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06/06/2012
The ever-thinning line between 'fringe' voices and 'official' rhetoric
In a new article on One News Now (the American Family Association's new site), decidedly non-strategic anti-LGBT voice Peter LaBarbera goes full-on nasty against gay people, our supposed ability to "change," and President Obama's recognition of equal rights:
"… He acts as if rights based on perverse and immoral behavior are basic rights," LaBarbera laments, "and, of course, those aren't basic rights. Basic rights are what we all share as Americans. Rights based on perversion, on changeable homosexual sin are not basic rights."
The AFTAH president contends that when President Obama uses his anti-bullying platform to promote sin, Christians cannot be silent.
"For a man like Obama, who professes to be a faithful Christian, to be celebrating an agenda based on using the government to create rights based on changeable homosexual behavior, that's a travesty," the activist decides.
So yes, that's ridiculous and offensive. And yes, it's easy to write it off as fringe and unworthy of address. Understandable reactions.
But here's the more major point of why this matters. In this same article, four paragraphs down from Peter, another man uses this very same One News Now piece to engage the audience. To rally the troops. To win some votes. That man? Derek McCoy, head of the official campaign trying to repeal marriage equality in Maryland, who weighs in with this:
"We turned in over 100,000 in excess of what we needed for our first turn-in," he reports. "So we've turned in over 122,000 to date. Our full turn-in of what we needed to have to validate the entire thing was only 55,736."
The signatures will have to be validated by the Board of Elections, but McCoy's group is excited about the results.
"That just shows you that we've had incredible engagement of people all across the state," he says. "People from every walk of life have been working this thing, and we're just really enthusiastic because in the lines of all the public polling that's been out there, and all of this recent activity with the president making his statement and the NAACP making theirs, we're finding that the opposite is actually taking place on the streets."
It's the same article. Same purpose. Same "pro-family" mission. Same news outlet—one that feels that these are the kinds of voices its religious audience needs to hear.
My point: You can't separate this stuff. Derek McCoy might never say the kinds of things that Peter LaBarbera says in public, but they are both working for the same cause. Both men are faulting President Obama for his principled stand, and both men hope to ultimately take civil rights away from loving couples. When the American Family Association's staff writer went to the digital Rolodex to fill in the gaps of this piece, he had both access and cooperation from allies McCoy and LaBarbera. He wanted the reader to first see us as perverse and broken, before then snatching our fairly-passed and signed marriage rights.
On the other side of this "culture war," the dots are always connected and the purpose always shared. Why should we isolate the "fringe" from the "official" when the opposition groups see no need to do so?
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