I don't often have time to smack down Bryan Fischer, the anti-gay Evangelical leader of the American Family Association. First, he says so many offensive and insane things, like that homosexuality will completely destroy the West, that it would be a full-time job to call out and respond to his many, many rants. (And that's what Right Wing Watch is for!)
The second reason I don't take on Fischer is that he and his allies are losing political leverage, and they know it: a 2011 poll of Evangelical leaders showed most of them, 82%, see their ideological group's power waning. They themselves blame this on the "scourge" of secularism, but one has to take into account that their constant anti-gay, moralistic crusades fly in the face of an increasingly inclusive nation. While devout Evangelicals, consistently the most anti-gay group in polls, are sticking to archaic laws and reasons, the rest of the nation is moving forward, leaving them behind. Spending too much time analyzing Fischer and company would typically be a waste of resources, but I simply couldn't pass this one up.
On his radio show Friday, Mr. Fischer launched a harangue in which he demanded his followers refer to same-sex marriage as "sodomy-based marriage." To him, same-sex unions are "counterfeit" and therefore must be referred to as such.
"One of the reasons people on our side don't want to use the word sodomy is it's an ugly word. Well, it is an ugly word, because it's describing an ugly practice. It's a good word. It's a legal word. It's a dictionary word. It's not a bad word. But it's an ugly word and it's an ugly word because it describes an ugly behavior.
"You want to be careful about ceding ground to the enemy by allowing the enemy to establish the terms of the debate.
"You know, I refer to homosexual marriage as sodomy-based marriage. This is a pseudo-marriage. It's counterfeit marriage, fake marriage, not the real thing, it's Naugahyde marriage and it is rooted in the act of sodomy."
But of course Fischer's completely wrong -- even more so than usual.
Not only gay people participate in sodomy, which though loosely defined as non-reproductive oral or anal sex, means mostly "anal" to people like Fischer. And gays don't have a monopoly on the butt sex. Women's magazine Marie Claire reported in 2010 that 40% have had anal sex; that was up from 16% in 1992, and women are openly talking about their love of taking it in the rear. (And straight men love it, there's no poll needed for that...)
More recently, just last week, in preparation for an upcoming story, I spoke with a straight, married woman who writes gay erotica, Laura Baumbach. Asked if she had to do research into gay sex, she replied, "Somehow people don't stop to realize that there's very little, outside of a prostate, that women don't have. We also engage in anal intercourse."
She went on, "Definitely I did a little bit of research, but as a nurse and as a sexually active female, there was really very little that was left to the imagination that I didn't get." So, sorry Fishcer, just because you don't know the joys of anal sex, doesn't mean other straight people, even striaght women, are as ignorant.
Here's video of Fischer's comments from last week, via On Top:
