THE PROPAGANDISTS: Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association and the Demonization of LGBT People

The Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association, the Mississippi-based Hate Group that is the focus of a disturbing new Intelligence Report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, summarized below, is based in Venango County. (The AFAofPA's activities are chronicled in the Emmy Award-winning film "Out In The Silence.")


It is from Venango County where vicious attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are broadcast (on the airwaves of American Family Radio station WAWN, 89.5 FM, Franklin), and it is from Venango County where the AFA of PA's president, Diane Gramley (pictured), launches vitriolic attacks and smear campaigns against LGBT people and their allies across the state.

Until Venango County's elected representatives, opinion leaders, and other voices of influence publicly denounce this organization's hateful and harmful activities, it must be assumed that they condone them.

In this case, cowardly silence must be seen as support.

THE PROPAGANDISTS:
Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association & the Demonization of LGBT People

Executive Summary

The American Family Association (AFA) is one of most powerful religious-right groups in the nation, with a $20 million budget, a network of 200 radio stations and two Internet television channels. Its spokespersons have appeared on all major networks and cable news channels, and in leading print and radio media. It is also one of the leading purveyors of lies about LGBT people and homosexuality.

The AFA has come under fire repeatedly over the years since it was founded in 1977 by the Rev. Donald Wildmon, who was sharply criticized in the 1980s for suggesting that obscene content on television and in the movies is largely due to the media being con- trolled by Jews. It once demanded that an openly gay Arizona congressman be barred from speaking at the Republican National Convention and suggested that he be arrested under a state law criminalizing sodomy. It regularly attacked corporations like Disney, which it described as a “two-faced” company that “welcomed hordes of homosexuals to celebrate their sexual perversions.”


But in the last three years, since hiring a radical Idaho preacher named Bryan Fischer (pictured) as its director of issue analysis, the AFA has gone even further. Since moving to Mississippi to join the group, Fischer has declared that “homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler … the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews” — a complete falsehood, as any historian knows. He has suggested that gay sex be recriminalized. He has routinely claimed that gay men molest children at rates far higher than those of heterosexual men — another falsehood, as all the relevant professional scientific associations have long agreed. Fischer has said that President Obama “nurtures a hatred for the white man” and suggested that welfare incentivizes black “people who rut like rabbits.” He has said that non-Christian religions “have no First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion,” claimed that the “sexual immorality of Native Americans” was part of what made them “morally disqualified from sovereign control of
American soil,” and suggested that the best way to deal with promiscuity would be to kill the promiscuous.

Words like these have consequences. While the AFA would certainly deny it, it seems obvious that its regular demonizing of members of the LGBT community as child molesters and the like creates an atmosphere where violence is all but inevitable. And that violence is dramatic. A study by the Southern Poverty Law Center found, based on an analysis of 14 years of FBI hate crime data, that LGBT people were by far the American minority most victimized by such crimes. They were more than twice as likely to be attacked in a violent hate crime as Jews or black people, and four times as likely as Muslims. And that doesn’t take into account the anti-gay bullying that has resulted in so many recent teen suicides.

Based on the foregoing and other evidence, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last year began listing the AFA as a hate group. The listing, as was said at the time, was based on the group’s use of known falsehoods to attack and demonize members of the LGBT community — not, as some have gratuitously claimed, because the organization is Christian, or because it opposes same-sex marriage, or because it believes that the Bible describes homosexual practice as a sin.

Many thoughtful Christian commentators have said as much. Warren Throckmorton, a respected professor and past president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association, wrote last year that the AFA and other “newly labeled hate groups” were seeking to “avoid addressing the issues the SPLC raised, instead preferring to attack the credibility of the SPLC.” Reviewing an SPLC list of myths propagated by anti-gay religious-right groups, he said many are “provably false” and “rooted in ignorance.” The criticisms, Throckmorton concluded, are “legitimate and have damaged the credibility of the groups on the list. Going forward, I hope Christians don’t rally around these groups but rather call them to accountability.”

