The Political Freakshow

AFA Village Bigot Bryan Fischer Compares Children of Same-Sex Parents To Slaves Who Need To Be Saved Like The Underground Railroad

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer has sunk to a new, disturbing low with his anti-gay statements. In two separate tweets last night, he called for an “Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households.” In one tweet he was referring to the sad story of Lisa Miller, who, after declaring herself ex-gay, kidnapped her daughter away to Central America to prevent her former partner from having any custody. (She is still being tracked by federal agents as a fugitive of the law.)

In the other tweet, Fischer referred to the testimony of a individual named Robert Oscar Lopez, who blames all of his social problems on being raised by his mom and her lesbian partner. Here’s a sampling:

Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.[…]

Life is hard when you are strange. Even now, I have very few friends and often feel as though I do not understand people because of the unspoken gender cues that everyone around me, even gays raised in traditional homes, takes for granted. Though I am hard-working and a quick learner, I have trouble in professional settings because co-workers find me bizarre.

Perhaps unfamiliar with the concepts of self-fulfilling prophesies and internalized homophobia, this man’s odd testimony seems to attack gay parenting merely because he believes his bisexual mother’s decision to live with a woman made it a struggle for him to identify as bisexual himself. Unlike his mother, his preference seems to be to conform to heteronormative society, and he feels unable to do that because he feels he wasn’t properly conditioned by archaic gender stereotypes. Given the added incentive to defend Mark Regnerus’ “bullshit” faulty study attacking gay parenting, he is clearly trying to pin his panoply of personal problems on his mother (and all same-sex parents as a result.) His story is not a valid representation of anything except his own unique perception of the world.

And yet, Bryan Fischer believes it to be the perfect example of why the children of same-sex parents should be kidnapped away for their protection — that they are the equivalent of slaves who need to be rescued. This is incredibly dangerous rhetoric that has the potential to do great harm. How much destruction could self-declared “Harriet Tubmans” do to same-sex families, motivated by Fischer’s claims? More than ever, the “culture war” is a direct attack on the lives of LGBT and their families.