Bryan Fischer is director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association and host of the daily “Focal Point” radio talk program on AFR Talk (a division of the American Family Association).
When he’s not damning gay and lesbian Americans and inciting hatred toward them and their families, he’s busy damning Islam and inciting hatred toward Muslims. Sometimes he combines the two, as in his May 24 article in which he proclaimed “Homosexuals, as a group, are the single greatest perpetrators of hate crimes on the planet, outside the Muslim religion, of course . . .” That invective elaborated on one of his broadcasts in which Fischer claimed gays—and Muslims, of course—are Nazis:
The homosexual agenda is just like Islam . . .
I mean, ladies and gentlemen, they are Nazis. Homosexual activists, when it comes to freedom of speech, are Nazis. When it comes to freedom of religion, they are Nazis. There is no room in their world [for] dissent, there is no room in their world for disagreement, there is no room in their world for criticism. You criticize homosexual behavior, they tag you as a bigot and a homophobe and then they got to work to silence you just like the Roman Catholic Church did in the days of Galileo—it’s no different; it’s the Spanish Inquisition all over again.
Ladies and gentlemen, they are Nazis. Do not be under any illusions about what homosexual activists will do with your freedoms and your religion if they have the opportunity. They’ll do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents in Nazi Germany. . . .
Watch Mr. Fischer’s rant here. Then ask yourself: “In what sense could Bryan Fischer possibly consider himself ‘a Christian’?” And then ask yourself: “What are the morals, ethics and goals of the American Family Association that sponsors such derogatory, divisive rhetoric?” It seems Mr. Fischer just loves hating and has found an employer willing to pay him to incite others to do the same.
Mr. Fischer frequently makes a fool of himself and a mockery of Christianity. Some examples can be found here and here. He’s also done much to make ultra-conservatives look sillier, more out of touch with social and cultural realities, and more hypocritical than ever. Case in point: his May 19, 2011 article in defense of Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch parliamentarian who’s currently facing charges of hate speech and inciting hatred. Mr. Fischer began his article embracing Wilders’ agenda and then went on to flaunt his “Judeo-Christian” hypocrisy:
Geert Wilders is a Dutch parliamentarian who is facing prison in his home country because he has said the same things about Islam that I have said repeatedly on air and in print.
He is being prosecuted for inciting hatred and committing hate crimes for saying that Islam is a dangerous ideology, the Qur’an is just an Islamic Mein Kampf, Muslim immigration to the Netherlands should be curtailed, and the building of mosques should be halted.
In other words, for telling the truth and advocating sound public policy, he could wind up sharing a cell with a rapist, a murderer or a child molester.
Last Thursday evening, Wilders spoke in Nashville, TN, at the Cornerstone Church, and offered a sober and challenging warning to the Christians of America. And not just to American Christians, but to all Americans, period.
His message: Islam is a profound threat to Judeo-Christian civilization, and must be stopped dead in its tracks.
He is speaking from 30 years of experience and observation as Europe has allowed Islam to seep its toxic waste throughout the European continent. The results are not pretty. In fact, they are horrifying for everyone who cares about classic Judeo-Christian values such as liberty and equality under the law. [italics added]
“A dangerous ideology.” There are no more “dangerous” ideologies than those espoused by ideologues who claim to be speaking for “God” and advancing or enforcing “His” will . . . by whatever means necessary.
Ever since the actions of ideologues on 11 September 2001, media headlines have often featured reports about Islamic fundamentalists and murderous terrorist attacks. In the 7th century c.e., when Islam was just getting going, Christian ideologues were already hard at work concretizing and institutionalizing the ideology that resulted in the torture and murder of millions of people in Europe and the Americas. The horrors of the Inquisition and wholesale slaughter of native peoples in the New World were all done in the name of the Judeo-Christian “God.” But that’s the basis of religious ideologies “handed down” by the jealous, vengeful, warrior sky god common to all three Western religions. An “Us vs. Them” mindset and worldview is inevitable: “We’re of God. They are not, and they must suffer the consequences.”
