At the 2:00 mark, CBN gives Bigot Harry Jackson a bully pulpit to spew about getting his ass kicked over marriage equality in Washington DC, a city in which the carpet-bagging, blood-letting-threatening, NOM associatingJackson does not reside. Jackson then more than adequately demonstrates why he is the radical religious reich’s go-to person of color when he insinuates that only a “small minority” of “wavering” blacks are willing to accept marriage equality for LGBT Americans.
Carpetbagger and NOM-associate Bigot Harry Jackson has failed in his pathetic last ditch effort to get his gay-hatin’ hands on one of them activist judges in order to avert marriage equality in Washington DC.
A group led by Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, has wanted to stop the law from going into effect, but the effort has been stymied by decisions in lower courts. The group has also been unsuccessful in its attempt to repeal the D.C. Council’s decision on same-sex marriages through the ballot initiative process. It wants to propose a law establishing that marriage is between a man and woman.
For the geographically-challenged, Beltsville is in Maryland and not in the District of Columbia.
Jackson, who threatened bloodletting if marriage equality became legal in DC, and his pathetic posse of anti-gays have been insisting that the population of DC be allowed to circumvent legal procedure (AKA: representative democracy) and vote on the fundamental civil rights of a minority within the district — a clear violation of the DC Human Rights Act.
Although the D.C. Charter provides for referendums, the group has been blocked because the D.C. Council disallowed any referendum on an issue that would violate the D.C. Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination.
The Bush-appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, denied Bigot Jackson’s stay request.
Consequently, same-sex couples began applying for marriage licenses today in the nation’s capitol.
Senators team with religious right on reform obstruction (video: The Rachel Maddow Show)
The mustachioed bobblehead leading the Family Research Council’s anti-healthcare-reform freakshow is Lou Engle. Bruce Wilson, writing at Talk to Action, has a piece up on Engle, who Wilson suggests is “the Republican Party’s new spiritual guru.” In GOP’s New Prayer Guru Says Gays Possessed By Demons, Wilson says:
As the Rachel Maddow Show has recently showcased, on December 16th the Family Research Council sponsored a “Prayercast” event, attended by GOP luminaries including Senators Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback, and House Representatives Michelle Bachmann and Randy Forbes. But FRC head Tony Perkins did not lead the prayer event. That honor fell to Lou Engle, Founder of TheCall. Besides leading the capstone stadium rally for pro-Proposition 8, antigay marriage organizers last November 1, 2008 at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, Lou Engle could also be found, at a special ceremony at a Virginia Beach megachurch last summer, anointing and blessing GOP presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich.
In his article, Wilson, who has written extensively about Lou Engle, quotes a sermon in which Engle describes San Francisco’s Castro District as “where the homosexuals boast the dominion of darkness.”
Dominion of darkness? How could I possibly have missed that t-shirt the last time I was in San Francisco? Evan Hurst, writing at Truth Wins Out, ponders Engle’s hyperbole in a spot-on piece called Radical Cleric Lou Engle Believes Homosexuality Is A “Demon Spirit.”
Onstage at TheCall (foreground L-R) James Dobson, Lou Engle, Jim Garlow (Photo: Karen Ocamb)
When Engle first appears in the Rachel Maddow video above, holding his hand is none other than San Diego’s Pastor Jim Garlow.
Garlow also shared the stage with Engle, a few days before the 2008 election, at the prey away the marriage equality rally, TheCall, held at Qualcomm Stadium where Engle, who was invited by Garlow to bring his anti-gay dog-and-pony to San Diego, called for, what Wilson describes as, “acts of Christian martyrdom to stop legal abortion and gay marriage.”
That bit of rhetorical menace is the kind of incitement one usually expects from religious extremists as they urge their fellow zealots to commit violent acts of terrorism, i.e. bomb clinics, shoot doctors, fly airplanes into skyscrapers.
In another piece on Engle last June, Bruce Wilson notes:
In the early 1980’s, KKK and Aryan Nations strategist Louis Beam helped popularize a tactic known as “leaderless resistance” in which high profile propagandists would incite terrorist acts carried out by autonomous individuals and cell groups. Lou Engle’s inflammatory TheCall antiabortion rhetoric conforms with Beam’s tactic; Engle merely incites.
On 17 December 2009, Wilson connected Lou Engle with Uganda’s pending legislation that, if passed, would criminalize homosexuality and impose the death penalty for repeat offenders and HIV-positive individuals:
Engle’s religious movement has also played a significant role in inspiring, and even organizing, legislators who pushed the pending, draconian anti-gay legislation in Uganda that some have described as a “kill the gays” bill.
The connections don’t stop there.
Jim Garlow at “Prayercast”: Health Care Reform Violates The Ten Commandments (video: Right WIng Watch at YouTube)
Jim Garlow is the senior pastor of one of the recipients of the 2009 James Hartline Report Award For Excellence, Skyline Church in La Mesa. In the video above, Garlow, alongside fellow homophobes Harry Jackson and the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and sounding every bit as nutty as his pal Lou Engle, claims healthcare reform violates the Ten Commandments.
