Hitting Wildmon-AFA's Bigotry

Folk Bum has a post displaying the American Family Association’s (AFA) promotion of a Christmas-lighted cross that appears precisely like the image of a burning cross.

And the AFA is drawing howls.

“The American Family Association--they of the our-morality-for-all bent--is offering a sweet new Xmas gift,” laughs Folk Bum.

"The American Family Association has really topped themselves," observes John Cole.

The AFA’s founder is of course one Donald Wildmon—a self-proclaimed decency advocate challenging Jews, gays, humanists and other assorted going-to-spend-eternity-in-damnation types by “focusing primarily on the influence of television and other media” that Wildmon fears promotes witchcraft, homosexuality and so on.

Wildmon is of course a fool, as documented well, for example:

"During a 1985 speech before the National Religious Broadcasters, Wildmon cited a survey of top media executives conducted by two researchers, claiming that the results ‘indicated that 59 percent of the people who are responsible for network programming were raised in Jewish homes. If the people who control the networks in Hollywood were 59 percent Christian and if they were only 1 percent as anti-Semitic as the networks are currently anti-Christian, there would [be] a massive public outcry from the national liberal secular media.’"

More revealing is the response to Folkbum's post from the we-hate-evidence crowd of Wisconsin Republican bloggers.

- “Now you're just being stupid and insulting.” - James Wigderson

- “The post steps over the line at first impression.” - Dad29

Today’s Republican commentators on the net, seemingly with the sole exception of David Blaska, never were that big on civil rights and the fight against the social pathologies of racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia.

Since the inception of Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968, continuing through Reagan’s 1980 campaign kick-off in Philadelphia, Mississippi [the site of the murder of civil rights workers, Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, 16 years earlier], right on up to Bush and McCain, playing on the bigotries in America has been standard GOP fare.

Reading Wisconsin GOP bloggers, listening to Milwaukee talk radio, it seems apparent that this will continue.

So, as one considers the GOP and its allies in the religious right like the AFA (and their blazingly brilliant theories on Jews, gays, witchcraft and “decency”), their burning cross seems an apropos symbol for the anti-Semitic idiots.

And don't expect Republican bloggers to denounce Wildmon and his imbecilic rants.