FRC: Intolerant Gays Target Bachmanns [And Christians]

No one plays the victim card better than the Christianists and their parasitic allies among the professional Christian set. They believe that they have a license to disseminate unconscionable lies and untruths, but when some of their own are exposed for the liars and frauds that they are in fact, the whining and wailing becomes deafening. A case in point is the Klan loving, white supremacist supporting Tony Perkins of the registered hate group, Family Research Council ("FRC"). Like many in the professional set, Perkins makes a tawdry whore look like the Virgin Mary. It's also noteworthy that Perkins conveniently utterly ignores the admission by Mark Yarhouse of Regent University that sexual orientation is not changeable even in "mixed orientation" couples where one is gay and trying to be straight recently reviewed on this blog. He also deliberately misquotes the findings of researcher Robert Spitzer and relies on the repudiated "experts" at NARTH. If there's any misinformation being reported, it's the "ex-gay" myth lies well loved by FRC. Here are highlights from Perkins' vile batshitery in a column in the Columbia Missouri Tribune:
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There has been a frenzy of drummed -up controversy about Marcus Bachmann, the psychologist husband of Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann. His “scandal”? A counselor in a practice run by Marcus Bachmann offered a client the service he requested.
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The misinformation and bias in the media’s reporting of this story were astounding. Reporters used the sarcastic catchphrases of homosexual activists, such as “pray away the gay” or “gay cure,” as though they were objective descriptions of what is more properly called “sexual reorientation” therapy or “sexual orientation change efforts.” They described such counseling as resting only on prayer, Bible-reading and “willpower,” ignoring the serious therapeutic methods employed.
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The attack on Marcus Bachmann, while politically motivated to undermine his wife’s presidential campaign, also is part of a larger effort that could end up driving conservative Christians out of the psychology and counseling professions altogether. A counselor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was fired and graduate students in Michigan and Georgia have been dismissed from their programs for refusing to change their personal convictions about homosexual conduct.
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[R]adical homosexual activists not only want to deny help to those homosexuals who seek it; they have no tolerance for Christian professions who offer it. They seek to force them to change their faith-based beliefs or forfeit their livelihoods. These self-styled apostles of “tolerance” should try practicing a little themselves.

Monday Male Beauty

Has GOP Rhetoric Made Compromise Impossible?

I shudder whenever I think about what the mentality of the Republican Party has become. The sick feeling intensifies when I see the so-called leadership of the GOP fawning over Christofascists and Tea Party dolts who don't care what harm they do to the nation or how badly they trample over the rights of others as they cling to their - in my view at least, psychotic ideologies. The consequence is that there is no longer anyone in charge to rein in the occupants of the mental ward because the leadership has either become as crazy as the inmates or too spineless to stand up to their insanity. It's a problem that has been a while in coming but which was created by the GOP leadership's willingness to prostitute itself to unsavory elements in society for short term political gain. Now we may all be about to pay a huge financial price. A Daily Beast column conjectures that the GOP may now have backed itself into a corner through its own demagoguery to a point where compromise is impossible:
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The “push” of the details of any deal (and the threat of economic meltdown) will eventually come head to head with the “shove” of the hard emotional truth that the vast majority of Washington Republicans and conservatives will not do anything, participate in any act, that can be construed as a win for Barack Obama.
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I say emotion is stronger than reason, and everything about the way the right has behaved in the Obama era suggests to me that it (not just the right-wing politicians, but its media outlets and entire ideological infrastructure) has been girding itself for precisely this fight. This in turn means that the votes needed to avert disaster might very well not be there.
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[A] group’s rhetoric has a way of creating its own reality, which in turn forces a certain kind of behavior. If you say someone is a terrible American, even if you’re just joking at first, eventually you believe it. And if you believe it, how can you negotiate with the person? You can’t. You can only defeat him.
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This is the cry in Tea Party circles, and it is only going to crescendo as the debt deadline gets closer. Because as a deal takes shape, and as an actual vote approaches, the next thing that will happen is the right-wing media network is going to kick into gear, and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and all the others are going to scream that a raising of the debt ceiling, even a temporary one, is a win for Obama, and any Republican who goes along with it is committing treason.
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Obama is everything the GOP base and the right-wing media hate. Your typical conservative legislator is all-too-aware of this and feels (not knows—feels) many of the same impulses himself. Economic calamity is both hypothetical and a thing that exists in the realm of reason. People—and surely Obama himself, Mr. Reasonable—are counting on reason to prevail. To which I ask one question: Why would it now?

