How do to deal with the anti-gay Religious Right?

[Meldread]

I have been trying to think of tactics and strategies to deal with the anti-gay religious right in the media and other public places. Here are some things that have come to mind, please add your comments and any other tactics and strategies that you can think of.


* Take away their legitimacy. With Bush back in the White House for 4 more years they feel that they have earned a right to legitimacy. They feel that they are a strong segment of society. This might be true, but this validates them and lends credence to their cause. If people believe that they have some form of legitimacy then Politicians will continue to cater to their wishes.

* Do not engage them in religious debates, but instead draw them away from their religious overtones. Engaging them in religious debates is a pointless exercise because there is no possible way to win the debate. More often than not it will degenerate into some people identifying with them, while others may begin to feel sympathy for them as the Religious Right plays the "victim of persecution from the homosexual community" card. Instead draw them away from their religious overtones and into a territory where you can stand on a stronger ground.

* Use light-hearted ridicule. We should never forget that we are targeting a broader audience. We aren't going to change their minds, and making the attempt is more or less a waste of breath and energy. Our focus is the common person, the guy who reads his morning paper and is indifferent one way or another. The house wife who turns on the TV to catch the evening news. Subject the Religious Right to light-hearted ridicule, but avoid strong ridicule which could generate sympathy for them. If people are laughing at them, they won't be taken seriously and if they aren't taken seriously they will lose legitimacy. This recent Spongebob fiasco was ripe for this sort of thing. Here are two quotes that I feel easily summarize this tactic:

"...the enemy of our enemy is perspective... All we need to do is expose fears to the sunlight and they shrink. They're persistent but not brave. Or expose them to ridicule, and they flee. Laughing juries don't convict."
- Dale Dauten

"Ridicule is a weak weapon when pointed at a strong mind; but common people are cowards and dread an empty laugh."
- Martin Tupper

* Do not let their voices go unchallenged. Whenever one of them begins to speak out about something, we must always be there to counter it. It does not matter how trivial it is. We should never lose a battle because we are silent.

* Bring people like Fred Phelps into more visibility. His actions are so abhorrent that even people such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson try and distance themselves from him. If they are given more visibility then we could use that to better humanize us to the general population. (After all the only difference between Fred Phelps and Jerry Falwell is that Fred Phelps doesn't mix his intolerance and bigotry with flowery speech. He's blunt, harsh, and hateful. We should use him like a tool.)



These are just some possible strategies and tactics that have come to my mind. Does anyone else have any others?

[eallen]

1. That last half-point is important!

In a discussion on an unrelated bulletin board, some religious righters (we need a better term) tried to distance themselves from Phelps and his "hate." My one injection in the thread was to ask precisely how Phelps's views were different from Pat Robertsons or others in the religious right, except in tone and phrasing? It's important to point out that a pig isn't any more a pig when it goes without lipstick.

[rkc3]

3. A better term - try Christian Taliban.

These idiots, using the name of Jesus Christ, have done to my religion, what guys like bin Laden have done to Islam. They take specific quotations out of context and turn them into tools of war, hate, fear, and bigotry.

It's unfortunate the American people aren't smart enough to see the similarities between the two.

This never ceases to amaze me.

[BR_Parkway]

2. Would you support a Constitutional Amendment on sprinkling vs

dunking them under the water to baptize?

My response has been to reduce it to the ridiculous and put it back in perspective.

Every various religion has customs, traditions and practices according to what they believe their God has led them to interpret. Some churches support same sex marriage and affirm gays as one of God's creation. Other's don't. No one has proposed a Constitutional Amendment to protect the sanctity of baptism from those who don't want to do the traditional dunking.

[Ian David]

5. Christian won't give Jew driver's license because they drive on Sabbath

A devout Christian at the Registry of Motor Vehicles refuses to grant a driver's license to Jews because he has a conscientious objection to them driving on the Sabbath.

Make obvious parallels and direct reference to gay marriage issues, and to the Conscientious Objector Policy Act in Michigan that allows doctors to refuse to treat gay people.

