Bryan Fischer, whose inflammatory statements have been documented through GLAAD's Commentator Accountability Project, has gone too far for his employer, the American Family Association (AFA). Leaders of the AFA shared with the Rachel Maddow Show that he should no longer be referred to as the Director of Issues Analysis for the organization.
Bryan Fischer was fired after news that the AFA was providing an all-expenses paid trip for 60 Republican US lawmakers to Israel. It was then that the Israeli paper Haaretz began to report on some of Fischer's anti-LGBT and anti-Jewish comments, many of which can be seen in GLAAD's Commentator Accountability Project.
"This dismissal is a sign of how hurtful and inflammatory Bryan Fischer's words have been," said GLAAD Vice President of Programs Zeke Stokes. "His history of vicious attacks against the LGBT community and people of faith have gone without consequence for way too long. It's about time that he is held accountable for his toxic rhetoric."
To be clear, the American Family Association, continues to be an organization with an anti-LGBT agenda. It has been labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its consistent lies and misinformation about LGBT people.
The most inflammatory comments for Israelis was Fischer's statement that only Christians have religious freedom under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. However, Haaretz noted his other statements as well, including multiple references that the Nazi leaders were all gay men.
Additional statements include:
- Asserting: “Ladies and gentlemen, they [gay people] are Nazis (see video at :24). Do not be under any illusions about what homosexual activists will do with your freedoms and your religion if they have the opportunity. They’ll do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents in Nazi Germany.”
- Claiming: "So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn't the Germans, didn't the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.
- "Suggesting the Boy Scouts (who he calls the "Boy Sodomizers of America") would be better off drowned in the sea than to allow gay scouts
- On multiple occasions, calling for an “Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households”
- Saying gay people must be criminalized and treated like drug addicts; even asks (at 2:29): "Do you put them to death, do you lock 'em up...what do you do?"
- Saying: "The Democrats as a party, I believe, they want slaves, they want Americans to be as slavishly dependent upon the central government as slaves were upon their masters in pre-Civil War days, that’s what they want.” Claims African-Americans "stay on the Democratic plantation" because they are "like drug-added addicts and the Democrat Party has gotten them addicted to welfare benefits."
The American Family Association told the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC that they have fired Bryan Fischer as Director of Issue Analysis. Tim Wildmon, the President of the AFA, who also has his own Commentator Accountability Project profile for his previous radical anti-LGBT statements, said that he should simply be called "a radio host." Fischer does still retain his radio show associated with the AFA.
The GLAAD Commentator Accountability Project aims to put critical information about frequent anti-gay interviewees into the hands of newsrooms, editors, hosts and reporters. Journalists or producers who are on deadline often don't have the time to dig into the histories of a commentator. Audiences need to be aware that when they’re not talking to the mainstream media, these voices are comparing LGBT people to Nazi Germany, predicting that equal treatment of LGBT people will lead to the total collapse of society, and even making accusations of satanic influence. The Commentator Accountability Project is bringing all of these statements to light, while calling attention to the sentiments behind them. It demonstrates that the commentators who are most often asked to opine on issues like marriage equality or non-discrimination protections do not accurately represent the "other side" of those issues. They represent nothing but extreme animus towards the entire LGBT community.