Tony Perkins joins the chorus of xenophobic stupidity that is spewing out of the “Christian” right like a geyser after the Paris attacks. He cheers on those governors pandering to bigoted know-nothings by trying to block any Syrian refugees from moving to their states and says that the fact that Obama wants to take in a very small number of them is proof that he hates America.
It’s always amusing to me when anti-gay bigots use homoerotic imagery to criticize the fight for gay rights. The Gay is always being “shoved down their throats.” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has a new lurid metaphor based on the Titanic. America, he says, is heading directly for a big gay iceberg and we’ve only seen just the tip so far.
California recently passed a new rule allowing transgender prison inmates to attain sex reassignment surgery while serving their sentence. Predictably, the Christian right has flipped out over it. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council says that transgender will now start committing crimes intentionally just so they can get the surgery done.
Wow. The wingnuts have spewed a lot of incredibly stupid things about Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year old who built a clock and took it to school to show his engineering teacher and ended up being arrested on absolutely ridiculous charges, but this one has to take the cake. Tony Perkins took a call on his radio show from a guy who said that Obama was wrong to invite him to the White House because he might bring a bomb and blow it up, with which Perkins said he “agree[d] 100%.”
Liberty Counsel is not the only Christian right organization using Kim Davis as a fundraising tool. The Family Research Council, which actually has nothing to do with the situation other than agreeing with Davis, is furiously demagoguing the issue, telling their followers that if they don’t send money now, the “politically correct” judges will soon be throwing Christians in jail left and right — and they’re coming for you next!
Family Research Council leader Tony Perkins is leaping to the defense of Ben Carson after the Republican presidential candidate sparked a huge controversy by saying that we should never elect a Muslim as president because Islam is not consistent with the Constitution. Perkins says he was absolutely right because Islam is “not just a religion” but is a political, economic and judicial system as well.
One thing that has become quite obvious after so many years of covering the Christian right is that they have no understanding whatsoever of cause and effect. They just automatically blame everything bad that happens on whatever they oppose at any given moment. Tony Perkins shows how it’s done on his radio show when he says that the economic “roller coaster” we’ve been on — actually it’s just the stock markets — is the fault of Planned Parenthood and immorality.
I’ve written before about the difficult time Kim Davis’ apologists inevitably have answering the question of how they would limit the religious exemptions they’re demanding for her. They can either argue that her demand for an exemption is not like all those other hypothetical demands, or they can argue that they would limit it only to hers because she’s right about the religious questions. Tony Perkins lamely attempts the second argument:
The Pentagon is lifting its ban on transgender people in the military and, of course, the Christian right is flipping out over it. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council is very concerned that it will undermine our national security for some bizarre reason.
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council always seems to have a difficult time with the whole cause/effect thing. He seems to just decide on what horrible thing he wants to pretend will happen as a result of whatever he’s railing against at any given time and just declare that it will happen. To wit:
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has his typically hypocritical stance on an issue. This time it’s President Obama standing up for the human rights of gay people on a visit to Kenya, addressing the fact that his ancestral country imprisons people merely for being gay.
Tony Perkins is still bleating out this ridiculous claim that if Christians aren’t allowed to do anything they want to the people they dislike in America, this somehow emboldens Muslim terrorists to attack Christians in the Middle East. Because there’s obviously a direct cause and effect connection.
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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