Don Wildmon
This week's Creep, American Family Association Founder and Chairman Don Wildmon, comes to you courtesy of our Chicken Little Department.
As much as right-wing conservatives love to hate us, LGBT folks make them some pretty good money. Hell, we should be getting a commission for every dollar they raise scaring little grannies and home schooling parents with photos of muscled men in lime-green G-strings and big, burly lesbians kissing each other full on the mouth.
So it was hardly surprising that the week before Bill "Cat Killer" Frist is supposed to bring the Marriage Protection Amendment before the Senate for a vote, Wildmon would use the issue as a fund and fear-raising tactic. On May 28 the AFA sent out an email letter signed by Wildmon bearing the following subject line: "Activist Judge Overturns Marriage Laws; Homosexual Marriage Now Legal In All 50 States."
Now that ought to freak out the folks in Kansas.
It isn't, of course, true, and Wildmon says so in his opening pitch. "How would you like to wake up one morning and learn that the above headline was the top story in every newspaper in America? That hasn't happenedÑYET!"
Boo! Grab your purse, granny, because here come the queers.
Wildmon encourages readers to contact their Senators and tell them to support the marriage amendment. After all, Wildmon admonishes, "If a Senator votes against the MPA, he or she is in reality voting for homosexual marriage."
And why are so many of our Senators supposedly closet gay marriage supporters? "One reason," Wildmon says, "is that those who believe in traditional marriage have been silent."
Ah yes, the anti-gay faction has been pretty meek. I mean, it's not like the President just signed a ban on protests at soldiers' funerals to stop crazy right-wing wackos who are really picketing homosexuality.
Yes, the right-wing hold on every freakin' branch of government in this country is no match for the "homosexual grip" Wildmon claims our Senators are in.
But fundraising pitches like this are Wildmon's bread and butter. And this particular one probably wouldn't have stood out in my mind except that on that same day a headline in the New York Times read, "Indonesia Hit by Big Quake Near Volcano," with reports of up to 3,500 deaths. That number is now at 5,700 and growing. It's a humanitarian crisis of enormous magnitude.
Strange, but I didn't see an AFA email alert about that. I mean, sure, the people impacted aren't the AFA's usual constituency. They aren't Americans, for one, and they aren't white Christians. But still, it puts things in perspective, doesn't it?
I think it was Gandhi who said, "The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems."
But then, well, he wasn't American either.
Do what you're capable of doing starting with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies at http://www.ifrc.org. Then call Wildmon at 662-844-5036 and get all Foxy Loxy on his ass.
