#2375: Chelsen Vicari

The Concerned Women for America (CWfA) is a group of wingnut fundies that was founded by Beverly LaHaye and is opposed to anything that can be interpreted as sympathetic toward homosexuality or marriage equality. Chelsen Vicari is one of the crazies who has made a bit of a name for herself as a leader and recurring spokesperson for the group. She is currently Evangelical Program Director for the Institute on Religion and Democracy, where she seems to be promoting most of the same nonsense she promoted in her CWfA days.

A good example is her 2013 attack on Starbucks for supporting marriage equality, something she claimed would lead to anti-straight discrimination; Vicari called Howard Schultz “prejudicial and bigoted” for telling some anti-gay activist (Thomas Strobhar) to sell his shares in the company if he was overly distraught over Starbucks’ endorsement of same-sex marriage legislation in Washington state, and claimed that Starbucks “refuses pro-marriage supporters service” and “is only tolerant of approximately 2 percent of America’s 300 million citizens who live homosexual lifestyles.” That first complaint is telling: not only is supporting gay rights, in itself, anti-straight bigotry as Vicari sees it, but being heterosexual is incompatible with promoting marriage equality: if the Starbucks CEO is supportive of marriage equality then Starbucks might as well have “two separate drinking fountains for liberals and conservatives or ‘now hiring’ signs reading, “Heterosexuals Need Not Apply.’”

 

Here is Vicari and Wendy Wright (on Sandy Rios’s show) attacking Jon Stewart for discriminating against Christians in a hypothetical scenario they imagined.

 

Diagnosis: Silly, bigoted fundie. Yeah, there are lots of them, but Vicari seems to have achieved a position of moderate influence. Should be watched.