#1495: Steve Crampton

After the American Family Association closed its Center for Law and Policy, attorney Steve Crampton has continued his career as deranged bigot at another and arguably even more fervently insane anti-gay group, Liberty Counsel, where he is currently Vice President of Legal Affairs. As you probably have guessed, Crampton has little time for truth when it doesn’t serve his political goals, which it rarely does (though Crampton was very excited about the refuted Regnerus study, asserting that “true science” will always “reinforce and strengthen what the Scripture tells us from the start”, which is analytically true the way he uses it since “true science” is defined as corresponding to Scripture). Instead, Crampton relies on insane hyperbole and paranaoia to underpin his arguments, for instance to the effect that overturning Proposition 8 would lead to “societal collapse” just like legalizing gay marriage did in Canada, or that SCOTUS overturning DOMA would lead to the homosexual agenda “eradicat[ing] us,” presumably just like legalizing interracial marriages did. You see, gay rights activism is “the most totalitarian kind of philosophy that is afoot in America today” (it is rather unclear why, but such claims don’t bear explanation so Crampton prefers not to tell us) and by efforts like the Day of Silence, “we are sending [students] a death certificate”. “The life of the average homosexual is not controlled by reason,” says Crampton, though we remain unconvinced that Crampton has the faintest idea about how to recognize reason. In addition to gays, Crampton has identified ACLU as an important enemy, and as expected he attacks them with everything he’s got, which means mostly baldfaced lies.

As a response to SCOTUS actually overturning DOMA (which has thus far failed to eradicate us), Crampton called for civil disobedience, though remained unclear about precisely what civil disobedience would amount to in this case (protest outside gay marriage ceremonies? picket funerals for American soldiers?) He didn’t really expand on his argument that banning ex-gay therapy is just like promoting eugenics either, though we would really like to hear precisely how that argument is supposed to go.

Interestingly, there was a guy named “Steve Crampton” among Bob Cornuke’s expedition to locate Noah’s ark in 2006 (pretty successful, according to themselves). We assume that it’s the same person.

Diagnosis: Whereas his fellow Matt Barber usually cooks up some insane reasons to tenuously support his conclusions, Crampton seems to usually not even try. Perhaps he harbors a suspicion that there are no reasons, but we suspect that he rather hasn’t quite grasped the point of offering reasons and premises in his arguments to begin with or why people care about such things.