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The director of issues analysis of the fundamentalist anti-LGBT American Family Association (AFA) on Wednesday refused to answer a "simple yes or no question" about whether he had ever had a "gay impulse."

Liberal radio host Alan Colmes pointed out that AFA's Bryan Fischer could set an example for gay men and lesbians by explaining when he had chosen to be straight.

"Have you ever had a gay impulse?" Colmes asked.

"Alan, I am not going to talk about that," Fischer laughed. "Alan, I'm not going to go there! Give it a rest!"

"It's a simple yes or no question," Colmes observed.

"We're not going to talk about that," Fischer insisted.

"Because maybe if you've been able to overcome your gay impulses and you've been successful in doing it, you could be a model for other people you'd like to see act the same way," Colmes pressed.

"The focus here, Alan, is that everybody experiences sexual impulses that if they acted on those impulses, it would destroy them," the anti-LGBT crusader declared.

"Well, can you give me an example from your own life? What would be some of yours?" the liberal host wondered.

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The director of issues analysis of the fundamentalist American Family Association (AFA) is instructing his followers that Jesus wants them to pray for President Barack Obama because he is the "enemy."

During the Monday broadcast of AFA's Focal Point radio show, Bryan Fischer told a story about a woman who had been praying for 18 years than an abortion clinic in Mississippi would be closed. And thanks to a law that requires abortion doctors to have “admission privileges” at a local hospital, this last clinic in the state could be closing in the coming weeks.

Fischer pointed out that prayer may not make work immediately, but Christians should be persistent.

"One of the reason that I pray for President Obama -- and virtually every day pray for him by name -- is that Jesus taught us to pray for our enemies and for those that persecute us," the conservative radio host opined.

"We should be under no illusions here. President Obama is not our friend, President Obama is our enemy. He is seeking to restrict religious liberty. He wants to confine the First Amendment free exercise of religion clause to one hour a week."

"So why do we pray for him?" Fischer asked in conclusion. "And it's genuine, I pray for him, it's genuine. It's not pro forma prayer. I pray for him as genuinely as I pray for anyone else because Jesus taught us to pray for our enemies."

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

What's really frightening is that there apparently are people out there who take this guy seriously rather than being viewed as some insane carnival barker who ought to be run out of town on a rail: Fischer: Fiscal Cliff Legislation is 'Demonic':

Bryan Fischer is not at all pleased with the legislation passed last night by the House of Representatives in an effort to avoid the "fiscal cliff, "declaring that it is a violation of the Ten Commandments' prohibition on covetousness, meaning that the Democratic Party is driven by a "Satanic" ideology and the resulting legislation is "demonic."

So much for that talk about it being harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than that camel going through the eye of a needle. Those greedy poor people out there are the evil ones for coveting what that rich man has by wanting him to pay his fair share of taxes.

As Steve Benen noted on this:

There was no word from Fischer as to why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would help craft a "demonic" fiscal agreement -- or for that matter, why 125 congressional Republicans voted for it.

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Oh goodie. Pass the popcorn. The religious right is none too happy now that Willard has lost the presidential election and wanting to push the party even further to the right -- GOP civil war: Herman Cain calls for third party:

It’s been less than 24 hours since the polls closed and already the first shots in an emerging civil war within the conservative movement are being fired. Right-leaning pundits have been taking turns beating up on Mitt Romney and blaming him for the loss last night. Donald Trump just tweeted, “Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money.” And GOP leaders are already taking to the barricades on either side of the divide, which basically comes down to this question: Were Romney and the GOP too conservative or not conservative enough?

Steve Schmidt, a top Republican strategist who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign, invoked the term on MSNBC this morning. “When I talk about a civil war in the Republican Party, what I mean is, it’s time for Republican elected leaders to stand up and to repudiate this nonsense [of the extreme right wing], and to repudiate it directly,” he said.

But on the other side of the fight, Herman Cain, the former presidential candidate who still has a robust following via his popular talk radio program and speaking tours, today suggested the most clear step to open civil war: secession. Appearing on Bryan Fischer’s radio program this afternoon, Cain called for a large faction of Republican Party leaders to desert the party and form a third, more conservative party.

“I never thought that I would say this, and this is the first time publicly that I’ve said it: We need a third party to save this country. Not Ron Paul and the Ron Paulites. No. We need a legitimate third party to challenge the current system that we have, because I don’t believe that the Republican Party … has the ability to rebrand itself,” Cain said.