[Ian David]

4. I have a whole bunch. Some of them I presented here already

1) The Demchurian Candidate: Run for a state or local office on a rabidly anti-gay platform for the sole purpose of splitting the vote with a genuinely anti-gay politician.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3055898#3057702


2) Stand around sidewalks and parks offering "Free Divorce Registration" to people who have had their marriages destroyed by gay marriage.

3) Homosexual Recruitment Drive. "Hi, would you like to become a homosexual? No? Why not? You think you were 'born straight'? Oh, is that so! So, people who are gay must not have been 'born straight, right?"

4) County Fair Freak-Show Booths. Pay $0.50 to "..see the gay family in their natural environment. A real-live gay family will talk to you and answer your questions."

5) Shock-and-awe campaign of simultaneous gay-rights lawsuits filed pro-se in ultra-conservative dirt-poor jurisdictions.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=221x6063

6) Celebrity door-to-door canvassing. Take a celebrity spokesperson door-to-door to do "Voter ID" and to talk to people about gay rights and marriage equality. For example, take Margaret Cho to Asian neighborhoods, Whoopi Goldberg to black neighborhoods, or to any community where they have been tested as having a high approval and recognition ratings."

7) Infiltrate and sabotage from within. Where you can't infiltrate, create the appearance of infiltration to spread distrust and contention within their ranks. I won't go into detail HERE.

8) Re-direction. Purchase mailing lists of conservative Christians and encourage them to direct their time and money into more useful endeavors-- for example ending the human sex slave trade, supporting The Christian Children's Fund, or fighting against the oppression of Christian minorities over-seas.

9) Create satirical anti-gay PACS and use them to put satirical position statements on the voter education packets for ballot initiatives (this has already been done). Something like "The Society for Heterosexual Breeding.

10) Join anti-gay protests and out-do them with slogans like, "Gay eat Christian Babies."

11) Find opportunities to speak at anti-gay rallies, use quotes in your speech from Adolf Hitler, and at the end of your speech tell them where you borrowed your words from.

12) Work the crowd at anti-gay rallies to collect signatures for bogus causes that you can use to humiliate them. Or, collect signatures for REAL causes for use to re-direct them in more positive directions (see item 8). This information, once collected, can also be shared or used for other purposes.

13) Information collected from #12 can, for example, be used to call anti-gay people to attend meetings in a college auditorium only to find that they aren't scheduled for the space and it's being used for a physics final.

14) Obtain copies of the signatures they've collected for ballot initiatives (public domain) and confirm that they are collecting valid signatures. This information can also be used (if legal) for various other of the above programs.

15) Compare the list of petition signatories to voter registration lists to identify registered voters who have NOT signed the anti-gay petitions. Target THOSE individuals for outreach.

16) Leave ridiculously anti-gay material in supermarket literature racks. For example, "gays eat Christian babies" and "gay people sneak into your house and steal your breath while you're sleeping." Similarly, locate ACTUAL anti-gay literature left at the supermarket, duplicate the style of the material, and replace it with pro-equality literature.

17) Determine who on the pro-gay email lists is actually someone working for "the other side" and intentionally feed them mis-information and re-direction.

18) Harvest email addresses of anti-gay organizations and make sure they can easily fall into the hands of spammers. Also, send re-direction messages to those addresses (Save the Children).

19) Target neighborhoods where Catholic churches have been shut-down with messages saying things like, "Your archdiocese spent forty million dollars this year to try and keep gay people from marrying. That would have been enough to keep your church's doors open for three more years."

20) Similarly, leave literature to that effect on the windshields of cars in church parking lots.

[BR_Parkway]

6. So, if you and I formed a think tank, with the express intention of

proving, once and for all, something like how much it damages children to be bought up in gay homes (like mine were, hey, we've got our first two guinea pigs) - I wonder how much $$$ we could convince these groups and churches to put into our hands for "research"?

I like alot of your ideas - except some of the "leave totally ridiculous pamplets around" - but I live in a Red state, too many people around here would NOT get the fact that it was over the top, they'd just pass it along with "hey, did you hear about them gays eatin Christian babies?" Trust me, well armed men with very little deductive reasoning skills do NOT need to be encouraged this way around here.

[Ian David]

8. I'd love to start forming local "disruption cells" to do this stuff

So long as it was things within the letter of the law.

