Anti-Gay

While sitting down with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council at the Greenwell Springs Baptist Church, Rick Santorum doubled down on his commitment to bring back the discriminatory Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Perkins, a staunch opponent of Don't Ask Don't Tell's repeal, said the Obama administration "has systematically used this military for social experimentation" by "overturning the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy and forcing open homosexuality on the military," asking Santorum if he would "reverse" the repeal. Santorum said the repeal was "not in the best interest of our men and women in uniform" and pledged to restore Don't Ask Don't Tell, but added, "that doesn't mean that people who are gays and lesbians can't serve."

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Jennifer Roback Morse of the National Organization for Marriage’s Ruth Institute appeared on Breakpoint with Chuck Colson this week where she accused the “gay lobby” of “having an absolutely corrupting impact on the whole political process.” She claimed that the gay lobby, along with “rich, Republican, Wall Street guys,” have been able to “buy state legislators” in order to win their votes for marriage equality. “So all of these legislators across the country, it’s like they’re salivating over all this money they might get if they vote the way the gay lobby wants them to,” Morse said, “the gay lobby has figured out that they cannot win a voter referendum, they have never won a voter referendum, it’s easier to buy state legislators than it is to try to buy off a whole population.”

The National Organization for Marriage, of course, repeatedly pledges to spend millions of dollars raised from a handful of out-of-state donors in order to finance the campaigns of any legislator who opposes the legalization of same-sex marriage and support any challenger to a marriage equality supporter, but apparently Morse doesn’t consider the same efforts from her own group “rank political corruption.”

Morse: In a way most ominously something that happened earlier this year is the New York state legislature voted to redefine marriage and the reason I say that one was so ominous is because it was Republican votes that did that and it was rich, Republican, Wall Street guys who came in with a lot of money and said ‘we want to get this done’ and basically they dangled money in front of swing voters, state legislators, and said ‘we’re going to put money into your re-election campaign if you vote the way we want you to.’ Now I’m not just saying that, they wrote about that in the New York Times, they wrote about it in the New York Times, they bragged about it, and to me if that’s not political corruption, I don’t know what it is. I mean, that’s just rank political corruption. So all of these legislators across the country, it’s like they’re salivating over all this money they might get if they vote the way the gay lobby wants them to, so it’s having an absolutely corrupting impact on the whole political process. The gay lobby has figured out that they cannot win a voter referendum, they have never won a voter referendum, it’s easier to buy state legislators than it is to try to buy off a whole population, and that’s where they are, and that’s what’s going on around the country.

After calling GLAAD a tool of the Devil, talk show host Kevin McCullough defended previous statements, listed by GLAAD’s Commentator Accountability Project, that gay couples “despise” marriage and are “seeking to destroy” it. McCullough said that they are indeed trying to “destroy” marriage, but took issue with GLAAD’s use of the term “gay,” because according to McCullough, “I don’t believe that you can be gay.” He said that being gay is a choice and warned that “homosexual behaviors can end up killing you” because “homosexual behaviors when acted upon in the teenage years greatly increases the likelihood if you’re male that you will try to commit suicide.” McCullough is correct in arguing that gay youth do have a higher risk of suicide, but seems to ignore the fact that anti-gay prejudice and bias in society plays a large role in why there is the higher suicide rate.

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They also said that ‘Kevin once said that gay couples both despise marriage and are seeking to destroy it.’ How is that not true? If homosexuals who want to engage in homosexual behavior therefore sexually couple just like themselves, if they are wanting to change the definition of marriage then they are wanting to destroy what current marriage is, that’s just a factual statement that I made. They don’t like the fact that men and women complete one another. They don’t like the fact that that union is so perfect that it sometimes brings children out of it, they don’t like the fact that that is the ability of what a natural marriage relationship brings. So I said they “despise,” they do, “they don’t like normal marriage and they’re seeking to destroy it,” yeah, “by redefining it,” that’s what they are seeking to do, they are seeking to undo what it’s always been. Yeah, I said that, I still believe it. It’s still true.

