Friday, November 18, 2011

AFA - Stay out of the 'culture wars' unless you are taking our side

This morning, the American Family Association's phony publication, One News Now, is railing on the corporations who filed briefs asking for the elimination of DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act).

With the headline Businesses have no business in culture war blaring in bold letters, One News Now doesn't make any bones as to the direction it is going in the article. And this point is further made by the one person the author's article, Charlie Butts, chooses to quote in the article - longtime homophobe Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel:

Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel Action finds it unfortunate to see the firms "alienate a large percentage of their customer base" by choosing sides in a very polarized culture war, and he is especially disappointed to see CBS advocating for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act "when CBS purports to be an objective news agency." But he decides the network's part in the lawsuit "kind of reveals them and really underscores and supports what we all know -- that in the mainstream media ... liberal bias runs amok."

Barber also extends a special bit of venom to Starbucks:

You know, there was a scandal a while back where they were putting pro-homosexual propaganda on some of their Starbucks coffee cups," he recalls. "There was an uproar, but now we see that Starbucks is again emboldened and again carrying the water for radical homosexual activist organizations."

Barber contends that Starbucks needs to "get out of the business of pushing radical San Francisco-style social policies, and instead get about the business of making good coffee."

So with the help of Barber, One News Now seems to be making the point that companies should stay out of the fight for gay equality.

Too bad One News Now doesn't have the same frame of mind when it comes to companies fighting against gay equality. Remember this jewel in January:

A pro-family organization that works to equip churches to transform the culture is defending a privately held, family-owned chicken restaurant that is under fire for providing lunches for a recent marriage seminar.

In addition to closing on Sundays to allow worship and family time for its employees, Chick-fil-A and many of its franchise owners across the U.S. have pledged to contribute to everything from marriage seminars to retreats and counseling for the employees of its 1,200 locations. The perk has gone largely unnoticed until recently.

"A local Pennsylvania Chick-fil-A decided to donate some box-lunches to a seminar called 'The Art of Marriage: Getting to the Heart of God's Design,'" reports Family Research Council (FRC) president Tony Perkins. "Since then, the fast-food chain has come under attack from liberals, who say these sandwiches are somehow a political statement against homosexuality."

Of course that's not the entire story. The marriage seminar was sponsored by the Pennsylvania Family Institute, a conservative research and education organization associated with Focus on the Family. And both of these groups are vehemently opposed to marriage equality.

Furthermore, it was discovered by an investigation via Equality Matters that Chick-Fil-A has a long history of donating to anti-gay groups and causes to the tune of $1.1 million. Futhermore, the company has not only partnered with some of these groups but on some occasions have sponsored them.

So the question here is does One News Now hold Chick-Fil-A to the same standard that it does with business who are pushing for gay equality? Does One News Now think that Chick-Fil-A should stay out of the so-called culture war and concentrate on making "good chicken?"

Who are we kidding? We all know the answer to that question.

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11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Double standards for the Religious Right? No, I won't believe it! Next thing you know you'll be accusing them of thinking freedom of speech and civil liberties are for Christians only!

EvilI said...

An objective news agency doesn't mean a neutral one. They're biased in favor of the truth.
In more and more cases, that's the same thing as liberal bias. That's not because the news is liberal, it's because conservatives are lying more and more, and working against their constituents.

Stop doing that and the bias evaporates. And please, please stop doing it! No really, I'm beggint you! At the moment, we effectively have a one-party system and opponents who want to hurt America! That's really really bad! We need actual conservative leaders! Need them! Only having two choices is bad enough; with only one choice the American people have no voice.

David Cary Hart said...

Ever notice how Barber has only one setting - - - hyperbole?

leah said...

"Reality has a liberal bias." --Steven Colbert

Chip said...

Alvin,

There's also the fact that Media Matters did a follow-up to this investigation this November, and they found that Chick-fil-A's WinShape Foundation has donated directly to causes and groups that seek to put the whims of anti-gay theologians and politicians into law.

BlackTsunami said...

Yep. that's in the post. ;p

Mycos said...

"It appears that conservatism has pathological dimensions manifested in violence and distorted psycho-sexual development" (Boshier, 1983, p. 159). This is supported by a study conducted by Walker, Rowe, and Quincey (1993) in which there was a direct correlation between authoritarianism and sexually aggressive behavior. An investigation done by Muehlenhard (1988) revealed that rape justification and aggression toward subordinate individuals was much higher in traditional (conservative personality) than non-traditional personalities."

