m going to give you a bottle of scotch every month.’ That’s not true love. True love is what you’re talking about, it’s defending godly values and praying for your son to be delivered out of that lifestyle.

Eliason also likened homosexuality to not only drunk driving but also the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, arguing that they are all manifestations of wicked behavior. LaBarbera lamented that the “homosexual movement” has successfully “redefined” and “marketed a sin,” changing the word “gay” to no longer “mean perversion.”

Eliason: Behavior is the problem. Let’s just think back a few weeks to a horrendous thing that happened in that little school where twenty-some little children were killed because of the behavior of an individual who was deranged and in my book, demonic, in what he did. But it was behavior. Let’s talk about a car wreck, when someone is driving drunk and the car goes crashing into someone and kills them, the result is horrendous but it’s because of behavior. And somehow this idea of behavior has escaped us, that everything should be status quo and that people are free to go out and imbibe and commit terrible crimes and violate nature because behavior is ignored.

LaBarbera: That’s a great point, Vic. The homosexual movement specifically is a movement that successfully marketed a sin. That’s what they did, they redefined a sin, marketed it as gay. Vic I had an old-time reader when I first started the Lambda Report, that was my original publication, and her name was Gay Guptill. Boy, was her life made a lot harder when they stole her name. You know the word used to mean merry, it didn’t mean perversion. They redefined that and it only went downhill from there.

Later, Eliason said that not reproaching someone’s homosexuality is much like failing to move “someone who is on a train track who is about to be hit with a speeding train” as homosexuality, according to LaBarbera, is “a ticket to Hell.”

LaBarbera went on to say that President Obama is “not really a Christian” since he supports marriage equality but admitted that he “underestimated” how Obama’s endorsement “would have an impact on the homosexual so-called marriage debate.”

Eliason: If you have someone who is on a train track who is about to be hit with a speeding train, you may have to speak loudly or firmly but the most loving thing you can do is get them off the track.

LaBarbera: Absolutely. Whether the left likes to hear it or not, embracing homosexuality as a lifestyle is a ticket to Hell and we want people not to spend eternity apart from God.

Eliason: We have Wanda standing by in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wanda you are on the line with Peter LaBarbera.

Caller: I just wanted to say that I think it’s more important to be obedient to God rather than to have all this fairness in marriage. I have noticed in reading my Bible that when a country’s leadership was corrupt, the nation usually went along with the corruption and that’s where we’re going right now.

LaBarbera: I think you’re right on. I think that’s part of the reason we lost on the marriage issue. Obama’s corrupt Christianity, so-called, of course he’s not really a Christian with what he’s defending, homosexual marriage. I underestimated how that would have an impact on the homosexual so-called marriage debate.

• Carlos Maza @ Equality Matters: Fox Nation, Rush Limbaugh Peddle Gay Marriage-Pedophilia Link.
• Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Crapo poised for promotion after DUI.
• Noah Rothman @ Mediaite: The Piers Morgan Interview Was Nothing: Watch Alex Jones’ Nine Nuttiest Moments.
• Rebecca Leber @ Think Progress: Gabby Giffords Launches Gun Safety Group, Calls For ‘Responsible Changes In Our Laws.’
• Alvin McEwen: How They See Us: Unmasking The Religious Right War on Gay America.

Forgive us for not buying Liberty University law dean Matt Barber’s attempt to lecture everyone about the Civil Rights Movement in an attempt to smear gay rights advocates. Barber, who is also the Director of Cultural Affairs for Liberty Counsel, on The Janet Mefferd Show yesterday said it is “so offensive to me” and his many African American friends that “sexual anarchists” have “cynically co-opted and hijacked the language of the very, very noble civil rights movement and applied it to their disordered lifestyle.”

“The civil rights era, the true civil rights fight is pretty much over,” Barber later agued, rather astoundingly.

“So people want to be part of something bigger than themselves, they want to feel like they’re doing something important, so they cynically manipulate people and use the language of civil rights in order to dupe well-meaning young people into a cause that is contrary to freedom and facilities a lifestyle that is emotionally, spiritually destructive and doesn’t do society any good either.”

Listen:

Maybe it’s just me, but does anyone else find it problematic that a person whose idol is Jerry Falwell, the founder of Liberty University, is now using the civil rights movement in a harangue against gay rights? Falwell was a fierce opponent of the Civil Rights Movement and a proponent of segregation.

