Lorie Zapf wants to replace City Councilmember Donna Frye, but she might not be all that comfy hanging with some of San Diego’s other elected officials, according to CityBeat’s Justin McLachlan:
“I absolutely want to keep homosexuals out of public office and not be allowed to influence our schools, textbooks, altering marriage, children, and on and on,’ [San Diego City Council wannabe Lorie] Zapf wrote in a 2006 e-mail exchange obtained by CityBeat between her and James Hartline, an anti-gay activist.
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She also made it a point to tell him she supported his cause: “I like that you are trying to keep homosexuals and homosexual activists out of public office because we both know what the long term agenda is.” And later: “I do believe homosexuality is a sin. I have three homosexual first cousins. I love them all and would ‘be seen’ in a photo with them. I believe they all live in sin and frankly all are very unhappy people and had horrible childhoods as well.”
Has Zapf progressed from those statements?
When presented with copies of the e-mail, Zapf said her comments to Hartline “do not accurately reflect my views or actions then or now. For many years prior and after this e-mail, I’ve hired gays in my business and have endorsed gays for elected office. But, I recognize my words may still be hurtful, and I apologize for them sincerely.”
And … puft! … as if by magic, her comments vanished in a puff of rainbow-colored patchouli smoke and we all lived happily ever after and got along famously.
Not.
One thing to remember: Closeted homophobia festers in the dark looking for a release.
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.
Halloween’s here … time to cast out those crazy demons! (video: Metro Weekly at YouTube)
Yesterday in Washington DC, Ernestine Copeland testified against a bill that would recognize marriage equality in the nation’s capitol. Despite her James-Hartlinesque meltdown, Metro Weekly reports:
A majority of the testimonies were touching, pro-marriage equality stories from citizens, activists, and other local religious and political figures — both gay and straight. However, some of the testimony came with arguments from the Catholic Archdiocese and other socially conservative religious perspectives. Others used the argument that the citizens deserve the right to vote on whether gays deserve equal civil marriage rights.
The issue of same-sex marriage in Washington DC really seems to bring out the christianist crazies. Anyone remember the completely deranged Pastor Leroy Swailes and his insane rambling rant, in which Swailes claimed homosexuality is anti-human and a form of both pedophilia and bestiality?
Stephen Colbert: “Don’t think of it as the cross that Jesus died on – think of it as a giant ‘T’ for ‘Thanks Jews!’” (video: Colbert Nation)
Christianist martyr and self-annointed saviour and preserver (at tax-payers’ expense) of crosses on public property, Saint James Hartline, no doubt, has a new hero in news anchor Stephen Colbert. Hartline is, as most of us are aware, the embodiment of symbol-mindedness.
Yes, I’m quite happy with my smug look. Thank you for asking.
“Ever notice how so many of these “ex-gays” are stunningly, unfuckably ugly? Hartline says he stopped taking it up the ass after becoming a homeless, meth-addicted, ex-con with multiple stretches in prison. Happy and successful people don’t become “ex-gay”, only losers trying shift the blame do.”
— Joe Jervis, who blogs at the popular Joe. My. God., on professional prevaricator and perennial waste of oxygen James Hartline