We hope public figures will do the same.

Gay Marriage Opponents Need to Get the Facts About Homosexuality

This article from The Baltimore Sun speaks to the lies about LGBT people propagated by the Venango County-based hate group, the American Family Association of Pennsylvania.

Comparisons of Gay Marriage to Polygamy and Worse
Belie a Lack of Understanding about Homosexuality

By Lori W. Hollander for The Baltimore Sun:

A state delegate from Virginia recently wrote on this page that "Sexual orientation is not limited to same- or complementary-sex attractions but includes attractions to children, prostitutes, multiple wives (polygamy), dead persons (necrophilia), animals, inanimate objects and others that could not printed in the Baltimore Sun out of deference to readers." Not only is this statement erroneous and misleading, it demonstrates a reckless disregard for the gay community.

As licensed marriage and relationship therapists in practice with straight and gay couples for 23 years, my husband and I have seen firsthand the relationships of gay and lesbian couples. Their partnerships are no different than yours or ours; only they have the additional burden of being discriminated against by people who don't know the facts.


The following facts were copied verbatim from the website of the American Psychological Association, the leading advocate for psychological knowledge and practice informing policymakers and the public to improve public policy and daily living:

• What is sexual orientation? Sexual orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual or affectional attraction toward others. Sexual orientation exists along a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality and includes various forms of bisexuality.

• Is sexual orientation a choice? No, human beings cannot choose to be either gay or straight. For most people, sexual orientation emerges in early adolescence without any prior sexual experience. … Psychologists do not consider sexual orientation to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed.

• Can therapy change sexual orientation? No; even though most homosexuals live successful, happy lives, some homosexual or bisexual people may seek to change their sexual orientation through therapy, often coerced by family members or religious groups. ... The reality is that homosexuality is not an illness. It does not require treatment and is not changeable.

• Is homosexuality a mental illness or emotional problem? No. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals agree that homosexuality is not an illness, a mental disorder, or an emotional problem. More than 35 years of objective, well-designed scientific research has shown that homosexuality, in and of itself, is not associated with mental disorders or emotional or social problems.

• Can lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals be good parents? Yes. Studies comparing groups of children raised by homosexual and by heterosexual parents find no developmental differences between the two groups of children in four critical areas: their intelligence, psychological adjustment, social adjustment, and popularity with friends. It is also important to realize that a parent's sexual orientation does not indicate their children's.

Another myth about homosexuality is the mistaken belief that gay men have more of a tendency than heterosexual men to sexually molest children. There is no evidence to suggest that homosexuals or bisexuals molest children at a higher rate than heterosexuals.

• What can be done to overcome the prejudice and discrimination that gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals experience? Research has found that the people who have the most positive attitudes toward gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals are those who say they know one or more gay, lesbian or bisexual person well, often as a friend or co-worker. For this reason, psychologists believe that negative attitudes toward gay people as a group are prejudices that are not grounded in actual experience but are based on stereotypes and misinformation.

• Why is it important for society to be better educated about homosexuality? Educating all people about sexual orientation and homosexuality is likely to diminish anti-gay prejudice. Accurate information about homosexuality is especially important to young people who are first discovering and seeking to understand their sexuality, whether homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Fears that access to such information will make more people gay have no validity; information about homosexuality does not make someone gay or straight.

These are the same positions taken by the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, National Association of Social Workers, American Counseling Association, American Academy of Marriage & Family Therapists and American Academy of Physicians Assistants.

A simple computer search would have easily revealed all of this.

Statements and beliefs based upon individual morality are one thing. But a delegate who holds the public trust and serves the community — which includes people who are straight and gay, adolescents and young adults who are becoming aware of their sexual orientation, families of gay children, and gay parents of children — also has a moral and ethical obligation to know and put forth established scientific knowledge.

Lori W. Hollander is a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in Owings Mills.