The Ballad of Reading Fail

The writer of World o'Crap turned his back for a minute, and I walked off with this...

You may remember RenewAmerica mainstay Bryan Fischer, who's been ranting about sodomites and Musselmen for far longer than this blog has been in business. But in today’s wingnut world, quality, craftsmanship, and experience don’t mean much, not when a hungry young up-and-coming crank like Tom Tancredo can publicly demand a return to literacy tests and the poll tax, forcing an established tradesman like Bryan to match the rhetorical mark-up by calling for the mass imprisonment of gay men and lesbians.

Or as Bill S. put it in a message, "Shorter Bryan Fischer: We could eliminate a whole bunch of pesky civil rights laws by simply putting the people they’re supposed to protect in prison."

Fortunately, this isn’t some wild eliminationist scheme pulled out of the pasty white, but pure and Adamic ass of some preacher in an Aryan Nations or Christian Identity compound in Idaho. No, according to his official bio:

Bryan Fischer is the director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy at American Family Association, where he provides expertise on a range of public policy topics.

By "public policy topics" he means teh gayz! and by "expertise" he means "a willingness to fantasize on the internet about reviving Martin Sherman’s play Bent, but this time as a reality series."

Bryan has been married to his bride, Debbie, for 32 years

And as you can imagine, she’s dying to get out of that wedding dress.

...and they have lived in Idaho since 1980.

And how nice for Bryan that he got in on the ground floor of that whole "relocate to Idaho" movement that was so popular with certain white Christians in the 80s and 90s, since I imagine the fortified compounds were still reasonable.

I guess the only other biographical items we should note before going on is that Bryan is the host of an American Family Association-sponsored talk radio program for various down-market and low wattage AM stations, and he bears an eerie resemblance to Peter Graves in Airplane!

"Have you ever seen a grown man naked?"

Laws proscribing homosexual conduct can be found in the Middle Assyrian Law Codes dating back to 1075 BC. To my knowledge, the Middle Assyrians have never been part of the vast, right-wing conspiracy, which gives the lie to the myth that only blue-nosed prudes who believe in the Judeo-Christian tradition have ever found fault with sodomy.

Yes, the Assyrians of 3000 years ago were known for their leftist politics, and their surviving steles and tablets are littered with feminist boilerplate like “a man may strike his wife, pull her hair, her ear he may bruise or pierce. He commits no misdeed thereby.” Still, I’m a little confused; usually folks like Bryan insist that the Ten Commandments are the only body of laws we ought to heed, since they’re the basis for all Western jurisprudence; unfortunately, they don’t have anything to say about homosexuality, so the American Family Association is forced to bring in a ringer from the pagan league.

"Justice Pazuzu issues a well-argued dissent from the Court's ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, and condemns you all to be devoured by locusts!"

Every state in the Union at the time of the Founding had laws which made homosexual behavior illegal. In fact, that noted icon of the left, Thomas Jefferson, wrote a law for the state of Virginia that mandated castration as punishment for two men apprehended for male-to-male friskiness.

By a strange coincidence, that’s the same punishment the Assyrian penal code called for in the 10th century B.C. We’ve come a long way, Baby.

Sodomy was a felony offense in all 50 states as recently as 1962, and was still a felony in the other 49 states ten years later.

Meanwhile, miscegenation was still outlawed in only 22 states, meaning that while blacks could marry white people in over half the country, they couldn't legally ass fuck them.

Still today, 12 states have sodomy statutes on the books, although our meek acquiescence to judicially activist rulings from the Supreme Court have rendered those unenforceable.

Sixteen states had anti-miscegenation laws on the books which were rendered unenforceable by Loving v. Virginia and your meek acquiescence. Just when are you going to get around to lynching the corpse of Earl Warren, anyway? People are beginning to talk.

By the way, it’s silly to criticize a law just because it’s old and antiquated. The First Amendment has been around for 219 years, and I don’t hear anybody saying we’ve got to get rid of it because it’s so out of date. The issue is not how old a law is but how right it is.

Very true, which is why we should seek guidance from the ancient Assyrians about modern abortion policy, too. Under the old law, if a man punched a married woman and caused her to lose her fetus, he was forced to pay "two talents of lead," but if a woman merely experienced a miscarriage, she was crucified and her corpse left out to picked at by vultures. And since, as we will shortly see, Bryan believes that any law that was once a law is still a law, there’s no reason we can’t immediately adopt the same common sense approach to social issues as practiced by our polytheistic, Bronze Age forefathers.

The fact remains, however, that in nearly 25% of the states in the Union, sodomy is still in the criminal code as illegal behavior.

And puppet shows and oral sex are illegal in Indiana, especially when you combine them. What’s your point?

This raises the question, then, as to whether sodomy laws should be, or legitimately have been, repealed just because they are rarely enforced.

The answer to this is a clear and unequivocal "No."

Hopefully Doghouse Riley can flush those marionettes before the cops break down his door.

Think for a moment of the current social controversies that could potentially be avoided if homosexual conduct was still against the law.

Exactly! Global climate change — well, no. But health care reform…Hm. What about the budget deficit? Financial sector bonuses? Clean energy? Mountaintop mining regulations? How about "shovel-ready stimulus?" C’mon, that sounds a little gay...

Gays in the military: problem solved. We shouldn't make a place for habitual felons in the armed forces.

Well, it’s a bit late, since 12% of new Army recruits in 2007 had criminal records (presumably for sodomy, since most young people have had oral sex, or gone parachuting with an unmarried woman on a Sunday). But while I’m not actually surprised that military life is so attractive to homosexuals — it certainly worked for the Macedonians and the Janissaries — I am wondering where, with so many gay men in the Army, the next generation of Catholic priests is going to come from.

End of discussion, end of controversy.

Except not everyone would agree with your assertion that simply because an overturned law remains on the books, it remains a law. Perhaps you could lead by example, and hunt down a few fugitive slaves.

If someone objects, ask them which other felonies the military ought to overlook in screening recruits.

Nowadays? Not many.

Gay marriage: problem solved. We should never legalize unions between any two people when the union is forged specifically to engage in felony behavior.

Dude, even before Lawrence, gay sex was only a misdemeanor. In Texas.

"Do you like movies about gladiators?"

Would we sanction, for instance, the formation of a corporation whose stated purpose was to import illegal drugs?

No, I’m pretty sure the CIA would object to the competition.

Gay indoctrination in the schools: problem solved. We don't want to raise a generation of schoolchildren to believe that felony behavior is perfectly appropriate. That’s why we spend so much money warning students about the danger of drugs.

But what do we do about those people who claim they were born drug users?

Q: When did you first suspect you were a heroin addict, Bobby?

A: Oh, I’ve known since I was five. I remember, whenever my mother would leave the house, I’d dress up in tie-dye and sing Janis Joplin songs into a hairbrush in front of the mirror.

Hate crimes laws: problem solved.

We just legalize hate!

We wouldn’t throw a pastor in jail for saying that illegal behavior is not only illegal but also immoral.

Although throwing him into a prison shower room full of gay men is not only fair but also funny.

For instance, he’s free to say that murder is not only contrary to man’s law but also to God’s law. End of the threat to freedom of religion and speech.

If we can just get him to shut up about the Negroes...

Special rights for homosexuals in the workplace: problem solved. No employer should be forced to hire admitted felons to work for him. End of the threat to freedom of religion and freedom of association in the marketplace.

I used to work for a English woman who was married to a Jamaican, but under your innovative theory of jurisprudence she wasn’t technically my boss, so I made all those photocopies for nothing!

This list could actually be extended...

I’m looking at you, Brown v. Board of Education...

The promos for the old movie "American Graffiti" asked the question, "Where were you in '62?"

I’m guessing your answer is, "under a conical hood."

If the same question were asked about the United States, we’d have to answer: in a much better, saner and healthier place when it comes to criminal sexual conduct.

"Joey... Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?"