Tweet
crossposted on Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters
A story that seems to be under the headlights but very appropriate involves how the Family Research Council got caught inaccurately accusing a Congresswoman of being a religious bigot.
The entire story is here in Faith In Public Life:
. . . the Family Research Council sent out a press release with the headline “FRC Calls On President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Senator Reid to Repudiate Diana DeGette's Religious Bigotry,” which stated
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins today called on President Obama and Congressional leaders to repudiate comments made by U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) to The Hill's Michael O'Brien that “religiously-affiliated groups…should be shut out of the process” in the health care debate because of their support for the Stupak/Pitts amendment. She told The Hill, “Last I heard, we had separation of church and state in this country,” she said. “I've got to say that I think the Catholic bishops and all of the other groups shouldn't have input.”
Faith in Public Life refutes this:1) ) Congresswoman DeGette's remarks didn't come from an interview with The Hill's Michael O'Brien. Rather, they came from O'Brien's report about DeGette's appearance on ABC News's “Top Line” broadcast today.
2) In that Top Line appearance, Congresswoman DeGette said religious groups should have input in the debate.
The webpage Tracking American Evangelicals adds more context to FRC's deception by juxtaposing the organization's truncation of Congresswoman DeGette's comments to what she actually said:
Congresswoman DeGette's comments – “I gotta tell you, last I heard we had separation of church and state. I don’t think the Catholic bishops are in charge of writing our healthcare bill. I think that they are one of many groups that we should listen to, but in the end they should be concerned that 36 million more people in this country will get healthcare. Many of them are their parishioners.”
FRC's version of her comments – “religiously-affiliated groups…should be shut out of the process” in the health care debate because of their support for the Stupak/Pitts amendment. She told The Hill, “Last I heard, we had separation of church and state in this country,” she said. “I’ve got to say that I think the Catholic bishops and all of the other groups shouldn’t have input.”
The site also said that because of scrutiny and complaints from organizations such as Faith in Public Life, FRC revised the comment:
However, Rep. DeGette accused the Catholic Bishops of controlling the outcome of the health care legislation and also accused them and other conservative Christians of violating the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state.
If only the lgbt community could muster up such force to make the Family Research Council own up to all of the times it cites Paul Cameron as well as the many times it distorts legitimate studies to spin false images of our community.
13 Comments
Screw the Evangelicals
I HATE RELIGION ! screw the dammm churches…and someone/anyone GAG Tony Perkins! The day they start PAYING TAXES, is maybe the day..they have “some” imput – until then – STFU!
Lying for bigotry is much easier than loving for Christ
SING OUT LOUISE!TAX THE CHURCH !!!!!
TAX THE CHURCH !!!!!
TAX THE CHURCH !!!!!
TAX THE CHURCH !!!!!
TAX THE CHURCH !!!!!
TAX THE CHURCH !!!!!
TAX THE CHURCH !!!!!
TAX THE CHURCH !!!!!
TAX THE CHURCH !!!!!
Now is the timeIts time for someone to initiate a test case to give the U.S. Supreme Court the opportunity to revisit its N.Y. Times v. Sullivan view on defamation law, which, for all practical purposes, prevents a public figure such as the congresswoman from ever going after people who blatantly lie about them.
Bill O’Lie-ly consistently complains that he can’t go after people who (he deludes himself into believing) lie about him; lets see if he stands up for the congresswoman on this.
That sound you hear is me not holding my breath.
Why don’t we do this, Alvin?
1) LGBT arrogance. So many times these quotes strike me (and many of us, it seems) as too stupid and non-factually based that anyone with common sense would dismiss it.
We seem to forget that LGBTs are not the target audience for this bigotry. We have let stuff like this go practically unchallenged (for example, the Religious Right has flooded the black community has been flooded with religiously based homobigoted messages like this since the late 1980′s, really)
and two…
Low self-esteem and fear- It means that the LGBT community will actually have to take on the religious bigotry head on. There are a few committed activists (such as yourself) that are willing to do, but can we get behind this as a community? It seems that we can’t.
Didn’t their imaginary friend Goddy McGod condemn lying?That’s what I thought. But what do I know? I’m just another “sodomite heathen” going to hell… And enjoying the ride. With bigots like these, who’d want to spend eternity with them?
Gee, for religious zealots,they sure forget some of the details… What was that thing that Moses brought down from Mt Sinai called? Hmm, must not have been important, but they should have had something like “Do not bear false witness against your neighbor” in there, that would have made it harder to go against…
As I’ve commented before,virtually everything these people do is based on lies. Christianity, as represented by the Bible, presents a patently, demonstrably false view of reality. If they were to stop lying, they’d be out of business in a heartbeat. (And I’m for that.) So, really, why single out just one of their lies, or even one set of their lies, at the expense of all the rest? The whole enterprise is a massive, ongoing fraud. The way to counter the individual lies is to mount an extensive, continuing campaign to expose the inherent dishonesty at the heart of everything they say and do.
Well hell,She should have said it!
Religion poisons everything!
No thank you!I’m a sadist, not a masochist.
I wouldn’t screw a fundamentalist even if I was paid $1,000 a day for the rest of my life! Ewwwwwwwwwww!
All I can say kevinchiAll I can say kevinchi is amen. ;p
I hate it when we don’t do our homework on the right.
FWIW, the FRC did release a retraction the next dayBut it was very weak, and missing an apology. It did, however, aim at scoring additional points against Rep. Gette.
http://www.frc.org/pressreleas…