Marriage Equality

Brian Camenker’s group MassResistance is out with its analysis of the Religious Right’s failure in four states to ban same-sex marriage, and has concluded that equality opponents simply weren’t anti-gay enough. They accused the National Organization for Marriage and others of going to “great lengths not to criticize homosexuality” when they should have been working to “persuade the public through advertising that homosexual behavior was perverse, dysfunctional, and unhealthy” and exposing “the destructive nature of homosexual relationships.”

MassResistance explains that such advertisements are necessary because “in America the average person is emotionally and intellectually unequipped to confront the Orwellian and often vicious onslaught of propaganda, disinformation, threats, intimidation [and] confusion” about homosexuality, even comparing the plight of anti-gay activists to those resisting Communism in the Eastern Bloc.

At its root, "gay marriage" is really about the forced acceptance of homosexuality as a normal part of society. But both NOM and the state pro-family groups went to great lengths not to criticize homosexual behavior. They were very fearful of being perceived as "anti-gay" or "homophobic" especially in the liberal press. So they insisted on moderating everyone's messages. In Minnesota, for instance, activists were specifically told, "Don't make this a gay issue."

Those who deviated from this and took a more direct approach were shunned and even publicly criticized by the pro-family establishment. This included some of the vocal black churches in Maryland who wanted to quote the Bible, and activists in Maine and Minnesota who felt compelled to discuss the negative aspects homosexual behavior.

Except for some material posted on websites of the local pro-family groups, there were no attempts at all that we know of to persuade the public through advertising that homosexual behavior was perverse, dysfunctional, and unhealthy. Our side basically conceded that argument completely, and even went to lengths to state that "we're not anti-gay." The homosexual lobby took full advantage of that by aggressively portraying homosexuality as just another facet of normal human behavior.

This tactic is not sustainable, as it soon became clear. It certainly does not effectively counter the emotional strategies put forth by the homosexual lobby. At some point you have to engage in the real battle at hand.

…

Furthermore, the groups running the campaign opposing gay marriage had an arsenal of weapons about homosexuality, homosexual behavior, and the destructive nature of homosexual relationships that they didn't use because it would not be "politically correct" and would likely anger the liberal media -- and because it wouldn't be seen as "nice." And when they finally were willing to use the very effective issue of schools forcing homosexuality on kids, it was too late.

…

One thing is painfully clear: At this point in America the average person is emotionally and intellectually unequipped to confront the Orwellian and often vicious onslaught of propaganda, disinformation, threats, intimidation confusion -- and the force of law that often follows -- which engulfs us. That is something we must change.

Pope John Paul II famously observed that a major force that facilitated the collapse of the Soviet Union was the people who were no longer afraid to tell the truth. That's a beginning, along with internalizing the fact that we're in a war and not at a dinner party. And that being reactive instead of being aggressive only slows down our losses. All nonviolent movements understand that.

They also claimed that the push in Maryland to overturn the state’s marriage equality law may have failed due to…you guessed it, voter fraud!

During early voting in Maryland, in many cases the touch-screen machines which created paper ballots did not register the "no" votes on the marriage ballot question; instead it come out blank. One woman told us that she noticed hers came out blank, and she had to go back and re-vote on it. She said that this happened to many others she knew of, and that one person had to go back three times to get his "no" vote properly registered. This is outrageous.

At least one relatively conservative area in Maryland surprisingly voted "yes" for gay marriage. There is suspicion that some kind of voter fraud was behind that. "It was really startling that we lost there," one local activist told us.

We have been informed that pro-family attorneys are getting involved in the continuing counting of absentee ballots in some of the key areas where the vote was close.

Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality was indignant about the “shocking” election of Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate, making her the first openly gay Senator. He told Jim Schneider of VCY America on Crosstalk that Baldwin is “hardly a role model for young women,” whom he says should uphold “healthy, wholesome behaviors, not lesbianism.”

LaBarbera: All of the sudden I wake up to the news and look on the TV and see that Tammy Baldwin, a radical homosexual and pro-abortion feminist, everything’s on the left in her policies, is now elected Senator in Wisconsin. It was quite shocking.

Schneider: The Human Rights Campaign, they call themselves ‘the largest civil rights organization working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality,’ they celebrated this, they attribute part of this, to ensure her victory they said ‘they raised and contributed well over $500,000 for her campaign’ and they said Tammy Baldwin is ‘a role model for LGBT youth and young women across the country.’

LaBarbera: Human Rights Campaign should be called the Human Wrongs Campaign; it’s a homosexual pressure group and we would expect them to be celebrating Tammy Baldwin’s victory. But she’s hardly a role model for young women, we want women to embrace marriage and healthy, wholesome behaviors, not lesbianism. Her policies are to the far-left, she’s pro-abortion, in so many ways she represents what’s wrong with the left and now she’s going to be in the Senate for six years.

Recounting the other defeats gay equality opponents suffered in the election, LaBarbera warned that more Americans are embracing the “complete blasphemy” of same-sex marriage and that we are “seeing a civilization’s moral decline” with the rise of the “side of sin, of evil, the pro-homosexual side.”

