Rev. Bill Banuchi, executive director of the New York Christian Coalition, recently made the following comment to Mid Hudson News:
"We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we 'celebrate' a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span according to the 2005 issue of the revered scientific journal Psychological Reports."
What Rev. Banuchi doesn't tell you is that his "fact" regarding decreased average lifespans for gays is taken from a study that was done by the virulently anti-gay organization, the Family Research Institute. FRI's chairman, Dr. Paul Cameron, is often sited as an "expert" by other anti-gay groups like NARTH and the Family Research Council, a scion of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, despite the fact that Cameron's research has been discredited by his peers over and over and over again.
But even if we lay aside the issues of honesty and credibility, we're still left with a leader of a major branch of one of the biggest Christian organizations (which happens to have the ear of the White House and both houses of Congress) apparently suggesting that gays wear identifying labels, "warning" the public of the danger they pose to American society.
How is this different from the Nazis marking of undesireables (two yellow triangles for Jews, a pink one for gays, red for political enemies, green for criminals, brown for gypsies, etc.)?
The radical religious right is slowly picking away at the rights we all once enjoyed. They're also slowly disenfranchising minority groups who won't toe their ideological line. They're using fear, they're using lies and misrepresentation, they're use religion and they're using the apathy of the American public to continue promoting their agenda of exclusivity, intolerance, bigotry and consolidation of power among their own kind. And, with alarming frequency, they're succeeding because they've learned if you only take small enough steps, no one's going to pay attention. Like the tortoise in Aesop's fable, their slow persistence is paying off because stories like the comment by Rev. Banuchi aren't big enough to generate the kind of sales and ratings that the newspapers and television stations are looking for.
When I first read this story, I asked myself, "Where is the outrage from the American public?" Then I realized the public can't protest what it doesn't know about. The story was mostly covered in gay online publications and on progressive blogs. The mainstream media was too busy worrying whether Michael Jackson was going to be acquitted or not.
When the mainstream media regurgitate the same story in different words, when they ignore or downplay stories that put this presidential (mis)administration in a bad light or expose its lies and deceptions (or alternately, give prominence to its lame excuses), when they ignore the little rips the radical religious right is putting in the US Constitution, can we really claim to have freedom of the press anymore?
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