Saturday, July 24, 2010

Danger! Right Wingnuts! Danger! Home Depot And The Homosexual Agenda Approaching! Danger!

Danger!
Beware Of It! 
Whatever It Is!
Even If We Made It Up!
Danger!

Without a doubt, Tony Perkins of Family Research Council envisions himself as the intelligent robot (with a kind of human mind/soul) of TV campdom's Lost In Space. His latest alarm must be the 1000th time he has described the institution of marriage as being in danger. The repeal of DOMA is, of course, "catastrophic" and is yet another instance of proof of the evil "homosexual Left" and the "homosexual agenda."
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is in danger. ...

The homosexual Left will be able to bring the weight of the federal government down on anyone who refuses to go along with counterfeit marriage and the rest of the homosexual "rights" campaign.
UPDATE: Perkins and Byran Fischer (American Family Association) have lambasted Home Depot for advancing the "agenda.":
Is it Home Depot or Homo Depot? After the month of sponsoring gay pride parades, no one's sure. Hello, I'm Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. People who shop at Home Depot ought to drill down on where their money's going. In June, a big chunk was spent promoting homosexuality to children. At gay pride events in five states, the hardware chain hosted special kids' workshops.
So now the AMA has called for a boycott of Home Depot.  Ho Hum. Then again...

It all seems so ridiculous, but ... when you get to the heart of the matter, the actual danger  rests in the relentless drive of Christofascists such as Perkins in demonizing people: Tony Perkins and his band of merry malcontents become more like "The Four Horsemen of The Homosexual Agenda."

Perkins & Company build most of the Christian Rights' illusions on the "homosexual agenda", but what is it exactly? None of my friends know. I tried looking up the term, and, oddly enough, only came up with Right Wingnut references to it, but not anything substantial on its actual definition or origins. Frustrated, I finally went to that bastion of unbiased truth, Conservapedia.com:
The Homosexual Agenda, or homosexual ideology, consists of a set of beliefs and objectives designed to promote and even mandate acceptance and approval of homosexuality, and the strategies used to implement such. This article notes that the goals and means of this movement include indoctrinating students in public school, restricting the free speech of opposition, obtaining special treatment for homosexuals, distorting Biblical teaching and science, and interfering with freedom of association.
Among all the liberal belief systems, the homosexual ideology is the most self-centered or selfish. Liberals generally give much less than conservatives to charity, but gay charity work in particular is virtually non-existent. 
That reaction you've just felt from reading the last sentence is treatable with a prescription drug called Granisetron, but please see your doctor before using it.

To be fair, the writer of the definition was probably on another plane of consciousness during the Age of AIDS; while Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were thanking God for the "gay plague" hundreds of thousands of gays were giving their money, their time, and their very lives to help the plague's victims. They even made quilts (see below). And ribbons. Yeah, the ones that got trendy and morphed into other colors for other diseases.

So now we know that (in the minds of Perkins et al) what drives the "homosexual agenda" is pure selfishness and that its basic tenets are to mandate acceptance, indoctrinate students in public school,s restrict free speech, obtain special treatment and "interfere with freedom of association" (whatever that means). The homosexual agenda means gays are out to recruit your children into a totally decadent lifestyle and if you say one word against it, you'll be thrown in jail. In other words, it means the end of the family unit. It means the end of the world. And the Four Horsemen of the Homosexual Agenda come as a warning of man's potential destruction.

But how was this "agenda" exposed? Well, don't strain the brain too much: it was documented in an oh-so-reliable-and-educated way, with a documentary produced by... The Family Research Council! But back then it was simply called "The Gay Agenda."
In the US, the term "the gay agenda" was first used in public discourse in 1992 when the Family Research Council released a video series called The Gay Agenda as part of a pack of materials campaigning on homosexual issues and the "hidden gay agenda".
So the Family Research Council, armed with a video and a Bible, set out to destroy homosexuality - and homosexuals in the process. And the inspiration for violence might have come from the Book of Revelations. Hence the Four Horsemen.

The Four Horsemen of the Homosexual Agenda:  
Perkins (Fear), Cameron, (Deception), Nicolosi (Hypocrisy) and Lively (Malevolence).


So the homosexual agenda was fabricated  by the Family Research Council in 1992. The FRC also featured a rising star for their anti-gay agenda: Paul Cameron.
[Cameron] appeared in the video, wherein he asserted that 75 percent of gay men regularly ingest feces and that 70-78 percent have had a sexually transmitted disease.
He also taught that Alfred Kinsey's studies were skewed because he believed Kinsey to be gay. The gay agenda was stretched into a trilogy (of terror) and Paul Cameron made the rounds of Christian Right organizations and churches. It has survived because of the milking by people like Perkins and James Dobson (Focus on the Family). BTW: Cameron fully supports Uganda's "kill the gays bill" INCLUDING the part about capital punishment.

