Wildmon
Don Wildmon, the leader of the Mississippi-based, virulently anti-gay group, the American Family Assoc., joined Facebook recently, and has sent an email blast to his followers urging them to sign up so that they can use the social networking platform as an outlet for propagating hatred and intolerance of gay people.
“I have joined Facebook. Please join me on Facebook and become a friend of AFA,” reads the email’s headline. In the body, Wildmon explains what Facebook is and hints at how his followers can use it to promote the homophobia agenda:
Every day new technologies are emerging on the Internet. For several years now Internet “social networking” has been the preferred choice of many for keeping in touch with friends and family. From Yahoo! 360 to MySpace to Facebook, people of all ages are enjoying quick, easy, and inexpensive ways of communicating with others near and far. And best of all it’s FREE!
I have joined Facebook. I hope you will join, too, and become a friend of AFA. Facebook allows users to send and receive emails, add comments, post photos and videos, share links, and join groups or causes. You can also learn about the people you meet or would like to meet. And you can network with like-minded people concerned about America’s moral decline. Once signed up, you can invite your family and friends to visit or join your homepage. You can also search the entire Facebook site to see if relatives, friends, acquaintances, and classmates are already members. Facebook is informative, fun, and easy to use. There simply is no reason not to join!
Take Action!
It’s likely that most Facebookers are not familiar with the AFA, which is among the wealthiest of the groups that raise money based on gay-hate mongering. In fiscal year 2006, the last year for which figures are available, it claimed net assets of $37 million. The AFA generates almost all its revenue in advertising campaigns designed to raise the specter of hatred of gay people, mostly among less educated, low-income whites.
The AFA is known for its “off with their heads” approach to boycotts. It even targets companies that exercise free speech — and free enterprise — by marketing to gay consumers. The list of companies boycotted by AFA is a who’s who of American brands, including 7-Eleven, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Airlines, American Girl, Blockbuster Video, Burger King, Calvin Klein, Carl’s Jr., Clorox, Crest, Ford, Hallmark Cards, Kmart, Kraft Foods, S. C. Johnson & Son, Movie Gallery, Microsoft, MTV, Mary Kay, NutriSystem, Old Navy, IKEA, Sears, Pampers, Procter & Gamble, Target, Tide, and Walt Disney Company.
The group is not just opposed to gay marriage, it even attacks companies that provide partner benefits for their employees:
[The AFA asks]”Christian consumers”to think twice before they patronize companies that support the homosexual agenda.” AFA lists major corporations that have non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation or that offer domestic-partner benefits for same-sex couples… “One company losing five to ten percent of its sales will send a clear message to every company in America,” offers Don Wildmon. AFA attacked Kraft Foods (owner of brand names Post, Oscar Meyer, and Maxwell House, among others) for the company’s support of the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago.
Facebookers should know that, like all anti-gay groups, AFA purports to base its anti-gay agenda on the Scriptures. But not only is using the Bible to justify organized hate campaigns a bizarre construct, it also requires a mind-bendingly selective reading. The Bible does condemn homosexuality in a few obscure references, but, in the Old Testament, it classifies it as an “abomination,” a class of sins that also famously includes eating shrimp, lobster and ham, as well as burning incense, cheating at business, women wearing pants, haughtiness, lying and improperly covering one’s poop in the desert. among other infractions.
At the same time, anti-gay Christians selectively ignore sexual sins that the Bible decries much more frequently and fervently than homosexuality, including sex between unmarried people, which it calls “fornication,” and, in particular, adultery. Adultery, unlike homosexuality, is prohibited in the Ten Commandments — the only Old Testament laws that Jesus did not rescind with his New Covenant.
In the real world, adultery, unlike gay marriage, is a real threat to “traditional” marriage. Adultery destroys families, and is a direct cause of the high incidence of single-parent homes, poverty and a whole host of social ills. Heterosexual adulterers are 100 percent more likely than monogamous gays and others to contract sexually transmitted diseases. Adulterers are, by definition, liars, and there is no doubt that adultery, unlike being gay, is a choice.
But the AFA is mute in opposition to the civil rights of adulterers. It has never opposed the right of adulterers to remarry. It has never launched a boycott against a company that employs adulterers or that gives partner benefits to remarried philanderers. The AFA once forced the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to reassign a reporter who covered education because he happened to be gay, but the AFA finds no problem with adulterous reporters covering education or even with adulterers working as teachers, where they are can recruit children into their sinful, adulterous lifestyle.
When the day comes that the AFA expands its agenda to advocate rescinding the marriage rights of adulterers and denying adulterers’ protections from being fired or evicted because of their status as sinners, we’ll start to believe their antipathy toward gays is purely Bible-based. Until then, the only conclusion to draw is that they are using the Bible to excuse their own personal prejudices and, too often, their own self-loathing — a fact that renders their hatred of gays to be as destructive and scornful as white supremacists’ hatred of blacks and antisemites’ hatred of Jews.
