The Ballad of Ake Green

With the Senate considering new hate crimes legislation [1] that adds sexual orientation to the list of protective categories, bloggers [2] have been noting the acceleration of a right-wing disinformation campaign that I first noticed on election day in 2004. I was listening to Christian radio flush out Republicans to the polls. I learned [3], as I wrote then, that

a certain bill Senator Edward M. Kennedy wishes to pass, with the intention of providing federal penalties to thugs who beat up people for reasons of sexual orientation, is actually an opening wedge to anti-Christian pogroms. Dobson and his cohorts have been railing that is not just a step but a giant leap down the same slippery slope that found a Swedish minister named Ake Green sentenced to prison for preaching against homosexuality from his pulpit.

I started digging.

And I found that claim epidemic. Here was the Maryland Family Values Alliance, which said Kennedy's bill

would literally throw open the door to attacks against people of faith, who could be prosecuted with federal monies for expressing their views on homosexuality!"

A Dr. John Ankerberg [4] invoked Ake Green to argue

that our next President and the Supreme Court Justices that he will appoint could radically change the way you practice your religion.... You will not be able to teach all that the Bible says in your church.

His authority was Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship of the nation's largest (and most politicized) Evangelical denomination. And what did the man who teaches the nation's Baptist preachers argue? That

[i]f this law is passed, which it will be in a very short time if Christians do not act, even witnessing for our Lord Jesus Christ will be a crime in America, as it is already in several countries around the world.

If you are a conservative Christian in America, it is likely that Ake Green is a household name - and that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt in 2004 that Senator Kennedy had introduced a bill to visit his fate on American ministers who preach God's word about homosexuality.

You'd have to actually have read Kennedy's S. 966 [5] to find out, as these good ministers of the gospel counted on their flocks not to do, that this was a dastardly lie. Read it backwards, sideways, up and down. Read it a thousand times. The law covers physical violence, nothing else. Those visions of thought police and preachers in jail are simply made up. Invented. Big Lie propaganda.

How long had this campaign been churning? How many radio preachers on those "praise and worship" stations that crowd the bottom of the FM dial in rural America had their listeners believing that they were about to have to join an American underground resistance? I never was able to find out. I pitched the story idea to editors of glossy magazines who had reached out to me to write for them after I finished my latest book manuscript, and didn't attract interest from a single one. There is an entire gothic strata of "knowledge" motivating the political decision-making of millions of our fellow citizens, most of it invented by moral cripples, that the mainstream media isn't interested in plumbing. It's one of the reasons I'm a blogger, instead of a glossy magazine journalist.

I digress. Now that a similar bill is under renewed consideration, The Lie is back bigger than ever.

Click on this [6] the latest contribution from the Family Values Coalition - whose leader Lou Sheldon CNN has [7] gladly let [7] pollute its air, a "WANTED" poster for Jesus Christ:

Wanted for revealing the truth about homosexuality in 'The Bible' and encouraging his followers not ot offend God by committing such behavior.

Here's Richard Land [8] of the Southern Baptist Federation, one of the most powerful Republicans in America:

The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (H.R. 1592), which passed in the House of Representatives in a veto-susceptible vote of 237-180, could well lead to serious infringements of our First Amendment freedom of speech protections in the United States. Such legislation has had a very chilling effect on free speech in Canada, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe.

The good word now has spread to black churches; several pastors, the Washington Post [9] has reported, told co-sponsor John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) his bill would "muzzle the black church.... This law can be applied in the way that can keep the church from preaching the Gospel."

How badly are the lying? Let me count the ways.

Actually, just one way: they're specifically contradicting the precise text of the bill. Which adds language, to avoid misunderstanding, to the effect that [1]

Nothing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of, the First Amendment to the Constitution.

And so, a quick reminder of just what these ministers of the Gospel are fighting for: making it easier for people to get minimal punishment when they beat people within an inch of their lives.

Christianity loves a martyr. One of my favorite Christian right organizations, in fact, is "Voice of the Martyr," which sponsors prostelytization into non-Christian nations [10] and, in its free magazine and website persecution.com [11], loves nothing more than to luxuriate over violence visited on believers in foreign lands. It is, of course, a noble human rights issue, but another message, I'm certain, is never far from many of its American supporters: that someday, perhaps soon, they, too, as faithful Christians, might suffer these mortifications of the flesh. (VOM wins extra hits for its website by exploiting these yearnings, making the come-ons as vague as possible; "Pastor Beaten by Radicals While Police Watch" [12] was a recent one - happened to be a story about India, but couldn't it have gone down just as well in Greenwich Village? Couldn't it????)

It would be, indeed, surprising had this powerful spiritual yearning had not been exploited by righteous fag-haters for Christ. And, a final thought: media indifference to the con makes hustling it surprisingly easy. "At Issue Are Sermons Against Homosexuality," [9] ran the subhead of the Post's article on conservative black pastors fighting the hate crimes bill. No, no, no, no, no: "sermons against homosexuality" are not at issue at all. Lies are. Maybe, two or three years down the road, the Post will finally get around to reporting about that.