Family Guys: Gay-Bashing Tops Agenda At Religious Right Rally In Florida
The nation’s Religious Right leaders may still be hunting for an appropriately far-right candidate to get behind in the 2008 presidential election, but until that special someone is found they’ll continue to rely on bashing gays to motivate their supporters to the polls.
In what may be a prelude to other attempts nationwide, a campaign is under way for a 2008 ballot initiative that would amend the Florida constitution to outlaw gay marriage. That drive is being fueled by the Florida Family Policy Council – which is affiliated with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family — and a local outfit called the Community Issues Council.
High-profile Religious Right leaders helped draw attention to the Florida anti-gay marriage drive by co-sponsoring a so-called “Family Impact Summit” at Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon, Fla., over the weekend.
Family Research Council head Tony Perkins and FRC senior fellow Kenneth Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State who unsuccessfully sought the governorship, were keynote speakers on the gathering’s final day. Don Wildmon of the American Family Association and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land also contributed to the conference.
The three-day event was replete with speakers who bemoaned gays as societal threats and pleaded for evangelical Christians to not become complacent in the public policy arena. The underlining message of the conference was not subtle – the outcome of the 2006 elections was disappointing, but don’t give up. So conference speakers urged the gathering of around 300, many of them local pastors, to become informed on the issues, get fired up and vote for God-fearing candidates in 2008.
During a luncheon address on the conference’s second day, Sept. 21, Wildmon declared America a “society that is crumbling before us, like ancient Rome did.” The Tupelo, Miss.-based preacher added that if evangelical Christians didn’t stay committed to cleaning up American society that someday they would be powerless and open to punishment by secular society for “being Christian.”
Other speakers also railed against the First Amendment principle of church-state separation, an allegedly corrupt American society and public schools that fail to teach students that America is a Christian nation. (Land, for example, claimed Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union essentially invented the principle of church-state separation.)
But the conference speakers were more likely to hit upon the dangers of the so-called homosexual agenda and the prospect of legally recognized gay marriage. Several panel discussions focused on the impact of gays in general, how to minister to gays and the need for Florida to adopt a constitutional amendment making sure the state could not recognize gay marriages.
John Stemberger, of the Florida Family Policy Council, conducted workshops on the drive to place the constitutional amendment on Florida’s 2008 ballot. The proposed amendment reads: “Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.”
Stemberger repeatedly said that “no society needs gay marriage, but all societies need natural marriage” and urged pastors to circulate the petition for the proposed amendment.
During another session dubbed “Defending Marriage: What’s at Stake,” panelist Dale O’Leary, who writes for a Catholic-based Web site, www.thefactis.org, spent the majority of her allotted time spewing invective at gay men.
The majority of gay men, according to O’Leary’s purported research, is prone to psychological problems, drug abuse and sex with numerous partners, and is really intent on destroying marriage as we know it. But a primary reason to oppose gay relationships, she said, is because of her take on God’s will.
“If God says something is wrong,” she said, “I can go to the research and prove He is right.”
The Family Impact Summit’s three-day event hit upon other topics, strategies for prodding evangelical Christians to be politically active and included a host of other speakers with intriguing takes on American society, politics, education and public policy. A more detailed account of the gathering will be presented in a forthcoming Church & State issue.