Tony Perkins is claiming that 30 percent of TV characters or story lines are about or devoted to gay people. Perkins compounds this unsubstantiated and false claim by adding that the “fiction” of “lovable gay characters” masks “the reality of homosexuality: the men and women dying of AIDS, or the same-sex couples threatening Christian businesses.”
Perkins, of course, is the head of the Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty Law Center-certified anti-gay hate group, but he is often welcomed as an “expert” on family issues, social policy, same-sex marriage, and even politics by all the major cable news networks.
The reality is that HIV/AIDS, unlike Tony Perkins, doesn’t discriminate, and same-sex couples don’t “threaten” Christian businesses. In every case brought against a “Christian business,” state and local anti-discrimination laws, often decades-old, are the reason same-sex couples are entitled to take action against discrimination. Whether or not a state has extended marriage to same-sex couples, a business that violates an anti-diuscrimination law is guilty of discrimination, regardless of whom they choose to discriminate against.
But fact have never mattered to Perkins, who, as GLAAD notes, calls gay people “intolerant,” “hateful,” “vile,” “spiteful,” “operating outside of nature,” “abnormal,” and says of homosexuality, it is “not what we were created to do and it’s against God’s plan and it’s contrary to our nature and the way were were created.”
Here’s the audio and transcript, via Right Wing Watch:
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F95543331&show_artwork=false
Is marriage headed for a Hollywood ending? Hello, I’m Tony Perkins with the Family Research Council in Washington. The debate over same-sex marriage has been perfectly scripted by Hollywood. Television shows are full of lovable gay characters, whose dangerous lifestyle is just another funny footnote. Unfortunately for America, those make-believe people are having a real-life impact. In a new survey, almost 20% of Americans credit television with changing their minds on same-sex marriage. And that’s no accident. Homosexuals make up 4% of the population, but they’re a whopping 30% of TV characters and storylines. Liberals are using this barrage to desensitize America and viewers are buying it. Of course, producers don’t show you the reality of homosexuality: the men and women dying of AIDS, or the same-sex couples threatening Christian businesses. They don’t cast the Dan Savages bullying kids or the parents kicked out of school for opposing gay curriculum. Like most everything else on TV, it’s fiction. And the only way to fight it is knowing your role in speaking truth!