He preached against Brown v. Board of Education, which banned racial segregation in public schools, telling his church, “When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line. The true Negro does not want integration.”

Falwell kept his private Christian school segregated to help families avoid integration in public schools and opposed the Carter administration’s attempt to challenge the tax status of segregated schools. He also subscribed to the belief that black people were under “Noah’s curse on Ham” and argued that school “facilities should be separate.”

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” he said, warning that integration and interracial marriage will “destroy our race.”

Sound familiar?

He condemned the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a “civil wrong” and attacked movement leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., as “Communists” who sought to “bring about violence and bloodshed.” The televangelist even opposed sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid government and said that anti-Apartheid protests were “instigated primarily by Communist-sponsored people.”

Falwell’s rhetoric against the Civil Rights Movement are actually remarkably similar to Matt Barber’s own anti-gay diatribes, as Barber seemed to have taken a page from Falwell in warning that gay rights advocates are inspired by Karl Marx and that radicals “trying to impose a globalist, Communist structure” are the real culprits behind the gay rights movement. He claimed that “homosexual activism, undermining the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic and doing away with it, that is the ice breaker that breaks the ice so that the bigger Communist ships and the redistributionist ships.”

While surely Barber would distance himself from Falwell’s harsh condemnation of the Civil Rights Movement, he is not afraid to use the same harsh and demagogic rhetoric of the late televangelist in order to attack supporters of gay equality.

Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition used the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in order to bolster her campaign against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act over the bill’s protections for LGBT employees. While speaking to Janet Mefferd yesterday about the Orange County, Florida, school system’s new non-discrimination policy that is similar to ENDA, Laffery said that just as parents are upset about the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting and are concerned about keeping their children safe, they should also be worried about ENDA’s “devastating effects” as schools will have “people with some real issues playing out their personal problems in the classroom.”

ENDA, the bill itself as I have been talking about it won’t become law, but they’re going to piece meal it. They’re going to start by making federal contractors—if you want to be a plumber for the government or want to do this, that or the other with the government, you have to comply with this order. They make try and find other ways of doing it, implementing the whole ENDA but I’m not sure exactly how at this point. But what I think people should focus on is: what does this mean locally?

People are really upset because of this tragedy up in Connecticut and protecting our children and we’re going to see some devastating effects. What they did in Florida is they passed a measure which affects adults, teachers, staff and kids. Our concern is that transgender children in schools are a different issue than teachers and staff. What we’re going to see is people with some real issues playing out their personal problems in the classroom.

Like other Religious Right activists who have warned that ENDA will lead to sexual assault and death, Lafferty maintained that ENDA is part of the left’s “open season” on Christians on behalf of “fringe minorities and people that are truly sick.”

Lafferty warned that Chick-fil-A restaurants may soon be “forced” to hire “weirdos” seeking to undermine Christian businesses, warning that transgender people are committing “the ultimate act of self-hatred” and need “special medical treatment” rather than job protections.

Lafferty: I fully expect that depending on how the administration pushes this, we’re going to see people applying for jobs at Chick-fil-A and Christian businesses because families go there because A) the food is good and B) they want to support what Chick-fil-A stands for, and no better way of hurting a Chick-fil-A restaurant than to have a bunch of weirdos working there.

Mefferd: That is so weird you say that because I had an experience like that at Chick-fil-A just a couple of weeks ago, exact same experience. I thought: that’s very strange that this person is working at Chick-fil-A.

Lafferty: They may have chosen to hire this person but they’re going to be forced to.

…

Lafferty: I think minorities, those protected classes, are going to be shocked when they find out that a transgendered man or woman is going to be treated the same as an African American man or woman. That’s not right and the laws will be overridden if ENDA should pass. That’s why they are going jurisdiction by jurisdiction to try and force communities to accept this. This is the ultimate act of self-hatred and we are lifting this up? We should be giving them special medical treatment maybe.

Mefferd: Get them some help.

Lafferty: Not protected class [status].

Televangelist Robert Jeffress used his sermon about Armageddon to argue that America’s defense policy must include banning same-sex marriage, ending abortion rights and weakening the separation of church and state, warning that they will otherwise lead to divine punishment.