Fischer, a social conservative leader, noted that he predicted this summer that if Mitt Romney loses, evangelical conservatives would start a third party. “If Barack Obama wins this election the Republican Party as we know it is finished, it is dead, it is toast,” Fischer said in September at the Values Voter Summit in Washington. Read on...

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The director of issues analysis of a conservative fundamentalist Christian organization who is opposing anti-bullying efforts found himself on the defensive on Tuesday after a CNN host pointed out that his "hate speech" revealed an anti-LGBT agenda.

During a phone interview on CNN, host Carol Costello asked the American Family Association's (AFA) Bryan Fischer why his group was fighting the the Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) "Mix It Up For Lunch Day" anti-bullying effort.

"It's an attempt to push the normalization of homosexual behavior in public schools and to eventually punish students who would express a Judeo-Christian view of sexuality," Fischer explained. "It's interesting to me that they are doing this on Oct. 30, the day before Halloween, and what this program is, it's like poison Halloween candy. Somebody takes a candy bar, injects it with cyanide, the label looks fine, it looks innocuous, it looks fine. It's not until you internalize it, you realize how toxic it is. We want parents to understand that any program that comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center is going to be toxic to their student's moral health."

Costello noted that the program had been going on for 11 years and the SPLC's website "makes no mention of homosexuality whatsoever."

"The Southern Poverty Law Center has called your organization, the American Family Association, a hate group," she pointed out. "And some would say that's really what's motivating you."

"In reality, the Southern Poverty Law Center is out to bully students who have conservative moral values in silence," Fischer insisted.

"I think the Southern Poverty Law Center could turn the tables on you," Costello interrupted. "You have said, 'Hitler recruited homosexuals around him to make up his stormtroopers. They were his enforcers, they were his thugs. Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and cruel and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual soldiers had no limit to the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whoever Hitler sent them after.'"

"That spells agenda to me," the CNN host observed. "That, by many people's standards, would be hate speech."

Fischer then launched into a rant about how the SPLC was trying to destroy the AFA and other Christian groups and that "homosexuality has the same risks associated with it as intravenous drug use."

"That's just not true," Costello said, cutting him off. "I'm going to end this interview now, sir, because that's just not true. Mr. Fisher, thanks for sharing your views, I guess."

(h/t: Good As You)

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Fundamentalist Christian radio host Bryan Fischer says that the white supremacist who massacred six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin must have been a liberal because he hated former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and had a "a left-wing political philosophy."

On his Tuesday American Family Association radio show, Fisher said that Wade Michael Page could not be connected to the tea party because he had threatened to leave the country if Cain was elected president. But the conservative radio host failed to mention that Page's hate for African Americans may have trumped any desire to support the Republican candidate.

"The tea party [is] primarily made up of white people, of evangelicals, people of faith," Fischer explained. "We loved Herman Cain. He was a black guy. We loved him. We would have been happy to have him be our presidential candidate. This guy despised Herman Cain."

Fischer then made the claim that Page's identification as a neo-Nazi meant he also must have been a liberal.

"You know what the Nazi Party stands for? It's the National Socialist Party. What about the word 'socialist' do you not understand? They were the National Socialist Party - that is a left-wing political philosophy," he insisted.

Fischer continued: "And you think even here in the United States, who was the part of racism? It was the left, it was liberals who were the part of racism. It was Democrats that supported and defended the institution of slavery. It was Democrats that resisted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It was Democrats that instituted Jim Crow laws. It was Democrats that created the Ku Klux Klan. It was Democrats that filibustered the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s."

While Fischer often recounts the Democratic Party's opposition to rights for minorities, he always fails to mention that Democrats surpassed Republicans on civil rights when Democratic President Harry Truman became the first president since Abraham Lincoln to address civil rights issues in the 1940s. After attempting to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Southern Democrats have largely joined the national party in support of civil rights issues. Many of those that didn't agree with the party's civil rights agenda, defected to the Republican Party.

Earlier this week, televangelist Pat Robertson also attempted to disassociate Page with conservative Christians by suggesting that atheists were to blame for the shooting.

“What is it?” the TV preacher wondered. “Is it satanic? Is it some spiritual thing, people who are atheists, they hate God, they hate the expression of God? And they are angry with the world, angry with themselves, angry with society and they take it out on innocent people who are worshiping God.”

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

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The director of issues analysis at the anti-LGBT rights group American Family Association (AFA) is proposing that the government pass a law requiring that every American go to church or pay a tax penalty.

During his Thursday Focal Point radio program, Bryan Fischer backed a listener's proposal to have an "individual mandate from the government that everybody has to go to church."

