#368: Peter Sprigg

Peter S. Sprigg is Senior Fellow for Policy Studies at Gary Bauer & James Dobson’s Family Research Council in Washington (not the same as Paul Cameron’s Family Research Institute). His “research” and writings have addressed issues of marriage and family, human sexuality, the arts and entertainment, and religion in public life. He is unsurprisingly no fan of gay marriage and has frequently testified before federal, state and local courts on these issues. To take a quote from his interview with Chris Matthews: “I think that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas which overturned the sodomy laws in this country was wrongly decided,” [“wrongly decided” does not mean “legally wrongly”, of course, but that Sprigg doesn’t like it – although he doesn’t see the difference between the two things]. Furthermore, he “think[s] there would be a place for criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior.” On a direct question of whether we should outlaw gay behavior, Sprigg said “yes,” because he is a psychopathic Taliban monster. More here. You can see Sprigg struggling to argue that his (and anyone else’s) arguments against homosexuality are not based on religion here (yes, his failure is epic), and his tortured attempt to argue that gay marriage is still generally overwhelmingly unpopular among the public here. He vigorously attacked the Obama administration’s call to protect LGBT people from violence, calling it an “unconscionable” promotion of “the radical ideology of the sexual revolution,” apparently because protecting people from violence is un-Christian. To counteract the administration’s measures he reverted to the most efficacious weapon in his arsenal: prayer.

Sprigg has also been caught advocating fractally wrong claims about evolution, claiming that even secular evolutionists (though he doesn’t believe them) must support traditional marriage (by some less-than-non-fallacious appeal to nature). Sprigg is really an ardent creationist, however, from which it seems to follow that intellectual honesty should not be considered a virtue. He is known for complaining, with regard to a new book on evolution written by actual scientists, that it failed to address challenges to the theory of evolution but instead rehashed the same arguments (the book in question presented evidence, by the way, but Sprigg doesn’t understand the difference): “What's lacking is the true scientific debate about the merits and weaknesses of evolutionary theory as presented by Darwin.” Such a debate was evidently missing because evolution is obviously wrong and scientists don’t agree with him on that obvious truth.

Among his books are “Outrage: how gay activists and liberal judges are trashing democracy to redefine marriage,” and (with one Timothy Dailey) “Getting It Straight: What the Research Shows about Homosexuality,” which does, needless to say, not report what the research shows about homosexuality.

Sprigg was also a firm opponent of introducing the HPV vaccine in Michigan: “We don't feel using school attendance as a form of coercion to get parents to vaccinate their child is appropriate, simply because this disease is not transmitted through casual contact the way other diseases are that are subject to school mandates.”

Diagnosis: Certified Liar for Jesus, staunch denialist and ardently anti-science, as well as hell bent on  showing the world that he is a psychopathic monster. His life’s work is built on the delusion that “secularists are promoting a pro-science agenda as part of their age-old persecution of Christians”. He does have some influence, however, and should be considered dangerous.