This morning in Indianapolis, reality TV star and Family Research Council staff member Josh Duggar is leading a rally in support of marriage discrimination. And while it's noteworthy that a man who makes past of his living entertaining the masses would choose to lobby for a measure that divides the nation and limits the rights of millions of potential viewers, the extreme allies who will join Josh at his press conference should be even more newsworthy.
One of Josh's fellow speakers will be Peter Sprigg, a man who has called to "export" and criminalize gays. And I mean that quite literally. In two different TV interviews, the Family Research Council senior policy fellow made those direct calls:
*SOURCE:Gays seek immigration reform [Medill Reports]
*SOURCE: MSNBC
To be fair, Peter did apologize for the "export" comments, a few days after making them. But let's get real: that's not the kind of thing that just slips out. You don't accidentally say something like that. And when you follow it up with vocal support for "criminal sanctions," the earlier apology becomes even more suspect.
But Peter isn't the only one at the Indiana press conference who has said nasty things that go far beyond marriage. Josh will also be joined by Curt Smith, the head of the Indiana Family Policy Council. Smith is an "ex-gay" advocate who admits he believes that "homosexuality is harmful to all, including society." Note that I didn't say he thinks this about marriage—I said homosexuality in general. He thinks it's bad, by his own admission, which is why Mr. Smith works to "change" it, by his own advocacy.
Then there's Micah Clark, the head of the American Family Association of Indiana. Another "ex-gay" proponent, Mr. Clark's organization promotes three different groups geared toward "changing" gay people. He also was a vocal opponent of the Boy Scouts allowing openly gay youth, citing scripture about it being "better to have a millstone tied around your neck and thrown in the sea" than it is to negatively influence youth. Kind of harsh, huh?
And let's not completely let Josh off the hook either. He has gone on record claiming his lesbian relative "chooses" her "lifestyle," framing any rights she may want as being "special rights."
So that's your cast for Indiana. All on site will surely act like they are working only to "protect" or "preserve" marriage. Don't be fooled. Judge them by their own words.
Now let's move on to Utah, where advocates will hold a Tuesday afternoon rally outside the state capitol. While National Organization For Marriage president Brian Brown is one of the two headlining speakers, it's actually the other one to whome I want to direct my focus.
That other one is Robert Oscar Lopez, the college professor who identifies as a bisexual who was raised by a lesbian mom, yet who has spent most of his recent years attacking LGBT people. His rhetoric is truly some of the most egregious and downright shocking of anyone working today. Mr. Lopez saves his worst comments for gay parents, whom he routinely equates with slaveowners. Oh, and he also recently blamed the LGBT movement (and the It Gets Better project, specifically) for leading to teenage suicides. As I said: shocking.
But don't take my word for it. Judge Mr. Lopez by his own words:
-- Says that by siding with the majority to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor failed to connect the dots between same-sex parenting and slavery: "Incidentally, through my Puerto Rican roots I am also the descendant of African slaves, as I would guess Sotomayor might be as well. The scars inflicted on the survivors of slavery are tied to the fact that our ancestors were bought, sold, and robbed of a link to our biological roots. This is precisely what gay parenting does to kids through baby farming, adoption on demand, insemination, and surrogacy. You don't solve the historical trauma of such uprooting by vindicating the purveyor of the trauma -- in the case of slavery, white negreros, and in the case of same-sex parenting, gay activists who selfishly placed their desire for a family over children's needs for a mom and a dad. Slavery isn't the only past crime against humanity that offers warnings against shielding "parents" from scrutiny of their deprivation of children's roots. Did it protect the children born as slaves to keep slavery legal? Does it protect children deprived of their fathers to make it legal for the lesbians who have sequestered them to continue excluding them from contact with their fathers? Is the wise Latina awake? Paying attention? Just not connecting the dots? Hello!!"
