AFA’s Fischer Tells ‘Values’ Crowd: Islam, Gays Threaten U.S.

When your claim to fame is that you make a string of outrageous comments demonizing anybody who’s not white, Christian, straight and conservative, it’s probably hard to come up with new smears for your enemies. So for Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, perhaps the Values Voter Summit over the weekend was more of a chance to sum up his worst fears. So he did, declaring that the two most serious threats to the U.S. are – surprise – Islam and “the homosexual agenda.”

Appearing at the conference of social conservatives in Washington, Fischer told a cheering audience that “every single mosque in America is a potential recruiting [place] or training cell for Islamic terror.” He said “the greatest long-term threat to our security is not radical Islam but Islam itself. This is not Islamophobia – this is Islamo-realism.”

The problem with Muslims, it seems, is that they worship the wrong deity. According to Fischer, “our Muslim friends also believe in a creator God, but it is important that our next president understands that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God.” Fischer warned that it’s imperative to “resist, reject, and prevent the implementation of Shariah law anywhere, in any place, in any circumstances, in the United States.” The idea that Shariah law can be implemented within the legal system of the United States is ludicrous, of course, and has been dismissed by legal scholars.

Having warned about Muslims, Fischer switched gears and argued that “just as Islam represents the greatest long-range threat to our liberties, so the homosexual agenda represents the greatest immediate threat to every freedom and right that is enshrined in the First Amendment.”

Stopping same-sex marriage “is not just about morality, is not just about children – it is about the strength, stability, prosperity and survival of the United States,” exclaimed Fischer. “Homosexual behavior” should not be a political cause, he said. Rather, it should be treated as a “threat to public health.” He misrepresented the research of the Centers for Disease Control by implying it had found that “homosexual behavior represents the same threat to public health that injection drug use does.”

Fischer also lumped together LGBT rights and illicit drug use when he claimed that “neither homosexual behavior nor injection drug use represent lifestyles that any responsible government ought to normalize, legitimize, legalize, protect, sanction, or subsidize.”

Fischer called for passage of a federal marriage amendment, which he said was not inconsistent with “states’ rights.” He called for the government to vigorously support the “Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA] in court” and to revoke  the “permission to military chaplains to perform same sex marriages.” Fischer also urged the re-instatement of the “ban on open homosexual behavior in the United States military,” not just for reasons of morality but because “our national security depends on it.” Fischer has previously said the gay soldiers in Nazi Germany were responsible for orchestrating the Holocaust and that Hitler couldn’t find straight soldiers who were savage enough to carry out his orders.

Not satisfied with his attacks on Muslims and LGBT people, Fischer took aim at the theory of evolution, finding a political hook for his disdain. He called for political leadership that “flatly [and] unambiguously rejects the morally and scientifically bankrupt theory of evolution. Not a single one of our unalienable rights will be safe in the hands of a president who believes that we evolved from slime and we are the descendants of apes and baboons.”

Fischer also challenged the common understanding of the U.S. Constitution by claiming, “No matter what you think of the mythical separation between the church and state, it is not possible for there ever, in the United States of America, to be a separation between God and government.” Fischer claimed that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which recognized a woman’s reproductive rights, was “not only unconstitutional but profoundly immoral,” and therefore should be overturned.