#1638: Blaine Galliher

Blaine Galliher was a member of the Alabama House of Representatives (30. district) from 1994 to 2012, when he resigned to serve as Governor Bentleys Legislative Director. For our purposes Galliher is most notable for his strategy for getting creationism taught in public schools. While legislators have not had much success forcing creationism onto the curriculum, Galliher’s bill would allow schools to offer academic credit for a released time program of creationist instruction taking place off school property. His colleague, Mary Sue McClurkin (R-Indian Springs) thought “this would be a real good [opportunity], to be able to study religion.” According to legal experts, the strategy would not be less in violation of the Constitution than the usual creationist attempts. And at least Galliher was pretty forthcoming about his intentions: “They teach evolution in the textbooks, but they don't teach a creation theory,” and “[c]reation has just as much right to be taught in the school system as evolution does and I think this is simply providing the vehicle to do that.”

Apparently the bill was introduced at the behest of a former teacher who was “fired in 1980 for reading the Bible and teaching creationism at Spring Garden Elementary School when parents of the public school sixth-grade students objected and he refused to stop,” one Joseph Kennedy, who “still has a dream of teaching public school students about creationism.” Kennedy and his supporters were poised to offer a course on creationism if the bill should have passed. Which, of course, it didn’t (though it passed committee).

Diagnosis: Alabama still doesn’t have much of a reputation for its public education, and anti-education zealots like Galliher are at least partly to blame for that. There are plenty of them where he came from.

#1637: Dan Gainor

Yeah, we’re on a roll with them, so here you go: Dan Gainor, journalist and leader of the Business Media Institute (BMI), a branch of L. Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, and director of its Culture and Media Institute (taking the reins after Robert Knight), whose goal is “to advance, preserve, and help restore America’s culture, character, traditional values, and morals against the assault of the liberal media,” anti-gay activist. To illustrate the work of the BMI, their 2006 report is useful: It concludes that various TV programs, including Law & Order, were “biased against business.” Beyond businesses, according to Gainor, the media is conspiring against Christians; the media is for instance covertly attacking Christianity by reporting on sports (instead of religion) and by covering non-Christian faiths. And GEORGE SOROS IS BEHIND IT‼‼ Gainor didn’t like the movie “Norm of the North” either (because “Norm goes on his own little polar bear jihad against capitalism”). Another BMI report accused the news networks of bias in favor of the Gardasil vaccine; yes, the BMI is anti-vaccine as well, though they attack vaccines from the fire-and-brimstone side where disease is considered just punishment for sin rather than from the point of view of flaky woo.

Currently, Gainor and his group have had a particular focus on homosexuality, however. So, according to Gainor, marriage equality advocates will “undermine our entire country and everything that made us free.” And to achieve this goal, those advocates have coopted the media, who is now engaging in “full-blown fascist propaganda" tactics to promote marriage equality. And thus, “it’s Christians who stand up to traditional marriage who are actually the ones being discriminated against” (quote by Efrem Graham that Gainor endorsed). So, yes – that kind: like any good paranoid conspiracy theorist, Gainor thinks that those who disagree with him not only, you know, disagree with him, but that they want to “kick us out of the country, lock us up, or shoot us,” which sounds strikingly like psychological projection. Here is the Culture and Media Institute’s Andrew Collins on the show Glee (and here is Paul Wilson giving his two cents as well).

It’s not only gay rights, though. Gainor also thinks that 2007 snowstorms in Denver prove that there is a “Northeast bias” on global warming – if the leftist media had been living in Colorado than on the East Coast, they would have been more skeptical of global warming. Since that’s how climate science works.

In general, Gainor’s stated goal is to combat bias in the media. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the faintest clue how biases actually work or how to recognize them. A telling example of that is his recent pronouncement that now that NBC has terminated its financial relationship with Donald Trump, no one from that channel can cover the Republican primaries now because they’re “biased”: “No NBC reporter is now qualified to cover the presidential election,” said Gainor. “They have chosen an activist position – and the same goes for Univision. If they don’t want to discipline their president of content, then they’ve made their decision: they’re an activist organization, not a news organization.” But if they had retained Trump’s show and thereby had a direct financial connection to him worth millions (for both)? (And as Ed Brayton points out, one wonders what Gainor would say if one of the networks was invested in a television series with Hillary Clinton worth millions of dollars.) Anyways, to Gainor it is an example of classic liberal media bias: “They are picking and choosing who the American public is allowed to see, interact with, and vote for” by dropping the show, concluded Gainor. “That’s not their role.” Words fail.

Diagnosis: Ah, yes: With all his might Gainor is trying to combat bias in the media. However, when your general outlook is best characterized by delusional paranoia and motivated reasoning turned into (something close to) an art form, this is what the result will look like. It’s not pretty.