-- Directly compares gay parents to slaveowners: "Slavery is the buying and selling of children. In US history, people whose families weren't large enough to work their own land paid slave owners to breed their male and female slaves, then bought their babies and raised them, presumably as beloved members of their family. Gay couples are no better when they arrange such things, even if they lie to themselves and say it's for love. To love a child you have to love yourself and the other biological parent; it all goes hand in hand. Otherwise you're being selfish and abusive. You are selfish and abusive in the way you put forth fraudulent arguments to justify the sale of human chattel and give over to modern slavery in the name of gay liberation."
-- Writes of gay men and their sex lives: "I have often wondered if a very large percentage of gay men have chronic PTSD that one would expect of rape victims."
-- In open letter to a theoretical lesbian couple with a child, refers to same-sex parenting as "this crime": "Why engage in debate with me at all if you are going to limit our vocabulary to brainless platitudes like "my family counts," "my family exists," and "I am as good as you"? Do you plan to keep your daughter in this Orwellian state of dumbed-down doublespeak for her entire life, lest she suddenly realize that you deprived her of a dad and spent much of her childhood trying to deflect blame for this crime onto other people?" Adds: "Do you ever plan to apologize to the girl you are raising for violating her basic human rights, severing her from her father and denying her a father and controlling her for your own quest for validation?"
-- Equates same-sex adoption with "cultural genocide once used against blacks and Indians": "The gay community is now entirely allied to the cultural genocide practices once used against blacks and Indians, since they are determined to say that, in the words of Nancy Polikoff, genetics doesn't matter as long as an adoptive couple can sway the powers that be to award them children. It all feels new and shiny to the gay community, because to them it's a way to overcome past inequality. But they are repeating the same genocidal practices of the past."
-- Without any evidence, claims that the late Tyler Clementi probably "had liaisons with men who were older than eighteen and committing statutory rape."
-- Described the anti-bullying "It Gets Better" project as "expressly designed for delivery to vulnerable minors in a state of potential nervous breakdown;" added that the late Tyler Clementi's parents "need to step up and show true courage; rather than allow their son to be exploited by the very same subculture that actually caused his death, they need to take the LGBT movement to task."
-- Slurs same-sex parents as "slavers buying children from poor surrogate mums overseas": "The testimonials from happy children of same-sex couples are obviously handpicked and staged to maximize the value of propaganda, but a gullible populace won't ask what isn't being printed or broadcast. A gullible populace prefers ingesting whatever is printed or broadcast. 'Love' is a meaningless mantra, like 'nobody is really listening to your phone calls' or "we need drones for national security purposes" out of the mouth of Obama; but in a country where people are swayed by Obama's silky voice, why would people not be swayed by gay couples saying, 'we aren't slavers buying children from poor surrogate mums overseas, we love our kids'?
-- Claims the Human Rights Campaign "abets chattel slavery in the form of gestational surrogacy"
-- Claims Disney Channel show featuring lesbian parents is meant to "anesthetize us to cruelty"
-- Says of LGBT activists: "Dear God, these wacko LGBT full-body totalitarians don't know when to stop. They must control ALL forms of government record-keeping, ALL possible conversations between doctors and patients, ALL lessons in EVERY classroom, ALL jokes made in EVERY military barracks, ALL tweets, ALL florists and cake-bakers and photographers and....Dear God, they are taking over the whole world!!!! God help us."
-- Says neighbors should intervene in lesbian households "to make sure the kids don't turn out totally screwed up": "Listen, lesbian moms out there -- cut the crap. You went out of your way to place helpless children into a fatherless home. You knew your household was going to be controversial. You shouldn't have created this situation in the first place. Now that you created it, we all have to make the best of it. Your loved ones and neighbors should be intervening in your household to make sure the kids don't turn out totally screwed up."
-- Claims gay people who use reproductive assistance are "re-pathologizing" homosexuality: "If it's normal to engage in homosexual relationships then you can't justify using sperm banks or surrogacy to procreate, in cases where a gay man's testicles are functioning perfectly and a lesbian's uterus and eggs are fit for action. The fact that you're not interested in matching functioning testicles to a functioning uterus because you're gay is supposed to be NORMAL; if we start involving medical treatments for you, then you are reinforcing the notion that homosexuality is a defect. That undoes the whole de-pathologizing move of forty years ago."
-- On same-sex parenting: "Lesbian moms allow the sources of their children's sperm to run off and be unbothered, saying to themselves, 'those two dykes will care for my kid, shit, I don't owe the world anything.' Gay dads are just two pairs of men running off to live in a world of men, avoiding the hassles and PMS and demands of the women who bear them children. Both forms of same-sex parenting pass on more broken family ties, cause more erasure, sever children from their origins, and teach men to be fatherless and feckless all at once."
-- Accuses "the gay lobby" of "pushing internationally to bring back chattel slavery in the form of gestational surrogacy" and "carrying out a systematic cover-up of the community's global pederastic sex trade"
-- Claims "support for gay marriage means supporting the view of children as COMMODITIES FOR PURCHASE, otherwise known as SLAVES."
-- In downright nasty (and vulgar) take on Edie Windsor's forty year relationship, Lopez reduces her shared decades with her late wife as being all about sex: "So it goes with Edith Windsor and the woman she was having sex with. She went to the Supreme Court and demanded that American taxpayers reward her for having lesbian sex by issuing her a back check for $300,000+. This is what civil marriage is based on. The country pays you to have sex. When it's a man and a woman having sex, it makes sense -- we need men to have sex with women so that we procreate. Why do we need Edith Windsor to have sex with another lady? What is the public interest in their sex life? They have the freedom to engage in sex because after Lawrence v. Texas, anti-sodomy laws have been deemed unconstitutional. So it's not possible for the state to prevent Edith Windsor from jumping into the sack with another sexy senior female and using dildos, dental dams, frottage, or whatever stimulating activities might send them into erotic thrall. They are free to do that. Once they are legally married, however, and they want the state to pay them for this mutually gratifying sexual activity, they are now no longer free to stop having sex. If Edith and her partner were to keep their clothes on for twenty years and not even do anything erotic at all, her partner could sue for divorce and claim sexual neglect. They would have to go to divorce court. Judges would have to know facts and figures about how they serviced or didn't service each other's erogenous zones."
-- Equates same-sex parents with abusers: "So the kid is basically a victim of two gay adults, who are now (without realizing it) rubbing it in the kid's face. 'See! Everyone says what I did is okay! You have NO reason to complain!' This is the way abusers often treat the people they abuse: They send flowers and apologize, justify themselves, make their victims feel it's all in their heads, publicly force their victims to say they're happy and nothing's wrong...I hate seeing kids be exploited and placed in traumatically uncomfortable positions. I hate seeing them be crushed into submission with the emotional tricks of abusive adults."
-- Claims surrogacy, adoption, and other paths same-sex parents take toward parenting recall "many of the worst vices against humanity that have been committed in past eras"
-- Published fiction books bashing gay life
-- Blames America's LGBT rights movement for other nation's draconian bans on homosexuality: "If we do not clean up what's going on in our own backyard, we will only make the problem worse, increase the alarm overseas, and incite ever-increasing levels of antigay backlash. No, I am not excusing antigay backlash that goes this far -- but I am saying that we can't ignore what's happening at home because, in fact, the best way for us to help counteract the antigay backlash overseas is to reform our own gay lobby and inspire other nations with examples of a country that can find a reasonable middle ground of acceptance and support for homosexuals, rather than blatant antigay repression on one end, or the tyranny of LGBT social engineering on the other end."
-- Says "I think polygamy is far preferable to same-sex marriage because at least there is a father and a mother in a polygamous household, irrespective of how many additional fathers or mothers there might be."
Robert Oscar López [GLAAD CAP]
López' rhetoric rivals the worst anti-LGBT advocate out there. His words are dripping with such jaw-dropping venom, particularly for same-sex parents, that his words are almost in a different category than your ordinary political pundit. It's one thing to make comments against rights or protections. But when you quite literally equate loving parents with slave owners and suggest that same-sex adoption is on par with the worst "cultural genocide"? It's something else entirely.
As these folks rally in their respective states, it is incumbent on local media to let their audiences know exactly what these commentators have said about LGBT people and how sweeping their goals truly are.