Right Wing Watch reports every day the crazy claims made by wingnuts and I often pass those things on here. But this one, from Kevin Swanson of Vision Ministries, I found particularly loopy. He advocates a return to the theocracy of the pilgrims and offers some hilariously idiotic historical claims and fake statistics along the way.
Even Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, to some extent, had some writings that were somewhat favorable of homosexuality. Now, homosexuality had not existed for about 1,000 years, between about 300 AD to 1400-1500 AD where certain mentions of it were extant in some of the classical literature of the day, because classical literature tends to bring back homosexuality as the ‘cool thing’, but it hadn’t existed for about 1,000 years. It was, obviously, very very important to humanism, it always has been important to humanism, and whenever you get a humanist, classical approach to education, you’re probably going to get the gymnasium. The gymnasiums were all built around the idea of pederasty and pedophilia.
Now, I don’t want to get into a lot of the details on this, because it’s very very very gross, but they trained young boys in homosexuality. This is part and parcel of the homosexual vision, still is, by the way, to this day. This is the goal, this is where they’re headed, if you read the homosexual literature, which I encourage you not to do, but this is the direction that they’re headed. This is the goal of humanism. The goal of humanism is to make it to Sandusky. The problem is Sandusky was prosecuted and that’s an indication that we’ve got 2,000 years of Christianity, and these guys are not going to get away with it…
You know, Dave, I think if we’re going to have a halfway decent, stable society, much like what the pilgrims had, with a divorce rate of .01%, fornication rate of 1%, and a homosexuality rate of .0005%, if we’re going to have a stable society, we’re going to have to get back to biblical law.
Homosexuality didn’t exist for a thousand years? Riiiiight. And you have to love the fact that he thinks he has exact statistics on the sex lives of the pilgrims. It’s ironic that he’s so obsessed with gay sex, since he seems to like pulling numbers out of his anal cavity.
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raven
July 6, 2012 at 1:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The high point of American theocracy was back in that era. The Puritans killed 25 alleged witches, a few members of other xian sects, and drove Roger Williams out to form a refuge from them with the founding of Rhode Island.
The Puritans disappeared because no one wanted to be one any more. It was too brutal and dismal for normal people.
imrryr
July 6, 2012 at 1:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ah yes, the early middle-ages… What a *cough* stable society they had back then.
oranje
July 6, 2012 at 1:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What is their obsession with conflating homosexuality and pedophelia? Is it purposely demonizing, or do they choose, like with climate change and evolution, to ignore the evidence that pedophilia is massively overwhelmingly committed by heterosexuals?
But he must be right. He used quantitative evidence, after all! You know they’re in trouble when they’re using the Ahmadinejad argument.
oranje
July 6, 2012 at 1:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@imrryr
Makes me want to smack this pastor with a copy of the Decameron. Run away from the Plague!
MPG
July 6, 2012 at 1:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Because we wouldn’t want people checking the claims you make, right? That would never do.
raven
July 6, 2012 at 1:32 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The era commonly known as the Dark Ages.
No surprise. The fundies really do want to set up a new Dark Age. We’ve had the Enlightenment which they hate.
According to them it is time for…The Endarkenment.
oranje
July 6, 2012 at 1:33 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@MPG
I’m assuming you could take out “the homosexual literature” from that quote and it would still very much fit him.
DaveL
July 6, 2012 at 1:34 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Humanism conference at Cedar Point!
Did he actually just plead with his audience not to check his sources?
wieeseigentlichgewesen
July 6, 2012 at 1:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That’s an awesome History fail. Look, Kevin Swanson, primary source evidence of medieval homosexuality: http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/pwh/index-med.asp#c7
d cwilson
July 6, 2012 at 1:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
37 Puritans rode on the original Mayflower voyage. With a homosexuality rate of 0.0005%, that means 0.000185 people were gay.
dingojack
July 6, 2012 at 1:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“… a homosexuality rate of .0005%…”
That’s 1 in every 200,000 persons or about 1.893935 persons in 1790 (population of Mass. is 378,787 in 1790).
So much, much less than one when the Pilgrims landed. Maybe one was a little bit camp or sump’n.
Dingo
dingojack
July 6, 2012 at 1:45 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Damn, beat to it! Well OK one was 999/5,400,000 part gay (well probably half that since fundies don’t know about ‘tipping the velvet’)
Dingo
John Hinkle
July 6, 2012 at 1:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Boy, that’s some intense “us”… and very spooky “them.”
*consults glow-in-the-dark quija board*
I’m getting a message – it’s very strong now – that Kevin Swanson of Vision Ministries needs our money.
Honey, can you bring my credit cards? Nevermind what for.
eric
July 6, 2012 at 2:04 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
History.com tells me there were about 100 settlers who disembarked from the Mayflower. So, one 1/100th of a settler must have been divorced. Only one settler had buttsex. 1/200,000th of one settler was gay.