Like all social media platforms, Facebook is largely self-policing, so it will be interesting to see whether the Facebook community will tolerate a hate group like the AFA moving in and establishing an outpost there for its message of intolerance and oppression.
I have no use for hate and intolerance, but do not think this group or person should be banned from facebook. I support free speech, even he worst of it and believe that voices that oppose this groups message of hate are stronger and no need to feel threatened by them. Let them be there. I don’t have to befriend them or support them, but even assholes have a right to gather and I refuse to ban them as they would me.
Who said anything about banning them?
DO people really have to have someone to hate….why can’t everyone live their own lives and let others do the same?
Durn, they didn’t mention UPS. From the UPS web site:
“UPS again achieved the top rating of 100 percent in the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2009 Corporate Equality Index. UPS remains the only company to obtain this rating in the Mail and Freight Delivery industry.
Human Rights Campaign, or HRC, is America’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) civil rights organization. The Corporate Equality Index is a tool used to measure how companies treat their GLBT employees, suppliers and customers.”
Maybe I should join their facebook group and let them know.
It is unacceptable that people hate the sinner. I hate the sin but love the sinner.
It’s about time this group made it to facebook. In case you guys haven’t realized it, the vast majority of people in the US disapprove of the gay lifestyle. Also most people don’t care about what you do behind closed doors. The problem is when it is not only forced down our throats, but we are told that it is good and if I disagree then I am bad. Schools have no business telling my children that the gay lifestyle is good, bad, or anything else. It obviously isn’t good for society, but there is no hate from AFA towards an individual person. Rather a movement that is in opposition to what we as Christians stand for, namely family. We can get along, but not if I am told that my religion is less than your lifestyle choice.
No Christian who has posted in these comments has ever argued with the assertion that if Christian antipathy toward gays was really about “hating the sin,” Christians would persecute adulterers and fornicators with the same zeal they attack gays.
The fact that no one has ever denied this fact reinforces my belief that Christians’ indifference to adultery and fornication is proof that their homophobia agenda is not about the Bible, it is about their own personal prejudices and, in some cases, twisted self-hatred.
For what reason other than hatred would Christians give tens of millions to professional homophobes like Wildmon so that they can work every day to force gay people out of their jobs, harass companies who want gay people to buy their products and prevent gay people from the pursuit of happiness that comes from marriage?
In 2006, the total revenue of all the Christian hate groups like AFA, Focus on the Family and the rest was nearly half a billion dollars. Instead of lining the pockets of bigots, one would think that real Christians would prefer that their money be used to house the homeless and feed the hungry — especially in these times. The fact that they don’t is a sign that Christianity has devolved into decadence.
But that’s your business. The real issue here is that this country is not a theocracy, and it is un-American and anti-democratic to make laws based on religion and especially religion-based bigotry.
Consider this – in the O.T. Soddom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of the unnatural desire men had for eachother, not for adultry or any other sin listed in an earlier post. all are sins but never was a nation destroyed for the ones you listed.Seek Him while He may still be found.
calling afa a hate group and don wildman a professional homophobe is indeed a personal attack. sounds like hate speech.
i would have to say your web site discriminates-
That’s not what the Old Testament says, Jill. Nowhere does it say that Sodom was destroyed because men were having sex with each other. Sodom was destroyed after angels visiting in human form were treated rudely.
The original text says the “people” of Sodom, men and women, young and old, wanted to “know” the angels. This phrasing is a holdover from the 17th century English translation. Back then “know” was a euphemism for “have sex with.” (Ironically, that 17th century English translation, which is known today as the “King James Version,” was commissioned by James I of Great Britain, who was gay.)
Have you ever really thought about this, Jill? Why would angels have gender? Do angels have sex? And even if gays in Sodom had put the moves on them, surely the angels were powerful enough to protect themselves.
In Ezekiel 16:48-50, God compares Jerusalem to Sodom, saying “Sodom never did what you and your daughters have done.” God then describes why he aimed a death ray of fire and brimstone at the city:
Have you ever thought how many “poor and needy” people could be fed, clothed and housed with the hundreds of millions AFA and other hate groups raise to persecute gays? What makes Wildmon, AFA and the other haters any different from the daughters of Sodom? Are you positive that God does not find AFA’s hate campaign “detestable?”
The hate comes from you guys, not us. We’re just trying to defend ourselves. We’d be very happy if you’d leave us alone and persecute another group. My candidate would be adulterers. For one thing, there are millions more of them. Just think of all the money you could raise in that hate campaign.
Also, how can calling someone a “professional” be a “personal” attack? But, yes, we do discriminate against bigots here. Proudly.