Take a look at this sign (via Think Progress) which was produced and displayed publicly by NOM supporter Larry Adams at a recent rally in Indianapolis as part NOM’s Summer for Marriage Tour 2010, and tell me this isn’t one of the worst examples of hate speech we’ve seen this year (and that’s saying a lot):
How often have we heard that extreme right wing Christian groups love gay people. It’s only the “sin” of gay sex that they hate. Yet there is recent visual evidence of a supporter of the National Organization For Marriage (NOM), the ant-gay marriage group that produced the infamous (and fact free) video “There’s a Storm Coming” about the danger same sex marriage posed to marriage …
… that demonstrates at least some NOM supporters don’t love gay people so much as they would like to implement a “final solution” to the gay problem based on their version of “Biblical Law.” And, what is worse, that visual evidence evokes the worst abuses of the Jim Crow era in our own history: the lynching of African Americans in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The sign speaks for itself. Not only is this offensive to gay people, it is no doubt offensive to many African Americans, especially those of Shirley Sherrod’s generation who can still remember when their relatives, friends and neighbors were routinely murdered by mobs of bigots, killed by the KKK or simply beaten to death by white law enforcement officials.
It is also reminiscent of one of the least publicized aspects of the Nazi Holocaust. The Nazis didn’t just slaughter European Jews. Gays were also targeted for torture, slave labor and mass murder by that horrific regime.
And lest we forget, Adam’s ugly, violence inciting sign calls for the same punishment of homosexual men and women that extremist fundamentalist Islamic states such as Iran impose against gay people today: Death by hanging. Iran, one of the countries former President Bush’s included in his original “Axis of Evil” is ruled by a theocratic religious regime where homosexuality is a crime based on that regime’s interpretation of Islamic law.
Is that the kind of America NOM and other anti-gay groups really want? Oh, we know that they claim they are only out to protect their (heterosexual) marriages their children, and their first amendment rights from the dangers of Gay Marriage (though to date I;ve yet to hear a valid argument about the danger same sex marriage poses to my heterosexual marriage), but I for one do not trust them.
Why don’t I trust their “good intentions?” Why don’t I take them at their word when they state that they love the gay “sinner” and merely hate the “sin” of homosexuality?”
Well, it’s hard to trust radical right wing Conservative Christians on any topic related to the civil rights of homosexual men and women at this moment in time. Not when people like Larry Admas appear at NOM rallies carrying signs that advocate for the lynching of members of the LGBT community and are not told to leave or denounced by NOM’s leadership.
And I certainly lack faith in the words of conservative Christians and their leaders after evidence came to light recently that evangelical fundamentalist American Christians were active supporters, promoters, defenders and and architects of the anti-gay legislation in Uganda that would institute death by hanging for those who engage in homosexual acts:
KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.
The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family. […]
One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals …
The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill. […]
[T]he Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to “a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” […]
Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape. […]
Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. {…]
And these weren’t just merely random coincidences. “The Family” a secretive conservative Christian organization based in Washington DC, with ties to many socially conservative politicians, was actively involved in Uganda’s “gay eradication” legislation from early on as this interview of Jeff Sharlet by Terri Gross of NPR explains:
The Family is also connected to proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda that could sentence, quote, repeat offenders to the death penalty. That family connection is revealed in new reporting by my guest, Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet is the author of the bestseller “The Family” and is a contributing editor for Harper’s. He’s been investigating The Family for years. […]
GROSS: Now, you mentioned that The Family thinks it’s important to have their people and their concerns represented in both the Republican and the Democratic Party. Is there an active strategy to actually have Family-affiliated politicians in the Democratic Party?
Mr. SHARLET: Yeah, I think it’s always been very important to The Family, going back to the beginning of the group’s roots in the 1930s, when they actually formed with the idea that democracy wasn’t going to work. Remember, this was in the 1930s, and they’re looking around the world, and they see communism as this incredibly powerful world force, and fascism is, of course, too. Well, they certainly don’t want to be communism. Fascism they are a little more sympathetic to, and there were a lot of sort of early-American fascists in the group, but it’s still a problem because it’s a cult of personality. They put Hitler and Mussolini where Jesus is.
So they come up with this idea of a third way, that they later start calling totalitarianism for Christ. And they predict that the United States will pretty quickly embrace this and will get rid of political parties because democracy doesn’t work. People arguing and debating doesn’t work. They don’t want a Republican Party, a Democratic Party. They want one big party – theirs. […]
GROSS: Let’s talk about The Family’s connection to Uganda, where there’s a, really a draconian anti-gay bill that has been introduced into parliament. Uganda already punishes the practice of homosexuality with life in prison. What would the new legislation do?
Mr. SHARLET: Well, the new legislation adds to this something called aggravated homosexuality. And this can include, for instance, if a gay man has sex with another man who is disabled, that’s aggravated homosexuality, and that man can be – I suppose both, actually, could be put to death for this. The use of any drugs or any intoxicants in seeking gay sex – in other words, you go to a bar and you buy a guy a drink, you’re subject to the death penalty if you go home and sleep together after that. What it also does is it extends this outward, so that if you know a gay person and you don’t report it, that could mean – you don’t report your son or daughter, you can go to prison.
And it goes further, to say that any kind of promotion of these ideas of homosexuality, including by foreigners, can result in prison terms. Talking about same sex-marriage positively can lead you to imprisonment for life. And it’s really kind of a perfect case study in the export of a lot of American, largely evangelical ideas about homosexuality exported to Uganda, which then takes them to their logical end. […]
Mr. SHARLET: Well, the legislator that introduced the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of The Family. He appears to be a core member of The Family. He works, he organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which The Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda.
Jesus said “Love thy neighbor.” Too many anti-gay bigots who call themselves Christians would rather ignore those words by excluding gay people from the definition of “neighbor” altogether. Indeed, they seem very eager not only to deny LGBT people the same civil rights that other Americans enjoy, but also to create an atmosphere of fear and loathing of gay people, a fear so great that it encourages hatred and violence against our fellow Americans who simply choose to love members of the same gender as themselves.
And clearly they have succeeded with individuals like Larry Adams and the many, many criminals who have attacked, assaulted and murdered LGBT people solely based on hatred. A hatred fueled by good Christians like those who belong to NOM.