Jeffress: I think we ought to have a strong military, but there is absolutely no amount of armaments we could require to protect ourselves against the judgment of almighty God. The best defense policy we could have as a nation, instead of just the acquisition of an endless number of armaments, the best defense policy we could have to protect our nation would be to turn away from ignoring God’s almighty law; to turn away and say no to these things that God has said no to; to turn around and repent from the murder of millions of children in the womb through abortion; to turn away and say no to what God has called an abomination, homosexual marriage; to say no to the continued allowance of God’s named to be blasphemed or be banned from the public square.

Janet Mefferd spoke to Focus on the Family official Glenn Stanton yesterday about a new study in The Quarterly Review of Biology which suggests that epigenetics may explain what causes homosexuality. Right off the bat, the two were wary of the study because its principal researchers work in the field of evolutionary genetics and anyone who believes in the theory of evolution should not be trusted. Stanton maintained that upholding the science of evolution “takes as much faith” as believing in creationism!

Mefferd: It’s strange, you have scientists here headed up by an evolutionary biologist at the University of California Santa Barbara and right away I saw ‘evolutionary biologist.’ Is there more of a propensity do you find for people who subscribe to evolution and have an evolutionary bias to buy into this?

Stanton: They do come with that bias but basically the evolutionary sociobiology as they call it is a very interesting field of study, basically as I read it and I read it all the time because that’s the norm or the orthodoxy, it’s basically trying to utilize evolutionary theory for explaining what God did: there’s a male nature, there’s a female nature, we’re affected by these things. So they talk about our evolutionary development for why men tend to be more sexually adventurous and why women tend to be more sexually conservative, well you know it takes as much faith to believe that these things evolved as it does to say, that’s the way God wired us.

He later argued that any instance where scientific findings contradict his religious views, the science is wrong and leads to rebellion against God.

Stanton: To understand it, at the end of the day there is no real separation between good science and our Christian faith. It was Christians and a Christian worldview that created scientific investigation; it has its roots in that. At the end of the day, God is right, he is true, he is lord, and he set things in orbit, not just inter-planetary, but within our human makeup. When we follow those things, good things happen; when we rebel against them, bad things tend to happen.

Stanton dismissed those who have researched the biological or hormonal link to homosexuality as biased and “politically motivated” ideologues, unlike say a Religious Right activist who has his masters in religion. He concludes by arguing that “quite literally there is more evidence for Bigfoot than there is that homosexuality is just who we are.”

Stanton: Up to now most of the scholars have been politically motivated, they have a very deep, personal interest. But here’s the thing and all your listeners need to know this, there is no evidence whatsoever that has come up in the last twenty years—and not for a lack of trying—but no evidence that has come up in the last twenty years that shows any evidence that homosexuality is solely and purely genetically driven, like we are not born that way. Quite literally, this is a provocative statement, but quite literally there is more evidence for Bigfoot than there is that homosexuality is just who we are, we’re just born that away because of our genetic makeup and you’re not going to hear that from the mainstream media.

Peter LaBarbera and John Kirkwood hosted fellow anti-gay activist Ken Hutcherson on Americans For Truth About Homosexuality Radio Hour to criticize Rick Warren over his interviews with Piers Morgan and Marc Lamont Hill. The three even agreed that Warren should not be giving money to organizations doing HIV/AIDS work that don’t condemn homosexuality because, according to Kirkwoood, it puts Warren “in fellowship with darkness.” They encouraged Warren to donate to ex-gay groups instead, but not Exodus International because they’re not anti-gay enough.

Kirkwood: Rick Warren went on to say how many millions of dollars he’s given to the cause of HIV/AIDS and how he’s worked closely with gay organizations on that. My comment on that is you could give millions of dollars for that cause without having to be unequally yoked and be in fellowship with darkness, without having to work with organizations that openly boast about their sexual perversion.

Hutcherson: There are so many organizations out there, Exodus International, I don’t know if they are continuing to hold on to their strong point but he could’ve given millions of dollars at the time to Exodus International.

LaBarbera: Well we wouldn’t support that now because they are starting to slide. John makes a good point, even a lot of AIDS groups, it’s like the point of faith, it’s not really faith of course, is pro-homosexuality.

Kirkwood: I think he was trying to establish his street cred with homosexuals because then he came out and said, ‘I have many, many homosexual friends.’ Marc Lamont Hill said, ‘I get the love part about AIDS but what about this’?