#1636: Steve Gaines

Yes, let’s run yet another anti-gay lunatic. Steve Gaines, of the Bellevue Baptist Church in Tennessee, was one of Rick Santorum’s valued supporters during the 2012 Republican primaries. Gaines thinks that gay rights and gays in the media are a serious threat to America’s security and economy: “America’s economy and America’s safety are more tied up with what’s going on in those courts in Massachusetts than what’s going on in Wall Street or over in Iraq,” said Gaines, but didn’t explain how: “Radical homosexuals and lesbians seek to take over our nation. You cannot watch television without being subjected to Gay propaganda. They seek to brain wash our citizens so they can make same-sex marriage the law of the land” is not an explanation, nor is “I personally believe that if America does not repent, she is headed for national disaster,” though apparently it is God who is going to cause it, out of revenge, and if He does, then it seems pretty unfair to blame the gays for these disasters, doesn't it?

Moreover, Gaines has warned us that since “homosexuals and lesbians cannot reproduce biologically so they prey on the children of normal people, seeking to entice them to be trapped in their perverted lifestyle,” since homosexuality is not a sexual orientation but a conspiracy to control the world.

One interesting detail about Gaines, though, is that his own moral compass seems to be broken. Or to put it differently: It is unclear whether his endorsement in the end helped Santorum’s campaign.

Diagnosis: Delusional nitwit fundamentalism, and that, predictably, comes with being an a**hole. Noisy, but we're not sure he has a lot of influence.

#1635: Robert Gagnon

Presbyterian theologian Robert Gagnon does not like gay rights. And he has an explanation for why others do: It’s in part because of “heterosexual guilt”. Says Gagnon: “A lot of heterosexuals have, you know, we’ve not done all that well in some areas of sexual ethics. That includes issues of divorce, remarriage, that includes premarital sex, includes abortion. And if you can give a pass on the issue of homosexual practice, in effect it’s a way of exempting our own guilt, and it’s accommodating in a way that’s self-serving.” One is almost tempted to admire his brazenness: If you support marriage equality, it’s because you are trying to downplay your own moral shortcomings by excusing others’. Gagnon himself, on the other hand, need no such self-deluding, self-serving excuses.

He has also compared homosexuality to incest, but “[w]hen I compare homosexual practice to incest it is primarily to make the point that if we are opposed to the latter we should also be opposed to the former, since both involve a union of persons who are too much alike on a structural (formal, embodied) level: too much sameness as regards kinship (incest) or gender (homosexual practice), not enough complementary otherness.” Which might be an argument against intra-racial marriage if it weren’t so abysmally stupid on its own terms. But at least we can appreciate how much his arguments reveal of his own personality. (For the record, Gagnon actually thinks that homosexuality is a worse sin than incest.)

No wonder Gagnon has become a leading voice among those who oppose gay rights and churches that fail to condemn them (Here, for instance, is the ex-gay “Sunday school documentary” Such were some of us that he appeared in). He has offered some more traditional arguments, too, however. Gagnon has for instance asserted that same-sex relationships are doomed to failure because two men, without a feminine counterpoint to their hyper-sexuality, will become promiscuous, adulterous and contract sexually transmitted infections. And two women cannot have a stable relationship and will develop mental illnesses because they don’t have a man in their lives to keep their needy, demanding personalities in check.

But really, to make sure you don’t misunderstand him and thinks he just care about the quality of your relationships, he has been crystal clear that Christians who don’t warn their friends to abstain from gay sex, and thereby let them go to hell for their sins, will be judged by God for failing to warn them. Here is Gagnon claiming that homosexuality is a declaration that your “maleness is only half intact.” He has also received some attention for his defense of updating older religious texts to make their anti-gay message more explicit.

Diagnosis: And among his gang Gagnon’s arguments seem to be considered to be among the more “intellectual ones”. Words fail.

#1634: Sandra Gade

More bullshit dredged up from the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. Sandra Gade, a signatory, is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, though I have been unable to locate any research in her name. Nor does she have any expertise in any area related to evolution, of course, and there is ample evidence that she doesn’t have much of a clue about what evolution (or science in general) involves.

Gade received a little bit of attention in 2006, when she started a petition to ask the Oshkosh school board for an “advisory referendum” requesting that students learn evidence for and against evolution, in the manner recommended by the Discovery Institute. Of course, the alleged evidence against evolution is not evidence against evolution, but creationist ravings based mostly on misunderstandings, motivated reasoning and poorly developed critical thinking skills (there is a comprehensive selection of PRATTs at her webside (cached)). Nor was Gade really particularly interested in the research- or science part of evolution teaching. Gade was concerned about Jesus. “The way evolution is being taught is antagonistic to students’ religious beliefs,” said Gade, and therefore a apparently a violation of the First Amendment. She also asserted that Wisconsin students are being brainwashed because what Wisconsin students are (ideally) taught is science and fact rather than what Gade wants them to believe, which is not based on science and fact.

At least the schoolboard does not seem to have been impressed.

Diagnosis: Stock denialist, motivated by very typical, fundamentalist reasons. Probably harmless – more village-idiot than David-Barton material.