The Family Research Council (FRC) is a homophobic, fundamentalist, wingnut denialist group entirely appropriately designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Robert Morrison is senior fellow at the FRC, and staunchly opposed to marriage equality. For instance, when Dick Cheney came out in favor of marriage equality, Morrison lamented that “in this great cultural clash, Dick Cheney has enlisted with the forces of dissolution”. And, like many opponents of marriage equality, Morrison promptly went on to lament the great “devastation that comes from the breakdown of marriage,” apparently willfully oblivious to the fact that legalizing same-sex marriage would rather obviously mean that morepeople would get married.
Of course, Morrison has shown great willingness to go way more ridiculous than that, such as when he compared the LGBT rights movement to the Vietnam draft, complaining that “the whole country’s being conscripted into a pride parade” (it’s striking how these people so consistently fail to understand, well, words). “It’s a question of defending liberty itself, because they can’t violate the laws of nature and of nature’s God [that’s not quite what “liberty” means], as the Declaration talks about, they can’t violate those laws without trampling religious freedom and political liberty at the same time.” And that, readers, is of course the epitome of a word salad – Morrison evidently thought that putting “liberty” and “the Declaration” into a sentence denouncing LGBT rights would make it rhetorically powerful, but didn’t really think out how to make the resulting sentence make minimal sense; we do, of course, suspect that neither Morrison nor his intended audience would care or even notice. This one is not much better in terms of coherence or meaning. Here is Morrison trying to defend the Southern Strategy without really understanding what it is.
Morrison has also weighed in on other pressing matters, for instance claiming that the government or states failing to mandate reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools creates more “American Talibans”. He has also weighed in on sex education, offering what he thinks of as “proof” that “condom programs don’t work.” The proof is the Monica Lewinsky scandal, “the most deplorable episode in our history.” How that is supposed to be proof of the inefficacy of condom programs is one of many mysteries of the feverish imagination of Robert Morrison (he has no clue, of course; nor does he have a clue what a proofis). Try to make sense of this. He also invoked Bastille Day as well as Jimmy Carter and Library of Congress to argue that we shouldn’t confirm Sonia Sotomayor in one of the most bizarre stream-of-consciousness rants ever penned.
Diagnosis: Might be genuinely stupid. At least he has a precarious grasp of words and their meanings, and the whole idea of inferences from premises seems to elude him – he tries, to be sure, with bizarre results that bear little resemblance to anything recognizable as reasoning. But hate – well, he’s got that one down.
He's from a nation that has the Trail of Tears in its past, was built on literal genocide and was in fact still sterilising 'undesirable' against their will in the Eighties, but he thinks the Lewinsky scandal is the most deplorable thing in its history.
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