There doesn’t seem to be a bit of anti-gay action going on that Pastor Jim Garlow doesn’t want a piece of. On 16 November 2009 in Washington DC, Garlow joined other anti-gays in a so-called Religious Free Speech Rally. The rally, staged to protest the passage of The Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act, was a wholly unnecessary photo-op allegedly having something to do with the participants’ right to bash the gays from their pulpits — a right already firmly ensconced in the US Constitution. Garlow was among the initial signatories of the Manhattan Declaration that called for nothing less than an American theocracy on 20 November 2009.
And Uganda?
Earlier this year, Americans affiliated with so-called ex-gay ministries, Exodus International and International Healing Foundation, and anti-gay hate-group leader and holocaust-revisionist Scott Lively traveled to the African nation to fan the flames of hatred and violence against Ugandan gays.
On 27 January 2010, Pastor Jim Garlow’s Skyline Wesleyan Church, will be hosting a training event (aka: Equipping Event) for Exodus International. Exodus board member Don Schmierer played a role in stirring up the anti-gay sentiment that resulted in Uganda’s proposed legislation that, if enacted, could result in the extermination of gay and lesbian Ugandans.
Former NOM spokesmodel Carrie Prejean weighs in (montage: mine)
A marriage equality bill has just been passed in Washington DC. Let me be the first to condole Maggie Srivastav (née Gallagher) andBrian Brown and the National Organization for Opposite Marriage (NOOM) on the occasion of their horrifying avalanche (11-2) of a defeat in Washington DC.
Brian Brown butches it up for NOM’s followers:
NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR MARRIAGE
VOWS TO DC COUNCIL: We Will Overturn Your Same-Sex Marriage Bill
“We have one message for David Catania and the rest of these politicians today: this fight is not over.
We will go to Congress, we will go to the courts, we will fight for the people’s right to vote and we will win!”
- Brian Brown, Executive Director, NOM -
(WASHINGTON) – The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) released the following statement today in response to the D.C. Council’s passage of a same-sex marriage bill:
“The people of D.C. have a right, guaranteed by the charter, which is D.C.’s constitution, to vote to protect marriage. Politicians on the city council are acting as if they have the right through legislation to deprive citizens of D.C. of their core civil right to vote, but we will not let them get away with it,” said Brian Brown, Executive Director of NOM. “We have one message for David Catania and the rest of these politicians today: this fight is not over. We will go to Congress, we will go to the courts, we will fight for the people’s right to vote and we will win!”
NOM has led successful campaigns to protect marriage in states across the country, including victories in California in 2008 and most recently in Maine in November, 2009, as well as legislative battles to block gay marriage in New York (where gay marriage failed in the Senate by a lopsided vote of 38 no to 24 yes).
To schedule an interview with Brian Brown, Executive Director for the National Organization for Marriage, please contact Elizabeth Ray, eray@crcpublicrelations.com, (x130) or Mary Beth Hutchins, mhutchins@crcpublicrelations.com, (x105) at 703-683-5004.
That elegantly thin plume of rising smoke on the distant horizon, was that Bigot Harry Jackson’s head?
Even before the vote, opponents of same-sex marriage were gearing up to try to fight the bill in Congress and the courts.
“The city council’s action today is not the final word. The issue is far from over,” Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, said in a statement Monday.
Jackson has aligned with Robert King, a longtime Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in Northeast, the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a former civil rights leader who was a longtime pastor at New Bethel Baptist Church, and several other religious leaders to try to force a referendum to outlaw same-sex marriage.
I expect Bigot Jackson and the rest of ilk will have much more unpleasantness to spew shortly. Stay tuned.
Back in May, Washington DC’s crack-smoking, prostitute-frequenting, tax-evading, pillar of morality and former-Mayor, now Councilman Marion Barry threatened civil war if the District of Columbia merely recognized same-gender marriages performed outside the nation’s capitol. The Washington Post reported:
“All hell is going to break lose,” Barry said while speaking to reporters. “We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this.”
Now DC’s other pillar of morality and associate of Maggie Gallagher’s National Organization for Marriage, Harry Jackson, according to Right Wing Watch, is threatening “bloodletting” if he doesn’t get his way:
We’re going to have to start earlier and take straw polls earlier. Our opposition had been working with these [council members] for five years. They’d invested time and money, and, to their credit, my opposition applied extreme political pressure on 30 or 40 people in the city, in the mayor’s office and the city council.
But they have not changed ordinary people’s opinions. It’s a faux change. For instance, they created a gay organization of clergy. Our side has done the opposite, mobilizing a grass-roots effort with 1,200 churches in D.C.
In future races, religious people are going to start going after people’s political careers. In D.C., some very vulnerable black councilmen went along with the city council, and some of these guys will not be sitting in those chairs in 2010 elections. Many in our coalition are wising up, looking for candidates. Political action committees are going to be formed. You’re going to see a bloodletting that is going to mark a new style of engagement for people who are against same-sex marriage.
(emphasis: mine)
The National Organization for Marriage might want to reel in this loose cannon. While Jackson might be speaking metaphorically, the District of Columbia in 2009, according to blogger Joe My. God., has seen an increase in violent, anti-gay hate-crimes. And, on 20 November 2009, the Los Angeles Times reported that, while hate crimes dropped by 4% in 2008 in LA County, hate crimes directed at LGBT people “increased, prompted in part by last November’s highly charged Proposition 8 initiative, the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage in California.”
There were 134 sexual-orientation hate crimes reported last year, up from 111 in 2007, and were more likely to be violent than hate crimes motivated by race or religion, according to the annual Hate Crime Report by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations.
