This post is among a weekly series of examinations about the effect society’s attitudes has on Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgendered and sexual orientation Questioning citizens. Each week’s contribution seeks to expose motivations, machinations, malice and complicity among detractors of the LGBTQ community and supporters.  

Oh, how they love to make things up. 

 “They” are a small but vociferous group of perennial malcontents who are steeped in wishful thinking and self aggrandizement. Training starts early in life when they’re most vulnerable, most impressionable, and incapable of telling the difference between fantasy and reality. They’re taught that magic is real. They’re taught that an opinion is equal to a fact. They’re taught that conviction is the same thing as truth.  

Infantile brainwashing and childhood indoctrination doesn’t make one stupid. Emotional and intellectual abuse makes one a victim. Often, in cases of abuse, such victims have a higher predisposition to pass on the damage by becoming an abuser – more often than not to their own children.  

They think it’s a good thing. 

They define themselves as a special, chosen few.  As a society they embrace whoever else agrees to be chosen by the same rules. They discourage and deny those who think differently enough to contaminate their pristine conformity. Theirs is given of an immutable, unwavering authority that defies challenge on pain of eternal, infinite, untiring suffering.

The first loyalty among the abused is to their recognized authority. Everything cited under this authority is attributed exactly as described. This authority trumps any other idea. Informed by this authority, it is assumed unassailable.  

Of course, there are those who disagree with all or part of such an approach to life, especially when adherents would change or limit choices, opportunities, expression and even the very lives of those who disagree. This is a fundamental challenge to the supernaturally entitled chosen and their free interpretation as a way of life. 

A self-appointed subset, among the chosen, raise themselves to meet the challenge. They claim to be called upon by their transcendent authority to engage and subdue those who disagree. Clothed in a mantle of morality, claiming the power of their transcendent authority, they invariably replace fact with opinion and conflate conviction with reality, painting a picture of overwhelming threat that any alternative may pose to all things good and virtuous. Oh, how they love to make things up to illustrate their points. In the coming weeks this column will profile and quote among these servants of virtue   

Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy for the American Family Association where he serves as their spokesman, blogging on his AFA forum Rightly Concerned, and hosting Focal Point on American Family Radio’s network of around 145 stations, reaching an audience of about two million. Fischer’s attacks on Gays, Muslims, Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics and other immigrants has earned Fischer and the AFA official hate group status by the Southern Poverty Law Center.   

Fischer earned his baccalaureate in philosophy from Stanford University and his graduate degree in theology from Dallas Theological Seminary.  He served as the founding director of the Cole Center for Biblical Studies in Boise, Idaho for 13 years. Afterward, Fischer founded the Community Church of the Valley which he headed as senior pastor for twelve years during which time he also served as executive director of the Idaho Values Alliance. Fisher was a commissioner for the Boise, Idaho Parks and Recreation department from 2000 to 2005 and founded the Keep the Commandments Coalition in 2004 to keep a memorial to the Ten Commandments erected in civic Julia Davis Park among museums, a zoo and other public cultural, recreational and educational amenities.   

As Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy at the American Family Association, Bryan Fischer has fabricated a list of threats imposed upon his brand of god and country. 

• Muslims: serving in the military, immigration and residency,  building community 
  centers too near to wounds upon American exceptionalism, equal protection
• African Americans and Native Americans
• The “feminization” of the Congressional Medal of Honor
• Grizzly Bears 
• But, wait! There ‘s more!

Fischer has directed the greatest proportion of his zeal toward the LGBTQ community using a wide array of bizarre characterizations to vilify innocents he was taught from an early age were not only different but intrinsically corrupt. Fischer has championed amendments to many states’ constitutions banning marriage equality, promoting boycotts among businesses, corporations and state governments that have offered benefits and protections to gays, and ousting state supreme court judges who ruled in favour of marriage equality and equal protection. 

It’s not just the volume of Fisher’s vituperative statements, or even the creativity of what he says. What is most telling is his meandering absurdity. Here are some examples of what he gets paid to say.

  Not even one among Fischer’s claims is supported by evidence that hasn’t been thoroughly debunked and rendered objectively false. The studies cited by Fischer are mischaracterized, unscientific or use faulty procedure/sampling/analysis/objectivity or have been otherwise falsely applied. All his arguments in The list of ten “truths” about homosexuality are debunked here by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The only reason there is anything remotely resembling a culture war follows radical religious zealots’ resistance of public pressure to rein in the traditional taboo from challenge they’ve been allowed to expand their religious freedoms to the point of running rough shod over the rights – and lives – of innocents. They perceive being told they can no longer dictate controls over others’ lives is somehow an infringement of their religious freedom. You see, their world view includes exerting domination – or dominion, using their terminology – over all aspects of society, and everybody in it, thereby turning the world, and especially America, into a theocracy. [video, video] All of this is in readiness for the corporeal (re)appearance of their chosen, transcendent authority. You know, the one that tells them what to do, how to do it, what to say and what they may and may not think. According to Fischer, anybody who stands up to their tyranny is acting in hate is is therefore guilty of a hate crime. Always the aggressor who cries foul, the bully as martyr. [one, two, three,  four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,]

Everyone is entitled to an opinion and has the right to express it. Yet, victims of early onset religious indoctrination are hard pressed to prove their case among those not subjected to infantile brainwashing. Making a case to people not conditioned to accept magic as a natural state would do well to present credible proof – or even a hint of factual indication – that their transcendent authority exists. The very best on offer to back up their claims so far – well, for the most recent pair millennia – are more assertions, hearsay, superstition, old wive’s tales, myths. The best are neither provable nor testable claims. Arguments in favour of their authority are most often presented in a mind bending array of logical fallacies, most often including appeals to popularity and appeals to authority, the very one for which there is no objective proof. Wanting it to be true doesn’t make it so. Or, in the words of Marcus Bachmann, “Just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn’t mean that we are supposed to go down that road.”

America is a land defined by the rule of law. Tradition and popularity are not law. Consider this rule of thumb: would the dispute survive the test of judicial trial? Ask the proponents of Prop 8, Congressional defenders of DADT, and the myriad apologists for the almost three dozen states that have passed discriminatory state level, anti-equality constitutional measures. Each of these examples about the tyranny of the masses the Founding Fathers warned us against are under the threat of judicial review and subject to the dispassionate  judgement of jurists who know the difference between opinion and fact, conviction and reality. 

“…The things you are liable to find it the Bible: It ain’t necessarily so.”

©2011
Nathan Garcia. All international rights reserved.