Editor's note - This is a 2014 post but it bears repeating in light of the fact that the Liberty Counsel has taken a leading voice in the false argument of "religious liberty," particularly in the case of Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. The Liberty Counsel claims that it is in defense of "religious liberty" that it is advising Davis to ignore a federal judge's ruling to give out marriage licenses to gay couples. But, just like the post I published Friday, this post proves that the Liberty Counsel's motivations is less about "religious liberty" and more about the petty undermining of the legal practice of same-sex marriage in a malicious attempt to deny gay citizens their rights and deny the entire lgbt community their dignity. The fact that this revelation hardly got any hype last year only goes to prove how the media is derelict in exposing those who push anti-gay propaganda in the name of religion. If an lgbt organization had been in the center of the controversy below, Congress would have probably still be having "investigations:"
June 11, 2014
 |
| Mat Staver |
It seems that Liberty University's Mat Staver's recent testimony in front
of a Congressional committee has become more than he bargained for.
The online publication
Raw Story is now asking did he tell the committee a lie:
At a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, the head of
a conservative legal group may have misled the committee when he said
that he does not support the implementation of Russian-style anti-gay
laws in the United States.
On Tuesday, the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice held a hearing on “The State of Religious Liberty in the United States”
to study the rise of “religious freedom” laws in some U.S. states,
under which people of faith cannot be compelled to perform their jobs or
provide goods and services if to do so would conflict with their
personal beliefs.
. . . Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) asked Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel,
“There are certain antigay laws they have in Russia. You, I believe,
have advocated for something similar to that, have you not? Do you
support the Russian antigay laws?”
Staver replied, ”What I am concerned about is having people of
Christian, uh, Judeo-Christian beliefs be forced to participate in a
ceremony or an event that celebrates something that is contrary to their
religious beliefs.”
“Okay,” said Cohen, “so you’re not in favor of the Russian antigay laws and what I read was wrong?”
“I don’t know what you read,” Staver said. “I haven’t spoken on the Russian laws.”
However, Right Wing Watch reported
in January that Staver and the Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber both
voiced their support for anti-LGBT laws like those in Russia, Uganda and
Nigeria during an edition of their “Faith and Freedom” radio show.
That would be this below:
Transcript:
Staver: President Obama has been going in a direction to really
deconstruct this and to create this idea of same-sex marriage, which is
really an oxymoron. But, at the same time, the rest of the world seems
to be going exactly opposite of the president and some of the states.
Barber: Yeah, and it's encouraging to see what's happening around
the world. I think many nations, you think of Russia, you think of some
of the African nations around the world, are looking to a liberalized
Europe and are looking to the United States under this Obama
Administration and they're rejecting this notion that you can take the
institution of marriage and radically redefine it by sanctifying what
every major world religion and thousands of years of history and
uncompromising human biology have long held: that homosexual behavior
and conduct is both immoral, unnatural and self-destructive to the
individuals engaged in the behavior and that you don't have a marriage
built upon this immoral behavior.
...
Staver: Well, it seems as though, if people are having AIDS and
most of that, as the CDC comes down and says, it is transmitted by male
homosexuality, by and large, what are you going to do? Are you going to
say, are you going to elevate that to a preferred status and say, well
yeah, men ought to be able to marry men? That's an oxymoron. What
Nigeria has done by reaffirming marriage as between one man and one
woman is what a number of countries are doing around the world. They're
reaffirming marriage as one man and one woman. Russia is one of those
countries recently that did that. Latin American countries have
reaffirmed marriage as one man and one woman. Then other countries
around the world are reaffirming marriage as one man and one woman and
rejecting this radicalized homosexual agenda.
...
Barber: This is a very dangerous lifestyle that countries like
Russia are, in addition to reestablishing and saying no, marriage is
what it's always been, they're saying additionally we are going to stop
this homosexual activist propaganda from corrupting children in our
nation and we need to see that right here in the United States.
Feel free to draw your own conclusions. MY conclusion is simple. Liberty Counsel head Mat Staver lied to Congress in June of last year when he said he had not spoken in favor of Russian anti-gay laws.
And it leads me to again advise the lgbt community, our leaders, allies, etc to stop devoting so much attention to Kim Davis that we ignore who is pulling her strings. She is nothing but a puppet, to be used and discarded when she no longer serves the needs of the Liberty Counsel.
This argument of preserving religious liberty is nothing more than a homophobic dodge by the Liberty Counsel and the anti-gay right in general. It's yet another angle in their war on lgbt equality and dignity.