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I don’t believe that you can be gay. I believe that people engage in homosexual behavior, and I believe that homosexual behaviors can end up killing you, and I think that homosexual behaviors when acted upon in the teenage years greatly increases the likelihood if you’re male that you will try to commit suicide. But that’s what the data says, that’s not what the Kevin McCullough says, that’s what the studies show, that’s what the secular humanist studies indicate about homosexual behavior. I don’t—they are grossly misrepresenting me—they are saying that I said that being gay kills people, no, because I don’t believe that people are gay, I think they behave in homosexual ways but I don’t buy that ‘gay’ is a state of being, I think it’s a series of choices.

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins on Tuesday defended the Parents Action League, a Minnesota group that fiercely lobbied the Anoka-Hennepin school district against implementing anti-bullying policies they believe will make the kids targets of “homosexual propaganda” and result in them being “indoctrinated in homosexuality.” The Parents Action League, a division of the Minnesota Family Council, claims the school district has an “outstanding policy” regarding sexual orientation and gloats that they helped craft it. But the group has come under fire from legal organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and even the Justice Department after a string of teen suicides, so naturally Perkins is standing by the school district’s anti-gay activists:

Perkins: Out of Minnesota where the school board had adopted a neutral policy on homosexuality, where teachers couldn’t be for it or against it and there were a few suicides that took place, which is really kind of tragically a rash, there’s been a rash of suicides, actually it’s been almost growing for a number of years in high schools across the country. Well there may be some cases where these young people are bullied, which is wrong, shouldn’t happen. The Southern Poverty Law Center, teaming up with local homosexual groups, immediately claimed that all these were related to homosexual students being bullied, as it turned out it was not but the damage had already been done. The Southern Poverty Law Center came in threatening a law suit, then brought the Justice Department in—the federal government, going into a local school district—and then in the process a parents organization kind of grew up, the Parents Action League, which was defending the neutral policy, they weren’t against homosexuality, they weren’t for it, but they didn’t want their kids taught something that countered what they were taught at home. Well the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocate in the process for homosexual special rights and special status for homosexuals, labeled the opposing group a hate group for trying to marginalize and stigmatize them in that local debate. Then the Justice Department went forward with consent decree which is onerous, we’ll get into that on Thursday, but it just shows how the other side wants to shut down the debate so they can have their way and push their radical agenda through.

However, as Rolling Stone reported, at least four of the students who committed suicide were bullied for being gay or perceived to be gay:

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied. The tragedies come at a national moment when bullying is on everyone's lips, and a devastating number of gay teens across the country are in the news for killing themselves. Suicide rates among gay and lesbian kids are frighteningly high, with attempt rates four times that of their straight counterparts; studies show that one-third of all gay youth have attempted suicide at some point (versus 13 percent of hetero kids), and that internalized homophobia contributes to suicide risk.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school district's policies on gays are not only discriminatory, but also foster an environment of unchecked anti-gay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well.

Stephanie Mencimer notes that along with the nine suicides, at least seven other students “have been hospitalized for attempting or threatening suicide.” She goes on to write:

There's no sure way of knowing why any of the kids took their own lives, but gay rights activists quickly honed in on one factor they saw as contributing to an unhealthy climate for at-risk kids. Anoka-Hennepin has a policy on the books known colloquially as "no homo promo," which dates in back to the mid-1990s. Back then, after several emotional school board meetings, the district essentially wiped gay people out of the school health curriculum. There could be no discussion of homosexuality, even with regard to HIV and AIDS, and the school board adopted a formal policy that stated school employees could not teach that homosexuality was a "normal, valid lifestyle."

Later the policy was changed to require school staff to remain neutral on issues of homosexuality if they should come up in class, a change that critics said fostered confusion among teachers and contributed to their inability to address bullying and harassment, or to even ask reasonable questions about some of the issues the kids were struggling with, like sexual orientation. Both policies were put into place at the behest of conservative religious activists who have been among Bachmann's biggest supporters in the district. They include the Minnesota Family Council (MFC), and its local affiliate, the Parents Action League, which has lobbied to put discredited "reparative therapy" materials in schools.

