Mike Tidmus

(Graphic: mine)

The New York Times, on Monday, published an article about California’s Proposition 8 called A Line in the Sand for Same-Sex Marriage Foes. For quotes and background, writer Laura Goodstein turned to a few of the leading lights of the radical religious right — Tony Perkins, Chuck Colson, and Ake Green.

In the article, Tony Perkins claimed the vote to take away marriage equality in California was “more important than the presidential election.” Perkins added, “We’ve picked bad presidents before, and we’ve survived as a nation, but we will not survive if we lose the institution of marriage.”

Someone should remind Perkins that the institution of marriage is not being taken away — it’s not even at risk. The institution was, in fact, recently expanded to include all citizens of California, including the ones who happen to be gay.

And someone should remind the New York Times that, according to Max Blumenthal, writing in The Nation:

In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.

Speaking of bad presidents, in the article, former Nixon henchman Chuck Colson warned, “This vote on whether we stop the gay-marriage juggernaut in California is Armageddon.” He rambled on, “We lose this, we are going to lose in a lot of other ways, including freedom of religion.”

Now, having read the full text of the proposition and the arguments for and against it in my handy-dandy voter’s guide, I can say with certainty freedom of religion is only mentioned in this line:

Regardless of how you feel about this issue, the freedom to marry is fundamental to our society, just like the freedoms of religion and speech.

Anyone with a lick of sense ought to be able to grasp that this means freedom of religion is not what’s at stake in this election.

As for that whole Armageddon nonsense, that kind of melodramatic hyperbole is what one might expect from Richard Nixon’s, Watergate-era, go-to hatchet man.

Chuck Colson is the guy who once boasted: “I’d walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon.” Colson did, in fact, trample all over the law when he ran secret operations for Tricky Dick and played a substantial role in the Watergate break-in — for which he was sent to prison. But don’t take my word for it, take Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff, H R Halderman’s:

Writing in his 1978 book, The Ends of Power, Halderman said:

Colson had signed up an ex-C.I.A. agent named Howard Hunt to work for him and thereafter became very secretive about his exploits in the name of Nixon. Years later I heard of such wild schemes as the proposed fire bombing of a politically liberal foundation [the Brookings Institute] in order to retrieve a document Nixon wanted; feeding LSD to an anti-Nixon commentator [Jack Anderson] before he went on television; and breaking into the offices of a newspaperman [Hank Greenspun] who was supposed to have documents from Howard Hughes that revealed certain secrets about Nixon.

(Emphasis: mine)

The Times article also notes that, just to prove their point that Prop 8 isn’t at all about bashing gays, the radical religious right have imported Sweden’s most notorious homophobe, Ake Green.

Green, you might remember, a few years back gave a sermon in Sweden in which he characterized homosexuality as “abnormal” and “a horrible cancerous tumor in the body of society.” Gay people, according to Pastor Green, are “perverts, whose sexual drive the Devil has used as his strongest weapon against God.” And, of course, paraphrasing Green, perverts like to have sex with animals and no person can be a Christian and a homosexual at the same time.

Green gave this sermon to his tiny congregation to challenge Sweden’s addition of sexual orientation to its hate crimes law in 2003. To make sure he got the level of attention he craved, Green invited members of the media to witness his Hellfire-and-damnation sermon. When none showed up, he sent copies of the sermon to the press, and, was subsequently arrested and sentenced to one month in jail for violating Swedish law.

Although Green was acquitted by Sweden’s Supreme Court, the radical religious right in America rushed to Green’s cause. Even the Reverend Fred God-Hates-Fags Phelps jumped on the bandwagon proclaiming “God Hates Sweden,” praising the Lord for the high number of Swedes killed in the 2004 tsunami and earthquake in the Indian Ocean, and taking time to design a special granite monument in Green’s honor.

Fred Phelps and his fellow Christianists regard Green as a “Christian martyr.”

“He is a symbol of what is ahead,” said the Rev Jim Garlow in the New York Times article, ignoring the fact that if anyone has a right at risk in Prop 8, it is gay people, whose existing right to marry is at stake.

While hardly Armageddon, the battle for marriage equality is important enough for the radical religious right to trot out a David Duke associate, a Nixon-era wannabe terrorist, and Sweden’s biggest publicity hound. If the mainstream media did their job and Americans read and retained what they read, it wouldn’t be left to bloggers to point out the parade of crooks and liars behind Proposition 8.