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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!

fischer.jpg
“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.

PazuzuDemonAssyria.jpg

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.
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“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.

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“Joey…Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”

24 Responses to “The Ballad of Reading Fail”

Single-track minds, & simple solutions. For simple people. Let’s bring back the adultery laws, while we’re at it.

You could put up another demon image or two to offset the three pix of B.F.

Justice Pazuzu

Doesn’t he sell inexpensive but well made Japanese cars?

By the way, Jefferson’s proposal went a lot further:

Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least. – Bill Number 64, authored by Jefferson and “Reported by the Committee of Advisors, 18 June 1779″

But…he authored that law to replace one already on the books that made homosexual behavior as well as heterosexual sodomy a capital crime, something Son-Of-Steve-Martin missed.

Thomas Jefferson, wrote a law for the state of Virginia that mandated castration as punishment for two men apprehended for male-to-male friskiness.

I believe it was for rape, polygamy or sodomy and it also proposed that women be punished by boring a hole through the cartilage of their nose. Is Bryan intending to defend that as well? Never mind, forget that I asked that.

In any case Jefferson wrote not long after “On the subject of the Criminal Law, all were agreed that the punishment of death should be abolished, except for treason and murder; and that, for other felonies should be substituted hard labor in the public works, and in some cases, the Lex talionis. How this last revolting principle came to obtain our approbation, I do not remember…It was the English law in the time of the Anglo-Saxons, copied probably from the Hebrew law of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ and it was the law of several ancient people. But the modern mind had left it far in the rear of it’s advances.”

And

I have strictly observed the scale of punishments settled by the Committee, without being entirely satisfied with it. The lex talionis, altho’ a restitution of the Common law,…will be revolting to the humanised feelings of modern times. An eye for an eye, and a hand for a hand will exhibit spectacles in execution whose moral effect would be questionable…This needs reconsideration.

Bryan seems to have missed that part.

Note that he’s STILL parroting the bullshit about how Hate Crime laws would render anti-gay speech illegal.
And he KNOWS it’s a lie because HE AIN’T IN PRISON!

And-maybe I misunderstood what he was saying with the Jefferson remark but…is he implying that if castration was still the punishment for gay sex, he’d approve? I mean, he’s arguing that the law isn’t antiquated, so what else could he mean?

“Off with their nuts!! And noses!”

they couldn’t legally ass fuck them.
or have oral sex with them either

You know, I’d love to say something witty and dismissive here, but I keep getting distracted by the imagined sounds of Mr Fischer being run headfirst through a stump grinder, and it’s hard to concentrate with all that noise. I need to imagine a stump grinder with a silencer, I guess. But it’s just not the same without the noise, you know?

The last person imprisoned for felonious consensual oral sex in Indiana, as I recall, was a heterosexual male who got a hummer from his ex, who then got mad at him for something and swore out a police report, after which she tried to recant but the authorities pursued it anyway, and the man did actual hard time, you should pardon the expression.

Didn’t know about the puppet ban, actually, but I’m all for it; I had the same childhood reaction to the nasty little string danglers that other people have to clowns.

Why headfirst?

Why NOT?

Queer Eye for the Incarcerated Guy?

Poor Bryan. That boat left the dock quite a while ago and is tied up in Uganda. Perhaps he’d feel a little less threatened there. Problem solved.

Why headfirst?
stops the screaming faster, duh

That was actually kind of my point. We may be talking past each other, but a guy like this, I want him to suffer some.

My new dishwasher and sink faucet are all installed and working correctly now. Take that, whoever the jackass was who was saying feminism was to blame for not having manly men around the house to solve our silly ladyproblems. New stove comes Saturday. Mind you, neither I nor my partner are girlyshoppers enough to have realized another week would put us into President’s Day sales. You win some, you lose some. Well, the models we picked out probably wouldn’t have been on sale anyway.

Scott
Idaho may be one of the most socially bass-awkward pieces of real estate on the planet. These folks seem to thrive here…but it got too liberal for Fischer. He’s Mississippi’s joy now.

The Ballad of Reading Fail

o/~ Well, he failed his way from Utah to Idahoooo
In the pocket of his vest
A coat he hid
And his age and his size
Took his wifey by surprise
And the word spread of
Joey the Kid o/~

Thanks for the new postings — I saw that “Bigguns” picture so much (as I perused the blogroll) that I was having watermelon and Velveta nightmares !

“it certainly worked for the Macedonians and the Janissaries” as well as those 300 Spartans so beloved by pubic intellectual Victor Hanson Davis !

How about bringing back the Roman laws criminalizing Christianity ? Then we wouldn’t need an Establishment Clause — problem solved !

Nobody’s mentioned it yet, but kudos to Scott for the Oscar Wilde-based title.

Scott wins the internet for the title of this post.

Use it wisely, Scott.

stops the screaming faster, duh

So would a well fitted ball gag.

I recommend head-first because it gets that face out of my sight faster. He’s like a bust of Peter Graves sculpted out of Smug.

Hey, D.Sidhe, check if anything you bought is on sale anyway. Then try to get something out of it, by cheerfully complaining to the store. Maybe you won’t get the difference back, but you may get some kind of store credit you can use later on. Like a discount on a stump grinder.

I fear jack-in-the-boxes. I think I feared them even before I saw Anthony sending crap to the cornfield.

Bryan Fischer is well-known in Idaho. The man’s obsession with and hatred of homosexuals is well documented.

I have been reporting on this guy for years during his reign of terror on LGBT Idahoans.

His latest rant on criminalizing homosexuals is just the tip of the iceberg of who this hate-monger really is.

For those activists, bloggers and reporters who are interested in learning more on this bully, I have assembled an archive on my site (The Fischer Files) you might find illuminating.

Something to say?