But Cameron is an honest psychological researcher, is he not? We-e-l-l-l-......no. He has been expelled or censured by: The American Psychological Association, The Canadian Psychological Association, The American Sociological Association and the Nebraska Psychological Association. (Of course, if you lived in Lincoln, NE, perhaps the most exciting thing going is getting kicked out of an association.) In addition, his group - the Family Research Institute - is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The next two men who made the term homosexual agenda equivalent to Satan, are Joseph Nicolosi and Scott Lively.

Nicolosi heads up the ex-gay movement with his National Association for Research and Therapy for Homosexuality. He espouses something called reparative therapy. If you feel that he thinks of himself as a repair man, you're not far from the truth. Unfortunately, his form of therapy has been debunked by even more associations than Cameron has been ejected from (a race?): the National Association of Social Workers, The American Psychological Association, The American Psychiatric Association, The American Counseling Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Nicolosi's attitude towards homosexuality is positively toxic:
I remember Dr. Nicolosi telling me, in response to the question of whether one could easily contract HIV from semen, that if this were the case then gays would be “jerking off in hamburgers all over” to infect people.
For an interesting exchange of parental love meets the rude & the crude, click on  this segment of Dr. Phil. 

But of the four, Scott Lively is definitely the most extreme. He has been living almost exclusively on the fame of his first book, The Pink Swastika. Long out-of-print, it is now self-published and printed "on-demand." It's purchased by people who devour hate prose and who salivate at the thought of using it as a reference. Needless to say, historians have had nothing good to say about the book because it simply isn't true:

In 1942, the death penalty was instituted for homosexuality. Offenders in the German military were routinely shot. "That wasn't a punishment," Himmler explained, "but simply the extinguishing of abnormal life. It had to be got rid of, just as we pull out weeds, throw them on a heap, and burn them."
Lively's organization, Abiding Truth Ministries, has a website describing Lively as "one of the most articulate opponents of the Homosexual Agenda in America."

No wonder Lively is among the people responsible for Uganda's "kill the gays bill". Here's part of the address at the (now) infamous conference in Kampala just before the proposed bill reared its ugly head:
You must be ready to stop this gay agenda. And don't think that fighting the gay movement is the solution-you will be fighting a losing battle because this movement has come to stop humanity. They have a clear vision, mission and strategies. The only way to defeat them is to compete with them. Their movement is 70 years old and that's why they don't care about you. They know you will die soon and they will replace you and take over the nation. They have decided to recruit the youth.
Besides Abiding Faith Ministries, Lively is also the founder of the virulent (and violent) Watchmen on the Walls, based in Riga, Latvia. Lately, Watchmen has captured attention due to a homophobic homicide of a man in Sacramento. 

BTW: Lively's cohort in homophobia is Reverend Ken Hutcherson:
“God hates effeminate men... If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.”
All men of God should be so macho.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council plays the other three "horsemen" like a puppeteer, using their rhetoric and skewed logic to demonize everyone who is gay or who  might indicate a slight leaning towards support of gay rights:
"It was her [Elana Kagan's] rabid pro-homosexual views that led her to restrict military recruitment on Harvard Law School's campus, and, as Solicitor General, to sabotage the defense of our federal marriage law. In both instances, she favored her personal ideology and political calculations over the law.
"Rabid pro-homosexual." The Four Horsemen of the Homosexual Agenda are definitely leaning towards a Ugandan sensibility by making it a sin (crime) to be supportive of the LGBT community.

There are more people who can articulate what the Homosexual Agenda means to them, but the Four Horsemen are at the top of the list as self-appointed ministers of righteousness. 

Additional Note:

I know that it seems I  take things cavalierly sometimes. The headline of this article, for example, was written to introduce a subject with levity. That was in the way of attracting attention, then leading you to the real cause of my concern. Please remember: these people are real, their actions are real and their motives are real. And even though some people dismiss them as "wingnuts," they must be monitored. Their influence is not to be underestimated. You've heard it said that their rhetoric can kill. That's not a silly hyperbole - it's a fact. The sad part is that they know it and just chalk it up to God's will. In other words, God gave them each a conscience, but they sacrificed them to God on an altar of self-righteousness.