Anti-Gay

Mission America’s Linda Harvey today on her radio program warned Christians to “keep their kids away” from comic books because they have now succumbed to the “ever-present gay agenda.” After reading a blog post by Christian writer Danzil Monk, Harvey said that comics like the Green Lantern and X-Men are now part of the “homosexual agenda” and promoting “lies in our culture.”

I grew up reading comic books. I was a huge Archie and Veronica fan so when I learned that Archie was rolling out a gay character I felt like part of my childhood had been revised according to the ever-present gay agenda. The new character, Kevin, was injected into the story in 2010 and the writers made him a military hero, trying to advance that part of their political goals. Well now this year Kevin was shown entering a homosexual so-called marriage with another male. There had been plans for the glorified Kevin to have even his own comic book. The original Green Lantern character Alan Scott was reintroduced earlier this summer as himself in his long ago days of youth but with the new information that he had really been a homosexual all along as a young man. The Marvel Comics X-Men character Northstar was introduced as a homosexual way back in 1992 and just recently the storyline had him marry a longtime boyfriend. Batwoman, Kathy Kane, was introduced several years ago as a lesbian. In 2005 Marvel introduced a new series called ‘The Young Adventures’ including characters called Hulkling and someone called Wiccan who the publishers decided to make a homosexual couple. Some of these stories are complete with full-on males kissing males, and so on. And some people claim there’s no homosexual agenda?

My friend Danzil is correct that probably it’s only true believers in Jesus Christ who will ultimately stand up against such lies in our culture and try and reverse these trends. I know comic books are not all that important in the grand scheme of things but if we believe that then Christians should keep their kids away from them and we should also be willing to speak out against one more area of depravity.

William Owens of the Coalition of African-American Pastors, which is not so much a real coalition as it is a right-wing front group, appeared on WallBuilders Live today with David Barton and Rick Green to denounce President Obama for endorsing same-sex marriage. The virulently anti-gay pastor once again compared his political activism to that of Martin Luther King, Jr., agreeing with Green’s suggestion that he is “taking the same stance Martin Luther King, Jr. would.” Owens also reiterated his claim that he was a civil rights figure, despite little evidence of his role in the movement.

He claimed that Obama’s approach to the black community is “not acceptable” following his endorsement of marriage equality and decision to lead America “down a very immoral road,” and doubted that Obama “even believes it himself, but because of the money and catering to the homosexual community” he took the pro-equality stance anyway. To top it all off, Owens said that “my people in Africa killed each other by the thousands so we can’t give him a pass because he’s black.”

Green: So why is this an important enough issue for ya’ll to move forward like this?

Owens: I think it’s important because it’s changing our culture and we feel that the President, being the first black president number one, holding the most powerful position in the world was put their overwhelmingly by black people. I was in the civil rights movement and we marched for civil rights but it was not for a man to marry a man and a woman to marry a woman, and the President has not given us the courtesy of even answering our request. That is improper, it’s disrespect. You cannot ignore that many pastors and their members and cater to the homosexual community, he’s had Lady Gaga in the White House, he gave same-sex marriage a party in the White House, but to ignore thousands of pastors and their members is not acceptable and we will not give him a pass because he’s black.

Green: You know you said something I think is just absolutely correct; you said ‘by embracing same-sex marriage President Obama is leading this country down an immoral path’ and ‘some things are bigger than the next election’ and you also mentioned that the black church has always been the conscience of America, I think that’s absolutely true. To see this stance, being willing to say we may agree with the President on a ton of other issues but this one is just too big, we cannot stand by and allow him to lead us down this immoral path is a courageous stance. How are people responding to you?

Owens: We almost have that 100,000 signatures, believe it or not, and they are responding daily, sometimes three or four hits a minute, supporting our position. As you know, every state that the marriage amendment has been on the ballot, we have won in every state and the blacks have overwhelmingly voted against same-sex marriage in every state. So the President takes it on himself to put his ideas out there for political reasons, I don’t think he even believes it himself, but because of the money and catering to the homosexual community, well I guarantee you the homosexual community doesn’t have as many people as there are Christians, black and white and all colors. I think he’s put himself in a corner, I don’t think he expected us to come out against him so hard because he’s black, but we’re not giving him a pass because he’s black, he’s leading the country down a very immoral road that it will take years to know the ramifications.

