The American Family Association (AFA) – a politicized Religious Right organization – continues its anti-gay campaign by attacking McDonald’s for its membership in the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC). AFA accuses McDonald’s of “aggressively promoting the homosexual agenda.” McDonald’s released a statement as a result of the e-mail barrage promoted by AFA among its members to attempt to shame or force McDonald’s into renounce its membership in NGLCC, its member on their board of directors, and any advertising within gay media.
AFA did the same thing for years concerning Ford and their advertising in gay-oriented media (the Advocate, for example) events (like the Human Rights Campaign events). AFA sponsored a boycott of all Ford automobiles and claimed to be the reason Ford’s sales have declined so much over the last couple of years. (They called off the boycott and claimed victory recently.) Now, it is McDonald’s turn.
What caught my attention was AFA’s rebuttal to the McDonald’s statement. The first sentence goes like this, “As a Christian organization, the American Family Association always seeks to be honest, accurate and completely forthright in the information we pass along to our supporters.”
Anyone who knows anything about the AFA and their perceptions of “reality” concerning the gay community, the continued and repeated and intentional spreading of misinformation (bearing false witness and outright lying), stereotypes, and scapegoating knows that their self-congratulatory statement about being honest, accurate, and complete is not honest, accurate, or complete.
This is what gets me – either they are so isolated that they really don’t know what is going on (“let them eat cake”) or they are intentionally lying and deceiving in order to win their cause – the end justifies whatever means they think they need to employ in order to win.
Another explanation could fall within the thesis of the author of the book I am reading right now, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society,” by Farhad Manjoo. I’ve been following this phenomena for a while now, and the author puts words to my perceptions. A couple points he is making revolve around the explosion of technology and our ability to find all kinds of “facts” and supporting commentary without having to be confronted with contrary ideas or “facts” that oppose what we already want to believe. It is the idea that “belief” and “feelings” now trump empirical “facts.” This is more than misinterpretations of “facts.” A second point is the notion that we honestly see completely different “realities” of the same event.
So, here we have one very large and influential group of people, the AFA and the Religious Right, who completely and honestly believe that if American society allows the acceptance of homosexuality and the legitimacy of gay relationships, that God will destroy Western Civilization. Some believe this more strongly than others, but I have read and heard and seen these kinds of statements from the leaders and their organizations that are currently the face of Christianity in this country. What lengths will they go to if their mission is to same American and Western Civilization from God’s wrath due to homosexuality? This is their “reality.”
In so many “conversations” I have had with anti-gay people, they seem truly unable to realize or accept that there are gay people who are not the stereotype – who are not promiscuous, who are not sexual compulsives, who are not drug addicts, who are not predatory in their attempts to recruit boys because they can’t breed their own kind, and who are not always diseased and die by the time they are 49 years old. They are not able to see that “fact” at all regardless of whether such a person is standing right before them and can “prove” the reality of such a non-stereotypical life. They only “see” or accept what they already want to believe to be true as the “reality.”
New technology allows any “researcher” to post the results of non-peer reviewed “studies” that proclaim the validity of their thesis, and the same technology makes widely available to people who want to believe them. In doesn’t matter that the studies prove to be flawed, unreliable, and invalid. The “proof” is in the eyes of the beholder. In this kind of scenario, credentials or “expert” status no longer mean anything, because we all can create our own reality and proclaim the validity of it. When “facts” matter less than feeling and believing, what kind of a society do we end up in?
In the anti-gay cause, anti-gay Christians don’t need to honestly engage their opponents or their opinions because they are able to surround themselves with like-believers and buttress their positions via like-minded media and organizations. They are in an echo-chamber, and attempt to speak outside the chamber to demand adherence to their claims by everyone else – all the while those of whom they speak and condemn know good-and-well that their propositions are invalid for the majority. They also condemn any study, regardless of whether it can be shown to be reliable and valid, that does not support their interpretation and presupposition. They testify before congress and the courts and the school boards, etc. Listen to the ex-gay rhetoric for another example of this phenomena.
Now, I well know that there are proponents of “gay-rights” that put themselves in a similar kind of echo-chamber. They find their own “reality” using their own “facts” that “feel” so “right.”
What do we do at this point? How do we deal with one another? If the AFA and the HRC, as examples of virulent opponents, will not, or worse yet cannot, understand the perspective of their opponents, recognize a common “reality,” or deal with the issues and problems that face both communities despite their “beliefs” surrounding those problems, then we will get nowhere.
It would seem that the final result of this kind of thinking and/or perceiving will be chaos or autocracy. When we can no longer listen, when we can no longer recognize the good in our opponents, when we can no longer compromise, when we are no longer able to love our neighbor let along our enemy, were do we end up? It would seem that a common, civil society resting on respect for difference and the rule of law will not survive. Theocracy, autocracy, oligarchy – what will be the result?
Read AFA’s rebuttal to McDonald’s statement here or by clicking below.

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