Don Wildmon, the leader of the Mississippi-based, virulently anti-gay group, the American Family Association, joined Facebook recently, and has sent an email blast to his followers urging them to sign up so that they can use the social networking platform as an outlet for propagating hatred and intolerance of gay people.
“I have joined Facebook. Please join me on Facebook and become a friend of AFA,” reads the email’s headline. In the body, Wildmon explains what Facebook is and hints at how his followers can use it to promote the homophobia agenda:
Every day new technologies are emerging on the Internet. For several years now Internet “social networking” has been the preferred choice of many for keeping in touch with friends and family. From Yahoo! 360 to MySpace to Facebook, people of all ages are enjoying quick, easy, and inexpensive ways of communicating with others near and far. And best of all it’s FREE!
I have joined Facebook. I hope you will join, too, and become a friend of AFA. Facebook allows users to send and receive emails, add comments, post photos and videos, share links, and join groups or causes. You can also learn about the people you meet or would like to meet. And you can network with like-minded people concerned about America’s moral decline. Once signed up, you can invite your family and friends to visit or join your homepage. You can also search the entire Facebook site to see if relatives, friends, acquaintances, and classmates are already members. Facebook is informative, fun, and easy to use. There simply is no reason not to join!
Take Action!
It’s likely that most Facebookers are not familiar with the AFA, which is among the wealthiest of the groups that raise money based on gay-hate mongering. In fiscal year 2006, the last year for which figures are available, it claimed net assets of $37 million. The AFA generates almost all its revenue in advertising campaigns designed to raise the specter of hatred of gay people, mostly among less educated, low-income whites.
The AFA is known for its “off with their heads” approach to boycotts. It even targets companies that exercise free speech — and free enterprise — by marketing to gay consumers. The list of companies boycotted by AFA is a who’s who of American brands, including 7-Eleven, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Airlines, American Girl, Blockbuster Video, Burger King, Calvin Klein, Carl’s Jr., Clorox, Crest, Ford, Hallmark Cards, Kmart, Kraft Foods, S. C. Johnson & Son, Movie Gallery, Microsoft, MTV, Mary Kay, NutriSystem, Old Navy, IKEA, Sears, Pampers, Procter & Gamble, Target, Tide, and Walt Disney Company.
The group is not just opposed to gay marriage, it even attacks companies that provide partner benefits for their employees:
[The AFA asks]”Christian consumers”to think twice before they patronize companies that support the homosexual agenda.” AFA lists major corporations that have non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation or that offer domestic-partner benefits for same-sex couples… “One company losing five to ten percent of its sales will send a clear message to every company in America,” offers Don Wildmon. AFA attacked Kraft Foods (owner of brand names Post, Oscar Meyer, and Maxwell House, among others) for the company’s support of the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago.
Facebookers should know that, like all anti-gay groups, AFA purports to base its anti-gay agenda on the Scriptures. But not only is using the Bible to justify organized hate campaigns a bizarre construct, it also requires a mind-bendingly selective reading. The Bible does condemn homosexuality in a few obscure references, but, in the Old Testament, it classifies it as an “abomination,” a class of sins that also famously includes eating shrimp, lobster and ham, as well as burning incense, cheating at business, women wearing pants, haughtiness, lying and improperly covering one’s poop in the desert. among other infractions.
At the same time, anti-gay Christians selectively ignore sexual sins that the Bible decries much more frequently and fervently than homosexuality, including sex between unmarried people, which it calls “fornication,” and, in particular, adultery. Adultery, unlike homosexuality, is prohibited in the Ten Commandments — the only Old Testament laws that Jesus did not rescind with his New Covenant.
In the real world, adultery, unlike gay marriage, is a real threat to “traditional” marriage. Adultery destroys families, and is a direct cause of the high incidence of single-parent homes, poverty and a whole host of social ills. Heterosexual adulterers are 100 percent more likely than monogamous gays and others to contract sexually transmitted diseases. Adulterers are, by definition, liars, and there is no doubt that adultery, unlike being gay, is a choice.
But the AFA is mute in opposition to the civil rights of adulterers. It has never opposed the right of adulterers to remarry. It has never launched a boycott against a company that employs adulterers or that gives partner benefits to remarried philanderers. The AFA once forced the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to reassign a reporter who covered education because he happened to be gay, but the AFA finds no problem with adulterous reporters covering education or even with adulterers working as teachers, where they are can recruit children into their sinful, adulterous lifestyle.
When the day comes that the AFA expands its agenda to advocate rescinding the marriage rights of adulterers and denying adulterers’ protections from being fired or evicted because of their status as sinners, we’ll start to believe their antipathy toward gays is purely Bible-based. Until then, the only conclusion to draw is that they are using the Bible to excuse their own personal prejudices and, too often, their own self-loathing — a fact that renders their hatred of gays to be as destructive and scornful as white supremacists’ hatred of blacks and antisemites’ hatred of Jews.
Like all social media platforms, Facebook is largely self-policing, so it will be interesting to see whether the Facebook community will tolerate a hate group like the AFA moving in and establishing an outpost there for its message of intolerance and oppression.
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