I am not sure how that first one works. The last two are easy: for #2, their partner stayed behind. For #3, only a small part of their anatomy is gay. :)
baal
July 6, 2012 at 2:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The right has a veritable primal ooze bubbling on the fringes and we’ve seen many of their insane inanities get adopted by what used to be the conservatives of the Republican party (Oren Hatch moved more right (conceptually difficult concept) in response to a primary challenge from a tea partyer).
This particular idea of going all US-Theocracy is definitely percolating.
and WTF @ conflating everything they don’t like into the same thing. And I don’t want to get into the detail on this (it’s an unrelated note) but Paterno is Catholic and Sandusky is Methodist. Neither are particularly humanist or openly part of a gay community (so far as I can google).
eric
July 6, 2012 at 2:07 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Damn, scooped not once but twice! Incidentally, my numbers probably don’t match d cwilson’s because not all the settlers were puritans.
Vasha
July 6, 2012 at 2:07 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Since he thinks so highly of the Puritans, I couldn’t resist looking into Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland. The authors found traces in those days, all right: mostly men (and also women!) being prosecuted or censured for sodomy or “lewd behavior” with one of their own sex — half a dozen cases they cite. But also, they found the minister Thomas Shepard, in telling of how awful he was before he repented, confessing to same-sex sins; and the minister Michael Wigglesworth keeping a carefully coded diary in which he recorded his forbidden desires. Then there was the colony of Merrymount, founded by Thomas Morton as a haven for “misrule”, maypole dancing, and “atheism” (by which the language of the time meant religious nonconformism and sinful behavior). His enemies claimed that sodomy was rampant there.
The data sure isn’t adequate to conclude the statistic of “.0005%”; but I think that there’s as much record of same-sex behavior in Puritan Boston as anywhere else in the same period.
matty1
July 6, 2012 at 2:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ignoring for a moment that these statistics are almost certainly bullshit I want to look at the idea of claiming low divorce rates as a good thing. Now they could be a good thing if they indicate lots of happy marriages but they could also indicate that divorce was made impossible or almost so and this second option seems particularly likely in a theocracy. It’s a bit like putting someone under house arrest then claiming they love to stay at home, they may do but if they had no choice you can’t assume that.
alanuk
July 6, 2012 at 3:42 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
.0005%
I very much doubt that he knows anything about decimals or percentages – .0005% just sounds impressive.
NitricAcid
July 6, 2012 at 3:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Alanuk Just as impressive as the description “very very very gross”.
Q: How important is vocabulary?
A: Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very important.
busterggi
July 6, 2012 at 3:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Considering Swanson worships a man who supposedly;
1 regularly hung around with twelve other men who greeted one another with kisses
2 had a ‘the beloved disciple’ who kept losing his clothes leaving him naked
3 never showed any sexual interest in women
I guess he knows all about homosexuality.
Pierce R. Butler
July 6, 2012 at 4:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
… homosexuality had not existed for about 1,000 years, between about 300 AD to 1400-1500 AD …
That’s not just “the early middle-ages” or “the Dark Ages”, but all of the “dark” and “medieval” periods, plus some of the Classical and Renaissance eras on each end.
Note that somehow the Roman Empire extirpated homosexuality right before it fell, and Teh Ghey came back just as culture, art, and science revived in a world-transforming way. No gays -> massive stagnation (which I guess is what sweet little Kevin means by “stable society”, though if I had a horse I wouldn’t leave him alone in the barn with it).
tbrandt
July 6, 2012 at 4:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Nope, no sodomy in Dante’s Divine Comedy written in the 1310s, nosiree. Well, maybe a little bit in the seventh circle of hell, and oh, half the people purging themselves of lust in purgatory. But other than that, nothing!
kagekiri
July 6, 2012 at 4:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The shit? Does this guy forget the classic defense of Christians “We’re just trying to stop America from being destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah were, homosexuality brings God’s judgment!”
You know, things that supposedly happened in the Bible thousands of years B.C.? You know, that Lot guy offering his daughters (who he later slept with on consecutive nights) to be raped by the town’s men instead of his male guests, because somehow that utter dehumanizing of his daughters was “more righteous” than homosexuality?
Christ on a stick, Christians can be DENSE.
He’s also forgetting that the Israelites (according to my old books about Bible times) married 30-40 year old men to girls who just hit puberty (so like 13 year olds) in Old Testament times. SO yeah, pedophilia wasn’t ever really opposed by the founding people of Judeo-Christianity. Hell, it’s not even opposed in the New Testament.
Also, “gym is for promotion of pedophilia”? What??
rork
July 6, 2012 at 4:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“This is part and parcel of the homosexual vision, still is, by the way, to this day.”
It’s a dangerous thing to imagine that ideas of “homosexuals” in my culture apply very much to classical, or even dark ages, or to any other place and time. What men having sex with men (or boys) felt like and meant then and there, I am not enough of a scholar to know, but it sometimes sounds quite strange (Greeks, Romans, New Guinea highlanders) and sometimes not (St. Augustine). It is hard for me to accept that my experiences are not universal, so I need to remind myself that I only get to dip my toe into this one river, not those others.