Why Norway Could Happen Here

For the last two days I've written about my concerns over the manner in which the unending inflammatory hate speech of the Christian Right and elements of the political far right creates an atmosphere where some unhinged individual or individuals could commit a heinous crime like that the struck Norway on Friday. Worse yet, the constant hate speech would make such individual(s) feel completely justified in the unleashing murder and destruction. I'm not the only one that had such thoughts. Peter Beinart at The Daily Beast has an article that looks at the same concerns. Here are some highlights:
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How would the American right have responded had Anders Behring Breivik been a Muslim? Luckily, we don’t have to guess. In the immediate aftermath of Friday’s terrorist attack in Norway, conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin did us the favor of simply assuming that he was a Muslim. She then used the attack to denounce lawmakers who in the name of deficit reduction favor “huge cuts in defense” and to lambast President Obama for suggesting “that we can wrap up things in Afghanistan.”
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But had Breivik actually been a Muslim, I suspect Rubin’s efforts to tie the attack to the Afghan war and the defense budget would have quickly been overtaken by the search for his American counterparts: homegrown Muslim terrorists. . . .
The media’s primary question in the wake of the Breivik attack would have been, Can it happen here? And conservatives would have answered, Hell yes.
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So let’s ask that question about the real Breivik attack: Could an anti-Muslim bigot commit a large-scale terrorist attack in the U.S.? The answer is, Absolutely, because the same anti-Muslim bigotry that influenced Breivik in Europe is widespread here.
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There’s actually been a lot of right-wing, extremist Christian terrorism in the U.S. in recent years. The biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history prior to 9/11—the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing—was carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a white ex-Army officer with ties to the militia movement. That same year, Eric Rudolph bombed the Atlanta Olympics to protest abortion and international socialism. The only major WMD attack of the “war on terror” era—the 2001 anthrax mailings—apparently was the handiwork of a microbiologist angry that prominent Catholic politicians were pro-choice. In 2009, anti-abortion militants murdered Wichita doctor George Tiller.
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[W]hat makes a larger, Breivik-style attack possible is that terrorism usually stems from the intersection between militant ideology and mentally vulnerable people. That’s why people like McVeigh and Rudolph latched onto extremist militia and anti-abortion ideology in the 1990s. And it’s why their equivalent today might well be influenced by Islamophobia, the current obsession of America’s extreme right.
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Islamophobia is at least as prevalent on the political right today as militia-style, anti-government conspiracy-theorizing was in the 1990s. . . . . It’s painfully clear that in today’s Republican Party, the price of publicly opposing anti-Muslim bigotry is higher than the price of fueling it. And somewhere out there, someone like Anders Behring Breivik is watching.
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Words do have consequences and it is long past time that the demagogues of the Christian and political right be held accountable for the hate and violence they engender.

