Tag: Hate Groups
Sorry, Christians – Under Religious Freedom Laws, the Bible Also Requires You to Refuse Service to Adulterers
Public outrage over the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts that have passed in 21 states, so far, appears to be the latest sign of a massive shift toward support for gay civil rights. It also suggests people looked past Republican rhetoric and saw these laws for what they’re really meant to be — licenses for right-wing Christians to discriminate against gays, particularly Christians in the wedding business who want to refuse to bake cakes and provide floral arrangements for same-sex weddings based on moral grounds.
It is not only petty to withhold wedding flowers and cakes from a particular class of sinners, it is also unlawful on its face. RFRAs not only violate public-accommodation laws and would arguably be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause, their use of religion to single out a particular class of people runs afoul of the separation of church and state — the legal barrier that prevents our democratic republic from sliding into theocracy. It’s as un-American to discriminate against gays based on the Old Testament as it would be to restrict gay rights based on Sharia law, for example.
Like ISIS, US Christian Extremists Advocate Killing Gays – But ISIS Is Actually Doing It
While ISIS has been barraging the world media with horrific images — burning a Jordanian pilot alive and beheading journalists, aid workers and, most recently, 21 Egyptian Christians — it has also been executing gay men by hurling them to their deaths off of rooftops and other high places. Two men were also reportedly crucified for being gay.
ISIS appears to be handling these two kinds of public murders differently. By releasing videos of its executions of hostages, ISIS seeks international publicity as a gambit to stoke outrage, fear and horror in order to lure the civilized world into an Armageddon-like conflagration in the Middle East. The executions of gay men are handled with less fanfare, however, because ISIS views these murders as simply carrying out God’s judgment for the sin of homosexuality, based on scriptures in the Koran.
Most Americans view this sort of barbarism toward gays with detachment — it’s a faraway Muslim death cult acting out its extremist views. In fact, on the issue of homosexuality, ISIS is aligned with Christian extremists right here in the United States, many of whom also interpret God’s law as calling for the execution of gays.
There is a key difference, of course. While Christianists advocate killing gays, ISIS is actually doing it.
White Terrorist Suspect Sought in Bombing of NAACP Offices
Agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were in Colorado Springs yesterday collecting evidence at the scene of a mid-morning bomb attack on the local NAACP office there yesterday. According to local media accounts, witnesses saw a balding, middle-aged white man fleeing the scene in an old white pickup truck.
On Fox: Republican v Republican on Marriage Equality
On Fox News Sunday, Ted Olson, the Republican on the legal team that argued for marriage equality in California’s Prop 8 case — but who led the witness-bribing, anti-Clinton “Arkansas Project” in the 1990s, and who represented Bush/Cheney in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case in which Republicans on the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush as president — debated Tony Perkins, one of the grand wizards of the anti-gay hate movement. Transcript follows:
They Looked Jewish
What’s an angry white supremacist to do?
They don’t make ’em wear stars like they used to.
So it’s prudent to inquire
Before you open fire
Whether your intended targets indeed are Jews.
Haters Got to Keep on Hating: Prop 8 Defenders Try to Kill Marriage Equality in California One More Time
Despite having been slapped down by the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, the hate groups and Republican activists behind Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment that outlawed same-sex in California, have not given up. They announced last week that they will waste more of the taxpayers’ money with an appeal to the California Supreme Court to once again halt gay weddings in the state:
Hate Group Spokesman for GOP Base: Romney Has Put a ‘Bag Over Ryan’s Head’ and a ‘Sock in His Mouth’
The fringe dwellers that comprise the Republican base met in Washington this week for the Values Voters Summit, which is sponsored by the Family Research Center, which is on the hate-group list maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. At the conclave, FRC spokesman Bryan Fischer launched the campaign to pre-blame a Romney-Ryan loss in November on Mitt Romney’s insufficient ideological purity — but note how he uses analogies based on kidnapping and violence (or, more aptly perhaps in Fischer’s case, BD-SM):
Anti-Gay Hate Group Leader Who Gives Marching Orders to Romney Objects to New Yorker Article That Reveals His Obsession with Rigid Masculinity
According to Right-Wing Watch, Fischer is very unhappy with the New Yorker piece at least in part because it exposes his obsession with, um, rigid masculinity. This obsession may have started when he learned that his father had been a conscientious objector during World War II. Fischer’s lifelong shame about his father’s weakness appears to have been compounded when his mother left his father for a bus driver — when Bryan was at the tender age of 20. (Even so, when Fischer, who turned 18 in 1969, had the opportunity to go war himself, he opted not to volunteer and did not serve in Vietnam.)
As a student at Stanford, Fischer joined an evangelical church in Palo Alto. He told a friend that he was attracted to the church because of its “manliness.” “It was the first time I’d been around a real muscular Christianity,” Fischer said to a friend then. “It had a kind of strength and virility to it that would appeal to men.”
Hate Group Claims Victory in Forcing Out Romney’s Gay Spokesman: ‘Romney Will Do the Right Thing If It’s Politically Expedient’
It’s remarkable, this shitcanning of Richard Grenell as foreign-policy spokescritter for the Romneybot 2.0. Remarkable still for its being handled with such notable dispatch. First, you hire on the former mouthpiece for authoritarian nutbag John Bolton to establish further your neo-conservative foreign-policy gravitas. It turns out the guy is openly gay, so bonus! (Remember, all you wavering and otherwise vacant “independent” voters: Once, I was going to be a gayer senator than Teddy Kennedy. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.) Then, of course, the guy turns out to be just as crackers as his former boss — Bad-mouthing the lovely Callista Gingrich? Calumnizing kindly Doc Maddow? My seconds will call on yours, sir! — and, because he’s gay, the megachurches scramble the flying monkeys into the air and, within two weeks, Grenell is as fired as an Ampad worker.
Andrew Sullivan, who has insight into the gay conservative movement, believes Grenell resigned because Romney refused to come to his defense after Bryan Fisher, a hate group apparatchik, accused Grenell — who is in a committed relationship and, counter to his party, advocates marriage equality — of probably engaging in “random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters” (because, you know, heterosexuals, especially anti-gay evangelical leaders, are never promiscuous), a factor that, Fisher says becomes “a significant issue when we’re talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy.” (Talk about exhuming McCarthy!)
