Box Turtle Bulletin

Harvey and Glenn: Gays Make Bad Employees

Mission America’s Linda Harvey and the American Family Association of Michigan’s Gary Glenn spoke on Harvey’s radio program, where the two of them warned against hiring gay employees. Right Wing Watch has the details:

Glenn: Herman Miller, which is a major employer and corporation in Holland [Michigan], a furniture company, supported this so-called gay rights ordinance on the claim that it allowed them to attract the best and brightest.

Harvey: Here we go, yeah we heard that before.

Glenn: What ridiculous folly to suggest that only those individuals who engage in homosexual behavior given all of its severe medical consequences constitute the best and the brightest. It’s not really bright to engage in behavior that puts you at dramatically higher risk of mental illness and substance abuse and AIDS and cancer and hepatitis, and according to various sources, premature death. So to suggest that engaging in that type of behavior defines someone as the best and brightest, which seems to be the line coming out of corporate America, is just ridiculous.

Harvey: You’re right. And higher rates of domestic violence and unstable relationships. I would not think of a homosexual person as a good employment risk, I just wouldn’t.

There is no closet deep enough that would ever satisfy these people

Another Reason To Rejoice

There’s another reason to rejoice over the LDS Church’s historic support for pro-LGBT legislation in Salt Lake City: it’s causing all sorts of angst among anti-gay extremists. The right-wing group America Forever, whose fundraising ventures included selling worthless ID’s to Mexican immigrants, is incredulous. They charged that the seemingly powerless Church “was placed in this position by the gays from Utah.” That’s right. Gays are more powerful in Utah than the Mormon Church.

Other denunciations were more conventional. The American Family Association of Michigan’s Gary Glenn sputtered that the Church’s position was “grossly ignorant.” The Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg charged that the Church was “bend[ing] over backwards to exhibit tolerance toward homosexuals in some way.” Peter LaBarbera wailed that the church’s stance may mark “the ‘official’ split of the American pro-family movement against homosexuality into two camps,” with only one camp holding fast to unadulterated, no-holds-barred, anti-gay warfare — the only stance he finds acceptable. LaBarbera also worries:

If churches back “gay rights” (and the LDS is hardly the first), is there some truth to the idea that those of us who remain opposed to ALL aspects of the “GLBT agenda” are “bigots” or somehow extreme in our worldview?

Increasingly, the answer to LaBarbara’s question is self-evident. If someone opposes ALL aspects (as LaBarbera emphatically stipulates) of recognizing the humanity of any people — whoever they may be — then yes, they are bigots and extremists. That’s pretty much the definition. There’s no other way to put it. And whenever a major denomination like the LDS church can frame a question like this through its actions with such stark clarity, we all benefit.

More Anti-Semitism From “Pro-Family” Activists?

UPDATE: I make mistakes from time to time. And I’ll even admit to it when I do. :)I misread Gary Glenn’s poorly written article about David Benkof’s (inaccurate) reporting of comments made by Sean Kosofsky. I thought that Glenn was noting that Kosofsky was Jewish when upon closer inspection it appears as though the comment was about Benkof being Jewish.

Frankly, I find it odd that there is a need to note that ANYONE in this story is Jewish. And I think that including this irrelevant fact in Glenn’s opinion piece is peculiar.

But, as commenter Truthteller noted, Glenn did not present a Jew=bad dynamic in his piece as I had earlier thought and reported.

Gary Glenn, President of AFA-Michigan, started off a bitch and moan articleon Peter LaBarbera’s website thusly

Michigan’s largest homosexual activist group says once marriage is legally redefined to include homosexual couples, business owners and even news media outlets who refuse to recognize such marriages should be jailed or sued and “publicly slapped,” a Jewish and openly bisexual columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News reported Monday.

Hmmm. Something seems out of place there. I’ll get back to that.

Glenn goes on at quite some length quoting from an opinion piece by David Benkof, an opponent of gay marriage. Benkof, who writes in GaysDefendMarriage.com, attributes outlandish quotes to a number of people. And Glenn repeats them as fact.

Now, having had interaction with Benkof in the past, I was not at all surprised to find his version of the truth to be disputed. Jeremy at Good-As-You reports,

By the way, we have dialogued with someone who is quoted in the article. He confirms our suspicions that Mr. Benkoff has completely misrepresented/discontextualized his words.

Benkof is an interesting guy. As David Bianco, he built up a gay news source only to have a spiritual epiphany, denounce sex, and adopt a new “sexual identity”. (Benkof seems to have a bit of a fluid identity and, as best I can tell, uses whatever gives him the most credibility at the moment). Since then he’s taken it upon himself to oppose gay marriage whenever he can.

He’s also, in my opinion, arrogant, abrasive, and obnoxious.

So it’s not at all odd that a pro-family leader would leap right up and delight in quoting Benkof and repeating his claims. An anti-gay activist that presents as LGBT is a dream to anti-gays.

But that’s not what I found interesting in Glenn’s article. What is more fascinating than Glenn’s reliance on Benkof is what he leaves out of his article. Glenn never mentions that Bekhof’s religious conversion was not to Christianity, but rather to Orthodox Judaism.Glenn denounces the “Jewish and openly bisexual columnist” but never mentions the religious/ethnic affiliation of Benkof, the one he wants to present as credible. Bad guy: Jew; good guy: well, let’s not talk about it.

Now from my point of view, this is either blatant anti-Semitism or at least an appeal to those who are. Considering LaBarbara’s affilitations with Ted Pike, it doesn’t surprise me to see anti-Semitism on his website. But you’d think that the head of a state wide pro-family organization would be more careful not to reveal his bigotry.