The idea of homosexual marriage is a complete blasphemy and you would think that with most Christians the vast majority would get it and not affirm such positions, but sadly I think our society is de-Christianizing, it is becoming more secular, a recent study showed that a shocking number of Americans are unchurched. You see in such an environment, basically you are seeing a civilization’s moral decline, the secular forces, the sin movement which is homosexual rights, has more momentum. Unless we see revival in this country, we’re going to see more of this where the side of sin, of evil, the pro-homosexual side, has more energy than the side of good, which is the defense of marriage.

LaBarbera also attacked UPS for ending its financing of the Boy Scouts because the organization conflicts from the company’s anti-discrimination policy, and said that “I think most Americans agree that we don’t want homosexual men out camping in tents in forest with young boys, I certainly wouldn’t want a homosexual man, an open homosexual, with my young son.”

Look who the real discriminators are, it’s UPS, they are saying if you adhere to a certain policy, which happens to be the Boy Scouts’ moral creed, their morally straight policy which precludes homosexual Scout Masters, and I think most Americans agree that we don’t want homosexual men out camping in tents in forest with young boys, I certainly wouldn’t want a homosexual man, an open homosexual, with my young son. Yet that is called discrimination and they lose the funding while the Human Rights Campaign, which has multimillions of dollars, this hugely funded homosexual group, will continue to get UPS’s funding.

Naturally, the far-right fringe is blaming Obama’s election victory on voter fraud. WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah released a new column which started with the line, “I am not a conspiracy theorist.” Farah said that Obama must have won through fraud because he won in states with Republican governors and legislatures, and also claimed that Obama “welcomed foreign contributions,” including one donation under “the name Osama bin Laden.” The bin Laden donation hoax has been debunked before – the Obama campaign notes that while some contributions “may have initially appeared to have gone through when the donor completed the transaction,” they were later rejected.

Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association and his fellow staff members appear to believe any conspiratorial column which reaches their desk, and so he once again invited Farah onto his radio show to explain how voter fraud swung the election to Obama, since it is inconceivable to them that the majority of Americans would vote for him.

But Farah said that WND’s possibly illegal donation to Obama using bin Laden’s name is just like “what Martin Luther King did, sometimes you’ve got to actually commit civil disobedience to get people’s attention to the injustices that are going on.”

Later, Wildmon talked about the decision by UPS to pull funding from the Boy Scouts of America over the group’s ban on openly gay members, which is making the prolific boycotters at the AFA consider a pressure campaign. Farah said that the decision is proof that the “culture is deteriorating” and urged Religious Right activists “to figure out how to reverse this or stop this real fast.”

Wildmon: Have you heard about the Boy Scouts and UPS?

Farah: I saw that and it’s just astonishing. It’s harder to get packages delivered—

Wildmon: I know, pretty soon we’re going to have to move to the mountains and live off the land. It really is and that’s why we here at the American Family Association, we don’t call for boycotts very often despite our reputation, and when we do we’re serious about it and we’ve exhausted every means of appeal to a particular company, like we have done with Home Depot and their sponsorship of gay pride parades. At the same time it doesn’t hurt to inform people about what these corporations do, if you don’t call for a boycott just let people know because if they do business with these companies and they might say if you do any business with UPS just tell your driver or your local office, ‘hey guys, you realize what you did, and I will have to consider how much business I see with you because of this,’ and that moves up the food chain.

Farah: Tim, I want you to think back to twenty years ago and try to imagine that we would have corporations essentially declaring war on the Boy Scouts of America.

Wildmon: We live in the Twilight Zone.

Farah: Try to imagine going back twenty years and you’d have a real powerful movement for same-sex marriage, and it’s actually winning now on ballot initiatives in several states, this is how rapidly the culture is deteriorating. It’s not happening in a vacuum, it’s happening because there are people and forces, powerful forces, that are making it happen and we have to figure out how to reverse this or stop this real fast.

Wildmon: That’s exactly right.

Sandy Rios of the American Family Association mourned the defeat of anti-gay ballot measures and candidates for office during her organization’s election coverage, and was dumbfounded as to why actor Brad Pitt donated to the marriage equality campaigns in four states. She asked: “What causes a person of such means to be so passionate about that, who is a heterosexual man with children? What is that all about?” As AFA news director Fred Jackson noted, Pitt “didn’t listen to his mom.”

Rios: Last week in the midst of the hurricane and the devastation and people clamoring for food and help, Brad Pitt made this huge donation to gay marriage. I think, what drives that? I think he gave $100,000, $25,000 to each state to fund homosexual marriage. What causes a person of such means to be so passionate about that, who is a heterosexual man with children? What is that all about?

Jackson: That is the case; he didn’t listen to his mom.

Rios: That’s for sure.

Later, Rios and AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer were stunned by Allen West’s loss in Florida, which for Fischer proves that Americans are making “alarming choices about who their leaders are going to be.” Rios lamented that voters have clearly become solidly in favor of abortion rights and gay equality, saying that voters “want abortion, they are demanding it,” and are also “clamoring for gay marriage.” She went on to argue that marriage equality will lead to “explicit instruction in public schools” and the “rape of our children’s innocence.”