I think we could form pretty much any kind of think-tank we wanted so long as we're not taking money from people under false pretenses. As long as nobody is giving you money, you can get away with a whole lot more.

That means of you were to run a Demchurian Candidate, it would probably be best NOT to accept donations from anyone who does not know your real purpose. If you started a PAC just to get a statement in a voter's guide, it would be best NOT to solicit funds. It is a good rule of thumb NOT to accept ANY money from your opposition.


Also, I have another idea. Form special-interest PACs for the purposes of inserting yourself into court cases where you should have no business, just like the anti-gay groups do.

For example, "Americans Against Divorce." When one of the fundamentalist "pro-family" Christians files for divorce, you file an amicus brief in the case and sue to prevent the divorce from taking proceeding.

I am sure there are other instances where you could insert yourself. Watch the real estate listings, and if someone like Dobson is trying to buy or sell a property, suddenly a religious organization can declare the place to be a sacred site that needs to be left un-developed.

If THEY can insert themselves into court cases where THEY have no business, then why can't WE?


Also, the religious right loves to portray themselves as victims of a liberal secular agenda.

The moderate religionists-- the ones that aren't "obvious" and don't "flaunt it" and don't try to "cram it down our throats"-- are almost as annoyed as the atheists and non-theists.

Let's put an end to that.

Let's make the moderate religionists outraged by the onslaught of religious belief upon their day-to-day lives. Let's make it so that religious forces are constantly suing to intrude on all their business.

Become an obnoxious crusader for "religious freedom" and your right to "religious expression."

Sue to keep Jews from getting drivers licenses because they drive on Sunday. Sue to prevent non-Jews from being circumcised. Sue to prevent non-Catholics from marrying because a marriage is not sacred unless you accept communion. Sue to have the stop signs removed from your town because they look like Satan's pentagram. Sue to have barcodes removed from product labels because it has something to do with The Mark of the Beast. Sue for the right of a defendant in a courtroom to have a priest say a blessing over the jury, whether the jurists like it or not. Sue to get your town to stop selling condoms. Sue to make blood transfusions illegal. Sue to make traffic stop five times a day so Muslims can pray to Allah on the highway. Sue to ban the sale of leavened bread during Passover. Sue to have the names of streets in your town changed because you have religious objections to streets like "Gay Street" and "Broadway" and "Holly Lane" and "Malcolm X Boulevard." Sue to have your streets re-named to things like "Virgin Mary Lane" and "The Avenue of Our Savior." Heck, sue to have your town re-named to "Jesus is Lord."

And most importantly-- SUE TO MAKE IT ILLEGAL TO HOLD OR TELEVISE SPORTING EVENTS ON SUNDAYS!!!!

[mitchtv]

7. I would like to greet them going to Sunday school

at the War supporting Churches (S Baptist) with lurid blowups of Iraqi children maimed, mocking their Pro-life stance. Slight;y off message , but its all the same battle.

[Ian David]

9. Ooh! I like that! Use anti-abortion tactics for anti-war purposes!

Someone please let me know if you want to do this in Massachusetts.

I would love to do this outside one of our local Catholic churches that is most well-known for its anti-abortion activism.

Conversely, I suppose we COULD just have anti-abortion demonstrations outside their churches using the exact same signs and graphics they use outside the clinics.

You know, show-up outside THEIR church and show THEIR children the same pictures of aborted fetuses that THEY show outside the clinics.

This is nothing against Catholics or Catholicism, this is about the personal activities of certain individuals using the organization as a base of operations for POLITICAL activities, as opposed to their personal spirituality for which I have great respect.

[mitchtv]

11. RC's haven't been as consistantly and staunchly pro war

as their S Baptist allies. Also a twist Their support of Walmart and China's forced abortion policies.

[TrogL]

10. You have to engage them in religious debate

They are wrong in their interpretation of the Bible even if they refuse to call it an "interpretation" (which is their first mistake).

[xchrom]

12. back in the day

when aids activism was at it's height -- some of the things described were used -- and to great effect.

gay folk have a wonderful brand of humour{some of it pretty dark, some not} that can be used in direct confrontation with conservative churches -- terrific public relations moments can be made out of the ridiculous.

covering jerry falwell's home church with the rainbow flag comes to mind....