Irish Parliament's Condemnation of Vatican Brings Messages of Support

Last week by a unanimous vote the Irish Parliament condemned the Vatican for its directive that basically told Ireland's bishops that they could ignore requirements that possible instances of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy be reported to police authority. In addition, Ireland's Prime Minister directly condemned the Vatican and said that a new day was dawning and that the laws of the Irish republic would prevail over the Vatican. All pretty unbelievable stuff in a country once viewed as a bastion of Catholicism and a next exporter of priests to countries all around the world. Now, as the Irish Times reports, Prime Minister Kenny has said that he has received “thousands” of supportive messages from around the world in response to his speech on the Vatican’s role in the cover up of sexual crimes against children and youths. Moreover columns in Ireland and elsewhere are championing the Irish parliament's condemnation of the Vatican. Indeed, some editorials have taken the position that Ireland's decision to stand up to the Catholic Church should be the new model for government dealings with the Church. The irony is that the Vatican chose to cover up abuse with a goal of protecting the Church's image. The result - especially in Ireland - has been the exact opposite with the Church more or less in a death spiral of shame and irrelevance. Perhaps there is a God after all. Here are highlights from the Irish Times on messages of support flowing to the Irish prime minister:
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TAOISEACH ENDA Kenny has received “thousands” of messages from around the world in response to his speech on the Vatican’s role in events relating to the issue of child abuse, he said last night.
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This reflected the way people felt about this issue, he told the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal. Mr Kenny added he was “astounded” by the number of clergy who had been in touch to say it was “about time” someone in his position spoke out.
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The Taoiseach received a standing ovation when he finished delivering the annual lecture in honour of Nobel laureate and former SDLP leader John Hume at the opening session of the summer School.
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“The fact that I have had thousands of messages from around the world speaks for itself about the impact and the way people feel. “The numbers of members of the clergy who have been in touch in the last few days, to say it is about time somebody spoke out about these matters in a situation like you are, has astounded me. “I haven’t made any other comment except to say that we await the response from the Vatican.
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A column in the Independent in Ireland likewise lauded Parliament's action and argued that the Irish republic needed to defeat the Church in the effort to punish sexual predators and those who aided and abetted them. Here are highlights:
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THERE are battles yet to be fought in the war between the Catholic Church and the Irish State. But the outcome is no longer in doubt. The Church will lose, if it has not already lost. Which is not necessarily to say that Irish society has won, or will win.
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This war was unwise and unnecessary: unwise in the extreme on the part of the church, which started it and promoted it. It behaved as if its relationship with Ireland had not changed since the days when our politicians abased themselves before the Holy See, declaring themselves -- in the notorious words of Brendan Corish -- Catholics first and Irishmen after.
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The sex abuse scandals which he [Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin] inherited were not about sex. They were about power. They were about protecting an institution whose rights took precedence over the protection of the young, over every precept of common decency, ultimately over the law of the land.
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And the guilty parties were not confined to the abusers. They included those who covered up the crimes, for whatever reason, and somehow reconciled their actions with their consciences.
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That confrontation, long postponed, took place this week, openly and sensationally. Irish politicians, once noted for their servility, directly defied and attacked the Vatican. There were calls for the breaking off of diplomatic relations and the expulsion of the Papal Nuncio.
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Just for once, our parliament did not shrink from confrontation when the chips were down. Just for once, our leaders offered some leadership. We can follow the way they have shown.
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On this side of the Atlantic, the Ottawa Citizen takes the position that Ireland's new found confrontational style with the Vatican should be the model for other nations as well . Personally, I am in full agreement with this approach. All of the deference and special privileges afforded to the Catholic Church need to end. The institution has shown itself to be morally bankrupt and undeserving of any respect and the time has come when the Church needs to reap the fruits that it has sown. Here are editorial highlights:
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Good for Ireland. The traditionally Catholic country - still (wrongly) viewed in cliché as a devout nation of unquestioning churchgoers - has finally had it with empty words and vacuous apologies.
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This week, in a unanimous parliamentary denunciation, Irish lawmakers blamed the Vatican for encouraging Irish bishops to not report suspected abusive priests to the police - thus defying Irish law and permitting the victimization to continue.
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This is not a reference to ancient history, either. It was in 1996 that Irish bishops decided calling the cops on priestly abusers might be the right thing to do. And, it turns out, it was in 1996 that Rome nixed that notion.
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Let the example of tiny Ireland be an international model. No nation that reveres justice and the rule of law should be intimidated by religious institutions, no matter how ancient or influential, if those institutions have been criminally implicated.
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Like Ireland, no nation should shy away from telling harsh truths about an institutional culture that, on this file, has turned all the forces of its labyrinthine secrecy to self-protection - at the expense of justice, morality and countless destroyed human lives.
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In the end, though, it is institutional Rome's deeply embedded self-interest, its stubborn reluctance to take genuine action to end the abuse of children - action, as opposed to the breast-beating rhetoric of which Benedict is so enamored - that all moral people must condemn. . . . Ireland's blunt stand this week for the greater good should be applauded.
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The Church hierarchy in its current form needs to be eliminated from Benedict XVI on down with a wholesale replacement of those who have shown complete indifference to the safety and welfare of children and youths. For the Catholic laity it will be a tsunami like experience. But without it, the laity will remain little more than accessories to sexual crimes against children.

