#2086: Star Parker

Star Parker is the founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), columnist (e.g. Townhall and the WND), sometimes politician (running unsuccessfully for Congress for California’s 37^thDistrict in 2010), author, activist and extreme wingnut. According to herself, she used to be a “welfare queen” who realized the sinfulness of her ways and went on wingnut welfare instead.

She is, accordingly, probably most famous for her views on welfare, which she claims has become like a “government plantation”, creating a situation where those who accept the invitation switch mindsets from “How do I take care of myself?” to “What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?”. Her views on these matters are laid out in her books Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats: From Welfare Cheat to Conservative Messenger(1998) and Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It(2003). In 2010, Parker sued the White House over its efforts to rebut misinformation regarding health care reform.

Religion and Politics

Politically, Parker is an admirer of Christian Reconstructionism founder R.J. Rushdoony, which is well illustrated by her 2010 talk to the John Birch Society claiming that Obama “is a secular leftist” who doesn’t have a “biblical worldview” and is “pushing the envelope as far as angering God.” Whether he is a “Pharaoh or a Nebuchadnezzar we don’t know, but we do know that ultimately he will not succeed. The Scriptures are very clear, that God abhors the bloodthirsty and the deceitful,” said Parker. Indeed, the whole Democratic Party is “evil” and “the party of anti-Christ.” In 2015, when Obama had the audacity to make entirely reasonable but very moderate comments about religious violence, Parker accused him of committing “verbal rape. Frankly, what the president did was verbal rape.” It was not, in part because the phrase is utterly nonsensical.

Meanwhile, secularists hate America. They have also taken over America, to the chagrin of delusional conspiracy theorists everywhere. Fortunately, as Parker sees it, God will come and beat them all up.

At least racism doesn’t exist anymore. In a 2010 WND article titled “Why Are We Discussing Racism?” Parker pointed out that “[a]ccording to Gallup polling of last week, the issues most on the minds of Americans are the economy and jobs followed by dissatisfaction with all aspects of government. I didn’t notice racism on the list anywhere.” So that settles that.

In the wake of the Parkland shootings, Parker refused to blame gun access. Instead she blamed the students for not being “nice enough” to the attacker.

Promiscuity and moral chaos

Otherwise Parker is an uncompromising champion of the religious right’s view of sex and the body, being opposed to abortion (claiming that “rampant abortion” has hurt black families and pushing the thoroughly debunked claim that abortion leads to mental health issues), divorce, homosexuality (e.g. this one) and birth control, things she believes are factors contributing to the decline of America. In particular, argues Parker, all of America’s ills, from excessive government spending to poverty, can be accounted for as results of “sexual promiscuity” and “immorality.” We “can’t divorce our sexual promiscuity from our fiscal promiscuity,” Parker says, and “sexual irresponsibility and immorality” have already brought us “the top three social crises confronting us as a nation today,” namely “AIDS, abortion, and the entire welfare state.” These are not the top three social crises facing the US today. If it were, however, it would, according to Parker, have a quick fix: by reducing our “sexual energy,” we can produce “economic health as well as moral health”. Moreover, politicians who currently represent poor communities are like “tyrants” who “sell a lie,” since “the redistribution of wealth” is “inconsistent” with Parker’s political views Scripture (chapter and verse not provided) and American values. Here Parker compares the Congressional Black Caucus to slave masters; “the overseer today is the Congressional Black Caucus, their exclusive job is to keep them on the plantation, keep them uneducated, and keep them unarmed. And this was the same job as the overseer of the slave plantation, which was liberal Democrats,” which is one way of viewing things; “they would take that slave, they would strip the skin off of him and make everybody watch,” Parker adds, “and that is what they do to us,” the Black Caucus leaders. Apparently Parker seems to think that her, uh, analogy can do the work of a political argument.

Based on that line of “thought”, Parker has devoted some effort to criticizing the major players she thinks are wreaking havoc with these destructive sexual forces. Speaking at the Values Voter Summit in 2012, for instance, Parker strongly criticized Sandra Fluke: The “HHS Mandate has made Sandra Fluke a national icon for sexual promiscuity,” said Parker, which is a very silly thing to say.

