You May Be A Far Right Fanatic If... Your Personal Life Is A Hopeless Hot Mess

Just a little alert here: we're very supportive and very proud of the elected officials from the LGBT community who come out publicly. Earlier today we lionized the work of Riverside, CA freshman Mark Takano, an openly gay man and we're extremely excited about helping Massachusetts progressive Carl Sciortino, also openly gay, in his run for the House seat opening up when Ed Markey moves on to the U.S. Senate. But that isn't what this post is about. This one is about the people who, for one reason or another, find their personal lives a disaster and wind up in the arms of the religious charlatans who are sent among us by Satan to pervert Jesus' message of live and salvation. I'm talking about the greed-obsessed false prophets of the right-- from James Dobson, Tony Perkins, James Robison, Franklin Graham, and Pat Robertson, to sticky-palmed crackpots like Jerry Boykin, Mike Huckabee, Don Wildmon, and Ralph Reed.

These people have built communities based on collapsing, tragic lives of emotionally strapped individuals being led down depraved paths, communities where the fear of pornography is real because the addiction to pornography is overwhelming, communities where all the preaching about mortal turpitude makes sense since they are the very people whose lives are centered around the moral turpitude they chastise the normal world for. Let me share a little with you from Max Blumenthal's book on the subject, Republican Gomorrah. We'll begin with a look at the Christian Right's obsession with "Purity Balls."

[More] often than not, girls who drop flowers at purity balls are deflowered soon after. Over half of them wind up having sex before marriage, and with a man other than their future husband, according to sociologists Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner. Bearman and Bruckner also note that communities with the highest populations of purity ball attendees also have some of the country's highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). In Lubbock, Texas where abstinence-only education has been mandated since 1995, the rate of gonorrhea has risen to double the national rate, while teen pregnancy has spiked to the highest level in the state. A congressionally funded study of adolescent behavior, Add Health-- the most comprehensive of its kind in history-- revealed another dirty secret of the Christian right: White evangelical women lose their virginity on average at age sixteen, younger than any group besides black Protestants.

We'll come right back to Blumenthal but I want to take a moment out to point out a report from the CDC this week. For the first time, researchers have been "able to map the incidence of HIV around the country, and have discovered a disturbing trend. Among the states with the highest rates of new HIV diagnoses were nearly all of the states in the deep south, many of which don’t require school districts to teach 'medically accurate' sex education, and some of which don’t require any sex education at all." Last week, the NY Times was going down a similar reporting path in regard to a big self-inflicted wound in Texas.

Right-wing Republican state legislators gutted women's health services in Texas and now it's coming back to cost the state's taxpayers a fortune. They're scrambling to undo their ideologically-driven war against women insanity.

Using taxpayer dollars to finance family-planning services has become politically thorny in Texas, largely because of Republican lawmakers’ assertions that the women’s health clinics providing that care are affiliated with abortion providers. In the fiscal crunch of 2011, the Legislature cut the state’s family-planning budget by two-thirds, with some lawmakers claiming that they were defunding the “abortion industry.” Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, found that more than 50 family-planning clinics had closed statewide as a result.

Now, amid estimates that the cuts could lead to 24,000 additional 2014-15 births at a cost to taxpayers of $273 million,  lawmakers are seeking a way to restore financing without ruffling feathers.

Back to Blumenthal and Gomorrah, who we pick up while he explains how a distraught and fully demented woman, Judith Reisman, who used to write songs for Captain Kangaroo, persuaded the anti-Jesus wing of the "Christian" Right to make the LBGT community its top target.

At a May 1994 conference sponsored by Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, described by the Washington Times as "top secret," Reisman introduced her theory of a proselytizing homosexual movement. "I would suggest to you," she told the conference, "that while the homosexual population might right now be 1 to 2 percent, hold your breath, people, because the recruitment is loud; it is clear; it is everywhere. You'll be seeing, I would say, 20 percent or more, probably 30 percent, or even more than that, of the young population will be moving into homosexual activity." By the meeting's conclusion, representatives of the forty organizations in attendance agreed to move anti-gay politicking to the forefront of the movement's long-term agenda.

...Reisman's lobbying piqued the interest of Texas Republican Representative Steve Stockman, a former drifter with well-established ties to anti-government militia leaders. In 1995, Stockman introduced HR 2749, "The Child Protection and Ethics in Education Act," a bill Reisman helped author that proposed "to determine if Alfred Kinsey's [books] Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and/or Sexual Behavior in the Human Female are the result of any fraud or criminal wrongdoing.

...In November 2004, Reisman spent a week on Capitol Hill at the invitation of Republican Senator Sam Brownback... [and] testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space on "The Science Behind Pornography Addiction," declaring that "Pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the 'high' from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub 'erotoxins-- mind-altering drugs produced by the viewer's own brain."

This is the world evangelicals inhabit, the world in which they are corralled by those unscrupulous fake prophets can round 'em up, rope 'em, brand 'em and shear them of their worldly possessions, making these Satanic preachers multimillionaires and leaving their victims in eternal agony and filled with self-hatred and loathing they're taught to turn outward. As Blumenthal points out, Jim Dobson is positively obsessed with pornography; it's almost as important in his ministry as the sadomasochism on which he thrives and he explains that "a wealth of data... suggests that porn has been a particularly pernicious problem within the evangelical community... An evangelical anti-porn group, found in a 2007 survey that 50 percent of evangelical men and 20 percent of evangelical women are addicted to pornography' 37 percent of evangelical pastors who responded to a 2001 survey by Christianity Today magazine called porn addiction a "current struggle." This is the wretched state of mind these poor people are taught to project onto society in general and then respond by voting for crazy right-wing anti-Science, anti-government crackpots, which, in effect, is today's Republican Party.