Green: It sounds like you’re taking the same stance Martin Luther King, Jr. would, it’s not the color of his skin but the content of character and what are the actual positions.

Owens: That’s right. We can’t give him a pass because he’s black. My people in Africa killed each other by the thousands so we can’t give him a pass because he’s black. Being black does not make him any more honorable, in this case as far as I’m concerned it’s making him less honorable. He was the first black president and this is what he uses his power for.

The 700 Club today highlighted the anti-gay views of the Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP) and its founder William Owens, who praised the Republican Party for opposing gay rights in its platform and “ensuring that at least one party is willing to stand up for the common sense, biblical understand of marriage.” Owens’s son, William Owens Jr., told CBN that same-sex marriage will “hurt the heart of God.” While CBN’s Lee Webb described CAAP as a “major coalition,” the group receives all of its funding from allied conservative organizations like the American Principles Project and the Family Research Council, and CAAP’s long record of anti-Obama activism hasn’t paid dividends as President Obama currently leads Mitt Romney among black voters 94-0.

Host Pat Robertson, who in July called the Democratic Party’s likely endorsement of same-sex marriage a “death wish,” said that Obama risked alienating voters over the issue, “to think that the Democratic Party would put in their platform support of gay marriage you just say: what are they thinking about, what are they thinking about?” “Now you see this in the platform and you think: are you out of your mind?” Robertson asked, “Well maybe not, we’ll see.”

Watch:

On today's "Faith and Freedom" program, Matt Barber declared that gay activists don't actually want marriage equality but rather are interested in "deconstructing the Judeo-Christian notion of marriage as marriage has always been." 

In fact, Barber claimed, the institution of marriage has always been about restricting which sorts of relationships are legitimate, which is why "people can't marry children, people can't marry close relatives, people can't marry their favorite pet."  Barber then warned that if "we're going to break the institution of marriage and radically redefine it" then "polygamy is inevitable if same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land and we can no longer have prohibitions on incestuous marriage":

Janet Mefferd hosted Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality yesterday to discuss the deplorable and unconscionable shooting at the Family Research Council’s headquarters. Mefferd criticized the Human Rights Campaign for posting an article the day before the shooting “that was very inflammatory about the Family Research Council, ‘they want to export homosexuals from the US’ and ‘they equate homosexuals with pedophiles’ and all this stuff,” and wished there would be “public pressure on some of these gay rights organizations to tone it down”:

Mefferd: I was reading through for example what the Human Rights Campaign had posted the day before the shooting and they had a whole list there that was very inflammatory about the Family Research Council, ‘they want to export homosexuals from the US’ and ‘they equate homosexuals with pedophiles’ and all this stuff. I thought: if you were somewhat of an unstable person and you read this sort of stuff and you were in line with what they believe I think it could drive somebody to violence. So we’re back to the question of, to what degree should there be public pressure on some of these gay rights organizations to tone it down?

LaBarbera: Well I think it has to come from people holding them accountable and we know that the left-wing, the liberal media is basically now a cheerleader for the gay cause so it comes down to I guess alternative media, the internet. Certainly in the Chick-fil-A situation the gay activists were beaten back a bit and they know it in the sense that they overreached. But in this case, this idea of this hate proposition, where the SPLC just went for it and started ticking off every pro-family group out there. Except they keep Focus on the Family off the list, I think intentionally to say ‘hey those are the good Christians,’ of course Focus on the Family has deemphasized politics in the last few years so maybe that’s why they’re not on the SPLC’s list because the SPLC is trying to marginalize the FRC’s and the Americans for Truth’s out there, they want them out of the picture, they want them to have less power so that their pet cause, which happens to be homosexuality, will grow in power. That’s what this is all about; it’s all about helping gay activists win their goal, one of which is same-sex so-called marriage.

First to LaBarbera’s point: Kyle noted yesterday that FRC received the designation “because of its dissemination of false and demonizing propaganda about gays and lesbians,” not due to their opposition to marriage equality.

