Letting the religious right speak for itself does wonders for the gay community

It always amazes me how some members of the religious right will pretend to push nobility and rationality, but then will drop their masks when they think no one is looking.

From Think Progress:

Recently, two contributors to the Friendly Atheist blog attended a Marriage Symposium organized by the Illinois Family Institute (an American Family Association affiliate) and reported back what they heard. The panel included Austin Nimocks from the Alliance Defense Fund and Linda Jernigan, a self-identified ex-gay. Here are some insights into the thinking and strategies of those opposed to LGBT equality:

• Anti-bullying programs are meant to silence anti-gay beliefs.

• Do not use the term “sexual orientation” because it implies “biological determinism.”

• Do not use the term “gay” because it normalizes and empowers people who are gay.

• Same-sex couples are “sterile” by design and cannot provide for children what an opposite-sex couple can.

• Marriage is a “pre-political” institution, and therefore not a civil right.

• Anti-gay advocates should “reach out and resist,” framing resistance to equality efforts as compassion for those who are gay.

• People in Sudan and Malaysia who have sex with farm animals demonstrate how marriage can deteriorate.

• “The end goal of gay activism is an assault on gender” — in other words, at the heart of sexual orientation discrimination is gender discrimination and a desire to maintain gender norms.

• Same-sex couples are “greedy” for trying to deprive a child of a mother or a father, and they will negatively impact how children are gendered.

Think Progress suggests that you check out the full report and I also suggest the same. There are two things worth knowing though.

Austin Nimocks was the person who helped anti-gay legislators in NC craft that awful amendment which the state will be voting on next year.

The Illinois Family Council was called out last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its homophobia:

Over the years, the group also has occasionally embraced the groundless propaganda of Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute, above). Until 2009, it carried an article on Cameron — “New Study Shows that Homosexuals Live 20 Fewer Years” — preceded by a full-throated endorsement LaBarbera. “Paul Cameron’s work has been targeted for ridicule by homosexual activists, and he’s been demonized by the left,” LaBarbera wrote in his introduction, “but that should not discount his findings.” IFI also posted a video attacking school anti-bullying programs that claimed, based on Cameron, that gay men’s median age of death is 42. Both were removed in response to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2009 listing of IFI as a hate group, which was largely based on its use of Cameron.

 . . .In 2009, Higgins compared homosexuality to Nazism, likening the German Evangelical Church’s weak response to fascism to the “American church’s failure to respond appropriately to the spread of radical, heretical, destructive views of homosexuality.” Elsewhere, Higgins has pined for the days when gays were in the closet. “There was something profoundly good for society about the prior stigmatization of homosexual practice… . [W]hen homosexuals were ‘in the closet,’ (along with fornicators, polyamorists, cross-dressers, and ‘transexuals’), they weren’t acquiring and raising children.” She’s also said that McDonald’s, because it ran a gay-friendly TV ad, is “hell bent on using its resources to promote subversive moral, social, and political views about homosexuality to our children.”