But Perkins tells a much different story.

First, he claims that the Southern Poverty Law Center “immediately claimed that all these were related to homosexual students being bullied,” adding, “as it turned out it was not.” However, the SPLC never claimed that all of the suicides were by “homosexual students,” but did argue that anti-gay bullying was “at least in part the result of a gag policy that prevented teachers from discussing issues related to lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people.” Perkins also claimed that the Parents Action League emerged as a result of the SPLC lawsuit, which isn’t true as PAL has been active in the school district for years prior to the SPLC’s involvement. He even claimed that PAL’s members “weren’t against homosexuality,” which is difficult to believe since the organization wants schools to teach reparative therapy, warned that gays and lesbians  have “targeted” students and called homosexuality “one of the most hazardous behaviors that kids could get into.”

But of course, no one should be surprised that Perkins twists the facts in order to promote his anti-gay views, and after misrepresenting the controversy he attacked the SPLC for advocating “special status for homosexuals” and pushing a “radical agenda.”

The Center for Arizona Policy, one of the state’s leading conservative organizations, coming out strongly against legislation in the Arizona State Senate, Senate Bill 1462, in the Arizona State Senate that tackles the problem of school bullying, which is nothing new from right-wing groups. But while Religious Right groups typically claim they oppose anti-bullying policies because they identify “sexual orientation” as a reason that students are bullied, SB 1462 does not mention “sexual orientation” or other enumerated categories. Instead, Center for Arizona Policy says that they oppose the bullying-prevention effort just because groups such as the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network and the Anti-Defamation League support the legislation. There is no doubt about it; the ‘bullying’ theme is agenda-driven propaganda,” the group writes. “The irony is that groups like Equality Arizona and GLSEN have chosen this issue to bully you and me into allowing them access into our schools and to our children.” The group also lashed out at a Teaching Tolerance film, Bullied, which “chronicles one student’s ordeal at the hands of anti-gay bullies and offers an inspiring message of hope to those fighting harassment today.”

The questions arise when one considers which organizations would provide the training and which organizations are behind the legislation. As a leading homosexual magazine in Arizona wrote, Equality Arizona, one n ten, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) were all in attendance at the bill's committee hearing to support and see the legislation pass.

You see, groups like Equality Arizona and GLSEN have used the bullying issue in order to gain access to our public schools. These are the groups that supporters of the bill will bring into schools to teach the anti-bullying training to our students.

What concerns me is that this is already happening. I received an email from a parent whose 11-year-old daughter was forced to watch a documentary called Bullied during class time without any parental notification or consent. Taken directly off the tolerance.org website, "Bullied is a documentary film that chronicles one student's ordeal at the hands of anti-gay bullies and offers an inspiring message of hope to those fighting harassment today. It can become a cornerstone of anti-bullying efforts in middle and high schools." As this dad wrote:

Upon questioning my daughter I was able to determine the video presented was the documentary Bullied. My wife and I spent the next several minutes apologizing to her that she was forced by her school to view the material ... I should note the school was diligent in requiring written parental approval for my daughter to view a specific rendition of Star Wars, but the Administration need not trouble the parents over [these] materials. The material was not all that timely for our child either since we had to define for her the terms "homo" and "fag" at our dinner table.

There is no doubt about it; the "bullying" theme is agenda-driven propaganda. [emphasis theirs]. The irony is that groups like Equality Arizona and GLSEN have chosen this issue to bully you and me into allowing them access into our schools and to our children. To express concerns about anti-bullying bills is portrayed in the most unfavorable light.

These bullying bills are not sound public policy. Not only are they a thinly veiled attempt to allow political groups into our schools, they also divert the focus of our school system off the fundamentals. Class time should be for reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Alabama pastor Aaron Fruh last week appeared on Crane Durham’s show on the American Family Association’s radio network, where Fruh explained that marriage equality for gays and lesbians is actually “heterophobic” because it discriminates against heterosexuals and “against the unborn children who will never see the light of day if you revise the historical, moral and legal view of traditional marriage.” Fruh appears to believe that by allowing gays and lesbians to marry, heterosexuals will somehow lose their right to marry, have children and oppose same-sex marriag. He called marriage equality the “height of bigotry” and said gays and lesbians are “hateful and malicious” towards married heterosexuals.

I don’t consider myself homophobic and I’d like to reframe this argument on my terms, and I’m insulted for even being called homophobic and insulted that I’m called a bigot because I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. My question is, to the gay community, how did you come into the world in the first place? There’s only one way, through the physical union of a man and a woman and in most cases a married man and a woman, your father and mother. So I want to say to the gay community, why are you so heterophobic? Why are you discriminating against the unborn children who will never see the light of day if you revise the historical, moral and legal view of traditional marriage. Why are you so condemning of me because I’m a married man to a woman of the opposite sex and to me that’s the height of bigotry. So I say to the gay community, you’re being quite malicious towards me, a married heterosexual man who believes in traditional marriage values, and you’re prejudiced and hateful towards my right to be committed to the principle of family and marriage.

Today on the 700 Club a woman asked Pat Robertson whether it was appropriate for her to serve as a bridesmaid or even attend her lesbian sister’s wedding to another woman. Robertson, a fierce opponent of gay rights, demanded the woman take no party in the ceremony. He cited Romans 1, without giving its cultural and historical context, to argue that God gave gays and lesbians up to do “evil things with their own bodies.” “If she doesn’t like it, if that breaks the union between you,” Robertson said, “that’s tough luck.”

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Meeuwsen: This is from Kathryn who says: ‘I’ve been asked to be a bridesmaid in my sister’s wedding. There is only one problem. My sister is gay and she’s marrying her partner. I don’t know what to do. If I don’t agree, our relationship will be ruined. I don’t even know if I should attend the wedding, much less be a part of it.’

Robertson: That is a very hard decision but you can’t add you’re—if you go what you’re doing is saying ‘I bless this union and I agree that what you’re doing is right.’ You know the Bible is so clear about homosexuality and when you read in what Paul said, he said, ‘Wherefore God gave them up,’ and having given them up they did evil things with their own bodies, men for men and women with women, defaming their bodies. Read Romans, read the Book of Romans, this isn’t something I came up with, read it in Romans. You say, ‘should I go to my sister’s wedding, should I participate,’ the answer is to tell your sister, ‘I love you but I cannot participate a ceremony that is contrary to God’s word, period.’ If she doesn’t like it, if that breaks the union between you, that’s tough luck.

While using the exact same arguments of opponents of legalizing interracial marriage, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah is joining with Bryan Fischer in asserting that gays and lesbians already have full marriage equality because they can simply marry members of the opposite sex. Farah claims that since gays and lesbians actually don’t face any legal discrimination, they only want to legalize same-sex marriage in order to “destroy” marriage…in the same way the terrorist group Hamas wants to destroy Israel!

Anyone in the United States can participate in the institution of marriage – if they choose to do so.

Homosexuals don’t usually choose to do so because they usually don’t want to be married to members of the opposite sex. But it’s their choice.

So why do homosexual activists make this claim? And how do they get away with making a patently false charge against a 6,000-year-old religious institution and the civil laws that it inspired? Same-sex marriage advocates no more care about the legality of same-sex marriage than Hamas cares about the creation of a Palestinian state.

Neither is interested in creating something new – something that has never been before. Instead, what same-sex marriage advocates and the terrorists of the Gaza Strip have in common is their desire to destroy something they find repulsive. In Gaza, it’s the Jewish state of Israel. Among homosexual activists, it’s the institution of marriage.

