Archive for the 'American Family Association'

Today’s show will be about that cherished buzzword of ignorance: “Family Values”. Consider this post to be an open thread on the episode.

I have a theist friend who thinks I’m too quick to blame some of the world’s ills on religion. After all, he was raised in religion. He believes in god, and he doesn’t care if anyone else does or not. He isn’t trying to force it onto anyone else. He isn’t writing to legislators to ask them to incorporate his beliefs into laws that impact anyone else. And none of his friends or family has ever done anything like that, either. Christianity isn’t impacting U.S. policy. I’m simply imagining things. My friend is an example of what Sam Harris discusses in his writings when he describes how moderate Christians act as a buffer—a safety net—for fundamentalist Christians who are pushing their agendas into public policy and legislation. To criticize such a Christian agenda insults moderate Christians (like my friend) who are quick to defend that their religion should not be blamed for public ills. After all, what moderate wants to be held responsible for harmful public policies and legislation? Say that religion is at the root of such a problem, and you get shot down before you’re even out of the gate (if I can mix my metaphors)—not by overzealous fundamentalists, but by moderate, liberal Christians—like my friend. Point out where religion harms society, and you’re met with the shout down—from moderate, middle-of-the-road Christians—that you’re guilty of painting religion with too broad a brush. You’re cherry picking lunatics and fanatics and trying to impose that dysfunctional mess upon all Christians, who are, for the most part, socially benign. To be honest, I have no idea if the majority of Christians are “moderate”—in the sense that they have personal beliefs they don’t try to spread around or impose on others. I have no aversion to assuming most Christians fit that bill. Certainly most believers I have met personally aren’t any different. But whether they have majority numbers or not, it’s the fanatics that are running...
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Yes, there was a blemish on last night, which is that Christian Hate gets to crow about at least one victory. I am a little baffled about the Californians this morning. After all, they managed to deliver the state pretty handily for Obama, giving him no less than 61% of the popular vote there. So how they could have folded to fundamentalist fear so completely on the same night is rather strange. Still, I hope that this is just the beginning of Supreme Court challenges. There’s simply no room for this in an enlightened culture. And an enlightened culture is what I’m sincerely hoping America may start slouching towards during the next (being optimistic here) eight years of the Obama presidency. But for now, I thought, for schadenfreude purposes, we’d take a look at a little of the morning-after whining from the fundie camp in response to the election. My oh my, I do believe it’s time to call the waaaambulance! From the American “Family” Association, Donald Wildmon’s homophobic hate club, we get some advice for Christians: “Defend Life, Prepare for Persecution.” Since there’s nothing these people love more than to feel “persecuted,” I expect this is, perversely, good news for them. Read more
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Donald Wildmon, patriarch of the American “Family” Association, is really really upset that McCain/Palin are flailin’ in the polls, you betcha, and he’s sent out one of the AFA’s typically histrionic “Action Alert” e-mails in the hopes of rallying the Hate+Fear Brigade to save America from the scary libruls. After the usual whining, blaming the ascent of Obama to obviously slanted reportage from the “liberal media” — as if they were the ones responsible for Palin’s inability to answer a direct question from a journalist with anything resembling a coherent sentence or displaying even passing knowledge of the topic at hand; as if they were the ones responsible for ramping up the hate rhetoric at recent McCain/Palin rallies, prompting those stalwart supporters of the far right to shout things like “Kill him Read more
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Via Brayton, I come across this awesome piece over at OneNewsNow, the “news” site of the fundamentalist hate group American “Family” Association. You know, the same people who had that hilarious editorial gaffe recently involving an Olympic track star. Wildmon has his knickers in a twist over the upcoming Proposition 8 vote this November in California, in which the haters hope to make gay marriage illegal until, presumably, the end of time. If the Christians lose, Wildmon warns, well, down that slippery slope we fall! “If the homosexuals are able to defeat the marriage amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, then the culture war is over and we’ve lost — and gradually, secularism will replace Christianity as the foundation of our society,” he adds. The vote in California, Wildmon explains, will affect the entire nation. “California is a big dam, holding back the flood — and if you take down the dam in California, it’s going to flood 49 other states,” he illustrates. “It will destroy marriage as it has been known for thousands of years, and with that the cultural decline that normally would follow.” You know, the homophobes constantly rail about how recognizing gay marriage will somehow destroy their own, sanctified straight marriages, but they never explain how. That they take this approach to the argument seems to say voluminous volumes about the insecurity they feel about their own personal situations in marriage. If any situation, including someone else’s marriage, could possibly threaten your own marriage, then your marriage is already a failure, and it’s everything to do with you, gang. How a bunch of folks absolutely none of these terrified, insecure Christians will ever meet personally could threaten them, simply by deciding to commit to one another in marriage while happening to be the same gender, is simply absurd to contemplate. Unless...
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