A terrific diary yesterday drew our attention to Jane Mayer's eye-opening article in The New Yorker on the evangelical "Christian" radio broadcaster Bryan Fischer and his pernicious influence on Mitt Romney. As Mayer points out in her piece, Fischer's mission goes far beyond defeating Barack Obama; the goal of the AFA and its allies is to eliminate the separation of church and state, making the US a "Christian Nation", dedicated to military adventurism, torture of "non-Christian terrorists", abolition of Medicare, Social Security, and public education. And a key component of Fischer's mission is to lead a crusade against gays and lesbians. His tactics involve making use of junk science, phony sociology and historical revisionism.
Fischer and his allies have rewritten history in order to portray the efforts to establish equality for gay and lesbian Americans as a continuation of Nazi Germany.
This passage stood out in the New Yorker Article:
In Idaho, Fischer attacked homosexuality with growing fervor. In 2007, he sponsored a summit where he hosted Scott Lively, the co-author of a widely criticized book, “The Pink Swastika,” which argues that homosexuality was at the heart of Nazism. (In fact, the Nazi regime persecuted gays.) More recently, Lively has expressed support for anti-gay initiatives in Uganda. He has been a guest on Fischer’s radio show, and Fischer often promotes Lively’s theories. “Hitler himself was an active homosexual,” Fischer has said. “Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Storm Troopers. . . . Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough.” On another occasion, Fischer declared that “homosexuality gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine, and six million dead Jews.”
Given that thousands of gay German men were detained and later perished in Nazi concentration camps, Fischer holding gays responsible for the Holocaust turns logic upside down.
Fischer's source for Nazi=Gay doctrine, The Pink Swastika, has been floating around right-wing evangelical circles since 1995. Some chapters are now available online, for fans of absurd revisionism.
The authors of The Pink Swastika, Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, make their objective clear in the preface:
The Pink Swastika documents how,
from its beginning, the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi Party were
animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornogra-
phers and sado-masochists.
But the authors' true objective is not to examine the Third Reich, but to falsify history to spread hatred against American gays and lesbians:
The Pink Swastika documents how the Society for Human Rights, founded by members of the Nazi Party, became the largest homosexual rights organization in Germany and further, how this movement gave birth to the Ameri-
can homosexual rights movement. Its influence has grown. The President
of the United States now receives official homosexual delegations at the White
House who expect the President to repay them for helping him into office.
They expected him to "normalize" homosexuality in the American military.
It is, of course, easy to refute and debunk the many lies and distortions in
The Pink Swastika, but it doesn't matter. Brian Fischer will cite the book as the gospel truth to his one million daily listeners and they will believe it. And they will act on it - in the voting booth and elsewhere. As Jane Mayer points out in her article, Mitt Romney sorely needs these extremist evangelical voters behind him to win:
The electoral math helps explain this calculation. More than a quarter of American voters identify themselves as evangelicals, and, according to the National Religious Broadcasters association, ninety-six per cent of them tune in to some form of Christian media each month. This constituency has, arguably, become the most reliable bloc in the Republican Party. Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, who now heads the Faith and Freedom Coalition, reports that more than half of the voters in the current Republican primaries have identified themselves as evangelicals. Michael Lindsay, an expert on evangelical politics and the president of Gordon College, outside Boston, says, “No Republican has captured the White House without evangelical votes since Watergate. They’re the most organized constituency in the Republican Party.”