Mike Airhart and Timothy Kincaid hit the nail on the head in a discussion on Exgay Watch about the AFA's tactics. And I'd like to drive the nail home.
Mike points out how religious right anti-gay groups demonize gays and lesbians through abuse of language. We are repeatedly objectified as 'homosexuals' and 'sodomites' and not people (and certainly never 'Christians'). Our orientations, struggles, triumphs and deeply held desires are dismissed as 'choices', 'preferences' or 'lifestyles', as if they were something we could simply shrug off like yesterday's clothes if we really wanted to.
[T]he AFA dehumanizes same-sex-attracted persons and their families and supporters by repeatedly referring to them as "homosexuals." While an isolated reference to the noun might be sensible, AFA persistently uses the word alone, without modifiers. The objective of this tactic is to reduce people to nothing more than their sex drives -- and then to project that smear onto same-sex-attracted persons, falsely accusing them of defining themselves solely by their sexual attractions or conduct.
If the smear tactic stopped there, AFA could already be condemned for savaging human souls, reducing decent people (including Christians) to smut. This is what AFA -- and its allies, Exodus and Stephen Bennett -- consider Christian "ministry."
This is a very salient observation. The religious right's obsession with, objectification and hypersexualization of LGBT people is a potent form of religious smut, a kind of ecclesisatical pornography peddled on every street corner and trumpeted from a thousand websites. I would take the smut association further and suggest that, in a very real sense, these people (Wildmon, Dobson, et al) are porn kings/queens — who delight in and profit from the filth and muck they so eagerly spread around.
Which would be bad enough in itself. Except we have seen time and time again that this sort of desensitization and objectification has led to spiritual and physical abuse, violence and even murder. Who can forget the potent symbolism of Matthew Shephard, literally crucified by his attackers? So the smut inevitably and tragically leads to snuff.
And for what? Do these people really believe they are defending family values, protecting marriage, holding back the Apocalypse? Tim, in responding to Mike, highlights how the AFA further perverts the truth by propagating the lie that progressive, equal-opportunity employers (such as Ford) are actively promoting 'gay marriage':
The first line in the letter says "..a shareholder resolution forbidding Ford to promote homosexual marriage..". But the resolution isn't about homosexual marriage. It is to change Ford's workplace nondiscrimination policies.
The resolution is "that Ford Motor Company amend its written equal employment opportunity policy to exclude any reference to privacy issues related to sexual interest, activities, or orientation". Interstingly, this would NOT exclude Ford from fully funding the fight for marriage equality, it it so wanted. Yet Wildmon claims that it would "...force Ford to stop the promotion of homosexual marriage...".
As Mike says, Wildmon and the rest know that Ford is not promoting 'gay marriage' or even providing funding to groups that do. All Ford is trying to is uphold equality and non-discrimination in the workplace.
Donald Wildmon is deliberately using anti-gay-marriage sentiment to attact the employment of gay people. And he's willing to make claims that are false to try and come up with linkage that he know's does not exist.
Why? Because the real agenda of these people is to wind back every civil right fought for and won by LGBT folk over the years, including the rights (to the extent they exist) to employment, housing, contractual rights, privacy in consensual sexual matters, and ultimately the right to exist at all.
Fundamentalists and theocrats are waging a war against civil society itself. Forget about minor skirmishes over funding for stem cell research, creationism or 'intelligent design' supplanting the teaching of evolution in classrooms, or even overturning Roe v. Wade.
What would really make these folks happy is to wind the clock back forty years — to a time before the APA had destigmatized same-sex attraction and removed it from the catalog of psychiatric disorders, and when acting on such attraction was still a criminal offense across the nation — and then to keep winding it back further and further.
As many of the right's leaders have publicly stated, the time machine should keep moving backward until we all arrive happily in pre-Enlightenment Christendom, when kings and emperors ruled at the mercy of ecclesiastical potentates, and witches and faggots and anyone else who got in the way of the divine order were burned at the stake.
The anti-marriage agenda of the religious right, and all the deceitful bullying that accompanies it, is not about protecting 'traditional' families or defending Christian truth. That is a smokescreen designed to deceive the innocent, the ignorant and the lazy. The anti-gay/'pro-family' agenda, in many ways like the anti-abortion/'pro-life' agenda, is ultimately about who gets to define who is human and therefore has human rights, and who isn't and has none.
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