July 9, 2011
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Tags: The Week in Quotes

The Week in Quotes (July 3 – 9)

Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.

Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, a national organization that works to counter the effects of ex-gay counseling or reparative therapy promoted by many churches, on a Michigan bill that would allow counselors to refuse to help LGBT clients.

This would set a very dangerous precedent. If the Christian therapist can reject gay clients, why can’t a fundamentalist mail carrier elect not to deliver letters advertising concerts for the Gay Men’s Chorus?

Read the full article

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Dan Quinn, communications director for the Texas Freedom Network, on Gov. Rick Perry’s appointment of religious-right board member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, as chair of the State Board of Education.

Once again, he is putting politics ahead of the education of Texas students by installing an ideologue in the chairman’s seat. Just like the governor’s two previous appointees as chair, Ms. Cargill has worked since her election to the board to promote her own personal beliefs rather than facts and sound scholarship in our kids’ classrooms.

Read the full article

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Houston’s openly lesbian Mayor Annise Parker, using an anti-gay activist’s letter that attacks her sexual orientation to raise funds for her re-election campaign.

Your contribution will help me win re-election and show David Wilson and narrow-minded bigots everywhere that anti-gay attacks don’t work and have no place in a civilized society.

Read the full article

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Kansas Equality Coalition Chairman Thomas Witt, criticizing Kansas Republican Gov. Sam Brownback for accepting an invitation to attend next month’s prayer and fasting event hosted by Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the hate group the American Family Association.

There are a lot of people in this state that are outraged that our governor would attend an event hosted by a group that blames gays and lesbians for the Holocaust and for Hurricane Katrina.The AFA’s mission is to smear and vilify the LGBT community, we do not think it’s appropriate for our governor to go to something like this.

Read the full article

7 thoughts on “The Week in Quotes (July 3 – 9)”

  1. Calling the AFA a “hate group” is both hateful and as bigoted as anything they might say of folks who stray from their narrow point of view. The we hate bigots pitch is bigotry par excellence,

    AFA’s stated Christian views are narrow from a broader and no less Christian including those parts of Christianity that do not accept the Trinity such as the Nestorians whose history exceeds that of Protestantism, albeit reduced substantially or the last thousand years.

    Neither did the Cathars agree with their view, and were often burned at the stake for that. Christians nevertheless.

    1. AFA is a hate group because of its outrageous, untruthful and destructive rhetoric, not its founders’ religious beliefs. That rhetoric is designed to foment fear and hatred of a minority, much as the the rhetoric we hear from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups is designed to foment fear and hatred of racial and religious minorities. From the Southern Poverty Law Center’s description of anti-gay hate groups:

      For Christian Right leaders, the gay rights movement and its so-called “homosexual agenda” are the prime culprits in the destruction of American society and culture. In the words of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, the battle against gay rights is essentially a “second civil war” to put control of the U.S. government in the right hands, meaning those who reject gay rights.

      The religious right in America has employed a variety of strategies in its efforts to beat back the increasingly confident gay rights movement. One of those has been defamation. Many of its leaders have engaged in the crudest type of name-calling, describing LGBT people as “perverts” with “filthy habits” who seek to snatch the children of straight parents and “convert” them to gay sex. They have disseminated disparaging “facts” about gays that are simply untrue — assertions that are remarkably reminiscent of the way white intellectuals and scientists once wrote about the “bestial” black man and his supposedly threatening sexuality.

  2. If you send a letter of criticism to the AFA, as I once did, and click the box that says that you do not wish to receive e-mails or other written materials from them, they will sign you up without your permission ANYWAY as an act of spite, as they did me, and make it very hard to get them out of your life. In my case, I viewed it as overt harassment and still do. To the best of my recollection, I received a flood of unsolicited messages by e-mail and U.S. mail. I tried unsubscribing several times. No dice.

    Finally, I wrote them a message to tell them that my attorney was going to be in contact with them soon if they did not cease immediately. I haven’t heard a peep out of them since that time. It was then that I concluded that the AFA’s understanding of just about anything is…well…watch the movie trailer closely and listen to what W. Averell Harriman has to say about what the “Soviet Understands.” I think it is also the only thing the AFA understands:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSA7Evcy7iE

  3. It is hard to have a religion worth getting aroused over that doesn’t outrageous, untruthful and destructive rhetoric. Same applies to emotional political rhetoric regardless of right or left. Non destructive rhetoric usually doesn’t have the mojo, verve, jive, hype, cant or twiet worth listening to.

    Dull isn’t dangerous,

  4. “Many of its leaders have engaged in the crudest type of name-calling, describing LGBT people as “perverts” with “filthy habits” who seek to snatch the children of straight parents and “convert” them to gay sex.”

    Well, you know, the 9th commandment was only a suggestion, of course.