Sunday Male Beauty

Weddings Begin in New York State! - Robert Knight Has Apoplexy

Weddings began shortly after midnight in New York State. Pictured above are Cheryle Rudd and Kitty Lambert became the first gay married couple this morning with Niagara Falls in the background. Besides ending religious based discrimination in the civil laws in New York, same sex marriage will bring an economic windfall to the state. Bob Witeck has a piece at CNN that looks at why marriage equality is good for business. Read the article here.
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Meanwhile, Robert Knight who has made a career out of disseminating anti-gay untruths and who strikes me as a self-loathing closet case, recently had a rant in the Washington Times about the left's - read gays - assault on the nation's so-called Judeo-Christian morality. With Knight the quest to force Christianist religious beliefs on all citizens trumps everything else - even the potential default on the national debt. Here are highlights from his screed that likely would have sat well with Norway's mass murder suspect:
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Over the past 90 years, a relentless campaign has unfolded to overthrow Judeo-Christian morality and replace it with an amorality that says desires themselves validate choices.
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This campaign has been advanced largely by hijacking the rubric and moral capital of the black civil rights movement and misapplying it to volitional behavior. The changes, which move us closer to barbarism, are enforced via media that pounce on even the slightest hesitation to embrace the new immorality.
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The current target of this unholy campaign is the perversion of marriage. For the first time, a Republican-controlled state Senate chamber provided the margin of victory for a state law redefining marriage away from the man-woman requirement. Soon, there will be no bride needed or no groom for a New York marriage license.
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The left is not about to call a truce in the culture war. Sensing disarray, the Obama administration has stepped up its attacks on the moral order even while it runs our economy off a cliff.
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It’s not too late to save what’s left of marriage and to reorder public policies to strengthen rather than corrode the sanctity of the home. . . . A great reservoir of sentiment for the permanent things is waiting to be tapped. What’s needed first is moral leadership from those who purport to be leaders.
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Can't you just feel the Christian love?

World Net Daily Blames Norway Attacks on Islamic Terrorists

In my first post of the day I ended by referencing the hate and fear mongers among the so-called "conservative" and "Christian" that help to fuel the actions of those like of Breivik in Norway. Imagine my shock to see that despite all of the evidence to the contrary, World Net Daily, is telling its Kool-Aid drinking readers that the attack on Norway was "Islamic terrorism."

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As one commentor stated most aptly, the fact that World Net Daily has left up the incitement to anti-Muslim hate speaks volumes about just how dishonest and - in my view, evil - the faux news site has become. Here's the comment left on the webpage (I suspect the comment will be soon scrubbed):
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It would seem that a legitimate Christian news site (one concerned about not bearing false witness, let alone lying) would have had the integrity to pull this poll question after it became clear that the perpetrator of this horror was not a Muslim, but a Norwegian Christian conservative Islamaphobe (someone very much one of your own). Sadly, WND demonstrated an utterly lack of integrity and honesty in posting and perpetuating this poll.
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Part of me suspects that the folks at WND are secretly applauding the terrorist attack in Norway.

Thomas Roberts Takes On GOProud Kapos

Given what the Republican Party has become, I find it difficult to grasp how anyone who isn't clinically mentally disturbed or who has had a lobotomy. I find it even more difficult to understand how anyone gay can be a Republican when denigrating LGBT Americans and maintaining our third class citizen status is a matter of party platform. Thus, members of GOProud strike me as somewhat akin to kapos who worked for the Nazi regime. I just don't get it. Neither does MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts who took Jimmy DeSalvia, the head of GOProud, deservedly to task. Here are highlights from Huffington Post followed by a video clip:
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Openly gay MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts had some very harsh words for Michele Bachmann and the GOP on Friday.
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Roberts was speaking to Jimmy DeSalvia, the head of GOProud, a gay Republican organization, about Bachmann. DeSalvia said it was important to "replace" a "failed president," and that his organization had reached out to all the GOP presidential candidates. (Bachmann is known for her ferocious opposition to gay rights, and video footage has shown that a clinic she co-owns practices so-called "conversion therapy" on gay people.)

