In Porno Pete’s wildest and wettest dreams! (Graphic: mine)
It’s possible that the term “homofascism” originated with one Pastor Ralph Ovadal. A failed pig-farmer and failed beer-truck-driver, Ovadal eventually became Director of Wisconsin Christians United and pastor of Pilgrims Covenant Church. In October 2003, Ovadal staged the First International Conference on Homo-Fascism in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The conference was attended by several leading dim bulbs of the radical religious right, including Pastor Grant Storms, Director of Christian Conservatives for Reform, who during the conference advocated shooting GLBT people in the streets — “Boom, boom, boom, boom. There’s twenty! Ca-ching!” Storms later sued the GLBT group Action Wisconsin (now Fair Wisconsin) for making an audio tape of the conference available to the media. Storms lost, and Action Wisconsin was awarded $87,000.00 in legal fees. Storms labeled the judge a “liberal,” and proclaimed, “We’ll win this case and we’ll win the cultural war. We have God on our side.”
Front, center and slated to speak at that conference was none other than Peter LaBarbera, now President of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality (AFTAH). Of course, that was back in the pre-comb-over days, when Porno Pete’s leather chaps still fit, and he could hang out and spy on all the hot, gay male leather action that continues to dominate his blog.
Americans for Truth about Homosexuality is probably, I suspect, as comedian Kathy Griffin said of William Donohoe’s Caholic League, one dude with a computer. But today, I clicked on over to Americans for Truthiness Truth about Homosexuality and did a couple of searches. I was looking for some very specific terms, in light of LaBarbera’s whining this morning about having been accused by a “homosexual activist” with the Georgia Log Cabin Republicans of running a “domestic terrorist group” that would be “more welcome as a mainstream Nazi Germany organization.”
I searched for and found at Pete’s blog:
- 35 instances of the term gaystapo
- 40 instances of the term homo-fascist
- 66 instances of the term homo-fascism
- 131 instances of the term Nazi
In all fairness, a good number of the “Nazi” references are accusations that Americans for Truth about Homosexuality is Nazi-like in its ruthless attacks on the GLBT community.
In a letter to his readers this morning, LaBarbera claims, “Someone smart once said that the first person in a debate to accuse his opponent of being a “Nazi” automatically loses the argument.”
Were LaBarbera himself “someone smart,” he would know that someone was Mike Godwin, who, in 1990, formulated what has come to be known as Godwin’s Law. The law states, “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
If, as LaBarbera maintains, “the first person in a debate to accuse his opponent of being a “Nazi” automatically loses the argument,” and, given LaBarbera’s propensity to relentlessly trot out the Nazi comparisons, he and his Americans for Truth about Homosexuality lost the argument ages ago.