As for Mefferd, it is absurd to claim that HRC or any other organization is wrong to point out exactly what the FRC has said about homosexuals. Here’s FRC senior fellow Peter Sprigg explicitly stating that he prefers to “export homosexuals from the United States”:

And here is Sprigg and FRC president Tony Perkins linking homosexuality to pedophilia (0:52):

To say that it is “inflammatory” to report on exactly what the FRC says and believes is patently absurd. If the FRC is proud of its anti-gay rhetoric, then they and their allies should stand by it and not criticize others for simply pointing out their attacks on the LGBT community.

Linda Harvey of Mission America is out with another attack against the National Education Association, which she earlier claimed is leading “gaystapo efforts” and creating “financial incentives” for students to become gay. On her radio program yesterday, Harvey said that the NEA is promoting “destructive beliefs” and an “anti-life, anti-morality agenda” by supporting the health care reform law and LGBT rights, and warned that their efforts to curb bullying and encourage safety for LGBT students and staff is part of “a Trojan Horse to bring pro-homosexual indoctrination into our schools.”

Listen:

Harvey: The NEA is already on record as supporting Obamacare and apparently that includes the mandate to pay for abortions and abortion-causing drugs even if it violates ones conscience. At the convention, the union reaffirmed its intention to support this and incorporate government-run health care into teaching contracts. The NEA also passed new Business Item D with support for sweeping ‘social justice’ measures in schools. The language here implies that homosexuality and gender confusion are equivalent to race, which is simply not true. Another agenda item will urge the US Department of Education to spend money researching the causes of bullying and especially as it leads to, you guessed it, homophobia. So this just adds another supporting point on our list proving that the issue of bullying is being exploited as a Trojan Horse to bring pro-homosexual indoctrination into our schools. And the NEA passed a measure urging more safety programs for students and teachers who are LGBTQ, that is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and questioning, and they cited as their support the invalid and discredited School Climate Surveys of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which is as you know is a group promoting homosexuality to kids…. So what can we do? We need to keep praying for our schools, support the teachers out there who don’t have these destructive beliefs, and work at the local level in all our communities to diminish the influence of the teachers’ unions as long as they would have such an anti-life, anti-morality agenda.

Linda Harvey of Mission America once again attacked Lady Gaga on her radio show, warning that her hit “Born This Way” is an “occult” and “demonic” song that is “full of lies” about sexual orientation and gender. She went on to attack Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation for leading children to “perversion, deviance, depravity, selfishness, incredible self-indulgence, artificiality and to a self-destructive path” by “embracing homosexuality” as part of anti-bullying efforts.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the video and I don’t recommend it but the theme is not just about a deviant view of gender and sexuality but it is occult in spirituality and it’s referring to first of all there’s all these gruesome birth scenes which is a complete and utter perversion and really a demonic caricature, frankly, of God’s creation, yet she dares to use words like ‘brave’ and so on. Of course she has the usual distortion, including that homosexuality and gender confusion that they’re similar to race or ethnicity, and that’s another big lie, the thing is just full of lies.

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‘The foundation is dedicated to creating a safe community that helps connect young people with the skills and opportunities they need to build a kinder, braver world.’ Nothing in this video or this song leads us to an authentically kinder, braver, noble vision for the world. It leads us to perversion, deviance, depravity, selfishness, incredible self-indulgence, artificiality and to a self-destructive path, at the same time they’re against self-destruction, this is so ironically shooting oneself in the foot. That’s part of this whole incredible anti-bullying campaign that the homosexual community is putting out there, trying to make it seem as if traditional values leads people to harm kids who are behaving homosexually or gender confused and so on and that traditional values causes this, it doesn’t. Traditional values is a help and not a harm. Troubled kids are the ones who bully, those bullying incidents need to be punished. We need to get our heads straight about this and not be manipulated and let our kids not be manipulated into embracing homosexuality as a byproduct of thinking we’re being kind.

