Current Affairs

Anti-gay campaigner says opponents are part of “Satan’s plan”

Nov 03 2011
Written by Stephen Gray

Peter LaBarbera, the founder of anti-gay campaign group Americans for Truth, claimed this week that the people who say he fosters a “climate of hate” are part of “Satan’s plan”.

In the interview, given to Linda Harvey, he also claimed the media was “in the tank” with the “homosexual lobby” and as such was not prepared to defend his freedoms.

LaBarbera described his detractors as homo-fascists and homo-communists. By criticising him, he argued, they fostered the same sort of hate they were criticising him for promoting.

LaBarbera’s group Americans for Truth is “dedicated to exposing the homosexual activist agenda”. His views have courted controversy for a number of years.

Sally Kern drew criticism recently in an interview with Barbera in which she said gays were more dangerous than terrorists.

LaBarbera also leapt to the defence of Michele Bachmann’s husband’s “gay cure clinic”. In 2007 he had said: “homosexuality is not a civil right; it is a human wrong – one that is redeemable as proven by thousands of contented former homosexuals and ex-lesbians.”

A transcript of the interview is below:

LaBarbera: The homo-fascism is on the rise, and let’s just call it for what it is, or if you want to call it homo-communism, because why should the fascists get all the bad—the communists also wanted to shut down speech and did so. What’s happening is they’re ratcheting up what constitutes so-called hate, what is acceptable speech, and because the media is in the tank with the homosexual lobby and will not defend our freedoms, Linda, Christians’ religious freedom, then essentially they’ve, basically, given a get out of jail free card essentially to the homosexual activists. They can do anything they want and it seems like there’s very little critical, media attention which would restrain them.

Harvey: This is fascism. And if people don’t see what it is, even if they don’t agree, if people don’t see that these are the tactics of fascism, they’re trying to shut down debate, shut down free speech, and it will not simply end at the door of the right-wing. When you have fascists, everybody will suffer.

LaBarbera: Remember the left used that phrase “climate of hate”? The would say, “oh people like Linda Harvey and Peter LaBarbera are creating a climate of hate against gays.” As usual, this is Satan’s plan: the very thing they’re charging us with is what they do. They’re creating a more dangerous environment for us!

Harvey: Exactly and they don’t care. The people who’ve been screaming about human rights and the fact that they’ve been mistreated, really I’m getting the sense that they don’t care about our personal safety. There is not a humanity here.

An audio recording can be heard on the blog Right Wing Watch, here .