As Right Wing Watch reports, Brian Brown was a guest on a February conference call hosted by a group called Staying True to America’s National Destiny (STAND), where he advised those on the call to “turn accusations of anti-gay discrimination around and accuse gay rights activists of ‘anti-religious’ and ‘anti-Christian bigotry.'” Facts are not valuable in Brian Brown’s world, so the fact that anti-gay discrimination persists in the United States, whereas discrimination against fundamentalist and conservative Christians is limited to being forced to play by the same rules as everyone else, is irrelevant. They simply hate LGBT people and they’re willing to lie to achieve that goal. Here’s the text of what he said:
Whether it’s being forced to photograph a ceremony that you don’t agree with, forced to create a same-sex marriage wedding cake that you don’t agree with, whatever it is, that’s a very different thing than saying this is somehow Jim Crow all over again. In fact, it’s the reverse. What proponents of same-sex marriage are attempting to do is to coerce Americans to leave their faith at the door when they enter the public square, leave their faith at the door if they own a business.
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So, when they bring up discrimination, we need to turn it on its head and say, this is about anti-religious, specifically in some cases, anti-Christian religious bigotry, and there’s no place for this in this country. The discrimination is there, but right now what’s happening is the discrimination is coming from those that want to punish, repress and marginalize individuals and organizations that stand up for their religious beliefs.
And what they’re trying to do is to constrain religious liberty to a new term: freedom of worship. Well, our founders didn’t die and come here for freedom of worship, they came here for religious liberty, to practice in the public square, not only within their houses of worship what they believed, but to go out into the community and act on it. And this is one of the important points when we debate this, is to not accept this new language of quote-unquote ‘freedom of worship.’ We believe in religious liberty, we believe in freedom of conscience. We don’t accept the idea that people should be punished in the public square for trying to live out the Gospel call.
For what certainly won’t be the last time, we must remind Brian Brown that the “sincerely held religious beliefs” that lead people to be anti-gay bigots don’t in any way make them Special Americans, or any more “American” than anyone else. In fact, the theocratic laws they support are some of the most un-American things in the history of this country.
It is valuable, though, to hear how cynical Brown is as he lays out plans to manipulate Americans into accepting special “religious freedom” laws that allow anti-gay bigots to discriminate.
Listen:
