Thursday, August 16, 2012

Quote of the Day: Joe Jervis on Brian Brown's Call for "Civility"


In the wake of yesterday's shooting at FRC headquarters, the far right is busy spinning the tragedy to depict gays as would be terrorists and the ones guilty of incivility in discourse.  Joining the disingenuous chorus is Brian Brown, President of the National Organization for Marriage which has been exposed as engaging in all kinds of anti-gay lies and propaganda that has nothing to do with stating religious beliefs "protecting the sanctity of marriage."  Joe Jervis sums up Brown's hypocrisy well:

The man who heads an organization that routinely characterizes LGBT people as hellbound sinners and inherently mentally ill child molesters is calling for gay people to show "civility" towards groups that advocate for our imprisonment and brainwashing. HUGE props to the CNN host for demanding that Brown acknowledge the hateful history of the Family Research Council.

The video clip Joe references is set out above.  Meanwhile, Jeremy Hooper has a post with links that lay out the far less than civil statements made by FRC's mouth pieces against gays:

These links, from GLAAD's Commentator Accountability Project, detail just a few of the words that Peter Sprigg and Tony Perkins, FRC's top two voices, have directed at LGBT people. These words include suggestions that gays should be criminalized and exported, that gay kids try suicide because they know they are "abnormal," that liken LGBT advocacy to terrorism, and much, much more. See links here: 
 http://www.glaad.org/cap/tony-perkins
http://www.glaad.org/cap/peter-sprigg

To save readers some time, here's a sampling of FRC's version of "civility":

TONY PERKINS:
 
- Says about gay people: “They are intolerant. They are hateful. They are vile. They are spiteful...pawns of the enemy.” (See 0:43 mark.)

- Says many gays have an "emptiness within them" (:55) because they are "operating outside of nature" (1:09)

- Says that gay young people “have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict; homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal.

- Despite what health experts have said, insists that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem.”

- The Family Research Council has distributed a pamphlet that erroneously depicts gay men and lesbians as physically and mentally ill pedophiles who can be cured.

- The Family Research Council has distributed a pamphlet that begins by likening the logic behind same-sex marriage to the logic behind man-horse marriage (complete with horse graphic)

PETER SPRIGG:
 
- “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States, because we believe that homosexuality is destructive to society.” (See 0:11 mark here.) [*NOTE: A week later, Peter rolled back his statements, saying he "used language that trivialized the seriousness of the issue and did not communicate respect for the essential dignity of every human being as a person created in the image of God"]

- Says he wants to see being gay punished by law: “I think that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned the sodomy laws in this country, was wrongly decided. I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior.
 
- Sits on the board of and serves as a key spokesperson for an “ex-gay” advocacy group that tells gay people to “change."  Routinely claims no one is born gay.

- Instructs those engaged in marraige conversation to always bring it back to gays "choosing" their behavior

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