By contrast, Parker firmly supported Mark Sanford’s return to Congress because he is “principled”.

Gay marriage

As for marriage equality, Parker has compared gay marriage to (of course) slavery, arguing (well, claiming) that it leads to “moral chaos” (she expands upon that claim here, in a column that is remarkable for its ridiculousness and tortured attempts at drawing connections, even by wingnut standards). Moreover, writes Parker, “homosexuals have hijacked the civil-rights movement” and “have interjected the very values that are destroying black communities,” such as “the escalation of crime and disease – much tied to irresponsible sexual behavior.” The one tying “irresponsible sexual behavior” to “escalation of crime and disease” is of course Parker herself, not the evidence (there has been no escalation in crime and disease). Then she argued that “enemies of God” (i.e. liberals) are using the issue of homosexuality to undercut marriage and “bring hostility into the public square,” for instance by comparing anti-gay activists to slave holders, we presume. Moreover, gay marriage is, according to Parker, killing black people.

No fan of Obama, Parker claimed in 2013 (in a notoriously incoherent ramble) that Obama’s government is going to turn America into an openly gay nation of emotionless, disconnected zombies like “in Europe”, where people exalt “vileness.” In particular, Europeans are currently “just a bunch of zombies” who have stopped talking to each other because of growing distrust caused by gay rights and, in particular, equality-promoting legislation, “laws that are pushing homosexuality out into society;” “when you have this type of vileness exalted, the wicked go on the prowl,” says Parker. And make no mistake: zeh gays are coming for your children.

Expanding on her point about the hostility of the gay rights movement, Parker pointed out that liberals have “declared a war on marriage, weakened women and opened the door to this culture of meaningless.” Moreover, “[t]he feminist movement was nothing more than the promotion of monism, the elimination of gender binary. It’s an attack on the Creator, the created, the distinction. He said if we look at marriage, we see Him. Conjugal and sacramental marriage is the capstone of creation and, as a result of its collapse, homosexuality is now dividing us and bringing horrible hostility into the public square.” If you haven’t noticed, Parker’s rants are – as so many wingnut rants – entirely devoid of argument, evidence or use of reason (unless you count this?) but merely sequences of descriptions of stuff they don’t like using more and more colorful language.

In 2010, Parker warned that marriage equality in DC would lead to the spread of HIV – it’s like thinking “that serving up another glass of wine is the way to help a drunk” – saying that “it should concern every American as we watch our nation’s capital city transform officially into Sodom.” That is already setting a pretty high bar for oneself in terms of ridiculousness. She has managed to top it, though – we’ll give her that. For instance, Parker has gone on to compare the rainbow flag with the Confederate flag, pointing out the “incredible irony” in the fact that it “is the same people that are demanding that the Confederate flag comes down are the same people that are insisting that the rainbow flag goes up. These two flags represent the exact same thing. That certain people groups are not welcome here.” Yes, she said that. 

The real goal of the gay rights movement is of course to vanquish Christianity. In a WND column “‘Gay’ Agenda: A Cultural War Against Christians,” for instance, Parker points out that “the ‘gay rights’ crusade” wants “to push Christian reality, once and for all, into the closet and to lock the door.”

Parker has also tied marriage equality to failing public schools, and LGBT-inclusive rules in schools amount to the “molestation” of children in Parker’s mind.

Miscellaneous

Pointing out that conservative talk radio is bigger than liberal talk radio, Parker hypothesizes that this is “because talk radio is a medium of the mind and of thinking and discourse. This works well for conservative and free-market ideas, which get sold on thought and logic;” by contrast, the “liberal message is emotional, not logical. This is why it doesn’t work on talk radio. Liberalism operates by provoking emotions such as guilt, fear and envy. This works in sound bites and visual media, but not on talk radio.” Not a hint of irony.

Diagnosis: Yes, another one. But Parker has managed to attain quite some influence in wingnut circles, and it is certainly not because of her reasoning skills.