By making the bogus claim that marriage, as it has been known through the eons, is inherently unfair because some people don’t want to participate in it as it has always been defined, homosexual activists are able to establish for themselves what appears to be the political high ground of the victim. In exactly the same way, Arab terrorists are able to portray themselves as the victim by claiming they have been denied a state.

But scratch beneath the surface of these two movements and you will soon learn that their objectives go far beyond same-sex marriage and a Palestinian state.

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It is amazing how quickly the same-sex marriage advocates have been able to rally support from the media, the cultural establishment, the government elite and the judiciary for a radical social experiment that challenges the fundamental building block of human civilization – the family.

They’ve done this by inaccurately portraying themselves as victims of discrimination. They are no more victims of discrimination than any other radicals who believe forcibly remaking society in their own image is their inalienable right.

It appears that for the Religious Right, simply criticizing their anti-gay activism strips them of their freedoms. Echoing Kirk Cameron’s claim that his freedom of speech and religion are jeopardized by negative responses to his claim that homosexuality is “destructive,” David Krayden of the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies writes on LifeSiteNews that GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is a “totalitarian” organization because it denounced Cameron. Of course, Krayden never shows how organizations that have decried Cameron are taking away any of Cameron or anyone else’s freedoms. He also claims that “the current trend towards acceptance and promotion of homosexual behaviour is in itself a throwback to the attitudes and opinions of ancient pagan civilizations,” and argued that supporters of the “gay agenda” are “completely at odds with basic democratic freedoms.”

The remarks engendered a swift counterattack by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), which apparently is unaware that Cameron has continued to work as an actor and producer since he was a featured player on the sitcom Growing Pains. Said GLAAD’s senior director of programs Herndon Graddick, “In this interview, Kirk Cameron sounds even more dated than his 1980s TV character. Cameron is out of step with a growing majority of Americans, particularly people of faith who believe that their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should be loved and accepted based on their character and not condemned because of their sexual orientation.”

OK, so you would not expect an organization that is actively pushing the gay agenda to either ignore Cameron’s comments or even to agree to disagree. Cameron said nothing about not loving gays and lesbians, but for GLAAD, anyone not of the fervent conviction that homosexuality is as natural as the rain falling is trapped in a medieval mindset and hopelessly out of step with progressive thought.

But does being “out of date” have anything to do with being right or wrong on an issue? For that matter, one could say that the current trend towards acceptance and promotion of homosexual behaviour is in itself a throwback to the attitudes and opinions of ancient pagan civilizations where same-sex couplings were not only an acceptable part of sexual expression but embedded in religious rites.

The demands of GLAAD and other similarly focussed groups that Christians accept homosexual activity may well be a rooted in the approval of that distant coupling of sex and religion, in a desire to have organized religion today sanction that behaviour just as it was in the distant past by pagan cultures. GLAAD desires a return to a religious conformity that might well be described as strangely nostalgic.

The “people of faith” that Graddick describes as accepting any sexual orientation must surely belong, as far as Biblically-based Christianity is concerned, to any apostate church that flatly rejects the clear moral dictates that may be found in preponderance in both the Old and New Testaments. Furthermore, since “sexual orientation” is a term that can describe anything, and therefore ultimately means nothing, do we really believe that any sexual urge may be satiated, that any sexual calling must be applauded, that any sexual – dare we say – perversion is permissible?

Clearly we have reached a new level in society’s attitudes towards homosexuality. The yardstick of political correctness has subtly but undeniably been stretched from tolerance to acceptance to promotion – and now it is insistence, insistence that religious opinion and “people of faith” accept the homosexual lifestyle without question, without remorse, without further comments—especially to networks like CNN. At least no one – yet – is suggesting that Cameron should not be allowed to work in films because his opinions are too odious and corrosive for public viewing.

This insistence is profoundly totalitarian in scope and intent while being completely at odds with basic democratic freedoms – in particular a certain freedom which we used to have called freedom of religion. No one can demand that people think in a certain way or that the only acceptable “people of faith” are the ones who won’t disagree or “condemn” your lifestyle choices.