Tweet
crossposted on Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters
From my online buddy Jeremy Hooper comes an interesting comment from the Traditional Values Coalition's Andrea Lafferty.
She was commenting on the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center designated her group as one of 12 anti-gay hate groups:
The SPLC is the group that wrote a memo used by Obama’s Homeland Security Department claiming that veterans and pro-lifers were dangerous to national security.
Actually, it is a badge of honor for TVC to be listed by the SPLC as a “hate group.” It proves we’re effective in challenging liberalism, socialism, and the LGBT agenda.
That comment about SPLC writing memo a for the Obama Administration is a lie. But since when do you expect a hate group to be truthful. Now it's important to establish what SPLC constitutes as an anti-gay hate group:
Opposition to equal rights for homosexuals has been a central theme of Christian Right organizing and fundraising for the past three decades – a period that parallels the fundamentalist movement's rise to political power.
For Christian Right leaders, the gay rights movement and its so-called “homosexual agenda” are the prime culprits in the destruction of American society and culture. In the words of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, the battle against gay rights is essentially a “second civil war” to put control of the U.S. government in the right hands, meaning those who reject gay rights.
The religious right in America has employed a variety of strategies in its efforts to beat back the increasingly confident gay rights movement. One of those has been defamation. Many of its leaders have engaged in the crudest type of name-calling, describing homosexuals as “perverts” with “filthy habits” who seek to snatch the children of straight parents and “convert” them to gay sex. They have disseminated disparaging “facts” about gays that are simply untrue — assertions that are remarkably reminiscent of the way white intellectuals and scientists once wrote about the “bestial” black man and his supposedly threatening sexuality.
Would this comment from TVC head Lou Sheldon at a 2006 religious right conference do?:
Sheldon demanded laws that treat homosexuality as “a social disorder.” Decrying the term “homosexual” as the brainchild of a 20th-century German psychologist obviously sympathetic to gays, Sheldon implored the conferees to return to the 18th century's superior diction. “The word used in America [then] was 'perverted',” he noted. When Sheldon was asked by an audience member what to call homosexuals, he shot out of his chair and shouted, “Call them what they are — sodomites!”
Of course Lafferty conveniently didn't mention her father's outburst in her screed. Jeremy lists a couple of other things that Lafferty neglected to mention:
Andrea and her father (TVC prez Lou Sheldon) have willingly set up shot atop this contentious volcano. If Andrea wants to get TVC off of it, then Andrea can vow to be better. She can vow to stop saying that being gay is equivalent to schtooping a toaster. She can stop calling an important piece of legislation the “Barney Frank She-Male Shower Bill.” She can stop referring to a collection of transgender people as a “freak show.” She can stop putting Jesus on Wanted posters as a way to pit that particular religious figure against gays who support hate crime protections. She can stop directing her worker bees to Photoshop a smiling Barack Obama in front of the burning WTC towers or onto a Nazi propaganda poster. TVC can stop flipping Congressional exchanges so that they are made more convenient for their self-serving purposes. She can stop being untruthful.
And let's not forget TVC's tasteless need to attack the transgender community (amongst other things, call them “she-males”), which I have talked about on several occasions via their fight against ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) but best be illustrated by this awful graphic:
In addition, there was the time when the Traditional Values Coalition:
claimed that the passage of ENDA would lead to the sexual abuse of disabled veterans,
continued to intentionally mix the term “sexual orientation” with “paraphilias” in another attempt to lie about ENDA,
used bad research in YET another attempt to lie about ENDA, including distorting marketing statistics,
made a tacky attack on Obama appointee Kevin Jennings and actor Tom Cruise,
claimed that a repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is a bad idea by asking, amongst other silly questions, how would the military ” handle sodomy in battlefield situations,”
kept a bad study regarding gays and pedophilia on its web page even after a researcher complained about his work being distorted in the study AND telling an outright lie about testimony during Congressional hearings regarding hate crimes legislation. The lie was so bad, it was easily refuted via transcript, which Jeremy Hooper did when he broke the story.
Bottom line – Andrea Lafferty saying that she is proud to be a member of a hate gro
up is a like a cannibal bragging about his table manners.
Big hat tip to Goodasyou.org
8 Comments
If we’re going to revert to the attitudes of previous times,I suggest we revert to the way the Romans viewed the Christians–as opponents of religious freedom and diversity and enemies of society who insisted that only their own ridiculous beliefs should have any credibility or official recognition. I.e., they are inherently opposed to everything civilized culture is about. I can’t imagine any lion with a shred of common sense or taste actually devouring a creature like Lafferty (cats are way too smart for that), but it sure would be nice to see someone give it a go.
Ignorance & LiesIt’s hard to know whether people like Sheldon are ignorant, lying, or some combination of both, but he’s totally wrong claiming that “the term “homosexual” [w]as the brainchild of a 20th-century German psychologist obviously sympathetic to gays.”
The term was already in use in the late 19th century. These people can’t get the smallest fact right. Maybe somebody told him what he repeated on a golf course or in a bar, and he just spit it out, and I should be used to this kind of mendacity/ignorance of history. After all, we had eight years of Bush.
But it still irks me.
Lou Sheldon is a Sodomite, as is his daughterThe Men of Sodom, if we actually read the Genesis story instead of listening to asses like Joe Ratzinger (who wrote in 1986 that “everyone knows” what the story is about), were people who were inhospitable to people who were different, people who were strangers in their midst.
They were not gay – they were misogynists, who used their feelings that women were “less than men” to use sexual assault on male visitors (“using them as we would use women”) as a means of degrading the visitors to “less than women.”
The language and tactics of Sheldon and his spawn Lafferty are the verbal equivalent of the degrading sexual assault that the misogynistic men of Sodom wanted to perpetrate on the two angels from out of town.
They and their organization are the real Sodomites, as are the foul “Doctor” Dobson and the rest of their ilk. Christianist Dominionists are warring on American liberties with their assault on people who are made by God to be different from them.
Actually, Lot was the mysogynistHe offered his two daughters because, to him, there were little more than the most valuable “property” he had to offer as a bribe. He emphasized their virginity because that is what made them so valuable as potential wives. Had the crowd accepted the bribe, the girls would have been auctioned off to the highest bidder with the money being split among the gang. Raping them would have been like accepting two Picassos as a bribe and then shredding them.
The fact that the crowd rejected Lot’s offer would seem to make them less mysogynistic than Lot: they were less inclined to see the girls as property.
LotOr could it mean Lot just had really ugly children? :P
That might have been itSince later in the same chapter (Genesis 19) his daughters got him drunk and raped him, getting pregnant in the process. Talk about desperation!
Lafferty would be the nastiest furball ever coughed up by a big cat.
There is a parallel story in Judges 19Sodom wasn’t the only place where inhospitable townspeople wanted to degrade visitors – in the parallel story, they actually take advantage of the offer:
Sure, Lot was also a misogynist. But that doesn’t mean the men of Sodom treated women equally.