Later, she asked people to pray that Lady Gaga and Ellen DeGeneres will change their sexual orientation and support of LGBT rights:

JC Penney of course we know, they took on a new spokesperson this past winter, Ellen DeGeneres, they made her their national spokesperson. She’s an openly lesbian celebrity, a talk show host on television, and many people find Ellen to be a very pleasant person, nobody has anything against her, she seems pleasant enough. She is openly and proudly homosexual and that part of her example is a very poor and tragic one. I hope that she personally will change that at some point in the future, we need to pray for all of these people. Pray for Lady Gaga, I don’t know if she is doing this because she’s personally involved in any of these behaviors or she’s just an opportunist—she’s certainly that—or if she’s just the sum of all of the above. Pray for her too, none of these people are beyond God’s reach if it’s His will to change them.

The US Embassy in the Czech Republic, as part of the State Department’s new LGBT rights initiative, is supporting a pride festival in Prague “to address discriminatory behavior based on sexual orientation and to promote a tolerant civil society and equal opportunities in the Czech Republic.” Already irate over Secretary Hillary Clinton’s speech on LGBT rights, American Religious Right activists joined their European, African and Latin American allies to denounce the Obama administration for “aggressively promoting the ‘gay’ agenda internationally” and leading a campaign of “cultural imperialism” [PDF]:

At the directive of the president of the United States, Washington is aggressively promoting the “gay’’ agenda internationally, including same-sex “marriage” and the stigmatization and marginalization of any who object to the same.

The Obama’s administration’s embrace of “same-sex marriage” has been overwhelmingly rejected by the American people. There have been 32 state referenda on marriage. In every one of them, voters endorsed the natural definition of marriage (a man and a woman). The North Carolina vote, on May 8, was 61% in favor of natural marriage.

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It stands to reason, then, that anything which undermines the family – including changing the definition of marriage – is a breach of the State’s responsibility to protect this indispensable institution which precedes government and makes a stable and free society possible.

The Madrid Declaration of World Congress of Families VI (May 25-27, 2012) --which was unanimously adopted by more than 3,200 delegates from 72 countries --provides, in part: “We affirm the natural family to be the union of a man and a woman through marriage for the purposes of sharing love and joy, propagating children, providing their moral education, building a vital home economy, offering security in times of trouble, and binding the generations.”

Regarding “gay rights,” those caught up in this lifestyle have the same rights as other citizens. This does not include the “right” to force others to validate a lifestyle they find objectionable, for religious or other reasons. It also does not include the right of men to marry men and women to marry women.

The foregoing pseudo-rights do not advance human freedom and dignity but debase them.

We can not imagine a worse form of cultural imperialism than Washington trying to force approval of the “gay” agenda on societies with traditional values.

The list of signatories is mighty long, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay; Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver and Matt Barber; American Family Association’s Tim Wildmon; Catholic League’s Bill Donohue; Vision America’s Rick Scarborough; Rabbi Daniel Lapin; American Civil Rights Union’s Robert Knight; Concerned Women for America’s Janice Shaw Crouse; Pastor Jim Garlow; WND’s David Kupelian; TFP’s C. Preston Noell III; conservative activist Richard Viguerie; World Congress of Families’ Don Feder; Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell; Traditional Values Coalition’s Louis Sheldon and Andrea Lafferty; and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Paige Peterson.

Other activists like Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, Scott Lively of Defend the Family International and Sharon Slater of Family Watch International are also among the signatories, as is Mission America’s Linda Harvey, who believes people should refuse care for themselves and their children from openly gay doctors and nurses:

Another signatory was Yehuda Levin has claimed that gay marriage caused last year’s D.C. earthquake and linked gay rights to the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake:

The list even included former chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, who performs gay exorcisms:

Jerome Corsi worked his way up the ranks in Republican circles by swiftboating John Kerry, pushing birther conspiracies with Sheriff Joe Arpaio and writing books such as Where’s The Birth Certificate and Where’s The Real Birth Certificate Lately though, he has been peddling the conspiracy that Obama had a same-sex relationship with his Pakistani roommate, and was even married to him:

is gay is nothing new on the far right, and so it was no surprise to see that Scott Lively, the Religious Right hero for his work as an anti-gay activist in Uganda in trying to criminalize homosexuality, is pushing the claim himself:

Much like birtherism, which started out on the fringe but has since became a mainstream idea within the GOP, maybe it is only a matter of time before more and more conservative activists demand Obama “prove” he isn’t gay.