"Conservatism is not the doctrine of the intellectual elite or of the more intelligent segments of the population, but the reverse. By every measure available to us, conservative beliefs are found most frequently among the uniformed, the poorly educated, and the less intelligent" (McClosky, H. Conservatism and personality. American Political Science Review, 52, 27-45. ).

Anonymous said...

@Mycos above

I read a similar article just the other day. (If you Google the first line you quoted several articles come up with the same conservative = batsh*t crazy consensus). Lol, they must just love that.

Problem is, crazy people don't know they're crazy and think it's everyone else who is. How do you combat people who do not live in reality and actually believe they're being guided by an invisible, supernatural entity that just happens to agree with all their politics and prejudices?

*Sigh* It's going to be a loooong battle.

Jerry Dobson said...

This site should change its name to Middle Of The Road to Left Wing Watch, because there doesn't seem to be anything right wing, or morally conservative about it. Or maybe a better name would be Left Wing Liberal Watch. This country is headed in a course of complete downfall, because of the kind of tolerance of liberality that this web site, and others like it, support, unless religious people stand up against the evils that will destroy this nation. Of course I'm sure this comment will be censured by the "blog author" and none of the readers will see it.

BlackTsunami said...

On the contrary, Jerry. this "blog author" will let folks see it as a shining example of the rambling idiocy that some on your side of the spectrum choose to engage in.

I think I am clear as to where I stand on my blog. But I will also make it clear that I also stand for truth and accuracy. The problem is that so many folks cling to the cross, cling to their religion while totally forgetting that a hallmark of religion is honest and integrity.

I was taught that, Jerry. I don't know what you were taught. And I would also venture to say that before anyone viewing themselves as "religious" chooses to take a stand against the so-called evils of society, that person needs to examine his or her heart. Unfortunately, as proved by this blog time and time again, those "religious folks" who whine about society's evils are the main ones pushing said evils.

Mycos said...

@ Anon
Yes, there's actually a great deal of data out there now that shows in clear and unequivicable terms how poorly we are being served by a mainstream media that attempts to portray the veracity and ethical acuity of the two sides as being roughly equal, and our opposition to each other being only matters of having grown up with different cultural perspectives.
If a completely objective spacemen had only the various news broadcasts to go by to decide if earth's right or left wing leaders was more sane, he'd go away thinking they were roughly equivelent and that they both just need to learn to be more tolerant of the others POV.

Bulls**t!!

When the underlying psyhological profile and measures of social-intellectual development, cognitive complexity, epistemological veracity or accuracy....when these matters are tested using blinded studies and the data is all ground up and spat back out using the appropriate coefficients and correlation studies....it's apparent there isn'y much to even argue about.

It sounds like more of the same ol' "he said, he said; I'm right bdecause I said I was..to say that conservatives only THINK theyre right most of the time, but are in fact almost always wrong due their habit of accepting uncritically whatever their in-group authorities say on individual matters, sounds like I'm simply engaing in the same, though reversed, rhetoric that I want to believe confirms my own liberal worldview. But the difference between me and a con making this claim is they have very facts to back them up while I have decades of research done at the world's most prestigious universities by many of the biggest names in the field.

But like Darwin and evolution then or global-warming today, reality and facts are secondary to emotional comfort and continuity of prior beliefs is how they "select" info worth accepting as true. But if you ask them about it, they'll claim they choose beliefs the way everyone does.


Dr. Bob Altemeyer, PhD: "If you ask people how much integrity they personally have, guess who claims they have more than anyone else? High RWAs (IOW conservatives) think they had lots more integrity than others do.

Similarly, when various people are asked to write down their biggest faults, cons wrote down fewer and said they had "no big faults". When subjects were all asked if there was anything they were reluctant to admit about
themselves to themselves, the cons led in saying, no, they were
completely honest with themselves.

Cons show little self-awareness and have no idea how much they differ from others. Most of the time they get it quite wrong, thinking they are no different from others, or even different in an opposite way from how they actually are.
For example, they are sure they are less self-righteous than most
people -- which of course is what self-righteous people would think, isn’t it?
And when I give feedback lectures to classes about my studies and describe the conservative personality traits, it turns out conservatives in the room almost always think I am talking about someone else."
paraphrased from http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf