Fox News columnist and on-air contributor Todd Starnes praises him as "one of the most intelligent talk show hosts in the country." Elected figures like Senator Rand Paul still go on his radio show. He and his team dupe actors like Patricia Heaton into believing that their platform is biblical rather than shockingly hostile. His words and his agenda now pretty much define the American Family Association, where he serves as senior issues analyst and prominent spokesman.
The he in question is Bryan Fischer—and he is trying to lead America into war against LGBT people. I'm not being hyperbolic. In a new column that goes a step beyond even the reliable extremes that we know to expect from him, Fischer has made perhaps his most pointed call to arms yet, using his platform to tell AFA supporters that we cannot go on in an America that accommodates LGBT people. Bryan (or someone at the AFA) titles his piece "The battle over gay rights is THE battle ... there is no other;" here is the gist:
Everywhere Big Gay gains ground, Christ is forced into retreat.
Everything hinges on the outcome of this cultural conflict. Whether America continues to be a beacon of faith, family and freedom will be determined by who wins this battle. If the forces of sexual normalcy and natural marriage prevail, America will once again move the world toward the sunlit uplands of civilization, family, morality, goodness and prosperity.
But if the forces of sexual deviancy prevail, every part of our culture will be corrupted and contaminated beyond repair, and America will plunge the world into a moral abyss of darkness and depravity.
Bryan, I should remind you, opposes even the most benign measure of LGBT progress. He has admitted that he wants us to be "rehabbed" like drug addicts, so his ultimate goal, stated time and time again, is for a nation of "cured" gay people. When he talks of us "[gaining] ground" or "prevailing," he means that in a very low-bar way; when he scares readers with a future that lies in "a moral abyss of darkness and depravity," his warning is of a world where Ellen DeGeneres gets to host the Oscars from the Dolby Theater rather than her rehabilitation facility.
Again, that is not hyperbole—it's Bryan in his own words! He says this because he means it.
Moving on, Bryan writes:
In their quest for cultural domination, they will relentlessly extinguish the light of sexual normalcy and morality, as well as the light of Christianity.
They have the will to crush biblical Christianity into broken pieces. They lack only the power.
Okay, so now he's telling his AFA base that we are out to destroy the church. For the readers he is specifically targeting, there is no worse charge, and Bryan knows this. He is telling them that in this "scary" future, there will be no more Christianity. Gone. Finished. People will no longer have a venue or right to pray, he claims, because those evil LGBT people are both out to and capable of destroying religion. Never mind the millions of LGBT people who are Christian, or the even more millions of Christians who support and love their LGBT friends and family, because of their faith and not in spite of it. No. For Fischer, there cannot be such a reality. For him, LGBT people are intent to destroy Christianity.
He says this because he means it.
But not content with the way he's already demonized us, Bryan moves to what is widely considered a third rail in the world of political commentary:
Advocates of sodomy-based marriage want to push Christians so far into retreat that they dare not poke their heads out of their own church buildings. This is the very spirit of Hitler, who bottled up the Christians of his day inside the four walls of their buildings.
Hitler and his propaganda machine concocted slogans such as "Politics do not belong in the church" and "The church must be separate from the state" to neuter Christians and paralyze the church's ability to resist his totalitarian impulses. (Yes, you read that right. Those slogans did not come from so-called civil libertarians like the ACLU, they came from the fevered mind of Adolf Hitler.)
Yup, you got it: We're Hitler, basically. And it didn't even take us being L, G, B, or T to get us there—it simply took the basic and widely accepted idea that church and state are separate entities. I guess being L,G,B, or T makes us like a "super Hitler" or something.
But where is all of this leading, you ask? Well here, see for yourself:
Said Winston Churchill:
"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
The time to stand against the war machine of the homosexual regime is now. Today. It is still a battle the forces of goodness can win. But we must not wait another day.
To war. That's where he is leading this whole thing. He is telling his readers that this "culture war" will culminate in a literal war. We proud and publicly affirming LGBT people are already a "war machine," according to Bryan, and he has framed his entire piece in a "battle" motif. Couple that with a quote that commands its sympathetic ears that "it is better to perish than to live as slaves," and you have nothing less than a call to arms. At a time when violence against LGBT people continues to skyrocket, he wants to call his followers to take up arms.
He says this because he means it.