#2738: Jim Daly

Focus on the Family is a fundamentalist hate group – presently self-designated as ‘a church’ for tax disclosure purposes – that we’d have had plenty of opportunities to cover already. Jim Daly is its current president (or, since it is now a church: “head deacon and elder”) and as such generally responsible for the group’s efforts to promote in particular anti-gay propaganda and legislation, including fighting restrictions on conversion therapy. He is also the main host of the Focus on the Family radio program.

 

Though Daly is behind efforts to repaint his group’s messages in friendlier and more inclusive terms – mostly just emphasizing how much they love people while denouncing them as being manipulated by Satan and claiming to be nonpartisan while taking explicit positions on political issues – Daly has himself spread plenty of hate against LGBT people. He has, for instance, claimed that same-sex marriage endangers civilization and that Satan himself is behind same-sex marriage since “he hates marriage because it’s a reflection of God’s image” – “the Enemy hates that, it’s disgusting to him,” said Daly, “and with that, he wants to break it down, he wants to destroy it.”. Here is Daly trying to invoke Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel to argue why it is important to denounce the decision to allow “openly practicing homosexuals” in the Boy Scouts, which, as Daly sees it, will undermine “the character and safety of the boys.”

 

In a more conspiratorial mode, Daly has also claimed that “homosexual activists” wish to restrict the speech of anyone opposed to homosexuality, and that campaigning on behalf of LGBT rights “it really is a form of fascism.” On the pseudoscience side, meanwhile, Daly has supported and promoted the discredited anti-LGBT study by Mark Regnerus.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s hate, and hate pinned up by pseudoscience; and trying to portray your hate as something other than hate isn’t going to make it less hateful. But the religious right remains a powerful political force in the US, and Focus on the Family remains more or less in the center of the religious right; Daly’s political influence is, in other words, difficult to overestimate.