Hutcherson: I think the correct statement would be one that we make: we’re friends with many, many ex-homosexuals. That should be the statement because homosexuals are not going to stay around me if they don’t want to change.

Hutcherson said that if evangelical leaders like Warren and Americans do not begin to denounce homosexuality more fervently then God is going to get “sick and tired of America” and “really turn loose judgment on us.” LaBarbera added that Morgan is “obsessed” with homosexuality and that it is a religious “sacrament” to him, and Hutcherson explained that Morgan and others “promote homosexuality” and seek to “destroy God’s plan.”

Hutcherson: God does not have the same consequence for the same sin, bro. We’ve got to understand that as Christians and we better wake up soon because I think that one of the things God is showing us is that He’s getting a little sick and tired of America, he’s definitely having a holy throw up fest with his bride, we need to really stand back up and get this unity going or God is going to really turn loose judgment on us.

…

LaBarbera: You can tell what Piers Morgan’s religion is and one of the sacraments is homosexuality, I mean he is obsessed.

Hutcherson: Secularism. They know that if you really want to destroy God’s plan, promote homosexuality.

LaBarbera: Why is that?

Hutcherson: Because that is the sin that God says when you’ve turned a man over to his own lust, there is no hope.

Hutcherson warned that not only is God’s judgment coming but also that the Republic may collapse if the Republicans begin to abandon their anti-gay views, which Kirkwood likened to Republicans in the mid-1800s deserting their strong stance against slavery in order to win Southern votes.

Kirkwood: Ronald Reagan spoke about the three-legged stool and one of those legs was the social—pro-life, and back then it wasn’t even an issue the same-sex marriage thing—but if we abandon that leg of the stool we are no longer the Republican Party, we’d be the Whig Party again. The Republican Party was born on principle, the principle that all men are created equal. Yeah we could have picked up a lot more Southern votes if we didn’t believe that way when we were founded but if we start to believe that way now to prostitute ourselves for votes, they’re going to lose thirty percent of the Republican Party.

Hutcherson: What you’ve got to understand is it’s not just that we’re losing the Republican Party when you eliminate those legs, we’re losing America bro. If you cannot have a moral backing for our Republic, our Republic cannot stand.

Yesterday it was reported that a group of scientists had put forward a new theory that epigenetic marks may play a key role in determining why people are gay.  According to press reports, these "epi-marks" determine how genes are expressed and are normally "erased" between generations, but in cases where they are not erased, they may be passed on from a mother or father in a way that can lead to a child becoming gay.

Which means, according to Bryan Fischer, that homosexuality might be a "birth defect" which could lead prospective parents to choose abortion:

As I have said before, I suspect that not even homosexual activists today want the gay gene to be found, even if it exists, because of advances in prenatal genetic testing. It is now possible to routinely screen for 3500 genetic defects while a child is still in the womb. 

So these activists rationally fear that preborn children who are detected with this gene will be aborted before they even have the chance to be born. After all, if 90% of babies in the womb who are diagnosed with Downs syndrome never draw their first breath, what are the chances that parents disposed to abortion will not exercise the same choice with regard to the gay gene? 

The scientists in Koebler’s article, in my view, are now resorting to genetic subterfuge and are coming dangerously close to saying that homosexuality is the result of a genetic defect, a genetic abnormality. In other words, read from one angle, these same scientists are saying that homosexuality is the result of a birth defect.

...

So in other words, when something goes wrong genetically, and these markers are not erased, the epi-markers which provide an evolutionary advantage to parents instead do evolutionary damage to their offspring.

Now these researchers are quite at pains to avoid saying anything like this, but the logic to me seems inescapable: Homosexual children, on this theory, are born evolutionarily and genetically disadvantaged. They have been overexposed or underexposed to testosterone because something has gone wrong in the process of genetic transmission. In other words, they are the product of a genetic abnormality at best, a birth defect at worst.

...  I expect many abortion-minded parents will want to know exactly how strong this epi-marker is in their unborn children so they can decide whether or not to exercise reproductive choice. 

In fact, I expect that if this theory gains some currency, it will not be long before we have legislation from the homoexual lobby prohibiting “sex-selection” abortions on any child carrying this epi-marker.

UPDATE: Fischer reiterated many of these same points on his radio program today: