Bryan Fischer is defending comments he made over the past 24 hours, adding that God’s Law, not man’s law, is to be followed, and repeating that children should be abducted from gay parents. Fischer via Twitter last night stated he believes it’s his duty to Christ to steal the children of gay people and same-sex couplesand send them on an “Underground Railroad,” noting that “we need an Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households.”
“We must obey God’s law, not man’s law,” Fischer said today at the end of the video, below.
As an example, Fischer abuses the story of “ex-gay” Lisa Miller, a woman in a same-sex relationship who became a biological mother and after the couple split, ignored multiple court orders and ultimately stole the child and fled the country with her.
But the issue at hand here is that Bryan Fischer, and as The New Civil Rights Movement wrote earlier today, the American Family Association, are now on record advocating for the commission of a crime, namely, that some person or persons unnamed, should actively steal and/or kidnap children from any gay person or same-sex couple raising that child or children, merely because the parents are in a same-sex relationship, or because one or both parents is/are gay.
Is advocating a crime a crime? Or merely free speech? Will the kidnapping of innocent children being raised in loving and stable homes headed by same-sex parents or one LGBT parent become a First Amendment issue? Will the state interfering with the pre-meditated theft of innocent children be seen as “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion, and just because the religious right claim it to be their First Amendment right — and duty?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Comments like these are not benign. They are calls to action, heeded by the least-willed among society, the emotionally and mentally disturbed, and those most-susceptible to the ravings of a lunatic.
HRC today noted:
LGBT families are not a new phenomenon. There are over 650,000 same-sex couples raising nearly 250,000 childen, according to the 2010 U.S. Census data.
Fischer’s call for kidnapping children from same-sex partners is not only offensive, but a harmful mischaracterization of families that struggle daily to provide loving and safe home environments despite significant legal, financial and dignitary inequality.
Meanwhile, back to the non-reality based world of Bryan Fischer, who claims Lisa Miller’s lesbian partner sexually abused the couple’s little girl, and yet the court chose to give the non-biological mother custody of the child.
As usual, facts are not Fischer’s friends.
Law professor Nancy Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law, writes that “in the Miller-Jenkins case there is no factual dispute. We aren’t dealing with a judge whose assessment of the evidence might be skewed by a resolute unwillingness to believe such things as sexual assault happen between a father and child.”
We’re dealing with a judge who made a reasonable visitation order for a noncustodial parent which was flaunted by the custodial parent only because she did not want her child around a lesbian. Lisa Miller clearly believes she made a mistake forming a family with Janet Jenkins, but lots of mothers regret the partners they had children with. That history cannot be rewritten, however. Noncustodial parents gets visitation rights, even when there is profound religious disagreement between them — something that is not at all uncommon as any student of family law knows. Lisa and the evangelicals supporting her don’t believe Janet is a parent, but parentage is determined as a legal matter. And the court got it right when it ruled that the couple’s joint decision to have a child through donor insemination, and all the other factors, made them both parents.
It’s really that legal ruling that Lisa and her supporters disagree with. And for that I cut them no slack. “Biblical truths” (themselves, of course, open to interpretation as the religious leaders who support lesbian and gay families have demonstrated) don’t determine legal parentage. And we would have a very different country if no parent who lived contrary to “biblical truths,” as determined by evangelical Christians, could visit with his or her child.
As usual, facts are not Fischer’s friends.
Calling Fischer’s stance “anarchy,” Zack Ford at Think Progress also classifies as “lies,” Fischer’s comments “that Jenkins was sexually abusing Isabella and that she had ‘no legal relationship’ with her daughter.”
Worse than simply being wrong on the facts, Fischer is arguing for complete anarchy. Judges granting custody to legally recognized guardians is the courts acting in the best interest of children. To call that “judicial kidnapping†is to suggest that the entire legal system be disregarded when it recognizes same-sex relationships. Fischer is essentially encouraging conservative Christians to become anti-gay vigilantes, kidnapping the children of same-sex couples to enforce their own perverted sense of justice outside the legal system.
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The New York Times, in an extensive story, adds:
The New York Times has assembled the most complete picture yet of their getaway and subsequent life.
The archive of Polikoff’s writings on the Lisa Miller story are here.
Video courtesy of Right Wing Watch.
Related:
All Gays Pose “Heightened Security Risk†To America Says AFA’s Fischer
Fischer: Absolutely No Reason Why Homosexuality Cannot Be Criminalized