"You will replace [Obama] with a person who would extinguish you," Roberts said to DeSalvia. He adding that Bachmann is someone who "doesn't believe that you have a right in this country to get married, that believes you don't even have a right in this country to be gay because she co-owns a clinic that will convert you.
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More Details Emerge on Norway's Fundamentalist Terrorist

As more details emerge about Anders Behring Breivik who has reportedly confessed to the bombing and shooting massacre in Norway, the more the man sounds like a clone of some of the far right Christians and white supremacist extremists in the USA. Yesterday, one commenter left a nasty comment attacking me for focusing on the parallels between what appear to have been Breivik's views and those that I see as a threat in this country. I did not publish the comment because I refuse to provide a platform for such people - they can get their own blog if they want to publish such drivel. If the truth hurts as to what such constant anti-immigrant, anti-liberal Christian and anti-Muslim propaganda can lead to I'm sorry. I will continue to call things as I see them. If individuals don't like my views, then my advice: don't read this blog. An Associated Press story in the Virginian Pilot has these highlights:
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A manifesto published online - which police are poring over and said was posted the day of the attack - ranted that the European elite, "multiculturalists" and "enablers of Islamization" would be punished for their "treasonous acts."
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More was coming to light Sunday about the man who police say confessed to a car bomb at government headquarters in Oslo and then, hours later, opening fire on young people at an island political retreat. Both targets were linked to Norway's left-leaning Labor Party, and authorities have said Breivik held anti-Muslim views and posted on Christian fundamentalist websites.
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"He wanted a change in society and, from his perspective, he needed to force through a revolution," Geir Lippestad, his lawyer, told public broadcaster NRK. "He wished to attack society and the structure of society."
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"We, the free indigenous peoples of Europe, hereby declare a pre-emptive war on all cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Western Europe. ... We know who you are, where you live and we are coming for you," the document said. "We are in the process of flagging every single multculturalist traitor in Western Europe. You will be punished for your treasonous acts against Europe and Europeans."
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CNN has highlights from the manifesto here. Yes, it's frightening stuff - and it sounds far too similar to things being said by anti-immigrant factions in the USA and far right Christians who have claimed that the freedom of religion rights under First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution apply only to Christians. As for Breivik's views on liberal Christian denominations - which likely included the Church of Norway that allows partnered gay clergy - the Christian Post has these highlights:
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He chose to be baptized into the Protestant Church at the age of 15, but over recent years has grown weary of the state of the modern Church. In one blog posted in 2009 he wrote: “Today's Protestant church is a joke. Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic.”
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Another Christian Post story has this highlight:
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“In Norway and Sweden extreme Marxist attitudes have become acceptable/everyday while the old-established truths of patriotism and cultural conservatism today are branded as extremism.”
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Candidly, his complaints against liberal churches sound like the screeds one sees on the website of the far right's so-called Institute for Religion and Democracy. This highlight from the New York Times is also note worthy:
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Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism specialist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said the manifesto bears an eerie resemblance to those of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, though from a Christian rather than a Muslim point of view. Like Mr. Breivik’s manuscript, the major Qaeda declarations have detailed accounts of the Crusades, a pronounced sense of historical grievance and calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.
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According to the police, Mr. Breivik first drew security services to central Oslo when he exploded a car bomb outside a 17-story government office building, killing at least seven people.
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Then he took a public ferry to Utoya Island, where he carried out a remarkably meticulous attack on Norway’s current and future political elite. Dressed as a police officer, he announced that he had come to check on the security of the young people who were attending a political summer camp there, many of them the children of members of the governing Labor Party.
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He gathered the campers together and for some 90 hellish minutes he coolly and methodically shot them, hunting down those who fled. At least 85 people, some as young as 16, were killed.
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Given the constant drumbeat of grievances against gays, liberals, Hispanics, blacks and Muslims being put out by so-called Christian "family values" groups and far right GOP aligned organizations, one can only wonder how many would be Breiviks are being cultivated here at home in the USA.