#1222: Frank Turek

Frank Turek is a famous fundie author and motivational speaker. He is the author of Correct, Not Politically Correct (you get the gist) and co-author with Norman Geisler of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist and Legislating Morality. His level of fundie insanity can probably be gauged from his participation in Bob Cornuke’s expedition to find Noah’s Ark in Turkey, an expedition the participants judged to be successful (though their findings don’t seem to have convinced the skeptics – or fellow creationists, for that matter.)

Turek is also a hardline theocrat. Of course, he claims not to be a theocrat (since “theocrat” is a poor sales pitch even in wingnut circles). Indeed he insists that Christians (that would be Christians^TM – those who agree with Turek) don’t want theocracy, they just want the government to enforce Biblical moral laws on people who don’t believe in them.

Turek is of course also negatively inclined toward gay people, and laid out his views in the Correct book. After the publication of that one, Turek did, however, notice that it became harder to sell his dayjob services as a team-building consultant – he was booted by Cisco Systems and Bank of America, for instance – since the rather rank bigotry of his book sort of tended to undermine his team-building message. Guess who screamed “persecution” because people didn’t want to buy his product and convinced himself he was a martyr, persecuted for just saying that he believed marriage should be restricted to one man and one woman? Of course, what Turek did claim was (for instance) that gays and radical muslims have united to destroy Western civilization – gays (and muslims) want to bring about totalitarianism, and they have united because “they both hate Western Civilization” and “hate Judeo-Christian natural law values” – gay marriage will, in Turek’s mind, cause Americans to “lose the freedom of speech,” and his arguments are quite clearly taken rather directly from the arguments against interracial marriage used in the 50s. His denunciation of diversity training programs (as well as gay pride events – “[p]ride is, as we all know, really the root of all sin,” though one suspect his main problem isn’t with the “pride” part) for religious reasons might also have been considered not entirely irrelevant to companies’ assessment of the suitability of his team-building consultancy practice.

A particularly notable feature is Turek’s borderline amazing inability to understand what marriage equality is all about and what the position of those in favor of marriage equality actually is – thus providing a rather stunning example of how bigotry-induced bias can blind one to the issues at stake. He has, at least, admitted that he sees no-fault marriage as an even greater threat than gay marriage.

Here is Turek being a wingnut moron on the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the individual mandate to purchase health insurance.

Diagnosis: Rank theocrat and Taliban fundie. Relatively standard fare for this Encyclopedia, in other words, but Turek seems to have risen to a position of some prominence in the wingnut community.