Fischer: Allen West apparently has gone down to defeat in Florida.

Rios: Tremendous loss, tremendous loss.

Fischer: He was a guy that represented the best of America, his military service, his staunch conservatism on all facets, so the fact that the voters in Florida chose not to renew their confidence, their trust, their contract with Allen West, that’s another mystery to me. But I think one of the things it indicates is that this is no longer the country that we grew up in, this is a different country now today, the values are different, the people are making different and I think alarming choices about who their leaders are going to be.

Rios: I think you’re right, I have some very deep thoughts about this and I’ve just been holding back. The thing that struck me last night and I’ll go right for this I suppose: I really do believe that God is really giving us the desires of our heart, as a nation, not us individually. This is what the nation wants. The nation wants abortion all the time for any reason. That was very important to people, that was one of the reasons that some people went down last night. That’s one of the reasons the President prevailed among women by a pretty high percentage. They want abortion, they are demanding it, they are going to get it and with no restrictions, they are going to get government-funded abortion. They also want gay marriage, they are clamoring for gay marriage. Of course it isn’t just gay marriage, it’s instruction, explicit instruction in public schools, it’s really I think the rape of our children’s innocence, but they want it and they are going to get it, and we’re going to get it too.

Election Day was a disaster for the National Organization for Marriage: it lost in all four states in which marriage equality was on the ballot in some way; it failed to take out another Iowa Supreme Court justice who had ruled in favor of equality; and it failed in its mission to defeat Barack Obama.

William Owens of the virulently anti-gay Coalition of African-American Pastors and the National Organization for Marriage talked to Sandy Rios and Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association for their organization’s election night special about the “unbelievable” impact if Maryland voters approve their state’s marriage equality law, which did indeed pass. He said if we “change God’s law” by legalizing same-sex marriage and adoption then “the whole gamut of the family is going to be destroyed and all areas of the social life will be destroyed from what has been for thousands of years.”

Listen:

Robert Jeffress has warned that a vote for President Obama is a vote for the “future reign of the Antichrist,” and told Janet Mefferd yesterday that if Obama secures re-election and marriage equality wins at the ballot box (it did), then America “is going to bring about God’s judgment upon our country” by backing “evil” and “reject[ing] God and His law.” He added later that he expects Obama to impose hate speech laws that could be used to imprison pastors and will try to give the government the right to select a church’s pastors and priests.

Mefferd: A lot of people look at this and think: what happened to my country?

Jeffress: And what’s happened to the Christian community? Take the same-sex marriage issue, for the first time ever the majority of young adult evangelical Christians support same-sex marriage or civil unions. I think it’s this false idea we have that somehow we don’t have any right to impose our values on society as a whole. But the fact is all values are based on somebody’s morality, and for the first two hundred years of our country it was based on Christian values and now it’s being based on pagan values. I remind people all the time that Jesus Christ is not just Lord over the church, he is Lord over all creation, he is not just interested in religious people and religious institutions, He is interested in all institutions, including government. Listen, God is no respecter of people or nations, God doesn’t get a lump in his throat when he hears the Star - Spangled Banner, He doesn’t hold America to a different standard than any other nation. Any nation that reverences God is going to be blessed by God, but any nation that rejects God and His law is going to be rejected by God. We as Christians have a responsibility to say without stuttering or stammering: this is wrong, this is sin, this is evil and this is going to bring about God’s judgment upon our country.

…

Jeffress: I do think as Americans we’re going to continue to see this attempt to restrict our religious liberty and our freedom of speech. I think all you have to do is to look at the past four years to see what the next four years under Obama will be like. I think we will live to see very quickly the enactment of hate speech legislation that will try to prevent Christians and especially churches from speaking out on issues like homosexuality or the exclusivity of the Christian faith. We just saw a year ago the Obama administration attempting to say that the ministerial exemption regarding federal hiring standards should be rescinded, that will ultimately give the government the right to say who churches could hire as their pastors or their priests. I think this is where we’re going under another four years of the Obama administration.

Conservative talk show host Janet Parshall joined Crosstalk host Vic Eliason of Voice of Christian Youth America this week to promote her book, Buyer Beware: Finding Truth in the Marketplace of Ideas. The two spent much of the time discussing Parshall’s time working for VCY America, before becoming a leader of Concerned Women for America and National Religious Broadcasters, but soon began discussing a prior Crosstalk program that blamed Hurricane Sandy on the gay community. While Parshall said she is not in the position to say whether God used the hurricane to punish New York for legalizing same-sex marriage, she did claim once again that Satan is the main culprit behind the push for LGBT rights.

Listen:

Parshall: While this gets debated in the halls of Congress and while it gets adjudicated from the high courts of this country, in the end this is a spiritual battle and we need to put on spiritual eyes and understand that the Father of Lies hates the model of marriage because it is such a profound message of Christ’s unconditional love for us, the church. So we begin to see all of these skirmishes, so battles for same-sex marriage are nothing more than the Great Deceiver himself still rattling his tail saying to a watching culture, ‘did God really say’? And the answer back from the church has to be without blush, hesitation or embarrassment: ‘yes he did, and here I stand, marriage is and always shall be one man and one woman.’