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| AFA gets smacked down by Connecticut |
It's no doubt that the following item will be exploited as an example of how Christians are supposedly being "persecuted" in America:
From the
Hartford Courant:
Mississippi-based Christian organization is being dropped from a list
of approved charities for state employees after the group failed to
provide a copy of its anti-discrimination policy.
Timothy K. Newtown, chair of the Connecticut State Employee
Campaign Committee, wrote to the group's president, Tim Wildmon, on
Thursday notifying them they were being removed. The program allows
state employees to direct payroll deductions to a charity of their
choice.
"I am grateful for the committee's unanimous vote to
remove AFA from the state charitable campaign – and I'm proud to live in
a state that broadly prohibits discrimination, whether based on an
individual's race, color, religion, age, sex, gender identity or
expression, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status,
national origin, ancestry or disability," Lembo, who is openly gay, said
in a written statement.
Apparently, this was a
unanimous vote of the Connecticut State Employees’ Campaign (CSEC) Committee. But before the vote, the AFA chose to focus on Lembo's sexual orientation:
Lembo had asked the group for information regarding its
non-discrimination policy and the group responded by asking its members
to contact Lembo for attacking their group’s Biblical beliefs and what
they saw as his attempt to diminish those beliefs by asking for
information about discrimination. Lembo has said most of the
communications were uninformed.
Not that I'm telling anyone anything that they aren't aware of but for the record, the American Family Association is a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group. According to
SPLC:
The AFA has been extremely vocal over the years in its opposition to
LGBT rights, marriage equality and allowing gay men and lesbians to
serve in the military. The group's arguments are filled with claims that
equate homosexuality with pedophilia and argue that there's a
"homosexual agenda" afoot that is set to bring about the downfall of
American (and ultimately, Western) civilization. In one October 2004
article, the AFA Journal suggested that gay influences are
leading to a "grotesque culture" that will include "quick encounters in
the middle school boys' restroom."
For years, until 2010, the AFA had a section on its website that
supposedly exposed "The Homosexual Agenda." There, a reader could find
articles and other AFA publications that claimed LGBT people were trying
to force the acceptance of homosexuality on children through sex
education programs in schools; condemned companies like Disney for
supporting LGBT rights and programming; and, also until 2010, featured a
particularly noxious booklet the AFA had published in 1994. That
booklet, Homosexuality in America: Exposing the Myths, included the bogus research of thoroughly discredited psychologist Paul Cameron
as a source. One of the publication's authors, Richard Howe, used
Cameron's "research" to claim that LGBT people don't live as long as
heterosexuals, that they're more promiscuous and that the "disgusting
details of the homosexual lifestyle explain why so many diseases are
present in the homosexual community." Another claim was that
"[p]rominent homosexual leaders and publications have voiced support for
pedophilia, incest, sadomasochism, and even bestiality."
The question shouldn't be should the AFA be included on the list of groups Connecticut employees can donate to via payroll deductions. The question should be how in the world did the AFA get on this list in the first place.