“For telling the truth and advocating sound public policy.” The fundamental truth is that dogmatic religious ideologies should not dictate—or even play a major role in deciding—sound public policy in the 21st century. Those are civil matter with new perspectives, new understandings, and new needs. That’s obvious in the march toward equality for gay and lesbian Americans, especially in relation to the state-sanctioned (and licensed) civil institution called “marriage.” Leaders of the radical Christian Right and their political sycophants had convinced many people that this form of civil equality was not what “God” wanted, as if they had any clue as to what “God” wants. But it is clear what they want: increased social and political control and for all those hate-inspired donation to keep flowing into their organizations’ coffers. Fortunately, more and more people—especially young people—are rejecting their gospel of hate and discrimination:
Focus on the Family Leader Sees Likely Loss on Marriage
By Advocate.com Editors
May 23, 2011
Jim Daly, the president and CEO of Focus on the Family, which funds attacks against marriage equality across the country, concedes in a new interview that his side has “probably lost” on the issue. . . .
“We’re losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage,” says Daly in the interview. “I don’t know if that’s going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We’ve probably lost that. . . .
“Focus on the Family finally got something right—the American people are rejecting their antigay toxic rhetoric and punitive politics, and are siding with loving and committed couples seeking the freedom to marry,” said Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry, in a statement issued in response to the Daly interview. “With six national polls now confirming that a majority of Americans support the freedom to marry, it’s time for Focus on the Family and other anti-gay industry activists to move on and, ideally, redirect their resources toward tackling the real problems gay and non-gay Americans could be confronting together in these tough economic times.”
In a rather verbose “response” on May 24, 2011, Mr. Daly displayed an ideologue’s skill at half-truths, logical flaws, and specious reasoning presented as fact. For example, in relation to a woman’s right to choose, Mr. Daly asserted, “Tragically, over 48 million babies have now been aborted and the beauty of life has been cheapened as a result, while child abuse has skyrocketed.”
How does one measure “the beauty of life” or calculate that it has been “cheapened”? All the new parents I know defy Mr. Daly’s opinion, and that’s exactly what it is: an opinion presented as a fact and spun for political purpose, as is the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy in the last clause: “while child abuse has skyrocketed.” Dr. Daly’s clever sentence structure links an alleged “skyrocketing” of child abuse to the legalization of abortion. First, Mr. Daly would need to document a rise in child abuse since 1973, taking into account the increased media attention given to the subject, more frequent reporting of abuse, and other sociological factors. Then he would need to document and substantiate a clear one-to-one cause-effect relationship to prove legal abortion directly caused more child abuse. He does neither, and for good reason. The implied connection is fallacious.
(It must be noted that one of the religious organizations leading the opposition to a woman’s right to choose is also guilty of decades of covering up child abuse by its priests. The Vatican’s latest attempt to shirk responsibility—by blaming the Sixties—is as feeble as Daly’s claims.)
In another section, Mr. Daly offered this: “I am, naturally, personally opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage for the simple but profound reason that it violates and contradicts the sacred text of the Bible, which I believe to be true and inspired.” Well then, one can only assume Mr. Daly supports all those rather nasty parts of that “sacred” and “inspired” text, such as the draconian laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and Jesus’ demand that one give up all earthly wealth in order to follow him. Have you emptied your bank accounts, cashed in your stocks, and given all that money to the poor, Dr. Daly?
