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Bonus: Check out Peter Montgomery’s summary of this AM’s Values Voter Summit batsh*t goings-on at Right Wing Watch, “Strong Morning Tea for Values Voters.”
Alvin posted this AM about the American Family Association bigot Bryan Fisher, its “Director of Issue Analysis” who is polluting the air with his anti-gay, anti-Muslim rants at the Values Voter Summit. It’s one thing for us to talk about this guy in the coffeehouse, but NPR has NO business featuring this man on Morning Edition as an expert on anything.
People for the American Way President Michael B. Keegan contacted NPR’s Ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, to present the facts about Fischer; the AFA tool has racked up an incredible list of offensive statements.
Dear Ms. Shepard:I was surprised yesterday to hear the voice of Bryan Fischer, Director of Issue Analysis at the American Family Association, on Morning Edition. I wonder if the show’s producers knew of Mr. Fischer’s record of extremism and hate speech against Muslim Americans and gays and lesbians.
People For the American Way’s RightWingWatch.org blog tracks Fischer in his roll as a blogger and radio host for the AFA, where he makes no attempt to disguise his extremism. Just in the past year, Fischer has:
- Demanded that no new mosques be built anywhere in America. (8/10/2010)
- Argued that inbreeding has caused Muslims to be stupid and violent. (9/10/2010)
- Says that Muslims should be banned from serving in the U.S. military. (11/9/2009)
- Insisted that all Muslims are traitors, called for the deportation of all Muslims from the U.S. (4/10/2010)
- Claimed that U.S. service members died in vain because the U.S. failed to make Iraq a Christian nation. (8/19/2010)
- Said that “homosexuals should be disqualified from public office.” (8/5/2010)
- Insisted that gays are biased, sexually deviant felons, not to mention pedophiles, and should never serve on the Supreme Court. (4/15/2010, 4/16/2010)
- Called gay adoption “a terrible, terrible, inexcusable, inhumane thing to do to children.” (8/10/2010)
- Argued that we should “impose the same sanctions on those who engage in homosexual behavior as we do on those who engage in intravenous drug abuse.” (2/3/2010)
- Wrote: “The inescapable conclusion is that gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism.” (6/10/2010)
- Said: “Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.” (5/25/2010)
- Disparaged family values in the Hispanic community: “Also, the illegitimacy rate among Hispanic women is over 50%. I’m not sure pro-family values are as strong in the Hispanic community as Dr. Land wants to believe.” (7/23/2010)
Yesterday, in response to People For’s call that GOP leaders distance themselves from Mr. Fischer, he repeated his comparison of gay men to domestic terrorists. On Tuesday, Mr. Fischer defended his call for deporting Muslim Americans, saying “we are doing them a favor by repatriating them to their homeland where an entire nation shares their values.”
Of course, Mr. Fischer has the right to air his opinions, no matter how hurtful. However, he should not be given air time by a nonpartisan news organization without some disclosure of his record of hate speech.
I also hope that Mr. Fischer is not, as Morning Edition implied, representative of the Tea Party movement as a whole.
This weekend, he will be appearing this weekend alongside leaders of the Republican Party, including Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, and 2012 presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Pence. We have alerted these public figures to Mr. Fischer’s record and urged them to denounce Fischer’s remarks lest they lend credibility to his extremism.
Similarly, I urge NPR to resist lending credibility to an extremist like Fischer by providing him with a national platform without alerting audiences to his record of vocal bigotry.
Thank you for your time,
Michael B. Keegan
President, People For the American Way
5 Comments
The alternative to FischerFor the purposes of this story (listen at http://ow.ly/2Fj6j), NPR needed an anti-gay, anti-choice Christianist wingnut who has aligned him/herself to the Tea Party movement.
Who else should they have called?
They’ve fallen for the ‘Fair and Balanced’ falacyA news outlet does not HAVE to give time to someone that believes in the flat earth every time a geoscientist discusses the equatorial bulge. To do so only gives equal authority and legitimacy to quacks. In fact, a news outlet is supposed to have a responsibility to NOT do such a thing. Question: are LGBT groups given equal representation when Christian stories are aired? Are Muslims or Jews or…? It just seems a bit…biased to my ears.
NPR is not the bastion of homemade granola, macrame and Democrat liberalness it was once assumed to be. No more than HRC is the…well, you get the idea.
Case in point: NPR now follows a pattern of airing long news stories by embedded reporters that happen to telegraph the Administration’s quiet shifts in policy. A great ongoing example is how over the last few months they’ve been pushing hard the up-close-and-personal human tragedies that will occur if the US Armed Forces pull out of Afghanistan. That story was sponsored by Chevron and various foundations, by the way.
NPR’s corporate sponsorship is telling. My eyes were opened when a news story on sugar tariffs almost as an afterthought mentioned various problems with artificial sweetners. The news that hour was sponsored by Chevron, Exxon and…Monsanto. I have yet to hear them run a story disparaging a sponsor, but nor do they claim to be impartial. Rather, they are now proud to be a “mainstream news organization”. They like being big and important enough to have a good WH press seat. But like Sesame Street, I fear they have lost their way.
HMMMM. and GLAAD has nothing to say??
GLAAD was busy..…getting CNN to take down a poll which queried something to the effect, “is the surge of gay characters and story lines on television….(I forget the rest). 40% of polling was anti-gay. But get this. The excuse for taking the poll down was not anti gay but rather invoking war-like terminology ie. surge to frame the question.
I don’t think GLAAD listens to NPR.
Here’s NPRs contact page:http://help.npr.org/npr/includ…
HPR has much valuable, and unbiased, reoprting. Some is not, and that which is not is many times cleverly disguised, not necessarily due to the presentation by NPR, but by its guest(s).
Conservatives infiltrate even the most traditionally even-tempered outlets and organizations.
Not long ago I questioned the Head Director of a Gay Organization in a major US City, for his support of the Marriott Corporation (in light of the Prop 8 campaign), and his first justification in his email was that he and his partner “owned stock in Marriott Corporation”. Of course! Why else would a major gay leader defend this corporation? Marriott gives stocks and benefits, so SOME (leaders) are bribed into leading others (the members of his organization) in completely the Wrong Direction. Infiltrated and affected – negatively.
In that specific circumstance, for a major corporation to offer benefits to gay employees, so that gays work at modest jobs to support an organization, but for that very organization, via its Highly Paid and overwhelmingly Mormon Board of Directors, to then turn around and contribute either directly or via the Mormon Church to the (Prop 8) campaign, is akin to slavery in the Old South:
“Come on into the grand dining room nigger and serve us white folks, because you do it so well, and maybe we’ll save you some leftovers, but Do Not Think for a skinny minute that you can eat in here WITH US!!! Oh no! Here, go out back o’ the hot kitchen and eat. You’uns enjoy.” -
Disguising extreme inequality and bigotry as anything other than what it is, fools some of the people some of the time, but not me.
NPR is in the very business of understanding information, and they shouldn’t be fooled, nor give an ounce of credibility, via cordial conversation, on their otherwise moderate platform, to those so extreme as Bryan Fischer.
NPR might want to consider a follow-up telling ‘the rest of the story’.