NOM’s Founding Chairman Princeton Prof. Robert George Receives Canterbury Medal for Defending Religious Liberty
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NOM’s founding Chairman of the Board, Robby George, is a renaissance man. Here’s a photo of Robby at the Becket Fund gala (which I attended) where he was honored with the Canterbury Medal for his contribution to the religious liberty of all faith communities.
We here at NOM certainly understand that SSM and related laws based on the assumption that Christian and other traditional faiths’ views of marriage and sex are somehow akin to racism are serious threats to religion in America and the world.

Sherman, set the WABAC machine to August 2009. Recall, s’il vous plait, the outrageously puffier than puffy puff piece the Washington Post did on the “pleasantly, ruthlessly sane” Brian Brown for an insight on how changing the language changes the playing field:

On NOM’s Web site, printable PDFs show visitors how to explain their position. “Why Marriage Matters” comes in versions for different religions: Protestant (Spanish and English), Catholic (Spanish and English) and Jewish.

Avoid the phrase “ban gay marriage,” the talking points suggest, adding that opponents “know it causes us to lose about ten percentage points in polls. Don’t use it. Say we’re against ‘redefining marriage’ or in favor of ‘marriage as the union of husband and wife’ NEVER ‘banning same-sex marriage.’ ” Bishop Harry Jackson, the Beltsville pastor who has been one of the most vocal gay marriage opponents in the area, sees a happy partnership between his followers and Brown’s group. Jackson says Brown and NOM “have a sense of dignity about human beings. They simply believe that marriage between a man and a woman is the best for society. But they’re not gay bashers.”

Monica Hesse, the Washington Post interviewer asks, “Does bashing require blows and slurs? Will those who oppose same-sex marriage eventually be put by their opponents into the same pile as people who think interracial marriage should be banned?”

“The racial bigot comparison is the most troubling part of the argument,” Brown says. It’s horrible, offensive, deliberately incendiary. He thinks it is “irrational,” a word he uses often.

Brown also thinks it’s “irrational” to point out that young people aren’t buying NOM’s line of bull. “‘People mature,’ he says. Their views change.” And, if not, just find yourselves a new and easier to manipulate crop of individuals possessed of what you perceive as an existing anti-gay bias.

The Obama White House invited reps from the Secular Student Alliance to attend a meeting of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and Bigot Harry Jackson abruptly wrenched into full metal freak-out mode:

“I think we’re being set up — for people of living faith who believe in a born-again experience who follow the Bible — to be seen as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who need to come into the 21st century,” Jackson said.

That’s seriously rich, considering it’s coming from the knuckle-dragging NOMiac who threatened “bloodletting” and tried to pit DC’s black population against DC’s gays over marriage equality in the District of Columbia.

Religious Right Paranoia Knows No Bounds
www.rightwingwatch.org
Earlier this month, representatives of the Secular Student Alliance were invited, for the first time, to attend a meeting hosted by the White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
According to SSA, the meeting focused on “connecting the higher education sector to broader national service priorities and creating spaces on campus to foster interfaith and community service” … and Bishop Harry Jackson is outraged that atheists were included, seeing it as proof that President Obama and his administration hate Christians:

Break out the opposable thumb and get a grip, Jackson. There’s a reason knuckle-draggers get tagged as knuckle-draggers.

(tip: Right Wing Watch)

Dan Barker on FOX News (video: Atheist Media Blog at YouTube)

Watch as former teenaged evangelist turned atheist Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation outfoxes a shifty Fox News entertainer who is more than miffed that, after 58 years of slouching toward theocracy, US District Judge Barbara Crabb has nixed the religious reich’s National Day of [Fundamentalist Christian] Prayer.

That the outrage about the demise of the National Day of Prayer is coming from the likes of theocrats like Rev Franklin Graham, Doctor James Dobson, Bigot Harry Jackson, and Tony Perkins says it all.

As for that whole it’s about mutually-respectful, volunteer spirituality for all and not at all about Christianity über alles, People for the American Way’s Right-Wing Watch has this about Franklin Graham:

In an interview Tuesday with USA TODAY, Graham reiterated his belief that “Muslims do not worship the same ‘God the Father’ I worship.” He laughed at Hinduism’s many manifestations of God: “No elephant with 100 arms can do anything for me. None of their 9,000 gods is going to lead me to salvation.

“We are fooling ourselves if we think we can have some big kumbaya service and all hold hands and it’s all going to get better in this world. It’s not going to get better,” Graham said.

Poor oppressed Brian Brown, of the National Orgasm for Opposite Marriage, and Bigot Harry There Will Be Bloodletting! Jackson have comedy -teamed up to proclaim BROWN IS THE NEW BLACK!

Outside the courtroom of the D.C. Court of Appeals, we pro-marriage forces rallied under the leadership of Bishop Harry Jackson. “THIS IS THE NEW CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT!” [Brian Brown] told a crowd of 250 enthusiastically cheering marriage champions!

Ummm. Urrr. Uhhh. The only thing is, NOM’s idea of a “civil rights movement” is a movement involves the systematic elimination of the civil rights of others – well that and propping up do-it-yourself porn princesses like Carrie Prejean and right-wing pin-up like the recently-elected Massachusetts Senator, Scott Cosmo Brown, as paragons of traditional Christian virtue.

NOM Marriage News: May 7, 2010 | NOM Blog
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We’ve been saying that for months, but the press finally had to notice–because the Chief Judge Eric Washington certainly did. When the lawyers for the D.C. City Council made their argument–a D.C. statute had been passed saying the city’s human right code could not be amended by a vote of the people, and that meant the rights laid down in the charter do not apply here–the Chief Judge pointedly asked: Isn’t that “a back door way of amending the Charter, putting a restriction on people’s rights?”

The anti-gays just love it when they get their homo-hating hooks into a like-minded activist judge of their own.

DC’s law, by the way, was enacted to prevent the presumably-bigoted white majority from voting to eliminate the civil rights of the minority black community in the District of Columbia. Historically, it’s served DC well. But, lookie fucking lookie! Who’s the bigoted majority now!

Jim Garlow at “Prayercast”: Health Care Reform Violates The Ten Commandments (video: Right Wing Watch at YouTube)

It’s a glorious Sunday morning and an absolutely perfect day for a stylish champagne brunch or perhaps a little Armageddon, if you’re so inclined. Because it’s the Sabbath, this is an excellent opportunity to make sure we all understand precisely why God himself has come out against ObamaCare. In the video above, San Diego pastor Jim Garlow deftly explains to the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and NOM-associate Bigot Harry Jackson why the Lord doesn’t want certain Americans to have access to healthcare and why this bit of godless, encroaching fascist socialism is entirely and utterly unbiblical.

— Mark Morford, San Francisco Gate columnist, reacting to the virulently bigoted response to the Washington Post’s publication of a photograph of two gay men kissing on the day marriage equality arrived in our nation’s capitol,
from Hey, sickos! Real men marry women!

Bigot Harry Jackson bleats (video: CBNonline at YouTube)

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 associating Jackson 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.

(tip: Jeremy Hooper, Good As You)

From the Washington Post:

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) and Brian 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?

From the Washington Post a few minutes ago:

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.