At next week’s Values Voter Summit, Mitt Romney is scheduled to take the stage immediately before Bryan Fischer, an American Family Association (AFA) spokesman with a long and shocking record of bigotry against gays and lesbians, American Muslims, Native Americans and other minority groups. Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum are also scheduled to speak at the event, which is sponsored by the anti-gay Family Research Council, the AFA, and other Religious Right groups. PFAW is urging these candidates for our nation’s highest office to condemn bigotry.
At next week’s Values Voter Summit, Mitt Romney is scheduled to take the stage immediately before Bryan Fischer, an American Family Association
spokesman with a long and shocking record of bigotry against gays and lesbians, American Muslims, Native Americans and other minority groups. Rick
Perry, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum are also scheduled to speak at the event, which is sponsored by the anti-gay
Family Research Council, the AFA, and other Religious Right groups.
Last year, People For the American Way
called on
Romney and other prominent GOP leaders to denounce Fischer’s bigotry before appearing with him at the Values Voter Summit. This year, the event’s organizers kept
Fischer off the list of “confirmed speakers,” but listed his Oct. 8 speech on an event schedule posted yesterday, PFAW’s Right Wing Watch
reports.
- Fischer, the chief spokesman for the AFA, has insisted that American Muslims have no First Amendment
rights,has said that Muslims should be banned from the U.S. military, and has
called for a ban on the building of new mosques in
the U.S.
-
· Fischer has written that “
gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism
,” thinks gays and lesbians should be “
disqualified from public office
,” claims that gays are responsible for the Nazi Party and
that gay people today will ”
do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents in Nazi Germany
“.
- Fischer has insisted that Native Americans are “
morally disqualified”
from controlling American land and insists that American Indian communities are “mired in poverty and alcoholism” because
not all have converted to Christianity
- He has written that African American welfare recipients “ rut like rabbits.”
-
Last year, Fischer
insulted Medal of Honor winner
Sal Giunta, who saved the lives of two fellow soldiers under heavy fire in Afghanistan, saying “we have feminized the Medal of Honor” because “we
now award it only for preventing casualties, not for inflicting them.”
People For the American Way president Michael Keegan
urged Romney and his fellow presidential candidates to denounce Fischer’s bigotry before appearing with him at the event.
“Bryan Fischer’s stunning record of public bigotry would make him a pariah in any sane political movement,” Keegan said. “But his long record of
hate speech doesn’t seem to bother the supposed ‘mainstream’ GOP politicians like Mitt Romney and Rick Perry who are sharing the stage with him at an
event sponsored by his employer. Candidates don’t have to agree with the views of everyone they appear with – but they should be wary of lending
legitimacy to those who peddle hate and fear of their fellow Americans.
“If Mitt Romney wants to appeal to mainstream audiences, he should publicly disassociate himself from Fischer’s bigotry before handing him
the podium.”
For more information on Bryan Fischer, see PFAW’s report,
The GOP’s Favorite Hate-Monger: How the Republican Party Came to Embrace Bryan Fischer
and the video
Four Minutes of Hate: The Naked Bigory of the AFA’s Bryan Fischer
.
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