And then there’s this gem: “If religious liberty is lost in America, we will cease to be the nation our Founders intended us to be. Our rights will no longer be derived from God but from man, and therefore, dangerously beholden to political despots.” First of all, “religious liberty” is exactly what Bryan Fischer and his ilk want to eradicate when it comes to Muslims. Secondly, “rights” are a man-made concept and, therefore, they evolve with societies. Most of the men who wrote the Constitution were slave owners. Obviously the “Creator” of which they spoke didn’t deem Africans (or women) worthy of the same “inalienable rights” afforded white European men. Thirdly, the claim that equal civil rights for gay and lesbian Americans will destroy “religious liberty” is one of the primary scare tactics the radical Christian Right uses. Organized religions and their believers can still believe as they wish and adhere to their dogma in their personal lives. Churches, mosques and synagogues can still determine who they will marry and who they will not, just as they do now. What “civil equality” means is that religions cannot use their beliefs as a means “to bear false witness” against fellow citizens or to justify and legitimate discrimination in civil matters where—we now believe—all citizens are equal and must be free from the oppression by any religion’s dogma.
Mr. Daly’s subject was marriage equality. In relation to that form of civil equality—and religious ideologues’ opposition to it—New Your City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said it best:
It is not a matter of if—but when. . . .
As private individuals, we may be part of a faith community that forbids divorce or birth control or alcohol. But as public citizens, we do not impose those prohibitions on society. We may place our personal faith in the Torah, or the New Testament, or the Koran, or anything else. But as a civil society, we place our public faith in the U.S. Constitution: the principles and protections that define it, and the values that have guided its evolution. And as elected officials, our responsibility is not to any one creed or congregation, but to all citizens. . . .
And on marriage equality, it will not be defeated.
There is no retreating to a past that has disappeared. There is no holding back a wave that has crested. And there is no denying a freedom that belongs to us all.
But let’s get back to Mr. Fischer . . .
“Islam is a profound threat to Judeo-Christian civilization, and must be stopped dead in its tracks.” Islam is not going away any time soon. Building walls to keep it out won’t work. Such hysterical responses have always been A.) productive for hate-mongers, B.) counterproductive for everyone else. “Productive” in that they fire up the ignorant and self-righteous and keep their donations flowing in, but counterproductive for civilization and any hope for a civil society based on reason and equality.
Mr. Fischer’s bigotry and hypocrisy were in plain view when he claimed Islam—or “toxic waste” as he dubbed it—is “horrifying for everyone who cares about classic Judeo-Christian values such as liberty and equality under the law” [italics added]. Fischer and his organization, as well as similar spokesmen at kindred “Christian” organizations such as Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council, James Dobson, founder and former CEO Focus on the Family, and Louis P. Sheldon at the Traditional Values Coalition, have vehemently opposed—with vile, vitriolic rhetoric, distortions, half-truths and outright lies—every attempt by gay and lesbian Americans to secure liberty and civil equality under the law. To say these people and their organizations care about civil equality is total nonsense. What they want is a theocratic state in which their cherry-picked version of the Bible and concocted dogma govern secular society and define “civil equality.” Western civilization experienced that once. It was called “The Dark Ages.”
To be sure, Islamic ideologues not only condemn homosexuals, they eliminate them, often in public hangings. That should epitomizes the danger of religious dogma dictating civil law. Alas, at least one of the “experts” often cited by American theopolitical “Christian” websites has proposed a similar response to “the gay problem”:
At the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference, [discredited “psychologist” Paul] Cameron announced to the attendees, “Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals.” According to an interview with former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, Cameron was recommending the extermination option as early as 1983. [links added]—Mark E. Pietrzyk, News-Telegraph, March 10, 1995
As Mr. Fischer’s rants become more and more vitriolic, more and more nonsensical, more and more hypocritical, he’s actually doing the country a favor. He’s showing the depths to which the radical Christian Right has sunk. His vile, hate-filled rhetoric is repulsive to more and more Americans, and his hypocrisy makes the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales look like a second-class hack.
The Christian Right was once fond of asking, “What would Jesus do/think?” One has to wonder what Jesus—champion of the disenfranchised—would do/think about Mr. Fischer and his brethren who “earn” a living by promoting hate and encouraging discrimination?
