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10/02/2007
Your actions are what are 'In-Defensible', Tony
From a short piece he's entitled "In-Defensible," Here is Tony Perkins speaking about the LGBT-centric hate crimes legislation that was recently passed by the Senate as an amendment to the Department of Defense authorization bill:
"By hijacking the bill and adding "hate crimes" they have severely crippled the bill's chances of passage. This puts our brave men and women at risk just so that they can curry favor with homosexuals. This is about as un-American as it gets. Essentially, the move is a slap in the face to our troops who are putting their lives on the line to preserve the very democratic process that liberals are manipulating to appease these wealthy special interest groups. Yet their political hijinks comes at every citizen's expense. As Kennedy and company waste valuable time on an amendment that is not germane, the Defense Department is left without the resources it needs to protect all Americans, not just a handful of homosexuals that liberals believe deserve special protection under the law."
And here we go again -- more divisive politicking in which a conservative tries to make it look like liberals are shunning and harming the armed forces by passing the bill in the manner that they did. That's because just like they know that their anti-marriage campaigns will be more successful if they frame it in terms of the children and heterosexual unions that will be "threatened" by same-sex nuptials; their anti-abortion campaigns will be more successful if they paint choice advocates as anti-life; and anti-ENDA campaigns will be more successful if such is presented as a threat to Christian-owned businesses, they also know that they will have more success in thwarting gay-centric hate crimes legislation if they act like the bill would come at a cost to the American military. That's their bag, baby. They take something that is widely considered to be precious, infallible, or beyond reproach, and then exploit it in a way that makes it seem like they are the only ones who care about the concept (with gays and liberals painted as militants hellbent on hijacking the same).
It's soooooo disgusting!
Tony asserts that liberals have "hijacked the bill" and "crippled [its] changes of passage." In truth, however, their campaigns of misrepresentation in regards to hate crimes are what have made the issue even the least bit controversial in the first place. They have used words like "special protection under the law" to describe what such legislation would do for the LGBT community, conveniently overlooking that things like race, color, national origin, and yes, religion, are ALREADY protected under the law. Yes, that's right -- Tony's Bible-believing self is already covered, yet we who are targeted so frequently and fervently by his Biblical persecutory ways remain vulnerable. Is his protection against anti-Christian violence a "special protection"? No, of course it is not. And neither he nor we would never claim it to be, as he has nothing to gain by stripping himself of these protections, and we refuse to stoop to the level in which we use intellectually dishonest code words in order to gain political ground.
Look, the bottom line is this: There is a worthwhile conversation to be had about what hate crimes legislation does and does not do. There is also reasoned discussion to be had regarding the appropriateness of attaching the measure to the Department of Defense authorization bill. Even within the gay and progressive communities, there has been debate about both matters. But the childish ways in which "pro-family" folks like Tony have framed the debate is harmful to everyone. They have used duplicity time and time again to flat out lie about what the measure does and does not do. Or they have stopped short of full disclosure into confuse people about current hate crimes laws and what this new addition would do for society. And they have launched baseless, fear-mongery, unfair attacks like the ones suggesting gays and Dems hate the armed forces. They have taken advantage of the fact that this situation, like most socio-political matters, is complex. They rely on the tendency of human beings to want to boil everything down to black and white, ignoring that there is lots of grey that needs to be rationally discussed. Such tactics may not be surprising, as we are at this point desensitized in regards to the levels to which these kids will stoop. However, such will never stop striking us as soul-numbingly disturbing, as we are no point going to become willing to trade our principles and morals for indecent, opportunistic deception.
In-Defensible [FRC -- Washington Update]
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