I do know that the secret manual now distributed did not exist before 1678.
scienceavenger
July 6, 2012 at 4:38 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
…if we’re going to have a halfway decent, stable society, much like what the pilgrims had…
You mean where only the penis-possessing European half of society had full rights, and the rest were treated as chattel or worse? Oh right, that’s the “halfway” part, I get it.
How about a FULLY decent stable society then, you know, BETTER than what the pilgrims had?
lofgren
July 6, 2012 at 5:43 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
*Does not include acts where one of the partners was a man and the other was a male goat.
garnetstar
July 6, 2012 at 5:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What about Edward II of England (1284 – 1327)? He was a Christian in a very stable theocracy (0% divorce rate), and was homosexual.
And BTW, his wife had him murdered. That’s family values in a stable Christian theocracy for you!
dogmeat
July 6, 2012 at 6:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What the hell is “homosexual literature?”. Is it when fiction books fall for other fiction instead of non-fiction as “God” intended? Are the activities of heterosexual books the reason why my library keeps growing (and my wife keeps giving me dirty looks?). Is this why I keep finding bookmarks hanging from doorknobs?
Inquiring mind want to know…
AsqJames
July 6, 2012 at 6:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Nevermind the homosexuality and divorce rates he pulls out of his fundament, how the hell does a “fornication rate of 1%” to produce the next generation?
Actually, what does it even mean? On average people spend 1% of their time screwing*? Only 1 in 100 people ever get their jollies on during their lifetime? Maybe it’s an annual figure?
Seriously, wtf does this mean?
* – That’s about 15 minutes a day. If you can’t last that long it’s your puritan duty to do it more than once per day, whereas if you take your time you have to space out your horizontal jogging sessions.
Pierce R. Butler
July 6, 2012 at 6:24 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
AsqJames @ # 30: Seriously, wtf does this mean?
Fornication is not just screwing, it’s screwing without a license.
Fun fack: The root of the word “fornicate” is the Latin “fornix”, which has nothing to do with sex but means “arch”. The story goes that back in medieval Rome, before the invention of the motel, lovers would meet for amorous frolics in the shadows beneath the arches – particularly, of the areas around St Peter’s Cathedral now known as the Vatican.
billydee
July 6, 2012 at 6:43 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Let’s bring the ‘gymnos’ back to gymnasia. No, on second thought,let’s not: just like at nude beaches and San Francisco gay street fairs, the only people who get naked are the ones you don’t want to see naked.
speed0spank
July 6, 2012 at 8:51 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“You could read about it and find out for yourself, but I wouldn’t recommend it” said every person that wants to keep the wool pulled over your eyes.
raven
July 6, 2012 at 10:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
According to the bible, the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was lack of hospitality to strangers, those angels. It had nothing to do with the gays.
The Vision idiot is like all fundies. He has no idea what is in their magic book and just makes it up as he goes along.
BTW, King James, who lent his name to the King James version of the magic book was also gay. The fundies really hate it when you point that out.
raven
July 6, 2012 at 10:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
For fans of bible trivia, here it is.
The sin of Sodom was “arrogant, overfed, unconcerned, and not helping the poor and needy.
Another proof that the xian god doesn’t exist. If he did, he would have blasted the GOP and Tea Party with millions of lightning bolts by now. We all know what their attitude towards the poor and needy is. Let them go eat Soylent Green!!!
He would have sent two lightning bolts to Kevin Swanson for being a Tea Partier and lying about his magic book.
Gvlgeologist, FCD
July 6, 2012 at 10:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I really don’t understand why everyone here is complaining about the statistics quoted by the esteemed pastor. Seems to me that this is a classic example of “not intended to be a factual statement”!
StevoR
July 7, 2012 at 5:05 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@17. Vasha :
Wigglesworth? Minister Wigglesworth? Really? Nice name! ;-)
Also “return to theocracy” eh?
Was the USA even the decidedly uber-religious no fun Puritan colony ever actually a theocracy as such?
dingojack
July 7, 2012 at 6:34 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Was the USA even the decidedly uber-religious no fun Puritan colony ever actually a theocracy as such?”
Whew – what a twisted sentence. Do you mean:
‘Was the USA ever a theocracy as such, like the decidedly uber-religious, no-fun Puritan colonies*?’ OR
‘Was the USA, even the decidely … Puritan colonies*, ever a theocracy, as such?’
Dingo
—–
* while intially there was only one colony, others were founded later, particularly after internal disputes
Fizzing thru da Fizzics
July 7, 2012 at 9:04 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Silly pastor, never read babble, and lying fer jeebus…. sigh
KG
July 8, 2012 at 3:15 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s standard theocratic rhetoric to diss the Enlightenment – but this guy clearly rejects the Renaissance.
jaker
July 12, 2012 at 4:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Turns out that fornication was common enough that it had two identified types, without contract (engagement) and with contract, the latter liable to 5-pound fines for each miscreant and the former, whipping. At least nine cases of adultery were tried. Early in the colony, there was a period without a criminal code. See http://www.histarch.uiuc.edu/plymouth/Lauria1.html. So, he’s a liar. Should we be surprised?