"Because after all, Obamacare is all about improving the health of the American people," the radio host explained. "We know that going to church is good for you, it's good for your health. So we are going to mandate that you go to church for your own health and we are going to tax the atheists who don't go to church."

"Now we can't make you go to church, but we are going to penalize you if you don't," Fischer continued. "We are going to assess a tax on every atheist who doesn't go to church because those atheists are endangering their physical health."

"That is actually a brilliant, brilliant suggestion."

Earlier this week, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) used the Affordable Care Act's individual health care mandate as justification that every person be forced to buy a Glock 9mm handgun.

“Well, I got a great idea,” West said during a campaign rally in Florida on Sunday. “I believe for personal security, every American should have to go out and buy a Glock 9mm. And if you don’t do it, we’ll tax you. Now, I wonder how the liberals will feel about that one.”

(h/t: via Right Wing Watch)

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The director of issues of the anti-LGBT rights group American Family Association (AFA) on Wednesday claimed that kids were facing "a form of sexual abuse" when they were adopted by same sex couples.

During his Wednesday radio program Focal Point, Bryan Fischer pointed to a debunked study that suggested children with same sex parents had less of a chance of succeeding as adults.

"There is a myth that homosexual couples can be just a good of parents to children as heterosexual couples, as married moms and dads," Fischer insisted. "Absolutely, flatly, totally, completely not true. Same sex parenting is bad for kids period."

"The bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, to put kids into this environment, it's a form of sexual abuse all its own. To adopt kids into a same sex environment is a form of child abuse."

Fischer also explained what it was about same sex relationships that he believes creates a dangerous environment for children.

"The sex that's involved in homosexual behavior, it's unnatural, it's immoral and it is unhealthy," he opined. "We know that it puts the human body to uses for which it was not designed. Whether you believe in evolution or you believe in creation, we can all say, look, the human body was not designed to be used that way. It just wasn't. In fact, I would suggest to you that people who believe in evolution ought to be more opposed to the normalization of homosexuality than evangelicals. Because evolution is supposed to be all about propagation of the species."

Constitutional Accountability Center President Doug Kendall told Mother Jones' Adam Serwer that if the study Fischer cites is valid -- and there is evidence that it's not -- then people were drawing the wrong conclusions.

"If a child born in poverty is less likely to thrive as an adult, no one would argue that poor people can't get married?" Kendall observed. "Even if it's true [that LGBT people's kids do worse], it should not be relevant to the constitutional question of invidious discrimination."

The American Psychological Association has concluded that there is “no scientific evidence that parenting effectiveness is related to parental sexual orientation.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Wednesday announced that it had filed a lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s second parent adoption ban, which effective prevents same sex partner’s from adopting children.

Same sex adoptions would protect children by allowing either parent to cover the child with health insurance, ensuring that families can stay together if something happens to the biological parent and granting both parents the right to make medical decisions for children in case of emergency.

“The current policy is discriminatory and doesn’t take into account what’s best for a child,” ACLU senior staff attorney Elizabeth Gill explained. “These parents want the same thing as any other parents: to be able to provide the best possible care and protection for their children. The law should not stand in the way of allowing loving couples to share responsibility for their families.”

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

If anyone needed any more proof that the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer is more than just a little bit nuts and that he really hates Mitt Romney, you need look no further than his latest attack on the Republicans' presumptive presidential candidate, where he blasted Romney for taking his advice and ousting his openly gay spokesman, Richard Grenell.

Here's some background for anyone who hasn't been following this story. First we had Fischer going after Romney for hiring Grenell because he's openly gay: Bryan Fischer Launches Full-Scale Attack on Romney Campaign's Gay Spokesman:

As we noted earlier today, Bryan Fischer is positively livid that Mitt Romney's campaign hired Richard Grenell to serve as its foreign policy and national security spokesman because Grenell is openly gay.

So it was no surprise that Fischer dedicated a segment to discussing the issue today on his radio program, where he began by asserting that most gay men have hundreds, if not thousands, of "random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters and that becomes a significant issue when we're talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy":

Later Fischer brought up the fact that the LDS Church opposes homosexuality and demanded to know whether Romney agreed with that position and, if so, explain why he would appoint an openly gay man to serve on his campaign. If Romney said he didn't agree with that position, then Fischer said there would be no reason for social conservatives to vote for him:

Then on May 1st, Fischer gets his head on a plate and Grenell resigns: Romney’s Openly-Gay Spokesperson Resigns After Facing Pressure From Anti-Gay Right Wing:

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