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 ChristiansTM – 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.
Marriage is between a man and woman. Always has been. The LGBT demand to redefine the institution is wrong headed on so many counts. It seems odd that the LGBT community demands acceptance of larger society. And that society must change to meet the demands of LGBT. And if you on rinciple do not agree any reasonable discourse is shut down
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