AFA’s Fischer Tells ‘Values’ Crowd: Islam and Gays Threatening U.S. Security
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.”