The American Family Association’s research director and American Family Radio radio talk show host Ed Vitagliano criticized Democratic congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis for supporting marriage equality, saying that “you can only discard the traditional institution of marriage if you abandon God and abandon our Judeo Christian heritage in this country.”
According to Vitagliano, Lewis was wrong to cite the civil rights movement to defend his support for equal rights for gays and lesbians: “If you want to cite God for eliminating slavery and Jim Crow laws, you cannot then thumb your nose at the same God who obviously created men and women and created us to maintain the race through having children, and thus being married. So with all due respect, Congressman Lewis has read the gay playbook and has bought the arguments, without thinking them through, or perhaps he just needs to go back and read his Bible.”
Later in the program, Buster Wilson, the managing director of AFR, said that gay and lesbian couples who faced discrimination as a result of the Defense of Marriage Act only had themselves to blame, arguing: “that of course is tragic for anyone to go through, but as I read all that and heard about all this and how terrible DOMA is because it has violated all these rights and caused all this trouble, I just kept thinking, you know there is consequence for wrong living.” He went on to say that “homosexual lifestyles and homosexual marriage relationships are not right, and so there are consequences for living in a way that society has said for over 5,000 years is the wrong way to live.”
