American Family Association Anything But Pro-Family (w'Poll)

Wayne Besen, in an entertaining and provacative editorial in the Falls Church News, points out what is obvious to most of us -- the "pro-family" American Family Association is anything but.

In the editorial, Besen points out that in their single-minded, anti-family quest to deny GLBT families marriage equality, they are ignoring many real, relevant issues that are having a far more pressing impact on the same "traditional American families" they are purporting to defend.

I don't agree with everything that Besen says or implies in his article. For example, he sites out-of-wedlock childbirth as a threat to families, and as one of five siblings raised by a single (widowed, not that it matters) mom, I don't see how we were any less "family" than a mom, dad, 2.5 kids and Rover in the suburbs set-up. Personally, I put my chips with the lefty/hippy adage, "Love makes a family."

But the point of Besen's article is not to trash-talk single moms, it is to point out the inherent hypocrisy of the AFA, and to that end, it is effective. Here are some morsels, with my side comments in italics:

With real families suffering from economic hardship in America, a declining birthrate in Europe and Google doubling the price of daycare for employees, the only thing right wing family groups want to discuss is their bizarre and all-encompassing fagela fetish.

I've always wondered what the fixation was. It always seemed a little "they doth protest too much" to me, or in the very least, a red herring ("Look over there! It's the Sam Francisco gay pride parade! Look away from where we are marrying our 16-year old first cousins!").

A new study by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University showed that in 2006, for the first time in U.S. history, a majority of births to women under 30 - 50.4 percent - were out of wedlock. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert points out that, "By comparison, when John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, just 6 percent of all births were to unmarried women under 30.

One imagines that this report might have startled "pro-family" organizations and they would have put their millions of dollars towards stopping this trend. No such luck. Instead, they are investing huge piles of money and manpower to pass anti-gay marriage amendments in Florida, Arizona and California. The upshot for "pro-family" groups is that if heterosexuals keep screwing up marriage, by the time gay people finally win the right nationally, we won't want to use it.

Two things irritate me about this passage. One is what I mentioned earlier, the implication that single parent households are less of a family. In this case, I'll let it rest because I see the point that he is trying to make, and for the AFA, childbirth outside of marriage does seem like something they would be against.
The other thing that annoys me is the dead sardine I often see bitter straight people throw out about gay marriage, like, "Marriage is a crappy institution, but if you really want it, whatever. I aint gonna stand in your way. I just hope you embrace gay divorce and alimony as well."
Of course, these folks always come off as those who are chewing sour grapes about marriage in general, I'd guess because of their own crappy divorces. How I always respond to these bitter-Bettys is by pointing out that GLBT couples in long-term relationships often do encounter those issues already when they separate. I mean, we do buy property together, start businesses together, raise families together, and when we split up, those things have to be divvied up. . The only difference is that there are fewer (virtually no) legal rights and precedents to protect us under those circumstances. And we have just as much right to split up as our straight counterparts. So, I guess what bothers me here is the implication that gays are somehow going into this naively, as though we think marriage guarantees bliss, as if we hadn't already been forging our own longterm relationships with all subsequent bonds, both emotional and financial, for eons.

"Evangelicals of the older generation have become obsessed in almost a technical psychological sense in opposing gay rights," David Weddle, a professor of religion at Colorado College told the Colorado Springs Gazette. "The irony is that homosexuality is not a biblical theme."

This, to me, is the crux of the editorial. I love it when folks make the accurate point that homosexuality is not a dominant issue in the bible, and, in fact, only a few verses relate to it directly, and even then, one had to take those quotes in the historical context that they were set. Furthermore, in the same bible that badmouths sodomy, there exists the very positive homo-affectional relationships of David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi.

He ends the piece thusly:

Finally, the Wall Street Wonder, Google, plans to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent. Under the revised plan, parents with two children in Google day care could see their yearly bill increase to more than $57,000 from around $33,000. This crushing blow to the family drove a few employees to tears.

Was the American Family Association in Silicon Valley raising hell and standing up for families? No, they ignored grimacing parents, so they could punish Ronald and Grimace by launching a boycott against McDonalds for supposedly having a gay agenda. Maybe the delusional scolds at the AFA thought they saw rainbow color fries, in much the same way they once accused the cartoon character Mighty Mouse of snorting cocaine.

Right wing organizations can be considered many things - but certainly not advocates for the family. They inhale money, exhale anti-gay pollution and have done absolutely nothing for the traditional families they claim to represent. It seems the more such groups proliferate, the more the family deteriorates.

And on this count, I couldn't agree more.