Time for AFA to pull out the 'persecuted Christians' card

Pam's House Blend alerted me to this mess:

This is all the American Family Association has left, folks, but it's slickly produced bile. When homo-hating, illegal pistol-packing state legislator Sally Kern cited the book After the Ball as the proof of the Homosexual Agenda last week at a fundnut fest in OKC, it should have been no surprise that the AFA has been propagandizing this nonsense with its web site and hour-long video, Silencing Christians.com.

The premise is that Christians are under assault by homosexualists, enabled by state and local governments and schools, to force them to accept LGBTs as -- gasp -- human beings deserving of civil rights! They are careful to mention "former homosexuals" and those struggling with "unwanted same-sex attraction" in order to soothe and absolve the target audience of "Christians" that their motivations are rooted in compassion, not bigotry.

You can watch the video on Pams House Blend. It made me positively ill.

It's a bunch of one-sided anecdotal nonsense with the same claptrap i.e. yet more isolated incidents anecdotes taken out of context, and out-and-out lies which push the same message - homosexuals are nasty oversexed radicals who want to force their beliefs on everyone and silence Christians.

For the record, Matt Barber is in it, so is Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle. But the person who really caught me by surprise was phony expert John R. Diggs.

I've talked about him several times on this blog. He wrote The Health Risks of Gay Sex, a piece of anti-gay propaganda so worthless that no one but members of the religious right cites it. Tomorrow morning, I will repost the errors I found in Digg's piece .

This constant complaint about being persecuted will only backfire on the AFA. You saw it last week when it and other religious right groups tried to claim that a simple wording of something in President Obama's stimulus package would lead to the persecution of Christians. Despite their planning and despite enlisting the help of Sen. Jim DeMint to push the lie, they were shot down in Congressional debates.

How long will it be before the AFA's (and religious right's for that matter) consistent lie about being persecuted evoke images not of Roman arenas and lions but cynical politicians. Or wild haired men on street corners with huge display cards.

Soon, I hope.

And by the way, if you want a real view of persecution, check out this via One News Now:

TN: Adoption by married couples best for children

Shades of Arkansas no doubt. But the state Congressman pushing for this travesty may have put his foot in his mouth with his explanation of the proposed law:

"We were having a lot of [unmarried] individuals apply to adopt children from state custody....And while single people can make very good parents, what we were finding is that some of those individuals were in same-sex relationships," he points out. "And we just thought it was not advantageous to have children who are the responsibility of the state being placed in such homes."

So the law is about denying lgbts the right to adopt children and not just keeping unmarried couples from adoption.

Of course the law will probably have no incentives for married couples to adopt children, therefore the Congressman's premise is faulty.

But neither lies nor faulty premises have ever stopped the religious right. After all, what's truth when you are trying to remake America in "God's" image?